Dave Bronson campaign: Who Hates Dave Podcast - Episode 3

Welcome everybody back to the Who Hates Dave podcast. We have took a little sabbatical, uh, with the campaign. Um, we have Josh Church, Lieutenant Governor Select, Dave Bronson, and Comms Director Alexis Johnson. Does everyone want to say hello? Are you guys just going to be quiet?

Hello everyone, let's loosen up. Jeez. Just trying to figure out if I'm one of the who hates Dave. Depends on the week. I only, I only got about 5 submissions for who hates everybody, so we're running out of hate.

Yeah, we're running out of—. Yeah, we need, we need more hate. It's Alaska politics. Uh, so I'm gonna get right into it and then we'll kind of get into some other stuff. Uh, hi Dave, as a fellow pilot, conservative, and avid outdoorsman, I'm a strong supporter of your policies and would like to vote for you.

However, I see that you are co-founder of Alaska Family Council. While I strongly believe in their pro-life values, I have concerns over their views on same-sex marriage. I believe all families should be valued, respected, and supported. My husband and I have adopted and raised 3 beautiful children. As governor, how do you, or how would you, support and protect families like mine?

Well, gay marriage has been established. It's a federal issue. I think it was the Obama— in fact, it was the Obama administration that federalized the marriage issue. It's what you gotta understand. If you have animosity towards Last Family Council, obviously they disagree with you, we disagree with you, but the point is, is that that is a faith-based group, a biblically-based group, and they're practicing, or, and I should say we, are practicing what we believe.

Now, am I running around condemning gay people? No, I've got gay friends. But if they ask me my opinion on gay marriage or homosexual, I'll give it to them, but I don't offer it. It's not my business. Live and let live is what I've heard you say many times before.

Hi, Dave and Josh. What a nice circus it's been the last couple of days in Juneau. Defined benefits election bill. What the hell is the plan here? Or is this just a live-action experiment?

State's barely middle-aged and already broke. Very impressive. So what's the move? What's the actual strategy? And are we still running Alaska off cocktail napkins?

How do we fix the pension mess? Clean up elections from here. Please help. Well, let's deal first with the pension mess, and then Josh is kind of the numbers guy. I'll give a high level and he can maybe crunch the numbers for you if you're interested.

I think the math always has to matter because we're in a financial problem in the state. So the defined benefit plan, if we want to talk to that, and I'll just give you a short history on what I had. I got hired in an airline, 1990, and if I were to hang around for, you know, till retirement, mandatory retirement at age 60, I retired in 1990 dollars when I turned age 60 here a few years ago at about $11,000 a month, which, is a phenomenal amount of money, I think. But guess what? When I'm 48 years old, 12 years away from mandatory retirement, my company declared bankruptcy, Northwest Airlines.

There was a subsequent merger, but it's what you do is you lose your pension, you lose your defined benefit plan. And you go, holy cow, I've got 12 years now before I have to retire to provide for the rest of my life financially. And because I had a defined benefit plan, this is what a defined benefit plan is. Is. It is a promise that has to be kept in the future by, if you're a state employee, by a future legislature made up of legislators.

And so let's just say, for example, you're a 23-year-old young man, young woman, you want to be a fireman or police officer, and you come in, you say, I have a defined benefit plan and I want to retire at 50, 55 years old, depending on the term. And you're making a bet that in 25 or 30 years from now, someone's gonna keep that promise of that pension that you have. And that politician may not even be born yet. That politician may still be wearing diapers. And you're gonna bank your entire future from the age 55 to 90 when you die, or 95 or 100.

You're gonna bet all those years, every bit of 1/3 of your entire life based on a promise by someone who isn't even here yet? Because it's, all these pensions at the state level are, the language is subject to appropriation.. And so they may not appropriate it in the future. You think it's a promise. It's not.

It's not a guarantee. Now you look at a defined— a DC plan, defined contribution plan. So this is how I recovered. We all have to come back to our own experience to explain things. My experience is this.

Okay, I lost it. I got a small portion of a small guaranteed portion, not livable. But the company and the union got together and they come to an agreement where they start a mechanism where they contribute 16.5% Defined contribution. And this was when I was 48 years old. And guess what?

Um, uh, there was some months I was making more in my return gains on that fund that I started at 48 years old, uh, than I was making it as a wide-body captain in an airline. And that money's all mine. It stays with me. If I wanna move out of state, I keep it. No one gets to touch it.

No one has to make a promise and keep a promise. To me, for me to fund my, my wife and myself when we're 90 years old. I'm just telling you, be very careful if you think you want a defined benefit. So we look back at California under, um, Schwarzenegger, and they— there was people that were state employees that were getting pensions pennies on the dollar on their defined benefit plan because it was subject to the appropriation of the legislature. And we don't want to— I don't want to see that.

I want to see people work for our state for a long time, 20, 25, 30 years, and then retire very, very well with a fund of money that is guaranteed to them that they control. If you make bad investments with it, that's your business. But my job is to take care of, I think as governor, take care of employees as best I can, and that's to give them real money, not promises. Josh, do you have something to add to that portion before I get to the elections? I keep telling Dave, you know, he needs to have a little more confidence.

He doesn't have to refer to himself as a wide-body captain. He's not that overweight.

Um, he did say that this morning. No, I think on the, the overall question, people are seeing dysfunction in Juneau, and they elect representatives to go do a job so the people don't have to, right? We don't all want to micromanage. We send people down to do the work, and we're not seeing it get done. There's a reason why our founding fathers gave judges lifetime tenures, but they gave politicians a couple of years.

When these people aren't doing their job, vote the bums out. And if we get in and we're not doing our job after 4 years, vote us out. The Texas legislature meets every other year. Alaska's— their state's way bigger than ours, but we have to meet every single year and run into special session. Vote the bums out.

Yeah, no man's fortune is secure when the legislature is in session. That was Mark Twain, a little bit of wisdom there. I think there's also a little bit of security with them being in Juneau and being so far away from their constituents and people. I mean, you saw the politics this year when they were moving committee meetings because they knew people were on planes showing up. Last week I had to go down on short notice to testify in front of Senate Resources because they moved the meeting from 3:30 in the afternoon on Wednesday to 9 o'clock in the morning.

