Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh - Epstein Files Blocked, Trump Cancelled Colbert? & Zohran's Chances in NYC with Ezra Klein

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

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

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 I don't want to get it wrong I don't want to get it wrong. It's a lot of weeks. It's a lot of weeks. Okay, the author 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

listen to it right now on Spotify listen to it but we're here with Ezra Klein everybody and you know Ezra's got a good insider information he knows exactly why Mike Johnson shut down Congress. So he's gonna tell us, this is not opinion, there's a 100% fact go for it, Ezra. Yeah, so we started on the easy one, huh? Yeah, yeah. So I listened to you all on Epstein.

And it had been in my head when I just did an Epstein show. And I read all the Epstein coverage and like went back and talked to people, 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. And it's really hard to believe there isn't something weird when the people with power are acting that weirdly.

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

Yeah, to force a vote with Democrats, to release the files, much more of the files. And if you, so I read, do you guys read the FBI, the FBI DOJ memo? I read nothing ever. So the FBI DOJ memo says why it's not going to release the files, and it says that the files are braided together with information about women and girls, and it doesn't want to, like their priority is not re-traumatizing people, re-victimizing. Even though they're begging for justice. So that's-

Have we asked the girls at all? Right. So that's, I guess, fine on the memo. Redact the girls' names. That is not a reason that Congress would force itself into recess, right? That is a preference on the part of the DOJ and FBI. But Congress is an oversight body in part, right? It's another branch of government.

And I have to say, Johnson is not acting like someone who just finds this politically inconvenient. He's acting like someone who can't let something happen. Yes. 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, 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 committee under closed-door privileges, right? There's a lot of things you could do. There's a million things they could do, and the weirdest thing... Congress is not usually one of them. 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. January 6th. They want them out, we're going to let them out. They want them out, we'll put them out. And this, he is rebuking the base, like almost like spitting in their face. They are asking for it, he campaigned on it, he puts Spongino and Cash in there,

which might be the stupidest thing in the history of the world. Why would you put the two guys that have nonstop pounded the pavement talking about how we're gonna expose this Epstein thing, and the second they get in there, they're like, you better shut the fuck up. You have to shut them up. Go on, Rogan, lie. 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 bungeano 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 No drop in the MLK. Like who asked for the MLK? Yeah MLK, you know, it's funny is I'm not a huge conspiracy theorist And I was initially like they have seen things for me was just the last straw in terms of you not getting things done 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, I didn't necessarily I was like there's probably something you started talking about Obama, I was like, oh, he's guilty. Yeah. Also, like, why are you talking about Obama and treason? You got a guy who has sex with teenagers that you are protecting. Also, some of the lies are so- He's protecting other pedophiles. Trump is protecting other pedophiles. Facts.

Like, that's what it is. Or, Epstein, because I actually think like, 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.

So you think Epstein was the only one messing with the children? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, of course not. But I don't think that's what the government's protecting. So here's what another administration would do, right? Because 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, around Hunter Biden. Yeah. Not a Hunter, man. He's making a comeback. He's making a comeback, too. They're not doing anything. 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 have, it violates privacy, but we're going

to put someone credible in charge of it, somebody we don't control. And their report is going to be credible to you. 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 in the Epstein 50th birthday book, and there's 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. 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. The funniest argument that I saw about it was, this is too poetic for Trump. I'm not saying that. I 100% believe he didn't write it, he just drew the naked woman. Fair enough. But the argument is essentially the president of United States of America is too stupid

to write this, therefore it must not be him. That was the argument that people were going for. I can give you the argument for like why you should believe there is less here than one would think. Okay. Less here meaning... In Epstein, right? This is where I was a week or two ago, which is that the amount of firepower, like investigatory

law firm, repritorial and government firepower that has been aimed at this thing, trying to find lawsuits to bring, because there's money, there's money here, there's media here, whatever, like whether people used to be scared of Epstein, they're 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 tell 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 the Trump administration appears to be panicking. 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. 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 wanna 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. Who gives a fuck? Get the info.

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 on a podcast swearing they would release the Epstein files. This was not a big theory, conspiracy, explanatory thing about the world in Bidenland, but huge amounts of MAGA have been very bought in. There was the QAnon version the first time, it moved over to this.

And there's some part of me, as somebody who's 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-crimining happening. Do we owe QAnon an apology? And more of it was going on with the knowledge of other people than one would have thought. Even going back to that weird Trump comment on Epstein that he loves beautiful women

as much as me, but he likes them young. He knew. You can say what he wanted to say about whether or not he was involved, but he knew. Yeah. And he wasn't the only one that knew. 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 assistance. There's no co-workers. 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 other names. I know two people doesn't that feel weird to you. Hmm

Yeah, yeah, there's 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? I do sometimes read things, not just about Epstein, but about all kinds of like, very rich person scandaling. And I think like, where do you have all this time, bro? Me with my less busy life, do not 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. This is the difference. You have kids, he has sex with them. Having kids is way more difficult. They require your time all day. They require 15 minutes of his time. Okay? Continue doing that. 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 deal. Wasn't the structure of it, if I understand it correctly, that it worked like a multi-level marketing scheme, basically. They would bring in girls and then they would basically say to the girls that if you bring in others, we will pay you. They made the people they brought in and abused into recruits. That's what I understood from a lawyer. It was like cutco knives or whatever.

Yeah, it was cutco. But people knew, right? Yeah. I mean, they just had to. So the thing that I was asking you before is like, is it possible this could be Trump's Watergate? 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 it 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, a recessing Congress to keep a vote he doesn't want from happening, there's no Watergate.

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 believe you on it, they already don't like Donald Trump, like it's already done.

This is happening inside Magus worldview. That's, this worldview. It's like under their framework of the world. This is a great point. And I think that this is something that like, when I'm having conversations with more liberal friends, I'm like, you echoing your sentiments of 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 the reality is you're going to 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 these 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, 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? You guys don't understand economics. That's the liberal problem.

Exactly. 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 going to affect them. It has to be an issue that they're going to be tugged at. Epstein tugs at them, also tugged at Democrats. Why would you not want to know about government corruption? Why would you not want to know about the covering up of a pedophile? This is important shit. So this is one of those things where I think Democrats, 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's distraction for liberals to chomp at and go, you see, he's a racist. Do you see what he's saying? No, no, no. Stay on Epstein. And when the entire country is just asking about Epstein, something's going to break. He's not trying to distract us.

He's trying to distract his people. But Wall Street Journal, the Murdochs, Obama, it's like spinning a giant wheel. I think it does 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.

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. 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, cause 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. You guys don't understand how money works. It doesn't make money. And then they get distracted from, not they're going to get distracted, but every one of them takes them one degree away from Epstein. They can ignore it. Keep it on Epstein. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I was thinking 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 populace 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? 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 huge 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, call it the bureaucracy, right?

But he was like his own administration, his own appointees like H.R. McMaster, like the somebody 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. And he was in this terrific tension with his own administration. So the advantage I gave him is when things went wrong, he's like, they're doing it, right? The deep state is blocking me. 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? But the idea is like, no, he's not really in charge. This time he's in charge and all the people are his people. So this is a fantastic point. And some people might say, like, I was talking to Assam piker about this and he was like, you have to understand what his argument was and I hope I'm not butchering this Assam 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 promise They act like he just 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 enact. Let's get to that. This is not true. I know these people. But fair, but fair. The argument is, is like, as long as they're talking about it and not doing it, 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. Or the Democrats are in charge of 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 that 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 It's 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.

So the base has- And does not want to do it. And does not want to do it. 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 Wyckoff is his negotiator. These are not people who think this war has gone much too far. I almost thought you were going to stop the sentence that these are not the case. 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. 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 think for Democrats to seize some of the base. If I get it and I did, they're going, don't you dare. You had them on your paws because 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 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. Did you see the clips of John Ossoff, the Senator from Georgia? What'd he say? Um, I don't know if we could pull it up because I'm not going to be able to do it

justice, but he, he's been, he's been on the stump. He's running for reelection and he is He's building the corruption argument that has always been there that it was clear somebody was gonna 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 grip now Hold on. Wait, wait, wait, break that down, about the 20.

It's worth it, I don't know if he's presidential candidate. Yeah, off of one clip, he thought this fact could be presidential. 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 Donny Beach, Florida. September 25th and 26th, back to Helen, Ohio. And this is a show that's, I'm very excited to do it, but it's gonna 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 Akash Singh show. 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. 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 you all. Thank you guys so much. Levittown, Washington, D.C., 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 stand-up comedy, that no more, no less. See you guys at the show. But the reason I brought it up in that context is one of the things that happened to Democrats

over the past couple of years, it happened in 2020, then it really happened in 2024, is you really lose the highest ground in American politics, the most ideal political ground, when you lose the stream of reform. The stream of reform? Yeah, when you don't have the argument about reform. Obama was a reformer. Bill Clinton was a reformer. Donald Trump was a reformer. 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 difficulty Trump has now that he was able to sort of weave out of in 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 the inevitable problem of having to take responsibility for it? In his first room he had a version of that. So then Giovanni wins and it's a pandemic, there's a lot of dimensions about that election, but Biden, whatever he is, he's not a reformer. But he's sort of a return to normalcy. Then by 2024, he's unpopular. You know, he's in his 80s. And he and Harris just cannot run as reformers, right? They cannot run against their own, against- Harris didn't even try.

