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Speaker 2: Good morning, everybody, Welcome to Breaking Points, where we have
Speaker 2: an extra special show plan because we have celebrity guest
Speaker 2: host Marshall Coslav, longtime, longtime front of the show and
Speaker 2: friend also of Sager, sitting in this morning.
Speaker 3: Great to see Marshall.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm excited to be here and moved out to Texas.
Speaker 4: I had a kid, I have a mustache, so everything
Speaker 4: is different. Everything has changed, and I'm exciting back on
Speaker 4: the show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: So Marshall, if you guys don't know post the Realignment,
Speaker 2: he also is in deep in the Abundance world. So
Speaker 2: I'm really excited to talk to you about some of
Speaker 2: that because I've been listening. I told you to your
Speaker 2: episodes on Abundance on the Realignment. It has actually helped
Speaker 2: me much better to understand what's going on inside the
Speaker 2: movement and what it's all about. So you can be
Speaker 2: a little bit of our of our guide through abundance
Speaker 2: World today, which I'm excited about. In addition, before I
Speaker 2: forget guys announced this yesterday, we brought back the monthly subscription,
Speaker 2: which I'm super excited about. I think it comes at
Speaker 2: a really timely moment when you know, economics are a
Speaker 2: little uncertain. That's actually what we're starting the show with today,
Speaker 2: and we are doing a free monthly trial right now.
Speaker 2: So if you want to try out being a premium
Speaker 2: Breaking Point subscriber, go to Breakingpoints dot com. The promo
Speaker 2: is BP free, so you can get that monthly trial subscription.
Speaker 2: All right, So here's what is in the show today
Speaker 2: is go ahead and put the show bar up so
Speaker 2: I can read it and not have to use my memory,
Speaker 2: which is a little bit suspect. We're going to talk
Speaker 2: about the latest with regard to Tariff's back and forth
Speaker 2: with China. We've got the continued fallout from that extraordinary
Speaker 2: Ukraine drone attack. Wanted to get Marshall's take on that
Speaker 2: in particular, and some reaction from Steve Bannon that was
Speaker 2: kind of interesting.
Speaker 3: We're going to dig into.
Speaker 2: That New York City mayoral race which is tightening between
Speaker 2: Andrew Cuomo and Zoron Mamdani. A lot of really interesting
Speaker 2: dynamics there. I think that will lead us into a
Speaker 2: great discussion imiking forward to on abundance, what it is,
Speaker 2: what it isn't, how the left should really be thinking
Speaker 2: about it. And then we're going to thank Marshall first time,
Speaker 2: let him go about his day, and Ken Clippenstein is
Speaker 2: going to join to break down what's going on with Palentier.
Speaker 2: Looks like the Trump administration is trying to assemble a
Speaker 2: mass database of all of the information that they have
Speaker 2: on every single American. Yes, you should be terrified about that.
Speaker 2: I certainly am so. Ken is going to talk about that,
Speaker 2: and he is also going to talk about Matthew Miller,
Speaker 2: former State Department spokesperson under Joe Biden, basically admitting that
Speaker 2: he was lying the entire time he was at the
Speaker 2: podium and asserting that Israel had committed no war crimes.
Speaker 2: So definitely want to look at that. So, Marshall, before
Speaker 2: we jump into the news, a lot of rising and
Speaker 2: breaking points. Fans know you already. You've undergone as all
Speaker 2: of us have, I think, somewhat of a political evolution
Speaker 2: over the years since you started being a guest on
Speaker 2: the show. So before we jump in, why don't you
Speaker 2: just sort of like set up for everybody who you.
Speaker 3: Are, where you were, where you.
Speaker 2: Are now, and kind of your general view of politics
Speaker 2: in this moment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally. So I think for a lot of people
Speaker 4: with the twenty sixteen election was really huge, as it
Speaker 4: should have been. If you serve a person who could
Speaker 4: see both like Trump and Bernie, If you just were
Speaker 4: comfortable with your perspectives and thoughts and evaluations of the
Speaker 4: world before that and that did not at all change
Speaker 4: by twenty sixteen, then I think there was probably something
Speaker 4: wrong with you. So Sager and I have known each
Speaker 4: other forever, so we started a podcast called The Realignment,
Speaker 4: and the Realignment was really rooted in responding to this
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen moment from both the right and the left,
Speaker 4: and I think as someone who's sort of contrarian by nature,
Speaker 4: I'm from like the center left Portland suburbs. I was
Speaker 4: alway attracted to the right, especially in the twenty tens
Speaker 4: after the twenty twelve election, where everything was up for
Speaker 4: grabs right like Mitt Romney loses to Obama, you have
Speaker 4: gay marriage passing at the Supreme Court. It seemed like
Speaker 4: we were moving in one direction as a country, in
Speaker 4: a more progressive direction by twenty fifty. So the question
Speaker 4: of how would the right respond to that moment, I
Speaker 4: think was genuinely the most fascinating question of the time.
Speaker 4: Then that really got me into those spaces. I covered
Speaker 4: a lot of those topics. The Realignment's first guest was
Speaker 4: JD Vance before he was well. I met JD before
Speaker 4: he was famous, But our first guest after JD was
Speaker 4: a little more famous was JD on the show. So
Speaker 4: covering that space was huge. After twenty twenty though, I
Speaker 4: think obviously what kind of happened with everything from January
Speaker 4: sixth to sort of COVID I think made pretty clear
Speaker 4: that the I think most hopeful version of that right
Speaker 4: populist project wasn't going to end well for anyone. It
Speaker 4: wasn't going to lead to like a stronger United America,
Speaker 4: was just leading to more division and the lack of
Speaker 4: actual certainty on these questions. I started getting more interested
Speaker 4: in the left and frankly started going back to my roots.
Speaker 4: So just in the same way that like twenty thirteen
Speaker 4: was like this big error where like the central questions were,
Speaker 4: how would the right respond to how the twenty twelve
Speaker 4: election really shattered their story? The question right now is
Speaker 4: how is the center left? How is the center, how
Speaker 4: is the center right? And how does the further parts
Speaker 4: of the left I think you represent, really well, how
Speaker 4: are they going to respond to that moment? So I
Speaker 4: think my politics have naturally drifted towards where the big
Speaker 4: questions are interesting.
Speaker 2: Okay, excellent, Well, with that being said, let's go ahead
Speaker 2: and jump into some of what is going on with
Speaker 2: the Trump administration that I'm anxious to get Marshall's thoughts on.
Speaker 2: In particular, Let's go and put this up on the screen,
Speaker 2: so we have an update on how they are thinking.
Speaker 3: About the tariff regime.
Speaker 2: And you will recall that there was a series of
Speaker 2: court decisions that were impactful here, So you had one court,
Speaker 2: the Court of International Trade, that came in and said, okay,
Speaker 2: you can't actually use this particular provision that you're using.
Speaker 2: You have vastly exceeded your authority. You can't do that
Speaker 2: to levy the Liberation Day tariffs. Another appeals court came
Speaker 2: in and said, well, you can do it for now
Speaker 2: while this is playing out in court. So the big
Speaker 2: question has been how is the Trump administration going to respond.
Speaker 2: Are they basically going to take the out and be like, oh,
Speaker 2: well we tried and we're just going to move on now.
Speaker 2: And effectively, all the indications are that they are not
Speaker 2: going to go in that direction.
Speaker 3: So that terror sheet that was up.
Speaker 2: On the screen indicates that they want to have countries
Speaker 2: provide their quote unquote best offer on trade negotiations by Wednesday,
Speaker 2: as in tomorrow, as officials seek to accelerate talks with
Speaker 2: multiple partners ahead of a self imposed deadline in just
Speaker 2: five weeks, according to a draft letter to negotiating partners
Speaker 2: seen by Reuters. So effectively they're saying that on that
Speaker 2: you know, the Liberation Day, which the tariffs went into
Speaker 2: effect on April ninth, they're giving them a deadline till
Speaker 2: July eighth, and then if there isn't some sort of
Speaker 2: deal into place, Trump is going to levy whatever teriffs
Speaker 2: he decides to levy. A bunch of administration officials, including
Speaker 2: Howard Lutnik, have been asked about the court real ruling
Speaker 2: and if it makes a difference in terms of how
Speaker 2: they go about this, and effectively they're all saying, no,
Speaker 2: we're going to do what we want regardless of what
Speaker 2: the courts say, and we'll figure out some other provision
Speaker 2: to use. If it isn't a EPO, which was the
Speaker 2: original provision, let's go ahead and take a listen to that.
Speaker 5: Congress gives the president under this AEPA authority the ability
Speaker 5: to take on other countries who are creating a national emergency.
Speaker 5: And the one point two trillion dollar trade deficit and
Speaker 5: all the underlying implications of that is a national emergency.
Speaker 5: It's gutting our manufacturing base. The President takes that on
Speaker 5: and Congress lets him do it, specifically, does not vote
Speaker 5: to take it away, calls a vote, and says he
Speaker 5: can keep it.
Speaker 6: So what's going to happen is we're going to take
Speaker 6: that up to higher courts.
Speaker 5: The President's going to win like he always does. But
Speaker 5: rest assured tariffs are not going the way. He has
Speaker 5: so many other authorities that even in the weird and
Speaker 5: unusual circums stance where this was taken away, we.
Speaker 6: Just bring on another or another or another.
Speaker 5: Congress has given this authority to the president and he's.
Speaker 6: Going to use it.
Speaker 2: And Marshall, my suspicion is that I and others who
Speaker 2: were thinking that maybe the Iepacurt ruling would be like
Speaker 2: an excuse with the Trump administration and back off of this,
Speaker 2: we're probably mistaken, and they probably are going to just
Speaker 2: figure out some other way to accomplish this. Because ultimately,
Speaker 2: I'm curious this is I want to know your thoughts
Speaker 2: on what really is going on here. I think Trump
Speaker 2: loves the tariffs because it consolids a lot of power
Speaker 2: in his hands, and I don't think that he is
Speaker 2: going to let go of that easily.
Speaker 4: I think it's not just the fact that he loves
Speaker 4: the power and using the executive branch over Congress. I
Speaker 4: think it's that if there are I'd say there are
Speaker 4: probably two things we could reasonably say Trump one hundred
Speaker 4: and twenty percent believes, Yeah, it's tariffs and immigration We
Speaker 4: should also understand that because Trump had a first term
Speaker 4: an interoperation between his first and second term. I think
Speaker 4: he's coming into this administration and they've made very clear
Speaker 4: that this is their priority. They see terroffs and immigrations
Speaker 4: as their unfinished business that they did not get done. Therefore,
Speaker 4: they are going to push as hard as they can
Speaker 4: on this issue. That's just like the number one thing here.
Speaker 4: If you don't understand that Trump just truly believes in
Speaker 4: this more than almost anything else, you're going to sort
Speaker 4: of miss the fact that they're going to keep pushing forward.
Speaker 2: And to be honest with you, I actually think he
Speaker 2: believes in tariffs more than he I think immigration is
Speaker 2: more a means to an end for him because even
Speaker 2: at times they're, you know, like he told all in guys,
Speaker 2: the thing about we're going to staple a green card
Speaker 2: to every you know, student who graduates, you know, would practice,
Speaker 2: his administrations are obviously very hardline anti immigrant, and I
Speaker 2: think he's basically outsourced that portfolio to Steven Miller, who
Speaker 2: is a psycho and a white nationalist and is you know,
Speaker 2: going full force with the anti immigrant program that he
Speaker 2: wants to. But it seems like, the part of the
Speaker 2: agenda that Trump has really taken the most interest in
Speaker 2: and actually asserted himself in is the tariffs. And so
Speaker 2: what is your view, Marshal of you know, the tariff program,
Speaker 2: of the possibilities for do you see any upside here?
Speaker 2: You know, what is your kind of like broad view
Speaker 2: of what's going on and what the impact could be economically?
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, So right before the election, when Sager and
Speaker 4: I were talking about this on the realignment, we really
Speaker 4: focus on the fact that if we want to understand
Speaker 4: the story of the modern American presidency, it's that when
Speaker 4: you come into your second term or even in your
Speaker 4: first term of Biden, presidents are going to just have
Speaker 4: like a theory of the case. And in two thousand
Speaker 4: and five, after George W. Bush won, his big theory
Speaker 4: of the case was I won, I have my mandate,
Speaker 4: I won the popular vote. This time, I'm going to
Speaker 4: do a social security of form, even though the voter
Speaker 4: base wasn't actually there in this case. And you see this,
Speaker 4: you know, leading up to the you know, twenty twenty
Speaker 4: four election, Trump's theory of the case was, once again,
Speaker 4: I'm coming back. I'm going to finish the job. And
Speaker 4: this has been something I've talked about since in the
Speaker 4: nineteen eighties when we were talking about Japan and other
Speaker 4: East Asian countries. I am going to past tariffs. I'm
Speaker 4: going to reindustrialize America by taking that specific route that
Speaker 4: has always been his sort of approach. And the big
Speaker 4: problem with these like mandate theories and these big like
Speaker 4: this is my big agenda project that I come in,
Speaker 4: is that mandate or that idea isn't actually sinc of
Speaker 4: what the American people are failing. You're going to run
Speaker 4: into a huge issue. The huge issue they ran into
Speaker 4: is that if there's one lesson and we'll talk about
Speaker 4: this during the Zoran segment, if there's one lesson that
Speaker 4: we should take from the twenty twenty four election, it's
Speaker 4: that pretty much the main thing Americans care about is
Speaker 4: how unaffordable everything is right now, every single level. And
Speaker 4: it's easy for people in the Trump administration just to say, like, oh,
Speaker 4: you know these cheap goods and do you need thirty
Speaker 4: dollars You just have two dollars. If we look at
Speaker 4: what's happened in America over the past fifty years, like education, healthcare, housing,
Speaker 4: in those sectors, everything has gotten way, way, way, way
Speaker 4: more expensive. The one thing we've actually kind of kept
Speaker 4: relatively cheap at the cost of manufacturing, at the cost
Speaker 4: of like in many ways, like our domestic politics and
Speaker 4: domestic economy have just been these consumer goods. So coming
Speaker 4: out of the COVID supply shock, coming out of Biden
Speaker 4: ignoring this issue, we needed to pay attention to it.
Speaker 4: Having your theory of the case be I'm going to
Speaker 4: launch a massive trade war within the first three months
Speaker 4: without doing the long term planning, without getting the industrial
Speaker 4: policy together, without going to companies and businesses, even some
Speaker 4: of the small businesses. I'm sure you saw a lot
Speaker 4: of those small business owners who v whatever for Trump's
Speaker 4: saying wait a second, like I wasn't ready for this.
Speaker 4: I needed time to prepare for this. And what's really
Speaker 4: frustrating and crazy about the whole program here is that
Speaker 4: even if you buy Trump's case for tariffs, this is
Speaker 4: just not the way you would actually do this. The
Speaker 4: starts and stops ninety days. Now we're extending ninety days. Actually, no,
Speaker 4: We're going to get this other deal. Tariffs and reindustrialization
Speaker 4: and bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country is a
Speaker 4: medium term project. Starting a new factory, rejigging your supply chains.
Speaker 4: That is so complicated in such a heavy lift for small, medium,
Speaker 4: and large businesses that you have to have a consistent
Speaker 4: policy so they can make investment decisions based off of it.
Speaker 4: If you and I we're going to launch a factory
Speaker 4: in Ohio, we would not launch a factory based on
Speaker 4: this current dynamic because we could have an entire situation
Speaker 4: where if you'd premised your reindustrialization plans on what was
Speaker 4: happening in February, March, in April, you could be totally
Speaker 4: screwed right now, yeah, because wow, are those tariffs going
Speaker 4: to be there? Is it going to make sense? Is
Speaker 4: he going to get a big deal? And the last
Speaker 4: part of here too is that, in many ways, the
Speaker 4: big problem of his trade policies they're doing so many
Speaker 4: different things at once. So on the one hand, the
Speaker 4: tariffs could serve as a new form of revenue. They
Speaker 4: could lead to like a income tax decreased. But if
Speaker 4: we're actually decreasing the income tax and we're actually like
Speaker 4: making money from this, then it's not going to reindustrialize
Speaker 4: the country right right, So it doesn't really make sense.
Speaker 4: And you really needed a different version of this administration
Speaker 4: that actually took those three months to say we're doing
Speaker 4: these five things. They make sense for this reason, and
Speaker 4: we're going to stay strong on it.
Speaker 3: And here's the other thing.
Speaker 2: And guys, let's get ahead to a five, Like, if
Speaker 2: your goal is reindustrializing the country, you're already failing. So
Speaker 2: this usism manufacturing imports index fell to thirty nine point nine,
Speaker 2: lowest level since two thousand and nine. COBEC letter says this,
Speaker 2: we're saying two thousand and eight light contraction and manufacturing
Speaker 2: imports as.
Speaker 3: Tariffs take effect.
