Epstein Files Blocked, Trump Cancelled Colbert? & Zohran's Chances in NYC with Ezra Klein

YERRR – this one’s a political rollercoaster with Ezra Klein in the building, and nothing’s off limits. From Mike Johnson shutting down the Epstein vote to Trump’s sketchy second‑term plans, Ezra helps the boys connect the dots on conspiracies, power grabs, and why reform feels impossible. They get deep into Project 2025, the rising cost of education, polarization, and why the Democratic Party might need a full rebuild. Plus: social mobility, Mamdani’s policies, and why forming real coalitions is harder than anyone admits. And of course—Colbert getting axed, CBS’s mess, and keeping the pressure on those Epstein files. All that and more on this week’s episode of FLAGRANT. INDULGE. 00:00 Mike Johnson stops Epstein vote + conspiracy 6:45 Trump loves to draw, Panic mode + He knew 12:28 Trump's Watergate? Don't get distracted 17:52 2nd term = all Trump's appointees 23:33 Dems are not reformers + Need for open primaries 31:49 Polarization on institutions + Opportunity for Dems 39:55 Dems keeping their distance + Defined by Mamdani 46:54 Project 2025 + Curtailing colleges 57:30 Need to look at institutions 1:02:26 Rising cost of education + What is it for? 1:13:31 Social mobility & Mamdani 1:19:49 Poirier Holloway was great 1:25:48 de Blasio + Other Mamdani's policies 1:33:06 Free and plentiful + Abundance 1:44:23 Horseshoe Theory + Forming coalitions are hard 2:03:44 Have to acknowledge own failings + Trump trust 2:12:12 My bad with Dave Portnoy 2:17:50 What the new Democratic Party needs to be? 2:31:45 Colbert cancelled + CBS merger 2:47:44 Trump's potential dangerous distractions 2:52:51 Mahmoud Khalil + Weaponization of speech 2:56:33 Keep pressure on Epstein files Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:30Speaker 03

  What's up, everybody? Welcome to Flagrant. And today, we are joined by New York Times bestselling author. I think it's been, do we say 16 weeks now? Is it something like that? Longer? I think a little longer. I don't want to get it wrong. I don't want to get it wrong right out of the bat here. It's a lot of weeks. Okay. The author, or the co-author, I should say, let's give Derek some credit, of Abundance, which I think addresses with amazing accuracy a lot of the issues that are going on today. I implore you guys all to go read this. Obviously, New York Times bestseller, so so many people have. But please, go listen. You could listen to it. That's what I did. You can listen to it, yeah. Right now, go Spotify, listen to it. But we're here with Ezra Klein, everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know... Ezra's got good insider information. He knows exactly why Mike Johnson shut down Congress.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  So he's gonna tell us. This is not opinion, this is 100% fact. Go for it, Ezra.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we started on the easy one, huh?

• 2:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  So I listened to you all on Epstein. And it had been in my head when I just did an Epstein show. And I did, I read all the Epstein coverage and like went back and talked to people who knew more about it than I did. And I come to the view that you could explain away most of it. And then Mike Johnson recessed Congress rather than even allow a vote on it.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  And it's, it's really hard to believe there isn't something weird when the people with power are acting that weirdly.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Can you explain like what that means to recess Congress?

• 2:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he used his power as speaker to send Congress home. Congress has a schedule, it can be recessed. There were enough Republicans breaking with the Trump administration to force a vote alongside Democrats. I think you guys had Ro Khanna on, right?

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, to force a vote with Democrats, to release the files, much more of the files. And if you, so I read, did you guys read the FBI, the FBI DOJ memo? I read nothing ever. So the FBI DOJ memo says why it's not gonna release the files. And it says that the files are braided together with information about women and girls.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  And it doesn't want to, like their priority is not re-traumatizing people.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Re-victimizing the girls, even though they're begging for justice.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  So.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Have we asked the girls at all?

• 3:44Speaker 04

  Right. So that's, I guess, fine on the memo.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Redact the girls' names.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  That is not a reason that Congress would force itself into recess, right? That is a, like a preference on the part of the DOJ and FBI.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  But Congress is an oversight body in part, right? It's another branch of government. And. I would just say, Johnson is not acting like someone who just finds this politically inconvenient. He's acting like someone who can't let something happen.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  There's a, and also, it would be, if the whole thing for them now was just, they think on net, it would not serve anyone's interest and just be intrusive to release this, fine. Like, again, that's a reasonable take to have had, but there is so much ferment and interest that you would think they would say, "Okay, well, this is what people want, and this is what Congress wants. You know, we told you, we don't think there's anything here, but I guess you guys can look at it," or they could give it to a committee under closed-door privileges, right? There's a lot of things you could do.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  There's a million things they could do, and the weirdest-

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Researching Congress is not usually one of them.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Here's the weirdest thing about it, like, Trump is usually so transactional with the base. The base asks for something, he listens. I would say he listens to the base way more than any politician that I've ever seen. There are certain politicians that might push back against their base, because they're like, "Ah, this wouldn't really go along with policy that we want to do." Trump is like, "Hey, the base thinks vaccines are fucked up, RFK, get in there, research the vaccines." January 6th, they want them out, we'll get them out. They want them out, we're putting them out. And this, he is rebuking the base, like, almost like spitting in their face. Like, they are asking for it, he campaigned on it, he puts Bongino and Cash in there, which might be the stupidest thing in the history of the world. Like, why would you put the two guys that have non-stop pounded the pavement talking about how we're gonna expose this Epstein thing, and the second they get in there, like, "You better shut the fuck up." Had to shut them up.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Go on Rogan, lie. Like, it is a very peculiar thing. It worked in that I think it moved any of the smoke off of Trump, because, at least for me, I was like, "There's no way that he's involved if he's putting Bongino and Cash in, who have campaigned on exposing it. Like, why would you hire those guys, or appoint those guys?" Right? So I'm like, "He can't be." But the fact that he will not touch this, and then this last week him doing the bullshit distractions- Dropping the MLK fight, like who asked for the MLK fight? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who asked for MLK? You know what's funny is I'm not a huge conspiracy theorist and I was initially like, the Epstein thing for me was just the last straw in terms of you not getting things done.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  And I was like, yeah, I'm sure there's some smoke, they'll release it, but the more they're doing to hide it, the more I'm like, oh, they're hiding something crazy. Where I didn't necessar- I was like, there's probably something. The second he started talking about Obama, I was like, oh, he's guilty. Yeah. Like, why are you talking about Obama and treason? You got a guy who has sex with teenagers that you are protecting.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Also, some of the lies are so-

• 6:46Speaker 03

  He's protecting other pedophiles. Yeah. Trump is protecting other pedophiles. Facts. Like, that's what it is. Or, or- Or- Epstein, because I, I actually think like, I, I actually think Epstein was a pedophile that was also involved in nefarious activities for maybe our government and other governments. And that, they're protecting that relationship they have with him. I don't think it's like the CIA was running a pedophile ring to blackmail people. I think Epstein was a pedophile, obviously heinous one, but he had these relationships with all these powerful people around the world. And if you have that type of power in those relationships, maybe our government would want to have access to that.

• 7:24Mark Gagnon?

  So you think Epstein was the only one messing with the young children?

• 7:27Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no, no, of course not. But I, I don't think that's what the government's protecting.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  So here's what another administration would do, right? Because you, you've had things like this before, where there's been a fear that they cannot investigate it or prosecute it independently. And they often name special prosecutors. We saw this under Bill Clinton, right? We saw this under Joe Biden or under Hunter Biden.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Jada Hunter, man, he's making a comeback.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  He's making, I think he's about that too. They're not doing anything. They're not doing any of the things you can do when, what you want to say is like, look, there's information here that everybody can't have, it violates privacy, but we are going to put someone credible in charge of it, somebody we don't control.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  And their report is going to be credible to you.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  And they're just not acting like that. Also, the thing I thought was funniest in all this was when the Wall Street Journal released that letter that is like in the Epstein, what, 50th birthday book? And there's a- A doodle from Trump and Trump's like, I don't draw. And then the Times is like, here is a gallery of doodles that Donald Trump has done and sold for charity. And then here's from his book.

• 8:37Speaker 06

  He said, I don't use the word enigma. And then they're like, here's him using the word enigma twice in a 15 second video.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  The funniest argument that I saw about it was, uh, this is too poetic for Trump.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  I 100% believe he didn't write it, he just drew the naked woman.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Fair enough. But the argument essentially, the President of the United States of America is too stupid to write this. Therefore, it must not be here. That was the argument that people were going with.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  I can give you the argument for like, why you should believe there is less here than one would think.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Okay, less here meaning?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  In Epstein, right? This is sort of where I was a week or two ago, which is that the amount of firepower, like investigatory, law firm, repertorial and government firepower that has been aimed at this thing, trying to find lawsuits to be, because there's money, there's money here, there's media here, whatever, like, whether people used to be scared of Epstein, but definitely not now. It's like the best media organizations in the world, the biggest law firms in the world, the Biden administration, the Trump administration, you're telling me there's something none of them can breach? Like, I found that hard to believe. And the thing that is waiting down the other side of it for me is how much their, like, the Trump administration appears to be panicking.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Panic mode.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Like genuinely panicking as there are demands to breach it. If it wasn't dangerous, I don't know why they don't give it to Congress.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  There's a, I mean, it has to be dangerous 100%. And I think there's an interesting thing happening, which is like, there are definitely a lot of Democrats that are interested in this story because it's putting pressure on Trump. And what I would say to conservatives is, don't do the finger wagging. Don't be like, why didn't you care about this four years ago? I would say like, you get the same, you want to know what's going on. Now you have bipartisan support to figure out what's going on. You're on the same page, let them in. Don't go, where the fuck were you for the last four years? Who gives a fuck? Now they realize that they want to have this, let them get there. And that's what I've seen, like, a little bit of this. I've seen little conversations online, like Biden had it for four years, why weren't you asking about it? Now you're only asking because of Trump.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Who gives a fuck? Get the info.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  Also, the Trump administration and the people around them made this part of their platform. The Biden administration did not come in with their vice presidential candidate going on podcasts, swearing they would release the Epstein files. Like, this was not a big, you know, theory, conspiracy, explanatory thing about the world in Bidenland, but huge amounts of MAGA have been very bought in. Like, there was like the QAnon version the first time, it moved over to this. I mean, and there's some part of me, right, as somebody who's like a little bit mistrustful often of conspiracy. When you sit back and you're like, we've seen Cosby, we've seen the Diddy parties, we've seen the Epstein thing. It's this weird thing about QAnon, which obviously was full of horseshit, and then there is more elite sex criming happening than I would have thought, you know?

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Do we owe QAnon an apology?

• 11:34Speaker 04

  And more of it was going on with like the knowledge of other people than one would have thought. Like, even like going back to that weird Trump comment on Epstein that like, "He loves beautiful women as much as me, but he likes them young."

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Right? Like, he knew.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  You can say what you want to say about whether or not he was involved, but he knew.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And he wasn't the only one that knew.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  And that's the other thing that's so weird about this story is that I find it hard to believe that there's not at least a team of people. You're saying there's one wrangler, which is Ghislaine, and then there's Epstein, and he's managing billions of dollars with the most powerful people in the world? Like, there's no assistants, there's no coworkers, there's no banker, there's no lawyer. Like, who are these other people that are associated with this enterprise? I don't know any of their names. I know two people. Doesn't that feel weird to you? Yeah, yeah. There's 12 people that work here every single day. 12 people that work here every single day. For some reason, he was able to run a billion-dollar empire, get one of the wealthiest people in America's assets sent over to him, have power of attorney, and nobody knows the lawyer that even did that deal?

• 12:38Speaker 04

  I do sometimes read things, not just about Epstein, but about all kinds of like, uh, very rich person scandalings. And I think like, where do you have all this time that me with my less busy life don't seem to have? I'm having trouble getting to the gym. You're running this like, while you're jetting around on your private jet, running your math salons, you're also somehow, the scheduling must be...

• 13:02Speaker 03

  This is the difference. You have kids, he has sex with them.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Having kids is way more difficult, okay? They require your time all day. They require 15 minutes of his time, okay? So, continue doing that.

• 13:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, I guess the argument would be like, well, he's a rampant pedophile and Ghislaine is the madam that's wrangling them and that is kept secretive from all of his other, you know, like legal business.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  Well, wasn't the structure of it, if I understand it correctly, that it worked like a multi-level marketing scheme, basically, that they would bring in, they would bring in girls and then they would basically say to the girls that if you bring in others, we will pay you. Like, they made the people they brought in and abused into recruiters.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  That's what I understood from what I remember. It was like Koko knives or whatever?

• 13:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was Koko.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  But people knew, right? Yeah, I mean, they're just, they just had to.

• 13:57Speaker 07

  So, the thing that I was asking you before is like, is it possible this could be Trump's Watergate?

• 14:05Speaker 04

  So, there are two pieces to that, I think. One is that, let me, there's a reason nothing can be Watergate again, which is that in Watergate, you had an independent, this was a time, my first book is Not Abundance, Why We're Polarized, is about party polarization. And Watergate happens during like the nadir of party polarization, which is to say the two parties are very mixed. You have a lot of liberal Republicans, you have conservative Democrats. So, the congressional parties are very independent. This world, like, if you imagine Watergate happening with Fox News and like the hyper polarized Republican Party of today, where something like Mike Johnson, you know, recessing Congress to keep a vote he doesn't want from happening, there's no Watergate.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  Watergate relies on the Republican Party turning on Nixon, demanding the information, and then ultimately going to Nixon and saying, "You have to resign." But in terms of can it be a scandal that envelopes Trump and that he kind of can't get away from, it seems like it is. And one of the reasons, I was thinking about this, liberals like me always complain about how they feel, nothing sticks to Trump. And one of the reasons that so little that they care about sticks to Trump is that the things they're thinking of that need to stick to him are things in their worldview, right? And so, if you have their worldview, my worldview, if you're mad about him lying to his people about cutting Medicaid or something, and people care about that, yeah, and who would

• 15:29Speaker 04

  believe you on it, they already don't like Donald Trump, like, it's already done. This is happening inside MAGA's worldview. That's, this is, it's like under their framework of the world.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  This is a great point, and I think that this is something that like... When I'm, when I'm having conversations with more liberal friends, I'm like, you echoing your sentiments or the things that frustrate you about Trump to other liberals? You already won them over. They have to be communicated in a way where the right is convinced so they can be brought over to your coalition. Or you just get pats on the back and I guess that's fine if that's what you're into. But like, the reality is you're gonna keep losing elections. We're in a democracy and you need to bring people over. You lost, you need more people. Some people went over and you need to bring back. So it's like, how are you taking those? What are the specific arguments that you're going to use that will appeal to them? Like, I don't even know if we want to go to Colbert so quickly, but like,

• 16:23Speaker 03

  there looks like there's some fucked up shit with this Colbert thing. But what I would say is, the fact, and I'd want to open that up and talk about it, but the fact that the show was losing money, anybody on the right will just go, but it was losing money. Why should it stay open?

• 16:40Speaker 06

  You guys don't understand economics, that's the liberal problem.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  And I think sometimes liberals put all their eggs in these baskets that don't appeal to the conservative side at all, so it's not gonna affect them. It has to be an issue that they're gonna be tugged at. Epstein tugs at them, also tugs at Democrats. Why would you not want to know about government corruption? Why would you not want to know about the covering up of like a pedophile? Like, this is important shit. So this is one of those things where I think Democrats are like, don't get distracted. Don't get distracted by him doing the Obama thing. Don't get distracted by the MLK shit. Don't get distracted by the Washington Redskins. That like, that's distraction for liberals to chomp at and go, you see he's a racist? Do you see he was a? No, no. Stay on Epstein. And when the entire country is just asking about Epstein, something's gonna break.

• 17:22Speaker 06

  He's not trying to distract us. He's trying to distract his people. Wall Street Journal, the Murdochs, Obama. It's like spinning a giant wheel.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  I think his point is both, right? Because the Democrats start to go, look how racist he is. He wants to bring back Redskins. And then his base goes, ah, shut up, you guys are triggered by everything. And then the conversation is about that.

• 17:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think his point is for, to borrow your verbiage from earlier, if we're looking at the worldview of conservatives, so much of it revolves around protecting children. Don't teach them XYZ. Don't do gender reassignment surgery. Don't abort babies.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  This pedophilia thing is really bad. And if you're a Democrat and Trump is trying all this fuck shit with like, oh, Obama did this, Obama, instead of saying, look at what Obama's doing, say, what he's doing is a distraction from the harm of children and conservatives. If we want you to realize this guy isn't who you thought he was, I'm staying on that. I'm not being like, look, because then all these other things, there's usually an exit ramp because it doesn't matter in their worldview, where it's like, oh, the Redskins, yeah, of course, the Redskins should change their name, that's stupid. Oh, Colbert got canceled, because you guys don't understand how money works, it doesn't make money. And then they get distracted from, not they're gonna get distracted, but every one of them takes them one degree away from Epstein.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  They can ignore it.

• 18:36Speaker 06

  Keep it on Epstein.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's a good point. I was thinking, essentially, about a different part of the worldview. So you're right about the protecting children dimension of it. I was thinking more about the, there's a kind of like conspiratorial populist worldview that is in MAGA, there's a version of it on the left too, but I'll stay with the right for a minute, which is, there's a corrupt, maybe pedophilic elite that is running everything. And what Donald Trump is, is a kind of human vengeance sent to destroy that. And once we destroy that, once we break it, then we can have the country, the world we want. And one of the reasons, one of the interesting things happening, I think, in Trump's second term, the reason this is happening in this very different way, the first one in a way is weirder, right?

• 19:22Speaker 04

  He names Alex Acosta, the prosecutor who gives Epstein the sweetheart deal to be Labor Secretary, and then Acosta resigns functionally over this in 2019, but it never becomes a new story. One of the reasons I think things don't stick in, under this framework in the first term, is that Trump didn't really control the government. And everybody kind of knew it, right? You could call it the deep state, you could call it the bureaucracy, right? But he was, like, his own administration, his own appointees, like HR McMasters, like to some degree, people like Jared Kushner, he was surrounded by people. Who sort of thought he got some things right, but also thought he was kind of a maniac and were trying to restrain him.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  And he was in this terrific tension with his own administration. So the the advantage I gave him is when things went wrong, he's like, they're doing it. Right. The deep state is blocking me.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Right. We're like, we're here, we're continuing the fight. It's why a weird conspiracy like QAnon can flourish during his administration. Like, isn't this guy in charge?

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  But the idea is like, no, he's not really in charge.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  This time, he's in charge. And all the people are his people.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  So this is a fantastic point. And some people might say, like, I was talking to Hassan Piker about this, and he was like, you have to understand what his argument was, and I hope I'm not butchering this, Hassan, but like, he basically said, like, there are people that are in government, like, the institutional old guard government, actually don't want to have full power. They don't want Congress and the presidency, because then they'll have to make the change they promised. They act like, so like, a Democrats in power, they actually kind of want the Republicans to have Congress, so the Democrats can talk about all the change they want to.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  This could tell you this is not true.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  I know these people.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  But fair, but fair. The argument is, is like, as long as they're talking about it and not doing it.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  The military still gets the money that they're getting, right? The foreign wars continue to happen. And in this circumstance, the Epstein files don't come out. And there's a convenient excuse that you can say to your base. Trump would say, the deep state isn't letting it happen.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  You create a theater.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Or the Democrats who are in charge would be like, the Republicans are not letting it happen. But in reality, the donor class is like, great, don't change a thing. Because the donor class doesn't want anything changed. And I thought it was an interesting way of looking at it. Now, Trump does not have that bad guy he can point at. You got everything you want. So now his base is going, fucking deliver. You know, this base is going, hey, we gave you the whole country. You got to deliver on it, and you're not fucking delivering. We're still doing all these wars. The Ukraine one is tricky, because you're dealing with Putin, who's literally, you know, a psycho. But with Israel, like, if you want to cut off funding, you cut off funding, it's over. You have the ability to do it, he can't do it. Right? So the base has.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  And does not want to do it.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  And does not want to do it.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  I think it's really like, you look at who he has appointed around that. He does not want to do it. Mike Huckabee is his ambassador there, Steve Whitkoff is his negotiator. These are not people who think this war has gone much too far.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  I almost thought you were going to stop the sentence at these are not.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  But on the things of what he's delivering, it's like, look, the rich guys got their tax cuts. You got Medicaid cuts. You got your Medicaid and food stamps taken where you will in a couple of years when all that kicks in after the midterms, and you don't get your files.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  So the base has every right to be upset because you campaigned on these things. You're delivering none of them. And here's a great opportunity, I think, for Democrats to seize some of the base. I get it, and they're going, don't you dare. You had him on your podcast. There's always a finger wagging. I get it. Get out of your system. That's fine. Feel whatever you want to feel. After you get out of your system, you want people to come over, and now you have an opportunity to be like, hey, we told you he was a liar. Here's the proof that he's a liar. Come over here. Here are some ideas that might be better. You might like these. If you just go, hey, fuck you. You're dumb. The people that are called dumb are never going to come to your side.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  Did you see the clips of John Ossoff, the senator from Georgia?

• 23:08Speaker 03

  What'd he say?

• 23:10Speaker 04

  I wonder if we could pull it up, because I'm not going to be able to do it justice. But he's been on the stump. He's running for reelection. And he is building the corruption argument that has always been there, that it was clear somebody was going to pick up. But he's just doing it well. It's not that often I see a single clip of somebody, and I just mentally, on one clip, I'm like, okay, in the 2028 group now.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  So wait, wait, wait. Break that down about the 20...

• 23:36Speaker 04

  It's worth it.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  He could be a presidential candidate.

• 23:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Off of one clip, he thought this guy could be president.