Well, the group of businessmen who said they want it from Fairbanks, friends of ours that want to go down and testify, they couldn't make it. So Glen Farn and some folks called me and says, hey, can you run down real quick and testify, you know, from Anchorage to Juneau? So that was like at 6 or 7 at night, 8 at night, and I got on our first flight out to Juneau and was there at 9 in the morning listening to testimony. And then by 3:30, the, the Second session, 3:30 in the afternoon, I was testifying and we— and then we did the same thing the next day. So, yeah, that— it's a real problem when the last person a legislature legislator sees and talks to before they go on the floor and vote on something of great consequence is a lobbyist.

The last person they should hear from, last several people should be constituents. But moving the Capitol, We've tried that 3 times. Am I willing to burn political capital on that anymore? No, I'm just not. But we have to understand, it's gotta be easier for people to get to Juneau to talk to the legislators.

You know there's a problem when you go into the legislature during session and you knock on the door, you walk in, and the first question you're asked by the secretary is, "Who are you with?" And the first time I was asked that, I go, "Hmm, who am I with?" And I was down there as just a citizen, wanted to talk to my legislator and a few others. And it's because the presumption is that someone is paying you, some group, some organization, some company, some union, somebody's paying your way down there. So who are you with? No, I'm with me. I'm a citizen.

I'm from Anchorage and I wanna talk about whatever problem. So it's kind of ingrained in our nature. But again, we have a lot of challenges in the state due to distance and logistics and, We just— we're gonna have to learn to deal with it, but we're gonna have to do a better job. I agree. Elections.

We need to get this mess fixed. We need to get it back so everyone has confidence in elections. We should have same-day voting. We should have in-person voting. We should have photo ID.

I mean, this really goes to the earlier question of all the mess of these different problems. What are those people doing down there? We have election law 15.15.225, and it says, hey, you need an ID to vote. But when you go through and read it, it's meaningless. You can vote with a utility bill.

And so we come up with these laws or these rules that at the headline look like we have it figured out, but when you get into the weeds, it's just a facade, and it's like a false-fronted building. We do not have Real ID laws to make sure that people are who they say they are. So we need reform. There was a time across Alaska, across the country, where we knew that night who won the election. I missed those days because you used to be able to go downtown to the Egan Center and like hang out as like a group, a collective, and it was fun.

I mean, even if you were on the losing side, like it was still—. It was pretty exciting. Now you just sit at home and wait. You know it's not going to be counted on election night. You're almost guaranteed of that.

Can you imagine like going to fly to Europe or something and you just need a utility bill to get on a plane? Yeah, well, I would say, you know, this is the current thing everyone seems to be in a kerfuffle here about. Uh, we gave our voting records to the federal government, um, to clean up the records. Um, I support that, but the argument is, well, we're a high privacy state, um, and that's a good thing. And they said we shouldn't be giving that to the federal government.

My goodness, my goodness, is there anything about you you don't think the federal government doesn't know? They know everything about you. And it was what we're sending in is—. Do you have a cell phone? Do you have a Facebook account?

I mean, people share their stuff willingly at this point. Yeah, so at the end of the day, someone's gotta clean up the records. And we seemed to be, until Josh Church is Lieutenant Governor, we seem to have been unwilling to do that., and I think the records first need to be cleaned up. And the other thing is we need to harken back, I think, to some great wisdom that was produced back in 2002, and that was the Carter-Baker Commission. Jimmy Carter, James Baker, former Secretary of State.

And this was after all the problems in Florida, the hanging chad business in 2000. And they came in, and this is what they said. One of their key recommendations was this: do not do mail-in voting. It is fraught with peril. It is a great risk of fraud.

Don't do it. What did we do? We did mail-in voting. We did ranked choice voting. And I'm just telling you, it's embarrassing.

We're the most advanced nation in the world. You go to Afghanistan, they don't have any problems with their elections. You come in, you show them a government-issued ID, photo ID, they let you vote, you vote, and then they come out and they dip your right thumb in purple ink that's indelible for nearly 2 weeks. You can't vote again. It's clean, it's simple, and then they count it.

It's a permanent, uploaded sticker. A, I didn't know that, and that's awesome. Yeah. Florida turned it around years ago. Florida had a big problem.

Oh, they were terrible. We all remember the presidential election. You haven't heard problems in Florida in years. These are not actually complicated problems. They're just difficult because people obstruct and don't want the change, but we can make these solutions.

And to the issue with turning over control to the feds, No, Alaska, its constitution says we're gonna run. We have a decentralized system for a reason. But that said, the reason you have an FBI is, guess what? Sometimes people will commit crime and then they'll move to a new state, right? So of course you would use the tools of the federal investigative agencies to track and see if somebody did fraud in another state and now they're doing it here.

Mm-hmm. So of course you would bounce that information off and use their tools, but we're gonna keep control and make the decision of who votes. But are we gonna use the federal government to assist Absolutely. Well, tell them too, Josh, about what you discovered when you, when you registered for the PFD. Tell them what happens.

Yeah, you get auto-registered for the PFD. Uh, I mean, when you register for the PFD, you're auto-registered to vote. And every time you do that, even if you're not voting, you get re-registered as a voter. So they can't get you off this voter list. So if somebody was committing fraud, or if they were eligible for the PFD but not eligible to vote, they're still on the voting risk list every, every year.

So you could be a non-resident and go in and just get on the website and apply for PFD. You're automatic— because you register for the PFD, you're automatically registered to vote. Guess what? They will determine at some point in the near future that you're not eligible for the PFD. They'll clean you off that roll, but now there's no mechanism to go back and clean you off the voter rolls because you applied fraudulently.

This is the 21st century, do we— modern America and we can't get this one fixed? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not like I think you can't get it fixed. Do you feel like it's a strategy? He'll get it fixed. Oh no, do you, do you— my question is, do you feel like it's a strategy from the other side?

I, I think, you know, we've seen in Chicago, we— people want to, want to be naive sometimes, but cheating happens, right? We— people steal. There's no group of hundreds of thousands of people where somebody's not trying to manipulate the system one way or another. And to The argument that IDs are racist really is a racist argument in itself. And the only reason you're in favor of stopping IDs in elections, and yet you're okay with them at the pharmacy, you're okay with them at the planes, you're okay with them everywhere else, is, is because you think it helps your system.

That absolutely helps your agenda. It helps your agenda. And the other reason where the voters go along with it because the, the people in control, they know it helps their agenda, so they want it. But some of the voters that are a little more naive, they go along with it because unfortunately in life there's often an inverse relationship between convenience and security. And it— I'm sorry, but there should be some level of security for our most trusted institution, the ability to vote for the elections, the ability to vote for who makes the decisions.

