The Millionaire Tech Bro Running Against Millionaire Tech Bros

19:57Saikat Chakrabarti:And this is a time where only 3 percent of Democrats and only 16 percent of Republicans want a bigger defense budget. So I'd say the politicians are completely out of step with where the people are at. And it's been a huge mistake. You know, this has been why we've killed millions of people. is why half the world hates us right now. We have to slash our defense budget, right? And same thing when you look at fundamentally how do we make people's lives better? How do we make life affordable again? I'm a strong supporter of universal healthcare and Medicare for all, you know, universal childcare, tuition-free public colleges and trade schools.

20:24Saikat Chakrabarti:I think we have to move to public power instead of having investor-owned utilities because that's the way to cut our utility bills. This is saying that the government should take a more direct role in directly providing these services. That's something where Nancy Pelosi has not been on the same page. And then, of course, when it comes to the corruption in D.C., I strongly believe we should ban members of Congress from trading stocks. We should ban the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying industry. We have to completely end corporate money in our politics to make sure that corporations can't buy out our politicians.

20:53Saikat Chakrabarti:And former Speaker Pelosi has not always been in support of those issues. She didn't allow us to get a vote on banning congressional stock trading. So my differences with her are on the actual policy and the vision of where the party should go. but of course acknowledge she's been an incredible incredibly effective legislator all right she hasn't endorsed in this race at least not yet do you think her silence helps you or hurts you you know I don't know I'm not sure where she's going to end up going but I the way I always look at endorsements is I'm going to run my race regardless and anybody who agrees with what I'm trying to do and where I'm trying to go is I'm happy I have your support but yeah I mean I am talking about going in there and primering other corporate Democrats changing Democratic Party leadership.

21:38Saikat Chakrabarti:So I wouldn't be surprised if people who like the current Democratic Party are not necessarily in favor of my campaign. Sure. Well, that sort of leads me to what I was I wanted to ask you about. So if you if you're just sort of tuning into this, you may be thinking, oh, look, this guy's, you know, a tech bro from San Francisco. Surely he's got the backing of the tech sector and these A.I. companies. You would be quite mistaken about that. Your your opponent, Scott Wiener has the backing, or at least appears to have the backing of some of the AI money. He's got a PAC that I believe is backed by Anthropic.

22:12At least it's been reported to be backed by Anthropic. You don't really know what this dark money. Why don't the AI guys like you?

22:19Saikat Chakrabarti:Well, it's not just one super PAC, by the way. He's got at least three super PACs now that are backed. He's got one that's backed by AI money, one that's backed by a bunch of tech VCs, another one that's backed by crypto billionaires and some Trump mega donors and also APAC board members. So there's a general, you know, the people with capital in San Francisco generally don't like me because I am calling for a wealth tax on billionaires and centimillionaires, which, by the way, includes myself. And, you know, I'm calling to completely restructuring. I mean, people see me as a class trader here, and I'm proud to wear that badge.

22:53Saikat Chakrabarti:That's fine. But the AI companies specifically, they don't like me because I do have a very detailed platform up on my website for how the regulations we are seeing right now are just way too small. And I think Anthropics has honestly been one of the villains in this because they are trying to pitch themselves as the good guys. Yeah, the good AI company. But if you look at the regulations they're passing, it's the AI version of greenwashing. Like they're trying to get – they know regulations necessary because there's this huge public backlash. but they're passing basically the bare minimum. So it can say, we're doing AI regulation, but it's not going to make a difference.

23:27I mean, if you look at the bill Scott Wiener worked with them on

23:30Saikat Chakrabarti:in the California state legislature, there's reporting that, you know, anthropic lobbyists came in, worked with Scott Wiener, and they weakened the whistleblower protections to the point where it's completely out of step with any other industry. They reduced the fines for violations from$10 million per violation to$1 million, which, I mean, these AI companies spend$1 million, like, every 20 minutes. That's nothing to them. Right. But that's enough to for them to know that Scott Wiener is their guy. And I, on the other hand, I'm talking for essentially public control of this technology. Like, I think if we have a technology that is going to potentially wipe out half of all of our jobs, maybe wipe out humanity itself.