• 23:41Speaker 06

  All right, guys. Let's shout out some dates. August 1st and 2nd, Kansas City, Missouri. August 8th and 9th, Perrysburg, Ohio. That's Toledo, I believe. August 22nd and 23rd, Liberty Township, Ohio. It's a lot of Ohio. September 11th and 13th, I'm back in civilization in Donia Beach, Florida. September 25th and 26th, back to hell in Ohio. And this is a show that's, I'm very excited to do it, but it's going to sell out. October 5th, Dubai Comedy Festival. I didn't get to go last year. It was a big mix-up. This year, I'm there. The tickets are already like 80% sold out, so you need to hurry up and buy those. All those dates and more at akashsingh.com. Get your tickets. Also, I am very excited to announce the...

• 24:23Speaker 06

  Akash Singh Show, uh, this is my podcast. I flew out to India to record a bunch of episodes because of everything that is happening with free speech over there, court cases with friends of mine being threatened with jail time. Uh, honestly, I'm not sure how many episodes I can put out because lawyers have been calling me left and right and my friends' lives are in danger, but we are still going to put out a bunch of great episodes with people that I'm excited to talk to. So it's on my YouTube at Akash Singh Comedy. Please check it out. I love y'all. Thank you guys so much.

• 24:51Speaker 07

  Levittown, Washington DC, Chandler, Arizona, San Diego, Burlington, Vermont, Montreal, Toronto, Berkeley, Detroit, a bunch of other dates getting added. I can't wait to see you guys at the show. I'll be doing one hour of standup comedy, that no more, no less. See you guys at the show.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  But, but the reason I brought it up in that context is one of the things that happened to Democrats, um, over the past couple of years, it happened in 2020, then it really happened in 2024, is you really lose, like, the highest ground in American politics, like the, the, the most ideal political ground, when you lose the stream of reform. The stream of reform? Yeah, when you don't, when you don't have the argument about reform. Obama was a reformer. Bill Clinton was a reformer. Donald Trump was a reformer. Um, Hillary Clinton, very much not a reformer. Joe Biden running for people who are running against the system. Exactly. Yes. Okay. Running against the system is a great way of putting it. The, the difficulty Trump has now, that he, he was able to sort of weave out of in

• 25:48Speaker 04

  his first term is like, when you're a truly anti-system candidate, when your whole point is this whole thing is corrupt, and now you are in charge of it, how do you avoid, like, the inevitable problem of having to take responsibility for it? Yep. In his first term, he had a version of that. So then, Joe Biden wins and, you know, it's a pandemic, there's a lot of dimensions about that election, but Biden, whatever he is, he's not a reformer. Yeah. Um, and, but he's sort of a return to normalcy. Then by 2024, he's unpopular, you know, he's in his eighties. Yeah. And he and Harris, uh, just cannot run as reformers, right? They cannot run against their own, uh, against- Harris didn't even try. She literally said, Biden's doing great. Well, because I think

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Biden just gave her his whole staff, and now she can't take his staff.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  Well, I would just love to hear why you think, because I, what I hear is Biden said to her, no daylight kid, you're not gonna do that. I don't know if that's true.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  I think both for personal reasons, where I do think she had a lot of loyalty and affection for him. And I think it's actually a trickier thing than people give credit for. You imagine she comes out as a vice president and like really tears in to where the administration say went wrong on inflation or went wrong in immigration. And somebody says, weren't you there? Like, weren't you in the meetings?

• 27:02Speaker 03

  She's in a tough position.

• 27:03Speaker 07

  I think it's a death mission. Like, I think they sent her on a death march.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  This is why I was arguing forever that you needed like an open convention. Because you, like, she can run.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  This is what all of us were asking for.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  At least like let people, let people have the argument.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  This is where I think the lack of accountability is happening on the left. Like, I think, I think a lot of people, I don't want to call they all left, but like the angry online left, where I think a lot of them just want to make it about, oh, Trump came on podcasts or Trump, whatever. It's just like, yeah, but you ran a dead guy and then a woman that couldn't speak. Like, at a certain point in time, you need to have a fair election primary and the people will tell you what they want. And what they want might not be what the institution wants.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  And I think that's what has been happening. And I want to talk about.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  There is nobody who was arguing louder earlier for an open convention, I literally believe in the country than me, so.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  But I bet you got a lot of criticism for that.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got a lot of shit for that.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  So what happened when you were, when you were bringing it up?

• 27:52Speaker 04

  When I was bringing it up, so when Biden gives the press conference after the Robert Herr special prosecutor report, I'd been at the White House that day and, and I was like watching in my hotel room that night. And he goes out, I don't know if you guys remember this, but the report comes out and basically says, we're not going to prosecute this guy. He probably did mishandle classified material. Some subsequent revelations have made this look worse if you read the Jake Tapper, Alex Thompson book original sin. But, but we're not going to prosecute him because the jury would see him as like a well-meaning but somewhat doddering old man with a faltering memory. What we now know, because we've got, which I did not have when I wrote this, what we now know is that Biden's performance in those interviews with, with special prosecutor

• 28:37Speaker 04

  Herr was like catastrophic. Like, you really, like, there really did seem to be something wrong with his memory. And, and we now have these transcripts and we have this audio. And so something really was wrong there. But a lot of Democrats took it as a, just kind of partisan or like a way for her to kind of like hit Biden even though he couldn't prosecute him. Okay. So that night Biden infuriated, goes out and gives this press conference. And this is one where he. mixes up Egypt and Mexico. And I watched that and this was right around the time they decided not to do this Super Bowl interview. Yeah. And he just wasn't doing interviews. Pyramids, pyramids though. I actually don't catch it.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Egypt, Mexico.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Oh, Egypt, yeah, yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  As we're going to travel a little bit. Yeah, right. Not as rural as I could be. Although I've been, I've been to the Jews made pyramids. I've been to Mexico pyramids, actually. And I just had this moment that night, I was like, this is not going to work. If like, if what you're doing is a press conference to reassure people about your memory, when you almost never do extemporaneous speaking anymore, and you can't make it through the 20 minutes, this is not going to work. So this series of pieces, without like going through everything, the, the, the big argument I make is that the thing that Democrats are saying at that point, because like you had super majorities of the public saying, this guy is too old. Like whatever you think of him, like 70 to 80% of the public did not want him to run for reelection. I don't think they wanted Trump either. I think 70% wanted neither of them.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  And, but the, the party primary bases are very loyal to their people, so. And, but the thing was, he had sort of made it through the primary already. This is, you know, I think it's February 2024. And my argument, and this was not that he was too old to run, a lot of people said that, but that the Democratic Party was pretending there was nothing left to do, right? That it was already over. But it wasn't there. The actual candidate is chosen at the convention. For most of American history, both parties chose candidates at contested conventions. And I was like, you could do that. Like, he could step down, I mean, and you could have a process leading up to the convention that ends in a contested convention. Everybody would watch it to be incredibly dramatic. And yes, it could go badly, but if you keep doing this, this is definitely going to go badly. Right? Like, you are not going to make it through here. But I get like huge pushback.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Everybody thinks I'm an idiot. I get like a lot of internal, and then like all goes quiet. He gives a good State of the Union and everybody's like, Azri, fucking idiot. When you watch that, where you're like, damn. I watched, I was like, I was like, where was this guy? I did a thing after the state of the union.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Crystal math.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  I did a thing after the state of the union where I was like, look, I don't know how to account for that. All I know is like, there's a long time between here and the election. And if this guy's having good days and bad days, you better really hope he never has a bad day.

• 31:16Speaker 06

  And if he wins, there's four more years.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  And there's that. And so then you have the debate where he has the bad day on the big day. Right? And so then there's not a lot of time. It takes him weeks and weeks after the debate to finally decide not to run. And by the time that happens and he endorses Harris, the party internally just doesn't have the energy for it. It doesn't believe in itself. It's like been a very brutal and emotional fight. But it was a mistake because they were changing their candidate. And the thing that always frustrated me about it was, look, if your belief about Donald Trump is that he has fascism on American shores, then what that means for you is not that you have to yell that at everybody else. It means you really have to try to win.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  Right? If, then you have to figure out your absolute best candidate against him. And you're not going to do that without any kind of process. It surfaces information.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  You are, you are preaching to the choir here. You can't simply run a campaign of that guy's worse. You have to run the campaign of reform, as you said. And the campaigns, and the reason why we need reform is because there are people struggling that want change. And I think that oftentimes we have a, we have more optimism and hope for the reform candidate, even if they can't exact those policies.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it disappoints us, right? This half of Obama, it gets disappointing.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  But there is that moment where you have hope. And hope is like tantalizing, dude.

• 32:37Speaker 06

  Unbelievable.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  So, and in this certain situation, when people are desperate and they really want change and they're faced with this idea of more of the same or potential happiness, they're willing to like, look past a lot of fuck shit.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  And that I think might be the scenario.

• 32:52Speaker 06

  And I think the status quo thing versus reform thing is also very important because a lot of times we get lost in the weeds arguing whether Kamala was a good candidate. We don't think she is. Some people will never agree with that. They'll think she's great. But you cannot deny there was no reform offered in a time when we weren't happy. Whether you think Kamala could have been president or not, that, no one's getting elected.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  So this gets, I think, something really deep. So the parties, so it used to be going back to this book on polarization I did years ago. The parties, for a long time, were in polarized at all. They had all kinds of people in them. Like Strom Thurmond was a Democrat, right? Before he became the most or the second most conservative Republican, right? This happened constantly. You had George Romney, Mitt Romney's father. Like, by today's standards, he should be a liberal Democrat, but he was a Republican. So the parties polarized on this line of liberal and conservative. And that's politics as we know it for a long time, right? That's Paul Ryan and Barack Obama. That's Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton. Like, pick your leaders. What has happened since Trump has been it's polarizing on a different line, which is system anti-system. Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  And by system, you mean institutions. Institutions. How do you feel about the universities? How do you feel about the scientific? Not science, but Democrats always say it's science. It's the scientific institutions. How do you feel about the government itself? Yep. How do you feel about, you know, name it, right? And that didn't used to be quite so... Like, it used to have a big anti-corporate left, right? Like, so the parties have become... Like, the Democrats have become the parties of the institutions. And this is partially because Donald Trump was so anti-institution that he drove a bunch of institutional figures out of the Republican Party and basically into the Democratic Party. So you have this weird election, right? In 2024, you have Liz Cheney. I was about to say, yeah. Right? Moving basically into what I would call... She wasn't a Democrat, but into the Democratic coalition.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  The sort of pro-system coalition. And you have RFK Jr., who is like, considered to be, I think it was EPA, Environmental Protection Agency Secretary. As liberal as you can be. Under Obama. Yep. You know, who runs for, you know, runs as a Democrat. And I think it's 2023 when he's running. And he, you know, goes into the Trump administration. And so the difficult thing Democrats are gonna have to figure out here to take advantage of what you're talking about is the Epstein files have given them a moment in which to do it, because it's easy for them. They actually, like, they don't have, at least Democrats in Congress, anything invested in this. But if they want to, over time, peel off some of the Trump coalition, they have to find ways to be actually kind of anti-system, right? They can't just be the party that...

• 35:26Speaker 04

  You know, we believe in science and we believe in government, right? You have to know these things have flaws and failures.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  And you have to balance the fact that you don't want to burn them to the ground.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  Right? Which is, I think, what Republicans are often doing.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  But nor does that mean you should rally in defense of the status quo.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 35:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think the science one is also interesting because when you say scientific institutions, it's like, sure, there's probably some Republicans who are anti-science or whatever, but the scientific institution of pharma?

• 35:50Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  That's an institution we don't trust.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 06

  And you can understand where that distrust comes from, and maybe you can meet them halfway on that.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  And you have.

• 35:56Speaker 06

  And understand why they feel that way.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  And there are Democrats that that have shown like amazing distrust towards it, like.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  Bernie has been rallying against it for years. Yeah. I mean, pharma is easy for Democrats, like every Democrat, like Democrats have been fighting for years, and finally, the Inflation Reduction Act got some of it in, like driving down pharmaceutical drug prices and Medicare. Democrats are, they find it easy on pharma. The the question is more, I don't know how to describe it. It's like the Democratic Party, the other thing is have is become a very educated party. And the Republican Party has become like the party that wins most people who graduated high school. Democrats win most people graduate college. And like this really shifted the parties, like people graduate college are like more yoked into American institutions. They believe in them more, in part because those institutions have worked better for them.

• 36:39Speaker 06

  That's a great fucking way to say it.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Give a great example about how those institutions are working for the college educated and against the high school educated.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  Well, like, just take COVID.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  Right? You're like a white collar office worker.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  There's lockdown, you're like sent home. And then we have these like quote unquote essential workers who we call essential, but like we're putting them out in harm's way, but also we've made like their jobs much, much harder.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  Like they're having to wear all this kind of protective gear. And there were reasons for everything. I mean, some we now know in retrospect, like we're bad of, you know. You're gonna have mistakes.

• 37:13Speaker 06

  hindsight is 20/20.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  Right? Hindsight is 20/20. So I'm always very careful about this, but but. It just worked really differently. People experienced very different Covid's depending on whether you were like a college graduate who worked from home, or you were like out there like being pushed in but also having to like undergo all these new, all these new rules. But also just the economy works differently for different people. If you're, you know, a high school graduate.

• 37:37Mark Gagnon?

  Most jobs don't even hire without a college graduate.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  Right. Or, or like you've got terrible like just in time scheduling and, you know, then somebody telling you like, no, don't worry, GDP's up this year. Like, that's bullshit for you. It's not up for you.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  It doesn't affect you at all. Oh, the stock market is up great. I don't own a single stock. It's the worst statistic to this side of America's doing well.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you can come up with all kinds of versions of these, but just a party that is getting richer and more college educated is going to be more comfortable with the way things work than a party that is shifting the other direction.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  And feeling left behind.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Now, there's still, there's still contradictions in these parties, right? I mean, Republicans just passed a giant bill cutting functionally five trillions, five trillion dollars of taxes, heavily tilted towards rich people. And the only part of it they paid for, which is like about a trillion dollars, they paid for by cutting Medicaid SNAP, which is food stamps and like green energy investment, right? So the Republican Party has not actually become a populist party, but it has a populist affect. And now Trump is like running into the wall of that affect, right? They fed it, they voiced it themselves, and now it is them, they are the system. And all of a sudden they're like, no, no, no, trust the institutions. Trust the FBI and the DOJ.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  You told us not to trust them.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  Yes, you told us it was all deep state to trust nobody.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  You're gonna drain the swamp.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  And they're like, trust us, this is all a radical leftist plot, and you're like bread and circusing us with like AI videos of Barack Obama getting, I mean, it's, I'm always amazed to me like at how much disrespect Trump often shows for the people who believe in him.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  This is, but this is the opportunity, I think, for Democrats right now. And I think you like are, you know, I think you're voicing it in like a really brilliant way, which is everything that Trump, I won't say everything, but the, a lot of the things that Trump have done reinforce the institutions that he was so critical of, right? He's continuing the wars. He's like, I'm gonna stop the wars day one, continuing to fund them. He is not releasing the Epstein files. He's increasing the budget. So the base that was promised these things, and now he has unilateral support, like he can go take Congress, can do whatever he wants. He's choosing not to do these things, and these are a choice. The base is furious about this. How do Democrats come in and seize that?

• 39:56Speaker 04

  I mean, I think they're doing a pretty damn good job, actually. Like, the ones who came in and said, "We are offering legislation to force these files to release."

• 40:06Speaker 03

  I love what Roe did.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  And we're gonna build a coalition.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  And like Roe, he's a very liberal guy, very progressive. I mean, a co-chair of the Bernie Sanders campaign a couple of years ago. He's good at building bipartisan coalitions, like on foreign policy, right? On things like whether or not Congress has, like, power over war. Roe is good at working across the aisle. He's a very, very talented politician.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  And because of that...

• 40:25Speaker 04

  So they're doing a good job on that.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  But because of that, the Democratic establishment hates him.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  I don't think they hate Roe.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  I wouldn't... I think Roe thinks they do.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  No.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  We had Roe on, and he was like, "I get so much criticism. They don't want to support what I'm doing. This happens all the time." And I think he's operating on an island. And I think that this is a problem, because I think the Democrats are fighting the institutionalists within the party. And the real support, like, the ground support you feel, is for the more progressive side of the party, which seems to be answering a lot of the problems that the people that maybe voted for Trump have.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  I will say, if you spend... I'm not... I don't want to discount any experiences Roe's had or the congressmen's had. I will say, if you spend a lot of time talking to members of Congress in the Senate, and I do... They all think the leadership doesn't support them. Like, not literally all of them, but...

• 41:17Speaker 03

  It's a common refrain.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  It's a very common...

• 41:19Speaker 03

  What I mean by this is, like, there haven't been... Actually, I don't know if this is true to this day, but, like, Zohran wins...

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  The primary.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  That's a different case.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Not a single Democrat has endorsed him.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Not a single Democrat within this state.

• 41:35Speaker 04

  Jerry Nadler endorsed him.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  What is he, is he controlled?

• 41:38Speaker 04

  Jerry Nadler is like the dean of the New York congressional delegation. It is true, I don't know if it's changed by now.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  Okay, maybe not a single.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  Schumer and Jeffries like kept their distance. I don't know if they've changed where they are now.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  And I would say that Schumer and Jeffries kind of represent the institutional Democrats.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  Yes, that is their.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  The system Democrats. So it seems like the system.

• 41:54Mark Gagnon?

  Akeem Jeffries still hasn't backed him yet.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Jeffries hasn't backed him, right? So it seems like, I think at least for the people, that the system wants to maintain the status quo, as you said before, is not down for reform, but the people want reform. And the people are optimistic about reform without really understanding if these policies that Zohran has can work.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  Well, here's what Schumer and Jeffries are thinking. I, we could talk about Mamdani, who I like in a bunch of different ways, but they're terrified, not of New York City or what's going to happen here. They are worried about running, trying to win senate seats in Kansas City, when because of the dynamics of the like attentional economy, the only Democrat whose name people know is Zohar Mamdani.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  So they think that the Zohar Mamdani policy will engulf the Democratic Party.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  No, it's not the policy. That's not their concern, but the vibe and the weaknesses, right?

• 42:54Mark Gagnon?

  The reform direction, I guess.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  No, I would call the reform, like this happened with AOC, but it happens with Marjorie Taylor Greene, right? I don't want to, I'm not, I do not think AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene are the same by any means, but the parties tend to get defined by the loudest, most interesting figures in them.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Yep, yep.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  And one of the dynamics that is very hard for party leadership now is that they have very little control compared to what they used to have over how their party is seen. Right? So Jeffries and Schumer have their strategies. They would like to have the Democratic Party understood as being about certain things and not about other things. But instead, the thing people know is who's, is they see who's going viral on X or TikTok or Instagram or whatever, and it's not the people they would choose, right? Saying the things that they would say. Like, the last thing Schumer and Jeffries want to talk about is the value of the term globalization de fata, right? They just, they just do not want to talk about that at all. And the problem for them with Mamdani. Is it, he creates that conversation. I was just watching a speech JD Vance gave,

• 43:56Speaker 04

  the Vice President, at the Claremont Institute, which-

• 43:58Speaker 03

  What is the Claremont Institute?

• 43:59Speaker 04

  Claremont Institute is a sort of far-right think tank. They were giving him the Statesman Award. And we should, it's worth, I would love to talk about the speech, which I just did, which I'm having a piece come out on, because it's very much about what, what citizenship should be about. But the entire first section and end of that speech that Vance gives are about Mamdani, right? He wants to define the entire Democratic Party, entire left around Mamdani. Vance Mamdani is a soft target.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  This is what-

• 44:24Speaker 04

  Right? And that's the fight those figures are having along each other.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  This is what I think Republicans do really well, is they exploit the most extreme version of Democrats, and then they paint it across the whole party. So in this last election, like, the most effective ad was, "Trump is for me and you, and Kamala's for they/them." And there was that ad about, like, Kamala supports, like, trans surgeries for inmates.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  Like, you remember this ad that they ran? I think they ran in the Super Bowl.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  And it was a great, they did a great job of painting the party in one light, and it was based on the most extreme version. And I think Democrats maybe tried to do it, and maybe Republicans are like, "Yeah, we're cool with that, too." Like, I don't know what that is. But it does feel like the institution is, like, fighting tooth and nail to stop the perception of the party changing. But here's the reality. If the people want that part of the party, there's nothing you can do about that in democracy. And fighting it makes those people feel like you don't want that change that they desperately want. And now, you become the status quo that they are fighting against. So they don't really have a choice. It's like democracy, for better or for worse. Zohran's gonna, if, if

• 45:38Speaker 03

  the people want Zohran, whether we like it or not, if the majority of New Yorkers want it, we have to let that happen. If it goes horribly, and we can go into some of those policies, and if he'll even be able to do them, but like, you cannot restrict what the people want in a democracy. And if you do try, which is what Trump is also doing, January 6th, they'll be furious. They'll be furious about it. And his base is furious, Democrats are furious. And I fear that's kind of what's happening with Zohran.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  I think it is not going to work.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  Which?

• 46:09Speaker 04

  It is flatly not going to work.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Zohran or?

