“Either way from what I can gather this may be all you need on the debate tonight” means “I mean I don’t pay too much attention to this stuff”.?
I don’t understand why people cannot just say what they mean. It would lead to a lot less confusion if people weren’t expected to decode sentences that mean completely different things.
It’s anecdotes like this that support the notion that things like the hypothetical at the end of this post aren’t so far fetched.