And so if you have to give up a little bit of an inconvenience to make sure that's secure, that's probably okay. I feel like it shows every year with the large amount of people that don't vote because you hear from them that my vote doesn't count. It doesn't matter. Well, they don't want to be inconvenienced. I mean, it goes back to that narrative of like, they just don't care enough to change the system.

And I always make the joke that if you could post on Facebook and change a system, it would've already been changed by now. But nobody wants to go beyond the keyboard and show up to vote and run, races and get involved. But it may inhibit me from voting if I don't think the system's good anyway. Yeah. If you think it's corrupt and there's fraud and it's going to be cheated anyway, why bother?

I'm not going to buy a car that I know has massive mechanical issues. And I feel like if we were to clean that up and call it once and for all, the voter turnout would be a lot higher. I think it would go up. Yeah. It would go— Well, we know it will go way up and the participation rates will go way up.

We had an election here, Fairbanks, in October. He can give me the number, he's a Fairbanksan. But the numbers are we had like a 14.5% voter turnout and we turned out a very good mayor, David Prews, out of Fairbanks because of low voter turnout. And if you don't vote, you don't get to complain. First, when people are complaining, "Well, the government's doing this, I don't have a PFD, the roads are bad," whatever.

And I go, did you vote? If you don't vote, I says, you're talking to the wrong guy, because I'm going to ask you if you voted when you start complaining. Get out and vote. Because they say, you know, and, and I think it's more so on the right, they could— well, I don't trust the system, I'm not going to vote because my vote doesn't count. I go, of course it doesn't count because you didn't vote.

I think the Republicans are really losing in that area as voters. We saw in the assembly race, of course, if we're Democrat or Republican, I think unanimously we think Anchorage has fallen. I'm sure Fairbanks, you have a similar sentiment in a lot of areas. Fairbanks is— I spend a lot of time, a lot of times and a lot of time in Fairbanks. We just spent 2 days there.

Josh is down here for 2 days and we kind of go every week like that. Spent a lot of time in Fairbanks. And Fairbanks is on its way to being Anchorage. In very short order. And I love my city.

I'm going to grow old, get fat and die in Anchorage. It's my city. I was the mayor of this city proudly. But we have a political crisis in this city, and it manifests itself on the streets, not in just elections, but it manifests itself in the homeless issue. We could have solved the homeless issue.

What we see as a homeless crisis could have been solved by now, probably 2 years ago. We have a political— we have the wrong people in office. So yeah, let's, uh, let's talk the campaign a little bit. Had you never run another campaign and never won prior, tell me how campaigning is, Josh and Dave. And Alexis, you can chime in after.

I'm going first. Well, the reason I say it is like for the people who have no idea what it's like to do what everyone here is doing, you know, it'd be an interesting thing to learn about. Yeah. So what the hell is campaigning like? It's a full-time job.

It's a full-time job for all three of us. And I'll just give you an example. Last week, I went to Juneau for two days, went to Fairbanks for two days, went to Kodiak for a day. And then went to Kenai Sledatna, Seward. And I went, I drove to Seward 3 times in 4 days.

That's campaign, and that's just kind of local, not weekly. In May. That was last week. Yeah. So yeah, it's busy.

I'm not complaining. All the candidates I think are plus or minus doing that. So, and it's a lot, and continuous texting, different groups texting streams that you gotta stay current on. What's the issue of the day? What's going on?

Uh, how do we communicate? You know, you're down to where are the signs. We're getting a lot of signs destroyed, especially in Fairbanks and Anchorage. So what are we going to do about that? Um, you know, we got the, the left, the, so the supposed— and I'll just be blunt with you— the supposed free speech left, they're, they're destroying our signs left and right.

And we'll get them, uh, we'll find them, we'll get them, and we'll prosecute them. But those kind of conversations pop up, just that subject matter, probably every 2 or 3 days. So it's busy. I'm not complaining. I've done this 3 times now on large scale, so 2 citywide campaigns and now a statewide campaign.

Well, your question was pretend you've never done this before. So I don't really have to pretend. True. Baptism by fire. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I've helped. I've helped on people's campaigns for years. My brother used to drag me to Frank Thomas, uh, Murkowski's campaign, and I'd hold signs kind of begrudgingly. I was not into politics, but I've helped.

Uh, but I don't think people understand how government really does affect them, how this affects your city. And it— and you can turn a town around, or it can get a lot worse. And I've, I've traveled, and I've fought in other places, and we can get a lot worse. So people need to take this seriously. So that's why I'm running.

And, and I'll just tell you, as a first-time person running, it's different than helping someone. Well, hold on, I hear that you guys are running for ego. Oh, I hear weekly ego. Yeah, you guys have huge egos and you have to, you, you have to run for office is what I've been hearing. You know, uh, that's one of the hard parts about running is so I don't know that we're 100% going to win, but I'm not independently wealthy.

So I'm still trying to work a job while working this other full-time job. So that's really hard. And then— With 3 kids under 5 years old, let's add that. Yeah. And so your clients are saying, "Hey, you're going to win.

Should I stick with you?" And I'd say, "Yeah, please." Because I don't know if I'm going to win, but you know, and so you've got to juggle running, putting 100% effort and saying, we are gonna win, we are the best candidate. And then you've also got to work your job and, and serve the people there. And that's really hard if you're not independently wealthy. One of the other things I would say that I've learned, I didn't know from just helping out in campaigns, how sort of brilliant the Founding Fathers designed the system. You have to walk around and talk to people and shake hands with all these people.

And I used to just kind of, ah, yeah, just shaking hands and kissing babies, just a politician.

Thing. Yeah, and probably a lot of politicians don't take it that seriously. But you know what one of the benefits is? Alaska's got 15,000 employees and, uh, you know, 15 different departments. And we— there's so much, you cannot know everything.

You— unless your ego is that big, you, you become very aware that you are not the expert in all the issues when you're shaking hands and talking to these people and they bring up their issue and they explain a problem they had and how they want you to address it. And then you just talk to you start asking other people about it to bounce ideas and learn, and you learn so much. And that's probably one of the things I did not appreciate about how smart that system is, that you have to go around and ask people for their vote, and then they get the chance to tell you what's wrong, what needs to be done different, what could be done better. That's super valuable. So I'm learning a lot.

This is a tiny, tiny state in population, big in geography, it's kind of hard to go visit a few hundred thousand people. And, and so how do you get on media like this and, and be genuine and let people hear you and hear back from people? And part of that is going door to door, but you cannot go door to door with everyone. And so that's one of the biggest challenges, just the, the time and the logistics of connecting with everyone that you want to. I think that's why this venue is so important.