She literally said Biden's doing great. Well, because I think Biden just gave her his whole staff and now she can't take his staff. Well, I would just love to hear why you think, because what I hear is Biden said to her, no daylight kid, you're not going to do that. I don't know if that's true. 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, why didn't you talk about this for the last four years? 100%. Weren't you in the meeting? She's in a tough position. I think it's a death mission.

I think they sent her on a death march. This is why I was arguing forever that you needed an open convention. She can run. This is what all of us were asking for. At least let people above the other. This is where I think the lack of accountability is happening on the left. I think a lot of people, I don't want to call they all left, but the angry online left, I think a lot of them just want to make it about, oh, Trump came on podcast or Trump,

whatever. It's just like, yeah, but you ran a dead guy and then a woman that couldn't speak. 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. And I think that's what has been happening. And I want to talk about- There's nobody who was arguing louder earlier

for an open convention. I literally believe in the country than me. So- But I bet you got a lot of criticism for that. Yeah, I got a lot of shit for that. So what happened when you were bringing it up? When I was bringing it up, so when Biden gives the press conference after the Robert Hirst

special prosecutor report, I'd been at the White House that day and I was 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. Subsequent revelations have made this look worse if you read the Jake Tapper, Alex Thompson book, Original Sin, 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 special prosecutor her was catastrophic. There really did seem to be something wrong with his memory 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 us 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 the Super Bowl interview. Yeah. And he just wasn't doing interviews. Pyramids, pyramids though. I actually don't catch it.

Egypt, Mexico. Oh Egypt, yeah't doing interviews. Pyramids, pyramids though. I actually don't catch it. Egypt, Mexico. Oh, Egypt, yeah, yeah, pyramids. As we're going to travel a little bit. Yeah, right. Not as rolled as I could be. Although I've been to the Jews made pyramids. I've been to Mexico to pyramids actually.

And I just had this moment that night, I was like, this is not going to work. 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 going through everything, the big argument I make is that the thing that Democrats are saying at that point, because you had super majorities of the public saying, this guy is too old. Whatever you think of him, 70% to 80% of the public

did not want him to run for reelection. I don't think they wanted Trump either. I think they got 70% wanted neither of them. But the party primary bases are very loyal to their people. But the thing was he had sort of made it through the primary already. I think it's February, 2024. And my argument, and this was not that he was told 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're not going to make it through here. But I get like huge pushback. 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 I was like, as we fucking idiot When you watch that were you like? I was just like what I was like, where was this guy? I did a thing at this state I did a thing of this day the universe like look

I don't know how to account for that all I know is like There's a long time between here in the election and if this guy's having good days and bad days You better really hope he never has a bad day on an important day. There's four more years. And there's that. And so then you have the debate where he has the bad day on the big day. 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 is 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 Yeah Right if then you have to figure out your absolute best Candidate against him and you're not gonna do that without any kind of process that surfaces information You you are you are preaching to the choir here The 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 more optimism and hope for the reform candidate, even if they can't exact those policies. And it disappoints, right? They're in that those policies. The time of Obama, it gets disappointing.

But there is that moment where you have hope, and hope is like tantalizing, dude. Unbelievable. 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. And that I think might be a scenario.

And I think the status quo thing and 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. So this gets at, 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, weren't polarized at all. They had all kinds of people in them.

Like Strom Thurmond was a Democrat, before he became the second most conservative Republican. This happened constantly. You had George Romney, Mitt Romney's father, like by today's standards, it functioned to 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.

That's Paul Ryan and Barack Obama, that's Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton. Pick your leaders. What has happened since Trump has been it's polarizing on a different line, which is system anti-system. Yeah. And by system you mean institution. 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? How do you feel about, you know, name it? And that didn't used to be quite so, like it used to have a big anti-corporate left, right? 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, the sort of pro-system coalition. And you have R.F.K. Jr., who is considered to be, I think it was EPA, Environmental Protection Agency Secretary. As liberal as you can be.

Under Obama, who runs for, 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 going to 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 the Democrats of 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, you know, we believe in science and we believe in government, right? You have to know these things have flaws and failures and you have to balance the fact that you don't want to burn them to the ground. Yeah. Right.

Which is, I think, what Republicans are often doing. Yep. But nor does that mean you should rally in defense of the status quo. Yes. 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, that's an institution we don't trust.

Yeah. And you can understand where that distrust comes from and maybe you can meet them halfway on that and understand why they feel that way. And there are Democrats that have shown amazing distrust towards it. Bernie has been rallying against it for years. Pharma is easy for Democrats. Democrats have been fighting for years and finally the Inflation Reduction Act got some of it in, driving down pharmaceutical drug prices and Medicare. Democrats are finding it easy on Pharma. The question is more, I don't know how to describe it. It's like the Democratic Party,

the other thing that's happened has 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 party is like, people graduate college are like more yoked into American institutions.

They believe in more, in part because of those institutions have worked better for them. That's a great fucking way to say it. Give a great example about how those institutions are working for the college educated and against the high school educated. Well, like just take COVID, right? You're like a white collar office worker. There's lockdown, you're like a white collar office worker. There's lockdown, you're like sent home. And then we have these quote unquote essential workers

who we call essential, but we're putting them out in harm's way, but also we've made their jobs much, much harder. 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 at, you know. You're gonna have mistakes.

You're gonna have a pandemic, right? Hindsight is 2020, so I'm always very careful about this. But it just worked really differently. People experienced very different COVIDs, 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 rules.

But also just the economy works differently for different people. If you're a high school graduate. Most jobs don't get higher without a college degree. Right. Or like you've got terrible just-in-time scheduling, and then somebody telling you, no, don't worry, GDP's up this year. That's bullshit for you.

It's not up for you. Yeah, it doesn't affect you at all. Yeah. The stock market is up. Great. I don't know a single stock. It's the worst statistic to decide if America's doing well. Yeah, it doesn't affect you at all. Yeah. The stock market is up great. I don't own a single stock. It's the worst statistic to decide if America is doing well. Yeah.

So you can come up with all kinds of aversions 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. And feeling left behind. Now, there's still contradictions in these parties, right? I mean, Republicans just passed a giant bill cutting functionally $5 trillion 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. You told us not to trust them. Yes, you told us it was all deep state to trust nobody. You said drain the swamp. And then you're like, trust us. This is all a radical leftist plot. And you're like bread and circusing us

with AI videos of Barack Obama getting. I mean, I'm always amazed to me at how much disrespect Trump often shows for the people who believe in him. But this is the opportunity, I think, for voicing it in a really brilliant way, which is everything that Trump, I'm going to say everything, but a lot of the things that Trump has done reinforce the institutions that he was so critical of. He's continuing the wars. He's like, I'm going gonna stop the wars day one, continuing to fund them.

He's 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, he can do whatever he wants. He's choosing not to do these things, and these are our choice. The base is furious about this.

How do Democrats come in and seize that? I mean, I think they're doing a pretty damn good job actually. Like the ones who came in and said we are Offered legislation to force these files to release. I love what Roe did. And we're gonna build a coalition. I love it. And like Roe, he's a very liberal guy, very progressive. I mean a co-chair of the Bernie Sanders campaign a couple 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 and because of that so they're doing a good job on that But because of that the Democratic establishment hates him. I don't think they hate Roe. I wouldn't I think Roe thinks they do

We have Roe on and he 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 may be voting for Trump have. I will say if you spend, I don't want to discount any experiences Rose had or the congressman

has 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 it's a common refrain It's a very common What I mean by this is like have there haven't been actually I don't know if this is true to this day But like Zoran wins. Yes, the primary that's a different single Democrat. That's it has endorsed him Not a single Democrat with a jerry-nabler endorsed him. Not a single Democrat within this- But Jerry Nadler endorsed him. What is he? Is he a consular? 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, that Schumer and Jeffries kept their distance. I don't know if they've changed where they are now. And I would say that Schumer and Jeffries kind of represent the institutional Democrats. The system Democrats. Yes, that is fair. So it seems like the system- Hakeem Jeffries still hasn't backed them yet. Jeffries hasn't backed them, 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 Zoran has can work. Well, here's what Schumer and Jeffries are thinking. 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 attentional economy, the only Democrat whose name people know is Zora Mondani.