Speaker 2: The overall measure of manufacturing is has been following month
Speaker 2: after month after month. And the reality is Marshall like
Speaker 2: the Biden industrial policy plus protectionism in certain key sectors
Speaker 2: was actually working. Like for the first time in modern history,
Speaker 2: we came out of a recession, the COVID recession, creating
Speaker 2: more manufacturing jobs that we than we went in the history.
Speaker 2: You know, in recent modern history, typically what happens is
Speaker 2: there's a recession, manufacturing drops and it never comes back
Speaker 2: right for a variety of reasons. And this was the
Speaker 2: first time that they had bucked that trend. And when
Speaker 2: you're talking about EV's when you're talking about battery production,
Speaker 2: when you're talking about you know, green energy, when you're
Speaker 2: talking about semiconductors. It was the policy was actually working
Speaker 2: because you paired the protectionism with industrial policy. And that's
Speaker 2: the piece that's completely missing here, is any sort of
Speaker 2: a strategic direction. And at the same time, the parts
Speaker 2: of that Biden policy, which I'm first to say it
Speaker 2: was like inadequate and wor should be done and it
Speaker 2: wasn't transformational for people in their daily lives, and you know,
Speaker 2: and wasn't sold with all of those things. But the
Speaker 2: parts that were actually working are also being attacked and
Speaker 2: dismantled by a Trump administration which just you know, hates
Speaker 2: Joe Biden, hates green energy, anything that's smacks of like liberalism,
Speaker 2: like evs, you know, EV batteries, any sort of green energy.
Speaker 2: They just want to destroy. And so they've taken a
Speaker 2: chainsaw to those pieces, and you know, are actually destroying
Speaker 2: the part of our industrial policy that was actually working.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the thing is, if Biden nomics, we should
Speaker 4: think about it on two different levels. So level one
Speaker 4: was like the political project, Biden's going to bring all
Speaker 4: the jobs back, We're going to reindustrialize America from sort
Speaker 4: of a center left perspective, that political project totally failed.
Speaker 4: It didn't deliver. It didn't deliver fast enough. Like I
Speaker 4: have a lot of like maga and laws, and like
Speaker 4: if you tell them about like the actual policies that
Speaker 4: Joe Biden pursued, they were like they are literally skeptical
Speaker 4: and do not believe it was happening. But as you
Speaker 4: didn't see this, there was lots of like really great
Speaker 4: reporting on how despite the fact that they put a
Speaker 4: lot of these jobs in red states and in purple
Speaker 4: and swing states, it just wasn't actually felt on the ground.
Speaker 4: So at a political level, it did not work. At
Speaker 4: a policy level, I think what's been so frustrating about
Speaker 4: covering this tariff topic is if you actually talk to
Speaker 4: most people left right and center, what they will say is, wow,
Speaker 4: we actually came to kind of a consensus after the
Speaker 4: first Trump administration and the Biden administration. The Bio administration
Speaker 4: could have jettisoned all of Trump's tariffs when they came
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty one. They didn't, though they kept them
Speaker 4: because they a bought into the idea that we couldn't
Speaker 4: just treat China entering the world market as this like
Speaker 4: chill thing that was going to work out for everybody
Speaker 4: and magically keeped everyone's jobs together. They kept that part,
Speaker 4: but then they once again added the government spending and
Speaker 4: industrial policy site. So we found a mix that, to
Speaker 4: your point, needed to be implemented better. So in a
Speaker 4: better version of the Trump administration. To the point I
Speaker 4: was saying earlier, you would have said, Okay, here's what
Speaker 4: didn't work with the Biden approach. Here's what didn't work
Speaker 4: far approach in the first term. Let's combine this into
Speaker 4: a mix that actually builds us into something productive. And
Speaker 4: and the key thing here, there was consensus in the
Speaker 4: business community, in the labor with labor, and with policymakers
Speaker 4: on the left and right around that mix. Jettising in
Speaker 4: it just because it's like Bidenomics or because it's Biden
Speaker 4: tied is like a huge disaster.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about the China relationship a little bit more.
Speaker 2: Can put a three up on the screen, so we
Speaker 2: have an indication here Trump and she may talk very soon,
Speaker 2: we'll see. In addition, this was the big news that
Speaker 2: came out yesterday, but a three b up on the screen.
Speaker 2: Trump has extended the China tariff, so pushing it off
Speaker 2: into the future, allow war time for negotiation, pushing it
Speaker 2: off till August thirty first, and then this was pretty
Speaker 2: remarkable in terms of global impact on view of the
Speaker 2: US since Trump has come back into office net favorability.
Speaker 2: This is again global average net favorability. This is a
Speaker 2: poll conducted by Morning Console the US. When Trump comes
Speaker 2: into office, the view of the US falls off a
Speaker 2: frickin cliff, and at the same time the view of
Speaker 2: China has been significantly on the rise. So now you
Speaker 2: have a positive, you know, almost nine point margin in
Speaker 2: favor of China, and the US is underwater at minus
Speaker 2: one point five, which is no surprise March twenty. You know,
Speaker 2: again with the incoherence of the trade policy, it would
Speaker 2: be one thing if you're like, we're going to specifically
Speaker 2: focus on China, We're going to create a block of
Speaker 2: our allies to you know, have some policy solidarity and
Speaker 2: to try to isolate China. But instead they went to
Speaker 2: war with the entire world, including like Canada and the
Speaker 2: EU and countries that only have you know, places that
Speaker 2: only have penguins and the whole thing. And so of
Speaker 2: course much of the world is like screw you, like
Speaker 2: what are you doing? So in that respect too, it
Speaker 2: has been thoroughly counterproductive and is really strengthened China's hand
Speaker 2: going into these trade negotiations.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and if I think the perfect so like two
Speaker 4: examples here, So number one, like why we're replacing tariffs
Speaker 4: on Madagascar, right, it actually does not make sense other
Speaker 4: than the explanation we gave earlier that like Trump just
Speaker 4: specifically does not like trade, and the kid Ben shows us.
Speaker 4: So it's not just that like, hey, we have these
Speaker 4: industries that really matter. Oh hey, we have this whole
Speaker 4: part of the country that really relies on these jobs.
Speaker 4: So we have to like balance the trade offs of
Speaker 4: like cheap goods versus people actually having jobs here. No,
Speaker 4: Trump just broadly is hostileal trade, which just blames why
Speaker 4: we are doing a trade fight with Mexico, which explains
Speaker 4: why we're doing a trade fight with Canada. And if
Speaker 4: you talk to the Canadians specifically, you know, the Mexico
Speaker 4: side of this thing has always been much more complicated
Speaker 4: because you know, going back to like NAFTA in the
Speaker 4: nineteen nineties and the Makuila Dories, like a lot of
Speaker 4: jobs like went south. So I think people had within
Speaker 4: their mental framework the idea that, Okay, the US and
Speaker 4: Mexico are going to kind of have a hostile trade relationship,
Speaker 4: and I think a dynamic where that is a fight
Speaker 4: doesn't lead to that fall off of support for the
Speaker 4: US in terms of these global polls. What the Canada
Speaker 4: experience just revealed is just like a real lack of trust.
Speaker 4: Like if you talk to Canadians about this, if you
Speaker 4: talk to people across the kind of world, they would say, wait, like,
Speaker 4: if they're just coming after us on this, why would
Speaker 4: we assume they're trying to find the right deal for this?
Speaker 4: Why is this about sort of us getting a good
Speaker 4: deal with them, us getting something from you know, us
Speaker 4: being Canadians. The Canadians they get something, Musk, we get
Speaker 4: some of them. It's all just domestic politics.
Speaker 2: Well, and not to mention, so in Trump's first administration,
Speaker 2: he renegotiated NAVDA with Canada and Mexico.
Speaker 3: So if you don't like.
Speaker 2: The deal that was struck, like you're the one who
Speaker 2: struck that deal, buddy, So get to your point about trust,
Speaker 2: Why should they expect that some new deal that they
Speaker 2: would enter into this time around, would be upheld under
Speaker 2: this Trump administration, under the next administration, whether it's Democratic
Speaker 2: or Republican, like the word of these people is just
Speaker 2: absolutely no good. Not to mention the just completely like
Speaker 2: chao and schizophrenic nature of how the tariffs are on
Speaker 2: and off and they're up and they're down, and you know,
Speaker 2: he's chickening out and then.
Speaker 3: He's all in on a day to day basis.
Speaker 2: I am curious what do you make of the taco discourse,
Speaker 2: because I'm actually a little bit skeptical to your point
Speaker 2: about how Trump is like ideala, one thing that he
Speaker 2: is ideologically committed to is tariffs. There and not to mention,
Speaker 2: you know, if you had told people going into the
Speaker 2: Trump administration that we would be at the level of
Speaker 2: tariffs that we're at right now, and this is at
Speaker 2: a time before you know, we get to July eighth
Speaker 2: and he once again does like another Liberation Day announcement
Speaker 2: or whatever that's going to be, people would be deeply
Speaker 2: concerned about what that would mean for the economy because
Speaker 2: it was an extraordinary increase. Even just the levels we're
Speaker 2: at now are an extraordinary change and increase over where
Speaker 2: we were previously so I'm a little bit I under
Speaker 2: stand where it comes from, because he has backed off
Speaker 2: the most maximalist positions of like one hundred and forty
Speaker 2: five percent tariffs on China, which just completely ended trade
Speaker 2: between giant in the US, which was completely insane. But
Speaker 2: on the other hand, you know, I think it is
Speaker 2: I think it would be foolish to understate where we
Speaker 2: are and what he could potentially still.
Speaker 3: Do in the future.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think that that's why the court cases
Speaker 4: is really matter here too, because once again, if we're
Speaker 4: going to understand, like what are the consistent parts of
Speaker 4: Trump's politics and personality over the past fifty years, he's
Speaker 4: a negotiator. Now if I am sitting in China, if
Speaker 4: I'm sitting in the UK or the EEU right now,
Speaker 4: I'm much less certain that Trump is operating with a
Speaker 4: full deck of cards here when it comes to the
Speaker 4: United States. Why is there And this is the danger
Speaker 4: of just sort of doing this, Hail Mary. We're going
Speaker 4: to reconfigure the way we conceive of trade policy and
Speaker 4: the trade policy with the administration to do versus actually Congress,
Speaker 4: because if you get knocked down at the courts, even
Speaker 4: though those are being caused by the pos Court. Right now,
Speaker 4: why would China negotiate the other thing that really is
Speaker 4: important to here too, And I want to go back
Speaker 4: to the comment about how China's perception is going up,
Speaker 4: is that the real problem that we're facing here is
Speaker 4: that we sort of root our approach to China in
Speaker 4: sort of two different periods. So a lot of people
Speaker 4: route their approach to China. In two thousand, we let
Speaker 4: them into the wto. They're a low cost, cheap manufacturer.
Speaker 4: They take a bunch of our jobs and not all
Speaker 4: basically happens there. In exchange, we get cheap consumer goods.
Speaker 4: That's one version of China. The second version of China
Speaker 4: is the China the Trump face down during the late
Speaker 4: twenty tens. We now in the year twenty twenty five
Speaker 4: are facing a new China where they now have BYD
Speaker 4: who are producing the best, the cheapest electric vehicles in
Speaker 4: the world, and they are penetrating and the most advanced.
Speaker 4: They are penetrating European and global markets. So if I'm
Speaker 4: sitting in let's say Germany, or I'm sitting in an
Speaker 4: East Asian country, and we see China delivering not just
Speaker 4: oh competing for jobs of US, but actually delivering like
Speaker 4: industrial first world technological advancement that the United States cannot
Speaker 4: match right now. But also, weirdly enough, the Trump administration
Speaker 4: says they're just totally uninterested in China looks really great
Speaker 4: right now, Like that's just like the key role context.
Speaker 4: You can't just treat China like it's the two thousands,
Speaker 4: the twenty eighteen.
Speaker 3: China, or even like the night.
Speaker 2: I mean, I feel like sometimes Trump has this like
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties view of China almost that is completely out
Speaker 2: of touch with where they are today. They made an
Speaker 2: explicit government led plan to move up the value chain
Speaker 2: and they've done it. You know, it's not the days
Speaker 2: anymore of just like China stealing other companies IP and
Speaker 2: using it to you know, create knockoff cheap versions of it.
Speaker 2: Like they have their own very high tech advanced research
Speaker 2: capabilities in some areas. To your point about BYD and evs,
Speaker 2: they are out pacing the US. I think they're on
Speaker 2: par in terms of AI development at the very least,
Speaker 2: And so this is a very different China. Not to mention,
Speaker 2: the trading dynamics have changed as well the US. If
Speaker 2: you consider ossion as a block. The US is no
Speaker 2: longer China's largest trading partner. They trade more with ossion
Speaker 2: you have an entire rest of the world, So it
Speaker 2: was easier for China to acquire more customers than it
Speaker 2: is for the US to, you know, recurr all of
Speaker 2: the supply lines and all of the manufacturing capability that
Speaker 2: has been outsourced to China and other countries too, by
Speaker 2: the way, over the years. And it always seemed to
Speaker 2: me wild at the beginning of this that there was
Speaker 2: so much confidence from the Trump administration that it would
Speaker 2: be China that would have to come to them, and
Speaker 2: China that would be in the more difficult political position
Speaker 2: in terms of these trade dynamics, because that too, there
Speaker 2: isn't public consensus around what Trump is doing, whereas in China,
Speaker 2: because we're the instigators here who started this war, there
Speaker 2: does appear to be a sort of rally around the
Speaker 2: flag effect and a willingness to withstand whatever it is
Speaker 2: the government policy in order to fight back against what
Speaker 2: the US is doing to them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the case, there's been some really great reporting
Speaker 4: from New York Times that I checked in on, So
Speaker 4: it's not as if this is just all like a
Speaker 4: total win for China. Like, the Chinese really depend on
Speaker 4: being able to export goods the United States, so it's
Speaker 4: not as if a trade war wouldn't be a disaster
Speaker 4: for their own economy. But what the Chinese have explicitly
Speaker 4: done since the last round of these wars back in
Speaker 4: the twenty eighteen period, is they've made their economy more resilient.
Speaker 4: They've prepped for this, They've set the national narrative. You
Speaker 4: are not going to see Chinese aside from the politics
Speaker 4: of it, you are not going to see Chinese small
Speaker 4: business owners knocking on She's door saying this is a
Speaker 4: disaster for us. This doesn't work. So they have set
Speaker 4: the table to fight a actual trade war, and what
Speaker 4: we have just literally not done. And I don't care
Speaker 4: if you're on the right and you like object even
Speaker 4: if you are on the right and think we need
Speaker 4: to take a totally different approach to trade, it would
Speaker 4: have taken multiple years of preparation to actually get our
Speaker 4: economy to the point where we could stand off against China.
Speaker 4: To your point, to the degree of which Trump wants
Speaker 4: to trade off on. I want to also go to
Speaker 4: LTINX comments about like national security, and that's why we
Speaker 4: need to really do this. I hope no one takes
Speaker 4: away the idea that you and I are dismissing the
Speaker 4: idea of that there are national security concerns here. My
Speaker 4: favorite topic on this is, like, we are incredibly dependent
Speaker 4: on China for pharmaceuticals. It's a huge problem to huge risk.
Speaker 4: This isn't just like a China Taiwan thing. This was
Speaker 4: like a COVID thing. Like there are so many critical,
Speaker 4: critical things that we're over dependent on China on and
Speaker 4: in an era where we have to be ready for
Speaker 4: supply chains to break at any any time. Once again,
Speaker 4: separate from your views of war and peace, we need
Speaker 4: to be more resilient in that category. The National Security
Speaker 4: Emergency supports the argument that, Wow, we should really really
Speaker 4: concentrate on these five specific areas. So once again, like
Speaker 4: we really really really should have focused on semiconductors, which
Speaker 4: is what the Bide administration is doing. Wow, even if
Speaker 4: our pharmaceutical goods are cheaper because of the fact that
Speaker 4: we get them from China, we can't be overly dependent
Speaker 4: on any one country and all of the cost that's
Speaker 4: happening right now. So if they'd come in and said, hey,
Speaker 4: here are these five to ten areas, we're going to
Speaker 4: hyper focus on them, and maybe if it turns out
Speaker 4: that makes pharmaceutical drugs more expensive, because we're reassuring we'll
Speaker 4: have some sort of subsidy or pursue some sort of
Speaker 4: industrial policy for purpoceutical goods. That would have been met
Speaker 4: not only with more policy consensus in this country. You
Speaker 4: wouldn't see the courts fighting, you wouldn't see the the
Speaker 4: you wouldn't see even Republicans, Republicans in Congress fighting. You
Speaker 4: wouldn't see angry, angry town halls where Republican congressmen and
Speaker 4: women cannot even articulate the case for this policy. That
Speaker 4: would have been the right approach here.
Speaker 3: That's a good transition into the next block.
Speaker 2: Actually, because you know what I learned yesterday, Marshall, Ninety
Speaker 2: percent of the drone industry is also in China.
Speaker 3: And obviously we covered yesterday.
Speaker 2: I will just put back up the images on the
Speaker 2: screen and refresh everybody's memory.
Speaker 3: Ukraine was able to.