And it's kind of a fun nature, good-natured thing, whohatesdave.com, kind of reference back to the last people who thought they hated me. Yeah. But—. So yesterday Dave got up at 4:00 and I think we went to bed at 11:30. So during the day, and it was a fairly long day, like a lot of the days.

Yeah, we drove to Soldotna and back from meetings. We had lunch at 9:48 AM. We're driving down to Soldotna. And he's like, I got to take a nap. I can't keep my eyes open.

So he starts taking a nap and proceeds to get interrupted every 10 minutes by a phone call, but still manages to go to sleep in between. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, we had the— Alexis was texting. That was the day after she hollered at me for 30 minutes straight. I'm going like, is there any time— I actually said this— is there any point here that I get to talk?

No. I said no. And so it went on for 30 minutes, but Josh got it the day before for 2 hours straight from someone else on the campaign. So it's interesting. We're going to miss it when it's over.

Win or lose, we're going to miss the family, the campaign family. Like yesterday, just Josh kind of mentioned as an example. So for 2 days before, he picks me up at the airport in Fairbanks. We spend— I don't know, we got about a dozen meetings and we met with local business leaders and then some campaign staff. And then I get on the airplane, I come back here the very next morning at 10:00 AM, I pick him up.

And I'd been up at, I was up at 4:30 or 5:00, so I pick him up at, the flight arrives at 10:00. And so we call Jesse and Alexis on the way in from the airport back towards Anchorage downtown. And I says, Josh, you hungry? And he says, yeah, I'm a little hungry. I says, you want Chinese or do you want breakfast or what do you?

Why? Jesse and Lexi's ridiculous Chinese at 10 in the morning. Yeah, it says I've been up 6 hours. This is lunch. And I didn't even know Chinese restaurants were open at 9:48.

We wound up— well, we missed the turnoff because I said you got to turn now. We were going to go over to the— I can mention that restaurant, can I? Fly-In Restaurant. And, uh, where I— when I worked at the airport, I used to eat there all the time. And then we just went over to Jackie's for breakfast.

Can I mention it? Can I mention it? Uh, we're gonna take a sponsored break. And then it went to Jackie's. Love Jackie's.

I don't know if I can mention it or not. We do love Jackie's. You guys will edit if I'm not allowed to say it. So, uh, so we went over and we got, we got, uh, traditional bacon and eggs. So, but that was, that was yesterday.

And then we, we, we drove down, got on the radio at Bob Byrd's show, uh, down the Kenai, uh, did a Republican women's group, then drove back, got back at 10 o'clock, and then here this morning. And that's, that's pretty typical. Let me ask you a question. Would you repeal ranked choice voting if it meant keeping an open primary? I can live, I have to, with the ranked choice voting, or excuse me, the open primary.

I can live with that. It's the ranked choice voting part, it's the complexity. It's the nest— because there's other things that surround it that got to be fixed. Voting machines gotta go away. The mail-in voting has gotta go away, and the Carter-Baker Commission is quite clear on that.

You know, we've gotta do better at that. I don't think— I want a head-to-head race, or maybe a third party, an independent party, you got 3 people running. But the trouble is, is when the top 4 go and there's a second choice, third choice, fourth choice on November 3rd, it's too confusing. Oh, I think ranked choice voting to the average person— I mean, we're heavily involved, so we understand. And we still have to ask ourselves questions.

Well, if this scenario pops up, what happens? You're just supposed— it's supposed to be easy. The only thing I hate about ranked choice voting is that if you're a bad voter, like if you don't pick the number 1, 2, 3, or 4, I mean, voters, you get to vote again and again and again and again and again until you reach this like median person, right? Which is like, I believe one person, one vote. But in a ranked choice voting scenario, it's like, okay, well, if I vote Josh first and he's not top vote getter, my second vote counts.

Like, now you're just one person, 9 votes, or however many it is. Well, and your votes get discarded too. So if let's say you only rank, uh, number 1 and your guy isn't number 1, then you— your vote's done. And so you might get your neighbor who votes for 4 gets 4, 4, gets 4 cracks at it. And that there's fun— something fundamentally wrong about that.

And so as you eliminate different candidates, you get to a point potentially where the winning candidate has 50 plus 1 of the vote, but it's actually 40% of the starting vote, right? And, and so the, the other problem too, like with the ranked choice voting, like we wouldn't— if I was lieutenant governor, we wouldn't have rank choice. Uh, Kevin Myers let that go in. I don't think they should have. That combined 4 things into one bill.

Bills are supposed to be single issue. So the lieutenant governor should have said, hey, this is not appropriately written, it doesn't comply with the Constitution and the law, and they should have sent it back to be rewritten. And one of the things I don't like about it that people don't talk a lot about is the open primary, where it's really not a primary, it's just like a pre-race where we narrow it down to 4, it actually hurts your constitutional right to freedom of assembly. So you, you no longer can form a Republican Party and pick who represents your party. You can't form the Independent Party and say this is who represents the independent, because anybody who's the independent or the Green or whatever can, can run.

Now you can have 4 Republicans. And so it disenfranchises you just like you have the right to unionize, it disenfranchises you from that right to bind together and say, this is the person that represents us. So I don't like that. I mean, if you want to have more parties, that's fine, but I don't—. But the one thing the party gives you is this, is it's not, well, I'm a conservative, I'm a liberal.

It's not, it's not just that. There's on each side, there's a party platform. And so when you say I'm a Republican, there's a great big platform. I think there's, I don't know, 34 planks. And then you go to the Democrat Party, same thing.

So you're saying it's deeper than that, it's far more three-dimensional. It's just, well, I'm a conservative. What does that mean? Well, go to the party platform. If you don't have a party— so there's this great big group of undeclareds, the U's and the I's we call them.

They don't have a platform, so what do they really stand for? And we know what— you know, we'll be blunt with you— the Democrat Party finds it— has traditionally found it very difficult to win elections in the state when you got a D behind your name. Because what they are is they're far leftists. They subscribe to everything on the Democrat platform. But they call themselves an I so they can get elected.

And that's somehow inherently dishonest to me. Just stand up, pick a side, and go with it. You know, but I, you know, I like the Independent Party though, too. What do you say to the people who hate the party system? And I'm not going to lie.

You do? I'm there. I think it's way too divisive at this point. I do too. I think the right's gone way too far.

We're not divisive because somebody calls themselves a D or an R. That we're divisive because we're in a, we're in a cultural conflict. Our, our culture is breaking down. We don't agree on some very fundamental things. You've got to get involved and you've got to clean up these parties. And if you want to start a different party, that's great.

