The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias What would actually make America great: more people. If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. We can’t compete with the huge population clusters of the global marketplace by keeping our population static or letting it diminish, or with our crumbling transit and unaffordable housing. The winner in the future world is going to have more—more ideas, more ambition, more utilization of resources, more people. Exactly how many Americans do we need to win? According to Matthew Yglesias, one billion. From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing. Vox founder Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must. Making the case for massive population growth with analytic rigor and imagination, One Billion Americans issues a radical but undeniable challenge: Why not do it all, and stay on top forever? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Matthew Yglesias co-founded Vox.com with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell in 2014. He's currently a senior correspondent focused on politics and economic policy, and co-hosts "The Weeds" podcast twice a week. Before launching Vox, he wrote the Moneybox column for Slate and blogged for Think Progress, The Atlantic, TPM, and The American Prospect. Yglesias is the author of two books, most recently The Rent Is Too Damn High about the policy origins of the middle class housing affordability crisis in America. Yglesias was born and raised in New York City, but has lived in Washington DC since 2003.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast oh my god it's another podcast we've made hundreds of these podcasts. I think we're going to close in on 1,000 here soon. Hundreds of podcasts.

And you know what we did today? We made another one. Oh, my gosh. Like, who saw that one coming? Anyway, guys, we have all the most brilliant authors and guests. And, of course, we review the greatest products on The Chris Voss Show. Be sure to refer your friends, neighbors, relatives. Go to thechrissvossshow.com,

thecvpn.com. You can see online podcasts over there. And subscribe. It's a really cool thing you can do there. If you want to see the video version of this, you can see it on youtube.com forward slash chrissvoss. Hit that bell notification button so you get all the ding notifications on your phone because God knows you don't have enough already. Go to goodreads.com. Follow me over there, goodreads4chrisfosh. You can also follow us on Facebook. We have a few book clubs over there as well. Today we have a very interesting gentleman.

This gentleman, you may know him. He is Matthew Iglesias. He co-founded Vox.com with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell in 2014. He's currently a senior correspondent focused on politics and economic policy and co-hosts The Weeds podcast twice a week. You definitely want to check that out. He is the author of the new book that just came out, One Billion Americans.

I can't do my Carl Sagan, evidently. One billion Americans, the case for thinking bigger. Welcome to the show, Matthew. How are you? I'm great. I'm great. Thank you for having me. Awesome sauce. So Matthew, give us your plug so people can check you out on the interwebs and where to get your book. You can get my book, you know, wherever fine books are sold. Amazon, your local bookstore, you know, local bookstores are really hurting during this pandemic. So check it out there. I'm on Twitter constantly at Matt Iglesias there. It's Iglesias with a Y, writing for Vox.com all the time. And, you know, just really excited to talk about the book. This is pretty cool. You co-founded Vox.com. I think we've all heard it, seen it, read it, and all that good stuff.

So that's pretty darn cool, huh? Yeah, it was good. You know, I co-founded it about six years ago. I was the executive editor for a couple of years, and then I got to fire myself from my management role there and focus on writing, which I'm actually good at. And we now have some very skilled managers running the website, running the company there.

And it's been exciting to watch something that was just a goofy idea really grow and prosper over the past few years. That's the beauty of starting a business and being an entrepreneur is you take an idea and then years later you look back and you go, wow, you're like, what if I never like even turn that, you know, turn that knob or whatever.

So what motivated you to write a book on, on this prospect or this concept of idea of 1 billion Americans? Sure. So, you know, there's a, there's a lot of different ways you can think about it. You could do like a serious way, but I've, I've been promoting this on enough podcasts now. I just tell you the truth. And people would ask me, it's like, oh, you want to write a book about this? You want to write a book about that? And it always seemed like, well, if I did that book,

it would be boring, right? Like a lot of books, it's kind of, you start with a strong article and then you're just padding it out with filler. And I didn't like that. So I didn't want to write a book. But I got this, I bug in my head, just the phrase, 1 billion Americans. And I really liked it. I liked the phrase. I was like, this is, this is a cool slogan. Maybe I should tweet a lot about 1 billion Americans. And you know, I didn't, I didn't write anything. I didn't write an article. But I was just thinking in my head, like, well, what would it mean to have a billion Americans? Like, how would you get them? Where would they go?