Speaker 2: Commit an extraordinary drone attack on far flung Russian air bases,
Speaker 2: and it's not confirmed how many Russian warplanes they were
Speaker 2: able to take out. The Ukrainians are saying over forty.
Speaker 2: Of course the Russians are saying a lot less. There
Speaker 2: hasn't been independent confirmation, but obviously a significant amount of
Speaker 2: damage was done, and Marshall it was, you know, quite
Speaker 2: an extraordinary operation. Zelensky says, this was eighteen months in
Speaker 2: the making. They used it appears civilian supply chains, trucking
Speaker 2: in these drones on large trucks, leaving parking them in
Speaker 2: key positions. The drones were like hidden in the top
Speaker 2: of these crates, and then at the appropriate time, the
Speaker 2: crates were remote control opened and these little drones you
Speaker 2: know that looked like toys, were able to go out
Speaker 2: and to tremendous damage to the Russian air fleet. So
Speaker 2: we've got some interesting ban In comments. But before we
Speaker 2: get to that, since we didn't have you here yesterday,
Speaker 2: just tell us sort of your overall view of the
Speaker 2: significance of this operation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it really shows a key way that the war
Speaker 4: in Ukraine has changed in a way those toy different
Speaker 4: from the Biden administration. So one of the big debates
Speaker 4: within the Bided administration. The Biden administration as a fall
Speaker 4: areas sort of found itself in this like middle where
Speaker 4: basically no one was happy. Yeah, so there are always people,
Speaker 4: sort of the more populous side who thought that the
Speaker 4: Biden administration was escalating things in Ukraine and were way
Speaker 4: too sort of in favor of Selensky's approach. The Hawks
Speaker 4: were tit pissed because the US wasn't authorizing strikes in
Speaker 4: to Russia. We wouldn't. We would say, hey, if we're going
Speaker 4: to give you missiles, we're goinging you ammunition, ammunitions, you
Speaker 4: cannot use them to strike Russia's potential nuclear accids. Because,
Speaker 4: to build on your point, these weren't just like warplanes
Speaker 4: like these were like Russia's like strategic that's right, strategic.
Speaker 2: Bombers, nuclear bombers, some of which they're not really able
Speaker 2: to produce anymore.
Speaker 4: Apparently they're quite literally not able to produce. These These
Speaker 4: are they've obviously been upgraded, but like the t U
Speaker 4: ninety five is a Cold War relic, just in the
Speaker 4: same way that our B fifty two is the airframe
Speaker 4: first started in the nineteen fifties, same thing is true
Speaker 4: of these planes. These are propeller driven bombers. They can
Speaker 4: launch missiles. They've been launching missiles into Ukraine, but they
Speaker 4: also can be used to drop launch nuclear weapons. So
Speaker 4: the fact is now that Ukraine has this capability of
Speaker 4: utilizing the druids the way they use them. This isn't
Speaker 4: something that US control anymore. So it doesn't matter if
Speaker 4: we're not sending the missiles to launch these types of strikes.
Speaker 4: They have built their own drone industry. They've effectually become
Speaker 4: in many ways, and this is kind of an overstatement,
Speaker 4: but it gets to the point they've become a drone
Speaker 4: suit power. This has really changed the way they could
Speaker 4: approach and take this strategy. Another really interesting thing that
Speaker 4: I learned too, and this is why we were speaking
Speaker 4: earlierbout how we're entering in a really new era we
Speaker 4: need to think differently. It should be noted all these
Speaker 4: planes were out in the open. These were things that
Speaker 4: people could see. That stems from the fact that ever
Speaker 4: since the Cold War, it has been in a basic
Speaker 4: rule that there's a degree of transparency with nuclear forces.
Speaker 4: From a pure deterrence and awareness and safety perspective, it's
Speaker 4: unclear that after this attack, any country of nuclear weapons
Speaker 4: could afford to let their strategic bombers out in the open,
Speaker 4: even if it means that previous nuclear limitations treaties required,
Speaker 4: they'd be out in the open so we could monitor.
Speaker 4: That was a very good thing. That's the type of
Speaker 4: thing that you need to have in a cold war situation.
Speaker 4: That's not sustainable anymore if you can get civilian drones
Speaker 4: in or if you could convert civilian drones into military
Speaker 4: use and then launch these attacks within the country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's I mean, that's absolutely right. And you
Speaker 2: know you saw it also, the ability to use these
Speaker 2: relatively small, relatively low tech, and easily accessible drones to
Speaker 2: inflict significant damage. I mean, it really does level the
Speaker 2: playing field of war fighting in a way that should
Speaker 2: be very troubling to the US. You know, we see
Speaker 2: it certainly here in Ukraine, where increasingly it is a
Speaker 2: drone war where you have drones fighting against other drones.
Speaker 2: You also saw it to a certain degree on October
Speaker 2: seventh where Hamas. The first thing that they were able
Speaker 2: to do was to take out the very high tech fence,
Speaker 2: multi million dollar fence that Israel had built along the
Speaker 2: Gaza border, including you know, automated machine guns and surveillance.
Speaker 2: So they're able to take those out, and that's how
Speaker 2: they're able to effectuate their attacks on October seventh. So,
Speaker 2: you know, this was a complicated operation that Ukraine was
Speaker 2: able to pull off. The US claims they had no
Speaker 2: idea this was coming out. Don't know whether that's true
Speaker 2: or not. There would be some interest both from the
Speaker 2: Ukrainians and the US if they did collactate to deny
Speaker 2: that there was any sort of coordination or collaboration. So
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if that's true or not. But this
Speaker 2: was a complicated operation to pull off. At the same time,
Speaker 2: the tech is very easily available and very low cost,
Speaker 2: and so you know, obviously the reason for Zelensky to
Speaker 2: do this at this particular point in time is because
Speaker 2: there are peace talks ongoing. The general consensus is that
Speaker 2: Russia is in a much stronger position than Ukraine is
Speaker 2: because they have much more manpower and they might have
Speaker 2: much more industrial might than the Ukrainians do. And so
Speaker 2: this is an effort to say, look, this is not
Speaker 2: you know, the playing field is more level than you think,
Speaker 2: and we can inflict damage on you deep into your
Speaker 2: territory that you know, and it doesn't require the assistance
Speaker 2: of the United States of America to be able to
Speaker 2: pull this off.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know, And The way to understand the Russian
Speaker 4: position right now is there's some good reporting the Russians
Speaker 4: are moving miles a day, They're sort of advancing into Denetsk.
Speaker 4: And the thing is, if you're looking at the Ukrainian
Speaker 4: position right now, all what the Ukrainians are basically trying
Speaker 4: to do is just make clear of it. They are
Speaker 4: in this for the long term, especially in a world
Speaker 4: where they can no longer guarantee the United States is
Speaker 4: going to have their back in the same way that
Speaker 4: the Biden administration did. I think obviously the Zelensky JD
Speaker 4: events blow up at the White House was a disaster
Speaker 4: on like fifteen different levels. But what I think it
Speaker 4: really accomplished in a way that the Biden administration. I've
Speaker 4: read all the report, I still don't understand why this
Speaker 4: never happened. I think what the Oval Office blow up
Speaker 4: forced the Ukrainians to finally reckon with is the idea
Speaker 4: that they cannot take for granted that the United States
Speaker 4: will supply them with intelligence, to apply them with weapons,
Speaker 4: always have their back no matter what, always be pushing
Speaker 4: for them to sort of get some sort of settlement
Speaker 4: in the exact way it's most maximumly Ukrainian. What happened
Speaker 4: this past weekend is what happens when Ukraine grows is
Speaker 4: it has to be much more independent and be able
Speaker 4: to actually back itself up without just begging the United
Speaker 4: States for war.
Speaker 2: So let's go ahead and take a listen to Steve
Speaker 2: Bannon's reaction to this operation from the Ukrainians.
Speaker 7: The White House has to condemn this immediately and pull
Speaker 7: all support and tell Lindsey Graham come home.
Speaker 6: Are we're gonna put you under a restaurant? You come home?
Speaker 6: You're sterring it up.
Speaker 7: Lindsey Graham's over there saying, hey, forget Trump, I got
Speaker 7: the house in the Senate.
Speaker 6: We're gonna we're gonna pass them.
Speaker 7: You ever see something a couple of days, Remember that
Speaker 7: he's sterning it up over there. He's telling me the
Speaker 7: guy backing if they did not give us a heads
Speaker 7: up on this all full stop and no minerals deal,
Speaker 7: walk away from all of it, they're irresponsible and they're
Speaker 7: dragging us into a kinetic third World war. As we
Speaker 7: said us, we're getting dragged in now or the deep
Speaker 7: State is driving us in there.
Speaker 6: Either of these are not good.
Speaker 7: Tulca Gabbert's gotta let us know, did anyone in an
Speaker 7: intel at all have anything to do with this?
Speaker 6: Did anybody have a heads up? Did anybody? And if not,
Speaker 6: who the hell's running the Ukraine desk? Who's running the
Speaker 6: Russia desk? Same thing with Ratcliffe.
Speaker 7: This is why Cash and Bongino and Pam Bondi. You
Speaker 7: got to clear out the deep state. This is he's
Speaker 7: a ticking time bomb. And you see what they're going
Speaker 7: to get us into because now we're now in exorably
Speaker 7: we're being drawn into this.
Speaker 6: If we didn't know about it.
Speaker 7: The President to me has got to condemn it and
Speaker 7: got to say we're not gonna give any more support
Speaker 7: because these people cannot be trusted. You're supposed to be
Speaker 7: in Turkey today talking peace, not three thousand miles into
Speaker 7: Russia blown up their strategic bombers.
Speaker 2: So what do you make of Bannon's position here and
Speaker 2: and kind of the position he occupies in the party overall,
Speaker 2: because you know he does this thing where he'll be
Speaker 2: critical of certain things going on in the Trump administra.
Speaker 2: It's never Trump's fault though, right, he's very critical of
Speaker 2: Elon Musk, but it's not Trump's fault. He's very critical
Speaker 2: of the direction that they're going in Ukraine. But you know,
Speaker 2: it's it's the deep state, it's it never has anything
Speaker 2: to do with actually the administration.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the principal thing that a, I just
Speaker 4: appreciate you noting how in many ways Steve Bannon is
Speaker 4: a politician, and he asked if I can navigate that.
Speaker 4: So here's here's the prime flaw here. So Trump and
Speaker 4: Trump now claimed that his comment that he was getting
Speaker 4: in the warn in Ukrain on day one was was castick.
Speaker 4: I think that was not true at the time. I
Speaker 4: think that really did reflect his sort of perspective that
Speaker 4: Biden had bungled this among all the other things that
Speaker 4: Biden bungled, and therefore you could have gotten a deal
Speaker 4: like once Trump was actually there. If the US just
Speaker 4: walks away from Ukraine and not just like walks away
Speaker 4: in terms of like giving every single ammunition they asked for,
Speaker 4: or like saying we're going to back some fort of
Speaker 4: NATO or like EU membership, just actually walks away and
Speaker 4: leaves the table. Russia isn't going to settle like. I
Speaker 4: think it's very clear that Trump wants a settlement. I
Speaker 4: think in certain ways the Ukrainians and the Russians wants
Speaker 4: and eventual settlements. It's clearly neither side at this point
Speaker 4: is getting their end goal right. Like it should be
Speaker 4: noted that, like Putin, we should define his end goals.
Speaker 4: Putin launched this war claiming that Ukraine was a delegitimized,
Speaker 4: illegitimate Nazi state. Denoxification, debasification like this really should be
Speaker 4: unders this really should be understood. Is Rusia's Iraq War
Speaker 4: here in all of the disastrous ways that that metaphor
Speaker 4: really matters here, Ukraine's going to exist. Ukraine is a name.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 4: This war has forced Ukraine into a nation, So Putin
Speaker 4: is not going to get that full maximust extent. The
Speaker 4: Ukrainians are also not going to get because Trump has
Speaker 4: been very clear in a way the Biden and people
Speaker 4: were not clear. The US is not going to back
Speaker 4: Ukraine until they take back every single inch of their territory.
Speaker 4: So everyone is going to have to get some form
Speaker 4: of settlement at some point. However, the issue though, is
Speaker 4: if the US walks away and the US makes cover
Speaker 4: and not going to back Ukraine at least or even
Speaker 4: participate in the process, why would Putin stop from that perspective,
Speaker 4: and that's the other reason why we should understand Ukraine's
Speaker 4: need to launch an attack like this. Ukraine has to
Speaker 4: launch an attack like this to make clear that they
Speaker 4: are still in this, that this is serious. And even
Speaker 4: if the Russians are going to take miles of territory
Speaker 4: in eastern Ukraine, if they're going to slowly but surely
Speaker 4: match march forward, even though things are sort of still
Speaker 4: kind of stealmated, Russia isn't going to get its eventual
Speaker 4: total aim. Therefore, you have to get to some form
Speaker 4: of settlement.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, and I think this attack underscores why you need
Speaker 2: some sort of a settlement, because, I mean, it is
Speaker 2: a dangerous escalation, and you know, we do have to
Speaker 2: be wary of the fact that Russia is a nuclear
Speaker 2: arm superpower, and you know, Will Putin will be sensitive
Speaker 2: to this attack, which is incredibly embarrassing and humiliating that
Speaker 2: they were able to penetrate so deeply into Russian territory.
Speaker 2: So I think it underscores the need for a settlement.
Speaker 2: I mean, to be honest with you, I'm somewhat sympathetic
Speaker 2: to the Trump administration here because I do think it
Speaker 2: is such a mess and so difficult to untangle at
Speaker 2: this point. You know, you're talking a little bit about
Speaker 2: the Biden administration policy. In a lot of ways, it
Speaker 2: really was the worst of all worlds because obviously they
Speaker 2: short circuited and undercut the original peace talks, so there
Speaker 2: wasn't pressure early on for some sort of a settlement.
Speaker 2: I think that was a grave error, you know, underscoring
Speaker 2: the fact that listen, there's no guarantees obviously that there
Speaker 2: would have been an ability to have a resolution at
Speaker 2: that point. But I've also become more sympathetic to the
Speaker 2: sort of more hawkish faction that says, listen, you're just
Speaker 2: letting them bleed out slowly rather than and over time
Speaker 2: the Biden administration kept going, Okay, well you can't. You
Speaker 2: can have these particular weapons. You can have the long riage,
Speaker 2: all right, you can strike inside of Russia. So it's like, well,
Speaker 2: if you were going to do that anyway, you may
Speaker 2: as well have actually given them the tools to be
Speaker 2: more successful earlier on, push for a piece and be
Speaker 2: able to get some sort of a settlement that wouldn't
Speaker 2: be a complete and total disaster for the Ukrainians. So
Speaker 2: I do think that people who say that the Biden
Speaker 2: administration policy was kind of the worst of all worlds
Speaker 2: are absolutely correct. And at this point, it is a disastrous, brutal, bloody,
Speaker 2: horrifying mess that lands in the lap of the Trump administration.
Speaker 2: And I don't think that there is an easy resolution.
Speaker 2: There's certainly not a resolution that is going to make
Speaker 2: literally any side happy at this point.
Speaker 4: And look, and because the stakes and this is you've
Speaker 4: rerewly highlighted this, Because the stakes are nuclear, you cannot
Speaker 4: have a situation where the US just walks away. This
Speaker 4: isn't just another sort of Eurasian conflict. This isn't acerby
Speaker 4: Jean versus Armenia. The stakes here are nuclear. The stakes here,
Speaker 4: And I think if there's obviously you're not going to
Speaker 4: have our disagreements about the Cold War and the different
Speaker 4: ways that it went. But I think a key thing
Speaker 4: that was achieved during the Cold War is that we
Speaker 4: limited nuclear proliferation.
Speaker 3: The world still exists, the world that you will still exist.
Speaker 4: And because the stakes are nuclear in this case, a
Speaker 4: a Russia that just thinks it has total impunity to
Speaker 4: do whatever it wants about consequences the world where you
Speaker 4: could see that type of escalation. I think part of
Speaker 4: the reason why, and this is why I'll give like
Speaker 4: a mild defense of the Biden administration. The reason why
Speaker 4: they are hemming and highing and were never really finding
Speaker 4: support from either sort of like the skeptics or the
Speaker 4: hawks was that Jake Sullivan was terrified of nuclear conflict.
Speaker 4: So the well maybe this, maybe that's to your point
Speaker 4: they're saying, okay, no F sixteen's, okay F sixteens, no missiles,
Speaker 4: Okay missiles was because they, I think, took very very
Speaker 4: seriously the idea that Russia could potentially nuclear escalate. Russia didn't.
Speaker 4: Russia was bluffing. Like the actual thresholds for what Russia
Speaker 4: would say for Russia claim would lead to escalation were
Speaker 4: passed years ago. So the Biden administration slowly, slowly, slowly
Speaker 4: like dripped in. And I think we're probably over cautious
Speaker 4: if we look at like the pure like what are
Speaker 4: like the best possible world that could have came here.