Right? So they think that the Zora Mondani policy will engulf the Democratic party. No, it's not the policy. That's not their concern, but the vibe and the weakness is, right? The reform direction, I guess. No, I wouldn't call it the reform direction. 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. Yep. Yep. 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 or how their party is seen. 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 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. The last thing Schumer and Jeffries want to talk about is the value of the term globalizing the defata, right? They just do not want to talk about that at all. And the problem for them with Mamdani is that he creates that conversation.

I was just watching a speech JD Vanske gave the vice president at the Claremont Institute, which is a sort of far right think tank. They were giving him the Statesman Award. It's worth, I would love to talk about the speech, which I'm having a piece come out on because it's very much about what citizenship should be about. But the entire first section and end of that speech that Vance gives are about mom, Donnie Right. He wants to define the entire Democratic Party entire left around mom Donnie to advance mom Donnie is a soft target. This is what right and that's the fight those figures are having this is what I think along each other

So I think Republicans do really well. Mm-hmm is they Exploits 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 a 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 Yeah, like you remember this ad that they were I think they ran in the Super Bowl Yeah inmates. Like you remember this ad that they ran, I think they ran in the Super Bowl. 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 try 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. If the people want Zoran, whether we like it or not, if the majority of New Yorkers want it, we have to let that happen. If it goes horribly, 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 Zoran.

I think it is not going to work. Which, which? It is flatly not going to work. Zoran or? No, I'll finish the sentence. For Democrats to try to keep an arm's-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 well they have I mean they try although mayor of New York is also

a little different than with a senator from Vermont and then AOC. 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? It's a big party and they have their disagreements. That's different than the Jeffrey Schumer, we're not going to endorse, we need to have

conversations, right? The question of whether or not AOC is a Democrat who will be endorsed in reelection campaigns is not up for grabs right now. And Mamdani, I'm just saying it's not gonna work for them. They're gonna need to figure out what to do with the energy Mamdani has unleashed. They cannot hide from it. And they cannot oppose it because that will crack up their coalition. The thing Republicans do for better and for worse, I mean, they do try to paint Democrats

by the most extreme candidates. Democrats do that 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 been a liberal substacker in the fall of 2024, I was like, fucking people, you don't understand what's coming. If Donald Trump gets elected, he's going to make Cash Patel and Dan Bongino the heads

of the FBI. He's going to put RFK Jr. at HHS. He's going to try to make Matt Gaetz the attorney general. He'll be like, calm down, dude. That's ridiculous. It's a little, like you can't define the Republican party by its most extreme wing in some way. It is its most extreme wing.

Like that would have been, I would not have written that. I would have found that far-fetched. Like truly far-fetched. It's like people threatening, oh they're going to do project 2025 and then they're like, no, you're overreacting and then you're seeing them slowly do all of project 2025. Did you read project 2025? I read a lot of project 2025.

It's like 12,000 pages. There's this idea that like everybody read it and they're like, how would you not read product 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.

Much shorter. The Constitution you could do in like an hour. Fair enough. Okay. But it is like, it's 12,000 pictures. What have they done from Project 2025? I asked Chad GBT what it was I already forgot I forget

Alright project 2025 so it's I Love that I get to do a project 2025 explain it for the flagrant audience Project 25, it's 800 some pages. I think if I remember correctly What happens there's 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 going to create the menu. We are going to create like, it's not like one playbook, exactly a bunch of parts of 2025 contradict themselves. It isn't one thing that you could just like do the whole thing. 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. 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 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.

But it's a lot of right-wing policies of all different kinds, some of 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 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 break the universities and force them to come under, in some cases, 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. 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 the federal money for scientific research, which is 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. 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 accredited university would probably break accreditation more than break Harvard, but nevertheless, I'm trying to do that. 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 because it's good to educate people from the whole world, but also those students pay a lot of money to be there. And they use that money to subsidize the American students.

So it's, if you, you know. I think that's a very favorable look at it. No, that's literally true. 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. 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. Yeah, me. You're welcome. We both went, right? Yeah. You're welcome.

All of you are welcome. All of you are welcome. 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. Right. But what the administration has 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. Now, I understand this idea. And I think 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, what does it say, 20 years ago or 30 years ago, it was between 2 and 5%.

I think Columbia is now at 70%. So I think that there is a concern that our finest institutions are not educating America's finest. I think that's fine. I don't know what the numbers are for Columbia or for Harvard's finest. I think that's fine. I don't know what the numbers are for Columbia or for Harvard. I think Columbia is like 70. I think Harvard maybe like 40, 50 or something like that. Columbia is an international student population.

40%. Okay, 40%. 70 seems crazy, but 40 is still high. Okay, fair enough. 40 is still high. So for me as an American, right, like 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 Nebo 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 going to go because they're going to spend an, you know, astronomical amount of money so they can go there. And you feel like, and it's the same feeling that I think that, you know, a lot of Americans- And they want the donations of their parents for the endowment later. Exactly. Which is a big part of this. 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 life. Not to justify what Project 2025 is. Yeah, I'm just saying, this is, I think, a reasonable argument in service of a different policy. 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? It feels like college has become a business, and that's a sentiment being able to take advantage of something that my country offers its people? It feels like college has become a business and that's a sentiment that they can take advantage of with their... 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, a minute Harvard's got 50 billion dollars is Harvard even a university or is it a hedge fund? I mean it is a saying that's the reason why they're taking that money away It's more the sentiment that I think is a fair frustration that people have and I think they're and I think the administration is taking advantage of that sentiment to administer this control leverage that they want, which is unfair. 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 a thousand percent on board. There's 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 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 by them. Through the administration, yeah.

Right? And so the plan here has been to- Which I disagree with 100%. The plan here has been to break these institutions and force them to come under the Trump administration's control. Right. 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 in the people. Graduated class B from the United States of America. Yeah, or US citizens or residents here, whatever it might be, right? You can imagine a bunch of versions of this. We just don't live in that particular world. I guess what I'm saying is like, I think it's important to meet people

where they are emotionally when explaining these things, 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 wanna 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 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.

Yeah. 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 Well what you have to do is you go you have to at least go hey white lives do matter dude and 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 that 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 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. And 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. 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, 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 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 much money rich people

have or support people? Like what's wrong with health insurance? What's wrong on this or that policy area? Fine, 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, where do you think they're failing and what would you do about it? 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 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.

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 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, you could say, well, I was focusing on other things three years ago.

Didn't like what was going on at Harvard didn't strike me as the biggest deal in the world. But it's fair, right? 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? I'm a little skeptical of that. But there are a lot of things they did care about.

But maybe they weren't aware. No, I think now that they're aware, we can meet them where they are. Yes, but now that's what I'm a little skeptical of that, but there are a lot of things they did care about. But maybe they weren't aware. No, I think now that they're aware, we can meet them where they are. Yes, but now that's what I'm saying, Kibler. 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 I graduated in 2006. I went back in 2009, it was 45,000 a year. 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, I don't get the jobs I used to get before, and I think to Shultz's point, just acknowledging, hey, I get you're frustrated about that, but what these guys are doing is not gonna ease your frustration, it's just allowing them to do some fuck shit. All right, guys, let's have an honest conversation here.

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If you asked me healthcare, I would have done so much more. I just want to say like for this conversation, I'd like there to be no minorities in the room. And again, you don't have to give us like the perfect example. More or less, can you tell us how this happened? So there are a couple things happening here. And I just have in my head my 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 years.

Don't yell at us, okay? We're on flagrant. We're just having fun. We're talking about cost inflation in college. So one thing is that I'm going to rank these from sort of benign to more problematic. 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. 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 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 sell live music because it was not all this other stuff. So this stuff where we can digitize it, this stuff where we can make it into 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 in a society that is 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 makes it... You can't make a teacher cheaper.

Or you shouldn't. But the idea is that you can make a flat screen cheaper. So that's one thing. You can mass produce it. But that doesn't... there's a lot of things that doesn't explain. Another thing is we have cut a lot of things that doesn't explain. 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. 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. 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. Yep. 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 how much their

family made. So that's another thing. There's a huge amount of administrative bloat in higher education. 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. 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? 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. I mean, part of that is just more people going to college.

Right, whatever reason. The college premium is no longer that. 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, the gyms were nice.

Like, that's a nice gym. Yeah, but the facilities were crazy. Like, the pool, like the climbing wall, whatever. Why is there a fucking climbing wall? Like, it's weird to get education here. But part of it is that, 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. Because like the best students get you good ratings and you know, US News and World Report or whatever. And the richer students pay for it. And the richer students pay for everything. And so one of the ways you get them

is when they come and do their tour on your campus. They take you to, it's like the Four Seasons. Exactly. They take you to all the amenities. So there's been money in that. 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 student loans work, if everybody's got them, you can kind of, everybody can pocket at least part of it. So that's what I wanted to talk about a little bit. I think it's quite benevolent to have a student loan process in America where they basically say, hey, we're going to 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 going to 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 going to 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? I mean, it's, I don't think arguable. So that's- Right? Some of them. But it's like everything-

I'm not trying to paint everybody as an affairs character. No, I'm not 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 yes, right? 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.