The answer to the, to the problem is not to say let's ban the parties. And really what you're doing when you're sort of doing the open primary is you're making it so someone with a lot of money can influence. Because now the people who don't have that much money can't grassroots organize and band together like a union and call it a party and say, this is what our party is going to fight for and we're going to defend all these little people. So you're actually weakening the people. So I think the answer is not the open primaries.

I think the answer is getting more people to start a party and get organized and get more grassroots and get people off the couch. Get in your party, get involved, influence your party. So then you can go into, say, an election against the other parties and have influence. When you have this great big independent movement and there's no party structure to it, you haven't— you've actually lost, you've lost your voice. And yeah, you're an independent, you don't like the Republicans, you don't like the Democrats, well start an organized independent party, not unlike Bob Byrd did and the AIP, and have a third option or have a fourth option, I don't know.

And in Europe they've got that, they got a Green Party, they They got the labor. But the reality is, in America, it's like you're, you're basically pissing into the wind. I think there's just so many times, especially like, because Jesse says he hates the two-party system, and there's times where I hate it too. I go back from being a Republican and, and then I— because sometimes I'm like, I'm not with that group. Um, but like, when we focus on things that just are so irrelevant, like, we just passed the fact that cabbage is now our state vegetable.

We spent taxpayer dollars, we spent time on the floor. So dumb. And to me, we needed a gas line. We should have been getting a gas line. Oh my goodness.

Instead we're arguing about cabbages. My January Enstar bill was $632 to heat my home in January. And I have 60 people down in Juneau talking about a cabbage. It's like the level of disrespect that I feel. I'm like, yes.

And then you can't even show up. I mean, at assembly meetings, at least you can show up to the library and be like, What the heck are we doing? But in Juneau, it's so far away. It's like, what are you guys—. Folks like?

Well, yeah. And I'll just tell you what's, what's coming. This is what we heard yesterday. Heating oil bills are— the contracts are going up by 61% in Fairbanks from, from catastrophically high rates of fuel costs. Right now, we've been buying natural gas in Cook Inlet, Anchorage, the, the rail belt.

For $8 to $9. The new contracts are going to $16. You're almost doubling your cost of gas. So your $600— what's your $625 in January going to be next year and the year after? And we do this.

Well, Glenfarm too, I think, said they started at $12, and then when they were doing the talks with the legislature, they said, "We just want to get it done. Okay, we'll do $6." And then that wasn't good enough. Do you remember this conversation? I do not. So all I know is you, you at some point, you got to be bold.

You got to stand up, build the bloody gas line. Yeah, build the line. Just be— get done with it. I know we, we do have to create a tax structure because it's, it's our gas, but it's not our— it's meaningless gas if someone who has the expertise doesn't come in and produce that gas. 0% Of any numbers.

Yeah, you can tax me, you can tax me at 60%. 60% Is 60% and nothing is nothing. And I know we gotta go through this process and I really appreciate the governor compelling them to sit in an extra session to focus on this one single issue. I think that we need that focus. But we're gonna lose another construction.

I sat with Glenfarm last week and they says in July we're planning on starting building our construction camps along the length of the interstate. Which should have already been done. Yes. And it should be— 3, 4 months ago. Well, we should have started to put things in place, but they can't, They can't start spending money until the whole project's been capitalized correctly in that they know what their costs are going to be out in the future.

And they've contracted— Josh knows the numbers better than I do— but roughly 40% or 80% of the gas that we need to, we've hit that threshold they've contracted for. I spoke with Mr. Lee. He's the president of PASCO, the Korean energy company here last week in downtown Anchorage. And he says, yeah, we've signed our MOU. We're ready to go to buy Alaska gas.

You know, LNG out of Nakiski. We're ready, but we're holding it up in Juneau, and I'm just telling you, there are people in Juneau, politicians, who don't want this gas line. They don't. And I can't— I just don't understand why you hate your state so much. I can't process that.

My thing is, is get the job done, and we've got a federal administration that's highly friendly, if not pushing us. This is an anecdote that I'd heard. I don't know if it's true. The project is supposed to be a 4 to 4.5 year project. He called up Alaska leadership and he called up Glenfarr and he says, you're going to turn it into a 2.5-year project and get it done.

And so I went to a friend of mine, very wealthy gentleman, very smart, who owns a couple of pipelines in the world. And he says, that's exactly what you do. He says, because the cost overruns come because of time, not because of the construction. He says, always try to shorten the window of construction, always compress it, because the overall cost at the end of the day, at the end of the project, will be lower. And that's what we've got to do.

I don't think— I don't think— first, first off, I'm a single father and I've been a single-income household for almost a decade. Mm-hmm. And I make good money, but I'm like, I don't know how much more I can keep going with—. Oh, you think it's bad here? Talk to middle-class business people in Fairbanks.

And I'm kind of deathly focused on Fairbanks because I see the nature of the problem. And they're They're at the point where people literally are leaving Fairbanks because of the cost of heating. I don't think people, I don't think the public really truly knows how scary of a situation we are in. You are exactly right. And I think that everyone's kind of in their little boxes and they're sitting in the legislature and they're ordering their wine and we're in special session and we're costing the state more money and all this stuff.

$30,000 A day.

I, it's, it's at a breaking point. They, they wasted time arguing about cabbages. They're trying to squeeze every last dollar, and they had 36 sessions in one committee on this gas line. They're not doing their job, and they're not focused on— it's not just about revenue to the state, it's about bringing the jobs, bringing the cheap gas so people can afford to heat their homes. This is so critical, and it is so frustrating because people are suffering and they're not doing their job in the legislature.

But what I would remind people is that the oil pipeline only passed by one vote. And if you go back further, Alaska was Seward's folly. Oftentimes people lack vision and things are hard fights to happen. And yet, where would we be without the gas, without the oil line? Where would we be without Seward negotiating that?

We probably wouldn't be a state. We wouldn't be. We would be dead broke. We would be just a chunk of land. We would be Russians.

Good point. Good point. Might want to consider that. We have a term in business, you don't have to be the best, but you got to be the first and figure things out. I mean, if you look back to turn of the century industrial era, massive growth in this country, we didn't always have the answers.

Yep. But you figure stuff out by doing it, right? That's right. And put that camp in, you know, let's get a little bit moving forward. Oh, new problem?