Speaker 4: But they start to really manage that. But once again,
Speaker 4: they came to an uncomfortable, unpopular position because they're just
Speaker 4: trying to manage a nuclear conflict and that is like
Speaker 4: the primary thing. And once again Steve Bannon's position, I'd
Speaker 4: be more sympathetic to that if once again this was
Speaker 4: Azerbaijan versus Armania. The consequences of this war going the
Speaker 4: r on direction our order. Maybe Poland gets a nuke,
Speaker 4: Maybe other countries become convinced like, oh wow, like we're
Speaker 4: all in it on our own. We can't be guaranteed
Speaker 4: that the US or the EU or other powers or
Speaker 4: have our backs. We need to get a nuke. Maybe
Speaker 4: South Korea needs to get a nuke. I think just
Speaker 4: tamping that down is why we have like an exit.
Speaker 4: And here's the key thing too, And this is what
Speaker 4: the Hawks did not do. US helping to bring this
Speaker 4: conflict to an end does not mean Ukraine gets an
Speaker 4: unlimited sort of amount of munitions or weapons. It doesn't.
Speaker 4: And this is what the Bidomen efficient also did not do.
Speaker 4: They should have made much clearer because they knew this
Speaker 4: internally that the American people did not support a US
Speaker 4: Ukraine policy that equaled they take back Crimea in every
Speaker 4: single part of Eastern Ukraine. That was never the actual
Speaker 4: in the administration consensus. What the American people want is
Speaker 4: a situation where this war comes to an end and
Speaker 4: Trump participating and negotiating and driving this process, him serving
Speaker 4: as the third force that's pressing these two sides who
Speaker 4: know in their heart of hearts they need to settle
Speaker 4: in some ways, but our incentivized not to do it.
Speaker 4: Like once again, more New York Times reported that I'll
Speaker 4: shout out of breaking points, you know, space to the
Speaker 4: mainstream media. Mainstream media has its actual functions. I'll pointed
Speaker 4: out that part of what's driving Russia's unwillingness to take
Speaker 4: the negotiation, and seriously, like they sent junior diplomats, not
Speaker 4: serious senior level diplomats, is they're like, actually, we've got
Speaker 4: a summer offensive. It's kind of moving. Let's take as
Speaker 4: much territory as we can over Things slow down in
Speaker 4: the winter. So that's really the situation that we're playing
Speaker 4: with now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly right. And the last week we can
Speaker 2: put up on the screen here is before guys. So
Speaker 2: there were negotiations yesterday. They were among low level delegations.
Speaker 2: As Marshall was just gesturing towards Ukraine. Russia remain far
Speaker 2: apart on ceasefire terms at these Istanbul talk apparently you
Speaker 2: know they're they're nowhere really in the ballpark of any
Speaker 2: sort of agreement. There was a prisoner swap that was
Speaker 2: agreed to, but that's really all that came out of that. So,
Speaker 2: you know, you have the the Ukrainians that were able
Speaker 2: to pull off this dramatic, risky but quite you know,
Speaker 2: damaging an effective attack within Russia. You have the Russians
Speaker 2: who've been able to claim quite a bit of territory
Speaker 2: actually just in the recent paths, and neither side really
Speaker 2: looking to uh, really looking to bring it to a
Speaker 2: close or you know, take the losses that would be
Speaker 2: entailed in bringing this to some sort of a settlement.
Speaker 3: In the near term.
Speaker 2: All right, let's turn to the New York City mayoral race,
Speaker 2: which has become much more interesting, I think than people expected.
Speaker 3: It can put C three up on the screen.
Speaker 2: There's a bunch of contenders here, but the two that
Speaker 2: are really in contention are former New York Government Governor
Speaker 2: Andrew Cuomo and Democratic Socialists Zoron Mamdani. So this looks
Speaker 2: very complicated. This is a recent Emerson poll that can
Speaker 2: came out. They do rank choice voting in New York City.
Speaker 2: That's why you have all of these different rounds. But
Speaker 2: the one that really matters is if you look all
Speaker 2: the way to the tenth round, you've got Cuomo coming
Speaker 2: in at fifty four, so we're still winning, but his
Speaker 2: edge has significantly declined, and nipping at his heels at
Speaker 2: this point is Zoron Mamdani at forty six percent. So
Speaker 2: we definitely have ourselves a race here. You know, mum
Speaker 2: Donni obviously not enjoying the vast name recognition that Cuomo
Speaker 2: has in the establishment backing, et cetera, really been an
Speaker 2: upstart Marshall. There's some indications that even he and his
Speaker 2: campaign were not expecting him to have this much traction
Speaker 2: in this race. And so we've got a couple of
Speaker 2: clips of Zoron that we can play here in a minute,
Speaker 2: but just wanted to get your reaction off the top
Speaker 2: of some of the dynamics that you see unfolding here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so several things here, I think, so, and we'll
Speaker 4: get into this Zoron. What I love about this race
Speaker 4: that that's sort of like a microcosm of all of
Speaker 4: the challenges facing the Democratic Party as we like look forward.
Speaker 4: So you have an aging, sort of like unattractive, establishment
Speaker 4: centrist candidate who doesn't really stand for anything, Like I
Speaker 4: genuinely do not know if you said to me, Marshall,
Speaker 4: like what is Andrew Coomo running on beyond just like
Speaker 4: post me to redemption, I could actually like not articulate
Speaker 4: that for you, and I don't think most people can. Versus,
Speaker 4: Zoran clearly believes in things, and I think is being
Speaker 4: really responsive. He's really great social media. He's also bringing
Speaker 4: the suit back. This is where I will speak for Sager.
Speaker 4: I think he looks so great in his suit, and
Speaker 4: I think that hopefully he can move us past like
Speaker 4: the very condescending era of like politicians like dressing down
Speaker 4: sort of act like they're like fake and that sort
Speaker 4: of with it. So like maybe there's a fashion trend.
Speaker 4: We could do a breaking point spin off on those
Speaker 4: cultural things. But I think so really, but that's the
Speaker 4: but here's the problem for Zoran though he's still underperforming
Speaker 4: with like over forty black voters, Like that's the central
Speaker 4: So if the central challenge for centrism is it's like
Speaker 4: central casting problem, the challenge for democratic socialism and Zoran
Speaker 4: is just the fact that like with like black and
Speaker 4: like Hispanic working past voters, just a real amount of
Speaker 4: skepticism about the project.
Speaker 2: So I want to talk more about that. Let's go
Speaker 2: ahead and put C four up on the screen, just
Speaker 2: to underscore what Marshall is saying here about what the
Speaker 2: various coalitions are. Coloma's strongest support comes from black voters
Speaker 2: at seventy four percent, older voters over fifty at sixty six.
Speaker 3: Percent, And this one kills me.
Speaker 2: Women really guys fifty eight percent to forty two percent.
Speaker 2: Mom Donnie leads among voters under fifty with sixty one percent,
Speaker 2: holds an edge among white voters fifty seven to forty three,
Speaker 2: and college educated voters fifty eight to forty two. So
Speaker 2: it's the exact opposite of the coalition that he would,
Speaker 2: you know, claims to speak to, and that his agenda
Speaker 2: is really crafted to attempt to appeal to. Before we
Speaker 2: talk a little bit more about that, because I do
Speaker 2: want to dig in on that piece. He was on
Speaker 2: MSNBC recently and I thought was asked a good series
Speaker 2: of questions about his platform and especially about the critique
Speaker 2: of like, yeah, you know, you're really too far left
Speaker 2: to appeal to be able to govern effectively. There's a
Speaker 2: concern within the establishment quarters of the Democratic Party that
Speaker 2: what's gone wrong with the party is that it's gone
Speaker 2: too far left. Obviously I have my disagreements with that,
Speaker 2: but is an important question ask let's go and take
Speaker 2: a listen to how Zorun responded.
Speaker 9: What New Yorkers deserve is a plan that actually speaks
Speaker 9: to the crisis in their lives, and affordability is the
Speaker 9: number one crisis. So we're going to freeze the rent
Speaker 9: for more than two million New Yorkers live in rent
Speaker 9: stabilized housing. We're going to make the slowest buses in
Speaker 9: the nation fast and free. And we're going to deliver
Speaker 9: universal childcare to each and every New Yorker, whether their
Speaker 9: child is six weeks or five years of age, because
Speaker 9: today childcare is the number two reason people are leaving
Speaker 9: our city, and it makes sense. It costs twenty five
Speaker 9: thousand dollars a year to raise a kid here, which
Speaker 9: is more money than it would cost to send that
Speaker 9: same kid to Quney eighteen years later.
Speaker 10: What do you say, though, to Democrats who look at
Speaker 10: what we saw in November with Vice President Harris losing,
Speaker 10: and a lot of the postgame analysis, if you will,
Speaker 10: was the party had moved too far to the left
Speaker 10: that it was actually time to come back to the
Speaker 10: center a little bit, to connect to a lot of
Speaker 10: those working class, blue collar voters who have broken for
Speaker 10: Trump in recent cycles. That seems to be what Governor
Speaker 10: Cuomo is saying. You say to people who say, well,
Speaker 10: I like the guy, but he's not right for this moment,
Speaker 10: he's too lefty.
Speaker 9: Well, you know, I think we as politicians need to
Speaker 9: lecture less and listen more. And when we saw New
Speaker 9: York have the greatest swing towards Trump in the entire
Speaker 9: nation eleven and a half points, we saw that it
Speaker 9: took place in the hearts of immigrant New York. And
Speaker 9: so I went there to Fordham Road in the Bronx
Speaker 9: Hillside Avenue in Queens. I asked those voters why did
Speaker 9: they vote for him, and they told me they remembered
Speaker 9: having more money in their pocket four years ago. I
Speaker 9: asked them what it would take to bring them back
Speaker 9: to the Democratic Party. They said, a relentless focus on
Speaker 9: an economic agenda. And when I told them my plan
Speaker 9: to freeze the rent, make buses fast, and free deliver
Speaker 9: universal childcare, they said that they would vote for me.
Speaker 9: And I think ultimately that's what we need, is a
Speaker 9: recognition that for too long, our party has moved away
Speaker 9: from working class voters. It's time we actually bring them back.
Speaker 2: So I personally think that's a great answer because he
Speaker 2: reframes it as not just like a where are you
Speaker 2: on the left right ideological access, but hey, we need
Speaker 2: to deliver for people in cost of living? Is this,
Speaker 2: you know, crushing burden, especially in a city like New York.
Speaker 2: And so here are the really super concrete ways that
Speaker 2: I'm going to try to make life a little bit
Speaker 2: easier for working class voters.
Speaker 3: What did you think of how he responded, Yeah.
Speaker 4: I know it's really funny because if and this is
Speaker 4: why I'm just really down on Cuomo as a candidate.
Speaker 4: If you think of like what the best version of
Speaker 4: like the centrist, pragmatic, technocratic prinches is just like, look
Speaker 4: forget the lofty stuff. People aren't trying to have a
Speaker 4: big ideological debate about socialism or liberalism or whatever. They
Speaker 4: just like are trying to put food on the table,
Speaker 4: and they care about things. So Zoran is given just
Speaker 4: like a perfect like, hey, life's expensive, rent control, life's expensive.
Speaker 4: We're going to focus on like housing and those other issues.
Speaker 4: In childcare. I just had a kid, myself, and even
Speaker 4: in the Texas suburbs, it is incredibly expensive. I cannot
Speaker 4: imagine how expensive it is in New York right now.
Speaker 4: So it's just wild to me that Cuomo and his
Speaker 4: team I think it's because they were asleep at the
Speaker 4: wheel allowed themselves for Culoma to take like the general
Speaker 4: like rhetorical attack of what centrist moderate candidate is and
Speaker 4: just like bring it that way. Like I think that
Speaker 4: their worst sort of DSA candidates come off like they
Speaker 4: and this is the diploma divide that center were of politics.
Speaker 4: Too many DSA candidates come off like they're sort of
Speaker 4: like campus organizers or they're sort of in academia and
Speaker 4: they're having this big debate about worker power versus. I
Speaker 4: don't think that means anything to most people. Zora was
Speaker 4: just like this, this and that. Yeah, Cloma hasn't responded
Speaker 4: to it, and I, you know, you know, since my
Speaker 4: politics is more to the center here, like I have
Speaker 4: like qualms and concerns about like rent controlling those different issues.
Speaker 4: But it's just like really frustrating that like if and
Speaker 4: if you're actually kind of this is kind of what
Speaker 4: we want politics to look like, we actually want politics
Speaker 4: not to just be like a you're a socialist, Well
Speaker 4: you were a me too, monster Like that's like very
Speaker 4: destructive and unhelpful. I love how Zoran has brought policies
Speaker 4: to the table when I wish we had a politics
Speaker 4: where Cuoma could say, hey, rent control, I get why
Speaker 4: you're doing it, here's why it doesn't work. Here is
Speaker 4: my actual plan. The lack of that Onquoulos side is
Speaker 4: a huge problem. And then the other big issue I
Speaker 4: want to respond to the comment about didn't voters perceive
Speaker 4: like Kamala Harris is being too left? And you know
Speaker 4: this is a left to yourself. Of the big issues
Speaker 4: facing the American left right now is when voters say
Speaker 4: the left broadly, they conflate like a bunch of different things.
Speaker 4: So the left doesn't just mean rent control, minimum wage increases,
Speaker 4: universal healthcare, things that pull really really popularly. It also
Speaker 4: means certain positions on crime and immigration, especially with working
Speaker 4: class voters. There are a lot of working class voters
Speaker 4: who want the minimum wage to be higher, but also
Speaker 4: are skeptical of like democratic approaches to crime, especially in
Speaker 4: a post twenty twenty one era. There are a bunch
Speaker 4: of people, the voters who he's going to speak with
Speaker 4: who are going to say we support economic populism, but
Speaker 4: actually we're really worried about like migration in the ways
Speaker 4: that it's like overstrained the city and its resources. So
Speaker 4: I think the thing that Zaron is really getting out here,
Speaker 4: and this is why he's not talking about the cultural
Speaker 4: issues as much, is he's focusing on that part of
Speaker 4: the left another thing, and this is just like so fascinating.
Speaker 4: This is the type of thing which centrist and my
Speaker 4: sort of can't need to really reckon with. We're assessing,
Speaker 4: you know, Kamala Harris's campaign obviously in the wake of
Speaker 4: Original Sin, but it was revealed that her most popular
Speaker 4: ads had to deal with building more housing mm hm
Speaker 4: and cracking down on landlords. Those messages actually broke through.
Speaker 4: So I think the problem was sort of like the
Speaker 4: left camp that like Zoran is there to engage with,
Speaker 4: they are a little unfocused on like the building more
Speaker 4: housing part. Like this Zuri politics are kind of the
Speaker 4: mb Rent control is effect for people who have housing
Speaker 4: right now, but what are the people who don't have housing?
Speaker 4: It's it's not a full spectrum approach, and housing policy
Speaker 4: actually requires that we do a bunch of things at once,
Speaker 4: but once again Zorn is speaking to an environment where
Speaker 4: people saying they don't like the left, but Kamala Harrison's
Speaker 4: most popular policies are a weird mix of like centrist
Speaker 4: the mbiism, but like left oriented landlord punching.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, I mean my politics are the center of
Speaker 2: the policy conversation and the center of the political narrative
Speaker 2: that should be pushed by you know, by the left
Speaker 2: and by Democrats. More broadly, focus is on economic populism,
Speaker 2: where you have the impeding like Trump has this narrative
Speaker 2: about immigrants are ruining the country, trans people are ruining
Speaker 2: the country, cultural elites, college educated women, they're destroying your life,
Speaker 2: ruining the country, destroying your.
Speaker 3: Communities, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And Democrats basically don't have a consistent coherent story of
Speaker 2: what has gone wrong in the country, What has gone
Speaker 2: wrong that led to your life being difficult, What has
Speaker 2: gone wrong that led to the rise of Trump, that
Speaker 2: led to the rerise of Trump. They have not really
Speaker 2: had a coherent storyline about that. And you know this
Speaker 2: will we'll get into this more in the abundance discussion.
Speaker 2: But the story that resonates with the majority vast majority
Speaker 2: of Democrats and vast majority of independence and majority overall
Speaker 2: of the American people. Is the reason life has gotten
Speaker 2: difficult is because you have a bunch of greedy billionaires
Speaker 2: who have rigged the system and we're effectively incompatible with democracy.
Speaker 2: And I think that's just you know, with the rise
Speaker 2: of Elon Musk and what we've seen in this administration,
Speaker 2: they've sort of made the case that the acceleration of
Speaker 2: oligarchy truly does represent both a democratic threat and an
Speaker 2: economic threat to people overall. So, you know, that's why
Speaker 2: this conversation about you know, well, should should we like
Speaker 2: throw the trans people overboard or should we throw the
Speaker 2: immigrants overboard? I think sort of misses the point because
Speaker 2: the reason those issues were made so salient and so
Speaker 2: effectively by Trump is because they fit into his narrative
Speaker 2: of what had gone wrong in the country. The reason
Speaker 2: why Democrats were unable to stand up to those narratives
Speaker 2: is because they didn't have their own story and theory
Speaker 2: of the case of what had gone wrong that made
Speaker 2: any kind of sense to people. So that's sort of
Speaker 2: my view of why that conversation really misses the mark.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you think about this is what always
Speaker 2: strives to crazy. Like if you think about polling the
Speaker 2: comments that Trump has made and the things that he
Speaker 2: has done, including things like, you know, you want to
Speaker 2: talk about crime and safety and policing whatever, Like he
Speaker 2: pardoned all the violent January sixers who beat up a
Speaker 2: bunch of cops. It pulls it like five percent support.
