The Midterms and the End of the Boomer Political Era

0:05Derek Thompson: Hi, everybody. Just wanted to remind you that we'll be having another Plain English live show right in my own backyard here in Washington, D.C. later this year. I'll be live at the Howard Theater in D.C. on Tuesday, December 8th, and hope you'll join me. Tickets are live now at theringer.com slash events. Again, Plain English, we'll be live at the Howard Theater on December 8th, and you can grab tickets now at theringer.com slash events. I'll see you there. Well, it's midterm day in America, and I want to tell you the three things I'm watching for on Tuesday night. Number one, how much water is in the blue wave?

0:45Derek Thompson: Barring a historic polling error, which, you know, does happen from time to time, it looks like Democrats are going to have a very good election. The question is how good. If Democrats win a bunch of swing districts and narrowly take the House, let's call that a trickle. If they start winning Senate races in states like Iowa and Alaska, which Trump carried by about 13 points in 2024, I would call that a wave. And if Democrats are seriously winning Texas or Kansas, we are talking tsunami. Kansas, for its part, is not elected a Democratic Senator since 1932, but the final New York Times-Siena poll has Democratic Senate candidate ahead by five points.

1:22Derek Thompson: as I told Nate Silver several weeks ago, if Democrats are winning archetypal red states like Alaska and Kansas and Texas, I really do think this entire country is gonna be talking about the end of the Trump era, a subject that we get into in today's show. Number two, the second thing I'm looking for tonight is affordability. Everyone's constantly running on cost of living, inflation, affordability, but who actually wants to do something about it? The 2024 election was a cost of living election. Trump won. The 2025 off-year election was another cost-of-living election, and Democrats won that one.

1:56Derek Thompson: The 2026 midterms seemed to be another cost-of-living election. 85 % of voters in a recent AP poll called the economy one of their most important voting issues, 85%. But affordability is one of those political words that everybody loves, I think, because nobody actually has to define it. Making things cheaper is often very difficult. If you want to lower, say, gasoline prices, you have to end or deescalate the war with Iran and maybe do something about the Strait of Hormuz. If you want cheaper imported goods, you might have to reduce tariffs. If you want cheaper housing, you have to actually do something about housing, build more housing, which might have something to do with our high interest rates.

2:36Derek Thompson: And if inflation is fundamentally a problem of too much demand chasing too little supply, then reducing it might require something like slowing our spending or raising taxes. I mean, doing that in a world where socialist Democrats are out there proposing tax cuts to appease their voters, it's very, very difficult to imagine this thing being easily accomplished. So one thing I wanna know is after this election, is affordability going to become an actual governing agenda, or is it going to remain something that's like a tax on political incumbents that outsiders can always run on, but insiders struggle to do anything about?

3:12Derek Thompson: And finally, number three, I wanna know if this election is the beginning of the end of boomer politics. This election's happening at a strange generational hinge point in American history. Donald Trump is 80 years old. Chuck Schumer is 75 years old. The political order that's governed America for most of my adult life has been overwhelmingly dominated by baby boomers. But the candidate class is changing. Boomers are 38 % of House members, but only 29 % of this year's candidates. Among the Democratic Senate candidates, There are 10 millennials, meaning born in the 1980s or later. Some of the most promising, like John Ossoff of Georgia, aren't yet 40 years old.

3:53Derek Thompson: What I find interesting is that American politics could become post-boomer in its personnel long before it becomes post-boomer in its policy. A younger Congress will still inherit a federal government built around Social Security and Medicare. It will have to do something about debts accumulated over decades that are often going towards spending on people older than 65. So tomorrow night, we won't just be learning who controls Congress. I really do think we could be watching the opening scene of the next political era, a post-Trump future where affordability concerns help outsiders but curse insiders and the beginning of a fight over what comes after the long boomer century.

4:36Derek Thompson: Today's guest is Sagar and Jetty, the co-host of the popular podcast, Breaking Points. We talk about the midterms, the state of the GOP, the state of virtue and ethics in politics, and the future of millennial politics in America. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

5:24Derek Thompson: This episode is brought to you by JPMorgan Chase. In today's unpredictable world, geopolitics isn't just a backdrop. It's shaping markets, business strategy, and risk. The JPMorgan Chase Center for Geopolitics brings together former senior policymakers and seasoned practitioners to translate fast-moving global events into clear, decision-ready insights. From conflict and great power competition to energy and supply chain disruption, the center helps clients anticipate what comes next. Read the latest insights at jpmorganchase.com slash center for geopolitics. This episode is brought to you by JPMorgan Chase.

6:05Derek Thompson: In today's unpredictable world, geopolitics isn't just a backdrop. It's shaping markets, business strategy, and risk. The JPMorgan Chase Center for Geopolitics brings together former senior policymakers and seasoned practitioners to translate fast-moving global events into clear, decision-ready insights. From conflict and great power competition to energy and supply chain disruption, the center helps clients anticipate what comes next. Read the latest insights at jpmorganchase.com slash center for geopolitics. Sagar and Jetty, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, man. So let's start with a quick hit in the news at the moment.

6:43Derek Thompson: Democratic runner-up in Michigan, Haley Stevens just endorsed the Republican, Mike Rogers. What's going on here, man? Wow, yeah, I said it on the show today, all-time messy woman. I hate to meet Don Sex this year, but she's a fascinating character. I mean, there's so much going on with that, right? Like she is somebody who in the hours before had reportedly said she was gonna vote for El-Sayed. the night before she's on the phone with jamie raskin she says i'm backing outside the morning of she appears to have had some sort of crisis of confidence or something and she calls mike rogers can i go to church with you even then she's still she's not voting for mike rogers and then she just comes out in the car video she's like yeah that's who i'm voting for i mean there's so much i guess that could be said we could do the israel angle of it all which is honestly kind of shocking like her own fiance who himself is interesting character mr jason turkish who she only apparently like recently met, like only in the last several months or so, this romance.

7:37But he comes out, and apparently he's been very influential and kind of evolving her thinking. A lot of this goes back to this rebellion pack ad, which was released by Cenk Uygur. By the way, he never actually ran on the airwaves, just purely on Twitter. So all of this leads to her just basically coming out and saying, because he hurt my feelings and disinvited me from this event, I'm going to endorse Mike Rogers, which is crazy. I mean, it is objectively crazy. She said he's a MAGA mouthpiece and a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. And this morning or this afternoon, I'm reading that she just did a sit down interview at 11 p.m.

8:12on her fiance's couch with Olivia Rheingold over at the Free Press. And she's like, well, maybe Mike can be like Lisa Murkowski. And I'm like, well, Mike's actually been in the Congress for a long time since honestly, almost since I was alive. and he's pretty much not been that way. So maybe you're dreaming a little bit differently.

8:31Derek Thompson: Yeah. If Mike Rogers wins, obviously this is going to be seen as absolutely seismic, especially if the Democrats underperformed their polling. If El-Sayed wins, do you think we're going to be talking about this in two weeks? Does this uncover something that's latent in the Democratic Party that's going to have to be dealt with? Well, you can speak more to this, actually, because the teed up conversation for Abdul, like there are various Abdul scenarios. So like the day you and I are speaking, obviously, New York Times Siena has Abdullah by 11. That would be actually shocking, like shocking, like overperforming Gretchen Whitmer levels of success.

9:06That's one where the DSA and let's say like the left flank can say, see, we told you so. Let's say underperforms and it's a squeaker similar to his primary victory. Well, the actual conversation that was set up before all of this was, well, see your Israel stance and kind of your combativeness within the Democratic Party. Like this has now made it so that if he does lose or if it's a squeaker underperforms, the conversation is about her, even though honestly, you know, the vast majority of the votes in Michigan have already been cast, which is ironic. But if you look to some of the way that the intraparty discussion of it all was going to be discussed, I would say we're not going to talk about it if it's a blowout.