Let's talk about it for a short time. Let's figure it out. But this is a finance issue is what's really going on here. We have the technology, we'll figure out where the employees come, come from, because that's a— that's going to be a fantastic challenge. Where are the heavy equipment operators coming from?

Where, where are the pipe fitters going to come from? Uh, we'll, we'll get that. We'll get so big. It, yeah, it's like, maybe this is a bad analogy, you go to a salad bar and, and they got all the beautiful delicious ingredients that you can, you can consume and, and reap the benefits of. But, you know, you go to get some lettuce and, well, nope, the carrots weren't—.

We—. I don't think that's going to pair well, so we're gonna— we got to talk about it. You know, it's like, no, let me just eat. "Let me just get those jobs going." Alaska needs to eat for sure. And Suzanne Downing, love her or hate her, she said, "Does the legislature realize that people can buy gas from anywhere?

It doesn't have to be Alaska. Alaska's not holding gas hostage. They'll just go somewhere else." She's 100% right. And that was the best thing she said. So I was at the Sustainable Energy Conference last week and this is what they says, the new president of Venezuela, the one that took over, the vice president when Maduro was sent packing.

She's going like this, oil companies, Glenn Farnes, yeah, he packed little clothes, he's wearing his little brown jumpsuit. Nike jumpsuit. Yeah, so he, and she's saying, please, Glenn Farnes, Exxon, Conoco, come to Venezuela, we want you. And now we've delayed this gas line, now we've got this Canada gas line to to the ocean, to the Pacific Ocean, where they can ship. Now we've got this other competitor.

Get this done or it's not going to be economically viable or financially competitive. And there's a time urgency. There's a real time urgency here. Well, it's like we've been dealing with oil for how long, right? We've seen the sweet spot for taxes.

We've seen when companies leave. When they draw down their production, when they manipulate their own market. We have all the data for oil, yet these people in the legislature, "We need more. We need more. We need more." Well, you guys are suffocating them out.

It's not going to happen. So do you want it to happen or not? Let's get to that because—. Well, let me ask you a question, not to cut you off. Why do some people in the legislature simply not want the gas line.

I was watching a documentary not that long ago, uh, and they were talking about the oil pipeline, and it was filmed not that long ago, but they were sort of reminiscing or about the, the scar of running this pipeline across the entire state. So there is an ideological group of people that they don't want any development. They want Alaska to just be this pristine park. They want— I have a friend, I call him my liberal friend. He tries to tell me he's a moderate, but I don't know.

But he went down and talked to some Republican legislators and they—. Legislators. Yes. Yes. Thank you.

And they said, you know, we probably need to go back to where we were before statehood, where we were just kind of a colony of the federal government. The federal government owned all the land and they sent the money because we probably can't develop our resources. That's some of the quote-unquote Republicans in there. So there is a group of anti-development people all throughout government, and, and I've seen this over the years. My dad and his friend had two cabins.

There's a 3-acre parcel in between them. They went to the state and they said, hey, can you sell that lot? You know, and they— and the lady said, as long as I work in this job, we will never sell that. We're not even talking about thousands of acres open in the wild. No, this— there are anti-development forces within our government.

They just do not want it. Maybe it's a dumb question. It's probably the same people that want a handout from the government. But when you get to a—. But someone's got to pay the bills.

And we can— they'll teach you in Econ 101 in college. First thing they'll teach you is this is you can't— you only create wealth by extracting something from the earth. It could be fish, it could be minerals, it could be logging, it could be oil, it could be natural gas. But, you know, creating something in your business is not creating wealth. It's merely moving wealth around.

And it's good. We need that. But guess what? Creating silicon chips, silicon chips, microchips, you're taking sand, essentially you're taking silica and creating chips. That is an extraction methodology and you are creating wealth.

But there's a lot of things where we don't, we just, we just transfer wealth. We've got to create wealth. And that's what Alaska is here for, is the place where we create wealth. We have all of the essential minerals that we need. We have all the critical minerals that we need in this world to create the batteries that we need to function in modern society.

I'm not willing to go backwards. But we have people in this state who don't want to build West Susitna Access Road. They don't. And I'm just telling you, if we don't get the act— the, um, West— or if we don't get the, um, gas line, um, West Susitna Access Road is going to be the single most critical piece of infrastructure for us to survive because they're going to bring coal down to, you know, they're building a road to a mining district. One of those sub-districts is coal.

They're going to bring— create electricity up there. They're going produce an electrical plant that's going to pump it down here, put it into the grid, which we really need because we've got electrical transmission generation issues, obviously. And then they're gonna— then they're gonna have a road that they're gonna bring coal down to Point McKenzie, Port McKenzie, and ship overseas and sell it. Okay, and then there's other minerals that are up there in contiguous mining areas up there that can come down this road. But we have an electrical problem if West Assiniboine Access Road is not is not built.

And societies cannot— countries cannot stand still. You've got to keep growing. You just got to make sure that it's controlled growth, not crazy growth, and it's responsible. But you got to keep growing. And Alaskans are going to face a decision this election because we are the pro-growth candidate.

We are the pro-growth team. But on the Democrat side, you know, they've got a running mate who's a Biden official. They will shut down this state. That's what they do. That's what they did.

That's what they did. And now a Biden-appointed running for lieutenant governor. So you are going to be faced with a choice between growing and shrinking. I mean, that's it. He publicly denounced AIDA and was like, I'm gonna defund AIDA.

And I was like, holy cow, that, that would be crazy. That, that is a mechanism that allows us to capture financing for resource development, for economic development, at incredibly low interest rates in And it was a great creation by the state. And now they want to get rid of it. And the legislature is proposing legislation where the legislature has investment decisions. Because they've done so well with what they're managing.

Yeah, yeah. We got cabbage, guys. Yeah, we got cabbage. So we have a political crisis in the state. We send the wrong people too often to Juneau.

There's some great people down there, but too often we send people down who are a couple anti- anti-development people. Anti— if you're anti-development, you're anti-Alaska. It's the same people, anti-oil people, you know. Yeah, fossil fuels, anti-oil. It's like, do you own a cell phone?

Do you drive a car? Yeah. Oh, I got an electric car. Okay, tell me how much diesel it took to, you know, mine the minerals to make your batteries, uh, for your— you know, it's just, it's so idiotic. And you hit on this earlier, they're out of touch.

They don't understand how bad it is. So— in Fairbanks, when I was going to college in the early 2000s, before I joined the Marine Corps, the CTC campus had a parking garage next to it. It was utilized. It's been closed for years. That parking garage would cost like $50 million to build today.