Speaker 2: Even one of the January six ers was like, I
Speaker 2: don't even.
Speaker 3: Want this pard and I broke the law. I shouldn't
Speaker 3: be forgiven for it.
Speaker 2: So, you know, that's where I get frustrated with some
Speaker 2: of the conversation around, like let's just pull out what
Speaker 2: the right positions are and let's just locate ourselves on
Speaker 2: the ideological spectrum.
Speaker 3: Number one.
Speaker 2: It ignores the fact that people's minds can be changed,
Speaker 2: as they obviously you know, have been on a variety
Speaker 2: of issues over time. It also ignores the fact that
Speaker 2: Trump won while holding some like insanely unpopular positions. Why
Speaker 2: because he had a compelling, wrong, evil crule in my
Speaker 2: opinion storyline, but that rang is true to people and
Speaker 2: sort of hung together as a narrative.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I said earlier, I didn't re understand the
Speaker 4: rationale for Cuomo's candidacy, but like in your comments you
Speaker 4: kind of revealed it, like Cuomo's candidacy was really was
Speaker 4: really premised on this November December, January vibe shift where like,
Speaker 4: oh wow, like Democrats overreached in so many different ways.
Speaker 4: We overreached on me too, in the sense that like
Speaker 4: young men are incredibly skeptical imat, we overreached on immigration,
Speaker 4: we overreach on LGBTQ rights. It it I think makes
Speaker 4: sense to look at a bunch of policy issues that
Speaker 4: when I think the DEVI has to defer over reaching
Speaker 4: those categories. But if you really understand what's being said there,
Speaker 4: it's incredibly defensive, right. It's basically this theory of the
Speaker 4: way we come back into power is by recognizing where
Speaker 4: we overreach and basically either explaining or not explaining why
Speaker 4: our position is different. I think that's needed in a
Speaker 4: bunch of cases, especially where those positions like lost trust,
Speaker 4: like I think Biden's immigration policy really damage the party's
Speaker 4: long term trust with like these same like working class
Speaker 4: black and Hispanic voters who like Zorin is really speaking to,
Speaker 4: So that has to be acknowledged. But what Centrist did
Speaker 4: not do, and I say this is the person who
Speaker 4: is more of in decently centrist coded is they didn't
Speaker 4: actually focus on what does the offense look like? So okay,
Speaker 4: we need to get a more moderator, or not even
Speaker 4: moderate in the sense of like we're just moving the
Speaker 4: chessboard pieces around. But like I love zorro UN's quote,
Speaker 4: listen to voters. Let's listen to what voters are actually
Speaker 4: saying on socio cultural issues and have an agenda's response
Speaker 4: to the step one. But step two is also what
Speaker 4: else are they also saying that requires us to have
Speaker 4: something to say. So Cuomo was ready to basically just say, hey,
Speaker 4: I'm the research and center left. Everything that's gonna be normal,
Speaker 4: and twenty nineteen, again that wasn't enough when people were
Speaker 4: facing an affordability and housing crisis.
Speaker 2: Well, and not only that, it's very convenient for a Cuomo,
Speaker 2: who is an establishment politician who is very closely aligned
Speaker 2: with business interest and you know, interests of the wealthy
Speaker 2: in New York City, and you know that comes out
Speaker 2: in is a rhetoric, et cetera.
Speaker 3: It's very convenient for.
Speaker 2: Him to say, well, the parts of the agenda that
Speaker 2: don't threaten wealthy interests, those are the parts that we
Speaker 2: can dispatch with, and that's going to enable me to
Speaker 2: keep together, you know, my wealthy donor base and make
Speaker 2: sure that there's nothing that infringes on the things that
Speaker 2: they want to do. And I think we saw a
Speaker 2: lot of that coming out of Trump's reelect, where there
Speaker 2: was an immediate effort to basically do the things that
Speaker 2: are easy in terms from a sort of like wealthy
Speaker 2: donor perspective, and not analyze any of the failings on
Speaker 2: the like you know, economic populist front and in the
Speaker 2: areas that you know would be more challenging and uncomfortable
Speaker 2: for some of those alliances with mainstream democratic politicians. I
Speaker 2: do want to go back to THO because I'm curious
Speaker 2: your view of, you know, the demographics that we put
Speaker 2: up earlier. There was all kinds of conversation during Bernie
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen and again in Bernie twenty twenty about the
Speaker 2: nature and demographics of his coalition, and I think, you know,
Speaker 2: parts of that were always really unfair because it was
Speaker 2: very much stereotyped as like it's just a bunch of
Speaker 2: white bros. Well, now that the white bros have shifted
Speaker 2: to the right, the Democrats would very much like to
Speaker 2: get those white bros back, But it was also never
Speaker 2: truly representative of what his coalition was. Bernie did have
Speaker 2: a largely working class coalition. His his greatest weakness with
Speaker 2: older black voters, and I think we can talk about
Speaker 2: why that is. It's now increasingly apparent that that's not
Speaker 2: a Bernie Sanders weakness, that is a left weakness in general,
Speaker 2: as evidenced by you know, Zorn and as evidenced by
Speaker 2: any number of other you know, sort of left progressive
Speaker 2: DSA type candidates. But you know, he had a it
Speaker 2: was a diverse working class base, including Latinos in particular,
Speaker 2: and certainly among young people. And that generational divide is
Speaker 2: important as well, because the stereotype was always like, oh,
Speaker 2: black people just don't like Bernie Sanders. If you looked
Speaker 2: at young black people, that was not the case. You know,
Speaker 2: he had a very diverse coalition among young people. So
Speaker 2: why do you think it is that the left consistently
Speaker 2: struggles with older black voters in particular seemed to be
Speaker 2: the greatest sort of challenge point for you know, for
Speaker 2: people who have a DSA style ideology.
Speaker 4: So yeah, so I think a we should understand that
Speaker 4: there's a policy pitch and there's a political pitch and
Speaker 4: a lot of what when I talked to sort of
Speaker 4: like you know, when we used to do Breaking Points
Speaker 4: live show, Like when we actually would talk to people
Speaker 4: who were attracted to these sort of ideas. Yeah, they're
Speaker 4: really attracted to like the anti Democratic Party, anti status
Speaker 4: quo part of the Bernie pitch. It wasn't talk to people.
Speaker 4: They'd say, yeah, I like universal health care, Yeah I
Speaker 4: want Medicare for all, Yeah, I want them minium wage increases, etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera. They would say those things, but like what
Speaker 4: was really animating them was just a deep distrust and
Speaker 4: not just distrust, but deep dislike of center establishment politics.
Speaker 4: These are people who came of age after nine to eleven,
Speaker 4: after the two thousand and financial crisis, right after twenty sixteen,
Speaker 4: after COVID. There is very little to no reason why
Speaker 4: people should trust if you grew up in that environment
Speaker 4: the center. If you're looking to order black voters who
Speaker 4: are rooted in the civil rights there, who are rooted
Speaker 4: in a different era of the American political system, that
Speaker 4: appeal of like, don't you just hate these old bums
Speaker 4: who just like screw everything up that just is not
Speaker 4: going to resound as well. So I think it's particularly
Speaker 4: attractive of the way that Zorin's approaching this is he's
Speaker 4: making this much less of a establishment versus anti establishment
Speaker 4: pitch though like it's obviously there and more just I'm
Speaker 4: going to go down the line and find the positions
Speaker 4: that you actually agree with and you were actually thinking about.
Speaker 4: So this is also another broader and there's a there's
Speaker 4: a warning here two min all offer at the end
Speaker 4: of this, but there's also a broder lesson here for
Speaker 4: the left, which is that, like you know, my takeaways,
Speaker 4: I'm actually thinking that like city issues and municipalities are
Speaker 4: probably a better fit for left politics right in this
Speaker 4: immediate most So, like you know, if you figure out
Speaker 4: it this way, like what is the central challenge that
Speaker 4: like centrists like to say to like leftist who say
Speaker 4: they want to take other political system they say, like, okay, cool,
Speaker 4: then like flip a red state or flip a purple state,
Speaker 4: or when a congressional district the same way that we're
Speaker 4: doing right now. It's a tall order and it is
Speaker 4: and I think it's a real serious challenge that left
Speaker 4: politics needs to really answer. And the thing is, though,
Speaker 4: if we're actually looking at like these actual cities, we
Speaker 4: look at the combination of policies and political dynamics that
Speaker 4: are better suited to the local rather than like the
Speaker 4: national wise dynamics. Sara's not having soon. It's not having
Speaker 4: to debate LGBTQ people. He's not debating immigration policy. He's
Speaker 4: talking about specific city issues. The warning though for the
Speaker 4: progressive left though is Chicago and Brandon Johnson, because the
Speaker 4: in this is we'll get into this during the abundance
Speaker 4: a conversation. I think a problem the left has yet
Speaker 4: to reconcile is that it's one thing to run successful campaigns,
Speaker 4: to put together narratives that I think are clearly like
Speaker 4: winning the long term narrative war, and actually governed. So
Speaker 4: he could say we're going to make buses fast and
Speaker 4: free so that during the clip, okay, can you actually
Speaker 4: do that? And okay, we're going to impose rent control,
Speaker 4: But if you don't actually make more housing over more people,
Speaker 4: if that's what we're going to help people who I
Speaker 4: kind of have theirs, what are you actually going to
Speaker 4: do when these actual challenges come in?
Speaker 6: Okay?
Speaker 4: Cool. You're going to do paid Sicklyave. That's really great.
Speaker 4: How I know this is usually a cent for stunk,
Speaker 4: but it really matters in like city and states where
Speaker 4: the budget is actually constrained and where voters also do
Speaker 4: not want tax increases. How are you actually going to
Speaker 4: pay for this program and make it actually work? Brandon
Speaker 4: Johnson's one of the least the mayor of Chicago is
Speaker 4: one of the least popular politicians in America because he
Speaker 4: campaigned on these sets of issues, but he did not
Speaker 4: have the talent, the coalition, the ability to actually get
Speaker 4: it done. So that the warning for the left.
Speaker 3: I think that's fair. But I also would say that
Speaker 3: the left always has.
Speaker 2: To answer for any politician on the left who doesn't deliver,
Speaker 2: but like the center never has to answer for Gavin
Speaker 2: Newsom or Kathy Hokle, who's you know, pretty profoundly unpopular.
Speaker 2: And I would also say that the most popular Democratic
Speaker 2: governor in the country is any Bushier in Kentucky, who
Speaker 2: may not be DSA, but he is an economic populist.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I used to live in Kentucky,
Speaker 2: have followed I know him a little bit, and I've
Speaker 2: followed his career and his pitch very closely. And I
Speaker 2: still talk to people in Kentucky about what it is
Speaker 2: about him that's really resonating there. And it's not because
Speaker 2: he you know, did a hard right turn on any
Speaker 2: particular issue. He stood up for transparently close churches during COVID,
Speaker 2: you know, he went all in on, like, you know,
Speaker 2: protecting people from the disease. But there are two things
Speaker 2: that people mentioned to me. Number one is just that
Speaker 2: he is hyper accessible. During COVID, he was doing like
Speaker 2: weekly certainly and maybe daylight briefings where he would just
Speaker 2: go out and talk to people in this way that
Speaker 2: was felt very approachable.
Speaker 3: And like you actually had a direct line to him.
Speaker 2: In number two, you know, his pitch has been on healthcare, education,
Speaker 2: and good union jobs. And he's brought a lot of
Speaker 2: good union jobs. Some of that came from the Biden
Speaker 2: administration into the state of Kentucky, and so he really
Speaker 2: has sort of delivered on this economic populist message. So
Speaker 2: I would put him up as proof that that general direction,
Speaker 2: when executed effectively, is highly successful, both in terms of
Speaker 2: the policy and in terms of the politics. You know,
Speaker 2: if you also look at congressional districts across the country.
Speaker 2: A lot of the candidates that have overperformed they may
Speaker 2: not be you know, exactly Bernie Sanders, but they have
Speaker 2: really featured a challenge of corporate power in their messaging
Speaker 2: and have used that to consistently outperform you know, the
Speaker 2: top of the ticket. So I do think that there
Speaker 2: is plenty to suggest electorally that there's a lot there.
Speaker 2: But you know, to your point, obviously, it has to
Speaker 2: be competently executed, and at the city level, especially when
Speaker 2: you're talking about you know, any sort of executive position,
Speaker 2: it has to be competently executed because at the end
Speaker 2: of the day, it's like did the trash get picked
Speaker 2: up or did it not get picked Did the snow
Speaker 2: get removed or did it not get removed. One thing
Speaker 2: I want in this will helps transition more into the
Speaker 2: abundance conversation is that one thing that's interesting to me
Speaker 2: about Zoron and this actually isn't unusual on the left.
Speaker 2: Oftentimes the left does focus on issues like zoning reform
Speaker 2: and some of the things that are you know, considered
Speaker 2: to be abundance policy. He has not only gone leaned
Speaker 2: into those more like DSA policies like the rent freeze
Speaker 2: and the free busts and those sorts of things. He
Speaker 2: also has made an explicit focus of zoning regulations of
Speaker 2: you know, streamlining bureaucracy for small businesses. He's talked about,
Speaker 2: you know, some of these things that are like single
Speaker 2: staircase reform and some of the things that are like
Speaker 2: core the abundance movement and the zoning reform movement. More broadly,
Speaker 2: let's go ahead and take a listen to this ad
Speaker 2: that he cut about small business in particular.
Speaker 9: There's a lot of things that make New York City
Speaker 9: special for me. It's the delis in Bodegas. Hopey be,
Speaker 9: could I get an egg and cheese on a roll
Speaker 9: with jalapeno ones don't want especially coming up. Small businesses
Speaker 9: employed nearly half of all New Yorkers in the private sector.
Speaker 11: They keep the city running.
Speaker 9: But the last four years have been hard. We've seen
Speaker 9: the dollar slice go extinct, storefront after storefront close and
Speaker 9: had a mayor and Eric Adams who has ignored the
Speaker 9: struggles of small businesses. That's why it is Mayor, I'm
Speaker 9: going to make it faster, easier, and cheaper for small
Speaker 9: businesses to get started and stay open. First, we're going
Speaker 9: to cut fines and fees for small businesses by fifty percent.
Speaker 9: Regulations are important, but small businesses have to navigate more
Speaker 9: than six thousand of them with far fewer resources than
Speaker 9: the big chains. That's why is Mayor, I'll appoint a
Speaker 9: mom and popzar with the clear goal of making it
Speaker 9: easier to run a small business. One thousand dollars isn't
Speaker 9: a lot to our city government, but it can be
Speaker 9: make or break for a small business trying to get
Speaker 9: off the ground. Next, we're going to the mom and
Speaker 9: pops are will coordinate with agencies to speed up turnaround times,
Speaker 9: cut rent tape, and letting Yorker start businesses soon because
Speaker 9: you shouldn't have to fill out twenty four forms and
Speaker 9: go through seven agencies to start a barbershop. But most
Speaker 9: of all, we're putting our money where our mouth is
Speaker 9: by increasing funding for small business support programs with five
Speaker 9: hundred percent. We're going to invest twenty million dollars in
Speaker 9: our business express service teams.
Speaker 2: So very abundancy messaging. I would say, you know, what
Speaker 2: do you what do you think of the pairing of
Speaker 2: the you know, the rent control, the free public transit
Speaker 2: and some of those other policies alongside the zoning reform,
Speaker 2: the cutting red tape and the kind of like abundance
Speaker 2: suite of policy options.
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, I think you are going to talk with
Speaker 4: this later. But as someone in the Abundance camp who's
Speaker 4: probably done more speaking with the left than like anyone
Speaker 4: else in that broad coalition, Yeah, what I keep hearing
Speaker 4: is obviously there's like the ang for your like Twitter
Speaker 4: discourse and they're all like the negative reviews. But when
Speaker 4: I talk to people in the know who I would
Speaker 4: take seriously, they're like, look, Abundance at its best has
Speaker 4: pointed out some real problems, and we'd like to get
Speaker 4: to a yes and from a progressive perspective that doesn't
Speaker 4: just treat us as these people to be left punched,
Speaker 4: but like a broader conversation, because like this is like
Speaker 4: I'm really interested in, like UK politics. I always like
Speaker 4: to think of American politics in a sense of like coalitions,
Speaker 4: Like this is a coalition, And if a coalition is
Speaker 4: going to be like fifty plus one and actually have
Speaker 4: a governing majority, it has to take everyone's different perspectives
Speaker 4: of mine too. So I really think that like the
Speaker 4: best version of the abundance agenda is going to be
Speaker 4: a set of policies that a politician like so around
Speaker 4: kid likes take and leave. This is good, this is good.