Where would their houses be? And I started to see in my in my mind, like all kinds of chapters, you know, like one about how we could improve immigration policy and get more people, one about how we could do more to support parents and children so people could have more kids. One about housing. One about transportation. One about the economics of population growth. One about just the basic facts as to how sparse this country is. And loop it all together, the idea that these are all just good ideas on their own merits. They'll make us a happier, better, wealthier country. But also fundamentally, they will allow the United States of America to continue to play a sort of preeminent role in the world at a time when I think a lot of us have seen increasingly, you know, disturbing news

out of China, this growing anxiety about Chinese influence in the world and anxiety about America, right? Both people who vote for Donald Trump Trump because they feel like we have to make America great again and people who vote against him because they feel like this is not who we are as a country. This is not what America is about. And, you know, can we recapture a real spirit of America as a proud but open country that takes care of people and cares about ourselves and our families. And that's the book. There you go. So my first question is, you write the case in the book for what would be great if there were one billion Americans. My first question for you is, have you

met Americans? Like, do we really need a billion of people running around going, I mean, do we need a billion asshole Americans as they were known around the world? Americans are great. I love Americans. Let me tell you, this is America in a nutshell to me. I was with some American journalists years ago in Germany, and we were, we were touring around. We were talking to different officials, doing different things. And we, we were in like one of those like weird little European vans. And we were in Dresden and going through some, some back alley.

It's really tiny. And we get to a part where the van can't, can't go because somebody has parked a smart car and they haven't quite parked it right. So there's not space. So the driver of the van, he starts trying to back the van out. But you know, like driving backwards

in a really narrow space with a really long vehicle, it's like super hard, you know? So this woman, woman older woman who was there in our american group she says like let's just get out and move the car and the driver he says no no no no and she's like yeah it's light she says look we got these young guys here just just tell the guys to get out of the car pick it up up and move it. And it's not possible. It's not possible. And then she turns to me and another, this is, I was in my, in my mid twenties, a couple of guys, the same age. This is guys, Matt, get out, just pick it up. And so we're going and, and, and we

get out cause, cause this, this older American woman is yelling at us, the German bus drivers, it's impossible. It's impossible. And we go, four of us would pick it up you know it's like a little rinky-dink smart car and we just move it a couple feet or as they would say a half a meter uh over to the side and the van goes and the driver he's shaking his head and this woman she says and you know that's why we won the war. That's what happened to Dresden. We moved the smart car. That's why we overthrew the Nazis. You know, and it was a classic obnoxious American moment, you know. But I do think that it's true.

I mean, it's not true that that's why we won World War II. But that Americans are characterized by a can-do spirit and a sense of trying to find our way around and through obstacles. This is a country that is populated by people who made the difficult decision to come here, you know, to improve their lives. And that's something that almost all of us here have in common. It's very deep into our culture. And it's a country that believes in doing big things. And sometimes we can annoy other people with that. Sometimes we can be obnoxious.

We can be rude. We can elect a maniac to be president. Like things can go wrong. But. But I do believe in us and in our ability to achieve this mission of 1 billion, to have a second American century, and to meet the concrete challenges. It's like, if we triple the population, we're going to need some more bridges. we're probably we're probably gonna need a train somewhere but like i think we can do that stuff yeah the uh uh so what is your idea to get one billion americans i mean i lived in utah for a while are you just gonna have the mormons keep doing what they're doing or what's what's up with that yeah they're doing great we're just all gonna

um i'm gonna get i'm gonna get the book of mormon because. Because they're on their way, man. I'm going to tell everyone the good news about the Latter-day Saints. No, so, you know, there's two ways to get more people, right? The fast way is you let more of the foreigners come in. And why not? Like, why are we expending incredible resources? You know, we have more people working in immigration enforcement than working for the FBI. And, you know, like the people the FBI catches, like bank robbers, kidnappers, the mafia, like that's really bad.

We should investigate those crimes. Yeah, the president. You know, people want to move here. And look, it's important. Like, we have rules. People want to enforce the rules. I understand that. But like, we can make it easier for people to come legally, instead of being like, well, my grandfather came the right way. And like, yeah, so did mine, because it was easier to come. So let more people in. The other way is, you know, we grow our own. And that means looking at the fact that people are having fewer and fewer children over the past 40 years. And they say that they are having fewer children than they would like to have.

And they say that the biggest thing driving that is the cost of child care. And so we need to have some programs to help people with that. Just like we have Social Security and Medicare so that people can retire. And we have to consider that people in their 20s, which is when people have kids typically, don't have the financial resources to meet the modern costs of child care and other things, car seats, all like that. And we need to, we need to give people some help. And then we can have more babies. We'll have more immigrants. We'll bump the growth rate up. Not, not just anything crazy, but we could grow our

population as fast as Canada's population is growing or as fast as we grew in the seventies. And that puts us on course to triple by the end of the century to stay ahead of china and rule the world and i kind of jumped ahead because i really wanted to get that mormon joke in there because i have issues we're all here for mormon jokes oh yeah there you go that's really why i wrote the book i mean i mean certainly uh whoever the gal is running i've ignored her name on purpose but i think she has like seven kids, and you're just like, what's going on over there? But jumping back, let's lay a foundation on why this is important, because years is because I think we had a, a, a pretty fast growth in who we were, at least from an educational basis.