24:06Saikat Chakrabarti:I don't think that should be in the hands of a few CEOs to make those kinds of decisions for all of society. You know, I think we should have labor say how AI gets introduced into a workforce. If there's all these productivity gains, that should mean shorter work weeks, higher wages for workers, not just workers getting replaced. And I call for having publicly owned national AI labs that, you know, use the technology for the good stuff, like cancer research, drug discovery, but not for the profit-driven slop feeds. And I say, you know, the way I think we can get there is at some point, this AI investment bubble is probably going to burst.

24:41Saikat Chakrabarti:These AI companies are going to come to government asking for a bailout, saying we're too big to fail. And I think in that moment, we should do what we should have done in the last recession. We should, instead of bailing them out, buy them out for pennies on the dollar and convert them into publicly owned corporations where we use it for the good stuff and not for the bad. Interesting. So would you would you support putting aside the possibility and probability that this is a bubble that is going to burst? Essentially, would you support nationalizing any of these companies if it turns out that the you know, like we keep hearing about Anthropic and its new LLM mythos that is so powerful, they can't even release it to the public.

25:14Is there an argument for nationalizing any of these companies if it turns out that they're just too powerful for their own good?

25:21Saikat Chakrabarti:Yeah. I mean essentially the plan I just laid out is one route to nationalizing, right? But I think if we get to a point where they're starting to just be too powerful in general, we should look into just straight up nationalizing them, taking public control. Like we don't – if there is any other technology with that kind of risk to society, we wouldn't have that in the hands of just a few profit-driven corporations because that's so risky. That's not how he makes the hidey-wide decisions. So, yeah, I mean, it doesn't surprise me that AI lobby doesn't necessarily like that argument. And they're going to spend, as they said, whatever it takes to make sure I don't win this race.

25:55But that's what I'm up against. I'm just fascinated by this stuff because I feel like you're on the sort of bleeding edge of where the public is. I mean, you're starting to see the backlash, I think, in polling. But I just – I hear from people all the time, readers and viewers who are just like this is out of – like we don't want this. Nobody wants this, right? I mean maybe they want the stuff that we keep being promised like the cancer research. But nobody wants the shit, the slop as you said that is coming for their – and this technology that their – the own CEOs of these companies are saying is going to wipe out half of white-collar jobs.

26:33It's not like this is just coming from some rant. Like Dario Amodi, the head of Anthropics, says half of white-collar jobs are going to be taken by this technology. But one thing that's a long way of getting to my question, which is I've been interested in this idea of a compute tax. I don't know how familiar you are, but basically the idea being that if AI companies are going to capture all of this economic value, let's collect some of that and sort of mail it back out as either a dividend or UBI or basically turn AI into a part of the tax base. Is that something that you are into that?

27:05Saikat Chakrabarti:Yeah, that's part of my plan as well, is I call for creating a new American trust fund, essentially. But it's modeled off the Alaskan Sovereign Wealth Fund, where they do that for the oil and gas industry. Exactly. Yeah, I'm open to how we collect the money. I call for just a tax on the AI companies, but I could do it as a compute tax. We could do it as public equity stakes, where we actually take stakes in the companies, and that would also be a path towards eventual public ownership of these companies. But absolutely, we have to tax them. I mean, because a big risk in the current model is we are basically – we have a model where we tax labor and wages, right?

27:40Saikat Chakrabarti:But if AI is going the way it's going, we are going to just see further wealth consolidation. And we have to completely change our tax basis, not tax wealth or wages and labor, but instead tax wealth and capital. And so there are a bunch of ways we can do that, but we have to do that. And I think that has to happen in general in our society. And I completely agree with you on that. Also, you call for a jobs guarantee, I think, right? How would that work? Yeah. So the way – so this is the other part of the equation, right, is if you take AI out of the equation of our economy, we are basically doing nothing in our economy.