9:41Like, let's say if it is like 10, 8 points, something like that. But if it does underperform, if Abdul underperforms, let's say by a point or 2.5, something like that, then, yeah, I actually do think we will be discussing it because there will be the battle of the narrative. It was about why he was able to underperform. The way I would look at it is kind of like the J.D. Vance vote in 2022. I'm sure you remember this, where there was a lot of discussion where he underperformed Donald Trump in the state. And so there was a factional intraparty GOP fight over, is he actually a strong candidate? He says he's the future.

10:13The guy barely wins Ohio by six. Trump previously won it by eight, you know, the last time around. So how can you say that you have any sort of strength? But Haley Stevens did Abdul the biggest favor she ever could. Honestly, he raised millions of dollars. She will be the primary rhetorical discussion point around this election. And if to the extent he has any flaws, she took them all away from him in the national media conversation. It's wild. I'm glad you ended there. That's exactly what I think.

10:39Derek Thompson: That if El-Sayed loses, then he loses, period. if he wins and he underperforms, the conversation around underperformance now is entirely muddied by the Stevens endorsement because the centrists who want to say, ah, he underperformed because he's a progressive lose a certain amount of juice in that argument because he was just, his opponent just endorsed his opponent. And then if he overperforms, oh my God, going into 2028, the number of progressive, I think, groups that are going to look at him as a potential presidential nominee are just gonna feel even more bolstered that this guy's impregnable.

11:17More broadly, on a scale of one to 10, how panicked are Republicans right now? Well, so panic is not, it depends on the race. So Texas, I'm 10 out of 10. I grew up in Texas. I've got good sources in Texas GOP. It's a real problem right now. I mean, my best people are telling me Tallarico is basically a lock now. I mean, they could play that over and I could look like a complete fool. if it doesn't, but I'm just repeating what they tell me. I am also, again, everybody I speak to is really the same stuff that they're leaking to all the national political reporters is we have real Trump problems all the way down the ballot.

11:55There's actually a great story today, which mimics a lot of what I've heard from people who will be willing to speak candidly or off the record, which is about Trump's role himself. So like if we look down the list, North Carolina, which looks like a genuine lock for Cooper. Well, Tom Tillis, I mean, Trump forced him out of the party and Tillis, remember, had an impressive victory last time around. Whenever he was on the ballot, I remember covering that race. Let's continue. South Carolina, who was supposed to be interim Senator Darlene Graham. He says, oh no, Darlene, you're going to be the nominee, forces her barely over the line in the Republican primary, which was actually a big field.

12:30A real South Carolina GOP politician has absolutely no problems in this race. Now they're having to spend millions of Okay, let's keep going. So it's Texas, obviously, John Cornyn. And this is the thing too. If Trump wanted to go all in on Paxton, whatever, right? He could have done that early. He flirted all the way up until the line after the runoff. Will they? Won't they? Will they? He's going to endorse Paxton. He's not. Eventually comes out, pushes Paxton over the edge, but he's fully aware of all of Paxton's flaws. The problem is by not picking him early and making clearing the field with Cornyn is the NRSC spent millions of dollars against Ken Paxton.

13:08And so it's very hard for them to then to come in to try to save him. Paxton had to rely on all this outside MAGA Inc. spending after all these Republican negative ads are against him. So demoralized Republicans, the kind of country club style demographic is definitely shifting away from Ken Paxton. From what I've heard there, Tallarico, I mean, he's a unique, interesting candidate kind of in his own way, but Texas itself currently trending towards that direction. So this is Donald, oh, JD, actually. I mean, this is one where by picking JD as his nominee for the vice president, he sets up for this election now, right?

13:43In the United States Senate, where Sherrod Brown, I mean, look, whatever you want to say about that guy, that guy always overperforms where the normal republic or the normal Democrat does in the state. I mean, this is a genuine like union, anti-free trade guy. He wrote whole books about steel tariffs. And he's undeniable, if you want to say it on the policy question, then he's going to ride that wave here. So there's multiple races here where Trump's own fingerprints are all over this thing. So that to the extent they're panicked, too, it's like this is just Trump's party. There's no you can't really say that Donald Trump, oh, this is a rebuke or if they had clung to Trump better.

14:20It's like, no, I mean, he picked the nominees. These are his people, something he's usually very, very proud of. And things are things are not looking good for him right now.

14:26Derek Thompson: What's so interesting about that answer is that when you said the Trump problem up and down the ballot, I thought you were going to say the Iran war, the cost of gas, the cost of diesel in the Midwest. And instead, you talked about candidate selection. And that's not to say that you think the Iran war is a great idea. Obviously, you're a million times in the record thinking the opposite. But it brings to mind the fact that there's really two different reasons to be frustrated at Trump in this moment. One is the issue of candidate selection. You mentioned Tillis and Graham and Paxton. And then there's a separate issue, which is policy.

14:59Derek Thompson: You said you wouldn't wage a war in the Middle East. You did. You were elected to be an affordability cost of living candidate, and your war drove up the cost of gasoline and diesel. When you're talking to Republicans, conservatives, are they more frustrated in Trump about the candidate selection flaws, or are they talking more about the policy flaws? Both, honestly. And the reason why I led with the candidates is all of the policy stuff that we just talked about is ever present. That's immovable. That's unfixable. But in the environment I just laid out, let's say where Cornyn is on the ballot, Cornyn is going to win.

15:31He'll win by one or two, kind of the way that Ted Cruz did against Beto. But he's going to win. I mean, Darlene Graham, I mean, any of the other Republicans who had a chance, they're going to win, too. Kansas, I mean, it's a little different. You can't blame Trump for that one. That one, I will say, probably is more policy-related. Iowa as well. But my point just remains where you can mitigate the damage. And so to the extent they're really mad at Trump right now on a candidate question, that's why. Because you can turn something which was already going to be bad into a genuine bloodbath. Then let's get to the policy thing.

16:02Like you said, with Iran. I mean, Iran is the most open and shut betrayal of a campaign promise that has, I mean, I can't even think of a modernity. or political equivalent. He said, I'm not gonna do foreign wars. I'm gonna lower your prices. I did a foreign war and I raised your prices. I mean, at a certain point, what are we doing here? I posted one. I'm on the record as very anti-prediction markets, which you and I were talking about a little earlier. And this morning, I just posted a diesel and gas price chart over the last 10 years. And I said, sometimes predicting elections just comes down to having the right chart.

16:32Here it is. Here's the price of diesel. Here's the price of gas. The vast majority, even Michigan, which you and I are talking about, I get very frustrated. 1 % of the Michigan population is Jewish. 4 % is Muslim. You know, the vast majority are like hardworking people who are neither of those groups. They're white guy to the extent that Abdul is going to win. It's not going to be because of either of those groups. It's going to be because a bunch of white guys are pissed off about the price of gas or diesel. Okay. And so sometimes like, let's just be real about what we're talking about here. But I mean, there's also the extent of rolling back, like where everything was.

17:07Trump was in a bad position before the war launch. I wouldn't say unsalvageable. I would say maybe 2018 style, which let's remember was D8 plus 8.6 in the midterms. But I would not say we remember that as some stunning terms of midterm rebuke. The reason why, if we take a little bit trip down memory lane, 2018, that's when a lot of the Democrats overperformed and they did very well nationally. But I mean, if I'm sure you remember this, do you don't you remember they're like, maybe Marsha Blackburn is in play, like Republican states, kind of the way that we are right now. All those Republicans came home because they were extremely upset.