We put out more engineers than any country in the world at one time. We, we educated more people. We, we kind of went through this whole, I think, you know, the wars helped us from a financial basis, an aspect of, of growing things at least up until the Iraq War, I suppose. And so there was a, you know, we're expanding country, a growing country. And like you say, we've kind of hit a step. And in recent years, you know, I've been watching since I was young, you know, the prospect of like, eventually China is going to figure out how to quit being a poor country they've got you know billions of people over there uh they just actually figured

out that their breeding law was stupid and was working against them um and and it's going to turn it was going to turn them i think into the most uh biggest uh economy in 2025 but i think now that's been reset or pushed back because of their gdp manipulation so what what are some of the things extenuating to that i mean what's the what's the benefit for us to go to this and then we'll get in the weeds of why of how we should do it well you know there's a lot that comes with size so we take for granted size is everything size matters is what you're saying absolutely it does no i mean so the United States has been the world's number one economy for a bit over 100 years.

So nobody who's alive today, you know, knows a world where that's not the case. But the gap is shrinking. So it turns out, you know, it's an interesting question. When will China overtake us? Nobody knows, not just because it's hard to predict the future, but because the actual measurement is subject to sort of dispute and uncertainty. But if you look at quantities, you can see in certain areas, China is the number one market for movie box office, right? So if you are releasing a new movie,

you have to care most about access to the China market. And what's happened, PEN America has done this great report about this, but that means that it used to be, if the Chinese censors didn't like your movie, you know, you didn't show it in China. It limited you somewhat. But now China's the whole ballgame.

So every studio lets almost every movie be censored by the Chinese government. And then you saw when Daryl Morey, the NBA general manager, when he tweeted support for protesters in Hong Kong and the Houston Rockets got taken off the air in China and NBA players, all kinds of league executives, they criticized not the Chinese government,

but him for speaking out in English on Twitter, which is banned in China anyway. You know, it's not like he was saying like, oh, I want to go do a protest in the middle of a game that's hosted in Shanghai. And so instead of economic interdependence spreading democracy to China the way I think a lot of people had hoped, it's done the opposite. It gives China the opportunity to export its own speech and thought controls into the West. And, you know, you can try to counter that with, you know, trade moves like earlier this summer, we were going to maybe ban TikTok,

but then I guess we didn't. But like messing around with like video meme apps is not, it's not going to get the job done, right? You have to think about, we were joking around about World War II, always a funny lighthearted subject earlier. And, you know, you look at it and it's like, well, okay, why was America able to intervene decisively in that war? And it's because we had the biggest economy in the world, right? Franklin Roosevelt said, well, we're going to be the arsenal of democracy that wasn't just like a nice speech and it's just not something that like the prime

minister of new zealand couldn't say that he could say what will be the arsenal it's like no like you'll you'll give us some wool you know yeah it's a little it's a nice country but it's a waiter table um and there's my asshole american and then the so you know so one thing is that size matters the other is that it matters what's going on in the world you can look at a lot of little countries you know finland new zealand whatever and they're nice but they are operating in the shadow of the united states of america right If you think about a world where the Chinese market is the dominant consideration in every company's decision-making,

in every government's trade policies, life is going to get worse for us, but also for all the small fish out there who've like, they've been used to complaining about America. And, you know, God knows we have our flaws, but it gets way worse. It gets way worse than the United States. And that's what we're staring down the barrel of.

And our politicians, you know, it's not like you hear Trump or Biden or Lindsey Graham or anyone else. They're not like, here's my plan to like make do as number two, right? They're all like, well, we're going to restore America. But it's like, well, how? And so I'm trying to take the commonplace of American politics that like we should lead in the world and take it seriously. Like, how can we do that? You know, you bring up

a good point and, and, and, you know, I've always kind of understood this, but I've never heard it said in a concise manner, uh sadly a lot of politicians try and say we're going to make america great again and they think that by restricting using it as a racist trope and restricting immigration makes america great again or or somehow going against globalization will make america great and again with the populist nationalist agenda that we've been in um but really what made made America great again was that American exceptionalism you talk about, the can-do, let's build the bridges, let's do the thing. You know, I heard some people talking about how one of the greatest opportunities

we've missed over the last while is not leading in global warming. When we could be outputting so many different products like Tesla's doing and different companies are doing. We could be exporting that to the world. And our exports have really fallen. I mean, a lot of our intellectualism has been sent overseas. People come here and they go overseas with their ideas. We don't encourage them to stay here. Certainly, ideas. We don't encourage them to stay here.