28:16Saikat Chakrabarti:Like it's basically all AI and healthcare-driven growth. And that's – The S &P 500 is like five stocks. It's all because of this AI CapEx, basically. Yeah. And that's happening because we don't know how to do that. You know, like a lot of the real idea space that we're trying to open up with the Green New Deal and the work I've been doing at New Consensus has been this idea of how do countries intentionally build up the industries and the economies that they want to build? Because if you look back at our own history, at the history of basically every rich European nation, of the rich Asian nations, we all went through these phases in the 20th century where we rapidly developed our entire economies within the course of like a generation.

28:53Saikat Chakrabarti:Like we did this during World War II when we did it to win the war, but we built up our entire industrial base. Europe did it to build up back out of the war. And Asian countries did just like get rich in the 80s and 90s. And the way that countries do governing in those moments is completely different than what we do today. And we've been calling it mission mode. But the idea is there's usually like a movement or a leader who comes to power, really sets the country on a mission to build up whatever we need to build. And then to accomplish that, we make comprehensive plans. We don't just pass some policies and take our hands on the steering wheel.

29:26Saikat Chakrabarti:We make plans of what we want to do. And then you have institutions to finance, coordinate, and execute those plans. We used to have tons of these in America. Largest by far is one called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. We've got a big plan for how to bring that back today. But the idea all boils down to this basic premise of you have goals of what you want to do as a country, and then you use your economy to achieve those goals. And that's the larger plans for how to do that is what I've been working on, new consensus. So I think right now we should be building up clean high-wage industries, the battery industries, solar panel industries, EV industries, right?

29:59Saikat Chakrabarti:We should be building out our public transit systems. There's all this work that we actually have to do that we are simply not doing because we don't have the institutions or the know-how for how to do it as a nation state. And so I believe we should start doing that work. And then at the same time, we should create a federal jobs guarantee so that nobody, you people do start getting fired because of these AI layoffs, they can get another job, make the same amount of money doing the work that we actually need to do in this country. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that this is an underappreciated element of politics right now that not a lot of people are talking about because, you know, if millions of white collar workers are all of a sudden given pink slips, I think people in politics, I think Washington is just completely underestimating what that's going to look like.

30:44I mean, it's going to make Occupy Wall Street look like, you know, literally like a walk in the park, right? Yeah. I'm cognizant of our time, but I have a bunch of other stuff to get to. So I just want to try and stay on track here. It's my own fault for going off on an AI tangent. But it's interesting to hear your – please, go ahead.

31:00Saikat Chakrabarti:I just want to say one other thing on the AI tangent, though. Please. Just something I'm not seeing reported enough. Like the reason that there aren't that many people talking about AI – because I keep seeing this. Like, this is a huge problem. Why are not that many Democratic politicians other than like Bernie and AOC and Ro Khanna talking about it? And it's because every single consultant in a congressional race will tell you, if you talk about AI, you're going to get a million dollars dropped against you. So just don't talk about it. Right. And that's why no one's talking about it. And in this race, I talked about it.

31:28Saikat Chakrabarti:I'm going to get millions of dollars dropped against me. Right. But I think it's too important of a topic not to talk about. And that's why we're making a big part of our campaign. Well, so this is a perfect segue once again to my next question, which is talking about campaign finance. So you've self-funded – you've put, according to the FEC records, that I saw$4.8 million of your own money into your campaign, roughly the cost of like what, a one-bedroom in the Presidio now? Something like that, right? But you've said that there's no limit to how much you'll spend on this. You say that you want to end private money in politics entirely.

31:59How do you square that? Would you support a ban on self-funded campaigns?

32:04Saikat Chakrabarti:I would, yeah. I mean I would like to see us move to fully publicly financed elections. Sure. But, you know, in this campaign, the other part of it is we have raised, you know, about$400 ,000 from 10 ,000 individual donors, which is more than my opponents combined. And that's despite us not actually focusing on fundraising at all. And that's partly because, you know, given that I do have money, I feel kind of bad asking people for money to, like, finance my campaign. But the other piece of it is the reason it's been so much is in this race I am up against about that equivalent amount of money so far in terms of like my opponents raising from corporations, from APAC board members, from the AI lobby, from crypto billionaires.