• 46:11Speaker 04

  No, I'll finish the sentence.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  For Democrats to try to keep an arms-length distance from their nominee for mayor in America's biggest city. Like, it's just not gonna work. But they've done it with Bernie and AOC for quite a bit. Wow. They have, I mean, they try, although-

• 46:29Speaker 06

  Mayor of New York is also a little different than with a senator from Vermont and then AOC.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Democratic primary. But this to me is a bit of a different, I mean, Bernie Sanders is on Chuck Schumer's leadership team, or at least, I don't know if that's true for this Congress, but he was in the last one, right? They have tried to bring him in. There is tension between them, right? They, it's a big party, and they have their disagreements. That's different than the Jeffrey Schumer, "we're not gonna endorse, we need to have conversations," right? The question of whether or not AOC is a Democrat, you know, who will be, you know, endorsed in reelection campaigns is like, not up for grabs right now. And, and, and Mombani, I'm just saying, it's not gonna work for them. Like, they, they're gonna need to figure out what to do with the energy Mombani has unleashed. They cannot hide from it. And they cannot oppose it because that will crack up their coalition. The thing Republicans do, for

• 47:16Speaker 04

  better and for worse, I mean, they do try to paint Democrats, you know, by their most extreme candidates. Democrats do it to the right, too, right? The thing that has happened on the right is they have embraced outside of themselves. Right? I always think about this. If I had, like, if I had been a liberal substacker in the fall 2024, I was like-

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Fucking people, you don't understand what's coming. If Donald Trump gets elected, he's gonna make Cash Patel and Dan Bongino the heads of the FBI. He's gonna put RFK Junior at HHS. He's gonna try to make Matt Gaetz like the Attorney General. He'll be like, calm down, dude. That's ridiculous.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  It's a little, like, you can't define the Republican Party by its most extreme wing in some, like, way. It is its most extreme wing. Like, that would have been, like, I would not have written that. I would have found that far-fetched.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Like, truly far-fetched.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:14Mark Gagnon?

  It's like, people threatening, oh, they're gonna do Project 2025. And then they're like, no, that's, you're, you're overreacting. And then you're seeing them slowly do all of Project 2025.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Did you read Project 2025?

• 48:26Speaker 04

  I read a lot of Project 2025.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  It's like 12,000 pages. There's this idea that, like, everybody read it. And they're like, oh, how would you not read Project 2025? I didn't read War and Peace either. Like, nobody read the whole fucking thing. And I'm tired of people acting like they read the whole thing. You saw a few headlines about it, and you're like, okay, they're doing the exact thing they said. But it's just like the Constitution. It's like, none of us have read the entire Constitution.

• 48:47Mark Gagnon?

  It's much shorter. The Constitution you could do in, like, an hour.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Fair enough, okay. But it is like, it's 12,000 pages.

• 48:52Speaker 06

  What have they done from Project 2025? I asked ChatGPT what it was. I already forgot. I forget everything.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  All right, Project 2025. So it's, I, I, I love that I get to do Project 2025, uh, expanded for the flagrant audience. Um, Project 2025, it's 800-some pages, I think, if I remember correctly. What happens is a Heritage Foundation, which is like a big right-wing think tank, brings together over 100 right-wing groups. And they're like, we're gonna create the menu. We are gonna create, like, and it's not like one playbook. It's actually a bunch of parts of 2025 contradict themselves. It isn't one thing.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  That you could just like do the whole thing. Ah. But if you read it, one of the biggest things that it is about is the takeover of the administrative state. I will say right at the beginning, it also argues for banning porn, which they haven't done, right? Like, there's a lot of things in there that you would not expect because it's also representing a lot of different factions. Have you been to Florida lately? It's partially, it's partially the Heritage Foundation also making a bid for leadership, right? Showing that we're the people bringing everybody together, like we are the conveners of everything. Ah. But it is like, it's a lot of right wing policies of all different kinds. Some of, again, which contradict each other, some of which they've done, some of which they haven't. But the thing they did the most from it is Project 2025 is a vision of how to use the tools of the government

• 50:16Speaker 04

  and the leverage of the government to first break the bureaucracy and like the deep state or the administrative state, as it's like more often called in there, in order to have control of it. So it's consolidating power. It's consolidating power and then using a lot of that power against other elements of society to make them come into alignment with you. For example? Everything they're doing on education, right? Where they're trying to break the, that actually also comes out of the Heritage Foundation in a different way. But where they're using federal money to try to, you know, break the universities and force them to come under, in some cases, you know, the administration, some kind of receivership or conservatorship, but certainly under some kind of control. And to make them afraid of who they hire and who they bring in, this is what they're doing with Harvard.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  And how exactly are they using this consolidated power to leverage that control over Harvard? So what they've been doing there is a mixture of things. They've been first trying to cancel all the money that Harvard gets from federal money for scientific research, right? Which is billions of dollars. Yep. There are other kinds of subsidy and grant programs. The universities are very, very woven in with the federal government because the federal government just funds a huge amount of the basic research in this country. Then there's also the student loans, obviously, some people go on student loans. They've been threatening accreditation, right? The idea that you would have Harvard University not being an accredited university. We'd probably break accreditation, or they'd break Harvard, but nevertheless, they've been trying to do that.

• 51:41Speaker 04

  They took a run at making, basically Harvard, like a lot of universities, has a lot of foreign students. And they do this for different reasons, some because it's good to educate people from the whole world. But also, those students pay a lot of money to be there.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  A lot of money.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  And they use that money to subsidize the American students. So it's, if you, you know.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  I think that's a very favorable look at it.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  No, that's literally true.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  There's a $50 billion endowment and you're telling me that they're using some Chinese kids tuition to pay for some American kids?

• 52:10Speaker 04

  Why Harvard doesn't spend down their endowment is like its own question. And like, it's a worthwhile question. But it is just the case that they, I mean, and basically all the, I mean, I went to UC, right? Like, they have out-of-state students they use to subsidize the in-state students, right?

• 52:23Speaker 03

  You're welcome.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  We both went, right?

• 52:24Speaker 03

  You're welcome.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, we were talking about this.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  All of you are welcome.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  This is, they just do do this. So if you go to Harvard and you're like from a family, you know, in Ohio who makes $75,000 a year, you're not paying tuition.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  But what they were, what the administration's been trying to do, and getting in a bunch of court fights about, is trying to basically say Harvard cannot use a provision of immigration law that allows for the foreign students to come in.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Now, I understand this idea, and I think it's like a, it's a decent justification of saying, hey, we're using these guys that pay for the students in America that are going. Now, the amount of foreign students they've been taking has been increasing exponentially. I think like, was it, say, 20 years ago or 30 years ago, it was between like 2% and 5%? I think Columbia's now at 70%. So I think that there is a concern that our finest institutions are not educating America's finest.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  I think that's, I think that's fine. I don't know what the numbers are for Columbia or for Harvard.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  I think Columbia's like 70, I think Harvard maybe like 40, 50 or something like that. Columbia's international student population.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  40%, okay, 40%.

• 53:25Speaker 06

  70 seems crazy, but 40's still high.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  Okay, 40's still high.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  So, so for me as an American, right, like, you know, I have a daughter, you have kids, like, you, hopefully, knock on wood, they're really smart and they have the opportunity to go get educated at our finest institutions. And now they're fighting with. The Nepo babies that end up going because their dad and their granddad went, so those slots are already taken. And then the oligarchs' kids that are gonna go because they're gonna spend an astronomical amount of money so they can go there. And you feel like, and it's the same feeling that I think that a lot of

• 53:54Speaker 04

  And they want the donations of their parents for the endowment later.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 53:57Speaker 04

  Which is a big part of this.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  So I think what a lot of Americans feel is like, wait a minute, do I not have an opportunity to get educated by our finest institutions that my tax dollars are actually going to pay for? Whereas these foreign students that are going to pay, yeah, they're maybe paying double, but they haven't been paid taxes their entire

• 54:12Speaker 06

  Not to justify what Project 2025 is.

• 54:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, I'm just thinking, I'm saying, this is, I think, a reasonable argument in service of a different policy.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Fair, fair. But I guess what I'm trying to argue for is this sentiment of Americans who might not understand how those policies align or misalign, but this feeling of, why am I not being able to take advantage of something that my country offers its people?

• 54:35Speaker 06

  It feels like college has become a business, and that's a sentiment that they can take advantage of with

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and especially when you hear about this $50 billion endowment. Again, I'm sure there are restrictions as far as how they can spend that money. Of course, we can get into the nitty-gritty of it, and that is the truth, and we should talk. But the average person that's not aware of how an endowment works, all they hear is, and they understand is, wait a minute, Harvard's got $50 billion. Is Harvard even a university, or is it a hedge fund?

• 55:00Mark Gagnon?

  The administration's not saying that's the reason why they're taking that money away.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  No, it is a

• 55:05Speaker 06

  It's the sentiment that allows you to take advantage of it.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  It's more the sentiment that I think is a fair frustration that people have. And I think the administration is taking advantage of that sentiment to administer this control and leverage that they want.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  I think if you want to say

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Which is unfair.

• 55:23Speaker 04

  There are a bunch of ways in which institutions in American life benefit from either public money, or largesse, or support of some sort, and do not give back enough or work in a way we think is fair. I am like 1,000% on board. There is a lot of organizations in this country, including a lot of religious organizations, that I don't think in the way we do the tax code should be

• 55:46Speaker 03

  Exempt from taxation.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  Should be exempt from taxation, right? The administration has been, I mean, they didn't even start on the foreign students thing. That was something they figured out later, as a vulnerability later. Because what they wanted Harvard to do was have to run who it was hiring and who was admitting either.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  Through the administration, yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  Right? And so the plan here has been to-

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Which I disagree with 100%.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  The plan here has been to break these institutions and force them to come under the Trump administration's control.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  And the things you're saying are reasonable. And in a country that worked better, right? And in a country where we could have these conversations, solve problems, you could 100% imagine something like, members of Congress collaborate on a bill that says you cannot be tax exempt as an American university if you have fewer than 80% of your, you know, of the people-

• 56:34Speaker 03

  Graduated class be from the United States.

• 56:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, or US citizens, or, you know, residents here, whatever it might be, right? You could imagine a bunch of versions of this. We just don't live in that particular-

• 56:45Speaker 03

  I guess what I'm saying is like, I think it's important to like, meet people where they are emotionally when explaining these things.

• 56:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  Because if we write off that sentiment, then they'll just write off the argument, which is a great argument, this idea that the administration is trying to really like, force control and make them bend the knee to whatever they want to do, which we don't want. We want these universities to operate with autonomy and not bend to whatever administration is there. But at the same time, there are legit concerns about these institutions that have so ungodly amounts of money and seemingly are not looking out for the best interests of American students. I think this-

• 57:19Mark Gagnon?

  It's almost like White Lives Matter. It's like, we're talking about Black Lives Matter right now, and you're like, oh, but White Lives Matter too.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:26Mark Gagnon?

  And I'm like, I understand you should acknowledge it, but it's like, if that's not what the administration is targeting, or the reason why they're targeting, like, why even discuss that?

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Well, what you have to do is you go, you have to at least go, hey, white lives do matter, dude. And you're 100% right about that. And when we say Black Lives Matter, we're not saying that white lives don't, because they do matter and they're equally important. But here's this circumstance right here that we're trying to work on, and we'd love your help, because your lives matter also. So we'd love your help on understanding this issue. But if we go, yeah- This is what you voted for. Yeah, shut up. Like, if you go- Shut up, you'll never get their support and you need their support on this.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  And that's, that's where I feel like a lot of times the finger wagging or the don't you dare mentality, or you're too stupid to understand this. You completely lose support from the people you actually want to bring over. Liberals are going to be on board with the liberal cause already. So you either pat yourselves on the back and say, we're so smart and we understand everything and big Trump bad. Or you go, this is why this is not working for you and they're taking advantage of your emotional reaction.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  I think a thing, and this goes to the anti-system, pro-system coalitions thing. I think a thing that Democrats are going to have to spend some time doing. If they want to become the kind of coalition that can come a lot closer to neutralizing the threat that to them MAGA poses. I, I think among Democrats, it's very easy to have a kind of conversation about what is wrong with the country. Like what's wrong with how, you know, how much money rich people have or support people? Like what's wrong with health insurance, right? What's wrong on this or that policy area? Fine, but everybody's comfortable with that. I think there needs to be a conversation about what's wrong with the institutions. What from your perspective or from my perspective, like a liberal perspective? What, where do you think they're failing and what would you do about it, right?

• 59:10Speaker 04

  I mean, abundance is very much a book about what is wrong with government institutions and particularly in blue states or when Democrats are running them. And very much a book about what has sort of gone wrong in a bunch of public scientific institutions. Right? So it's sort of, one thing we're attempting to model in there is a kind of self critique of institutional failure that is nevertheless grounded in our own values and our vision of what kind of world we would like to see in the future. But I, as you're sort of saying in this conversation, I think if you get into this fight and you're like, well, what you're doing on the universities is horrific. And then somebody pops up and says, well, you weren't saying anything about all these failures in the universities that you're admitting now, three years ago. Well, I mean, fair, you could say, well, I was focusing on things three years ago.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  It didn't like what was going on Harvard didn't strike me as the biggest deal in the world. But it's fair, right? It's, it does not show to people that you cared about what they cared about. Now, did that many people care about Harvard and its sort of percentage of foreign born students? Students, I'm a little skeptical of that, but there are a lot of things they did care about.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  But maybe they weren't aware. Now that they're aware, we can meet them where they are.

• 1:00:16Speaker 04

  Yes, but now, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:00:17Speaker 06

  And I think the larger, sorry to interrupt, I think the larger issue is not about Harvard. It is about this feeling that college has gotten so crazy expensive. Prices keep going up. It's just this feeling of being betrayed by institutions that people who are the new conservative feels. And it's like, I remember I graduated in 2002 from my college, my school was 25,000 a year. I went back to do a show in 2000, or graduated in 2006. I went back in 2009, it was 45,000 here. And it's like, this is a feeling people have. So, fuck you guys. You've become a business. You don't educate us anymore. You've become a business. And if I do graduate, I don't get the money I used to get before. I don't get the jobs I used to get before. And I think to Schultz's point, just acknowledging, hey, I get you're frustrated about that,

• 1:01:01Speaker 06

  but what these guys are doing is not going to ease your frustration. It's just allowing them to do some fuck shit.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  Can you explain, and I think this will take us to the Zohran populism that we're seeing right now.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, go, go.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  Can you, can you explain how the cost of education has skyrocketed? Like, do you understand how that happens?

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  I want to try to do a good job of this. If you asked me healthcare, I would have done so, been so much more.

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  I just want to say, like, for this conversation, I'd like there to be no minorities in the room, so.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  And again, you don't have to give us, like, the perfect example. Like, more or less, can you tell us how this happened?

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  So there are a couple of things happening here.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  And I just have in my head my, like, education policy friends who actually know this and are going to yell at me for what I get wrong because I've not looked at this in a couple of years.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Don't yell at Ezra, okay? We're on Flagrant, we're just having fun.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  Talking about cost inflation, Colton.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  So one thing is that... I'm gonna rank these from like, sort of benign Yeah. to more problematic, okay? So one thing is just using this thing called Baumol's cost disease. Baumol's? Baumol's, B-A-U-M-O-L. Baumol's cost disease. And the basic insight of it is that things that are reliant on human beings over time get more expensive, not less expensive, as societies grow richer. Things where we make them tend to get less expensive, right? Flat screen televisions, or in one of the very classic ways of looking at this, if you think about how cheap it is to now get a recording of like, classical music done, right? It's nothing, right? You pay nothing. Yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  Whereas like, the symphony costs a lot of money to go to. Right. Right? Whereas, you know, generations ago, it was actually, you know, less expensive because like, a lot of people went and sold live music because it was not all this other stuff. So, the stuff where we can digitize it, the stuff where we can make it in machines, it tends to get cheaper over time. But when you need a lot of skilled human labor, and colleges are built on skilled human labor, that labor gets more expensive. Why is that? Because we just keep paying people more over time, right? People do not become cheaper. Okay, so you keep paying people over time, but... So this is true in a bunch of areas. So healthcare is like this too. This is one of the big reasons healthcare costs so much. Nurses, doctors, teaching, right? Things where you have to keep up pay scales

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  in a society that is like, growing and getting more affluent. It tends to see its cost inflation, like, race ahead of things like consumer electronics. So that's like benign, right? That's like a thing that... You can't make a teacher cheaper. Or you shouldn't. Or you should, but the idea is that you can make a flat screen cheaper. So that's one thing. You can mass produce it, and... But that doesn't, there's a lot of things that doesn't explain. Yeah. Another thing is, we have cut a lot of the money, this is speaking about public universities here, not private. We've cut a lot of the direct money we spent on public universities over time, and we've passed that on to students and families. So, in different periods where states, which are the people primarily fund higher education, have to make big budget cuts, it tends to cut budgets there.

• 1:04:09Speaker 04

  And then, one of the things they do in those periods... Is they bring in more out of state students, they bring in more foreign students. And then they get sort of used to those income streams.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  So let me slow you down right here, just so I understand. So we need to cut the budget, the state budget. So we're going to cut the funding that we have for the state run universities. The state run universities still have to maintain their budget. So they push that cost on to the people.

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  So the cost of tuition goes up. One of the things about the tuition you were talking about a minute ago is tuition has gotten much, much trickier to evaluate. Because a lot of people, huge amounts of people don't pay full tuition. So the headline tuition goes up and up and up. But we've created a weirder market where people are paying much different rates depending on the, you know, how much their family made. So that's another thing. There's a huge amount of administrative bloat in higher education. Like you just can't get away from that. If you look at funding structures of the personnel there. And you look at how many administrators they have per faculty member compared to what things were like, you know, 30 years ago or 40 years ago. We have just added administrators and staffing at a crazy rate.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  And a lot of people ask, and I'm one of them, like, are we getting much for that? Is higher education so much better? Are all these people doing so much? Or have we just, has like the bureaucracy become kind of self perpetuating?

• 1:05:29Speaker 06

  If the reason you go to college is what we were told is so you can get a better job. We're getting much less for much more money than what we got 20 years ago.

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

  I mean, part of that is just more people going to college.

• 1:05:40Speaker 06

  Sure, for whatever reason.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  The college premium is no longer there.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  The college premium goes down. Then there's things about the colleges competing with each other on amenities. And this is sort of related to administrative stuff. But, you know, it's like, when I went to college, and I went to UC Santa Cruz and then UCLA.

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  The gyms were nice. Like that's a nice gym. Like the pool, like the climbing wall, whatever.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  Why is there a fucking climbing wall? We're here to get educated.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  But part of it is it, with the selective ones at least, which is what we're talking about, community college is still very cheap. Right? With the selective colleges, they now compete with each other for the best students and like the richer students.

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  Because like the best students get you good ratings and you know, US News and World Report.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  And the richer students pay for it.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  And the richer students pay for everything.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Speaker 04

  And so, one of the ways you get them is when they come and do their tour on your campus.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  They take you, it's like the Four Seasons.

• 1:06:32Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  They take you to all the amenities.

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  So, so there's been money in that. Um, I am sure there's a bunch of other dimensions. I mean, there's also an issue with increasing amounts of student loans, some of which do get pocketed by the colleges and they just use that to sort of like increase the rate because it's complicated, but the way the student loans work, it does, if everybody's got them, you can kind of, everybody can pocket at least part of it.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  So, so that's what I wanted to talk about a little bit. Like, I think it's quite benevolent to have a loan, student loan process in America where they basically say, hey, we're gonna give you the money to go to school, no matter how much it is. Like, there's no cap, really, right? Like, whatever the school costs, we will give you that loan and then you're gonna have to deal with it. I think the idea is quite beautiful. It's like, we want our people to get educated and the government is gonna back these loans so that we'll have an educated populace. Is it possible that there are people at the universities that are taking advantage of that blank check?

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  I mean, it's, I don't think arguable.

• 1:07:33Speaker 03

  So that...

• 1:07:33Speaker 04

  Right? Some of them, but it's like everything.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  I'm not trying to paint everybody as an fairest character.

• 1:07:38Speaker 04

  No, I'm not actually, I'm actually saying not even some of the universities, I'm saying some of the check. Right? Which is to say that, there's a lot of research on this. You do a big increase in student loans. All of a sudden, students have more money to go to college. The colleges will, like, take that money. And it's not like, they don't put all, I mean, they don't just pocket all of it, right? But, but yes, right?

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  I'm not even talking about pocketing it, I'm just saying like, let's say they're not pocketing it, let's say they're just building more climbing walls.

• 1:08:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what I mean by that.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, I don't think that they're like stealing money, but if it's a blank check, that check is gonna go up. If, for example, the student loan lending services, what is it? Is it Fannie Mae or Sally Mac or some, one of those things?

• 1:08:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, not Fannie, it's Sally.

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  Sally Mae, right? So...

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  I owe that bitch money.

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  All these different things. But like, if they limited the total amount at $150,000, that's how much universities would cost and maybe there would be less amenities and maybe there would be less bureaucracy. But there is no limit, so why would they limit the bureaucracy and why would they limit the climbing walls? If you put a guardrail on it, they'll be forced to decrease the cost of education or...

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Increase the amount of foreign students to make up for it, which could also piss off Americans.

• 1:08:52Speaker 04

  So this was a huge fight in the Obama years. One of the things that sometimes like frustrates liberal wonky people about about this stuff is that in ways that were like not well covered, there have been a lot of efforts to do something. So in the Obama years, they did a bunch of higher ed reforms. And one of the things that they tried to do was, and again, I'm worried about getting things wrong from memory, but so if I get things a little bit wrong, forgive me. What they tried to do was tie a bunch of things in how we funded colleges and how who could take the loans and who was accredited to the rate of loan repayment. And the thing they were tracking there was like, how can you define which colleges are

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  truly failing their students, right? How would you go about and try to figure that answer out? There are a lot of colleges, right? They're all across the country. Who's failing? One way to figure it out is where do you see people going to college, either completing it or not completing it, and then unable to pay back the loans they took to go there? And so what the administration did, sort of as I remember.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  UC Santa Barbara. That's how you define it.

• 1:10:00Speaker 04

  How dare you? You went to Santa Barbara, right?

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  Of course I did. Nobody's paying back those loans. Doug's still got loans from UC Santa Barbara.

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  So that's a situation where they began to try to crack down, including, by the way, on one Trump university, which had problems like this, right? A lot. So the first thing they began to focus on were these like for-profit degree mills. When we talk about this, we're thinking about UC Santa Barbara, we're talking about Harvard. We're talking about this like upper crust of selective four-year schools. It's like 50 schools. Most people don't go to them. Most people are just going to schools you haven't heard of or, you know, that they're just not as selective. And they're the people who are mostly really in trouble afterwards, right? And so that's where a lot of the legislation started.