Certainly our immigration policy doesn't encourage them to stay here. And there's an old axiom that I use for all the companies I ever built. If you're not growing, you're dying, right? And the same applies to a population and a business of running a country. If you're not growing, you're dying, right? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, to your point about, you know, immigration policy, right? You know, historically, the United States has been a great place to be an inventor or to be

an innovator. And so a lot of people have wanted to come here to do that. And some of that is just because, like, we're great. But other people come here because other people are coming here. You know, it's like you, it just kind of builds on it. Right. I mean, it builds on itself, right? It's like you, you, everybody, everybody knows that if you're ambitious, and you have big ideas, and you want to build big companies, that the United States is a good place to do that. But we have started to make it harder. I shouldn't say we.

Donald Trump has taken what was already probably a too restrictive view of student visas and entrepreneurs and skilled workers and things like that. And he's made it harder. He's made it harder to get a student visa. He's made it harder to stay after you graduate. He's made it harder for skilled technology workers to bring their spouses over, you know, so less desirable. And that's really, he's killing the sort of,

the goose that lays the golden eggs there, right? Instead of saying, this is a source of incredible strength and we need to try to be more tolerant and embrace the virtues of diversity, he's leaned into people's worst instincts and squandered so much of what makes this country precious and what's made this country successful. What's interesting is we go through these patterns of nationalism and populism.

Like after World War I, we went into a nationalist phase, and we didn't want to get involved in World War II because we were just like, no, we're not solving the world's problems anymore, F that. And then, of course, we got drug in the war, especially with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and that changed. And then you look at the economics that came from that. I mean, it was an extraordinary, horrific event of war. But when you look at the economics of the GI Bill, how they came out, they bought Levittown subdivisions.

They pretty much laid out the concreting of America, if you will. And we became a real country of growth. I mean, everyone went to this, you know, picket fence, two-car garage, you know, two weeks vacation at Disneyland, you know, the nuclear family, if you will. And we went through that whole thing. really where we were American exceptionalism, where people, you know, not everyone, actually, we should probably say about the 50s and 60s, enjoyed the fruits of Make America Great Again, if you will. Not from the racist sense of that, by the way. I'm just saying the nuclear family, that whole post-war era that was really probably the best era in our history. But we were going through growth, and that was, like, really good,

and that which isn't growing is dying. And it's sad that people take that time and they think that – and you know what? I just had a light go on. One of the problems is that time we still had a lot of racism, and then we still had a lot of – and then we had the civil riots. And maybe that's why people really equate that populist nationalist thing to that racist trope. But, you know, the other thing is, right, so people will say they will be nostalgic for things that were good and were working in that sort of post-war era.

But something they forget is that it was a very dynamic time. Yeah. Right? It was a time when the built environment changed very rapidly. It was a time when, I mean, it was a time when we had tremendous problems of racial exclusion, but it was a time when we made very rapid progress on those issues, right? That was when Brown v. Board of Education was decided. That was when Martin Luther King was leading bus boycotts in Montgomery. It was when the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act were passed. So it's understandable to feel nostalgia for a time when things were improving

and living standards were rising, but it wasn't a static time. It was a time of change. It was a time of people being challenged to take a more expansive view of the country is it was a time when as a country, we were open to change, right? When we saw ourselves as having surmounted big problems of the war, tackling big new problems of the Cold War, going to the moon, opening up the crabgrass frontier of the suburbs. And, you know, the United States has become a country that is very crabby, you know, with a lot of people fighting each other, a lot of fear. Trump is running around, you know, it's like, Cory Booker, he's going to destroy the suburbs.

And it's like... Oh, he is, yeah. It's barely even a dog whistle, right? I mean, we're all going to be living in tents, I think. And all he's talking about is like, okay, you know... We did that during Obama, didn't we? Weren't we living in tents i think and all he's talking about is like okay you know we did that during obama didn't we were we living in tents during fema fema concentration camps i think was no so you know it's like yeah like we got a black senator and he has an idea to make it easier to build affordable housing in all kinds of communities

like what like why is that even bad you know trump doesn't even try to articulate why these things are bad he just tells people that change should frighten them and we're not going to accomplish anything as a society with that mentality and and we're talking about a really great point i mean people don't realize the thing that made that era really great financially it wasn't great like i said for everybody but you had uh you you came from uh uh women were working in the factories we had this huge factory building i mean we were exporting war basically at that point but you know people weren't spending a lot of money in fact there was a lot of rationing back then so they weren't putting they weren't buying a lot of things because they couldn't but so they

were saving what money they had everyone Everyone was kind of leaning themselves out. You had the GI Bill. And so you had, like, all these young men coming back from World War II with an immense amount of savings. You had the GI Bill. They could buy houses. They were just flooding the economy. And the economy, you know, we grasp it and grew with it because, you know, we had to, you know, you've got to build houses,