17:44There was a caravan situation going on at the border. And there was also the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. And those two things made people be like, okay, look, I may be upset with Donald Trump, but I am voting Republican in this race. There is no such Republican catalyst that happens right now. If anything, it's the opposite. The national price of gas the day before the election, I just checked this morning,$4.19 a gallon,$5.90 in the state of California. A friend of mine road tripping through California just sent me diesel is going for 962 a gallon in California, San Diego gas station. There was one that had problems because they were like, we may need to charge$10 and the software literally doesn't work for that.

18:21That's insane. Then you've got the mortgages. What's a 30 year mortgage currently? 7.2 % average number of homes being sold is like all time low. You've got people locked into housing situation. You wrote a whole book about this, about how much angst and existentialism that can breed. The fact of the matter is you're not better off than you were two years ago. You're probably worse off unless you're a small subset of the population. And then you add on the social chaos and his own personal affect to this. Literally today, the day before the midterm, his final closing pitch will be before the Lincoln Memorial, reflecting people talking about capital beautification and how much richer he has made America.

19:01So we're talking about the reflecting pool. We're talking about the ballroom, physical monuments to himself and to his ego. And while he is personally and the coterie of the people around him are getting phenomenally rich, while the rest of you are getting poor and people are dying with chaos in the Middle East. So, I mean, it doesn't take a genius to say where these things are going to trend.

19:22Derek Thompson: The backlash is so interesting because he won a cost of living election in 2024. Inflation was high in 2024. Interest rates were high in 2024. And as an outsider, he could run on that message and win on it. Now he's an insider. And those same realities are an albatross around his neck. And as you pointed out, the Iran war certainly isn't helping bring down rates or inflation. And it's interesting that it seems to me like we're in this era of extreme partisan backlash. The New York Times-Siena poll was looking at voters under 30. between 2016 and 2020, they swung 20 points toward Republicans. Between 2024 and 2026, they seem set to swing 40 points toward Democrats.

20:05I mean, why do you think we seem to be

20:10Derek Thompson: in an era of whiplash politics, especially among young people? Yeah, it's interesting. I was literally almost a year, more than a year ago, I was in the same studio in the same room, actually doing an interview where somebody asked me, they're like, is this it? is are Republicans going to, you know, win for the next 30 years? And I have - Are they going to own Gen Z? Right. I think I might have written that column. Yeah, I have. And for this reason, because I'm always reminded of, I have James Carville's book on my bookshelf and I always look at it. 40 more years, the Democratic, you know, how Democrats will win for the next 40 years after the Obama election as a reminder of how disastrous and immediate that these types of predictions can go wrong.

20:50And I warned specifically about thermostatic public opinion. And I said, look, I know a lot of these Trump people. I know a lot of them personally, people who are in power. A lot of them are riding high, but they will all usually people in power forget of the rules of thermostatic public opinion and of backlash. Now, specifically with young people, if we think about why did young people eventually just take a flyer on Trump? Well, the Biden election, like if we think about the Biden presidency and all that, it was supposed to be returned to normalcy. There was an immense amount of chaos in our society.

21:18So a lot of people were looking at that and saying, look, what the hell do I have to lose? Ultimately, like we have, you know, let's say liberalism, wokeism necessarily. Let's also talk about the economic cost of living. I mean, Biden was killed by inflation, by these high interest rates. At the end of the day, people could look back at 2019. Everybody kind of gave COVID like this strange year. But they said, look, 2019, when Trump was president, the economy was pretty good. The interest rates were low and gas was damn cheap. So you know what? Let's go back. And for a lot of younger people, they went through the insanity of COVID through, let's say, either graduated from high school or college in this horrific environment.

21:56They're looking forward and they say, all right, we're going to go with Trump. We're going to check it out. But it didn't take long for the backlash really to begin. And that's where I think it's kind of a fascinating discussion where a lot of people, including myself, are talking about the Iran war. I think Iran war just took a bad situation, made it worse. Things were already not looking good before the Iran war. Tariffs, Liberation Day was huge. I actually think Doge was an interesting kind of part of it where when I would just like be about young guys, I would always be like, you know, what are you excited about?

22:27And Doge was like this big, they really believed largely because they've never studied appropriations or, you know, Washington. And they were always very loathe to hear me be like, yeah, you know, that's not really how it works, right? In terms of the federal budget. Yeah, this is interesting.

22:42Derek Thompson: What did young people that were enthusiastic about Trump 2.0 and Doge, what did they think about government? Why did they think Doge and Elon Musk were like the medicine to what ailed this country? Yeah, they just thought they're like, look, the government's got its hands and all these ridiculous things or its regulation or, you know, they're sitting in Washington. They're getting fat and rich. And while my mortgages and all these things are going up. And ultimately, I think they what they wanted was like a better services kind of thing, but at a leaner way. I mean, look, at that time, remember, the Elon vision is very enticing.

23:13The guy has cut all these jobs at Twitter. Twitter works fine. You've got, fine, you know, we can describe how much well it works. Tesla, I mean, he's a visionary entrepreneur. This kind of Silicon Valley type mindset. People were really excited about that. I'm telling you, like, that really was one of the answers that I would, I was surprised to hear kind of guys my age be the most excited about with Doge. But once Doge, first of all, I mean, you know, the entire Elon of it all became ridiculous and the show of it and USAID specifically, which kind of became this meme beyond this real project.

23:46After about six to seven months and Elon is out and he's gone, you become quite, you know, you come to the realization of like, well, not a lot really changed, you know, over here. And I think that really kind of set people off because it invited the backlash of a lot of people who work in the sciences or academia who are feeling the actual effect of the cut. And it didn't deliver the supposed promise of what a supposed better government and all of that was going to look like. And then I always remind people, June 2025, that's when he bombs Iran. And so that sets off another conversation. And on top of that, we have the entire Epstein saga, and we have the chaos that was invited by the way that the administration handled immigration.

24:28And so right before the war launches, we are already in a bad—oh, and I forgot Liberation Day. My God, how can I even have gotten around that? Which, put prices and all that aside, sheer uncertainty in the business environment. So many—I mean, you know this. The traditional Republican constituency is the small business owner. You know, the guy hates paying taxes, hates regulation, wants more predictability, wants government out of his life. Tariffs threw absolute insanity into so many different – forget about the corporations. A lot of them actually could absorb it because they have the legal teams and the personnel.

25:02Small mom and pops who do normal import, export, or certain parts, shortages, price increases and all. It was devastating for Trump. I remember realizing how much that particular episode was so, just the capriciousness of picking the rates and taking them off and the wild stock market swings. While, again, many people around him are getting phenomenally rich. That was really, really, it really undermined him. Because you can even be somebody who's supportive of tariffs or I am. I mean, I support like targeted tariffs or smart industrial policy, like any of these things. That conversation just goes out the window.

25:39When we're rolling that chart, I'll never forget that chart that he rolls out.

25:43Derek Thompson: You put your finger on something that's really, really important, which is that I think it's hard to remember how certain everyone was that there was a vibe shift toward Trump in January of 2025. I mean, there was a real sense, not just among conservatives, but among liberal writers that this country had swung hard right in a way that was going to be semi-permanent. And something about that, something about the fear that I think liberals had was that Trump represented this kind of dark nostalgia for the way of the 1950s. And, you know, that first American carnage speech, which I think was his first inaugural address, was very backward looking.

26:19Derek Thompson: But once he had Elon Musk on his side, the MAGA coalition wasn't just this weird, dark, nostalgic look backward. It also represented the bright future. Yes. And there's something really strange that happened to that impression of MAGA, which in January 2025, I was so certain was going to be this really, really powerful force. The New York Times' David Wallace Wells, I thought, wrote about it really, really articulately in a piece that went up this week. In 2016, conventional wisdom held that Trump was carried to victory by a resentful anti-elite coalition, in particular by surprising strength among the deindustrializing Rust Belt in the upper Midwest.