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 1:10:46Speaker 04

  And where they're trying to do things, did it go far enough? Like, I'm sure not. I think one of my frustrations is like the new right, the sort of Trumpist right. It has, if you read their books and their literature and like The smart people and it's a lot of good critiques of colleges in there. Right. They come in and do completely politicized horseshit, right? They're not trying to make them better, but just trying to break them until they bend the knee, which to me, there's like a particular pain in watching people identify problems, come into power without the coalitions and make those problems hard to solve. Right. And then just like also refuse to solve the problems because they're so focused on their own resentments and enemities. But yeah, it would be good to really think about higher education. Like I'll pose this as like a question, I guess for you all.

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  I think the base of a lot of this conversation and and the ways that higher education has gotten, if we want to say it off track, is there's not actually an agreement in society anymore about what is it for? Is it to deepen your faculties as a human being, right? Like the overview of higher education, like, you know, read the great books and literature, shame, right? Is it to get a good job? To get a job.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  Now, I think for some people, and I think that does still exist. I think like the quickest pathway to upward mobility is through education. Like I think if you're somebody that comes from destitute poverty and you manage to get a college education, you'll get a job. And yes, you might be saddled with these loans for the rest of your life, but you'll be able to move out of poverty.

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  What's happening right now, I think, is that

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  middle-class people, I think this brings us to some of Mamdani, is like middle-class people feel entitled if they go through the system that they have been promised, if they go to school, they take out the loans, they get the education, that they will be promised upward mobility. And now they're in New York City and they're paying $7,000 to live in a one-bedroom apartment. And they have $2,000 worth of loans every single month. And they have a job that pays six figures, which is like, holy shit, I'm rich. But then they realize they don't have any money left. And they really don't see upward mobility, even in the company. A lot of their friends are getting laid off and they're going, fuck, I did everything right. I did what you guys said I should do, but I'm not going to be able to buy a home or start a family. And there's this extended adolescence, right? And we're distracted with fun events to go to and this party and this concert.

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  But in reality, it's like, when do I start my family? When do I become an adult? And I think maybe it's a good way to segue into Mamdani because simply freezing the rent, right? is an amazing feeling. I cannot imagine how amazing that feeling is for somebody who sees their rent go up 3% every year, whatever it is, and goes like, I don't think I can afford, like, my salary might not go up that much. How the fuck am I gonna afford this? Freezing the rent is great, but in essence, it's like pushing the student loan debt onto the landlord. Because if the student loan debt is the thing, right, that's crushing you, if it's that $200,000 that you have to pay off, and that's coming down to a few grand a month, or whatever it is, and now you don't have any increase in rent, you're like, okay, I got a little wiggle

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  room now, because I don't have to worry about that going up, because I still gotta pay for this debt. So I think a lot of, and if you've seen like, Mamdani's base, I think it is a lot of like, middle-class people that are college-educated, that are like, crushed by these loans, and just the cost of living, and they just need a break somewhere. And that's, I think, where you go to the government to offer that break, and I think he's satisfying it with his promises. I don't know if he'll be able to deliver on those, but I 100% get why people are, are like, wishful about it.

• 1:14:09Speaker 04

  I don't blame them at all.

• 1:14:10Speaker 06

  Also, if you're meeting people where they are, you grew up in New York, so the prices don't seem as insane to you. Coming from the outside to New York, the rent prices, it feels like a robbery. It's like, there's no way this is not a criminal activity that you're doing, that an apartment that would cost me $600 a month in Dallas, Texas, cost me $4,500 a month in New York City. So fuck you, beat me where I am, fuck you, freeze the rent.

• 1:14:33Speaker 04

  Something gotta give.

• 1:14:34Mark Gagnon?

  And the only way to fix that is you create more housing. So you freeze the rents while creating more housing, and then it levels out.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  It's almost like somebody wrote a book about how important it is to create more housing. Maybe you guys should read Abundant, because he's got some great ideas. It's been number one for 18 weeks, or maybe 19.

• 1:14:49Speaker 04

  I didn't say number one, it's just been on the seller.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  It's been on the seller, number one for 19 weeks. Nothing else is being sold.

• 1:14:55Speaker 06

  Did you know 20 weeks it was on the number?

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  21, number one, okay. So, so, so, give us Mamdani populism, and, and do you think that there is a through line with the debt, that young people, middle-class people especially, are feeling?

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, like, let's start just like with the populism, right?

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  Mamdani, like, the point of almost every policy Mamdani has. There's this line I like from an old mentor of mine, Mark Schmidt, where he says, "It's not what you say about the policies, it's what the policies say about you." And you have all these liberal politicians, and like, Brad Lander, who I really liked, and was probably my choice for mayor. He's got like 75 pages, he's got like 70 policies, and they're all like 15 or 40 pages. But he doesn't have one or two policies that define who he is. But for Trump, "Build the wall." It's like a policy that says everything about him, like, one, you know, tariffs. It's not just a policy, it's also a sense that we're all getting ripped off. And for Mamdani, like, he really understands not how to, like,

• 1:15:59Speaker 04

  other politicians communicate about policy, he communicates through policy. Freeze the rent, free buses, the city-run grocery store thing, free daycare. They all say functionally the same thing, which is, "This society is unfair." "You are getting screwed in it." "And government should be here to make the things that people need available to them." "Not just like affordable to them, if you apply for the subsidy program, and you get cleared, and then you get it, you know, just there. You should just be able to get on the fucking bus." "Right? You should, you're a kid, having a kid is a good thing to do. It's hard. There should be daycare. They figured this out in other countries, we should figure it out too."

• 1:16:44Speaker 04

  That's awesome. How possible is it? Because that all, everything you're saying is fucking beautiful. In how possible is it for Mamdani to do free daycare just in New York City? The problem for his, he's got two problems, right? And I'm like, not on the anti-Mamdani side of this, but he's taken a couple of risks. And the big risk is that he can't deliver what he promises. Everything he is talking about, and most of the big ticket things he's talking about, not freezing the rent, actually. Requires a lot of money. Free daycare is very expensive. You need the, you need the facilities for it, which they don't have. You need the, the people to actually be with the, the students or the kids, not even students. You actually need a very, very high number of them because when you're dealing with kids that young.

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  You need a lot.

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  You need a lot, right? It's not like one teacher looking over their class of like 10, 15, 30 kids.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  That's what we went through.

• 1:17:33Speaker 04

  Right? When you're dealing with two-year-olds, it's like one person for three or four kids.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Tops.

• 1:17:38Speaker 04

  Tops.

• 1:17:39Speaker 06

  I was with Andrew's lovely daughter.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  Oh, thanks.

• 1:17:42Speaker 06

  A few days ago, she was trying to kill herself every second.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was more people for one kid.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, the, the correct numbers you need are two, two people for one child. That's the actual ratio that makes things manageable.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  He does not have control over taxes as mayor of New York City.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  So tax increases would have to go through Albany through Governor Kathy Hochul. She is running for her reelection on a no new taxes pledge.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  And she literally came out and she's like, I'm not gonna do it.

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  She's not gonna do it. It's bad politics for her. She doesn't just have to win a Democratic primary in New York City. Other parts of New York are not as blue.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:18:15Speaker 04

  As New York City is and not as rich as New York City is.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  I think that's something that people don't understand about New York. You get out of New York City, it gets red quick.

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  It gets red quick. Um, and I mean, a lot of places like this, like California, it's like outside of the big cities.

• 1:18:25Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:18:26Speaker 04

  It's very different, right?

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  So she's got very different politics than him.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  All right, guys, listen, I, I have a big if issue with the UFC right now.

• 1:18:32Speaker 06

  Hmm. Talk about it.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  It is, it's my favorite sport to watch. I buy every single pay-per-view. I mean, you can look at my, I've bought every single pay-per-view this year. I watch it religiously. I can't stay up for it. I can't stay up for it. I buy every single one and I watch the prelims and then I go into the main card and about one or two fights. I, I have, I have a kid, I'm up at six in the morning. There, but I do remember a time, it could, I could be off, where the main card was done by like 11.

• 1:19:04Speaker 06

  No. No.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  I remember a time where the main card was done by like 9:45. I would watch the UFC and then I'd go out for a late dinner. You guys don't remember that?

• 1:19:16Speaker 06

  When those fights are in Dubai? Yeah, sure.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  Was that it?

• 1:19:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  Interesting. So it was a time zone thing this whole time?

• 1:19:22Speaker 07

  Or you didn't have a kid and you just would leave your house at 12 and go hang out with your friends.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  You think that is it?

• 1:19:27Speaker 07

  I think that might have something to do with it.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  You think the fact that I'm up with my child at 6 a.m. every single morning is affecting my sleep schedule?

• 1:19:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  Damn. Okay.

• 1:19:34Speaker 07

  I have been watching the fights on your pay-per-view though. I appreciate that you still got them. I've been logging it.

• 1:19:38Speaker 06

  So what did you think of the Holloway 4A fight?

• 1:19:40Speaker 07

  I thought it was wonderful.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  No, honestly, the card was great. And that fight was just sensational. I mean, those two guys are just so...

• 1:19:47Speaker 06

  God bless, dude.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  It's like, you love Dustin. He's just such an absolute legend.

• 1:19:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  As part of you want to see Dustin, you know, you want to see him get a victory on the way out, especially he's fighting at home. But if I will give credit to the UFC over anything, which is like, they just reward entertaining fights. Like, an entertaining fight, the fans win, but the fighters win. If you put on entertaining fights, you keep getting fights at the UFC.

• 1:20:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Speaker 03

  If you win boring, you might not.

• 1:20:12Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  And so I don't think Dustin went out in this tragic way. I thought it was brave and awesome and it was like hell of a career. And also Max, you know, like Max just keeps on reinventing himself.

• 1:20:25Speaker 06

  Crazy.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  This guy gets knocked out in brutal fashion in his last fight, comes back and fights as if it never happened. Most people can't get over that. Like, and at 1:55?

• 1:20:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  Max is a terror. I mean, like, it makes you think, should he have been fighting? You know, like, he's 33, so it's harder to cut weight as you get older, but like, he has the frame for it. Should he have been fighting like this for the last five years?

• 1:20:45Speaker 07

  Yeah. Did you see his son talk to, like, afterwards, go to Dustin and just be like, "Yo, man, like, you're the man."

• 1:20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:54Speaker 07

  Because they had a moment from the fight before.

• 1:20:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:56Speaker 07

  And like, it came full circle five years later.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:59Speaker 07

  And that kind of shit is like why UFC.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Oh, it's so cool.

• 1:21:02Speaker 07

  Fight sports in particular.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  You get invested in these guys, man, and it's just like, yeah, it's just awesome. They're so brave and... You know, Max puts a performance on like that and obviously Max is like one of the biggest stars in UFC, so we want to see him watch, watch him fight no matter what, but you're just like, okay, let's do it again with Ilya at 155. Ilya's the champ of 155. Who else do you want to see him fight besides Max?

• 1:21:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think Ilya's the fight. Well, let me ask a question. When you see these guys like lay their lives on the line, take these risks, does it inspire you to like try to stay up till 10:30?

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  I thought about that. And there's something really interesting about watching in the morning with a cup of coffee.

• 1:21:38Speaker 03

  Around 6:30, right? You're feeding your baby a little bottle and then you just have her watch carnage even though your wife says no screen time. So that's what, that's how I choose to watch the fights. And then for some reason in the morning, my wife, my, my baby's just running around like an absolute savage, slapping the shit out of everybody.

• 1:21:53Speaker 06

  She was slapping everybody on Sunday.

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  My, my daughter got a left hook from hell. From hell.

• 1:22:00Speaker 06

  No, from Max.

• 1:22:03Speaker 06

  She literally, I saw her Sunday. She, if you're holding her, just reaches back. Daddy care. How can she slap?

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  My daughter slapped the shit out of me and then I started laughing and then my wife goes, you cannot laugh. It rewards it. Give me her. And I handed Shiloh over to my wife and my wife is looking at her and my wife goes, we do not slap, okay? We're gentle. And Shiloh goes, alright. Boom! Slapped the shit out of my wife. My wife looked at me, she goes, don't you laugh. I go, I gotta walk away because that was incredible right there. That was absolutely incredible. So yeah, so shout out to UFC. And yeah, I just, I can't wait to see who Max, I mean, if they do that Ilya fight with Max again, like, let's go. What do you guys think?

• 1:22:51Speaker 06

  I know, I think that you gotta run that back. And like you said, Max at 155, I don't know much, but it does look like that's, yeah, he needs to be at that. Could he go up even more?

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  I mean, the question is like, will he take the time to put on the weight? I think when he went up to fight Dustin at 155, he went, I think they fought for the interim belt at 155, I believe if I'm not mistaken. And then he lost that, but it didn't look like he came up in weight. It looked like he just didn't cut.

• 1:23:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  If you go up to 155, you actually need to walk around at 170 and then cut down to 155. And, you know, I think Max has all like the, the guys now that are helping him manage the weight and. But could he walk around at 200? I mean, we've met, he's, Max is my height. He's massive. He's my height, longer arms, like he's, there's a world where you just, you know, stuff him with protein and he's just fighting like insane guy, like you're 6'2". Yeah. I weigh 195. I'm lean, you know?

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  I don't want to say it, but you're cutting, you're cutting. Yeah, I'm in bulk, I'm in bulk. Yeah, you bulk and you cut, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's a cycle. I should have never learned about bulking. Cause every time I eat heavy, I'm just like, oh, I'm just bulking. I should have been more muscle when it comes up. I was bulking since I was four.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  So, yeah, um, no, I'm just, I'm just excited to see what Max does next, man. I mean, that's gonna be so cool. Yeah, absolutely. And if you want to bet on the next UFC fight? Of course, you're gonna do a stake. Stake's the leader in global betting and US social casinos. We're gonna figure out what social casinos are eventually. Bet on top sports and political events and use the promo code FLAGRANT for your welcome bonus. Now let's get back to the show.

• 1:24:29Mark Gagnon?

  How did de Blasio enact free pre-K?

• 1:24:33Speaker 04

  There is, um, so he was really hard and he was able to get the taxes to do it. He was able to get it for 3K and had to phase in over a series of years. My kid went to 3K. I mean, everybody in New York City, I wasn't here under de Blasio. I just moved here two years ago. You all seem to hate him. He seems like he was a pretty good mayor to me, like 3K happened.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  Turn off the podcast right now.

• 1:24:55Speaker 04

  So I would like somebody to explain all to de Blasio.

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  He just can't eat french fries. Like there's certain things you gotta be able to do. If you can't eat french fries, then, you know, you can't be mayor of New York City.

• 1:25:03Speaker 04

  So anyway, so there is, I don't, I was not here and did not cover it. So I don't want to give you a good account of how he did 3K. There's a good New York Magazine piece about it from Bryce Covert, I think it is, from a couple of months ago. But I don't want to try to go by memory.

• 1:25:15Mark Gagnon?

  I just like to point out that it is doable, like mayors can.

• 1:25:19Speaker 04

  Free daycare will be bigger and more expensive than 3K at a time when like the finances are gonna be pretty tough. The other thing that I think it's totally obvious, Mom Donnie will be dealing with if he wins the election, is the Trump administration is gonna look at New York City and be like Harvard. And they're gonna try to break him.

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  They're gonna try to.

• 1:25:37Speaker 04

  They're gonna take all the money from him they can.

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  They're gonna use New York City as a site for ICE confrontations. Right? Like, it is going to be very, very, very tough. And New York City, I almost assure you, is gonna be dealing with very reduced federal money coming in.

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  And with reduced federal money, you have no chance of doing these programs that are gonna require.

• 1:25:56Speaker 04

  So he's got that set of problems. Doesn't mean it's impossible, you know, and doesn't mean something couldn't be done. And something like, free buses are not that expensive. You could do free buses, right? That's not that bad.

• 1:26:07Speaker 06

  So that's sorry.

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  So that's, sorry.

• 1:26:09Speaker 06

  I was gonna say, with Trump in 2016 too, he ran on all these things and people are like, oh, how did you guys not know he lied? He ran on overturning Roe v. Wade, he got that done. If you get one of the big things done, your base will be, I think, satisfied and be like, oh yeah, this guy got it done. If he gets free buses, if he can freeze the rent, I don't see him being viewed as a failure because he didn't do all the other things.

• 1:26:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I think what, how he'll be viewed will have to do with a lot of things that we can't even predict right now, depending on what happens. But so freeze the rent, right? Here's the other one. Freezing the rent is, I think, just really tricky. I've spent a lot of time talking to affordable housing developers. And if you freeze the rent for a year, fine. Freeze it for two years, fine. If you do a long extended rent freeze, you will make the construction of new affordable housing

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  fall sharply. Like, so. Because it ju, I mean, what you've basically done is you've taken, it's already not an incredibly great business to be in, right? It's a complicated business, there's regulation, right, whatever.

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  You are, I mean, what is freezing rent, right? You are just saying that over an extended period of time, you're going to cap the amount that the people who own these places can, can make.

• 1:27:20Speaker 04

  That's gonna first come out in repairs, right? And then it's second gonna come out in new construction. If you just make any market less attractive to be in, then fewer people are gonna go into the market, right? That's just, that's just gonna be like hydraulic. If you look at Mamdani's housing policy, and Mamdani, who's like, rent abundance, and talks about that on the trail, which I appreciate, has done interviews with my co-author Derek Thompson. He talks about new construction. His plan. around public construction, which New York City has not done a lot of in a while. You would have to figure out ways to do that much more cheaply than we've been doing it.

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:54Speaker 04

  So like, I'm not as familiar with affordable housing construction in New York as I am in some other places. But there's a great piece in the Washington Post recently about a DC affordable housing complex that was coming in at 1.2 million dollars per unit. The same developer had built like another complex that was not affordable, like next door or very nearby, and it was coming in at, I forget, 300, 400,000 dollars per unit.

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  This is.

• 1:28:17Speaker 04

  And we put in all these rules. And even if you listen to Mamdani, he'll say like, I believe we need a lot more housing. You know, so long as it accords with our environmental, our union, our affordability goals. But, and that's great. I want housing that does that. But what we need first is a lot of new housing. And the more things you layer on to it, the more expensive it becomes. And you don't have money, right?

• 1:28:39Speaker 07

  And you're capping what the money could be.

• 1:28:41Speaker 04

  And that, I mean, that in a way too. So my worry is about like, yeah, so yeah, so my worry is that I feel okay with rent freezes. So as long as you do things to make construction boom, right? If your rent freeze is like a temporary palliative thing while you're building huge amounts of new construction.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  Great. Not public only, allow private as well.

• 1:29:03Speaker 04

  You need both, right? The public, the amount of housing New York needs can like, New York does not have the, like, how many construction workers does like this?

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  I want to put this in perspective. There's some that works with us here. Alex and her friends were in an apartment that the sewer line just broke. And there was just shit all over the apartment. So they need to move immediately. And the amount of anxiety that she was going through trying to get apartment in New York City. I mean, like, there was one that might have accepted their thing and they need to sign immediately on it. They need to get their guarantors. If they didn't do it in one day, there were five other applications that were going for it. This idea that like, it's hard to get an apartment in New York is not hyperbolic. It is. Destitute, like it is hard to find a place to live, especially when you have a limited budget. So I get the idea that, you know, if you just let developers do whatever they want, they're going to develop $5 million apartments because that's where they're going to make the most money.

• 1:29:56Speaker 03

  Actually, I don't know the economics on affordable housing, but I imagine it's more when you're doing like 3,000 foot lofts. But if you find a way to get developers to put up affordable housing, not necessarily housing projects, but like units that people can afford and you reward them while also doing some public projects and freezing, then you might have a scenario, but you have to let the developers develop as well. And it seems like he's not-

• 1:30:19Speaker 04

  I want to give Montoni some credit here. If it's not so much in his plans, but if you listen to his interviews and things he said, he talks about some things that would be really good, like getting rid of two stairwell minimums. Like weirdly, we have a bunch of rules on what you have to put into buildings that make them much more expensive. Like a bunch of these buildings in most countries, you can just build them with one stairwell. We make it two. It adds more than you would think. Parking minimums, right? He's like an opponent of like parking minimums in places where we still have them. That's good. I think that he's going to be pretty good at saying we have, like just like made it too hard. There's like too much red tape around construction. The place where I think he's going to struggle is where that comes into conflict with any other goal the left has.

• 1:31:00Speaker 04

  And the problem that liberals and leftists alike, Democrats of all kinds of stripes have when they govern, is that they don't choose between their priorities. They try to accomplish too much in every single project. And then the projects become extremely expensive. One of the things that has been the least persuasive about the Andrew Cuomo campaign, from this perspective, to me at least, is that he was governor when all this stuff was being built at like the most eye popping cost imaginable. Like, again, great, he did get LaGuardia done. It's beautiful. He did. I mean, the Second Avenue subway did in that, that phase of it get done. The Second Avenue subway was the most expensive subway per kilometer in world history.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37Speaker 04

  Right? Like- It's not like this is just a problem of the leftists. You have to choose and you have to like in some cases make people mad, but you have to make it affordable. One of the things I always want people to add when they're talking about this stuff, when you're talking about free is like, it should be free and plentiful, right? Oftentimes, people talk about making something rather free, healthcare, buses, whatever. The thing that will happen correctly, right? If you make this thing free that people need is more people are going to use it. And so the question is, how do you also make it plentiful? So you don't get rationing, you don't get wait lines, you don't get deterioration in service. You don't have like all kinds of bad things happen. And that tends to be a little trickier, right?

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  How do you do it?