and then those people are having kids and then we got to have those kids. And, and it was just this huge money role of economy and growth and expansion. And, and then, like you say, we started to die with those things. We saw some of the blowback from, from what Johnson did with civil rights. And then, you know, people arguing, and then we started to see the economy starting to expand and contract. And that, you know, causes its own thing that play it probably plays into politics. For me, I love the idea of 1 billion Americans, because, like I said, if you're not

dying, you're in you're not growing, you're not doing things. And that I think that needs to happen, like you say, from two folds, either we need to breed it, which we really need to get the incels and the 20-year-olds dating some more, because I understand that's a real problem. But also the immigration thing. We had Jean Guerrillo on with her book about Stephen Miller and talking about all this anti-immigration stuff that's part of the Trump administration. The one point that they bury is that, and that no one ever seems to talk about, is the immigrants that come to this country, like you say, they come here doing the dream. I mean, what if Steve Jobs had never, his parents had never come here from, I think, Syria? The CEO of Google grew up on a dirt floor in India in a hut.

You know, this is the embracement of the dream of who we are, that you can come here and have that dream. But one of the things that they buried is the net profit of immigrants coming here to America is, I either have them just sexually fixed. It's either $68 billion in contribution to the economy or $86. It's $68 or $86. I got them flipped somehow. So it's one of those two. And what people don't realize is, yeah, if people do come here and they're struggling,

they might use some of our services, but they also put money in the economy. They go to the local 7-Eleven, the local mom and pop shop. They buy goods. They interact with the economy. They spend and keep the money flow going. That's what a lot of people just don't get. They just think that they show up and they go, they take everything. And you're just like, no, that doesn't work that way. Human beings have existed for a couple million years. And for the vast majority of that time, the way it worked is that we were living off the land

and more people meant more mouths to feed. So if some people showed up from another tribe, another village, that was trouble. It was trouble for you. It was trouble for your friends. And that is so deeply ingrained into the way we think on an instinctual level, because it's the way human life worked for most of our history. The modern world is not like that. You know, very, very few of us make a living growing food or raising livestock. And very little of our budget, we are privileged to live in a world where people struggle economically, but groceries are not out of reach for the vast majority of people, right?

Instead, we do things. We've got a podcast, got a website. We're selling books. Maybe you're a doctor or a nurse. You're a teacher. You're cooking a restaurant. You've got a store. We're a teacher, you're cooking a restaurant, you've got a store, we're doing things for each other. You're cutting somebody's hair, you're an electrician,

you help people out when they want to renovate their kitchens. I have an OnlyFans account. There you go. But so people are not our competitors for like, you know, we're sharing the cow or we've got to split the rice crop further, right? They are our customers and our partners. Like it's hard. You can't build a business without customers and you can't build a business really without, you know, partners you work with, employees you hire, things like that. And so it's all fuel to the fire. And then we benefit, right? Ideas fundamentally drive our growth forward. You know, somebody invents, you know, an iPhone or, you know, Zoom so we can record these podcasts, things like that. And everybody gets to take advantage of those inventions. And the more people there are,

though, the more of those inventions we get. And it's scale. You get increasing returns to scale is the jargon for it. And it's very counterintuitive for good reason. It just cuts against the vast majority of human history. But it's how the modern world works. And it's incumbent on people you know, people in people with platforms, people with audiences to try to remind people to speak to our better angels to think more rationally.

And then you have demagogues, you know, like Stephen Miller, like Donald Trump, who take advantage of what they know is out there in the sort of lizard brain to scare people, to take advantage of them, to rob them. And it's incredibly damaging when we see society dominated by that kind of discourse. You bring up a really good point with the, you know, where in caveman days we had this economy of scarcity, and now we have politics of scarcity, where we're like, hey, I only have so much cake

right here and i don't want to share with you and that that's kind of the mantra of the politics of immigration and you know it really resolved when you look at the problems of some of our american problems like the rust belt which used to be this huge steel industry and so many ideas moved out of there and people have moved out of those areas because they've become scarce for jobs. They've been scarce to economy. And so a lot of people go, well, we should blame the immigrants or we should blame globalization and China and Mexico and their problem, et cetera, et cetera. When that's not really true, the problem is, is there hasn't been enough ideas, especially in that area, and enough people living in that area that have thought of something new. Instead, they were just like, well, we just,

we did steel, and I guess steel isn't big anymore, so we just got to go where things are better. And to me, the concept of what you have in the one billion Americans is, you know, these, the flyover states that people talk about, these places. I feel for these people. I've seen some of the videos of some of the places they're in, like Michigan and desolate ghost towns and where the economy is dying. The gentrification where it's just the old people dying away and there's no one to refill these things. If you look at places like Minnesota where they bring in a ton of immigrants where they've come and revitalized an economy and they have a buying power and stuff, it just makes a huge amount of difference.