Speaker 4: That isn't good, That isn't good. Okay, I'm governing. How
Speaker 4: do I actually make this happen? That's my best version
Speaker 4: of the project, rather than just a version that equals okay. Now,
Speaker 4: we ought to support Richie Torus for governor.
Speaker 2: When I saw the reaction to that ad from specifically Mataglesius,
Speaker 2: who's an abundance guy.
Speaker 3: And his position is you should basically rank zoran last.
Speaker 2: Cuomo would be superior Quomo, who we know was a
Speaker 2: failed governor and to you know, like older elderly people
Speaker 2: like to die in nursing homes during COVID is. Obviously
Speaker 2: there's the me too issues. Doesn't really stand for much
Speaker 2: of anything other than preserving the status quo. He thinks
Speaker 2: that he would be superior to Zoron, and there's just
Speaker 2: it seemed to expose that abundance is not really about
Speaker 2: getting to yes, and it is actually an attempt to
Speaker 2: compete with what is an ascendant narrative within the Democratic Party,
Speaker 2: a very popular narrative within the Democratic Party about fighting
Speaker 2: corporate power and fighting oligarchy.
Speaker 3: So how do how should I think about those things?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the key thing here is abundance is rooted right,
Speaker 4: So actually abundance is a bunch of different things, right, So.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, so maybe startof do you define about He's.
Speaker 4: Hard to find abundance. So Ezra and Derek have written
Speaker 4: this incredibly successful policy book, and yes, like it's an
Speaker 4: airport book. It's a quick read, but policy books like that,
Speaker 4: even short and accessible ones, do not sell as many
Speaker 4: books as they have sold. They have big platforms, they're
Speaker 4: really good writers. Like this is speaking to a set
Speaker 4: of people who have like real organic like interests and
Speaker 4: thoughts behind this. So that's that's one part of it.
Speaker 4: The other part is there's a right wing people call
Speaker 4: it dark abundance that anyways is sort of more of
Speaker 4: the vcs like Mark Andrecent people in the Trump administration
Speaker 4: sort of a lot of the tech right falls into
Speaker 4: that sort of like right wing abundance kind of because
Speaker 4: they're like, look like Trump's going to build nuclear Trump's
Speaker 4: going to deregulate everything and help us build again. Technology
Speaker 4: is the way to the American future, etcetera. Etcetera. That's
Speaker 4: part of the abundance movement as well too, though I
Speaker 4: would not overstate the use of the word abundance. And
Speaker 4: then there are sort of like this I think unhelpful
Speaker 4: sort of version of abundance that in many ways is
Speaker 4: this center that was finding itself in a defensive position
Speaker 4: after November December, where they said, Okay, we have to
Speaker 4: moderate on LGBTQ issues, we have to moderate an immigration etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 4: but we actually do need to have something like forward
Speaker 4: facing to say, and they've adopted abundance as part of
Speaker 4: that project because though the project is like moderating and
Speaker 4: making the Democratic Party more centrist, abundance has been mixed
Speaker 4: into that. What I'm trying to do with my work
Speaker 4: from my small podcast perch is build out abundance as
Speaker 4: a broader sort of approach or set of policies and
Speaker 4: questions that any sort of like from the center to
Speaker 4: the left over we thinking about it, and I think
Speaker 4: the way about to tell a story. And I'm not
Speaker 4: saying this as a dunk on you. This has become
Speaker 4: a sort of close table. I'm actually asking did you
Speaker 4: read the book Abundance? Yes? Okay, so you noticed the
Speaker 4: first the first chapter is this like twenty to fifty
Speaker 4: vision of the future where like technology and growth provided
Speaker 4: us all these different great things. I actually really did
Speaker 4: not like that first chapter, especially from the perspective of
Speaker 4: articular into the left. Why that should actually care about
Speaker 4: these ideas because I think a to your point, we
Speaker 4: live in an error where people are backlashing against oligarchy,
Speaker 4: where people like aren't excited about technology or resubating smartphones
Speaker 4: like that is a version of the book. Because this
Speaker 4: book was supposed to come out in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 4: I've suspect if they were to start this project today,
Speaker 4: the book first chapter be a little different. So my
Speaker 4: pitch for what the first chapter should have looked like
Speaker 4: is rooted in me not being a New Yorker or
Speaker 4: a San Franciscan, which is where a lot of the
Speaker 4: mb House people come from, with me being like a Texan.
Speaker 4: I live in Austin, I lived next to the hill Country,
Speaker 4: and I haven't looked at the books in a while,
Speaker 4: but the Path to Power that Robert Carrow's biography LBJ
Speaker 4: is no longer back there. But that was a really
Speaker 4: informative book for like Sager and my politics. And here's
Speaker 4: my favorite chapter of the book. It talks about how
Speaker 4: in nineteen thirty seven LBJ is a Congressman and during
Speaker 4: the New Deal there's something called the Rural Electrification Administration
Speaker 4: and what it literally did was bring power to rural America.
Speaker 4: We had electricity in the country of more than fifty years,
Speaker 4: but the private sector was not delivering electricity to the
Speaker 4: hill country to pour like hard scrabble farmers. And what
Speaker 4: the New Deal did used a combination of private actors
Speaker 4: and public actors to create these co ops that brought
Speaker 4: and Robert Carroll's telling I really reckon people read this
Speaker 4: book brought people into the twentieth century from the Stone Age. Effectively,
Speaker 4: people are like didn't have powered, Now they have power.
Speaker 4: That is a vision of broad left liberalism that deliver
Speaker 4: for people and really mattered and got over the actual
Speaker 4: objections and things that wouldn't make that happen. So rooting
Speaker 4: abundance in the story of Like Wow, Like it used
Speaker 4: to be that we had like a majoritarian left liberal
Speaker 4: politics that could fundamentally change people's lives by delivering them
Speaker 4: things that are powered by technology, that are powered by
Speaker 4: different forms of organizing and when the private sector or
Speaker 4: the public center can't get it done. That's really what
Speaker 4: I want abundance to be rooted. And I think the
Speaker 4: first chapter of the book that we pitched to the
Speaker 4: left would be rooted not in the future in a
Speaker 4: way that people aren't really bought into, just in the
Speaker 4: like why was it that nineteen thirties liberalism could deliver?
Speaker 4: But if we asked basically anyone, they would say that
Speaker 4: like New York, California, etc. All these like bastions of
Speaker 4: like left liberalism can't really deliver. That's why I want
Speaker 4: abundance to be rooted in.
Speaker 2: I think the whole country can't deliver. Though I mean,
Speaker 2: I am perfectly willing and happy to admit I'm in
Speaker 2: favor of, you know, zoning reform. That there are you know,
Speaker 2: ways that the Texas housing zoning policy is superior to
Speaker 2: the California zoning policy. But I feel like the differences
Speaker 2: between Texas and California are less important than the differences
Speaker 2: between America now and America during the New Deal.
Speaker 3: As you're laying out and so, you.
Speaker 2: Know, I was telling you before, I feel a little
Speaker 2: bit gas lit on abundance because sometimes it will be
Speaker 2: pitched to me this way of like we're just talking
Speaker 2: about the new deal, like you like the new deal,
Speaker 2: right bro?
Speaker 3: And I'm like, yeah, I like the new Deal.
Speaker 2: And then other times it's pitched like screws or on
Speaker 2: Mundani and we just need to you know, effectively, like
Speaker 2: abundance is just a new pitch for neoliberalism where we
Speaker 2: get the regulators out of the way and these out
Speaker 2: of touch do good or liberals so that the big
Speaker 2: business can do their thing. And it can't be both
Speaker 2: of these things. So there is a part the goals
Speaker 2: of abundance. Who could disagree with, right, building more stuff,
Speaker 2: building more housing, making housing more forward to actually being
Speaker 2: able to do the high spreed rail like really building out.
Speaker 2: And this is where there's another i think tension within abundance,
Speaker 2: like really building out the capability to move into a
Speaker 2: green energy future. But to your point about there's this
Speaker 2: other part of abundance that also is very fossil fuel
Speaker 2: aligned and is you know, exist in the Trump administration,
Speaker 2: which does not actually want that green energy future. It
Speaker 2: certainly starts to feel like, okay, this is being used
Speaker 2: whatever the intentions of you know, various people in the
Speaker 2: movement are it's being used as a way to stop
Speaker 2: a shift in the Democratic Party that would otherwise organically happen,
Speaker 2: and that you see happening towards, you know, a framing
Speaker 2: around corporate power and checking oligarchy. And so that's where
Speaker 2: the concern comes in, is that you've got this moment.
Speaker 2: You have this reckoning with the you know, the wreckage
Speaker 2: of neoliberalism that has been repudiated sort of across the board.
Speaker 3: Here and around the world.
Speaker 2: By the way, you have a moment where Bernie and
Speaker 2: AOC have never been more popular, not just with the
Speaker 2: original Bernie base, but with the broader Democratic Party. You
Speaker 2: have a really clear reckoning with oligarchy, which has been
Speaker 2: made you know, abundantly evident by the Trump administration and
Speaker 2: Elon and Doge and the tech right, and having all
Speaker 2: of those oligarchs behind him at the inauguration, and the
Speaker 2: way that so much of their policy is driven towards
Speaker 2: providing for the billionaire class.
Speaker 3: You also have this.
Speaker 2: Reckoning with AI coming where these people are trying to
Speaker 2: become the first trillionaires and eliminate like half of the jobs,
Speaker 2: and into this march is effectively what appears to me
Speaker 2: to be basically like a rebranding of neoliberalism to say,
Speaker 2: oh no, this is new and different, but really try
Speaker 2: to preserve the status quo. And that's where you know,
Speaker 2: I think evidence for this in terms of the way
Speaker 2: it's being used is by how eagerly it's being accepted
Speaker 2: by the richie tours is of the world, by the
Speaker 2: entire Senate Democratic Caucus and the establishment democratic figures who
Speaker 2: are most comfortable with trying to preserve the status quo.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that I'll offer you kind of
Speaker 4: a rubric here, so you should note that when I
Speaker 4: was sort of giving my pitch for abundance, I wasn't saying,
Speaker 4: and we need to get America back to growth. Growth
Speaker 4: is the key key thing. Growth growth, growth, growth growth.
Speaker 4: You'll kind of hear that from sort of like the
Speaker 4: right wing like tech billionaire crowd here. That is like
Speaker 4: the version of abundance which is basically just like a
Speaker 4: substitute for like neoliberalism, just substitute for me, we regulate
Speaker 4: and something that that is a key thing that I
Speaker 4: really should out for here. But let's go back to
Speaker 4: this Zorron conversation. What I love about abundance, and this
Speaker 4: is like the key thing. We're going to talk about
Speaker 4: this pole in a second. But there's you know, there's
Speaker 4: a poll out there it by Demand Progress that revealed
Speaker 4: that abundance messaging is far less popular when you're not
Speaker 4: door knocking for voters than a more populis centric pitch.
Speaker 4: So I think that that's fine, Like that is not
Speaker 4: a shocker, Like if you are running for office right now,
Speaker 4: you should not be talking about bottlenecks, and like the
Speaker 4: fact that like our NEA laws have made it so
Speaker 4: permitting doesn't Like that is not the pitch. The pitches
Speaker 4: that like Elon Musk is like literally killing kids in Africa.
Speaker 4: He's cutting your grandmother off of Social Security. So a
Speaker 4: bunch of like eighteen year old you know dudes can
Speaker 4: like play around and pretend they're like new dealers or
Speaker 4: something like that. Like that is what you are talking about,
Speaker 4: right and to your point about Zora, And you're also
Speaker 4: talking about like housing and afford a bit like actual
Speaker 4: not not just like housing in the Astra, but like actually,
Speaker 4: like I am meeting you as a voter, and I'm
Speaker 4: recognizing the number one thing you're worried about right now
Speaker 4: is how truly precarious American life is right now, So
Speaker 4: like that is what the actual electoral pitch is. But
Speaker 4: what abundance should be in response to voters not being
Speaker 4: jazzed about bottleneck reforms is a tool kit to help
Speaker 4: politicians actually think through how freaking complicated and difficult it
Speaker 4: is to navigate this country. So back when I was
Speaker 4: first getting into policy, if you were reluctive, you're talking
Speaker 4: about people talking people about housing, we just say, like, yeah,
Speaker 4: like rend control or you know, like let's just like
Speaker 4: kind of do that. Abundance expands the set of policies
Speaker 4: in a bigger direction, So it says, okay, soron. So like,
Speaker 4: I'm not going to convince Ron in any way whatsoever
Speaker 4: that rent control isn't what like New Yorkers are demanding
Speaker 4: or what wouldn't be informer delivery for his base. What
Speaker 4: I could offer with the abundance toolkit is, but hey,
Speaker 4: we really should also build more housing because there's a
Speaker 4: real gap and shortage of housing. And yes, there are
Speaker 4: two million New Yorkers who want rent control, but there's
Speaker 4: also like other New Yorkers who don't have apartments right
Speaker 4: now in the first place, and need apartments to actually
Speaker 4: exist in the first place. So my real like and
Speaker 4: the good news here too is.
Speaker 3: What would she embraces Yeah and so great?
Speaker 4: Right? That is that is that is what yes and
Speaker 4: looks like. And once again yes and should also be
Speaker 4: rooted in that Kamala Harris poll. And add thing we
Speaker 4: talked about earlier where it's like voters love more housing,
Speaker 4: talk about the new dear or like what did Harry
Speaker 4: Truman do after he comes into office? There was a
Speaker 4: housing shortage in America. Whence all the g eyes came back,
Speaker 4: We built more housing. This is we have to people
Speaker 4: do in this country. So we're gonna have to come
Speaker 4: up with a broad mix of doing these different things.
Speaker 4: I think part of the issue too, of abundance what
Speaker 4: kind of Ezra and Derek or pundits like that is
Speaker 4: their job, Like if you're a pundit, you noticed like
Speaker 4: you have to make your argument, dial it up to
Speaker 4: one hundred and twenty percent and advance the argument. So
Speaker 4: they in their argument really focus this on the deregulatory story.
Speaker 4: The reason why I went back to the New Deal
Speaker 4: story in terms of my telling of abundance is more
Speaker 4: just that we should be focused at this point in
Speaker 4: the conversation, or we put it this way because people
Speaker 4: what I wear are conversations they want. We should root
Speaker 4: our abundance conversations when we're trying to engage between like
Speaker 4: the center and the left in objectives and then work
Speaker 4: our way backwards rather than just sort of saying, hey, guys,
Speaker 4: guess what deregulations they answered all of your problems. You're
Speaker 4: not going to agree with that. What I want you
Speaker 4: to agree with me here, and I suspect you will,
Speaker 4: is we need to approach housing through a bunch of
Speaker 4: different vectors. Rent control is not going to solve everything.
Speaker 4: That's your concession. I'm going to concede that if we
Speaker 4: magically also a we're not going to magically just relax
Speaker 4: zoning across the country because the incredibly unpopular, ironically enough,
Speaker 4: even with moderate centrist voters. I live in the Texas suburbs.
Speaker 4: I promise you these mind. And this is also why
Speaker 4: the centrist like Abundance Project is going to run into
Speaker 4: like a weird place. I promise you like my centrist
Speaker 4: Texas voters definitely would like they're down for the moderate
Speaker 4: on social cultural issues part, they are not down for
Speaker 4: like a mass GMBD regulatory program that fundamentally transforms the suburbs.
Speaker 4: So we're both going to have to make some of
Speaker 4: some sort of like concession here and build an approach together.
Speaker 4: And that starts with recognizing, wow, we need to get
Speaker 4: more housing for people and make housing more affordable. That's
Speaker 4: a bunch of different approaches.
Speaker 2: I agree with all of that when you read the book.
Speaker 2: That is not actually the message of the book. And
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that has been useful
Speaker 2: to me in listening to the re alignment is helping
Speaker 2: to understand, like, Okay, the book is not the entirety
Speaker 2: of There are different factions here and the book is
Speaker 2: not the entirety of the movement. But you know, when
Speaker 2: we were talking about narratives before, the narrative of the
Speaker 2: book is that there were these liberal do gutters who
Speaker 2: put a bunch of regulations in place, well intentioned that
Speaker 2: have been that have you know, outserved their usefulness and
Speaker 2: need to go. And a lot of this becomes very
Speaker 2: squishy because there are difficult moral choices involved in, you know,
Speaker 2: pushing to the side any of these you know, regulations
Speaker 2: or any of the interest groups involved in what Ezra
Speaker 2: Client calls everything bagel liberalism, so he never wants to
Speaker 2: actually say, like, and that's why we shouldn't use prevailing
Speaker 2: wage standards, right, Or that's why we shouldn't require childcare
Speaker 2: as part of building these projects, or that's why we
Speaker 2: shouldn't do environmental review, or that's why we shouldn't have
Speaker 2: these air protections to make sure that when we do
Speaker 2: build public housing that poor people aren't like suffering from
Speaker 2: asthma and other conditions that.