• 1:32:19Speaker 04

  The left tends to be very willing to say, we're going to tax rich people and move the money over here. Fine, that's great. Like, I am supportive of taxing rich people and moving the money over. Not Andrew, you can't tax him.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  Can I get, you know what I mean? Can I get some sort of way? I got guys on here telling to tax the rich. I should get some sort of tax cut for that. Ah, that's a good point.

• 1:32:39Speaker 04

  A solidarity tax.

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  Exactly, like more rich people are going to get taxed because of me, therefore I don't have to pay the tax. I think that's nice.

• 1:32:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like when you get 15% off for like a referral fee.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  I'm the referral. I need to tax, you know, when you want Hollywood to come make a movie in your town? Okay, you get them tax benefit, that's what I'm doing.

• 1:32:55Speaker 04

  I also think this connects to the argument for taxes. I think people are not always just skeptical of higher taxes. I think they feel they don't get enough for the taxes they pay. And so if you begin showing people that you're being ruthless about making sure that their money is well spent.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  I would gladly pay.

• 1:33:10Speaker 04

  Then I think they are more willing to pay more.

• 1:33:12Speaker 03

  I don't want you to move on from the point you're about to make, which is like, how do you make them plentiful?

• 1:33:16Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, so there, one of the arguments about of abundance, right? Which is the, the, the big argument of abundance is we need to sort of refocus, politics, in this case, sort of like liberalism, on the question of what do we need more of and how do we get it? And it's a big critique of like how we get on our way on that. But another way of saying it is that. Liberals, leftists, Democrats, whatever, tend to operate on the subsidized side of the ledger, right? They see a problem and it's like, how come we give you some money to make this easier for you? And that's good. But then we don't deal with the fact that in some cases, if we can't make them more of the thing, like say in the student loan situation, a bunch of that money is going to get pocketed, right? Or give a different version of it.

• 1:33:58Speaker 04

  If we pumped a lot of money into rental vouchers in New York City, that would just lead to landlords getting richer. Not only, but there is not enough units. And so this is called, there's a term for this, cost push socialism or something, where you subsidize something that you are otherwise constricting the supply of. And so what I'm saying is that the most important question is how you increase the supply of these things. If you're going to make the buses free, how do we have more buses? If you're going to make, if you're going to freeze rent, but how do we build a lot more housing? Public and market rate. The thing I've not seen Mondani describe in detail is like how he's going to make public housing affordable to build and market rate much faster to build. And these are the things that are going to have to, that will decide, I think, if he's

• 1:34:43Speaker 04

  actually able to make a big dent in these problems. And they're hard fucking problems, right? Gavin Newsom came into office in 2017.

• 1:34:51Speaker 03

  Who's that?

• 1:34:52Speaker 04

  California governor.

• 1:34:53Speaker 03

  Ah, yes.

• 1:34:54Speaker 04

  And he promised three and a half million new houses. He knew there was a housing crisis and he knew he would be judged in part on whether or not he was able to solve it. California got nowhere near that. And now, huh? I don't know the exact number.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  Probably negative after the fires.

• 1:35:08Speaker 04

  I track, I track if you are having more new housing built in California per month, because I'm a nerd like that, that new housing starts in January of 2025 or lower than in January of 2015. So it just didn't really go up at all. And Newsom has just signed in some big bills, right? He's getting more aggressive with what he's doing and I'm glad he is. But even when politicians want to make this stuff better, it's hard as hell, right? Like the coalitions are hard, the unions are mad at you, like homeowners are mad at you, right? The rich people don't want to pay more taxes.

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  Nimbism, is that the term?

• 1:35:41Speaker 04

  It's hard.

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  Not in my backyard. Everybody wants new housing for people. Everybody wants affordable housing. For people who can't afford it, but they don't want it near them.

• 1:35:49Speaker 04

  One of the hardest questions in politics is not how you fight your enemies, it's how you disappoint your friends.

• 1:35:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's a great point. It's like, some of us are gonna be disappointed. They're gonna build some units near you, you're gonna have to deal with the construction, and you're gonna have like a different economic level of people living there, and that's what it is. Like, this is New York City, you should be fucking used to it. If you moved here from somewhere else and you're like, I just wanna live in this bougie area, why are poor people living there? You're not, you didn't move to New York City for the right reason. But the point of this is, we all grew up in these neighborhoods that are changing.

• 1:36:17Speaker 04

  How come New York City is changing? It's like the most dynamic city.

• 1:36:19Speaker 03

  This is the argument that drives me, this is how I know you just moved here. When you're like, oh, it's changing so much. It's like, I grew up in the East Village. Saint Marks was drug addicts, and then it became Japanese salons. Within my lifetime. So it's like, this is what happens to the city. It changes constantly, and if you grew up here, you understand that. And the people that move here are like terrified of this change. It's like, you don't get to decide what the culture of the city is. So, I think the people who are like born and raised here are not like scared of the idea of like a public housing project going up. If it's a project where you got fucking gangs running drugs in it, yeah, it's an issue. If it's one of these housing projects that we have all over the city where fuck it, what's the, like, all the artists grew up in it over in... Sci-Town? Well, there's not Sci-Town, Sci-Town's another one, but like, we're like, I think Timmy Chalamet lived there.

• 1:37:02Speaker 04

  Oh, I've heard, yeah, I don't know the name of it.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? It's in Hell's Kitchen.

• 1:37:05Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, where it's just like, basically subsidize housing for like people who are in the arts. No issue, at all. So like, I think that New Yorkers also have got to start embracing our identity a bit here. Like, this is what we're used to, and we need more of it. Like you said, this abundance idea, which I think is so great about the book that you directed, it's just like, you need to build, and if that means cutting the red tape, let's cut it. But like, if Zohran does win, and he does make public housing projects, but he's also doing, letting the private developers develop, and you see these rent prices go down, and more people can move to the city and actually achieve their dreams and have opportunity, which is, I think, what more people want in New York than anything. I don't think people want free shit. I think they want the ability to make money and achieve their dreams. And if that starts at affordable living...

• 1:37:50Speaker 03

  You'll be a fucking hero. And but I think that he's gonna need a little bit of wiggle or at least address the concern you have.

• 1:37:57Speaker 04

  This is an old kind of socialism. Old socialism.

• 1:38:00Speaker 03

  Scary word.

• 1:38:01Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:38:01Speaker 03

  This is a scary word.

• 1:38:02Speaker 04

  But even so.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  You're talking like Tucker and Charlie Kirk right now.

• 1:38:04Speaker 04

  We should talk about that.

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  They had a great column.

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  It was very materialistic, right? It was about abundance. It was like, we have a Karl Marx quote in the conclusion of the books. Like, it was the thing that sometimes frustrates me.

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  I know, right? And then you throw it all away.

• 1:38:20Speaker 04

  I know. When I went on Barry Weiss's show and made this argument, she was like socialism. But the point I'm making about it is not that you gotta like believe in socializing means of production. It's that I think that we lost the language of more. And there's a bunch of reasons for that, right? Kind of like the left sort of merged in with an environmentalist left in kind of the 70s. It was very small, it's beautiful, and like we're just spoiling the environment. And these things were true, but it became kind of skeptical of materialism. But there's an older tradition here, like more the, or if you don't want to do the socialist version, the New Deal liberalism tradition, right? Building things, often the government, like you look at what the Works Progress Administration did.

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Speaker 04

  Right?

• 1:39:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:04Speaker 04

  You look at the Tennessee Valley Authority. It's not, there's a reason in the book, people are always like, you just want market rate housing. The two housing stories I do over an extended period in the book are both affordable housing. Because the thing I'm trying to show to my friends on the left is that even the kind of housing you support and have no qualms with, you cannot build quickly or affordably anymore. Like, you can't deliver even the thing you are most comfortable delivering. And like, I don't, the point is, you should want to fix it. Like, I want to fix that. I want the government to be able to build beautiful public housing.

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:35Speaker 04

  Affordably and quickly.

• 1:39:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Speaker 04

  And they do in other places, Singapore, like huge amounts of public housing.

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  We talked about that, that there's a little bit. That's a tricky one because the government just owns all the housing like people can't own their own houses there like they basically do like a lease for 100 years or something.

• 1:39:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I'm just saying that they have the capacity to build it, right? It's a state capacity question, or I can do the high-speed rail in California version, right? Like, other places can build this stuff.

• 1:39:59Speaker 03

  I understand the point you're making, and I guess alleviating some of that red tape is what will make this possible.

• 1:40:04Speaker 04

  It's not just red tape, it's also, I mean, people always, it's also building the capacity of the state itself. You have to, I mean, we outsourced so much over the years. And it's also making so the people who are under, who are working for the state can actually do things and act. Nobody is more regulated than people who work for the government. People always think of deregulation as a thing you do to the market. But it's the government that often needs it.

• 1:40:27Speaker 03

  Why wasn't Epstein more regulated then? We've got to get to the bottom of it.

• 1:40:31Speaker 04

  Now let's get back to the show.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  I think this brings us to like an interesting conversation that I saw like Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson having, and I think it was Joey that pointed this out where there's this kind of horseshoe theory happening where the left and the right are coming to the same conclusions about what's happening in the world.

• 1:40:46Speaker 04

  They're coming to the same rhetoric, not the same.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  Okay, fair enough. They're coming to the same rhetoric and this maybe holding the same like institutions responsible?

• 1:40:55Speaker 04

  No, play this clip, can we play it for a second?

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Mark, can you just accent right now?

• 1:41:02Speaker 04

  You showed this to me and I feel like I almost lost my mind.

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  Because, and I'm not bringing this up as a criticism of them, I'm bringing it up as them understanding that there are concerns that the people have that need to be met, regardless of what party you're in. And they seem to be echoing certain sentiments that I think that you would agree with, even though you guys might be diametrically opposed when it comes to your politics.

• 1:41:25Speaker 04

  There is always, if you listen to the way people are critiquing what's gone wrong, it always seems like there should be room for agreement. Why you don't get to that agreement we should talk about, but, but, just play, it gets...

• 1:41:37Speaker 08

  This is like enjoy things now and pay for it later. It is a, you know what I don't like about conservatives, and I am one, is that it would never occur to the, some of them... That there are two sides to the story. It's like immediately, you know, they, they blame the people who are, you know, buying Coachella tickets on credit, which I get, you shouldn't buy Coachella tickets on credit or your pizza or your Whole Foods order. I totally agree with that. That's stupid. But they never, it doesn't occur to them that there's another side to the people loaning the money are taking advantage of the dumb people borrowing the money. That both are culpable. And by the way, I think the people with more power and more wisdom are probably more culpable

• 1:42:17Speaker 08

  morally than the people who are, in other words, like, are we matter at the drug user or the drug dealer? Typically the dealer, but conservatives look at all economic arrangements and they never blame the dealer. And I don't know what that is. Like, how about we'll blame everybody? It's bad.

• 1:42:33Speaker 09

  I think the reason, and it's a tick within the conservative movement, is that all of a sudden we're Marxists if we do that. And I think that there, no, I'm not saying, I don't believe that.

• 1:42:41Speaker 08

  No, but you're absolutely right. It's like, I'm a racist if I don't like mass immigration. Well, I don't like mass immigration, but I'm not a racist. I don't like this and I'm not a Marxist. Like, it's just name calling to stop you from raising the question.

• 1:42:53Speaker 09

  It's thought terminating cliches. Is what it is.

• 1:42:56Speaker 08

  So good.

• 1:42:57Speaker 09

  Right? It's, stop thinking it, because it's, we're going to terminate your thought by calling you a Marxist or whatever. And do I think this should be illegal? I don't know, probably. I need to learn more about it. All I'm saying is, I am here as a messenger of the next generation, I'm telling you, this is bad. This generation can't own anything. They owe so much more money than generations prior. This is the most indebted generation in history. And I, I double check that. Gen Z owes the most money in, in any history, any generation in history. So we wonder why, then all of a sudden, hey, you want to go buy a home now at the age of 38, your credit score is destroyed, your spending habits are terrible, you don't want to save and you don't think you should save.

• 1:43:38Speaker 09

  And you know what I hear from some of them is they say, well, why should I save when what I saw around me is that you need to get into this economy and spend, spend, spend? Because the savers got wrecked in 2008.

• 1:43:50Speaker 04

  Tell me what you think. So the thing that just drove me crazy about the middle of that, because neither Tucker nor Charlie are stupid or uninformed. Yeah. It's like when they're like, well, why, why don't we take seriously that we are, that you have predatory lending? There is an agency, it's called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It was started during the Dodd-Frank post-financial regulations. It was Elizabeth Warren's idea. It was full of people basically doing that thing, regulating the way credit cards are used and marketed, trying to give people information about things, regulating scams. And the Trump administration came into office with like the support of Charlie Kirk and

• 1:44:31Speaker 04

  Tucker Carlson, and they burnt the CFPB to the ground, the way they did USAID, right? People didn't hear as much about it, but we actually have people who've been worrying about this. And like, you can debate, you know, how, like, there are hard trade-offs here when you're talking about putting Coachella tickets on credit, you're talking about credit cards. People aren't like going and taking out a HELOC loan to get a Coachella ticket, right? They're putting it on their credit card. Do you really want the government regulating what people can, you know, put on their credit card? Like, I think that's tricky, even for me as a liberal. But we do have, like, it's not just that conservatives won't think it, they won't think it. The administration, they support, just like destroyed the regulator that is actually was trying to work on the thing they say they're upset about.

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  Very, very fair argument. We got our finger wagging out, we got our I-told-you-so out. Now let's just address what's happening emotionally, because I think they're reacting to what people are feeling. So now this is the opportunity to build the coalition. What do you?

• 1:45:28Speaker 04

  You're gonna run some down.

• 1:45:29Speaker 03

  I'm not, I don't want anything, I have no interest in.

• 1:45:32Speaker 04

  Finally a person who can bring us together.

• 1:45:33Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. I just think that this is, you make a good point, I think it's a fair point, I think that they should, they should also consider that.

• 1:45:39Speaker 04

  I just want to say, I'm not point-scoring.

• 1:45:41Speaker 03

  No, I'm not accusing you of that.

• 1:45:43Speaker 04

  The reason I say this is not because I don't want to find common ground, I love to find common ground, it's that I do think what is, there's so much rhetoric happening in politics at all times, and the question of what is actually being done?

• 1:45:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Speaker 04

  And like, do people know about it, is it?

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  I think that's probably.

• 1:45:58Speaker 04

  It often diverges.

• 1:45:59Speaker 03

  I think that's probably frustrating for you.

• 1:46:01Speaker 04

  It's very frustrating for me, yes.

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I think that like you, and it's one of the reasons why I love talking to you, is because you really understand like the instruments of politics.

• 1:46:08Speaker 06

  He actually knows what's happening.

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, you understand the policy, and you understand like how these things do affect people, so I'm sure you hear them talking.

• 1:46:13Speaker 04

  Yes, so to the common ground side. We... What are they speaking to, rather? There is a crisis of indebtedness and unaffordability. There we go. And those two things are very related. Okay. How to solve it, right? That's again, like, the whole introduction of abundance is about the crisis of affordability, which by the way is a term coined by my wife who works for the Atlantic back in 2021. Yeah, get yourself some credit. Yeah, exactly. I'm not going to take, I'm not going to create credit for that one. Leave her with the kids so you can do a podcast with the boys. Get yourself some credit.

• 1:46:45Speaker 04

  So you have this economy where the things people need to fill a house,

• 1:46:55Speaker 04

  furniture and televisions have gotten cheaper. And the things upon which they build a life have gotten much more expensive. Beautifully said. Give us an example. Healthcare, elder care, childcare, higher education, housing. You could name a couple others. Energy is more complicated than that, but those are big ones.

• 1:47:16Speaker 04

  And the biggest one is housing. It's why I focus a lot on housing. That is the biggest item in most people's budgets. But healthcare is the most desperate item in people's budgets. And when things get bad, healthcare really bites, right? Education, like, these are things that if you don't have it for yourself or your children or someone you love, you will mortgage everything. Yeah. You will go into any amount of debt, right? And part of what's going on there is we don't have enough of the things, right? Housing is in the places where people most want to live. We don't have enough houses. And that has meant an incredibly large wealth transfer to people who own homes and the people whom those homes will be passed on to. Right? There's a, like, one of the problems is not just that you have the, you have this

• 1:48:00Speaker 04

  growing problem of also dynastic wealth. I've had more libertarian economists tell me, like, I don't understand why you're so upset about... Dynastic wealth? Can you explain that? Wealth just going down through families, right? I've had libertarian economists say to me, I don't understand why you're so upset about the homeownership, like, when they're, when looking at charts about Gen Z homeownership or millennial homeownership versus boomers, it's like, that problem is going to solve itself, the boomers are going to die.

• 1:48:25Speaker 03

  Pass all of their shit to the next

• 1:48:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's not like how you build a fair society.

• 1:48:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:48:31Speaker 04

  That it goes down the cord of dynastic wealth. So the Republican Party, which I think, and this is, I think, good. It increasingly represents people who are working class. It increasingly represents people who, you know, don't have college educations. And particularly in 2024, it won a bunch of young voters. All of a sudden, there's pressure on it and in it.

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  To answer those.

• 1:48:53Speaker 04

  To do something about this. My frustration is often, I feel like they weaponize very real concerns and turn them on weaker people. Like JD Vance will say really smart things about the housing crisis and then blame it on illegal immigration.

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08Speaker 04

  Which is just not what it is.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:10Speaker 04

  But.

• 1:49:11Speaker 03

  It's an easy scapegoat. And that's not to say that there aren't problems with immigration, absolutely. But it does become this easy scapegoat that you can feed to the base and the base, it feels satisfied. They think things are going to change, but it might not actually accurately address the problem.

• 1:49:24Speaker 06

  Exploits the issues rather than.

• 1:49:25Speaker 04

  Exploits the issue, uses it. I mean, this is a problem of when you have scarcity, that's like a really good breeding ground for resentful politics.

• 1:49:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:49:33Speaker 04

  Right? And it's one reason I think liberals should be very attentive to alleviating scarcity where we can. But the thing that they are getting at there, which is people are going into a lot of debt in order to not just afford the very big things, but increasingly for the small things. Like, that's also true. And there's a question of how tightly we want to regulate financial products. But that's why I bring up things like Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, because the Republican Party has fought tooth and nail against the kinds of regulations that would keep certain kinds of debt and certain kinds of financial instruments from being something that are just like too easy to get because we worry about people making bad decisions around them. And this stuff gets really complicated.

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  No, I think that makes a good point.

• 1:50:16Speaker 04

  Like a trade off on it.

• 1:50:17Speaker 03

  But I, you can see these two guys go out like. You know, I don't know if, I think one of them said, I don't know if that should be illegal. I don't know exactly what was said, but it seemed like they were in favor of restriction. And here's a great opportunity to be like, okay, maybe you didn't realize that getting rid of that bureau was the restrictive force, but now you've come to the conclusion that there should be some sort of guardrails. So what are these guardrails and how can we bipartisan come together and make those guardrails? And this is where I get concerned because I think there's a lot of times where liberals go, you fucked this whole thing up. And it's like, okay, you fucked it up. How long are we just gonna sit here and go, you fucked it up?

• 1:50:53Speaker 04

  Well, let me, let me.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  Like your doctor going, you smoked cigarettes for 40 years and it's like you have lung cancer, but you're going, doc, I know I fucked up. How do I get rid of the lung cancer?

• 1:51:02Speaker 04

  Let me, let me steel man the liberal position for you a little bit to, to, to make my, I would call it cynicism because I would work with anybody on this stuff, right? There is an abundance, or it's called the Build America Caucus in the House, and it's Republicans and Democrats.

• 1:51:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:51:15Speaker 04

  Right? And it's a thing I really try to do on my shows, like have Republicans on and, but this cynicism comes from watching people make good, believable and empathetic arguments in public.

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

  And then?

• 1:51:29Speaker 04

  And then repeatedly do the thing that is the opposite in private. The reason, again, this goes to like different frameworks of the world, I guess, a little bit, but the reason like somebody like me is rip shit about the, the big, beautiful bill, right, that just passed, is it, you know, Trump and his people have been making these arguments about populism for a long time now, and they have been promising to make things better for people and they've been promising, you know, not to cut Medicaid. And then they get into power and whatever they are saying publicly, they do the opposite. Trump at his first address in his second term for the joint session of Congress, he said he would balance the budget. He just added three and a half ish trillions of debt. He's promised his people he was not cutting Medicaid, he cut Medicaid. And so the, the thing that is upsetting, if we could all work together on this, that would be great.

• 1:52:14Speaker 04

  I would like raise my hand. I could not be more excited for it. The thing that is frustrating is when it feels like what is getting carried out over time is a deception.

• 1:52:24Speaker 03

  But that's the politicians. What I'm saying is like, the people are up for grabs, so to say.

• 1:52:28Speaker 04

  Yes, I agree with that. The people are up for grabs.

• 1:52:30Speaker 03

  And we're talking to two people right there that are that are people and they're representative of people in terms of their audience and the ones that they're speaking to. So they can't exactly rebuke their audience, right? They're probably going to be more willing to understand the feelings and sentiments of their audience because they're not locked to legislation. So I'm not saying that you're going to change their minds, but there is this opportunity where they're speaking to their people, their people are agreeing about these concerns. And then we have the opportunity to be like, hey, you guys asked for this or to go, hey, you're telling your audience that this is a problem? I also agree it's a problem. Let's come together. It's it's Epstein in that, hey, we all agree this is a problem. We can work together to make some change. Here are our ideas. And if they can't beat your ideas, they got to join them. That's not how that works.

• 1:53:16Speaker 03

  Maybe I'm being a little bit too idealistic.

• 1:53:18Speaker 06

  I also think that you're being a bit idealistic in that what will often happen with these issues that are important, but not as important to voters.

• 1:53:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:26Speaker 06

  They're still going to get divided on the biggest issues.

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  That's fair.

• 1:53:28Speaker 06

  Which are pro-choice, pro-life.