And if we would learn, because that's what made America great, was that exceptionalism and that, like, let's build ideas and being the melting pot of of the world where everyone came here and and melted together and out of it we created this american exceptionalism which really was an american what came down to is the melting pot of of all those people but if we if we open up an immigration policy and had people come here they could help fill some of these, some of these places. Like I, one of the things I used to do in living in Vegas between Vegas and California for several years, they used to drive that road between Vegas and California. And I'm like, there's a lot of

California here that's fricking empty. And it's four hours from the ocean, which is better than probably Michigan. I don't know. Michigan's um it's cold there i'm just that's my point but uh you know there's so much we could do and i was like you know back in the 2016 election i'm like maybe we should just move these people that are in these places that you know we we move them where the jobs are but really your idea is much better let's let's open up the floodgates i mean we don't need to bring everybody in. We need to vet them. You know, certainly we don't want ISIS people coming in here. No ISIS people.

That's not the – one billion non-ISIS people. One billion non-ISIS. But, you know, we're kind of growing our own ISIS over here, so we've got that going on. You know, I'm afraid of people who look like me. That's why I'm afraid of blowing up stuff and shooting up stuff. But, you you know the thing i learned a long time ago with business as well you know not only the growing mantra if you're

not growing you're dying uh but also the uh uh the exception the the uh i can't find the right word for it but the one rule i had in my business is I didn't have all the ideas, and no one had the monopoly on all the good ideas. And so I would go to my people and go, okay, so here's what we're trying to fix, or here's what we're working on, or here's what we're trying to innovate. Who's got ideas? And the one thing I learned is the people you think don't have ideas have some pretty good ideas, and you need those people. And I didn't always have the answers. I'd go mad going, I've got to come up with the answers. And the CEO and having those people that have the ideas that generate and stuff like that.

And you can't, you can't walk down a line of people and go, well, you're poor, you're rich, you're educated, you're not educated, you're this, you're that, you're whatever. You can't, you can't look at people and go, you're this, you're that, you're whatever. You can't look at people and go, you know, you're the difference between having the idea of being successful or contributing to this economy or not contributing to this economy. And it's really sad that we've been polluted by politics where we don't think this is a great idea. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. You know, you were talking about, you know, if you're not growing, you're dying. And it's true of businesses. It's really true of communities, right? When you go to a place like Cleveland, which is a city that it has some real assets to it, but it was hit by deindustrialization. It was hit by suburbanization. And it's hit by the fact that, you know, to be perfectly blunt about northern Ohio, it's cold. You know, it's so people, they're inclined to move someplace warmer.

And they've had some negative shocks to their economy. But so now you go to Cleveland and, well, you know, they've got pensions for their fire department, their teachers, things like that, that accrued in the past when the city had more residents. So that's hard, right? You got fewer people paying those kind of old obligations. So the city services are not as good as they would be in a growing city. There's no, there's not much like construction jobs, right? Hard hat kind of stuff, because the city is shrinking. Because you know it's shrinking. If you're young and you grow up there and you've got a great idea for a business, you're more likely to take it to some other city, to Nashville or Austin or Vegas, Charlotte, someplace that's growing, right? So the lack of growth now hampers growth.

And leaders in a city like that, they're hoping for some big shot right so it's like maybe i will land the national you know battery technology whatever prize you know we'll get this the amazon warehouse yeah the amazon you know right hq2 but it's not just cleveland right toledo is shrinking cincinnati is shrunken akron has shrunk detroit detroit milwaukee buffalo and then littler cities right hartford utica rome and it's it's too many st louis has actually shrunk even more than detroit and you can't like hq2 your way to victory for all these places. But you can go to places, whether it's Minnesota or whether it's a small town like Lewiston, Maine,

and people have come there as refugees. And to them, it's like, okay, yes, maybe Lewiston, Maine is a little bit cold and a little bit remote, but it's way better than Somalia. Like they are thrilled to have the opportunity to live in Lewiston. And once they're doing that, it becomes a vibrant place where other people are also thrilled to live because there was never anything wrong with Lewiston. But like the paper mill closed. So it hurt their tax base and they lost their jobs. Main Street had businesses that were shuttered. And it's ugly. Like that's not what people want. But then some more people move in. The closed businesses, you know, the storefronts reopen. So now it's nice. And now, you know, because you got some foreign people there, you've got restaurants that you can't find elsewhere in the state. People come in and, you know, most people in the town aren't refugees. They're not necessarily going to the Somali restaurants even. But just once you

start, your population is growing. It's like, you need a plumber, you need an electrician, you're hiring teachers instead of laying them off. And it's just a growing, thriving community, and you don't even think about it. But we need to do something to sort of draw a line under the crisis of decay that afflicts so many of these Midwestern and Northeastern cities. And it's just a tragedy to have people who are clamoring, they would love the opportunity to come move to some of these places that are more affordable. And we're keeping them out. We're like locking people up rather than, you know, screening them and saying, yeah, you know, like do a background check. I mean, do whatever. But like, yes, like make a pathway for people to come in.