They sold it for $800,000, and they couldn't even find a private buyer. They had to sell it to Alaska Housing Finance Corporation.

Because it's vacant and vandalized. So people don't understand how bad this problem is. Well, I think Jeff Landfield said it on his podcast like 2 days ago. He said Anchorage rules the state, and if you don't have a thriving Anchorage, you really don't have a thriving state. And right now we have— they can say that we have law and order, don't quote me on it, but people just do whatever they want in town and we just don't care.

We just do not— quote me, you're on a radio show. I, I—. Yeah, yeah, I know. Quote me, I got in trouble last time I went Last week, Willoughby announced that they're closing. You know, a great social hotspot, watering hole, entertainment center, and they're just closing up downtown.

You drive downtown, boarded-up shop after boarded-up shop, and it's because we refuse to enforce our laws, especially in the areas of vagrancy, and we refuse to develop our downtown, and we're a dying city. I was talking to the folks over at Santos, and they says they've got to hire security people now to walk their female employees to their cars down the street at the, at the beginning and at the end of the work— of their workday. That is, that is an indicative of a failed city. Also, because we put the wrong people in office, state level, city level, over and over. And Jeff is exactly right.

If Anchorage fails, the state fails. I'll tell you an anecdotal story. There was a high-up C-suite executive that worked downtown in a private company that suffered a medical emergency outside of the building in downtown, and people walked past him because they thought he was homeless. And he was having a cardiac episode, and people were like, oh, just leave him, you know, he's fine. He was in a, um, like a polo t-shirt just on the side of a building, literally dying, and people just turned a blind eye to it, just kept walking by because that's downtown Anchorage.

It's something we see all the time. Did he survive? Yeah, he did. Thank goodness. Passed out on the side of the road and, you know, in alleyways and jaywalking.

I mean, we just had a pedestrian death on the Glen Highway. Like, something has got to change. It's a societal thing. But I think this goes back to voting. The community has kind of just given up and we've just kind of, you know, washed our hands of it and said, this is something bad, significantly bad, has to happen.

A fire, you know, something where the pendulum swings back to law and order, because right now it just hasn't gotten bad enough, clearly, because people continue to—. Yeah, what's the line? I hope people wake up before it gets that bad. Tell me, I need to take a survey. Tell me one city that's governed by leftist Democrat woke leftists in the city that's being run well.

One, just name one thriving utopia. Where's— yeah, but you can go to Florida, you can go to Tennessee, You can go to Texas, you can go to those conservative jurisdictions, and the cities are run the way they used to be run. It's a sad thing about Willoughby, you know, and you brought up Willoughby. Like, I work in Texas. You go to Texas and there are 500 Willoughbys, and yeah, they're beautifully built, they look modern, they're packed, they're thriving.

Young people are having a blast, having a good time, there's good music, and it's like, this This is awesome. But here, you get a Willoughby and you're like, "Oh, wow. Some development in town." And the politicians drive them out. It looks new. This is cool.

There's an Instagram page called Keep Anchorage Beige that's like back in the '70s and '80s, everything kind of looked the same. And it's like, "God, I just hate that." It's like, we need to develop this area. I went downtown this weekend, on my motorcycle, and I stopped by Wild Scoops, get some ice cream. And it's like, there's some families and it's sunny and it's— downtown should be absolutely popping. Yep.

And I was there for about 5 minutes, and I got, I got homeless people screaming at the top of their lungs by themselves like they're getting murdered. You know, I'm watching fathers and, and mothers, you know, hey honey, come over here, you know, stand right here. And, and I'm like standing guard card, you know, of these people just wandering around. And I'm like, Alex, you can speak to this. It's like, if I called the cops, would the cops— no, come take these people away?

If I called, uh, Downtown Partnership, would they come pick these people up and remove them? Where would they go? Um, you know, it's like, and this problem is so brutal. Our judges and our politicians have screwed this up so cops know nothing happens if they come. Yeah.

And, and the one encouraging thing is This is solvable. I mean, I know you were talking about the parties earlier and how it's depressing and you have to choose a camp, Republican or Democrat, and that's true. That's why I'm a Republican, not because I agree with everything, but it's the best. But the Republican Party got started because the old party sucked and was pro or not anti enough of slavery. The Republican Party came in to stop slavery, right?

So sometimes it takes years or generations. But then you have these moments where people get up, they organized, and they make a difference, and they change their world for the better. And you just got to keep fighting and try and get your friends and your neighbors, because we can solve this. We just can't lose hope, because you see what happens in these cities like Anchorage when people lose hope. We've got to get hope back in, because we can change this.

And if we lose this gas line, a lot of people will finally— it's the last gas for hope in this state, and we will lose it because we'll see our energy costs go up, our living costs go up, uh, crime will— crime will increase. I'd like to come back though to the city issue, the, the demise of a great— of a great city. Dave, you, you've ruined the city. I hear it weekly. Yeah, you ruined Anchorage.

No, no. Um, okay, I'm sure the left would like to believe that the left has ruined the city long before I got here. The left was previous couple administrations ruined the city because, because they forgot, they didn't want to fight crime, they didn't want to enforce standards. And in fact, it got to the point where we put the homeless in the Sullivan Arena during COVID I stopped that process. And then I says, well, I went to one of the assembly members and a couple of them and I says, what do we want to do with that building?

They said bulldoze it. So we want to put high-density, low-income housing there along the river. And I go, OK. So I'm thinking about that. So I go back, and it was like we went and got the appraised or assessed value, which was something like $60 million.

I go on a— so I started spending a lot of time in the building looking at it. And I says— and I called my purchasing director one morning, and I says, you're going to come up with a plan. It'll be just you and I, and we're going to restore that building. We're going to get it back under contract with someone to operate it. And the Sullivan Arena is functioning now.

And that, that's one of the bright lights in the city is you go there on a Friday night in the wintertime, Saturday night in the winter, it's full of people. It's traffic jams. I love traffic jams at the Sullivan Arena because it means the building is successful. And we've, we've had nights we've had 3,000 to 3,400 people for a hockey game. That, that's how you regenerate a city.

But until we get the homeless issue solved downtown, Downtown Anchorage is going to continue to fail. And like Jeff Landfield said, that is the financial economic heart of the state, whether you like it or not, is Anchorage. And we're letting it fail. And now homelessness has spread all the way to South Anchorage, all the way to DeArmond, because we refuse to fight crime and enforce our standards. And you had a plan to put people to the decision point to get better.

Right. So you— so So this is what you do. People need a place. No one cannot be in a place. You're sitting there, you're gonna go home, you're gonna have your own bed, you're gonna have your own place to be.