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  You're right.

• 1:53:31Speaker 06

  Whatever else. And then that, Republicans, Democrats, whoever corrupt politicians.

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Speaker 06

  Can just cloud everything with that. And then they can still sneak in their.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  But let's do it in easier. Can I say one thing really quickly? Yeah. Is it like, I think that you're 100% right about that. And I think that's why politics becomes so difficult is you throw some other things out there that can distract. But in this is the same criticism I have of like, you know, Hakeem Jeffries or like or Schumer or anybody who's running as a Democrat for for mayor is just like, you can call Zohran a communist or anti-Semi, you can throw out all these pejoratives, or you can address the problems in what you feel is a better way. And I feel like there's so much name calling instead of recognizing, hey, we agree on the problems, here's a better solution. If you were to offer a better reform, as you said, then you haven't got a fucking chance. So it's like, we agree, both sides feel this way. If you got not you or whoever

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  else in your coalition have the better ideas, maybe you won't pull all of them over. But you recognize bipartisan support for something. Yeah, look, I'm all for that. And I'm, I, I hold to two sides of this at once. Like, one, I'm not a politician, right? I'm an analyst. I know, I know. So I, like, I want people to know what's really going on, right? I think probably a lot of people watching flag, like, don't know. 100%. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was destroyed. You're talking to four of them. Administration, right? Yeah, talking to four of them right now. So I want people to know what happened. But. I just got a rush card. The politics.

• 1:54:57Speaker 03

  I got a good rate, 25%, that's all I got.

• 1:55:03Mark Gagnon?

  That's a total.

• 1:55:04Speaker 04

  One of the absolute, like, real mainstays of politics is people don't want it to feel like this, and they don't want it to work like this.

• 1:55:10Speaker 03

  They don't want it to feel like this.

• 1:55:11Speaker 04

  They don't want it to... The thing that you are, like, pointing out here, hitting, like, you know, all of politics for, right? People want to see their politicians work together. They want to see them... They believe, like, I've done... Again, my first book is about why this doesn't happen. It is the most powerful politics to promise that it will happen. I just see it all the time.

• 1:55:33Mark Gagnon?

  Do they want to see politicians working together on things?

• 1:55:35Speaker 04

  I think that, I think that we all have a little bit of a divided soul on a lot of this. We want to see people working together, so long as we think that where they're going to end up is where we want them to be.

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:55:45Speaker 04

  And then when it starts to go off the rails...

• 1:55:47Speaker 03

  Work together to satisfy me.

• 1:55:48Speaker 04

  Exactly. But I think there is some chance Republican Party is in a kind of, like, a period of transition between its old form and its kind of next form, right? That it's going to have to become more populist in an actual way, not like a fake rhetorical way, because of who's voting for it. I'm not 100% sure if that's true, but I think it's plausible. Again, though, it would be great to see people work on some of these things. So, for instance, there is bipartisan agreement that we should build more houses, and the government could do a lot about that. The federal government could do a lot about that. And they're not.

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  Well, they're not until there's, you know, a huge calamity. I think you even said it was an abundance. Was it Shapiro building the... rebuilding the bridge or something?

• 1:56:38Speaker 04

  Okay, so that's a great story. I mean, that's, I think, a different kind of story. Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, there's this I-95 bridge that collapses after a tanker overturns and catches fire, and he's able to get it rebuilt in 12 days, but he does it with an emergency declaration that wipes out all the bureaucracy.

• 1:56:53Speaker 03

  All the bureaucracy that would stop it, yeah.

• 1:56:54Speaker 04

  And that's what I'm sort of saying about the way that liberals don't, Democrats, the left, doesn't often choose between its different goals. And there, he chose. He used union labor, right? The unions rebuilt it. Built that bridge, but the like procurement regulations, the environmental regulations, the contracting regulations, I talked to the Secretary of Transportation in Pennsylvania. I was like, how long would this have normally taken?

• 1:57:18Speaker 03

  This is great.

• 1:57:19Speaker 04

  And he was like two to four years to just get through the bid and contracting process.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  So not even making it. So he did it in 12 days, but to go through the red tape, it would have taken two to four years. And I thought this was like a perfect example of abundance, showing the limitations of that bureaucracy. Now, I get that there's important bureaucracy when it comes to building, like I renovated apartment in New York City. I fucking flooded my downstairs neighbor and that's with all the bureaucracy. If there was none, we'd be living in a fishbowl. I know for a fact. So I understand, especially in a city like this, like you need some guardrails because there's some people that are not going to care about their neighbors.

• 1:57:51Mark Gagnon?

  Like in Texas, the lack of regulations, they built that camp on flood sites and you know, you can have something like that.

• 1:58:00Speaker 03

  That is the cost. Yeah.

• 1:58:02Speaker 04

  Let me go also to the thing you were saying earlier in a different way. So there's a question of can the parties work together on things? And weirdly, like this is my whole first book, which is really motivated. I'm a policy reporter, like going back, right? I covered the Affordable Care Act and the financial regulations and all this shit.

• 1:58:18Speaker 04

  I would always notice at the beginning, things would feel bipartisan. Like I would go to these meetings at think tanks and be the left and the right experts and it would be talking about how they could build something they both like better. And by the end, it'd be viciously, like relentlessly partisan. And it's all about kind of untangling the system behind that. But the very core reason is that when you've got two very polarized parties that compete with each other for elections, in the end, they do not want the other one to succeed.

• 1:58:48Speaker 03

  To get a win.

• 1:58:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:48Speaker 03

  Because getting wins.

• 1:58:49Speaker 04

  So there's something to that. But I think there's some other, there's another dimension of this, which is worth it, which is, it is really important to signal that you understand why people are mad at you and why they're disappointed in you. Right? That's another way of kind of building that ground. So it, one thing that Donald Trump did really well when he ran for president 2016, he's kept doing, is he ran then as a critic of the Republican Party as it existed.

• 1:59:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:18Speaker 04

  And you can, you know, argue about how much he delivered on that, but part of that was on things on the right, like immigration. But the Republican Party was trying to cut Medicare and Social Security. And he's like, we're not doing that anymore. Right? He moderated on that. And he's done that, you know, and on the wars, right? On the Iraq war, right? He like ran against the Bush administration's foreign policy legacy.

• 1:59:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:38Speaker 04

  One thing Trump said to people was, I know why you don't like us. And I also don't like us for that reason.

• 1:59:44Speaker 03

  And it's so validating.

• 1:59:45Speaker 04

  And it's so validating. And one of the arguments of Obama is one of the political arguments of it. And I believe this substantively, I'm not just like doing this political case, but to be trusted and to win over people they've alienated, Democrats have to make clear they understand why people think government is inefficient and sucks.

• 2:00:02Speaker 03

  You ever go to a restaurant and you ask the waiter if the meatloaf is good? And they go, the meatloaf fucking sucks. I get it. Whatever else they recommend, I trust.

• 2:00:11Speaker 04

  Yep, totally.

• 2:00:12Speaker 03

  You've won my trust. You were honest about your own institution. And now I'm like, oh, you're on my side. You're not on the side of the restaurant and making the most money. If I go to a restaurant and I ask the waiter, what's the best thing on the menu? Or what's the thing I have to try? And they choose the most expensive thing? I'm like, fuck you. You just want the biggest tip.

• 2:00:28Speaker 04

  Or everything. It's all good.

• 2:00:30Speaker 03

  Everything's good. So I think you're making a great point. It's like, that's how you build the trust of the people. You acknowledge the issues that you have.

• 2:00:36Speaker 04

  Obama did this, right? Obama, oh, sorry.

• 2:00:38Mark Gagnon?

  But then one thing I just don't understand is why do people continue to trust Trump? Like, we saw his first term, like, he didn't keep a lot of the promises. He didn't drain the swamp. He became the swamp.

• 2:00:49Speaker 04

  Good point.

• 2:00:49Mark Gagnon?

  Then build the wall. Like, why do we keep? Why does nothing stick?

• 2:00:53Speaker 03

  Hope.

• 2:00:53Mark Gagnon?

  He said, hey, I'm not cutting Medicaid. Cut Medicaid. I'm gonna end wars on day one.

• 2:00:58Speaker 06

  I think Ezra touched on this earlier. And I...

• 2:01:01Speaker 04

  That's a good point, Al. Yeah, go on.

• 2:01:04Speaker 06

  I didn't necessarily, I didn't like a lot of whatever, but I didn't think, what I thought I could be possible is what Ezra touched on, which is the government got in his way. He was able to get Roe v. Wade done because the government that was in power there, those parties supported it. All the other stuff he wanted to do, the government got in his way. And this time, the government is, oh, now I think people are turning.

• 2:01:24Speaker 03

  Now I think that's why people are really upset, because there isn't this big boogeyman that he can point at and say, they're not letting me do the things that I promised you. Now it's all on him because he has the government.

• 2:01:34Speaker 06

  Now you got it.

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  Backing him. And I think that's why people are so frustrated. I mean, that's why I'm frustrated.

• 2:01:38Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, but then you'll have a Charlie Kirk and whatever dude. His name was Tucker and Tucker and they're like, oh, we still support Trump, but

• 2:01:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, but their power, like their power is coming from their closeness.

• 2:01:49Speaker 07

  I also don't know.

• 2:01:50Speaker 04

  Charlie Kirk is.

• 2:01:51Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, so it's disingenuous.

• 2:01:52Speaker 07

  I think Tucker has also turned on Trump a little lately over like the Epstein stuff. I don't know all of his exact politics, but he still says, I support Trump. I don't know if that's true.

• 2:02:02Speaker 04

  I think you're talking about entertainers. There's also a dynamic where it's like, and this is like how royal courts work, you know, back in the day, where you could always say the king was getting bad advice. You can never say the king was wrong. And I see that in a lot of how people in MAGA will create, like, it's why they were so like, everybody wanted to blame the Epstein files on Pam Bondi. Yeah. Right? You're allowed to say Pam Bondi's wrong and Trump is getting bad advice. Cash Patel. But yeah, Cash Patel, but you can't say daddy's wrong. But now they're saying daddy's wrong. So that's where where things might get a little bit different. But Charlie Kirk, right? Like, I mean, he's very woven into conservative politics. So he's got, you know, uh, like he's trying to accomplish things in the world. And if he becomes alienated from the administration, he loses like the source of where where that power is.

• 2:02:48Speaker 04

  I also think, look, like Trump has always been complicated in this way. Some people trust him and maintain trust in him and a lot of people don't trust him. Right? He lost reelection the first time. And he won a pretty narrow election after there was a lot of inflation, you know, in, um, in 2024, right? It was like, uh, two points go the other way in the battlegrounds and he loses. And

• 2:03:13Speaker 04

  it's hard to, like, people's connections with politicians are not an itemized list of policy promises kept and and failed. They're also a kind of guttural sense of like, is this person who they told me they were? Trump's like, I think, greatest, like, asset as a politician. Is he's not always telling you the truth, but somehow you always feel he's being honest. Right? That's fucking dog. Having met him, yeah.

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

  Like he's, he says things that are wrong all the time. Like if you want to fact check Trump and we in the media do all the time, you can. But the feeling that he is telling you the thing that just popped into his mind at that second, which is not a feeling you have with most politicians.

• 2:03:50Speaker 04

  It's not focus groups like most politicians.

• 2:03:52Speaker 03

  That creates a kind of trust.

• 2:03:54Speaker 04

  Trust, yeah.

• 2:03:55Speaker 03

  And.

• 2:03:56Speaker 07

  I mean, even that comment where he goes, "I'm mostly honest."

• 2:03:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm a..." What was the exact? "I'm a mostly honest person." That's what he said. Was it mostly? No, no, was it mostly? "I'm basically an honest person," or something like that. And I just fucking died laughing.

• 2:04:10Mark Gagnon?

  Faces.

• 2:04:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:12Speaker 07

  And that is such an authentic, an authentic thing that I think.

• 2:04:15Speaker 03

  That's the most honest thing you can say. It is weirdly the most, because like, nobody is 100% honest. So it might be the most honest thing he's ever said. You know what I mean?

• 2:04:24Speaker 07

  But he's implicitly saying.

• 2:04:25Speaker 03

  No, I think he's exaggerating on how honest he is. Fair enough. But.

• 2:04:27Mark Gagnon?

  But then when we, when we call him out for a hidden question, then he's like, "Oh, well, I do this thing called the weave." Like, he created that, talking to us because we called him out that he was avoiding the question.

• 2:04:37Speaker 03

  But there is, there is a great point about building the trust. Cause I definitely, you definitely feel that. You're like, "Yeah, he is gonna go out there. He is gonna stop these wars. He is gonna reduce the budget. He is gonna do these things." And now that he doesn't have the boogeyman and he's not doing these things, he's starting to feel part of the institution.

• 2:04:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he's gonna lose trust. The question is, can Democrats rebuild themselves into something that can pick it up? So that's. Right now, they are incredibly unpopular. The Democratic Party, it's like, its reputation is like ad nauseam.

• 2:05:04Speaker 07

  And internally divided.

• 2:05:05Speaker 04

  Internally divided. It's not, like, in the polling right now, it's not looking like parties did when they had huge midterm wins, right, in the past? It's a little, like I said, yesterday, the Democratic Party is a little bit less popular than the Republican Party. Some of that is Democrats frustrated by their own party's inability to stop all this. And so like, they'll vote with Democrats. They're just mad. But some of it is that Democrats, like, kinda lost the plot a bit. Like, what do they stand for? Who are they? How do they win people back? And that requires you to do things and say things that surprise people. That like, make you think you... I always say this about like the 2024 election, that... They had this theory of winning independents, right?

• 2:05:49Speaker 04

  And so they brought on people like Liz Cheney to come on and say, no, he's really, really bad. But the key thing about an independent voter, from the perspective of any party, isn't that they don't like the other party, it's that they don't like you.

• 2:06:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you have to reform you.

• 2:06:03Speaker 04

  You have to reform you.

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  And that's, I mean, I know we've been harping on it, but I can't, this is like a golden opportunity for Democrats to offer a better solution. You can't just keep calling him bad, you can't just keep calling him a liar. That doesn't win people over. If you offer better ideas, people will come to you because they are desperate. So the Democrats need their version of populism, and I think that's what you're seeing with Zohran.

• 2:06:25Speaker 06

  So this is my question for you that I wanted to ask. You said what the Republicans need to do is kind of be the populist that they always claim to be. What do the Democrats, what do the new Democrats need to do, say, look like, et cetera? Can I hold us on that question and use the restroom?

• 2:06:40Speaker 03

  Yes, thank God.

• 2:06:41Speaker 06

  Yes, fuck yeah.

• 2:06:42Speaker 03

  Guys, very cool announcement. This weekend, we're doing the inaugural. This is the first one, hopefully we do this every single year. Maybe we do it around the world, you know, get on tour and be able to do it. But basically, the Hampton Paddle Classic. So we're gonna do a paddle tournament at the Hampton Racket Club out there in East Hampton. And, and all the proceeds go to this amazing fertility charity called Baby Quest. And it's not one of these charities where like 90% goes to advertising and, you know, 10% go this. Like, all the money goes directly to helping people make babies. Yeah, it's really cool, very excited about it. And, yeah, yeah, so a lot of cool sponsors got on board for it. I just wanted to shout out a few of them. Paul Street, Longevity Health, Love Every, Therabody, Huckberry, Nanit, Coterie,

• 2:07:27Speaker 03

  Best Diapers in the Business, Hex Glad, Longevity Health. So, and at Hampton Racket for putting it on, it's gonna be at Hampton Racket.

• 2:07:34Speaker 06

  Your two greatest passions.

• 2:07:35Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:07:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is awesome, I'm really proud of you, man.

• 2:07:38Speaker 03

  Paddle and events.

• 2:07:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, you should get, you should get Dave Portnoy to support.

• 2:07:47Speaker 03

  Today, ah, I should talk about the day thing. Anyway, real quick, we'll talk about the day thing in a second. But, uh, uh, yeah, there it's, it's a really awesome event. And, uh, if you, if you guys want to donate at all, I'll put like a link, even if you're not able to be there. We're really cool. We got all the 12 teams already booked. But if you want to come watch, you can definitely come watch. I don't know why you would want to watch intermediate, level paddles. But if you do want to watch out there, uh, kids are free. And then, uh, there's a $50 donation to the charity for the adults. So just come out. There's going to be food. It's going to be drinks. It's going to be DJ. It's going to be, it's going to be a great time. But, uh, but yeah, we'll get Dave out there. That's awesome. The day, yeah, I am a fucking, the Dave thing is so funny because like it's, it's just this like hilarious miscommunication. That's kind of my bad. It's, okay. So like. Full hair David moment.

• 2:08:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's like, okay. So here it is. It just went crazy on, on, on Twitter. He posted about like, all these like media platforms are reaching out to me for comments. And I'm like, I, I, I can't even tweet what happened because it doesn't even fit in a tweet. But like, here's, here's the basic story. So Dave sees a thing that I was saying about Mamdani, where I was like, you know, Mamdani is New York first. Whether you agree with his policies or not, like he's trying to address the concerns from New Yorkers, right? And this was like passed around. And I think a lot of like conservative circles, there was a lot of headlines about like, the Socialist Party in America is actually America first, not, you know, MAGA, right?

• 2:09:11Speaker 03

  So he texts me, he's like, uh, cause he doesn't really like Mamdani's policies and he just thinks the ideology is good. He doesn't think he's like favorable to America. I think that's like a fair, uh, version of what he said. And, uh, he's just, and, and basically he hits me up and he's like, uh, listen, I saw this thing like, well, what are you talking about? He's a more America first. Like, I don't think this guy likes America. And I'm, and I'm just like, no, I think he's trying to address the concerns. I sent him a clip and then we have like a really great like nuanced conversation about, you know, what's happening in America right now. And like what Mamdani is maybe serving. Agree, disagree on things, but great convo. And I was like, okay, this is awesome. Like, you know, he hit me up directly and he's like, listen, I didn't want to say anything because I like you, but. That's all he asked for. This is, this is like the ideal scenario when you have somebody that's like a friend or colleague, and then you guys disagree.

• 2:09:55Speaker 03

  You don't do it publicly, whatever. Go on Twitter a few hours later and I see this tweet and it's just, I don't know if you can bring it up, but it's like this thing from Jamie Dimon. Maybe we can zoom in. Oh, he's coming for your head. So Jamie Dimon says this thing where he's like, "I have a lot of friends who are Democrats and they're idiots," Jamie said Thursday at a foreign ministry event in Dublin. "I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand the real world, how the world works. Almost every single policy rolled out failed." And then if we go up, so then I see that Dave quotes tweets this and says, "I think he's taking, uh, I think he's talking specifically about Andrew Schulz saying Mamdani is America first."

• 2:10:34Speaker 03

  So I see this and I'm like, "We just had this fucking great conversation. Why the fuck do you throw me under the bus?" Like you said, like you weren't gonna say anything because we talked about it.

• 2:10:43Speaker 06

  Now you're riled up.

• 2:10:44Speaker 03

  You fuck, so I'm fucking annoyed. That was war. Now it's, you know, I'm upset. Like we had this great convo, right? Unbeknownst to me, he tweets this before we talk.

• 2:10:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:54Speaker 03

  But I didn't know.

• 2:10:55Speaker 06

  You thought he talked to Randy Twitter?

• 2:10:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm like upset, right? But I don't say anything about it. Like I think I tweet something underneath it about like the policies, right? And then Sager is interviewing us for Breaking Points and he asks about Dave's, I think, criticism of Mamdani. And so I'm like fucking annoyed. So I'm like, "All right, you're gonna throw me under the bus. I'm gonna throw you under the bus." I'm like, "Yeah, he's just upset about the Israel thing." And I'm like so reductive and there was really no conversation about that between me and Dave. But I'm fucking annoyed with him. So I'm like dismissive of like his actual concerns about policy. So I see that and then Dave, Dave sees that response and I guess that gets a big New York Post writes about it, whatever.

• 2:11:33Speaker 06

  And he's like, "Yo, I thought we talked about this privately."

• 2:11:36Speaker 03

  Exactly. So he's like, "Yo, we had a great talk privately. It was nuanced and thoughtful. We like agreed on a bunch of things." So then he screenshots our conversation and posts it, which I don't agree that you should never screenshot private conversations.

• 2:11:47Speaker 06

  I can see myself doing some shit like that.

• 2:11:49Speaker 03

  Oh, that's horny. Don't ever do that. You should never do it. You should never do it.

• 2:11:52Speaker 06

  I can see me doing it.

• 2:11:53Speaker 03

  Stop. Don't do it. But that being said, I do understand where he's coming from. He was like, "Yo, you're representing this convo we had completely different." But he doesn't know I'm angry because I thought he brought me, threw me under the bus and he would. He would never think that because he tweeted it before.

• 2:12:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:12:09Speaker 03

  So I text him, I'm like, yo, what the fuck are you texting on private convo? He's like, I never said any of that shit you said. I'm like, yeah, but you said the Jamie Dimon shit. He goes, what are you talking about? I go, you, we had this great convo, you posted the Jamie Dimon shit. He goes, I posted it before a great convo.

• 2:12:26Speaker 03

  So I'm like, well, that's my fucking bad.

• 2:12:30Speaker 03

  So that's my bad, I probably should have said that, my bad, I'm sorry.

• 2:12:34Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 2:12:35Speaker 03

  He goes, okay, it's all right. And I go, listen, you just, you know, text me right now that you love the Yankees and the Red Sox sucks. I'll post that and we'll call it even. He's like, yeah, there's no chance. Anyway, so that's, that's the Dave Portnoy.

• 2:12:47Speaker 07

  What's the lesson?

• 2:12:48Mark Gagnon?

  It's getting so cold in here, hell is freezing over, shelters the minute it's being.

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  I know, it's a newbie. It's a newbie. So I'm like, I'm seeing this, this like unfold on Twitter and like, I don't even know how to consolidate that story into a tweet. So maybe this will make it there, maybe it won't, but uh.