You know, I was talked about recently. I can't remember what news item triggered it, but we've had a lot of people on talking about, you know, seeing Miller Trump, the immigration policies and stuff. And you look into the cost of what we put to lock people up and manage the border and all that crap. And you could literally take, and I don't know, buy a mansion for everybody in Detroit. That's in the bad parts of the city. Like for, for what it's cost us to, to do this. Um, and, and like I say, and like we've been talking about the, the, the, the, like I always, I'll hear people say, well, they come here and they just take all our money and use all

our services. And like, no, they have to buy groceries. They have to buy, like you say, they have to buy plumbers and cars and, and it all comes back. I mean, even, even, uh, I've, I've known undocumented workers, uh, even then, I mean, they, they, they'll save their money. They're really miserly with their money. They'll save their cash.

Unfortunately, they save a lot of it on the mattress. But when they go, they'll drop cash, and they'll buy things. And even then, the way we restrict, come to think of it, people from interacting with the economy. I think California just finally broke down and let people that were undocumented have driver's licenses, I think, if I recall rightly, or at least get an ID card because you've got to have them in the economy. If they're in the economy, they pay taxes. They're in there.

But if you don't, I mean, it's just amazing how people think this. Let me ask you this because I don't know if you get into this in the book but we've got a lot of conversations about billionaire oligarchy sort of attitudes with some of these giant packs national councils uh i think betsy devos sort of societies uh that kind of have this whole thing where they want to control america they want to control a lot of what goes on. A lot of this is from an industrial basis where it's not really a political thing except for the feature of control because you can keep low wages. You can keep from going to $15 an hour.

You can keep – you make more money for yourself. Billionaires get richer. Do you get into any of that in the book and, and, you know, how that affects us or the prospects of it? Well, you know, I mean, just one obvious question people have is like, well, like, where are you going to get the money for these programs to support people and, and their larger, larger families and, you know, more childcare, more daycare. And, you know, you've got to look at the fact that a relatively small number of incredibly wealthy people are absorbing just an incredible share of the economic resources in this country. And, you know,

some of them have done it in crooked ways. Some of them have just done it by making cool stuff. But the fact of the matter is that the, you know, what do you do with your second billion dollars? Just not that much, you know. But that billion dollars could make all the difference for thousands of families struggling to get child care for their children, right? Struggling to pay the rent on a three-bedroom apartment somewhere. And there's just so much we could do to unlock the potential of the country by saying that, like,

you know, what, what was the old line about what, why do you rob banks? And you know, that that's where the money is. Like, I don't,

I don't, I don't, I don't per se bear the billionaires any ill will. But like, but, but that's where the money is. You know, we've got big stuff that we need to do. And I think people know that, right? Like if, if it was, if there was an alien invasion tomorrow and,

you know, like the lizard people were enslaving us or something, Republicans wouldn't be out there being like, well, how are we going to pay for that? Right. It's like, we know you're like, you take, you got to get the money from the people who have the money. The problem is like, they just not take the problem seriously. But, but we need to, you know, we fortunately don't have aliens invading, but we have people who can't get the necessities of family life together.

And so we got to get the money from people who have it and do what it takes. Yeah, and I think this is why books like yours are important to educate Americans because really, you know, you hit on it. During Kennedy, we had this vision, and he's like, we're going to the moon. I don't know how the fuck we're getting there, but we're going to the damn moon. And we set these goals, you know, uh, we had these visions.

Uh, uh, I kind of sound like, uh, what's his face in the news. It was the newsroom where he gives that speech about how America is not great anymore. He goes, damn sure. We used to be, we used to give a damn. We used to go to the moon. We used to care about things. And, and we had leaders during that time that had visions for us that went we're going to the moon we're going to do this we're going to do that we're going to be the exceptionalism in america we're going to spread democracy around the world um and then we went to leaders that have this scarcity of of economics and politics that largely are just doing that for control i mean clearly the reason they're doing racist and anti-immigration things is because it gives them power. They, they, you know, they can,

they can get into someone's deep seated fear of scarcity of rationing and play on that and get power. I mean, that's really what, what's at play here. I mean, if, if there was, if those people didn't respond to that, Donald Trump wouldn't be president right now. We'd be like, you're stupid. And there was a time in our life where we would have looked at a guy like him and gone, that's dumb. We'll vote for JFK. And I think that's probably one of the real problems is because we look to these people for leadership and they take us down these dark roads. You look at Ronald Reagan and issues there. You look at George Bush. I mean, the trillions of dollars we put into Iraq and trying to empire build over there is just extraordinary. Meanwhile, we've raised some of the dumbest things.