Yes, that's what I mean by that. I don't think that they're stealing money, but if it's a blank check, that check is going to go up. If, for example, the student loan lending services, what is it? Is it Fannie Mae or Sally Mae? Sally Mae, I think. Sally Mae, right? I owe that this money.

So, if Palo Brancanco's all these different things. But if they limited the total amount at $150,000, that's how much university loans will 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 increase the amount of foreign students to make up for it, they'll be forced to decrease the cost of education or increase the amount of foreign students to make up for it, which could also piss off Americans. So this was a huge fight in the Obama years. One of the things that sometimes frustrates liberal wonky people about this stuff is that

in ways that were not well covered, there have been a lot of efforts to try to do something here. 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 who could take the loans and who was accredited to the rate of loan repayment. And the thing they were tracking there, a bunch of things in how we funded colleges and 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 truly failing their students? 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, but again, it's been a minute. UC Santa Barbara. That's how you define it. How dare you? You went to Santa Barbara? Of course I did. Nobody paid back those loans. Dubs still got loans from UC Santa Barbara.

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? 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 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 that they're just not as selective. And they're the people who are mostly really in trouble afterwards. And so that's where a lot of the legislation started. 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,

there's a lot of good critiques of colleges in there. They come in and do completely politicized horseshit, right? They're not trying to make them better, they're 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, and then just like also refuse to solve the problems because they're so focused on their own resentments

and enmities. 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. I think the base of a lot of this conversation and the ways that higher education has gotten, if we wanna 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 older view of higher education, like, you know, read the great books and literature, shame, right? Is it to get a good job? It's a good job. Now, I think for some people, and I think that does still exist, I think like the quickest

pathway to upper 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. What's happening right now, I think, is that middle-class people, and I think this brings us to the mum, Donnie, 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. But in reality, it's like, when do I start my family? When do I become an adult? And I think maybe there's a good way to segue into Mumdani 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 going to 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 room now because I don't have to worry about that going up because I still got to pay for this debt. So I think a lot of, and if you've seen like, Mugdani'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 like, wishful about it. I don't blame if he'll be able to deliver on those but I 100% get why people are are like wishful about it

I don't blame them 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 probably the rent prices It's it feels like a robbery. Yeah, it's like there's no way This is a not a criminal activity that you're doing then apartment that would cost me six hundred dollars a month in Dallas, Texas criminal activity that you're doing then an apartment that would cost me six hundred dollars a month in Dallas Texas cost me forty five hundred dollars a month in New York City yeah so fuck you meet me where I am yeah fuck you freeze the rent something got a gift yes and the only way to fix that is you create more housing so you freeze the rents while creating more housing thank you and then

it levels out almost like someone wrote a book about how important housing maybe you guys should read a bunch it's been. He's got some great ideas about it. It's been number one for 18 weeks or maybe 19 weeks. I didn't say number one. It's just been on the seller. The New York Times bestseller number one for 19 weeks. Nothing else is being sold. Did you know 20 weeks it was on the new number one?

21 number one. OK. So give us Mamdani populism. And do you think that there is a through line with the debt that young people, middle class people especially are feeling? Yeah. So, let's start just with the populism, right? Mom Donnie, the point of almost every policy Mom Donnie 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 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. Build the wall. 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, he really understands not how to, like other politicians communicate about policy, he communicates through policy, right? Freeze the rent, free buses, the city run grocery store thing, free daycare. They all 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. Yeah.

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. Yeah. Right? You should, you know, you had a kid, having a kid is a good thing to do. It's hard. There should be daycare.

Yeah. They figured this out in other countries. We should figure it out too. That's awesome. Impossible. How possible is it? Because at at all everything you're saying is fucking beautiful in how possible is it for? Mamdani to do free daycare just in New York City. Yeah problem for his he's got two problems, right? And I'm like not On the like the anti-mamdani side of this. Yeah, 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 it most of risks and the big risk is that he can't deliver what he promises. Everything he is talking about, 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 facilities for it, which they don't have. You need the people to actually be with 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, you need a lot. You need a lot, right? It's not like one teacher looking over their class

of like 10, 15, 30 kids. 30 fucking kids, that's what we want to see. When you're dealing with two-year-olds, it's like one person for three or four kids. Tops. Tops. I was with Andrew's lovely daughter a few days ago. She was trying to kill herself every second.

Yeah, it was four people for one kid. Yeah, the correct numbers you need are two people for one child. That's the actual ratio that makes things manageable. He does not have control over taxes as mayor of New York City. 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. And she literally came out and she's like, I'm not going to do it. She's not going to 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 as New York City is and not as rich as New York City is. I think that's something people don't understand about New York. Yes. You get out of New York City, it gets red quick. It gets red quick.

And I mean, a lot of places like this, like California, it's like outside of the big cities, it's very different, right? Of course. So she's got very different politics in him. All right, guys, listen, I have a big issue with the UFC right now. Talk about it. It's my favorite sport to watch. I buy every single pay-per-view. I mean, you can look at my, I bought every single pay-per-view this year. I watch it religiously. 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 have a kid, I'm up at six in the morning, but I do remember a time,

I could be off, where the main card was done by like 11. No. No. I remember a time. You main card was done by like 9.45. I remember I would watch the UFC and then I'd go out for a late dinner. You guys don't remember that time? When those fights are in Dubai, yeah, sure. Was that it? Yeah.

Interesting. So it was a time zone thing this whole time? Yeah. Or you didn't have a kid and you just would leave your house at 12 and go hang out in front. You think that is it? I think that might have something to do with it. You think the fact that I'm up with my child at 6 a.m. every single morning is affecting my sleep schedule? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Damn. Okay. I have been watching the fights on your pay-per-view though, so I appreciate that you still get them. I've been logging in. So what did you think of the Halloween 4-A fight? I thought it was wonderful. No, honestly the card was great, and that fight was just sensational. I mean, those two guys are just so

It's like you love Dustin. He's just such an absolute legend Yeah, part of you want to see Dustin, you know, you want to see him get a victory on the way out He's 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 on entertaining fights, you keep getting fights at the UFC. If you win boring, you might not. And so I don't think Dustin went out in this tragic way. I thought it was like, 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. Like crazy. This guy gets knocked out, brutal fashion, his last fight comes back and fights as if it never happened.

Most people can't get over that. Like, and at 155, 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?

Yeah. Did you see his son talk to like afterwards go to Dustin just be like young man like you're the man Yeah, they because they had a moment from the fight before yeah, and like it came full circle five years later Yeah, yeah, and that kind of shit is like why you saw it's so cool Yeah, you get sports in particular you get invested in these guys man, just like, yeah, they're just awesome. They're so brave. And Max puts a performance on like that.

And obviously, Max is one of the biggest stars in UFC. So we want to see him watch and fight no matter what. But you're just like, OK, let's do it again with Ilya at 155. Ilya's the champ at 155. Who else do you want to see him fight besides Max? Yeah, I think Ilya's the fight. Well, let me ask a question. When you see these guys lay their lives on the line,

take these risks, does it inspire you to try to stay up till 10.30 to watch? I thought a lot about that. I thought a lot about that. And there's something really interesting about watching in the morning with a cup of coffee. So you get up 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 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 slap in the shit out of everybody. She was slapping everybody on Sunday. I, my daughter got a left hook from hell. No, from Max.

She literally saw her Sunday. She, if you're holding her, just reaches back, boom! Doesn't care. How can she slap? My daughter slapped the shit out of me and 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, we do not slap, okay? We're gentle. And Shia La goes, all right. Boom! I slapped the shit out of my wife. And 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 Shia La of the UFC. And yeah, I just, I can't wait to see who Max, I mean if they do that L.E.F. fight with Max again, like let's go. What do you guys think? No, 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.

Does he go up even more? 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 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. And like, if you go up to 155, you actually need to walk around at

170 and then cut down to 155. And you know, I 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 met he's max is my 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 mm heavy, I'm just bulking. It'll be more muscle when it comes up. How many is bulking since I was four? So yeah, no, I'm just excited to see what Max does next, man. I mean, that's going to be so cool. Yeah, absolutely.

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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. He just turned off the podcast right now. So I would like somebody to explain all the de Blasio. You 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.

So anyway, so there's, 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 months ago. But I don't want to try to do it by memory. I just like to point out that it is doable. Like mayors can change that. 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 Mamdani 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. They're gonna try. They're gonna take all the money from him they can. 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 going to be dealing with very reduced federal money coming in. And with reduced federal money, you have no chance of doing these programs that are required. She'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. So that's sorry That's sorry. I was gonna say With Trump in 2016 to he ran on all these things and people like oh, how'd you guys not know we live he ran on? Overturning rovers weight 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 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. I think 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 fall sharply. Like, so- Why is that? Because it just, 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. 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 make. That's going to first come out in repairs, right? And then it's second going to come out in new construction. If you just make any market less attractive to be in, then fewer people are going to go into the market, right? That's just gonna be like hydraulic. If you look at Mom Donnie's housing policy, and Mom Donnie, who's like read

abundance and talks about it on the trail, which I appreciate, has done interviews with my co-author, Derek Thompson. He talks about new construction. His plans are 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. So 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 per unit. The same developer had built another complex that was non-affordable, like Nextdoor or

very nearby, and it was coming in at, I forget, $300,000, $400,000 per unit. And we put in all these rules. And even if you listen to Mamdani, he'll say, I believe we need a lot more housing, 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 onto it, the more expensive it becomes and you don't have money.