• 2:13:07Speaker 07

  And just read the dates on tweets and shit, you know?

• 2:13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe I should do that.

• 2:13:10Speaker 07

  You go through the dates, you're like, oh, okay, yeah.

• 2:13:12Speaker 03

  I looked at it, I remember looking at it and trying to do the time thing, I don't know. It was my bad. That was my bad, that was my bad.

• 2:13:20Speaker 06

  I don't think you did that, man. I think you made up a memory.

• 2:13:26Speaker 03

  Fuck, man.

• 2:13:26Speaker 07

  No, I do that. I see a headline, I'm like, yo, this shit is fucking crazy from 2017. Like, alright, my bad, my bad.

• 2:13:32Speaker 03

  So come to the Hampton paddle classic. If not, Dave, you're invited. And if not, if you want to support the cause, it's an amazing cause and really like helps people that are, they're really trying to conceive and have had difficulty like myself. And it is incredibly expensive to do and not everybody has the privilege to pay for it. So we're going to try to help some people have some babies and that'd be pretty awesome. So that's going to be this Saturday at the Hampton Racket Club in, in the Hamptons, in East Hampton. So thank you guys very much, let's get back to this convo.

• 2:13:59Speaker 04

  You had a good question.

• 2:14:00Speaker 06

  Yes, where, what does the new Democratic Party sound like, look like, say, believe?

• 2:14:05Speaker 04

  Alright, so there are going to be a couple dimensions. I want to tell you that I, I know them all, or they're all going to be one thing, all predictable. But, but one is like, what kind of party do you need to be in opposition? And I think that the key thing the Democratic Party is gonna have to be in opposition is it's gonna have to like, open up the big seam of corruption in the Trump administration. The Epstein files are fundamentally a kind of story about some kind of corruption, some kinds of power networks. The giving rich people tax cuts, well, cutting Medicaid and SNAP is a different kind of corruption. The crypto stuff is the most insane fucking corruption I have ever seen in my life. The taking jets from the Qataris, right? Four hundred million dollar jets. Like, there is so much corruption. And that's not illegal.

• 2:14:49Speaker 04

  Like, that's under the terms of MAGA a bit, right? But it's also just like, Americans kind of get that politicians are corrupt. I saw somebody actually doing it. We were sort of talking about this earlier, but I think we found this clip of Jon Ossoff, where like, I saw this, and I was like, that's it. Like, that's what they're gonna have to do. Alright, I'm excited to see this. So, Democrat, now, Ossoff is a... Ossoff is a Democratic senator from Georgia, running for reelection this year, big race. But, but just like, really, really has gotten strong as a communicator.

• 2:15:18Speaker 10

  See, I get why people voted for him. Because even before he came on the scene, America had the most corrupt political system in the Western world. It's been running on corporate money, secret money, billionaire money, both sides. And it's worse than ever now. Citizens United was the worst court decision in modern American history.

• 2:15:46Speaker 04

  God damn.

• 2:15:47Speaker 10

  And, and when members of Congress aren't begging for money from lobbyists, they're trying to dodge getting carpet bombed by these super PACs. Senators get threatened every day with millions and millions of dollars of attack ads over the votes that we take. And see, this is why nothing works for ordinary people. It's not because of woke college kids, or trans students, or because there are interracial couples in cereal commercials. It's because the people's elected representatives don't represent the people, they represent the donors.

• 2:16:35Speaker 10

  And that corruption is why they just defunded nursing homes to cut taxes for the rich. Corruption is why you pay a fortune for prescriptions. Corruption is why your insurance claim keeps getting denied. Corruption is why hedge funds get to buy up all the houses in your neighborhood, driving you out of the market, and then your corporate landlord ignores your calls during a gas leak. Corruption is why that ambulance costs $3,000 after you just had to get your choking toddler to the hospital. So Trump promised to attack a broken system. I get it. Ripe target. But here's the thing, he's a crook. And a con man.

• 2:17:20Speaker 10

  And he wants to be a king. Yes, the system really is rigged, but Trump's not unrigging it, he's re-rigging it for himself.

• 2:17:29Speaker 03

  I'm voting for Superman. He knows how to Clark Kent buzz.

• 2:17:34Speaker 07

  This guy is handsome. Like White Obama. Yeah, I got that same vibe. I felt like he was speaking like him even. This guy's presidential.

• 2:17:43Speaker 04

  As I said, it's not offensive, he won't clip and I move somebody into my 2028 bracket. If this guy's on the Nelk Boys, I think he'll win. I think he has a chance if he goes on Nelk. So, that's gonna be part of it, right? Corruption is gonna be a kind of thread that unites a bunch of things. But first, then you gotta convince people you're actually something different than what came before. It was important when Ossoff said, "Both sides." It's exactly what Andrew brought up with the waiter. And so you're gonna have to be able to come out and say, like, in some policies, in some critiques of what has gone on before, like, why you're different. Right? I think that matters. Democratic Party, this is not the presidential level, right? The Democratic Party is gonna need to be a bigger tent. You're gonna have to have Mamdani in New York City. Yep.

• 2:18:27Speaker 04

  And be comfortable with that. And you're also gonna have to have much more conservative candidates, particularly culturally moderate candidates, the Democrats have been comfortable with in other places. Like, Democratic Party's gonna win the Senate again, it needs to win in places like Kansas, Ohio, Missouri. And Democratic Party, I mean, not long ago, used to run pro-life candidates, right? I'm pro-choice, right? But you gotta win power.

• 2:18:55Speaker 04

  And it has become a narrowed party, Republicans in different ways. But one of the best things Donald Trump did for the Republican Party was open it up to the RFK Junior Maha thing.

• 2:19:05Speaker 03

  It's a great point.

• 2:19:06Speaker 04

  It gave it a new kind of energy and like a tech right thing.

• 2:19:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:09Speaker 04

  And the Democratic Party is gonna have to open itself up to coalitions and kinds of candidates that do not tick every box.

• 2:19:20Speaker 03

  Every single box, yeah.

• 2:19:21Speaker 04

  They have been making people tick for a while.

• 2:19:23Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 2:19:24Speaker 04

  Because they, like, if you don't win power, none of it matters, right?

• 2:19:27Speaker 03

  It's the thing. You could have virtue, you could have your purity test.

• 2:19:29Speaker 04

  If they had won, you know, six House seats that they did not win, like, the big, beautiful bill never has a shot, it never goes anywhere.

• 2:19:36Speaker 03

  And people need to think about this when they're doing the finger wagging.

• 2:19:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's that. And then I think, and this is like actually to solve problems, it's not the case that the only problem in life is corruption, right? Like, the point of abundance, which is concerned about corruption, although there are a lot of kinds, is also just like, you have to, you have to have a vision of the future and then be pretty ruthless in getting there. So, one version of this is that Doge was a good idea, somebody should try it.

• 2:20:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:20:05Speaker 04

  Right? Like, I wish it had not been like a slash and grab operation, trying to burn things like USAID to the ground, not cutting money in the Pentagon, but actually making the government efficient in a way that is relentless and willing to break glass, that is worth doing, just yoked to good ideas and values rather than bad ones. Sort of similarly, I think Democrats need to sort of reemerge as the party that wants you to have more.

• 2:20:34Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:20:35Speaker 04

  Right? The party that, what people understand about it is like, they want you to have healthcare, they want you to be able to afford education, they're gonna make sure there are enough homes and those homes are gonna be affordable, right? Like, an old school, and they want good public infrastructure.

• 2:20:49Speaker 03

  But can they do that if they're attached to the donor class, in the same way the Republicans are?

• 2:20:52Speaker 04

  Some of it they can, some of it they can't. Somebody's going to require leaders to arise who are willing to put that class in its place. Right? Donald Trump has done a lot of things the Republican donor class, so to speak, doesn't like. Yeah. Right? He has done it, like the immigration stuff they didn't like, a bunch of the trade stuff they didn't like. Some of them moved over to him. He developed different donors, right? It's not that there's no donor class around him now. It's just a somewhat different donor class. There's also, people don't like to talk about this. There's another kind of difficulty here, which is the small donor class. So, big donors, there's a whole, I love getting to talk about the old, why we're polarized. There's a whole chapter. Big donors want transaction. Big donors are corrupting, right?

• 2:21:36Speaker 04

  They, like, the reason Walmart is giving you money is it wants something from you. Small donors, they are highly ideological. They don't want something from you. They want you to never disagree with them. They want you to say the things that excite them. And they want you to act in a way that often turns off people that aren't like them. Like them, yeah. And so, you have kind of two donor classes. Big money that wants something from you. And small money that wants you to act in a way that normal people find weird. Yeah. And like, that's true on both sides, right? The small money on the Republican side, like, loves things about how the election was stolen, right? You know, like, like, the big donor problem Republicans have here is, I'm sorry, the small

• 2:22:17Speaker 04

  donor problem Republicans have is that it pushes them into really, really weird rhetoric and positions.

• 2:22:25Speaker 04

  I mean, it would be good if we had some actual fucking public funding in this country, right? He was talking about Citizens United, which is a very bad decision, right? Where corporate money can be, is counted as speech and so it can kind of be unlimited in a lot of forms of politics. Behind that decision, way back, is a decision called Buckley v. Balaio, where we decided, the Supreme Court decided to count money as speech. And that's why we can't do a bunch of things like limiting money in politics, or doing the kinds of public funding we might want to, because the court treats that as limiting speech in politics. And so it's unconstitutional to do. If I say, and there are certain ways of like trying to get around it, but it's very hard. And you really can't do it. But like other countries, they limit the amount of money you can spend on elections. We can't

• 2:23:10Speaker 04

  because it'd be a limitation of speech. And then the weirder thing we did was we made it possible to limit how much you give candidates and parties directly. So the most accountable parts of the political system can't raise the money normally. It goes into these unaccountable super PACs and independent expenditure committees. It is the most insane system. And we should blow it up.

• 2:23:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:32Speaker 04

  Right? Part of running on corruption is having solutions. Like, we should appoint people on Supreme Court and pass laws that will change this. People think the system is rigged because we've created a...

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  But there's bipartisan support for that.

• 2:23:46Speaker 04

  No, there is not.

• 2:23:48Speaker 03

  No, I mean of the people.

• 2:23:49Speaker 04

  Yes, of the people.

• 2:23:50Speaker 03

  Whenever I talk about...

• 2:23:51Speaker 04

  Mitch McConnell has been blocking this for years.

• 2:23:53Speaker 03

  Of course, of course. But I'm saying the people do want that. I think if you ask Republicans and Democrats, if you want money out of politics, they would say yes.

• 2:23:58Speaker 06

  Do you think this Supreme Court would overturn Buckley versus...

• 2:24:01Speaker 04

  No, they're extremely far right on this kind of thing.

• 2:24:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I assume.

• 2:24:04Speaker 07

  And is there any going back, once money is speech, to undo money being speech if the money is getting people in?

• 2:24:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:24:11Speaker 04

  I think the problem with that one, the hard thing about that one, is the, it will take a long time to name new justices, more than I think the money is. Money is strong in politics. It is not as determinative as people think. If it was, Zohar Mhamdani would not have won the New York City mayoral campaign. If it was, Donald Trump would not have won in 2016, or separately, in 2024. Like, money helps, but particularly where there's a lot of attention, money is really, really decisive. In like, House races, nobody's ever heard of.

• 2:24:43Speaker 03

  That's where it's more effective.

• 2:24:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. But it is somewhat less decisive at things like the presidential level, at things where people are paying attention. Because what has money bought you?

• 2:24:53Speaker 03

  Attention.

• 2:24:53Speaker 04

  Money buys you attention. And increasingly, it's bad at buying you attention. I don't know if you guys noticed this being in New York. I get endless mailers from Cuomo that I noticed five days after the election, when I checked my mail, as I do every once in a while. Whereas like, my phone was full of Mhamdani.

• 2:25:11Speaker 06

  Blown up.

• 2:25:12Speaker 04

  Right? Like, Cuomo had a lot more money, but they didn't know how to spend it.

• 2:25:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:16Speaker 04

  But yes, money is like one of the big problems here.

• 2:25:19Speaker 06

  But if the Supreme Court is not theoretically going to overturn Buckley versus Vallejo, I guess it was, anytime in the next 10, 15 years, what hope do you have?

• 2:25:27Speaker 04

  There's a lot you could do that is legal. So there are a lot of acts around disclosure. And Democrats have been pushing these acts in Congress for a long time, but they're one of them was called the Disclose Act, in fact. And they would require a lot more transparency and like listing the names of who's funding what commercial. They would basically make it kind of embarrassing.

• 2:25:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, I love that.

• 2:25:46Speaker 04

  Doing this. So there's a lot of that.

• 2:25:47Speaker 06

  So accountability.

• 2:25:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's accountability. There are ways to do things like matching donations, where you can help people who are not raising a ton of corporate money. I'm not saying there's any perfect solution. There isn't.

• 2:25:57Speaker 06

  Okay, but there are solutions.

• 2:25:58Speaker 04

  There are things that would make it better and things you could do.

• 2:26:00Speaker 06

  You know, to harken back to something you said earlier about Democrats becoming the party of more again, I think they became the party of more rights. But I think most people, the average rights, more right, you have the right to do the surgery, the right to go to this bathroom. And I'm not saying those are invalid, but I think the average person is like, well, I don't have enough to survive in life materially. I need more of that before we get to more of this.

• 2:26:25Speaker 04

  People who do polling on these things have shown me their polling. And one of the kind of interesting things I've seen is a poll of who do you think the big, the parties care the most about? And for the Democrats, it was like the poor, LGBTQ, people are non-white, and there was like one more. But it wasn't like, just like the middle class, right? And Republicans have their own like donors, like etc. And then there's like another one of like, what do you, an issues poll that has a kind of similar problem, like the only issue that people believe Democrats care about and that they, and that the public prioritizes is healthcare. The other things that they believe Democrats

• 2:27:07Speaker 04

  care about, they are just not high on public priority lists, climate, you know, different kind of rights issues. It's not that you can't have all those, or some of those positions at least. It's that people have to think that the thing you care most about is the thing they care most about, right? It's not just like, you don't see the alignment on positions. You need alignment on priorities.

• 2:27:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:27:28Speaker 04

  And one of the places where, at least in public perception from polling, and like, this is a well-known problem among Democrats, the Democratic Party is super far out of alignment. People do not believe that like what Democrats are laser focused on is their cost of living, like is like the safety of their community, is like the kind of like bread and butter stuff that politics is mostly about.

• 2:27:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:27:51Speaker 04

  For most people.

• 2:27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:27:53Speaker 04

  Okay, before you get out of here, Colbert gets canceled.

• 2:27:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. There is a lot of, uh, I don't even know, I don't even want to call it conspiracy, but it seems like there's a lot of people that are approaching this from different angles and trying to understand why this happened, why this happened in this way.

• 2:28:13Speaker 03

  Are you kind of privy to what's going on behind the scenes at all?

• 2:28:15Speaker 04

  Not behind the scenes.

• 2:28:16Speaker 03

  Okay, but like you have thoughts about what's happening?

• 2:28:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:28:21Speaker 03

  Well, what is your perspective?

• 2:28:24Speaker 04

  So, the reason people are very suspicious of what's going on, I'll lay out that case and I'll lay out the case against it, is functionally that Colbert's parent company, CBS, one, the company that owns it has wanted to do this very, very big merger.

• 2:28:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:28:42Speaker 04

  And the Trump administration has made fairly clear that whether that merger happens is going to be based on whether or not CBS and the parent company are in Trump's good graces.

• 2:28:53Speaker 03

  Now, to be clear, this isn't something that they say verbatim. They just have an appointed guy, David Carr, at the FCC, who's been holding it up for 16 months or 18 months. And there's subtle ways of expressing these feelings. And Paramount, which is the holding company of CBS, I think there's Shelley, what's her name, Shelley?

• 2:29:12Speaker 04

  I was forgetting, Firestone, right?

• 2:29:14Speaker 03

  Something like that, like desperately needs to sell this company or else they're going broke. And, uh, Skydance, I believe David Ellison, Larry Ellison's kid, is willing to buy the company, so, or wants to buy the company. So there's this idea like the FCC could block this or the FCC could make this happen. And this is where we talk about the corruption, which is essentially, hey, if you're gonna, if you want us to play ball, you gotta be in our good graces.

• 2:29:39Speaker 04

  And the 2025 theory of like, how do you use your leverage through the government to bring all these institutions that you think have been taken over by, by, by the left to heel? Okay. So, so a couple of things have happened before Colbert, right? There was a settlement of a defamation lawsuit that was widely believed to be kind of ridiculous.

• 2:29:58Speaker 03

  This is the CBS.

• 2:30:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, George Stephanopoulos, I think it is.

• 2:30:01Speaker 03

  Oh, that's ABC, I think.

• 2:30:02Speaker 04

  No, which one, yeah, which one do they settle?

• 2:30:04Speaker 03

  So the CBS, ABC also settled, which I think is an important point. But the CBS one was that there was a favorable editing to a question. I could be getting this wrong, but essentially when they posted the answer that Kamala gave on News Nation, it was different than the answer she gave on the full 60 Minutes interview. Now, they might make the argument that like, it was a piece of the answer to the question on News Nation, and I think it was the full answer on 60 Minutes. I could be getting this wrong. But essentially, the idea is like, hey, they edited to make her look better, which gave her, you know, unfavorable news time, or no, sorry, gave her more favorable news time. They were essentially working as a propaganda tool to protect her.

• 2:30:45Speaker 04

  This is the kind of thing that within journalism, you would have never settled, right? Like, the culture of journalism going back a very long time is you fight this shit tooth and nail.

• 2:30:55Speaker 03

  And my understanding is from talking to some people in the business who I would say are not biased towards Trump or against him. Basically, they said that CBS would win this lawsuit.

• 2:31:06Speaker 04

  That was widely believed.

• 2:31:07Speaker 03

  Okay. But it would be dragged on a court for years, and that's not something that they want because they're trying to get this merger put through.

• 2:31:14Speaker 04

  So they settled for, I believe, as $16 million?

• 2:31:17Speaker 03

  $16 million.

• 2:31:18Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 2:31:20Speaker 04

  60 Minutes is also CBS, right?

• 2:31:22Speaker 03

  That is the show.

• 2:31:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, so 60 Minutes, there's another thing that happens. So at 60 Minutes, they begin, which is like a very, very revered news program, of course, has very, very strong editorial control. They begin putting so much pressure on the editors there on Trump stories that the key editor publicly resigns.

• 2:31:39Speaker 03

  Pressure on editors means?

• 2:31:42Speaker 04

  Just interfering with their editorial independence, trying to like push the show and how it's covered.

• 2:31:47Speaker 03

  To be more lenient on Trump?

• 2:31:49Speaker 04

  Got it. And he sort of publicly resigns, it becomes a big public thing. So this is like the backdrop behind which the Colbert move happens. People seeing that CBS was folding sort of repeatedly, that they have this big thing in front of Trump, that, you know, that it is, the assumption a lot of people are working under is that this is what is governing the actions of the company. And then they, they cut Colbert. The argument, to try to be fair and to say that we don't really know, right? Like, I was not in any board meetings there about what to do about Colbert. And I'm a huge fan of Stephen Colbert. The argument that they have made is that the show was losing a lot of money, that

• 2:32:31Speaker 04

  late night television, it's very, very expensive, and the ratings have gone down, like they've gone down for lots of stuff over, over the years. And it just no longer kind of works. The other argument against that this is all about Trump is that they didn't like take him off tomorrow, right? He's on for another 10 months, which is like slightly awkward for everybody.

• 2:32:53Speaker 03

  That's contractual.

• 2:32:54Speaker 04

  Is that contractual? So that would explain why that's fair.

• 2:32:56Speaker 03

  So I imagine, so yeah, there's like a lot of like inside baseball with this kind of stuff, but I imagine Stephen has something in his contract, which is if you're not going to renew him, you have to give him a year notice. So I'm sure that came up and they were like, okay, we're going to cancel you. And what I imagine happened is they said, would you mind waiting six months before you say it?

• 2:33:14Speaker 04

  Uh huh, and he minded.

• 2:33:15Speaker 03

  And he said, I mind. And he went out that day. And he said, they're canceling us. Because if it waits six months, now you don't have any conversation about, oh, it was a quid pro quo, they want to get this deal made because it happened much later.

• 2:33:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I don't know any of the internal, any of the internals on this. I'm trying to be as fair as I can to like why maybe we don't know what happened.

• 2:33:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:33:40Speaker 04

  Colbert and that show are like a real marquee property. If the issue is it's losing money, you can cut its budget.

• 2:33:48Speaker 03

  You can't.

• 2:33:49Speaker 04

  Huh?

• 2:33:49Speaker 03

  You can't.

• 2:33:50Speaker 04

  You think it's impossible to do?

• 2:33:51Speaker 03

  So this is the, this is the problem with it. And this is the nuance that I think a lot of people don't know. In order for Colbert to stay in New York, they got tax incentives. Those tax incentives were tied to hiring a certain amount of people and maintaining those hires. So it is-

• 2:34:05Speaker 04

  I did not know this.

• 2:34:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is like, it's very easy. Colbert doesn't lose money. It makes like $50 million a year. Unfortunately, it costs 100 to make. Why does it cost 100 to make? Because you ask seven different unions you gotta run. It was making 80 or 90 million dollars back in the day. I think Chris Licht was running the show. So it's not like it wasn't a profitable endeavor. What they've seen is advertising dollars remove itself from linear completely. Linear meaning like what you watch on TV, not on digital. There is an audience for Colbert. It's just not linear. His clips go viral, they do great online. The show just hasn't adapted to where people watch things now. And the model is antiquated and it's built in to this system to maintain these deals and relationships. So it doesn't go. If you take that show and you do it in fucking Jersey or Connecticut,

• 2:34:51Speaker 03

  you can make that show profitable in a fucking second. But then you lose the tax incentives that keep you in New York in the first place. And this idea that it's this New York institution.