Do you get into any of why these young people aren't breeding as much? I know that's one of our issues we're having. Breeding. You know, I don't like to put it in those terms. Look, people say they survey them and say, you know, like how many children would you like to have? And it's about two and a half on average, obviously. People don't want to have a child.

And then they look, you know, so how many children do people actually have these days? It's a little bit more than one and a half. And so they ask people, well, why don't you have as many children as you wanted to have? And number one item they give is child care costs too much. Number two is by the time I was financially secure enough, I was too old. Number three is something else. Number four is like also about cost.

And just like that's the issue. So I discussed in the book, it's called Baumol's Cost Disease, but it's like a fundamental sort of law of economics. And the cost of things that we can't get more efficient at goes up over time. And it's just like, if you've ever taken care of a little kid, you know, baby, little kid, it's just, it's labor intensive, you know, like your computer doesn't help you. The internet doesn't help you. You just gotta, you gotta, you gotta sit there and do it. You gotta watch them with your eyes, gotta change diapers with your hands.

And now maybe someday we'll have like a robot nanny and there's no problem. Right. You know, I'm not putting out like laws of universal human history, but the way it is now, the cost of childcare has gone up 350% since 1980. Yeah. So it's no wonder people don't have children. You know,

it's not like nobody thinks babies are cute anymore or anything like that. It's just like it's not feasible. But we can address this. We have Social Security and Medicare to take care of people when they're old. Otherwise, we've got 87-year-olds living good lives today. And they couldn't do all kinds of work but like it's good so this is like what we have a society for and we need to make it possible for people to raise children what about the cost of health care too i mean that's that's well the cost of health care is not great um you

know it's it's i wanted it to be like a huge factor in kids just because I like the healthcare topic. Children's healthcare is more affordable than other things. But I mean, if you just want to look at American society, I mean, this is just a huge burden on the cost of living and something, you know, we've got to address. Yeah, there you go. So we could probably talk for hours about all this stuff, but it's probably better if people just break down and get the book. Anything more in parting, Matthew, it's a short book and it's a fun book and it is chock full of answers to the questions that you have about this. You know,

where's the house is going to go. How's the transportation going to work? Like it's all in there. I promise you. I know what I'm talking about. You've read the reviews are very good. He'll have five stars up on Amazon. So please check it out.

There you go. There you go. And, and I love the idea. I mean, it would fill up there's, there's a lot out. There you go. There you go. And, and I love the idea. I mean, it would fill up, uh, there's, there's a lot of land still in this, in this world. And we didn't kind of get to, you know, how we used to have this idea of like, there's too many people in the world. Actually growth is fairly good. And we probably come up with some really good people that would come up with really good ideas to solve some of the issues that we

have, but it would refill some of these cities that are dying and just innovation, ideas, concepts, just build a better world. And yeah, we are going to be second fiddle. I mean, regardless of what someone in populism or nationalism does with going, hey, we're going to take our little pie and we're going to just hold it really closely and it'll be, and we'll still be the best. No, you won't. The world will run roughshod over you. I mean, China is taking up so many resources in, in South Africa. Uh, they're

pretty much buying up the continent when it really comes down to it. I mean, if we want resources, we're gonna have to go to them in the future and there will be a time where they'll have a stranglehold on us. I mean, already they're starting to, like you say, with movies in Hong Kong, they're starting to run roughshod and, and now they've got, uh, you know, uh, the, say, with movies in Hong Kong, they're starting to run roughshod. And now they've got, you know, with the Uyghurs, they've got their own Holocaust camps over there. You know, they're just going, we'll do whatever we want. And if America really wants to be exceptional, it's got to get away from scarcity. And back to what really made America great was that shooting for the moonshot and doing things that are great. You know, like, you know, people ask me, like, why did we go to Mars?

Why do we want to go to Mars? Because there's so much stuff that comes out of that. So anyway, guys, it's been wonderful to talk with Matthew. Grab the book. One billion. I want to insert Carl Sagan in the post-edit maybe saying billion. One billion Americans. The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Iglesias.

Matthew, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. And thanks, Moniz, for being here. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Foss. Hit that bell notification ding and subscribe to all the different things we have going on there. Tell your friends, neighbors, relatives, dogs, cats, pool boys, mistresses, get them involved in the show.

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