Speaker 3: Would be avoidable.
Speaker 2: That's all kind of pushed to the side so that
Speaker 2: it feels like there are no difficult moral choices that
Speaker 2: have to be made there when there actually are.
Speaker 3: So that's number one.
Speaker 2: Number two is what I would say is like on
Speaker 2: some of the concrete examples about you know, zoning regulation
Speaker 2: and about building out green energy, I don't even I
Speaker 2: don't disagree. What I disagree with is making that story
Speaker 2: the central story to politics, because I don't. It's not
Speaker 2: that it's not part of the picture, but I don't
Speaker 2: think it is the central story to politics whatsoever. And
Speaker 2: just to give one example, you know why when they
Speaker 2: did this massive study to look at, okay, when zoning
Speaker 2: reform has been implemented, what has been the impact on
Speaker 2: the housing supply, and it's it's not that it had
Speaker 2: no impact, but it increased housing supply.
Speaker 3: By like point eight percent.
Speaker 2: So to have it as part of the agenda and
Speaker 2: to understand these issues in terms of governance and being
Speaker 2: able to better deliver, yes, absolutely. If you're trying to
Speaker 2: supplant an oligar anti oligarch agenda with a yimbi agenda
Speaker 2: and a deregulatory agenda, yes, those two things are actually
Speaker 2: at odds with each other, and I.
Speaker 3: Think they fail.
Speaker 2: I think they fail on both the I think abundance
Speaker 2: as like this narrow we need to deregulate project fails
Speaker 2: both on the policy level to deliver the things that
Speaker 2: we would want to deliver and on a political level
Speaker 2: in terms of winning elections at a time when you know,
Speaker 2: the stakes are really existential. Like you know, if you
Speaker 2: zoom out for a minute, here we are, and I
Speaker 2: don't know if we agree on all of the contours
Speaker 2: of this, but I think we're witnessing the rise of
Speaker 2: a sort of like would be fascism and techno authoritarianism.
Speaker 2: You have these you know, powerful billionaires who are have
Speaker 2: vast control over our government, who are doing things like,
Speaker 2: you know, just cutting the funding of USAID so that
Speaker 2: millions of people around the world may die as a
Speaker 2: result of those cuts.
Speaker 3: We're stripping the social safety net.
Speaker 2: Who are deregulating AI so that there's just this you know,
Speaker 2: massive rush into an AI arms race that could have
Speaker 2: completely devastating consequences for the human race. But in the
Speaker 2: war immediate term is certainly going to cause significant labor
Speaker 2: and worker displacement. And you know, this agenda is being
Speaker 2: pursued at a rapid and terrifying pace. And so to
Speaker 2: fight back against that with zoning reform and you know,
Speaker 2: getting the regulations out of the way, it's just to me,
Speaker 2: it feels so wildly inadequate to the moment and what
Speaker 2: we actually need to deliver as a you know, counter
Speaker 2: political project to what is rapidly coalescing in this country
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So two things. So number one, I want to
Speaker 4: focus on like the liberal do good or deregulation story
Speaker 4: because I think it's really important. So what's been unfortunate
Speaker 4: from an abundance perspective is like Derek and Azer, because
Speaker 4: they're the size of their audience has just blotted out
Speaker 4: the sun. There was another book about abundance that also
Speaker 4: came out a month before. It's called Why Nothing Works
Speaker 4: by Market Dogglement. It's a very very good Frankly, it's
Speaker 4: actually a much better book. It's one hundred pages longer. People,
Speaker 4: if you want to really learn about these books, should
Speaker 4: read these books. They Why Nothing Works and when. What
Speaker 4: Mark does an amazing job is he tells this abundant
Speaker 4: story through the lens of like debates about America and
Speaker 4: the left and liberalism for the twentieth centuries. Here's here's
Speaker 4: the way he tells the story. In the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 4: you saw he explains us that liberalism and by the way,
Speaker 4: I know people, you know this, people get so nitpicky
Speaker 4: with the terms basically describing like left of like center
Speaker 4: left thought in America extends all the way out during
Speaker 4: the nineteen thirties. The way he explains this is liberalism
Speaker 4: has like two instincts. Like one is like the Hamiltonian
Speaker 4: instinct after like Alexandra Hamilton. It's it's big, it's making moves,
Speaker 4: it's trying to force change, it's aggressive. So the New
Speaker 4: Deal was a Hamiltonian project. We were going to once
Speaker 4: again electrify the whole country. We're going to build the TVA,
Speaker 4: we are going to build the Hoover Dan. We're gonna
Speaker 4: do all these big, big, big things and bring America
Speaker 4: into the twentieth century. We'll also like regulating capitalism, all
Speaker 4: these like different aspects. So that created a lot of
Speaker 4: really great stuff. And also, though, and this is why
Speaker 4: I think this needs to be more rooted in the
Speaker 4: story of abundance, it created a lot of bad things,
Speaker 4: Like what is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring about? Like what
Speaker 4: were all those nineties? What is Ralph Nader is like
Speaker 4: unsafe at any speak? All these sort of like left
Speaker 4: movements that came out of the nineteen sixties looked at
Speaker 4: a lot of like the benefits of what we got
Speaker 4: from that Hamiltonian New Deal era, where we also had
Speaker 4: business and government working very very and labor working very
Speaker 4: very comfortably low two entangled together. There was a real
Speaker 4: industrial complex there. We got a lot of benefit, but
Speaker 4: we also got crazy costs. We have Robert Moses like
Speaker 4: destroying whole neighborhoods of people in New York City, We
Speaker 4: had the police, We had all these different issues. So
Speaker 4: that activated a Jeffersonian instinct once again named after Thomas Jefferson,
Speaker 4: what's going to listen to me? Just citing Mark here,
Speaker 4: But the Jeffersonian instinct is like, nah, what about the people?
Speaker 4: What about the local community. Did anyone ask, like a
Speaker 4: small community of black people in New York City whether
Speaker 4: they agree with Robert Moses's grand Hamiltonian vision of what
Speaker 4: the twentieth century city looked like. So, coming into the
Speaker 4: sixties and seventies, as weocused more on the costs of
Speaker 4: everything liberalism accomplished, we got movements and said, hey, let's
Speaker 4: focus on the on the on the downsides of that,
Speaker 4: and that's really important. And I would really push back
Speaker 4: on your idea that the best version of abundant says
Speaker 4: we're just going to jettison We're going to jettison those
Speaker 4: regulations because they are just slowing us down and they're
Speaker 4: a whole problem. No, like democracy, like all our politics
Speaker 4: needs to be rooted in a belief in democracy and
Speaker 4: once again a balancing of the Hamiltonian vision and the
Speaker 4: Jeffersonian vision. So the way that he kind of explains
Speaker 4: this is what's going to work out during this era
Speaker 4: is how do we balance the recognition And I think
Speaker 4: this is what The Green New Deal is the definition
Speaker 4: of a Hamiltonian project, right. The Green New Deal recognizes
Speaker 4: that in a climate crisis, America has to move, It
Speaker 4: has to move fast as to be big, and it
Speaker 4: has to be bigginning. It's it's an ambitions. We're not
Speaker 4: going to get this done via a bunch of tax
Speaker 4: credits to a bunch of corporations. You get this done,
Speaker 4: that's Hamiltonian. Jeffersonian side, though, is hey a Hamiltonian project
Speaker 4: that has premised on us bulldozing in the entire country,
Speaker 4: not listening to communities who may have pollution, not listening
Speaker 4: to local communities who have their own Actually, it's also
Speaker 4: not going to work. So what I'm trying to do
Speaker 4: with my work, and this is why I'm really grateful
Speaker 4: to have a platform to talk about this here, is
Speaker 4: how do we actually balance the Hamiltonian instinct with the
Speaker 4: Jeffersonian instinct. And I think if Ezra and Derek spoke
Speaker 4: from the perspective more of like balancing those dynamics, And
Speaker 4: that's what we're trying to really get to. How do
Speaker 4: we recognize a climate crisis? How do you recognize the
Speaker 4: fact that you really need to get how do we
Speaker 4: recognize the fact that we need to reshore our semiconductors
Speaker 4: in this country with the fact that we have local
Speaker 4: communities and democracy. So that's what I'm trying to basically
Speaker 4: get to. And the last thing in the second part
Speaker 4: of your response is, look, I think an abundance And
Speaker 4: this is why I said that Ezra and Derek are
Speaker 4: doing the pundant thing where they dial everything up to
Speaker 4: one hundred and twenty percent to sell their argument. This
Speaker 4: is everyone does this right. This is a left fright
Speaker 4: of center thing. I think there's been a serious overstatement
Speaker 4: of effect of abundance and gender policies, and I don't
Speaker 4: want to I would, and that's why my pitch for
Speaker 4: what we do moving forward. I'm doing this on my
Speaker 4: own and other people are thinking about this too too.
Speaker 4: When when I talk about this on the podcast, I
Speaker 4: get input from actual politicians and actual staffers of what
Speaker 4: they're looking for. Is what we're talking about this here too.
Speaker 4: That's actually the funny thing, Like most people are not
Speaker 4: actually looking to do a big like centrist versus like
Speaker 4: progressive fight. Most people recognize what time it is and
Speaker 4: how we need to build something together. So my point
Speaker 4: is let's focus on I would love to sit down
Speaker 4: with Stora and right here and say, look, let's just
Speaker 4: start the fact that housing is a crisis and we
Speaker 4: need more of it and it needs to be more affordable,
Speaker 4: and then we work our way backwards to how we
Speaker 4: actually get there. If abundance people are not willing to
Speaker 4: do that, then A they're not going to gain political
Speaker 4: power in the first place, given your point, but B
Speaker 4: it's not going to work.
Speaker 2: So Unfortunately, at the very end of that segment with Marshall,
Speaker 2: I collapse into a coughing fit, which took me a
Speaker 2: while to recover from. But I just wanted to make
Speaker 2: sure to say thank you so much to Marshall. Really
Speaker 2: enjoyed seeing him, enjoyed engaging with him. I thought it
Speaker 2: was really great to have his insights on what is
Speaker 2: going on in the world and abundance. All right, let's
Speaker 2: go ahead and move on to what is going on
Speaker 2: with Palenteer. Trump administration, according to The New York Times,
Speaker 2: is launching this elaborate project to hoover up all of
Speaker 2: our data to consolidate it in one database, and they
Speaker 2: are working with Palenteer in order to accomplish these goals.
Speaker 3: So let's talk to Ken Clippenstein about what's going on here.
Speaker 2: Joining us this morning is Ken Klippenstein, who is a
Speaker 2: fantastic journalist over at Substack and has been following I
Speaker 2: guess you'd probably called the deep state the national security
Speaker 2: state for a long time.
Speaker 3: Great to see you again, Hey, good to be back.
Speaker 2: So I have grave concern and interest over these reports
Speaker 2: that Palenteer is going to be working with the Trump
Speaker 2: administration to compile this massive database of information about American citizens.
Speaker 2: We can put this up on the screen from the
Speaker 2: New York Times, they say Trump taps Palenteer to compile
Speaker 2: data on Americans. The Trump administration has expanded Palenteers work
Speaker 2: with the government, spreading the company's technology which could easily
Speaker 2: merge data on Americans throughout eahencies. So help us understand
Speaker 2: stand the contours of the story and what Palenteer even
Speaker 2: is and what it means for ordinary people.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so Palenteer is this sort of AI fueled software
Speaker 8: tech company that is a contractor for all sorts of
Speaker 8: national security agencies across government. I believe they had a
Speaker 8: meeting with the IDF last year in relation to the
Speaker 8: war in Gaza. So basically because of the advancements in
Speaker 8: AI that we've seen over the last several years, it
Speaker 8: has become an integral part of basically every major military
Speaker 8: at this point, for things like targeting kind of the
Speaker 8: roat stuff that it would have taken a lot of
Speaker 8: human manpower to do. Now they're no longer limited by that.
Speaker 8: And I think the concern on the part of ordinary people,
Speaker 8: even if you're not someone that lives in Gaza or
Speaker 8: in Ukraine where it's being used, or wherever else, is
Speaker 8: that something that has preserved our civil liberties for a
Speaker 8: long time has been just the pragmatic fact that as
Speaker 8: much information as agencies collect, it was never feasible for
Speaker 8: them to be able to go through it.
Speaker 4: All.
Speaker 8: AI now is making it possible to do that, To
Speaker 8: triage these huge amounts of data that are being siphoned
Speaker 8: up not just by social media analysis but network analysis
Speaker 8: ways that they try to map out connections between people.
Speaker 8: All of that now is able to be done in
Speaker 8: near real time without that delimiting factor of how many
Speaker 8: people you can actually have to go through it.
Speaker 3: So more perfect.
Speaker 2: Union put together a good video explaining what Palenteer is,
Speaker 2: what it does, and how the Federal government may be
Speaker 2: planning to use it.
Speaker 3: Let's go ahead and take a listen to a portion
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 12: There's a reason Palenteer just replaced Ford Motors in the
Speaker 12: S and P one hundred in the months after Trump
Speaker 12: was elected. The Trump administration is an ideal customer for
Speaker 12: what Palenteer is selling. First, there are many former Palenteer
Speaker 12: employees sprinkled across the administration, from inside DOGE to foreign
Speaker 12: policy advisors to high level technology appointees, and Palenteer co
Speaker 12: founder Peter Thiel, heavily invested in the company, is also
Speaker 12: heavily invested in President Trump and Vice President Vance. He
Speaker 12: was a major campaign donor to both. Then, the stated
Speaker 12: goal of DOGE is to streamline and combine government data,
Speaker 12: which is exactly what Palenteer does.
Speaker 10: The ways that the government is defrauded is that the
Speaker 10: computer systems don't talk to each other.
Speaker 12: And obviously Karp is.
Speaker 6: Loving in disruption.
Speaker 7: At the end of the day, exposed as things that
Speaker 7: aren't working, there'll be ups and downs, there's a revolution.
Speaker 4: Some people can get their heads cut off, Like you know,
Speaker 4: it's like we're we're.
Speaker 7: Expecting to see really unexpected things.
Speaker 4: And to win.
Speaker 12: And what is winning. According to Palenteer, this is CTO
Speaker 12: Shamsen Karr in twenty twenty.
Speaker 11: One, turning to government, we continue to advance our mission
Speaker 11: of becoming the US Government's central operating system as we
Speaker 11: extend our footprint across defense, healthcare, and suit allien agencies.
Speaker 12: The government's operating system, they want everything to funnel through, Palenteer.
Speaker 2: So the US Government's central operating system, and we can
Speaker 2: put E four actually up on the screen here. Jason
Speaker 2: Bassler tweeted about some of the data the government already
Speaker 2: collects on everybody that would now be centralized and unified.
Speaker 2: He's talking about tax filing, student dead, social security bank accounts,
Speaker 2: medical claims, immigration status, and he says no previous database
Speaker 2: system has ever centralized as much personal info across various
Speaker 2: federal agencies. So help us understand the extent of this
Speaker 2: in the ways in which this could be deployed. You know,
Speaker 2: I think we already have some inklings of this from
Speaker 2: the War on Terror and the way that you know,
Speaker 2: dissent in various administrations has been has been curbed and
Speaker 2: people profiled who may be at odds with administration priorities.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so the national security state is so pervasive in
Speaker 8: the United States that if you look at a case
Speaker 8: like ICE, which you mentioned a moment ago, they're being
Speaker 8: our on a large I think it was a thirty
Speaker 8: million dollar contract that they were rewarded. People think of
Speaker 8: ICE as the deportation Squad, which that's obviously part of
Speaker 8: their job, but they have another lesser known division that
Speaker 8: it's kind of like the Homeland Security Department's own equivalent
Speaker 8: of the FBI. It's called Homeland Security Investigations. And if
Speaker 8: you go and look through some of the stuff that's
Speaker 8: been released under FOYA about them, they're involved in monitoring
Speaker 8: protesters related to the Gaza war, stuff that you wouldn't
Speaker 8: think of as what you think of as ICE's remit,
Speaker 8: you know, being going after people that they're going to deport.
Speaker 8: That's what it's other function, called Enforcement and Removal Operations does,
Speaker 8: But that's not all they do. So these guys have
Speaker 8: a very broad mission set. It's not just immigration, it's
Speaker 8: also quote national security threats, which can encompass a lot.
Speaker 4: They've got thousands of special agents.
Speaker 8: It's kind of the biggest law enforcement agency you've never
Speaker 8: heard of Homeland Security Investigations.
Speaker 4: So not only is that all true of ice. ICE
Speaker 4: is not actually a.
Speaker 8: Member of the intelligence community, so at the very least
Speaker 8: we hear more about it because it's less secretive than
Speaker 8: some of the other agencies. My concern is the contracts
Speaker 8: that a company like Pound is being awarded on the
Speaker 8: classified side. On the side that is the national security agencies,
Speaker 8: you know, the part of FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency.