• 2:34:59Speaker 04

  So this was, so I don't know some of the tax incentives side, but the way this was sort of like described to me was the feeling is luck. They're probably having real meetings about the show and about-

• 2:35:08Speaker 03

  100% yeah.

• 2:35:10Speaker 04

  And that in another world where there's not this big advantage to canceling it, you figure something else out. Maybe you do move it to New Jersey, right? If you just wanna move to New Jersey, well, it's not Colbert's show anymore.

• 2:35:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:20Speaker 04

  Right? But that wasn't where the money for them was.

• 2:35:26Speaker 03

  You could do the Akash Singh show in fucking Ohio. I just wanted to see the possibility.

• 2:35:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not, and they didn't just give it to someone else, right? They just, you know?

• 2:35:34Speaker 03

  What, I think they're getting out of late night because they don't see it as a profitable endeavor. If they just fired Colbert, but they maintain the show, then you go, whoa, this is so transactional. But it is one of these situations where it is beneficial for this deal to go through. Nobody would deny that. But also, the deal was, the show probably would be canceled in a year anyway. Maybe if there wasn't this deal to go through, they let Colbert run his contract. And then they go, guys, we're gonna retire late night because nobody watches late night anymore. And, but at the same time- You never want government influence and being nice to the president to dictate whether a comedian can say anything. I don't care if it's liberal or conservative. So like, I want there to be the comedians that are holding the people in power accountable.

• 2:36:17Speaker 03

  I want that. Matter of fact, it's actually even more important than you're doing it for the opposition. Well, I don't want to say more important because both sides should be holding the people in power accountable.

• 2:36:26Speaker 04

  No, but I know what you mean.

• 2:36:27Speaker 03

  But you don't want the person in power to go, hey, you don't agree with me and you have a late night show? Well, you're off the air. If the show was making 1 million a year, not even 100 million, 1 million a year, this is a very hard thing to cancel without blowback. They, unfortunately for Colbert and his supporters, have an economic justification for the cancellation, even though I believe they're being disingenuous in terms of why they did it in this moment.

• 2:36:52Speaker 04

  I think this also gets to this difficulty of having all of society under this cloud of suspicion of like, why are different institutions doing things, right? What the Trump administration has tried to do across a pretty vast array of institutional contexts, law firms, universities, media, right, like almost anything you could think of, immigration, is use what money and power they have to try to contain and change how these institutions act and what they can do and what they believe they can do.

• 2:37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, horrible.

• 2:37:27Speaker 04

  It's been completely explicit, right? Like, this is something that, you know, they talk about.

• 2:37:30Speaker 03

  Wait, are you telling me Amazon paid $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary?

• 2:37:36Speaker 04

  To be fair, there were two documentaries in that deal.

• 2:37:39Speaker 03

  Phew, I thought it was just one. Okay, you don't think that had anything to do with anything else?

• 2:37:46Speaker 04

  So this, this was also, and it goes to why I think corruption is a strong political argument, but I've just always, what's the way to put this?

• 2:37:57Speaker 04

  Trump has always made the rules of the Trump administration very, very clear. Which is, you say nice things about him, and you give him things, and you get things in return. And you say mean things about him, and you don't give him things, and he will do what he can to harm you. And one thing you're seeing is like, a lot of other countries are just like, "Oh, I get it." Right? Here is your invitation to a party at the castle, right? Qatar giving him the jet. This is why he likes to do these sort of individual tariff deals. He's trying to make everything into bilateral negotiations between him wielding the power

• 2:38:38Speaker 04

  of the state, and you, the supplicant institution or figure, who wants something, who needs something, or who fears something. It's like a very crime boss way of running everything. But it also creates this question of why are things happening, including things we don't know about, right? You know, we don't know what negotiations happen, or what phone calls are made that we never hear. Like another version of this is we're going to have the tariffs, and you have all these tariff exemptions. Well, how do you get a tariff exemption?

• 2:39:07Speaker 03

  Before we go to tariffs, I just don't want to leave this. It's like, we have to put some accountability on Paramount. Like, I feel like what we're doing is just like, "Oh, Trump is the bad guy, he's putting the leverage." It's like, no, you're a massive media company, and you can choose not to bend the knee. And what we have to do is hold media companies accountable. It's like, we did it for years, when we were clamoring about like, "Oh, I can't do these jokes on TV, I can't, nobody's giving me an opportunity." And like, what we were forced to do is use the internet. And like, I would implore-

• 2:39:34Speaker 04

  How'd that work out for you?

• 2:39:35Speaker 03

  I don't know. I would implore, like Colbert right now, like, I don't know if he wants to do this, but I'm like, "Dude, you have an audience, people love you, right? They want to watch your show. Put that shit straight on the internet. Prove that there is an audience for this, prove that people want it."

• 2:39:51Speaker 06

  Prove that you exist beyond the brand.

• 2:39:53Speaker 03

  Prove you exist beyond the brand, and have all your supporters support you, make way more money, continue paying the staff, like, use the internet in the same way that all of us used it, and we'll support your freedom of speech for that. Like, if I just- No, I'm saying you could do a different version of the show, but I'm just saying like if there's one thing, if we just complain, if we're like, we can't say anything and then didn't try to do something on our own, then we're just whining.

• 2:40:15Mark Gagnon?

  No, I get that.

• 2:40:16Speaker 03

  We put all of our money up, like we had no money.

• 2:40:18Mark Gagnon?

  I'm talking about we should be upset at Paramount. I don't think like it's the pressure coming from the president of the United States.

• 2:40:25Speaker 03

  I don't give a fuck like.

• 2:40:26Mark Gagnon?

  Their business, they're trying to turn a profit like like.

• 2:40:29Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 2:40:29Mark Gagnon?

  They're gonna block a huge merger.

• 2:40:31Speaker 03

  No, no, I, we have to hold Trump accountable. We have to hold FCC accountable.

• 2:40:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think.

• 2:40:35Speaker 03

  We can, but we also can hold these people accountable for greed. They just want to sell the company for billions of dollars.

• 2:40:39Speaker 06

  But percentage wise, you would.

• 2:40:40Speaker 03

  Why are we letting billionaires off the hook? Because Trump is disagreeing with them. Why don't?

• 2:40:44Speaker 06

  I think he agrees.

• 2:40:45Mark Gagnon?

  Why are we okay?

• 2:40:45Speaker 06

  I think he agrees, but I think percentage wise, you put way more on Trump.

• 2:40:48Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:49Speaker 06

  And I think that's the important distinction to make.

• 2:40:50Speaker 03

  I guess, I guess I'm, I'm not, I'm not taking any percentage away.

• 2:40:53Speaker 04

  I want to back up Andrew's point on this a little bit because there, there is a reality that, there is a reality that it matters what everybody in society does. Like I have this thing that like every like institution, every person's like, you're like a, like a, like a node of social coordination. And other people will do the things that people like them are doing. And when you have, one thing that's been different about Trump's second term from his first is just the amount of call bending the knee, but just like.

• 2:41:22Speaker 03

  Capitulation.

• 2:41:23Speaker 04

  Paying to play is like maybe the friendliest way for me to play.

• 2:41:26Speaker 03

  Sure, like all the tech guys show up to an all duration.

• 2:41:28Speaker 04

  The tech guys, right? Like all of this. And you know, the law firms that were folding, like the early universities that folded and Harvard, because of that $50 billion endowment.

• 2:41:37Speaker 03

  Was able to fight.

• 2:41:38Speaker 04

  Was able to fight, right? The others can't.

• 2:41:40Speaker 03

  And that's what I'm saying about Paramount. Yeah.

• 2:41:42Speaker 04

  And yeah, and, and like people should feel dishonored by this, right? The fact that Paramount is coming in for a lot of fire is, is accurate. It is like Trump's fault, but also the Trump administration is not relentless in the face of, of, of pushback. Like if people weren't like paying to play, they've changed their demands.

• 2:42:01Speaker 04

  And at the same time, like, the fucking federal government's really powerful. And if you're gonna weaponize every part of it, it's gonna be hard for people to stand against it.

• 2:42:07Speaker 03

  Let me just at least first validate and acknowledge that. I'm not saying that that isn't wrong. It absolutely is wrong. 100%.

• 2:42:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:42:13Speaker 03

  What I'm also saying is like, when we weren't getting opportunities at Comedy Central, and it was very different. It's not like whoever was president at the time, I don't know if it was Obama going, "Hey, you better not let this type of comedy on Comedy Central." Like, we held Comedy Central accountable, right? We're like, "Hey, why are you censoring comedy so much? Why are you putting this New York Waterdome bullshit out that nobody likes? The network is failing, right? Nobody's watching the specials on Comedy Central." We found a way to go do it somewhere else, and I like implore comics to do that. And we have to reward the comics that do that. Like, even if you don't like the angle of comedy, you still gotta fight for comedy. At least, I don't know, that's my personal opinion. Like, I want Colbert Abishaw. I want him to make fun of the president. I want him to push back. Like, that's good for comedy. Comedy, comedy in its essence is like making fun of institutions, not reinforcing them. You know, the institutions that are in power, you know?

• 2:42:58Speaker 03

  So like, I just feel like, I feel like we're kind of like letting Paramount off without any blame here, when we could be going, "This is an opportunity for you to stand up for your network and what you believe in."

• 2:43:10Speaker 04

  Didn't you say they were gonna go bankrupt after they don't make this merger?

• 2:43:13Speaker 03

  Bankrupt? Like, you're a fucking billionaire. How fucking bankrupt? Like, "Oh, my God. So are you on Paramount, and now you can't pay bills?"

• 2:43:19Speaker 06

  No, I think we are essentially agreeing that both parties are accountable. I just think having, I went to India, I interviewed all these comics, and I saw what it's like when the government centers you because they don't like you. And I think we as comics who are like the free speech guys, "Well, you're doing it, but let's just also make sure that everybody hears it." "Hey, that's fucking, we can't do that. This ain't America."

• 2:43:42Speaker 03

  Did it come across like I was like saying what I was saying?

• 2:43:44Speaker 06

  No, but I just wanna make sure that's clear.

• 2:43:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, cuz it's not okay at all. I don't wanna see any version of it.

• 2:43:48Speaker 04

  Look, this is a thing I have some fear about right now, in a slightly different way. I've been thinking about, we've talked a little bit about how, as they've been under pressure on the Epstein files, they have been ratcheting up the rhetoric and other enemies, right? Especially Obama with that sort of weird AI, like we're through that AI video, like Obama being arrested in the, in the Oval Office. But not only, like, the Murdochs, the media, the whatever. One thing I wonder about with them is that... As things start to go wrong, right? If they're under pressure, if they're looking, their midterm is going badly, or looking bad, or they lose the house in the midterms, is if they start to get cornered, like, what kinds of fights do they try to create to distract from their problems? Or suit?

• 2:44:33Speaker 04

  Or to create a kind of different problem that they would prefer to be in? Right? Because, as you're saying, from India, in other places, this stuff can really get dangerous. Yeah. And, you know, some of something to do with immigrants, right? You know, again, I've like, sort of talked about my fears of like, what they will try to do with New York in a Maldani mayoral tea, because I think they will just want that fight. Like, they have an instinct. Trump has an instinct, and you really saw it on display, that when he is in trouble, he tries to move his base by escalating warfare with some other enemy he prefers. The opposition. And I just see that coming, right?

• 2:45:14Speaker 04

  I don't think we're in like, a steady equilibrium, and you just really saw in this, like, how they'll turn it up. But it didn't work. I don't think it worked, and that's why when there is... But I don't think they're gonna... They're not gonna stop, but I think that's why the Epstein thing is like, such a perfect thing for like, the American populace to support, because it puts this immense pressure on him to deliver on a promise, that he actually has the power to deliver on, and he's choosing not to. Seriously, saying strategically, we should not let up on this. Do not let up on that. Do not let yourself be distracted. Don't be distracted by the other shit. It's like, if I see like, liberals hammering this, like, change the name to the Redskins thing. Are any liberals actually caring about the Redskins thing? I see no people caring about this. But that's what I love. I'm like, this is great. So if I see them falling for it, I'm going, guys, this is the trap. Yeah.

• 2:45:59Speaker 04

  You're falling for the bait, stay on this one thing that is important to you, because you're a decent human being, that he has the power to reveal, and if he chooses, and his administration chooses, and these congressmen choose not to, to me, it shows that they're complicit in it.

• 2:46:13Mark Gagnon?

  And I agree, and I think it's also equally as important to point out all this corruption, all this pay to play, all this like, silencing PBS, NPR.

• 2:46:22Speaker 04

  We're doing it right now!

• 2:46:23Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, like, we have to keep the foot on the neck of that.

• 2:46:25Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 2:46:26Speaker 03

  And people will be upset at us.

• 2:46:27Mark Gagnon?

  He's slowly changing.

• 2:46:28Speaker 03

  They'll go, hey, you had him on your podcast. This is why we're in this situation. I get that. I get the frustration, but like, we also gotta go. What do we do in that situation? Do we just sit here and go like, okay, I guess we won't say anything? No, no, we gotta keep saying it. Anytime it goes against something that like, we feel is important, we gotta keep saying it.

• 2:46:41Speaker 04

  One of the things that I find so frustrating about the administration and like, the way that they weaponize things that are real and then take it in a, in, in, in a really dark direction. It's like, how much did we hear in the Biden era about free speech? And like, understand, like, the idea of cancel culture was real, right?

• 2:46:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:00Speaker 04

  And the idea that people felt afraid to say certain things was real. And then like, they come in and in space after space where they have power, like, they are using the power of the state directly to change what people can say, like, like, they are like going through immigrants' phones, right? You like, can't get into this country through customs of like, the wrong thing is on your phone, right? You can say what they allow you to say, like, they went through all the grants and canceled everyone with the word diversity in it, right? If you had said anything as a public employee,

• 2:47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:28Speaker 04

  you got fired, right? They have gone to this kind of enforcement of the speech the boss allows. And I'm not just like here to call it hypocrisy, like, to your, to your good political point, there are a lot of people who actually do care about free speech.

• 2:47:44Speaker 03

  You're saying that Trump is acting like a Democrat?

• 2:47:49Speaker 03

  Which should frustrate us all, like,

• 2:47:50Speaker 04

  He is acting in the way people, I think, think Democrats act. Like, Democrats wield a lot of cultural power. He's wielding a lot of state power. That's a great distinction. That's a great distinction.

• 2:47:58Speaker 03

  The same frustration that a lot of people have with Democrats, you know, silencing free speech culturally, maybe not through policy, but at least through cancellation and like, you can't say these words and you're naughty and all this finger wagging. If he's doing the same thing through state power, yes, one, that's like, actual power that can restrict those things. So I'm not arguing like, what is worse? What I'm saying is that same sentiment of restricting free speech should enrage all of us that like free speech. And we gotta call it out on both sides.

• 2:48:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:48:26Speaker 03

  And like, yeah, I don't know. I, I feel like there should be unilateral support for that. You know, because you've heard, you've heard the right talk a lot about it, right? You heard the right talk about like, free speech is the freedom to say things you disagree with. It's like, all right, well.

• 2:48:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, where were they?

• 2:48:39Speaker 03

  Not man up.

• 2:48:40Speaker 04

  He sued the Des Moines Register.

• 2:48:42Speaker 03

  But I agree with that.

• 2:48:42Speaker 04

  Over Ann Seltzer's poll showing him down in Iowa.

• 2:48:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48:48Speaker 04

  Even though he won't, right, like polls are wrong sometimes.

• 2:48:51Speaker 03

  But Ann Seltzer is an anti Semite and she hasn't said it in Israel enough and you know that.

• 2:48:56Speaker 07

  I mean, I don't know enough, but even like the Khalil Mahmoud situation.

• 2:49:00Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:49:00Speaker 07

  Like, that seemed like a suppression of free speech.

• 2:49:03Speaker 04

  I mean, I, I will be able to say more about like he's, I'm doing a show with him tomorrow.

• 2:49:08Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 2:49:08Speaker 04

  It'll come out in a little bit, so I haven't talked to him yet, but yeah, the throwing of people in detention for things they have said.

• 2:49:18Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:49:19Speaker 04

  Is terrifying, right? I mean, we are not supposed to do that.

• 2:49:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:49:24Speaker 04

  And a lot of people who were rallying for free speech at one point, like seemed pretty quiet about that, but there are a lot of people actually do care about, like something I'll give like Joe Rogan credit for, right? It was like, he's pretty loud on due process over these last couple of months.

• 2:49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:49:36Speaker 04

  Like, this is not, like, this is not the way we want to be doing things, right?

• 2:49:38Speaker 03

  And Israel.

• 2:49:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, uh, huh?

• 2:49:40Speaker 03

  And Israel.

• 2:49:42Speaker 04

  I've been watching my Israel.

• 2:49:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:49:44Speaker 04

  So I don't know what I'm agreeing to there.

• 2:49:45Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, no, just criticism of the, like, extent of the destruction in Gaza.

• 2:49:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's a different topic, but yes.

• 2:49:54Speaker 04

  The weaponization of the government's powers to change, like what institutions can do and say, all the way to what individuals can do and say, is like really scary, right? Like, all these, like, students who are terrified of getting things revoked and, and the feeling that this is gonna escalate.

• 2:50:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50:10Speaker 04

  Right? And so, yeah, um, this feels like a place where people should draw a very, a very hard line, and it's why I'm sort of more on your side. Yes, it is hard as a person running a university who is responsible for its income. Yes, it's hard as a person running a corporation who wants to sell it or doesn't want to lose contracts or whatever it is. And also, yeah, it's hard. Like, you know what's hard?

• 2:50:33Speaker 03

  Took the job, dude.

• 2:50:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, you took a job. Like, you know what's hard? It's like working three jobs and not making enough to support your family. You know what's hard is like coming here as a refugee and being turned away or like having lived here and like have a job under a temporary protection program, having Trump like yank it away, like, I'm just not, like...

• 2:50:48Speaker 03

  The job is hard.

• 2:50:49Speaker 04

  I'm just not that sympathetic.

• 2:50:50Speaker 03

  We say it to policemen all the time and people have no issue with it, right? They're like, "Yeah, the job is hard. It is dangerous." Like, they say that, they throw it in policemen's face. And it's like, "Well, let's throw it in a billionaire media conglomerate's face too."

• 2:50:59Speaker 04

  Like Jeff Bezos could have been-

• 2:51:00Speaker 03

  Took a fucking hard job.

• 2:51:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, Jeff Bezos could have been, like Jeff Bezos who personally, as I understand it, cleared Democracy Dies in Darkness, like in the first administration. And like, is out here like, you know, I guess like, you know, paying Melania Trump $40 million to be an executive producer on two documentaries, like the whole thing.

• 2:51:17Speaker 03

  I wonder what that has to do with it.

• 2:51:18Speaker 06

  I wonder if there's any government contracts that Amazon wants.

• 2:51:21Speaker 04

  There's just been a, there's just been, I think, an abdication of responsibility among people who have social responsibility. Like, they do not just have shareholder responsibility.

• 2:51:30Speaker 03

  How badass would it be if Colbert just did the show himself with the team-

• 2:51:34Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 2:51:35Speaker 03

  -on YouTube? And it became the biggest fucking show? It's like, take the same exact model that a lot of us did during a time where we felt like we couldn't say or didn't get the opportunities on like, you know, traditional networks or whatever. You go, you do it on YouTube and it fucking explodes, or it dies. And it, that's, the people will decide. But what a badass fucking move. And if you really want to hold the powers that be accountable, like, there's a perfect opportunity for it. I think there'd be so much support just off the rebelliousness of it. Like, it'd be awesome to see, "You're gonna shut me down? Fuck you. I got some money, and I got a great staff, and we're gonna make great shows." And it could be a smaller version of it. But to me, that is just such a great-

• 2:52:12Speaker 06

  What multiverse would that be, where the mainstream media is super pro-Trump? And then the internet media is, "Fuck Trump, he sucks."

• 2:52:18Speaker 03

  But I thought the thing-

• 2:52:19Speaker 06

  How cool would that be?

• 2:52:20Speaker 04

  But I don't think, the thing you said a little bit ago, which I think is like really right, I mean, comedy and also independent media is like by nature anti-institutionalism.

• 2:52:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:52:29Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 2:52:29Speaker 04

  And Trump is the institution. This is the whole problem of the advent of Epstein, like, and it opens up vulnerabilities they don't really know what to do with.

• 2:52:35Speaker 03

  Yup.

• 2:52:35Speaker 04

  They know, they are much better at wielding the power of being the system now.

• 2:52:39Speaker 06

  I don't mean to litter my bone-

• 2:52:40Speaker 04

  But they also don't know what to do about being the system.

• 2:52:42Speaker 06

  To your point about Epstein, uh, Trump Live Updates: Judge Denies Request to Unseal Epstein Grand Jury Transcripts in Florida. So, I guess, uh- So even the non-measure, they still- Yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:56Speaker 03

  You gotta, this is, listen, bro, it's like, you gotta talk about it.

• 2:52:59Speaker 06

  They're protecting pedophiles, man.

• 2:53:00Speaker 03

  They 100% are. They 100% are.

• 2:53:02Speaker 06

  They are protecting pedophiles.

• 2:53:04Speaker 03

  100% are. You know, and, uh, I hate that you agree with this.

• 2:53:10Speaker 03

  Ezra Klein, man, thank you so much. Thank you for your time, brother. We also got another bank app with Ezra that we got to drop in the near future, which is just fucking great. We got to talk a lot more about abundance and a lot more about the issues with like housing and everything in the book. And I want to put that out as well, but we just wanted to get one that was a little bit more, you know, topical and addressing what's going on today. So, thank you so much, brother. Thank you, man. Awesome, man.

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