Right? And you're capping what the money could be. And I mean that in a way too. And I understand the act of it. 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. Great. Not public only. Allow private as well. 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? I wanna 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 an 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. Actually, I don't know the economics on affordable housing, but I imagine it's more when you're doing like 3000 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't 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... I want to give Mon-Bonny some credit here. 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 gonna 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 gonna struggle is where that comes into conflict with any other goal the left has. 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 I can agree, he did get LaGuardia done, it's beautiful. He did, I mean, the Second Avenue subway did in that phase of it get done. The Second Avenue subway was the most expensive subway per kilometer in world history, right? It's not like this is just a problem of the leftists. You have to choose and you have to, in some cases, make people mad, but you have to make it affordable. One of the things I always 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 the 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 gonna 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 all kinds of bad things happen. And that tends to be a little trickier, right? How do you do it? The left tends to be very willing to say, we're gonna tax rich people and move the money over here. Fine, that's great. I am supportive of taxing rich people

and moving the money over here. Not Andrew, you can't tax him. 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. That's a good point. Solidarity tax credit. Exactly, 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. It's like when you get 15% off

for like a referral fee. I'm the referral. I'm the tax, you know when you want Hollywood to come make a movie in your town? Okay, you get them taxed, but that's what I'm doing. 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. As you begin showing people that you're being ruthless about making sure that their money is well spent. I would gladly pay. Then I think they are more willing to pay more. I don't want you to move on from the point you're about to make, which is how do you make them plentiful? Oh, yeah. So one of the arguments of abundance, right,

which is 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 how we get in 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 can 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. If we pumped a lot of money to 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. 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 Mamdani describe in detail is how he's gonna make public housing affordable to build and market rate much faster to build. And these are the things that will decide, I think, if he's actually able to make a big dent in these problems. And they're hard fucking problems, right?

Gavin Newsom came into office in 2017. Who's that? Um, California governor. Ah, yes. 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. Probably negative. I track if you are having more new housing built in California per month, because I'm a nerd like that, the 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 Newsome has just signed in some big bills, right? He's getting more aggressive in 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, homeowners are mad at you, right? Yeah, it's the- The rich people that want to pay more taxes. Nimbism, is that the term? Nimbism, it's hard.

Yeah, not in my backyard. Everybody wants new housing for people. Everybody wants affordable housing for people. Everybody wants affordable housing for people who can afford it, but they don't want it near them. One of the hardest questions in politics is not how you fight your enemies, it's how you disappoint your friends. 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 want to live in this bougie area. Why are poor people living

here? You're not, you didn't move to New York City for the right reason. The point of this is we all grew up in these neighborhoods. How come New York City is changing? It's like the most dynamic city. 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. St. Mark's 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 were 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've 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 fucking, what's the deal, like all the artists grew up in it over in- Sidetown? Well, Sidetown's another one, but like, where like, I think Timmy Chalamet lived there, Alicia Keys lived there. Oh, I don't know the name of it, but I've heard of this one. You know what I mean?

It's in Hell's Kitchen. Hell's Kitchen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I forgot the name of it. You know what I mean? It's in Hell's Kitchen. Hell's Kitchen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot the name of it. Yeah, where it's just like basically subsidized housing for people who are in the arts. No issue at all. So I think that New Yorkers also have got to start embracing our identity a bit here. 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 and Derek did, it's just like, you need to build. And if that means cutting the red tape, let's cut it. But like, if Zoran does win and he does make public housing projects, but he's also 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, you'll be a fucking hero. But I think that he's going to need a little bit of wiggle room or at least address the concern you have. This is an old kind of socialism. Old socialism. Scary word. I know. This is a scary word. But even so, old socialism.

You're talking like Tucker and Carly Kirk right now. We should talk about that. They had a great column. But even so, old socialism... You're talking like Tucker and Carly Kirk right now. We should talk about that. They had a great column about that. It was very materialistic, right? It was about abundance. We have a Karl Marx quote in the conclusion of the books. It was the thing that sometimes frustrates me.

You get me so close. I know, right? And they throw it all away. When I went on Barry Weiss's show and made this argument, she was like, socializing. But the point I'm making about it is this argument, she was like, socializing. But the point I'm making about it is not that you got to 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, 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 there, 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, right? Yeah. 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-grade 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 a thing you are most comfortable delivering. The point is you should want to fix it. I want to fix it. I want the government to be able to build beautiful public housing affordably and quickly. They do it in other places. Singapore, huge amounts of public housing. We talked about that. That's a tricky one because the government just owns all the housing.

People can't own their own houses there. They basically do a lease for 100 years or something. I'm just saying that they have the capacity to build them. It's a state capacity question. Or I can do the high-speed rail in California version. Other places can build this stuff. I understand the point you're making. And I guess alleviating some of that red tape is what will make this possible.

It's not just red tape. 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. Why wasn't Epstein more regulated then? We gotta get to the bottom of that. Alright guys, let's take a break for a second. You need protein, okay? And it's hard to eat chicken breast every single meal, trust me, it is boring. So you probably also need a little protein powder, and the most trustworthy pre-orce protein in the game is made by Transparent Labs.

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on their first order. Just head to cornbreadhemp.com slash flagrant and use the code flagrant at checkout. That is cornbreadhemp.com slash flagrant and use the code flagrant. Now let's get back to the show. 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, the point is 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. They're coming to the same rhetoric, not the same. Okay, fair enough. They're coming to the same rhetoric and this maybe holding the same

like institutions responsible. No, play this clip. Can we play it for a second? Yeah, yeah. Mark, can you just text him right now? You showed this to me and I feel like I almost lost my mind. 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. 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 just play the... 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 some of them that there are two sides to the story. It's like immediately, they know, 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 or taking advantage of the dumb people borrowing the money. They both are culpable.

And by the way, I think the people with more power and more wisdom are probably more culpable, act morally than the people who are. In other words, like, do 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. 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 they're, no, I'm not saying I don't believe that. No, but you're absolutely right. I think that 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. It's thought terminating cliches. Is what it is. So good. Right, it's stop thinking it. Cause we're gonna 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 double checked that. Gen Z owes the most money in any generation in history. So we wonder why then all of a sudden, hey, you wanna 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. 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. 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 don't we take seriously that you have predatory lending? There's 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 the support of Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson, and they burnt the CFPB to the ground the way they did USAID. People didn't hear as much about it, but we actually have people who've been worrying about this. And you can debate how, 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 going and taking out a HELOC loan to get a Coachella ticket. They're putting it on their credit card. Do you really want the government regulating what people can 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. Okay, just like destroyed the regulator that is actually was trying to work on the thing. They say 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 you're gonna run some? I just think that this is good. You make a good point. I think it's a fair point. I think that they should, they should also consider that. I just want to say I'm not point scoring. 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 and do people know about it is it often diverges. I think that's probably frustrating for you. It's very frustrating for me. Because I think that you, and it's one of the reasons why I love talking to you is because you really understand the instruments of politics.

And he actually knows what's happening. Yeah, you understand the policy and you understand how these things do affect people. So I'm sure you hear them talking. But yes, so to the policy and you understand like how these things do affect people. So I'm sure you hear them talking. So to the common ground side, we... What are they speaking to rather? There's 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.

Get yourself some credit. Yeah, exactly. 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. So you have this economy where the things people need to fill a house, furniture and televisions have gotten cheaper and the things upon which they build a life have gotten much more expensive. You've already said. Give us an example. So healthcare, elder care, child care, higher education, housing, you could name a couple

others. Energy is more complicated than that, but those are big ones. 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. 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 wanna live, we don't have enough houses, and that has meant a incredibly large wealth transfer to people who own homes

and the people whom those homes will be passed on to. One of the problems is not just that you have this growing problem of also dynastic wealth. I've had more libertarian economists tell me, I don't understand why you're so upset about- Dynastic wealth. Can you explain that? Wealth just going down through families. I've had libertarian economists say to me, I don't understand why you're so upset

about the home owning. 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. And then pass all of their shit to the next generation. Yeah. That's not like how you build a fair society 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 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 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, which is just not what it is. But- 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 feels satisfied. They think things are going to change, but it might not actually accurately address the

problems they have. It exploits the issues rather than treats them. It exploits the issues and uses it. I mean, this is a problem of when you have scarcity, that's like a really good breeding ground for a resentful politics. Yes. 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. No, I think that makes a good point. It's got a trade-off on it. But you can see these two guys going, I don't know if they, 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, OK, 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 going to sit here and go, you fucked it up?