32:45Saikat Chakrabarti:And so to go up against that amount of money, I could either spend all my time begging those people for money, which frankly they won't give me anyway because I'm talking about going to D.C. and completely changing the system, making sure they don't have any power, you know, taxing their wealth. or I could put in my own money to actually run a competitive race. So I've decided to do that. So I'll be free to go to D.C. and actually change this system the way I'm talking about. You know, it's funny because I don't personally have a problem with self-funded campaigns. I've never really understood the backlash against them.

33:14I mean, I was honestly when Trump ran for the first time, I remember thinking to myself, well, this guy's crazy. But, you know, it might be nice to actually see a billionaire self-funded. Of course, he didn't do that. Right. He didn't. And I think you can make arguments about why it's not a good idea, why it is. But a millionaire self-funding their campaign, to me, is very different from taking corporate PAC money. Right?

33:37Saikat Chakrabarti:Yeah, because the problem is not the— You're not beholden to anybody. Yeah, I mean, there's two problems. Like, one problem is that there's just, like, so much money involved in these races right now. So, like, the only way for me to compete against so much money coming my way is for me to put in money. And I think it does suck to have a system where, like, a working-class person wouldn't be able to do that unless they also raise tons of money. but the real problem in D.C. is the influence of those corporations like the reason all these corporations are donating to my opponent it's not out of charity you know that it's because they know they'll have access to him and they can influence him when he's in D.C.

34:11Saikat Chakrabarti:it's to buy his vote and I saw that constantly when I was in Congress I mean there would be both quid pro quote corruption but then there's like this other part which is much more nefarious where like the entire, it shapes the entire world of possibility within DC. So on the quid pro quo side, you know, we saw this really clearly when we tried to pick a fight on trying to make it so that the IRS can file your taxes for you. And Intuit, you know, who makes TurboTax, they spend millions of dollars every campaign cycle. Yeah. Make sure that doesn't happen. Trump killed that off. Yeah. So it wasn't there.

34:44Saikat Chakrabarti:Eventually Biden did pass it and then Trump killed it off again. But when we picked the fight, it wasn't just Republicans. It was also Democrats that came after us because they didn't want to piss off their donors. But the worst part is anytime we would propose legislation, you know, we worked on this one bill called loan shark prevention act, to try to cap interest rates on payday loans, really terrible stuff, very popular in red districts, purple districts everywhere. But we couldn't get a lot of these corporate Democrats to back it because it wasn't even someone was telling them no, they were just thinking like, which donors am I going to piss off, right?

35:14Saikat Chakrabarti:It shapes what's possible in DC. And that's the terrible, terrible effect of having all these corporations just continue to buy out our politicians. And so that is what I want to go in there and completely break. And yeah, then I'd love to move towards a place where no one has to put in any amount of money to win these races. We just have a fair playing field for all. Let's talk about a little bit about Hassan Piker. You just mentioned this. You rallied with him. What was that last week, right? A few days ago. We had him on the show. I think he's a fascinating guy. You know, had a great conversation.

35:45We were talking more about sort of like the male loneliness epidemic, so it wasn't as controversial as some of the other things he said. A San Francisco supervisor introduced a resolution calling on you to publicly acknowledge Hamas to be a genocidal terrorist organization, end quote, and distance yourself from Piker, who, again, is very sort of anti-Israel, has been very outspoken about what's going on in Gaza, et cetera. You chose to share a stage with him anyway. I have no problem with that at all. I think progressives and I think Democrats should do a much better job talking to basically anybody.

36:24But defend your decision to rally with Piker for people out there who think that Democrats shouldn't associate themselves with, you know, quote unquote extremists in their own party.