26:57Derek Thompson: Once it returned to power in 2025, the movement looked like it had been reshaped once again, this time in Elon Musk's image. A mix of moralistic social Darwinism, anti-woke retribution, and acquisitive tech accelerationism, pay-to-play access for billionaires and a kind of corruption free-for-all in the White House. Ten years ago, Trump could somewhat plausibly claim to be giving voice to the American voiceless. Now he is speaking largely for a different constituency when he isn't speaking for himself. End quote. Building on that, how is MAGA 2.0 different than MAGA 1.0? Well, that's a fascinating question.

27:33MAGA 1.0 really had no idea what it was because it was an internal war against the GOP. Then eventually what happens is 2020, January 6th, there's an entire discussion. Trump is obviously not impeached. He immediately says, I'm running for reelection. And the interim four-year period, there's kind of discussion and kind of an interest in like, where are we going from here? There is an attempt with the primary of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, but it gets proven out very, very quickly that there is no constituency. Donald Trump is the Republican Party. Everyone, nobody is offering this kind of like managing of Trump in the way that his chief of staffs were and others.

28:11And there's a general awareness of the what went wrong the first time is that Trump wasn't actually able to do what he had wanted to do. Now, let me clarify, because that's an important distinction. When we said what he wanted to do, what some understood that was, was to end the war in Afghanistan, right? Was to, which he wanted to, he actually genuinely did want to do. He just wasn't ever capable of doing it. Let's say he wanted to shut down immigration, but he's held back by Reince Priebus or by Paul Ryan, you know, these types of figures. He gets the only reason why the initial 2017, what is it, the tax cuts and jobs, the TCJA ends up passing is because that's all those Republicans would agree to.

28:49But now we're going to put this full spectrum of legislation forward and all that. Elon and the tech angle of this kind of throws an entirely different wrench because now you have these two fusion. You kind of have like what online MAGA, which very much is in the camp of like restriction of immigration, of free tribe. Immigration is going to be number one really that's on that list, but also no foreign adventurism. There is an important kind of neoconservative constituency within MAGA 2.0 as well, which is very different than, quote, online MAGA, but is in some ways kind of fused with this tech right billionaires where there's obviously the October 7th attacks and then a lot of alleged – they claimed they were Democrats or liberals, but they eventually move into the Republican or the Trump camp over the issue of Israel, where Trump, they say, is explicitly pro-Israel.

29:40Miriam Adelson is in this camp, Bill Ackman, Sean McGuire, these types of people with the all, I mean, to my eye, you know, the number one issue for a lot of them really is Israel, right? And so they also become kind of part of this constituency. But this feeds into the general, quote, vibe, I guess, if you will, where you have these united kind of disparate parts of the coalition. And then you really can't underestimate Maha as well. I mean, largely it's about anti-institution. I think that's what it just comes down to. Anti-institutional in all regards. You can see whatever you want to see. And so MAGA 2.0, which is really, I mean, kind of stunning still in retrospect, first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004, puts together this coalition where he wins people under$100 ,000.

30:26One of the first Republicans, maybe the only to do so in modern history. He's able to unite people who are anti-war, pro-war with Iran. He is able to bring in these libertarians, people who are really fed up with the Biden administration, the Maha kind of co-constituency, and then the young people. I mean, you just can't underestimate that. You know, as a podcaster, I enjoyed a lot of the podcast election discourse. In no way did we swing the election or any of that. But it was it was important to the extent that it contributed to this coolness and this forwardness, like you said, which is very different from how Trump was in 2016.

31:04And that illustrated kind of like you were saying, this view forward of like this media establishment will supplant the old media establishment. The lies will no longer be able to be perpetuated. And a lot of that just starts crashing into governance once things actually have to happen. Iran is really a, was a critical, critical break point, I think for that one.

31:25Derek Thompson: I really liked that interpretation. Tell me how you feel about this sort of gloss that I just sort of thought of as you were talking. It's that MAGA is united by a negative identity. Yes. And that negative identity is we are against the elite. We are especially against the urban liberal elite. But it's divided by positive identities because Trump has a positive identity that says, I want America to represent like 1980s mercantilism. And then Musk has an identity that's like, I'm an anti-woke futurist. So Musk loves electric vehicles. Trump kind of couldn't give a shit. And then you've got RFK, who's sort of this like hippie dippy conservative that in many ways is very unlike both Trump and Musk, but they all hate elites.

32:13Derek Thompson: I think that when you're an outsider, it's easier to unite around a negative identity because you're fundamentally running against. You're running against the incumbent. But once you have power, you have power to do something positive. And that's where I think these positive identities have become disharmonious and start to crash into each other. Absolutely. But this leads to the next question. I think that the midterms on Tuesday are going to be bad for Republicans. I don't know how bad, but I don't think they're going to be good. I don't think the polls are going to be that wrong. And when it seems like we're in a world that has to move beyond the last 10 years of Trump, someone else has to pick up that mantle of MAGA or conservatism.

32:52Derek Thompson: And I see a couple different ways forward. There's Vance who sort of represents like Catholic MAGA. there's Rubio, who's sort of a bridge to traditional conservatism, even neoconservatism. Yes. And there's RFK, who's this sort of anti-elite conspiratorial wing of MAGA. I wonder who you think has the juice in a world where Democrats win on Tuesday and it seems like we're entering a world where for the first time since 2015, someone not named Donald Trump has to march to the head of the parade. I mean, the problem with that analysis is it belies that Trump himself, Well, let's think back. Every single time a lame duck president is unpopular and then somebody is nominated after him, they usually have the grace and the wherewithal to say, I'm exiting the stage.

33:39Right. Reagan does not stage manage H.W.'s campaign. Clinton, I mean, I'm sure you have read about this like I have. Clinton was very aggrieved with Al Gore's campaign. He was furious. Because he was absent. Yeah. I mean, Al Gore was like, we need to move on, even though Clinton had like a 60 percent approval rating. Honestly, he probably should have campaigned with him. but you know Clinton doesn't demand that Al Gore do this he's upset about it Bush I mean I'm I think Bush is W specifically worst president of my entire lifetime probably of modern American history but W at various points gives McCain permission he's like look you can distance from me if you need to I get it as much of his advisor you think Donald Trump is gonna allow that of course never right so the thing is about Trump is that even though his name is not on the ballot he will control till the day he dies, by the way, people think you think he's just going to move to Mar-a-Lago and stop truthing.

34:31Like it's not going to happen. Let's say with JD, JD, I've thought about this a lot, right? I know I've known JD for many years and I feel like one of the strengths that he always had prior to becoming the vice president was his ability to speak relatively freely. He could be somewhat, you know, he could dissent, let's say from the GOP establishment, or he could even attack inter-GOP figures like Lindsey Graham and others. But when you become so closely tied to Donald Trump, can he answer the question that destroyed Kamala, in my opinion, on The View? Do you remember this? Where Kamala is asked, would you have done anything different from the Biden administration?

35:07And she couldn't answer one thing. How can he credibly answer that question? You and I know there's a lot of leaks going on in the New York Times. Oh, I would have done Iran differently. That ain't going to fly on The View and all the other podcast interviews and other things that he has to do. He's gonna have to defend Trump to the death, basically. Trump will allow zero, zero distance between himself and whoever that nominee is. So this is not just a JD problem. This is a Rubio problem. This is a RFK problem. Trump will trash you as all this is going on. And that will create real problems for you in Republican primaries, and especially in terms of depressed Republican turnout.