Well, let me, let me, like your doctor going, you smoke 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? Let me, let me steel man the liberal position for you a little bit to, to, to make my, I don't know what it's called cynicism because I would work with anybody on this stuff. Right. There is an abundance or it's called the build America caucus in in the House, and it's Republicans and Democrats, right? And it's a thing I really try to do on my show

is like have Republicans on. But the cynicism comes from watching people make good, believable, and empathetic arguments in public, 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 somebody like me is ripshit about the big, beautiful bill that just passed, is that 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 not to cut Medicaid. And then they get into power and whatever they're saying publicly, they do the opposite. Trump at his first address in the second term of 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 thing that is upsetting, if we could all work together on this, that would be great. 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. But that's the politicians. What I'm saying is like the people are up for grabs, so to say. Yes, I agree with that. The people are up for grabs. So it's like, and we're talking to two people right there 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 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. Maybe I'm being a little bit too idealistic. I also think that you're being a bit idealistic and that's what will often happen with these

issues that are important, but not as important to voters. They're still going to get divided on the biggest issues, which are pro-choice, pro-life, whatever else. And then that, Republicans, Democrats, whoever, corrupt politicians, can just cloud everything with that and then they can still sneak in there. Let's do it in easier versions. Can I say one thing really quickly? Is it like, I think 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 this is the same criticism I have of like, you know, Hakeem Jeffries or like, or Schumar or anybody who is running as a Democrat for mayor. It's just like, you can call Zoran a communist or anti-Semite. 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 don't offer a better reform, as you said, then you don't got a fucking chance. So it's like, we agree both sides feel this way. If you got, not you or whoever 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 hold to two sides of this at once. One, I'm not a politician, right? I'm an analyst. I know, I know. So I want people to know what's really going on, right? I think probably a lot of people watching the flagrant don't know that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was destroyed by the Trump administration, right?

He's talking to four of us right now. So I want people to know what happened. But the politics. I got a good rate. It's 25%. That's all I got to say. One of the absolute and real mainstays of politics is people don't want it to feel like this and they don't want it to work like this.

They don't want it to feel like this. The thing that you are pointing out here here hitting like, you know, all 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. Do they want to see politicians working together on things? 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. And then when it starts to go off the rails. Work together and it'll satisfy me.

Exactly. But I think there is some chance the 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. Well, they're not until there's a huge calamity. I think you even said it was an abundance. Was it Shapiro rebuilding the bridge or something? 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. 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 that bridge, but the procurement regulations, the environmental regulations, the contra-regulations, I talked to the Secretary of Transportation in Pennsylvania.

I was like, how long would this have normally taken? This is great. And he was like two to four years to just get through the bidding contracting process. 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 an 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. Like in Texas, the lack of regulations, they built that camp on flood sites and you can have something like that happen.

That is the cost. Yeah. 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 that shit.

Flex on, flex bro. 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 they would be talking about it. I think it builds 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 but the 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 to get a win Yeah, because getting with something in 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.

That's another way of kind of building that ground. So one thing that Donald Trump did really well when he ran for president in 2016, he ran then as a critic of the Republican Party as it existed. And you can 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. He moderated on that.

And he's done that on the wars, right? On the Iraq war, right? He ran against the Bush administration's foreign policy legacy. 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. And it's so validating. And it's so validating. And one of the arguments of Obama, 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. You ever go to a restaurant and you ask the waiter if the meatloaf is good and they go,

the meatloaf fucking sucks. Whatever else they recommend, I trust. Yep, totally. 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 table.

Or everything. It's all good. It's like, oh, okay, thanks. So I think you're making a great point. That's how you build the trust of the the people you acknowledge the issues that you have Obama did this right Obama. Oh, sorry. No, 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 swab. He became the swamp the point then build the wall. Like why do we keep?

Why does nothing sticking? Hope. He said, Hey, I'm not cutting Medicaid, cutting, cutting Medicaid. I'm going to end wars on day one. Wars. I think Ezra touched on this earlier. And I, I took a point out. Yeah, go, go. I didn't necessarily, I didn't like a lot of whatever, but I didn't think what I thought could be possible is what Ezra touched on, which is the government got in his way. He was able to get Roe vs. 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. Now I think that's why people are really upset because there isn't this big boogeyman that he could 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 backing him. And I think that's why people are so frustrated. I mean, that's why I'm frustrated. Yeah, but then you'll have a Charlie Kirk

and whatever dude's name was. Tucker. And Tucker, and they're like, oh, we still support Trump, but these are all the things I'm disappointed about. Like their power is coming from their closeness. I also don't know. Charlie Kirk is.

Yeah, so it's disingenuous. I think Tucker has also turned on Trump a little lately over like the Epson stuff. I don't know. Charlie Kirk is- Yeah, so it's disingenuous. I think Tucker has also turned on Trump a little lately over 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. I think you're talking about entertainers. You know what I mean? There's also a dynamic where it's like, and this is how royal courts work back in the day, where you could always see the king was getting bad advice You can never say the king was wrong

I see that in a lot of how people in MAGA will create like it's why they were so like Everyone to blame the Epstein files on Pam Bondi. Yeah, right You're allowed to say Pam Bondi is wrong and Trump is getting bad advice Mattel but you cash Patel, but you can't say Daddy's wrong, but now they're saying daddy's So that's 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, 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 that power

is. 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. He lost reelection the first time, and he won a pretty narrow election after there was a lot of inflation in 2024. It was like two points go the other way in the battlegrounds and he loses. And it's hard to like people's connections with politicians are not an itemized list of policy promises kept in and failed. They're also 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. 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. It's not focus group like most politicians. That creates a kind of trust. Trust. Even that comma where he goes, I'm mostly honest. Yeah, he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm a mostly honest person. That's what he said. I'm basically an honest person. I'm basically an honest person or something like that. And I just fucking die laughing. Yeah. And that is such an authentic thing that I think- That's the most honest thing you can say.

It is weirdly the most, because nobody is 100% honest, so it might be the most honest thing he's ever said. You know what I mean? But he's implicitly saying- No, I think he's exaggerating on how honest he is. Fair enough. But then when we call him out for a question,

then he's like, oh, well, I do this thing called the weave. He created that talking to us because we called him out that being in a question, and then he's like, oh, well, I do this thing called the weave. He created that talking to us because we called him out that he was avoiding the question. But there is a great point about building the trust, because you definitely feel that. You're like, yeah, he is going to go out there. He is going to stop these wars. He is going to reduce the budget.

He is going to 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. Yeah, so he's going to lose trust. The question is, can Democrats rebuild themselves into something that can pick it up? Right now, they are incredibly unpopular. The Democratic Party, it's reputation is out in the deer.

And internally divided. Internally divided. In the polling right now, it's not looking like parties did when they had huge midterm wins 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 kind of lost the plot a bit., 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. They make you think you... I always say this about the 2024 election, that they have this theory of winning independence, right? 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. Yeah. So you have to reform you. You have to reform you. And that's it. 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 them bad. You can't just keep calling them 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 Zoran. 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 populists that they always claim to be. What do the Democrats, what do the new Democrats need to do, say, look like, etc.? Can I hold us on that question and use the restroom?

Yes, hell yes. Yes, fuck yeah. 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 going to do a paddle tournament at the Hampton Racquet Club out there in East Hampton. And all the proceeds go to this amazing fertility charity called BabyQuest. And it's not one of these charities where like 90% goes to advertising and 10% goes. All the money goes directly to helping people make babies. That's awesome. That's really cool. Very excited about it.

So a lot of cool sponsors got on board for it. I just want to shout out a few of them. Paul Street, Longevity Health, Love Every, TheraBody, Huckberry, Nanit, Coterie, Best Diapers in the Business, Hexclad, Longevity Health, and Hampton Racket for putting it on. It's going to be at Hampton Racket for putting it on, it's gonna be at Hampton Racket. Your two greatest passions. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is awesome. I'm really proud of you. Yeah, paddle and events. Yeah, you should get Dave Portnoy to support. Sure, okay. Where's the Marshal part? Where's the Marshal part? It's positive.

Dude, I should talk about the day. Anyway, real quick, we'll talk about the day in a second, but yeah, it's a really really awesome event and 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 kids are free and then there's a $50 donation to the charity for the adults so just come

on there's gonna be food it's gonna be drinks gonna be DJ. It's gonna be that's all gonna be a great time But uh, but yeah, we'll get Dave out there. That's awesome the day the day 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 Okay, so like It's like okay, so here it is just went crazy on on Twitter. He posted bad like all these like media platforms are reaching out to me for comments and I'm like, 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 mum Donani 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?