36:34Saikat Chakrabarti:Yeah, I mean, at the same time that the San Francisco supervisor put out that resolution, the Republicans in Congress are putting out a very similar resolution asking for the same thing. which, you know, I frankly think Democrats should be spending more time fighting Trump rather than just trying to fight Hassan Piker, which has become their new focus. But look, Hassan is somebody who has been streaming like 10 hours a day for almost a decade, I think over a decade now. And in that time, yeah, he said some objectionable things. But the vast majority, if you listen to him, the vast majority of what he talks about is strongly pro-worker, strongly anti-racist, strongly like anti-Asian hate.

37:10Saikat Chakrabarti:It's for creating a society that works for working people and not just for the oligarchs. And I think we have to get past this whole era of politics where we judge people by the worst things they may have said years ago. I think that was devastating for Democrats in 2018 and 2020 and 2024. And it's like it's crazy to me that all that got sort of blamed on progressives. And yet now we're seeing this third way, you know, centrist think tank trying to wage a cancel culture war against one of the most popular media people in the country. I mean, Hassan is talking to millions of young people every single day.

37:52Saikat Chakrabarti:The voters as Democrats claim they want to win back. And yet you're not going to engage with the person talking to those people. And I've you know, and these folks who tune into Hassan's stream, they are exactly the people you talk to because they're the people who otherwise would either be completely nihilistic, wouldn't vote at all or would have gone to Donald Trump. They're the folks that are going over to the right. So I think he's doing a service right now, bringing those people back into fold and inspiring them. No, I mean, look, the litmus test on the left, I really it's one of my least favorite things about being a Democrat.

38:21Somebody we were talking on the show the other day. My producer, Mickey, was saying, like, how come, you know, why why can't the left have its own Joe Rogan? And my response was like, well, this look at what happened to Piker. Right. This guy is probably the closest thing the left has to a Joe Rogan in terms of influence and reach. And the Democrats are now trying to shut him down, to your point, because of like they were able to cherry pick some things. he said over, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of being on camera every day. Right. Anyway, yes, we're in agreement on this. And I think that more Democrats should follow your lead.

38:54Since we're talking a little bit about Israel, I don't want to talk much about it, but you are running for Congress. Where do you stand on U.S. military aid to Israel? Would you vote against it? Specifically, would you vote against the Iron Dome?

39:07Saikat Chakrabarti:So Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza right now, right? And that term has real meaning, which, so A, we should not send any aid, military otherwise, to Israel, because that's against our own laws. It's also against international law. And we should be going beyond that, because genocide means that, you know, we have a responsibility to do what we can to stop the genocide. So I've called for us exploring sanctions to try to put pressure on Israel to stop this genocide. We have to end it. And, you know, this has been a place where I've been clear on this from day one in the campaign. I've managed to move both my opponents by simply talking about me.

39:42Saikat Chakrabarti:Senator Weiner has been a longtime opponent of the Palestinian rights movement in California. He's authored a lot of the key legislation that equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism in our K-12 system. He's gotten multiple people fired for criticizing Israel. He got the president of Sonoma State University fired for doing that. He's been an opponent of this for a long time. But because this is an issue where the people have moved so dramatically, even he is now saying he no longer supports offensive weapons. He hasn't said he won't support stopping defensive weapons. Okay. So he's trying to move his way.

40:18Saikat Chakrabarti:And look, I'm glad. This is one of the great things about having competitive races and competitive primaries is you get to actually move people. But I don't trust him on the issue, to say the least, given his entire history on it. But yeah, I see this as a clear moral red line. We should not be funding genocides anywhere. And by the way, this extends for me to other genocides that were funding by proxy as well. Right now, there's a genocide in Sudan that we're funding by proxy through the UAE. I don't think we should be doing that either, right? This is a morally consistent position. So, I mean, I guess that probably answers my next question.

40:51But what I was going to ask you is San Francisco does have a significant Jewish community. Pelosi did, you know, she had deep relationships within that community. Do you worry about this position sort of affecting your coalition math?

41:05Saikat Chakrabarti:No, I don't. And it's because I do make a very clear distinction that my position is about the nation state of Israel. It is not about Jewish people. It is about making sure everybody can live in peace and without threats of violence and that no one should be funding us. And, you know, most of the of my Jewish constituents that I've talked to honestly support this position. They don't want America to be sending funds towards what's going on in Palestine. And people are pretty clear about that. At the same time. Yeah. Like I've also been clear about calling out anti-Semitism when we see it at home.