35:41So whoever the GOP nominee is, all of those three figures, by being so tied directly to Trump himself, they do not have the ability to speak freely. And this is the case still in all of conservative media. I mean, very few are willing to just be like, this is a disaster, a disaster on the war. Turn on Fox News and see if you can even hear a smidge of what I'm saying that isn't coming out of whatever the paid, like so-called Democrat voices that's on the panel. Haven't gotten around to that, but I will. I don't recommend it. Yeah, I don't watch it either. But when I do, I'm always like, oh, this is why I have a career.

36:14But so, but I mean, I have to take, you know, keep a close eye on where these things are. The dissent still doesn't exist. I mean, and so that's where I think what will happen to the Trump Republican Party is what Trump did to the Republican Party, is that a complete outsider has to come out and be the guy on the stage in the way that Trump was in an electric fashion to look George W. Bush in the eyes and say, your brother was a disaster. The war he started was bad. And Jeb is stumbling around like, my brother kept us. Sorry, that's not going to fly. Trump has not put the Republican Party in the same boat where he will demand, you know, the very same amount of loyalty.

36:54The difference, though, is that the Republican faithful, they still love Donald Trump. And that's the that's just the truth. And I recommend if you ever have the opportunity to speak with Thomas Massey, because Massey is a very honest guy, especially after what happened in the primary. And I was like, you know, you know, there's this narrative out there. Republicans are turning on Trump over Iran and all that. And he's like, well, that's not what happened in my election, right? He's like the Fox News people, they all still support it. The core constituency of Trump as the warrior against the woke elites and the F your feelings type stuff, which I think has been a core part of his appeal.

37:29Those people are not going anywhere. And they are dwindling, but it's still a small and important part of the Republican primary constituency. They're not gonna wanna hear what I'm saying right now. Well, so help me untie this not.

37:40Derek Thompson: One, the leading candidates for the GOP presidential nominee in 2028 work for Donald Trump and therefore will struggle to move beyond him. Number two, the highest, the most likely Republican primary voters still disproportionately like Donald Trump, certainly relative to the rest of the country. Yeah. Number three, no one who refuses to criticize a president with a 30 percent approval rating has any chance in a general nomination. Exactly. How does that work itself out? That's my point. Right. Is that you're just setting yourself up for structural blowout. I mean, in the same way that Kamala was just I mean, I I really believe that Kamala did not have a chance.

38:24Like, I don't think a chance. I think Biden cooked her from day one, even if he had also run again. And because of these structural problems, and remember, I mean, if you read Kamala's book, he's on the phone with her all the time. Like, no distance, kid, something like that, you know, before the debates. The egos of these people are not all dissimilar. And so you see the same problems that are going to play out for a Republican where, look, Trump will be there watching. He will tolerate no dissent. His family also will not tolerate any dissent. Remember, it's existential for them, too. They could be going to prison or they could be or at the very least subject to millions of dollars in legal fees come the next two to five years.

39:04So all of this is going to be watched exceptionally closely by Trump, the Trump family. The more and more that he gets isolated, the people around him, the Bill Pultys and others who will be in his ear kind of telling him what he wants to hear and kind of whispering snake's den about who's being against you. So whoever the Republican nominee is is just an impossible position. And that's why structurally with Donald Trump, by the way, I'm assuming a lot here. There's another scenario that could happen where I don't think it's going to happen, but it could happen. I was thinking about earlier. I go, you know, and this is pure politics brain because moral wise aside, let's say the Dems win 59 seats, something crazy.

39:44Right. On Tuesday? Yeah. Like super majority.

39:47Derek Thompson: Let's give it a 5 % chance. Yeah, they're winning Mississippi. Louisiana, which about Sabato moved today to likely are where I was like, wow. Okay. So, all right. So let's, let's say in that scenario and, and Schumer is like, let's impeach Trump. But here's the thing. I mean, if they impeach Trump and they removed him, like, again, these are crazy scenarios. I mean, JD would end the war and I think he would probably be a much better president than Trump would be. Well, maybe he could win. I mean, I don't know. He had a much better shot than before. So like, there's all kinds of, you know, X scenarios and all that stuff that could happen within this.

40:20But my base case is I think the Dems are going to do pretty well. I think they'll probably take control of the Senate and Trump will fall victim to the same thing that many presidents were stymied in Washington do, which is what they become obsessed with foreign adventurism and the wars that they've gotten themselves into. And they will try to go, you know, the only way out is through and they will try to bomb and it will be a total disaster. That is my base case for what is going to happen. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't think anything, I don't think we're trending in a good direction. And for the, for Republicans in particular, I mean, how can you run?

40:56Cause again, it's like you run against like ultimately Republican strength, conservative strength really is, is, you know, the famous phrase, like standing at thwart history and yelling stop. Right. And I just, I don't see how you can credibly argue that after Trump has been in office and will allow no daylight between himself and whoever, you know, wants to run against him.

41:16Derek Thompson: This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian. Your work is scattered. A thread here, a DM there, five different docs related to the same project. And now it's not just your team hunting for context, it's your AI agents too. Jira taps into Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more, and makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, Assign them work directly or connect your agents through Atlassian MCP. The result, less token waste, more accuracy, and more time moving forward.

41:55Derek Thompson: Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian. Your work is scattered. A thread here, a DM there, five different docs related to the same project. And now it's not just your team hunting for context. It's your AI agents too. Jira taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more. It makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through MCP. The result, less token waste, more accuracy, and more time moving work forward.

42:36Derek Thompson: Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. This episode is brought to you by Eden Red Pay. There's no doubt that AI is transforming the workplace, especially when it comes to accounts payable, helping organizations with automating invoices, fraud detection, and cashflow visibility. So Eden Red Pay surveyed financial professionals to uncover exactly how AI is being used, where they're investing next, and what challenges they're working to solve. Visit edenredpay.com forward slash Spotify to explore the exclusive survey insights and see how your organization compares. I was talking to someone from the tech world who said that they feel like their job, this is someone close to the VC world, that their job is to look at lines that are straight in history and keep projecting them straight, right?

43:28Derek Thompson: Or if they're exponential, keep projecting them exponential. Say, what happens if this line keeps going in this direction in six months, in two years? There's a line, a straight line that is going diagonally down, has gone diagonally down since April 2025, Liberation Day. And that is Donald Trump's net approval rating. Yes. What if that line doesn't stop going diagonally down? Who is the individual who would Trump Trump? Which is to say, perform the role that Donald Trump performed vis-a-vis George W. Bush, except he or she would perform that role to say, I own the mantle of an anti-establishment, anti-liberal coalition in America that Trump used to have the authority to run, but has lost that authority because the line that won't stop going down didn't stop going down.

44:18Derek Thompson: Who's the kind of person who would fit that role? I really can't. I have so many theories of this. We can tease them out, right? So where there is the, I have one general grand theory, and Nate Silver recently said this, that the Trump era is over. I think a more interesting question is not, is the Trump era over? Is the celebrity politician era completely over? So if we remember kind of, well, not remember, I wasn't alive, but I've read a decent amount of the period is the way that we get Carter, this kind of cardigan wearing, you know, affable, nice guy is through the general chaos of the 60s and the 70s of Nixon, of the scandal.

44:54He can never tell a lie, that type of mythos. I actually wonder whether we will switch back away from the celebrity era and we will start caring about candidates' records and we will stop caring about how good they are on a podcast. And in some sense, whether a nerdishness becomes a better candidate quality. I could be totally wrong, but this is a kind of general theory. I think things could go. The other option would be never bet against media trends. We are in a spoken age. You have to be incredibly well-spoken, a great community. cater, somebody who's good both off the cuff and in the grand moments.

45:28So you will get, you know, a very similar style of somebody who is able to quote straight talk and stitch together this type of coalition. I can't predict it because who could have predicted Trump? No one, really. I mean, really what it comes down to is it's kind of like, you know, post Versailles. We know something bad's going to happen in Germany. We just don't know which way it's going to go.