So he texts me, he's like, because he doesn't really like Mamdani's policies and he just thinks the ideology isn't good. He doesn't think he's like favorable to America. I think that's like a fair version of what he said. And he just, and basically hits me up and he's like, listen, I saw this thing, like, well, what are you talking about? He's more America first. Like I don't think this guy likes America.

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. I agree with 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 this is-

That's all he asked for. This is like the ideal scenario when you have somebody that's like a friend or colleague and then you guys disagree. You don't do it publicly, whatever. I go on Twitter a few hours later and I see this tweet and it says, 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 real 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 talking specifically about Andrew Schultz saying, Mom, Donnie first so I see this 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. Now you're riled up. So I'm fucking annoyed. That was war. Now I'm upset like we have this great combo right unbeknownst to me he tweets this before we talk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I didn't know it. You thought he talked around to Twitter. 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 asked 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 fucking annoyed. So I'm like, all right, you're gonna throw me out of the bus I'm gonna throw you another bus. I'm like, yeah, he's just upset about the Israel thing 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 and he's like, yo, I thought we talked about this He screenshots our conversation and posted which I don't agree that you should never screenshot private conversation You see myself doing some shit You should never do it

I can see me doing it. Stop. Don't do it. But that being said, I do understand where he's coming from. We're just like, yo, you're representing this convo. We had completely different, but he doesn't know I'm angry because I thought he threw me under the bus. And he would never think that because he tweeted it before. So I texted him, I'm like, yo, what the fuck are you texting on private convos? He's like, I never said any of that shit you said. I'm like, yeah, but you said the Jamie Diamond shit. He goes, what are you talking about? I go, we had this great combo, you posted the Jamie Diamond shit. He goes, I posted it before our great combo.

So I'm like, well, that's my fucking bad. So that's my bad. I probably shouldn't have said that. My bad, I'm sorry. He goes, okay, it's all right. And I go, listen, you just 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 the Dave Portnoy.

What's the lesson? It's getting so cold in here, hell is freezing over, Schultz just admitted to being wrong. I know, he's shit. I know, it's a new me. Oh, it's a new me. What's going on? So, I'm like, I'm seeing this unfold on Twitter

and I'm 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. And just read the dates on tweets and shit, you know? Yeah, maybe I should do that. You go through the dates, you're like, oh, okay, yeah. I looked at it I remember looking in trying to do the time thing I don't know it was my bad that was my bad

that was my bad. I don't think you did that man I think you made up a memory. Fuck man. No I do that I see it head on I'm like yo this shit is fucking crazy from 2017. Yeah anyway so come to My bad. Anyway, so come to the Hamptons' Battle Classic. If not, Dave, you're invited. And if not, if you want to support the cause, it's an amazing cause and really helps people that are 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 the Hamptons, in East

Hampton. So thank you guys very much. Let's get back to this combo. You had a good question. Yes. What does the new Democratic Party sound like, look like, say, believe? So there are going to be a couple dimensions. I want to tell you that I know them all or they're all going to be one thing, all predictable.

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 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 while 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?

$400 million jets. There is so much corruption and that's not, 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 John Ossoff where like, I saw this and I was like, that's it. That's what they're going to have to do. All right.

I'm excited to see this. Now Ossoff is a? Ossoff is a Democratic senator from Georgia running for reelection this year. Big race. Okay. But just like really, really has gotten strong as a communicator. 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. 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 serial commercials. It's because the people's elected representatives don't represent the people.

They represent the donors. present the donors. 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. 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. I'm voting for Superman. He does have a Clark Kent buzz. He's been lusted to it.

He's handsome. Like White Obama. I got that same vibe. I felt like you were speaking like him. This guy's presidential. As I said, it's not offensive. I see one clip and I move somebody into my like 2028 bracket. If this guy is on the NELC boys, I think he'll win.

I think he is a chance if he goes on NELC. 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.

Yes. It was important. It's exactly what Andrew brought up at 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. I think that matters. The Democratic Party, this is not the presidential level, right? The Democratic Party is going to need to be a bigger tent.

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

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 Jr. Maha thing. It gave it a new kind of energy and like a tech right thing. And the Democratic Party is going to have to open itself up to coalitions and kinds of candidates that do not tick every single box. They have been making people tick for a while. Because if you don't win power, none of it matters, right?

You could have virtue, you could have your purity test. If they had won six house seats that they did not win, like the big beautiful bill never has a shot, it never goes anywhere. And people need to think about this when they're doing the finger wagon. And then I think, and this is actually to solve problems, it's not the case that the only problem in life is corruption, right? The point of abundance, which is concerned about corruption, although there are a lot of kinds, it's also just like 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. 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 yoke 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.

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 going to make sure there are enough homes and those homes are going to be affordable. Like an old school and they want good public infrastructure. But can they do that if they're attached to the donor class in the same way the Republicans are? Some of it they can, some of it they can't. Somebody is 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, I love getting to talk about the old why we're polarized, this is a whole chapter. Big donors want transaction. Big donors are corrupting, right?

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.

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. 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 the big donor problem Republicans have here is, I'm sorry, the small donor problem Republicans have is that it pushes them into really, really weird rhetoric and positions. 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. Baleo, 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 trying to get around, 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 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. Part of running on corruption is having

solutions. Like we should appoint people in Supreme Court and pass laws that will change this. People think the system is rigged because we've created a... But there's bipartisan support for that. No there is not. No I mean of the people. Yes of the people. Whenever I talk about... Mitch McConnell has been blocking this for years. Of course of course but I'm saying the people do want that. I think if you ask for Republicans and Democrats, if you want money out of politics, they would say yes. Do you think this Supreme Court would overturn Buckley versus- No, they're extremely far right on this kind of thing. Yeah, I assume. And is there any going back once money is speech to undo money being speech if the money is getting

people in? Yeah. I think the problem with that one, the hard thing about that one is 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, Zoram Amdani 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. Money helps, but particularly where there's a lot of attention, money is really, really decisive in house races nobody has ever heard of.

That's where it's more effective. Yeah. But it is somewhat less decisive at things like the presidential level, at things where people are paying attention. Because what does money buy you? Money buys you attention. And increasingly, it's bad at are paying attention. Because what does money buy you? 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 undaunted. Yeah, yeah. Blown up. Right? Like Cuomo with a lot more money, but they didn't know how to spend it. Yeah. Right. But yes, money is like one of the big problems here. But if the Supreme Court is not theoretically going to overturn Buckley

versus Vallejo, I guess it was. Yeah, it's not going to be that. Any time in the next 10, 15 years, what hope do you have? 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 a lot. One of them was called the Disclose Act, in fact. And they would require a lot more transparency and listing the names of who's funding what commercial. They would basically make it kind of embarrassing. Yeah.

I love that. I love doing this. So there's a lot of that. So accountability. 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 okay

But there are things that would make it better and things you could do You know you to start hardening back to something you said earlier about the Democrats becoming the party of more again I think they became the party of more rights But I think most people that have more rights more right you have the right to do this 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. So 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 were 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, 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 end at the public prioritizes is healthcare. The other things that they believe Democrats 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. 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 what Democrats are laser-focused on is their cost of living, is the safety of their community,

is the kind of bread and butter stuff that politics is mostly about for most people. OK, before you get out of here, Colbert gets canceled. that politics is mostly about for most people. Yeah. Okay, before you get out of here, Colbert gets canceled. There is a lot of, 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. Are you kind of privy to what's going on behind

the scenes at all? Not behind the scenes. Okay, but like you have thoughts about what's happening. Yeah. Well, what is your perspective? 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, the company that owns it has wanted to do this very, very big merger. 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. 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? Something like I think it was something like that like desperately name? Shelley? Something like that. Firestone, right? Something like that, like desperately needs to sell

this company or else they're going broke. And 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 want us to play ball, you got to be in our good graces.

And the 2020 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 the left to heal? Okay. 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. This is the CBS News. Yeah, George Stephanopoulos, I think it is. Oh, that's ABC, I think.

No, which one? Yeah, which one do they settle? So the CBS one, 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 unfavorable news time, or no, sorry, gave her more favorable news time. They were essentially working as a propaganda tool to protect her. 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. 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. That was widely believed.

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. So they settled for, I believe, $60 million? $60 million. Uh-huh. 60 Minutes, also CBS, right?

That is the show. So 60 Minutes. Yeah, so 60 Minutes, there's another thing that happens. So at 60 Minutes, they begin, which is like a very, very revere 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. Pressure on the editors means?

Just interfering with their editorial independence, trying to like push the show and how it's covered. To be more lenient on Trump? Got it. And he sort of publicly resigns, this 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, 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 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 late night television, it's very, very expensive, and the ratings have gone down, like they've gone down for lots of stuff 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 take him off tomorrow, right? He's on for another 10 months, which is like slightly awkward for everybody. That's contractual. Is that contractual? So that would explain why that's there.

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

would you mind waiting six months before you say it? Uh-huh, and he minded? 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. Yeah, so I don't know any of the internals on this.