41:40Saikat Chakrabarti:And I actually think it's like a really dangerous thing that groups like the ADL and some of the, you know, pro-Israel lobby folks have been doing of trying to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. because I actually think that makes it worse. You know, that makes it more dangerous for Jewish people living here at home. It absolutely does. If everything's anti-Semitism, then nothing's anti-Semitism. I've been saying this forever. And yes, criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu and his completely insane government does not make you an anti-Semite. I'm sorry. I get this all the time in my emails, and it just infuriates me.

42:13It's just an unfair characterization. I know we've got to let you go soon. Go ahead. Sorry.

42:20Saikat Chakrabarti:Well, I just want to say, you know, I like I was growing up as a brown kid in Texas after 9-11. Right. And like and I'm not Muslim myself, but a lot of Texans didn't necessarily make that distinction. It didn't matter. And like, it sucks to be targeted for being part of some group because of stuff that's going on abroad because of America's foreign policy. So I feel this very personally. And it's not just something I'm saying. Like, I do really feel for my Jewish constituents who are feeling anti-Semitism right now. But it's just we have to separate the two. We should just have a general rule here.

42:53Saikat Chakrabarti:If we don't attack people based on what group they are, but we are OK with criticizing our other nation states, you know, changing what our foreign policy is. And that is going to be my role as a congressperson. My influence will be on where our military dollars go. Yeah. And Israel gets its money from us. So it's an extremely relevant and fair question for people who are working in Congress. Just as far as your policy platform and sort of governing Vision Go, I saw that some campaigns as of yours, you've pushed for things like a$300 monthly child stipend, housing affordability obviously medicare for all these are sort of national issues i guess you could argue housing is definitely a local issue in california what's your specific agenda for san francisco in the 11th district obviously again if you're not from san francisco great city it's had a lot of problems lately crime homelessness public disorder obviously a massive affordability problem what specifically will you do for the residents of that great city if you're elected these to me are entirely local issues i mean the biggest problem in san francisco is the cost of living crisis but it's a problem that you're seeing all over the country we just face it hardest here i don't believe the cost of living crisis is something we're going to be able to solve as a city alone we have to fix this at a national level i mean when i talk about medicare for all part of that is to make sure that people aren't spending their you know half their paycheck on health insurance but if even if you look at the san francisco city budget about the largest driver of employee costs is health care benefits.

44:24Saikat Chakrabarti:So the only thing the city can do as a result of that is cut other services, cut other measures, right? So we have to solve health care at a national level. That means Medicare for all. You know, I talk about public power in San Francisco. We need to kick PG &E out because there's other cities in California that have public power, and they pay about 40 % less than we do on their utility bills. And this is oddly a federal issue because San Francisco actually has, it was a federal law that allowed us to purchase the dam to get a bunch of power to get into the city. It's called the Raker Act in 1913.

44:52Saikat Chakrabarti:So as a cognizant person, I'm going to enforce the Raker Act to push PG &E out and move to public power in San Francisco and cut our utility bills. But same thing, I mean, if you look at universal child care, tuition-free public colleges and trade schools, trying to move, you know, building actual affordable housing and social housing to get the cost of housing down, kicking private equity and hedge funds out of our housing market, these are all hyper-local issues because the cost of the living crisis is a hyper-local issue and we can't solve it unless we solve these issues. at a federal level.

45:19Are you on board with the so-called abundance movement on the left?

45:26Saikat Chakrabarti:I'm not on board with the movement, no. I mean, I'm somebody who believes when it comes to housing, you know, yeah, we do have to, like, cut red tape and make it easier to construct housing. That's part of it. But it is not nearly sufficient. Like, that has been sort of the line that the abundance movement and people like State Senator Wiener have really been using. If we just made it easy enough to build, then the private markets would fix this problem for us. And that's not true. Like if you look in San Francisco, there's about 70 ,000 units of housing that have already been permitted to be built that are not being built because financing is not there.