45:48Derek Thompson: Speaking of the possible return of virtue in politics, you're in a one-man campaign to take on the rise of vice in America. Anti-weed, anti-gambling, anti-prediction markets. One thing that I think is really interesting about the evolution of the GOP is that the GOP that I grew up knowing in the 1990s was a moralizing party. There were books written called American Theocracy about how the prudish evangelical morals of Christian America were going to take over and turn us into Christian Saudi Arabia. Trump signed laws to reschedule marijuana. The party is largely pro-gambling. His sons sit on any variety of companies that might be related to this sort of industry.

46:34Derek Thompson: What happened here? how do you think conservatives became the party of vice? Yeah, Matthew Walter actually wrote this piece years ago called like the rise of barstool conservatism. And I've always thought it's like absolutely hit things on the head, which is the 90s culture wars was guns and it was abortion and it was gay marriage, where what eventually becomes the quote culture war of the 2020s is about, you know, trans bathrooms, surgeries, but it really actually becomes about political correctness. And so there was a similar trend that people observed in the early 2000s, kind of like South Park conservatism or South Park liberalism, which is basically making fun of or being completely politically incorrect, where that in and of itself was the virtue.

47:19And so I think ultimately, like if you were to look at it, that is actually where it was. You talked about young guys who voted for Trump. I mean, they're much more like a Dave Portnoy who literally is a Republican or at least votes for Donald Trump. where they're pro-choice, again, just like Portnoy, they don't care. They're not, they're actually atheists and or very secular. Ultimately, it comes down to this kind of folk libertarian spirit of the nation, do whatever you wanna do, right? And like that becomes the beating ethos of a lot of Trumpism. I mean, that's where Maha comes from. That's where a lot of the backlash to the COVID vaccine will come to.

47:56Ultimately, it's about choice and, you know, kind of this libertarian sense of like, you don't tell me how to lock down. You don't tell me how to eat. You don't tell me all of this. And so that becomes infused within MAGA and then gets paired with big money. And so those two things are the story of vice in the Trump administration is that that libertarian spirit of this. Remember, I mean, a tremendous amount of backlash to liberal elitism is don't tell me what to say. Don't tell me to say Latinx. Don't tell me how to live my life. Don't tell me that my son can be a girl. Like all of these things is that you are policing my speech.

48:31You are using your political correctness to literally shape the conditions of my lives, my thoughts and all this. And I don't want to do this. Screw you. Right. And that's a, such an immense part of that, but it becomes this general sense of, we no longer have the, let's put moral ability, the common sense to say smoking high potency THC marijuana is bad for you. Lowers your IQ. It's bad for testosterone is bad for pregnant women. All of the, you know, your kids weed that they're smoking today or ingesting more likely via vape or gummies is dramatically stronger than what you and your friend smoked in the 1990s.

49:06It's putting them in the ER. Why can't we just look at empirical data? And I think that, I mean, obviously it's part of my one man campaign, but I just think it comes down to what you were talking about with virtue. I think there is an ability. I'm, I'm, by the way, I'm secular, right? I'm an atheist and I don't ever couch any of my rhetoric around marijuana or gambling or any of this, I look at the societal costs and I go, guys, these people are stealing money from you. Why do you want your freedom to throw your money away? And then let's put even beyond that, you're being controlled by deceptive advertising, by rigged rules of the game, by also these powerful corporations, which are weaponizing your dopamine receptors to milk you of your savings, bankrupt your family, and also turn the nation into a bunch of gambling addicts while they become filthy rich billionaires on marijuana.

50:00Very similarly, oh, just let people do whatever they want to do. So much of this is cultural, unfortunately. But we come back to the point of like, look, 20 % of weed smokers are smoking high potency THC every single day. 20%, one out of five. It has now overtaken drinking as America's drug of choice. I mean, I think that has a lot of negative social externalities. I can make all these cases without talking about virtue, even though, I mean, there's virtuous cases behind all this. I go, look, on gambling, the average bankruptcy in the state when they legalize gambling, bankruptcy goes up, saving rates goes down, Bank of America ran the data, the vast majority are getting 90 cents on the dollar from what they deposit into a prediction market or into a sports betting app.

50:44It is making you poorer in an age of affordability. By the way, it increases domestic violence. There are all these negative, massively negative social externalities where if you accept the premise of we live in a society, I want to look out for you, right? That's how I always frame it as. It's like, I want to look out for my fellow. Look, if I was a true libertarian, I would say, hey, I'm buying DraftKings stock. You do whatever you want to do. I don't gamble. I'm going to get rich off your back, but I'm not willing to do that. You know, I think it's wrong. Yeah, it's really interesting.

51:11Derek Thompson: So I've almost and just consistently never gotten around to finishing this column that I really want to write. It's called America's Century of Guilt. And I have a theory about wokeness and anti-wokeness, which is that these are fundamentally movements about guilt. Wokeness is many things, but among those things is an accusation that the winners of society are guilty and should feel a certain kind of shame. That's true about white people, about men, about the rich, about Americans, even about American history. and the anti-woke rebellion against that that represented MAGA 2.0 represented a kind of guilt jubilee.

51:50Derek Thompson: A jubilee is when all debts are free. It said no one should pay the guilt tax. No one should feel guilty. In fact, rich, white men are the best. American history is fantastic. We're going to go into museums and erase the parts of those museums that tried to make Americans feel guilty about us. And it became this kind of guilt jubilee. We can use the R word for stupid people and never feel bad for it. We can use bad words. We can be racist and laugh at ICE arresting people and make little Ghibli AI images of them. And we never have to feel guilty about this stuff. And there's a part of the pro-vice politics that got enmeshed in this response to the guilt politics of the left and then the anti-guilt politics of the right.

52:34Derek Thompson: And the thinking is, it's like guilt has to flow somewhere in American politics. Someone has to have a clear message of who should feel or not feel guilty. And I wonder if there's sort of two pathways for the guilt politics of the next few years. One is the message that you hear from the left, I think often very successfully as a matter of rhetoric, that billionaires should feel guilty. Plutocrats should feel guilty by virtue of the fact that they are rich. You're making a related but different claim that I think is really interesting, which is not just that people should feel guilty because they're rich, because they're billionaires.

53:13Derek Thompson: It's that the guilt should flow to people who make vice, who make things that are compulsions that we use without wanting to have used them. Yes. And wherein our participation in these markets, whether it's, you know, weed or social media or certain kinds of gambling, enrich people that we can't see that are, you know, rubbing their fingers together in the rooms that have the cigar smoke. And I wonder, I don't know, maybe you can help me finish this piece. Yeah, I'd love to. How do you feel about this idea that what you're speaking to actually, I think, meets a very clear demand among voters, not only to know what is true, what is virtuous, but also having the right people to blame for the bad feelings in their life.

54:01Derek Thompson: I think that's a hugely important part of modern politics. So well said. I love that idea. Yeah, you really should finish it. And, you know, even to parse that, I've always, this kind of like always been my beef sometimes with the left is I'll be like, look, you know, you guys talk about billionaires. For me, it's about like, how do you get rich? Like actually how? And the question of how is important. Like there is a big difference between a guy who becomes a billionaire, let's say creating a service, which is beloved. And sure, there might be some questions, let's say about union or something like that.

54:25But at the end of the day, Amazon, something like that. We have a lot of criticism of Amazon, the way they treat the drivers and we can get into that ultimately. But we like online shopping and online shopping itself, the ease of delivery, et cetera. And it's like, well, OK, but let's not extrapolate that entirely to, let's say, Calci, where I mean, look, I'll just call him out right now. You know, Tarek Mansoor, the CEO of Calci, he just put out this long post about the American dream, about how he grew up in Lebanon and he became a math nerd. And the way you read this is like the celebration of America and of his general innovation.