Yeah. I'm trying to be as fair as I can to like why maybe we don't know what happened. Yeah. But Colbert and that show are like a real marquee property. If the issue is it's losing money, you can cut its budget. You can't. Huh? You can't.

You think it's impossible to do? So 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-

I did not know this. 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 have seven different unions you've got to run. It was making $80 or $90 million 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, 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. 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 the project. 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 he doesn't want to move to New Jersey, well, it's not Colbert's show anymore. Right?

But that wasn't where the money for them was. You could do the Akash Singh show in fucking Ohio. I just wanted to see that possibility. It's not, and they didn't just give it to someone else, right? They just, you know. 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 going to 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 a liberal or conservative. So like, I want there to be the comedians that are holding the people in power accountable.

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 about or accountable. 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 is making one million a year, not even a hundred, but one 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. I think this also gets to this difficulty of having all of society under this cloud of suspicion of why are different institutions doing things. I agree. 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. Yeah, horrible. It's been completely explicit, right? Like this is something like, you know, they talk about it. Wait, are you telling me Amazon paid $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary? To be fair, there were two documentaries in that. Phew!

I thought it was just one. Okay, you don't think that had anything to do with anything else? So this was also, and it goes to why I think corruption is a strong political argument, but I've just always, sorry to put this, 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 like, 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 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. Oh, I'm sorry. But it also creates this question

of why are things happening, including things we don't know about, right? We don't know what negotiations happen or what phone calls are made that we never hear. Like another version of this is around the tariffs and you have all these tariff exemptions. But how do you get a tariff exemption? Before we go to tariffs, I just don't wanna 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- How'd that work out for you? That knew. Okay. 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. Prove that you exist beyond the brand. 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, no, no, I'm saying you could do a different version of the show, but I'm just saying like 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 No, I get that we put all of our money up like we had no money. I'm talking about we should be upset at Paramount I don't think like it's the pressure coming from the president Fuck like their business. They're trying to turn a profit like that like no, they're gonna block a huge merger No, no, I we have to hold Trump accountable. We have to hold FCC accountable.

Yeah, I think we can, but we also can hold these people accountable for greed. They just want to sell the company for billions of dollars. But percentage-wise, why are we letting billionaires off the hook? Because Trump is disagreeing with them. Why don't, I think he agrees. Why are we okay? I think he agrees, but I think percentage-wise you put way more on Trump. Yeah.

And I think that's the important distinction to make. I guess I'm not taking any percentage away. No, but I want to back up Andrew's point on this a little bit because there is a reality that it matters what everybody in society does. I have this thing that every institution, every person is like, you're 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 was first is just the amount of

call pending the me but just like Paying to play. Yeah, it's like maybe the friendliest way for me. Sure Right like all of this and You know the law firms that were folding, the early universities have folded. And Harvard, because of that $50 billion endowment- Was able to fight it. Was able to fight. The others can.

And that's what I'm saying about Paramount. People should feel dishonored by this. The fact that Paramount is coming in for a lot of fire is accurate. It is like Trump's fault, but also the Trump administration is not relentless in the face of pushback. Like, if people weren't paying to play, they've changed their demands. And at the same time, the fucking federal government's really powerful. If you're going to weaponize every part of it, it's going to be hard for people to stand

against it. Let me just at least first validate and acknowledge that. I'm not saying that that isn't wrong. It absolutely is wrong, 100%. What I'm also saying is when we weren't. It absolutely is wrong. 100%. Yeah. 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. We held Comedy Central accountable, right? We're like, hey, why are you censoring comedy so much? Why are you putting this Newer Watertown 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 implore comics to do that, and we have to reward the comics to do that.

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. I want Colbert to have a show. I want him to make fun of the president. I want him to push back. That's good for comedy. Comedy in its essence is making fun of institutions, not reinforcing them. The institutions that are in power.

So I just feel like we're kind of 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. Didn't you say they were going to go bankrupt if they don't make this merger? Bankrupt. Like you're a fucking billionaire. to go bankrupt after they don't make this merger? Bankrupt like you're a fucking billionaire. How fucking bankrupt? Like oh my god.

Sorry you hold power now and now you can't pay bills. 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, we're 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. This is the thing that I have some. This ain't America. Did it come across like I was saying? No, but I just wanna make sure that's clear. Yeah, yeah. Because it's not okay at all. I don't wanna see any version of it.

This is the 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? Specifically Obama with that sort of weird AI, like between that AI video, like Obama being arrested 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 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. And some of the stuff they've been doing with immigrants, right?

Again, I've sort of talked about my fears of what they will try to do with New York in a Mamdani mayoralty 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. And I just see that coming, right? 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 going to stop. They're not going to 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 do not let up on that let yourself 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

Any liberals actually know 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. 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. I think it's 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. We're doing it right now. Yeah like we have to keep the foot on the neck of that. Absolutely and people will be upset at us. They'll go hey you had them on your podcast, this is why we're in this situation. I get that, I get the frustration but like we, we also gotta, 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. 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 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 cancer culture

was real, right? 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 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, you got fired, right? They have gone to this kind of enforcement of the speech the boss allows. And I'm not just saying here to occultic pockesy, to your good political point, there are a lot of people

who actually do care about free speech. You're saying that Trump is acting like a Democrat. Which should frustrate us all. He is acting in the way people I think think Democrats act. 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. So the same frustration that a lot of people have with Democrats silencing free speech

culturally, maybe not through policy, but at least through cancellation and 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 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. Is it like free speech and we got to call it out on both sides Yeah, and like yeah, I don't know. I I feel like there should be unilateral support for that, you know Cuz you heard the right talk a lot about it, right?

You heard a lot of talk about like free speech is the freedom to say things you disagree with. It's like, all right, well. Yeah, where were they? He sued the Des Moines Register. But I agree with that. Over Ann Selzer's poll showing him down in Iowa. Even though he won it, right?

Like polls are wrong sometimes. But Ann Selzer is an anti-Semite, and she hasn't said it is real enough, and you know that. Okay? I mean, I don't know enough, but even like the Khalil Mahmood situation. Oh yeah. Like that seemed like a suppression of free speech.

I mean, I will be able to say more about, like he's, I'm doing a show with him tomorrow. Oh really? 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 is terrifying, right? I mean, we are not supposed to do that.

And a lot of people who were rallying for free speech at one point seemed pretty kind about that. But there are a lot of people who actually do care about, like something I'll give Joe Rogan credit for, right? He was like, he's pretty loud on due process over these last couple of months Yeah, like this is not like this is not the way we want to be doing things right and Israel. Yeah, and uh-huh And Israel I've been watching Israel. Yeah, so I don't know what I'm agreeing to Criticism of the like extent of destruction in Gaza. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's a different topic. But yes

Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's a different topic, but yes. The weaponization of the government's powers to change what institutions can do and say all the way to what individuals can do and say is really scary, right? All these students who are terrified of getting things revoked and the feeling that this is going to escalate. Yeah. Right? And so, yeah, this feels like a place where people should draw a very hard line. And so 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 it's hard? You took the job, dude. Yeah, you took the job. Like, you know it's hard? You took the job, dude. Yeah, you took the job. Like you know it's hard, it's like working three jobs and not making enough to support

your family. You know it's hard, it's 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, I'm just not that sympathetic. 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.

They say that, they throw it in a policeman's face, and it's like, well, let's throw it in a billionaire media conglomerate's face too. Jeff Bezos could have been- Took a fucking hard job. Yeah. Jeff Bezos could have been, Jeff Bezos, who personally, as I understand it, cleared democracy dies in darkness in the first administration and is out here, I guess, paying Melania Trump 40 million dollars to be an executive producer on two documentary the whole thing I wonder what that has to do with I wonder if there's any government contracts that yeah, 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 how badass would it be if Colbert just did the show himself? Like they do not just have shareholder how badass would it be if Colbert just did the show himself with the team? I love that 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 if that's the people will decide But what a badass fucking move and if you really want to dies and if 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 They could 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 one multiverse would that be where the mainstream media is super pro Trump and then the internet media is fuck Trump. How cool would that be? The thing you said a little bit ago, which I think is really right, comedy and also independent media is by nature anti-institutionalist.

Yeah. That's true. And Trump is the institution. This is the whole problem around Ivanov-Evstin. And it opens up vulnerabilities they don't really know what to do with. They are much better at wielding the power of being the system now. I don't mean to live on my phone. But they also don't know what to do about being the system.

To your point about Epstein, Trump Live Updates, Judge denies request to unseal Epstein Grand Jury transcripts in Florida. So I guess... So even the non-measureasure they still... Yeah, yeah. You gotta... This is... Listen, bro. You gotta talk about it. They're protecting pedophiles, man. They 100% are. They're 100% are. They are protecting pedophiles. 100% are. And I hate that you agree with this. Ezra Klein, man. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time. We also got another banked F 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 want to get one that was a little bit more topical and addressing what's going on today. So thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, man.

Awesome, man.