The folks that are living homeless on the street, they have to have a place. The only place we're allowing them is a blue tarp, under a blue tarp in our parks. So is what we came in, we had a lot of money coming in for federal money, and we said, let's build a navigation center, not unlike what downtown LA had done, fairly successfully. We said let's build a navigation center, and then is what you do is once it was built, and we got halfway through pouring the foundation of it, and this, the assembly stopped it in the middle of a concrete pour, and they created all this turmoil. If that building was complete, very large building, sprung steel shelter, and we would call it a navigation, we would make it a navigation center, and that's where people would come in the front door, get treatment.

The police would bring them because you gave them a choice. You're breaking the law. You're living in a, in a park. You're living on a bike trail. You can't be here.

Now I'm going to get the police officers. I'm going to give you a choice. You're going to jail or you're going to a navigation center where you're going to get help. And we hope they will eventually— they'll— they have to make the decision for themselves. They go to navigation center and now they start working their way through that process.

They get better, they get clean, they get sober so they can make, make good decisions. And then hopefully they become productive members of society, but you don't— and we have a thing in the city called— in, in most liberal cities, if not all of them, have the same thing. It's called the poverty defense. There are certain laws that you can commit if you're poor and you're not prosecuted. Oh, I learned, I learned about this recently.

Yes. Yeah, well, I mean, if I go commit a crime, yeah, I get punished to the full extent of the law. Yeah. If, if the homeless do it, oh, it's on the list. They're, they can get away with it.

Yeah, that's right. It's called poverty. What kind of insanity is that. They just implemented a bunch of new ordinances in the municipality because there was a cameraman for KTUU that got assaulted by a homeless person, and he pushed over the guy's camera. And what the cop said is, well, they assaulted the camera, not the cameraman, and they didn't end up prosecuting him.

Well, that guy ended up coming into one of our buildings, um, and the federal government had called us because we have a federal building right next to and they said this man just came in and threatened to blow up the building. Well, we had contacted APD, let them know, hey, this is our— this guy is now in our building. Um, and APD was like, oh, we'll try and get someone out there. Never showed up. I think— file a police report online.

I honestly think my son, who has not graduated high school yet, could manage these basic rules and laws better than the administration. And it was where this comes from is the class— it's a clash Worldviews. The, the left has this very disturbed, wrong, errant view of human nature. They told me once, well, several times when I was the mayor, they says, well, you can't— I says, we're going to go and start arresting these people and put them in jail or put them into some kind of treatment facility as we're trying to build this massive NABS shelter, Navigation Center. And they say, you can't arrest them because if, then they'll have an arrest on their record and they won't get a job.

You know, once they're all better, they won't be able to get a job because they're, they're considered a criminal and they got an arrest record. So I went, we started going through the names. I actually, I think it was, I had you do it, Alexis, and we started going through the names and you start, these people have lists, pages of arrests already. Already. Yeah.

And I was on jury and the guy got called in for his 33rd trespassing count. Yeah. Yes, they have lists. And what people forget about this If you go set up in the park and make that your bedroom, and you're walking around in your underwear, or you're just sleeping out there, or you're doing whatever, and you make that your living room, that's a public space. And you've taken that away from people who want to go enjoy that park and have a clean—.

We just had that at Town Square. They did that, that news story, and the guy said, I can't believe they're demoing Town Square. We have an $8.5 million construction capital improvement project for Town Square. And, you know, a guy who was living in the park said, well, this is my living room and I don't agree with it. Use the quote, this is my living room.

All right, we're gonna, we're gonna close out. Uh, Josh, top 3 favorite movies. Top 3 favorite movies. Oh, The Patriot, uh, with Mel Gibson, probably. Um, I don't know, Patriot Games, pretty good.

Um, Patriots. I like Winter Soldier. That was a pretty good, uh, pretty good movie. Uh, it's hard to pick 3. There's so many.

Yeah, how about The Manchurian Candidate? Uh, which one? Denzel. I like Denzel. Dave loves a Denzel film.

Yeah, when I grow up, I want to be Denzel Washington. At least I want to walk like him. Man on Fire, that's probably the best. That's Kyle's favorite movie. Yeah, that— I, I don't know why I didn't say that first.

That's got to be up there. Man on Fire, Denzel Washington. But now The Equalizer. Equalizer series. Oh, great.

Just, I just, we watch, but I don't watch movies twice unless they're old class. I watch Equalizer, not voting for you, multiple times. But, um, class old movies, Bridge on the River Kwai, you got to watch all those. And the modern ones is Mel Gibson, Conspiracy Theory. That's a great movie.

Great one. Yeah. All right, real quick and we're going to close. Josh, name the 20 candidates running for governor. Walker, uh, Wilson, Mead, I think is in there.

We got, uh, you want lieutenant governors too? No, no, I just want governor. Just governor. So you got Walker, Wilson. So you got, um, Tregg and Shelley and Halala and Crum, Edna, Nancy.

Nancy. Yep. Uh, Bronson. Bronson. Bronson.

Uh, did we say Bronson? Uh, let's see, there's McGuire, there's Kroll, and, uh, Bruce Harkin. Um, Perkin, you mean? Perkin. Um, how many is that?

You need 9 more. I need 9 more. You haven't even done—. Oh yeah, there's Baggage. And JKT and Bishop Click.

Bishop. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, Clayman. I like how you put Click in the W. We do love Click.

Yeah. Well, I like Click a lot. He's a great guy. Greta's sweet. Uh, Click's—.

Click, Click's— Okay, so you have 5 more. Nice. Yeah. Uh, 5 more. Oh, 4 more.

Uh, there's, there's like a spiritual healer or something. What's her name? Meta. Mita. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, two more. Jessica Fairclough. Who's that? The lady from the Peninsula, right? Yeah, I think she's from the Peninsula.

And didn't McGuire say she's running? Did we get her? Yeah, we did. No, we didn't. I mentioned it.

Who else? Is that all 20? Good grief. Uh, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, Can we add commentary terms there? 19.

We're missing one. We're missing one still. Uh, oh, uh, Greg Brelsford. He's an educator out of Kotzebue. Greg Brelsford.

Oh, good, good for him. Haven't heard. Good for him. See? All right, she knows.

Sounds good. Well, everyone, thanks for joining us on the Who Hates Dave podcast. I know I do. Join me in that. If you also hate Dave, please join us on our next episode.

Got a good thing coming, and it's all I need. Everything I wanted is in front of me.