54:55I mean, this is a company which is entirely built on the back of regulatory arbitrage where they redefine gambling as prediction markets, basically buy off or allegedly give donations and political influence to the CFTC and get the federal government to legalize gambling nationwide. All right. I'm sorry. That's not innovative. That's not impressive. That is not something we should celebrate as part of the American story. For all of our history, we have recognized gambling is a grievous sin. In fact, George Washington banned it at Valley Forge. George Washington at one point, he called it the father of avarice.

55:32You know, he said the death of many a man's honor. You can read it. It's one of the letters he wrote to his nephew. I mean, for all of our history, we've recognized. And this is where I'm again, I'm not a moral majority guy. I'm not saying ban at all. My modest proposal is, OK, it's fair. Gambling only in the state of Nevada, which is ultimately what the Supreme Court ruled on, is wrong, right? And the reason why is ultimately it gatecapped Nevada from any sort of outside competition. Fine. Gambling in person. You know why? By the way, gambling is fun. I don't know if you ever gamble. But you know what's important?

56:05It's actually having to go to the casino and see somebody on an oxygen tube sitting there and just pissing their life savings away. And when you go in there, you go, man, I'm a loser if I stay a long time. And not just a literal loser. Like I'm a physical loser. You have to see these things in the eyes. You need to create friction, right? And that's my biggest problem with online gambling in particular and a lot of social media addiction. I'm not nearly as radical as some of my, you know, opponents and others will portray me as, but what I will not accept is a value neutral kind of way of looking at things that we know are bad.

56:41Lowering IQ in the case of marijuana is bad, all right? I mean, even on, I don't drink alcohol, by the way, and on alcohol itself, I mean, alcohol taxes are way too low. I think that the way that we talk about, or maybe at an elite level, things have changed quite a bit, but still like the normalization of just like, oh, a beer or a shot. I'm like, nope, sorry. Like, actually, I think there's a lot wrong with that. And the general, like having a good time somehow became the virtue. And like, when I look culturally at the way that we should venerate in terms of like how we at least talk about these things, It may be ironic, but like, I just think back to kind of the 1930s, 40s era.

57:19I become obsessed with reading these books about like leaders of that time. And, you know, I will read about this guy, John Winant. He was the ambassador, Citizens of London, shout out, one of my favorite recent books I read. He's a US ambassador to the UK, Court of State James, under FDR. His previous background, he's like a Republican. He is, you know, in New Hampshire, becomes one of the most popular governors in the history of the state. He becomes a New Deal Republican, gets appointed a Social Security administrator. And he just had such a strong moral compass. He came from immense wealth.

57:49But he kind of had this genuine feeling of like noblesse oblige and of helping the people and of looking out for the common man. I do not feel that our current elite, our capitalist elite in particular, have any of that. I think they will literally, literally do anything to make a dollar.

58:06Derek Thompson: And I think that's what I find really disgusting. And I feel like that's bubbled up now to our government as well. And especially with these, I mean, turn on the NFL. I mean, it's just, oh, it's just beer. It's gambling. It's just, I mean, gambling, gambling, gambling. That's all you see. It's like gluttony, excess, consumption. And that was all socially understood as really gross, as excess in itself is not virtuous, you know? And that was broken from our culture. I'm not exactly sure what year exactly. There's a lot of different takes that we could go back and look. And, you know, a lot of my Christian friends would say, well, see, this is why you should be a Christian.

58:46So, you know, sometimes I think they have a point. I get that too. Right. In terms of at least acknowledging the very things they were warning about at the time.

58:54Derek Thompson: Christians do have a way of liking to end conversations about morality by saying, by the way, you should also be a Christian. Yeah, that's right. Something about the culture. Yeah. Um, it's interesting that you touched on Noblesse Oblige because I'm fascinated by the question of why did so many of the robber barons who nobody thinks were particularly moral creatures like Rockefeller or Carnegie also started the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Chicago, the all sorts of different organizations. They gave away so much of their money.

59:23Derek Thompson: And when you look at a lot of the equivalent robber barons or tech barons of the moment, whether it's Elon Musk, Brian Armstrong at Coinbase, Jeff Bezos, you'll often hear from them in the argument that it would be wasteful for them to give to charity. And in fact, that the companies they start are their charities. That the companies they start do more for the world than any charity could possibly do. And there's an idea embedded in that argument, I think, that gets to exactly the last point that you made, which is that maybe one of the most powerful ideas of the moment, maybe especially among business elite of the moment, is that markets are moral.

1:00:04Derek Thompson: Yes. Right? Yes. The companies that I start are charities. Why? Because they're successful in a marketplace that is moral, whose outcomes are moral. And I think that same attitude potentially explains why ideas that used to be contained because they were seen as vices. You can gamble, but only over there, that we expand them because, well, it's not a casino. It's a prediction market. And now, oh, well, it's a prediction market when I can't be gambling markets are good. And so there is something about this idea of market brain that even as a sort of left liberal capitalist myself, I still think there's ways in which that can take us into some dangerous places.

1:00:52Well, what's so ironic is read a book. I mean, you and I are obsessed with that period of the late 1800s and of the industrial revolution. Vanderbilt argued the same thing you are. And guess what? Everyone was like, yeah, but the conditions on your steamships are bad. You know, the conditions on your railroads are awful. And there was an entire social revolution against this exact idea. No, the company and the business itself is not in and of itself virtuous is actually your job is to is our job is to put constraints around your ability just to be able to make a dollar. You need to make a dollar in the right way with hours, say, with a 40 hour work week, with work, with weekends, with no child labor.

1:01:29I mean, these are hard fought causes from Republican, Democrat, progressive era and all of this. It's just that we've lost all this language. Like, how do we how can we sit in America today and just allow the proliferation and mass bankrupting of our young men. I don't understand it. Same with the mass deadening of people's IQ with marijuana. I just, I like truly this idea of like, do whatever you want to do. I mean, to what extent? Like we don't know, you know, everyone tells me they're like, Oh, should we tell other people how to live their lives? We do it every day. You have to cross when the crosswalk sign goes on when the red light turns green.

1:02:04I mean, you're not allowed to murder people, obviously not. You know, they're going to say, Oh, well, you're saying all of this. What I'm saying is that every single thing in society is a trade-off. I don't think people should have to go to jail because they're in possession of small amounts of marijuana, even though that's basically fake and doesn't happen anymore. But what exists today is just this vast permissiveness of do whatever you want to do. And we cannot live in a society. Our country is too big. Not only do we need rules, we need a general understanding. We're too heterogeneous from two different class class backgrounds and all this, people are always like, oh, you love, I love Japan.

1:02:41Actual like one of those people who's, you know, the classic online guys just obsessed with everything about Japan. They're like, oh, well, Japan doesn't need these rules. I'm like, well, they have a highly homogenized culture where all of this is enforced culturally. That's not an option here. So we actually do need to solve it at a policy level and set basic ground rules. And I'm willing to concede, you know, yes or no. Like, I don't want to see a casino, period. Honestly, I would ban them all. I really would. However, I recognize, you know, in terms of like where the political solution is, I just can't get there.

1:03:13Like the online one is what I actually despair for our country. Nothing gives me more genuine despair than online gambling. It really does. I am watching people destroy their entire lives.

1:03:26Derek Thompson: Last chapter. I wanted to talk to you about post-Trump politics. I wanted to talk to you about virtue. Last thing I want to talk to you about is the gerontocracy. I think we're at a really interesting reflection point. I know, I'm just riling you up. I'm all rubbing my hands. So we're going to get, very likely, some very prominent millennial politicians in the next few hours. John Ossoff, already an elected millennial. I think his star is on the rise. El Sayed, I think, is going to win in Michigan. There's a bunch of others. Steve Buttigieg is out there licking his chops for 28, I think. But we're not yet ready, I think, to move beyond boomer politics.