45:56Saikat Chakrabarti:Cost of construction is too high. And so that's why at a federal level, what I call for is a new federal financing bank. It's really bringing back the reconstruction finance corporation that I talked about earlier from the New Deal World or Two era. And that could actually provide low cost financing to build out affordable housing. It could even do things like spin off public developers to build out this housing directly and even stockpile lumber and steel to control costs of the housing market. It's a much more proactive approach by the government to actually make sure really affordable housing gets built.

46:24Saikat Chakrabarti:To do that, we have to also repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which is a law that exists that prevents us from building any new social housing in the country. And we also have to have way more support against displacement. So I call for doubling rental vouchers, having federal support for tenants unions to make sure people can stay in the homes they're in. And we have to actually go after capital. So that's why I talk about preventing private equity and hedge funds from buying up single family homes. But the problem is right now, of all the four ideas I put out there, cutting red tape, building out social housing, only one of those ideas is favorable to the real estate lobby.

46:58Saikat Chakrabarti:And that's the cutting red tape part. And that's the one that gets all the attention. So I'm going to be the candidate in this race who doesn't take any real estate lobby money. We have to completely break the stranglehold of real estate lobby money in DC. And that's going to mean changing Democratic Party leadership. It's going to mean primering a bunch of corporate Democrats because the solutions we have right now are just like not even at the scale of what we need to do to solve the housing crisis in San Francisco. I think that's fair. So my final question to you before I let you go, I'm thinking about my my aunt, who's, you know, lifetime resident of San Francisco, probably.

47:30I mean, I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I think she probably considers herself sort of an establishment Democrat, you know, probably voted for Pelosi every election. What's your sort of elevator pitch to my aunt for why she should pull the lever for you in a couple weeks in the primary. How old's your aunt, out of curiosity? Yeah, that's probably good information to have. She's a boomer. She would be in her 70s.

47:54Saikat Chakrabarti:Well, I'll tell your aunt, because I've done so many events in rooms full of people exactly like your aunt. Older folks in San Francisco who've been here for a long time, who've loved... Love the city. Love the city, of course, but also love Nancy Pelosi, love Democratic Party have been mainline Democratic voters and but even people like her aunt I tell her like look think of your children right think of the next generation think look at what's turning what's the city is turning into and the city is turning into this place that only the wealthy can afford to live in right where the people actually run the city that people are working in our cafes the people are you know the nurses in our hospitals they're getting driven out.

48:34Saikat Chakrabarti:And we have to completely change the system to make it right. So to make it so that your kids can afford to live here. And I'll say like, when I give the pitch of the bigger ideas to those rooms, and I see those rooms coming on board, that's what inspires me. Like, that's why I think that this kind of change is possible right now. Because it is, you know, people like your aunt, I think two years ago would not be open to this message. But right now they are because they see Donald Trump coming back and it's no longer an aberration. Like clearly something is really wrong. What the democratic establishment is doing is not working and we need something new.

49:08Saikat Chakrabarti:And so what I'm trying to pitch here is a real answer for what do we do in this moment to completely turn the system around and do what you know FDR did during the new deal. Do what we know we can do. We have a history of being able to change our system when we've needed to do it. So not talk about anything all that radical but it's possible to do right now well uh well said uh shaykhad chakrabarty everybody candidate for uh for congress and ca 11 primaries on june 2nd shaykhad just tell people where they can find you if they want to look into your platform a little more yeah so you could go online go to shaykhad us and i do want to say we've been running a massive grassroots operation we've had over 3 000 people sign up to volunteer we've knocked nearly 400 000 doors in the city right now we're in the middle of trying to get the vote out so if you live in san francisco or the bay area please consider going to website and sign up to volunteer and if you live outside you can phone bank for us but we're gonna get it done and i'd love to get your support it's gonna be a it's gonna be a fascinating statewide race i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of great races going on california right now this is one of them shrekat chakrabarti thank you again for your time and uh most appreciative and good luck to you yeah thanks for having me on again

50:22Thank you.