Speaker 8: We're not going to hear about any of that. And
Speaker 8: my sense from talking to people is that there is
Speaker 8: a massive deployment going on at that level, as well
Speaker 8: as the you know, lower law enforcement agencies that are
Speaker 8: not a member of that system of the of the
Speaker 8: intelligence community like I. So so what we're talking about
Speaker 8: now is just the tip of the iceberg and what
Speaker 8: you're actually able to see.
Speaker 4: All this is important thing to talk about. What you
Speaker 4: did there.
Speaker 8: All this is important thing to talk about because when
Speaker 8: Trump talks about cutting these agencies, and in some cases
Speaker 8: he is trying to cut them. He proposed to five
Speaker 8: percent cut to FBI, for instance, and cutting certain things
Speaker 8: in the Department of Defense, the military. He's cutting legacy systems.
Speaker 8: So we're talking Lockey Martin. It's going to affect the
Speaker 8: old school companies but what's happening at the same time
Speaker 8: is more money is being thrown at these newer entrants
Speaker 8: who are focused on AI technology. So it's sort of
Speaker 8: misleading to say he wants to cut these deep state agencies.
Speaker 8: It's more like he wants to move the money from
Speaker 8: these legacy platforms, which I think there's a good argument for,
Speaker 8: but towards these AI fueled ones that raise all these
Speaker 8: civil liberties concerns that we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Now, right, And you wrote an article called Homeland Securities,
Speaker 2: pre Crime Push where you're talking about some of these elements.
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the things that I've been really
Speaker 2: thinking through in this era where the Trump administration is
Speaker 2: trying to fectuate this policy of mass deportation, there's a
Speaker 2: conception that you can sort of limit those tactics just
Speaker 2: to the immigrant or the undocumented immigrant population. That's not possible,
Speaker 2: And I mean, we already see this in ways that
Speaker 2: American citizens are getting swept up by ice. You see
Speaker 2: this in the way that American citizens who may be
Speaker 2: married to an immigrant are having their liberties infringed upon.
Speaker 2: But more broadly, in order to figure out who is
Speaker 2: citizen and who is non citizen, you got to take
Speaker 2: a look at and surveil everyone. It necessitates a vast,
Speaker 2: massive police state. Again, the priorities of which are quite
Speaker 2: evident in the Republican Trump budget, which massively expands ICE.
Speaker 2: It also expands the Pentagon budget, massively expands detention facilities.
Speaker 2: Like those things don't just stay aimed at a the
Speaker 2: non citizen population. It necessarily has to take a look
Speaker 2: at everyone in order to figure out who are the
Speaker 2: goodies in their view and who are the baddies.
Speaker 8: Yeah, a critical point here is that what AI allows
Speaker 8: you to do is map out networks, connections between people,
Speaker 8: and that's very explicitly what they're trying to do, and
Speaker 8: that's going to, you know, pull people into the drag
Speaker 8: net far beyond the only individuals you're talking about. So
Speaker 8: when you send ICE out to conduct things like what's
Speaker 8: called pattern of life analysis, see or someone walks to
Speaker 8: and goes back from before they deport someone, they try
Speaker 8: to get a sense of their pattern of life, where
Speaker 8: do they go about their day, Where can we try
Speaker 8: to intercept them? And as you're mapping that out, you're
Speaker 8: going to sweep up all sorts of other things. So
Speaker 8: in the case of Mackmood Khalil. They're going to be
Speaker 8: surveilling the demonstrations of which he's participating in. It's impossible
Speaker 8: to separate those two things, and that's what we've seen
Speaker 8: again and again there are you know, Foyer records to
Speaker 8: show this that ICE is looking at the demonstrations more
Speaker 8: generally and not just people they suspect of immigration violations.
Speaker 8: So yeah, that has to be front and centered everything
Speaker 8: we think about, because again, now they can process this
Speaker 8: stuff at scale in a way they never could before.
Speaker 2: And so that is really the sort of I guess
Speaker 2: tipping point that we're at right now is just the
Speaker 2: technological development has advanced to the point that they are
Speaker 2: able to accomplish this grand scheme of having a mass
Speaker 2: database of all of the information and tracking us in
Speaker 2: these significant ways. You know, there's been a lot of
Speaker 2: conversation about Elon and Doses. There's actually a little clip
Speaker 2: of him in the more Perfect Union piece, and in
Speaker 2: some ways DOJ's this total and complete failure didn't save
Speaker 2: any money, made the government less efficient, but in other ways,
Speaker 2: you know, I have a lot of questions about what
Speaker 2: was going on there and what sort of data was
Speaker 2: being collected what sort of data was being consolidated. And
Speaker 2: you know Elon obviously very close to Teal and to
Speaker 2: Alex krp over at at Pallenteer. You know, what do
Speaker 2: you make of how the DOGE project sort of is
Speaker 2: connected to this move towards massive data collection.
Speaker 4: Yeah, AI informed that as well.
Speaker 8: I mean, Musk has his own company x AI, which
Speaker 8: the most common part of that that we think of
Speaker 8: is is Grock on Twitter. But the idea behind that
Speaker 8: is that all of these companies are trying to take
Speaker 8: the information that they already had. And you know, there's
Speaker 8: a lot of speculation that that's why Elon Musk bought
Speaker 8: x in the first place, is to be able to
Speaker 8: access that data and then have some sort of input
Speaker 8: to use to train AI on. And so there is
Speaker 8: just this Blitzer out Just to give you just one
Speaker 8: random example, since the budget came out, I was looking
Speaker 8: through it, the Department of Homeland Security has an AI core,
Speaker 8: just like the Peace Corps or any other you know,
Speaker 8: subgroup that an agency might have that has an entire
Speaker 8: team of people going on to these different agencies figuring
Speaker 8: out just like we saw with DOGE, but happening at
Speaker 8: the agency level, which we might not hear about how
Speaker 8: do we take these breakthroughs that these these advancements that
Speaker 8: are happening and apply that to case management, to information processing,
Speaker 8: and like you said before, sharing across agencies. Even though
Speaker 8: ICE is not in the intelligence community, they have a
Speaker 8: they have a formal mechanism by which they can share
Speaker 8: information with them. So something that ICE might sweep up,
Speaker 8: maybe they'll get passed along to FBI, maybe it'll get
Speaker 8: passed along to military police.
Speaker 4: Or whatever it may be.
Speaker 8: So there really needs to be a debate about this
Speaker 8: brave new era we're entering in because protecting ciblierties can
Speaker 8: go completely different than it did prior to prior to
Speaker 8: machine learning and some of these large language models.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that is all well said. I wanted
Speaker 2: to talk to you also, Ken about another issue. We
Speaker 2: got some extraordinary, I guess comments from former State Department
Speaker 2: spokesperson Matt Miller, who became, you know, quite infamous from
Speaker 2: being up at the podium and defending things that should
Speaker 2: be indefensible in the context of our support of Israel,
Speaker 2: as Israel is committing what I and many scholars see
Speaker 2: as a genocide in Gaza. Now he comes out and says, Yeah, obviously,
Speaker 2: Israel is committing war crimes. You know, that's that's completely apparent.
Speaker 2: I just couldn't say it at the time because I
Speaker 2: was representing the government.
Speaker 3: Let's take a listen to what he has to say.
Speaker 4: Now, do you think what's going on in Gaza and
Speaker 4: now is a genocide?
Speaker 11: I don't think it's a genocide, but I think the
Speaker 11: I think it is without a doubt true that Israel
Speaker 11: has committed war crimes.
Speaker 12: You wouldn't have said that with the podium. Yeah.
Speaker 11: Look, because when you're at the podium, you're not expressing
Speaker 11: your personal opinion. You're expressing the conclusions of the United
Speaker 11: States government. The United States government has had not concluded
Speaker 11: they've committed war crimes, still have not concluded that.
Speaker 12: But your personal view is they have. Well so they will.
Speaker 11: Well you with that. But here's here here, yes, but here,
Speaker 11: let me let me qualify that there are two ways
Speaker 11: to think about the commission of war crimes. One is
Speaker 11: if the state has pursued a policy to deliberately committing
Speaker 11: war crimes or is acting reckless in a way that
Speaker 11: aids and abets war crimes, And that I think is
Speaker 11: an open question. I think What is heart is almost
Speaker 11: certainly not an open question, is that there have been
Speaker 11: individual incidents that have been that have been war crimes,
Speaker 11: where members of the Israel and military have committed war crimes.
Speaker 11: So ultimately, in almost every major conflict, including conflicts prosecuted
Speaker 11: by democracies, you will see individual members of the military
Speaker 11: of militaries commit war crimes. And the way you judge
Speaker 11: a democracy is whether they hold those people accountable. But
Speaker 11: Israel has and that's my point is we have not
Speaker 11: yet seen them hold sufficient numbers of the military accountable,
Speaker 11: and I think it's an open question whether they're going to.
Speaker 11: I'm really struck that you think now that Israel did
Speaker 11: commit war crimes and yet at the time and I
Speaker 11: get why, but at the time you were at the
Speaker 11: podium and you couldn't say that.
Speaker 6: I mean, personally, that must be very DIFFERENTIVE tell you.
Speaker 11: So the State Department itself had concluded not in these
Speaker 11: they didn't phrase it in these terms, but I think
Speaker 11: I did it. The podium a few times had concluded
Speaker 11: that it was likely that Israel had committed war crimes.
Speaker 6: But I do think it's almost certain your thoughts online ken,
Speaker 6: I mean, on the.
Speaker 8: One hand, it's of course outrageous that he's willing to
Speaker 8: work for an administration that he clearly didn't agree with.
Speaker 8: But on the other hand, I'll tell you, and I
Speaker 8: talked to a lot of people from State, including diplomats,
Speaker 8: what he speak what he's saying is pretty much in
Speaker 8: line with what a lot of these guys would say
Speaker 8: privately when I talked to them.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's the Agency for Diplomacy.
Speaker 8: It shouldn't surprise us that they see these things that
Speaker 8: have these attitudes. But what does surprise because it shows
Speaker 8: you how out of step President Biden was with his
Speaker 8: own administration. Yeah, that so many people, including this spokes
Speaker 8: this paid flag are coming out and saying this stuff
Speaker 8: like Biden had really, you know, strongly held views about
Speaker 8: Israel that were not consistent with much of the rest
Speaker 8: of his of his administration.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think most people would feel like even
Speaker 2: if even if you are a paid spokesperson like that
Speaker 2: doesn't just give you license to lie. And that's I mean,
Speaker 2: that is the moral position that he's effectively articulating here.
Speaker 3: So there's that.
Speaker 2: It's also astonishing to me the continued levels of spin
Speaker 2: at this point in time. I mean, You've got frickin'
Speaker 2: Piers Morgan out being like, what can I say? All right,
Speaker 2: it's a genocide. I mean the number of Israeli officials
Speaker 2: all you have to listen to is their own statements
Speaker 2: when he's trying to parse, well, there might have been
Speaker 2: individual war crimes, but I don't know if it was
Speaker 2: government policy. It's like, really, did you not see them
Speaker 2: announce a policy of mass starvation and blockade of the
Speaker 2: entire gaza strip?
Speaker 3: Like have you not watched as we've had.
Speaker 2: Month after month after month of total annihilation and people
Speaker 2: being massacred as they go and try to get food aid?
Speaker 2: Have you not listened to what BB neat and Yahoo
Speaker 2: was saying about how you know, we're just going to
Speaker 2: use this aid as a pretext to basically.
Speaker 3: Engage in ethnic cleansing.
Speaker 2: Like it's wild to me at this point that you
Speaker 2: could still engage in that level of self delusion to
Speaker 2: pretend that maybe this was just rogue actors within the
Speaker 2: IDF and though they haven't been punished appropriately, but they
Speaker 2: were just doing, you know, their own thing, rather than
Speaker 2: a very clear, consistent, concerted government policy at a time when,
Speaker 2: like I said, even figures like Piers Morgan have figured
Speaker 2: out that this is the case.
Speaker 8: Yeah, not just Peers, but very sufficials from powerful European
Speaker 8: governments in France for instance.
Speaker 4: I mean, this is your changed.
Speaker 8: I don't even d these are very powerful, wealthy European
Speaker 8: states saying these things. Something is happening over the last
Speaker 8: several weeks. I looked at that. I couldn't figure out
Speaker 8: what was driving it. But there's absolutely a shift that
Speaker 8: we haven't seen at any point since October seventh.
Speaker 2: So just for people's recollection, let's go ahead and take
Speaker 2: a listen to some of the ways, some of the
Speaker 2: things that he was saying when he was at the podium.
Speaker 11: I think it is without a doubt true that Israel
Speaker 11: has committed war crimes.
Speaker 4: You wouldn't have said that with the podium. Yeah.
Speaker 11: Look at bureaus that look at facts, apply them to
Speaker 11: international law and make assessments. Those assessments are ongoing, and
Speaker 11: we have not yet at this time concluded that Israel
Speaker 11: has violated international humanitarian law. But we have ongoing assessments
Speaker 11: across a number of different fronts.
Speaker 12: So all these organizations are just wrong. They just see
Speaker 12: the little difference.
Speaker 11: I'm telling you that we have ongoing assessments and we
Speaker 11: have not yet reached that convailed to implement all the
Speaker 11: things that we recommend in that other Now that said,
Speaker 11: we are not at the end of the thirty day period,
Speaker 11: and we are. It's not the end, it's not the
Speaker 11: end of the semester. You don't give out you don't
Speaker 11: hand out grades in the middle and gives you the
Speaker 11: right to lecture other countries on there. More So, if
Speaker 11: you have a policy question for me, I'm happy to
Speaker 11: take it. If you want to give a speech, But
Speaker 11: I think spa places in Washington where you can give
Speaker 11: a speech.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but people are sick of the bullshitting here.
Speaker 6: I mean it is a genocide.
Speaker 1: Another question, a real blowing up an entire village in
Speaker 1: southern Lebanon.
Speaker 4: What do you make of that?
Speaker 11: So I've seen the footage, I cannot speak to what
Speaker 11: their intent was or what they were trying to accomplish.
Speaker 11: Sometimes everyone likes to make this seem like a black
Speaker 11: and white issue that it's completely simple, where there's somebody
Speaker 11: that's blocking humanitarian assistants, when it actually it can be
Speaker 11: much more complex. Targeted attacks on civilians could not be justified.
Speaker 11: But Israel does have the right to go after terrorists.
Speaker 11: I mean, that is just a fact under international humanitarian
Speaker 11: law that every country has the right to defend itself.
Speaker 3: So Ken, I'd like you to.
Speaker 2: Talk a little bit about the moral calculation that goes
Speaker 2: on here, because I think in some instances people could
Speaker 2: be sympathetic to the idea that like, look, you're a
Speaker 2: spokesperson for this other politician. It's impractical to think your
Speaker 2: views are going to line up one hundred percent of
Speaker 2: the time. You aren't speaking for yourself. You speaking on
Speaker 2: behalf of this agency. You're speaking on behalf of the president, whatever.
Speaker 2: So there are going to be times when you represent
Speaker 2: something that is not truly your own personal view. It
Speaker 2: seems very different when you're talking about something like war
Speaker 2: crimes and crimes against humanity. And I do think the
Speaker 2: willingness of someone like a Matt Miller to stand up
Speaker 2: there and say things he knows is not true to
Speaker 2: remain in that job, even as it's not just Israel
Speaker 2: committing war crime, it's US funding, providing diplomatic cover for
Speaker 2: lying on their behalf shipping weapons in order for them
Speaker 2: to perpetrate those war crimes. Like that is to me
Speaker 2: a morally unconscionable decision to make. So talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about that moral landscape and the rationale that does
Speaker 2: go through the minds of people like Matthew Miller who
Speaker 2: end up adopting this pathetic line of Defenso I, you know,
Speaker 2: I was just following orders.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the capacity for rationalization has to be strong if
Speaker 8: you're if you're going to be a spokesperson for an
Speaker 8: organization like that, and he clearly has that. I was
Speaker 8: amazed how breezely he was able to put it off.
Speaker 8: I mean, if I did an interview like that, I'd
Speaker 8: be kind of embarrassed and kind of like, here's what
Speaker 8: I'm doing to try to, you know, make up for
Speaker 8: what I said before?
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, But you know it speaks to the it speaks.
Speaker 8: To the culture, because he must be surrounded by people
Speaker 8: that also are making these you know more uh, you know,
Speaker 8: very morally compromising decisions, and they're also used to it
Speaker 8: that it doesn't even merit thinking looking a little embarrassed
Speaker 8: or trying to explain what what you're doing to to
Speaker 8: make up for your position before. That's the most disturbing
Speaker 8: feature of it is how when they're breezy about it.
Speaker 8: That means that they're used to it and they're surrounded
Speaker 8: by other people that are used to it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's such a great point. Can tell people where
Speaker 2: they can follow you and support your work.
Speaker 4: I'm on substack. You can find me at kenclipansign dot com.
Speaker 3: All right, Ken, Great to see you, my friend, Get
Speaker 3: to see you again.
Speaker 2: All right, guys, that does it for me here today,
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Speaker 3: And thanks for watching today. I'll see you soon.