1:04:05Derek Thompson: No, we're not. In fact, people like El-Sayed, who represent our generation, are out there promising boomer homeowners that he's never going to raise their property taxes and that'll freeze or even eliminate them. You had a really interesting conversation with Abdul El-Sayed on your show. And I would just love to hear your version of what he said literally, but also what he's saying about the degree to which politics cannot seem to infringe on the holdings of the elderly. Yeah. So Abdul, I've known Abdul for many years and to be, and somebody actually joked in response to my interview where Abdul is like, Hey man, can't you just see I'm trying to slop your eyes?

1:04:51Like that's what he really wants to say. And, and just, you know, that's kind of the joke. But if basically what we, I said, you infamously said seniors should have their property taxes frozen. How can you emulate a policy, which has failed everywhere it's been implemented, which has dramatically driven down the housing stock. It lowers the incentive to sell and creates all sort of market distortions. There's an entire NBR paper, by the way, that proves all of this out.

1:05:16Derek Thompson: And just to quickly say, it lowers the housing stock and therefore drives up prices for young people who don't yet own homes. And so it is a kind of generational giveaway from the young to the elderly. And not to mention underfunds the social services, like schools in particular, which elder people paid for for their kids, but they don't want to pay for our kids. So it's generational war on multiple fronts. He came around to his answer, which I think is totally nonsensical, is he told me, you are technically correct, but in the practical world, when seniors' property taxes go up, younger people end up having to pay their parents' property tax because they don't want to lose their home.

1:05:54Obviously, this is a ridiculous answer. What he's trying to say is, I'm trying to buy off senior votes, ultimately. But the problem I find with that is that El-Sayed, who has some of the most young people backing, like the amount of enthusiasm online from, I mean, audience. I mean, my entire show is maybe 9 % Boomer audience. 90-something percent of my audience is below the age of 65, the vast majority even below the age of 45. And so all of those people, like those types of people that are going to be excited about El-Sayed, and yet somebody still cannot propose a single— By the way, nobody even asked him to do it.

1:06:28He came out proactively to do it because he knows that they're the median voters, 55 years old, not in college, is the person who ultimately shows up at the ballot box. And I think that's the really sad part is that he is twisting himself into knots, concedes I am technically correct. And yet nobody has the courage to say what I have have said, which is, yeah, here's the truth. If your property taxes are too high, sell your house. That's it. But nobody wants to say it. We have all of these shibbolets in American politics, like fixed income. This is my personal favorite. You know, they're like, oh, seniors are on fixed income.

1:07:02I don't know. And especially in the age of real time wage deflation, which we're in right now, where real wages have not caught up with inflation today. They get inflation adjusted tax free income. I mean, the big, beautiful bill, which Abdul criticized on my show. I was like, well, it's funny you're saying that because you're in line with a policy where 88 percent of people who have Social Security pay zero federal income tax. More than half of states in the nation charge zero income tax on Social Security. They get free health care. They get free inflation adjusted income. Now they're getting their property taxes frozen.

1:07:34I mean, the vast majority of them will receive more benefits than they paid into the system. By the way, I am not one of these, you know, people who's like cut Social Security under that. I do think we need a general compromise. There's a lot of different ways we can get there. And I recognize that many seniors, it is their only, you know, only source of income. And I have no general animus towards them. More what I'm trying to say is I never hear a politician talk about what you wrote about in your book, which is my friends. I'm 34. My friends who are having two children and are facing a landscape of historic housing prices and a 7.2 % mortgage interest rate and the complete inability in the mass inflation environment to save for a 10 to 15 % down payment.

1:08:14Will somebody please just talk about it? Talk about it. Propose some sort of a policy. Actually come out and say, this is my plan. And, you know, that that's it's the disparity in the in the pandering and the catering to and even in the discussion point where everyone will engage at a high level. But also in terms of what out of every single thing that Abdel has proposed, what is the one that actually will probably happen is freeze property tax. That's the political reality of it. Well, does he have the power as a senator? But I'm saying generally, like if you were looking, I mean, how many of these state out of all those policy proposals, what is the one that will actually happen?

1:08:53Property tax freeze. My home state of Texas is exempting 65 and up from increases in school tax. They are dramatically lowering property. The state of Florida wants to get rid of property tax entirely. And the governor of the state of Florida, when I point out how the disastrous policy of this, you know what his response to me was? I must be getting paid off. And I was like, sir, who's paying me? Miami-Dade County? You know, what general interest group? I'm looking out for young people because that's a state which caters entirely to the elderly. And I'm sick of watching, you know, normal working people in Florida having to pay a toll road every single time they drive 0.2 miles.

1:09:32And then the quality of their education is going to go down. I went to a good public school in Texas. That's all. They're trying to cut it right now. High school football, by the way, if Abbott gets his way, we'll be destroyed. The entire Friday Night Lights culture will be nuked in rural Texas if we continue to go down this road. People just, it actually comes back to the gambling thing, the do whatever you want to do, is the idea behind that is that I have no duty to you. And I believe, just as I just laid out about seniors, I have a duty to you. You have a duty to me too, right? And you have a duty to my daughter and to my children, right?

1:10:07Like we have up and down social contract. And that's what's breaking apart in our country right now. Who's talking like this?

1:10:13Derek Thompson: I mean, obviously, no one. It's political. Guess what? If I ran for office on this, I would lose. I would. Because what's the average age of voters in local elections? Exactly. Or in primaries. Or not even that. On the state ballot initiatives, which these people put forward in off years so that they can come in 2025 and just like that, lower the property tax. To be clear, I am, even though you might be nodding your head in your car, in your earbuds, If I ran for office on this, I would lose in a historic blowout, like historic blowout. It's why this millennial moment's really interesting, because you might have in the next few years a lot of young people talking like old people.

1:10:48Derek Thompson: Yeah. Because you're going to be 37 years old, 39 years old. You're a senator. You're a governor. You're, you know, a hotshot mayor. Sure. But who's voting in those primaries? unless you have just an incredible Obama times 3.0 moment like 2008, where like the entire, like, you know, campuses are, you know, outvoting the senior centers, the average age of voters is still just very high. And so you are lighting your political career on fire if the first thing that you say is, we have to raise taxes on old people in order to fund the schools better. We don't even need to raise, just keep our taxes the same.

1:11:21Do you see how crazy I feel? I go, you should pay the same as me. and that is a radical position, you know? I mean, we can get crazy. And I have, you know, I will sometimes get a little bit crazy where, you know, I just, it's enraging, especially, I mean, you've been on the receiving end of avocado toast politics and all of that. And then they're like, oh, I didn't save enough to pay for my property tax. I'm like, I probably should have pulled yourself up from a bootstrap. Sounds like a you problem. But you start talking that way, my God. But they can speak to us that way. That's the part that gets me.

1:11:53Derek Thompson: It's interesting. I mean, you have an interesting portfolio of ideologies. And as one puts them all together, it's like, you know, you have like the virtue ethics of like a 17th century Calvinist preacher. Sure. You're 34 years old. So you're a 21st century millennial. And so you combine this like very 21st century attitude. And plus you're a YouTube podcast. Literal YouTuber. You're a little YouTuber. Right. So you have like sort of the presentational politics of a 21st century young person combined with the virtue ethics of Someone from like ancient American history. It certainly makes for something unique.

1:12:29Yeah, thank you I appreciate that. I'm just doing what they did Which is using the new form of mass communication to reach as many people as possible To ignite just like just like a discussion exactly. That's all I'm doing so good. Thank you very much. Thanks

1:12:48Thank you.