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there's this really counterintuitive but popular idea in Silicon Valley that it's actually easier to build a hard company than it is to build an easy company. And I think the idea comes from Sam Altman in 2019, Sam wrote this thing he said. I believe that it's easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People wanna be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters. If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don't be afraid to work on what you really wanna work on. Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too. When you understand this philosophy, you start to see it all over San Francisco and Tech. But recently, I've been really interested in cases from other parts of life, from other industries where this is true. That's how I first came across Scot Scot's entire life story is a case study in this philosophy. You know, he had a pretty standard start raised by Indian immigrant parents in Texas. Went to a really good school, went to work at Wall Street and eventually Silicon Valley. But in 2016 short, Cott made a big move. He left his life in tech to go work for the Bernie Sanders campaign, and fresh off of that Bernie campaign. In 2016, Troy Cott launched this crazy ambitious mission to recruit an entirely new class of Congress. In every single district in the country. And even though that mission didn't work out, it resulted in Cho Cott recruiting A OC. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or, or Alex Ascott calls her, was working as a bartender in the Bronx when she met Cho Cott. And together they decided to challenge the third highest ranking Democrat in the country. A man that had been in his seat for 20 years. Just the boldness and the enormity of what they were trying to do. Was so big that it captured everybody's attention. It's all the TV cameras could talk about for months and months. And I think you know how that story went and weeks after getting elected a OC and Show Cott ran it back, that exact same playbook, they released the Green New Deal, which was an almost shocking piece of legislation in how big and bold it was. The Green New Deal pitched this entire rewiring of the American economy around the idea of climate change. Short Cott wrote it, and in 2020, every single Democratic presidential candidate had to come out and show their support for it. Eventually, a lot of people don't realize this. The Green New Deal became the law under President Biden, and now Scot's making his next big move in February of this year. Sho Cott announced by Tweet. That he was going to be challenging Nancy Pelosi for her seat in San Francisco. Nancy Pelosi is the most powerful and the most feared Democrat in the country. She's been in her seat for as long as KO's been alive. If he wins, he would be one of the youngest people in Congress. I think he would also be the only coder in Congress if he wins. He's promising to do these really big, bold things and once again. It's capturing a lot of attention, and that attention is allowing Kott to build this really incredible grassroots movement. I've been fascinated by how he thinks about things. I've been fascinated by how he thinks about politics and policy, and I just wanted to understand how the gears turn in his brain. That's why I wanted to have this conversation with him, and honestly, after having this conversation, I, I think we got there. I think I actually understand how he thinks about this stuff. I could not be more excited to present this conversation to you. And now I present you Shaka Chakra. Bardi. I. from Wefunder's office on Mission Street in San Francisco, this is warm intro.

Chai: 4:25

Sure caught. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me on. So I've been getting this question a lot, I'm trying to think about the exact moment that it started. I don't think it was Bobby Jindle, but it was, one of the fellow Indians when they got into politics, I started to get this sort of barrage of why is it that so many Indian people are not only interested, but so good at this? And I started to get it a lot when people found out that you were gonna be on. The Thing I tell everybody is if you just had dinner at a brown family's home, you would know it's dinner table conversations are so political. Tell me to the degree that your parents would be comfortable with, what what were dinner table conversations like at the Choco bar,, table? Oh, man. I mean, I think whatever stereotype you have of Indians at dinner table conversations, bengalis at dinner table conversations is like next level on this. Yeah. We, in fact, we have a whole term for just the idea of shooting the shit for hours at a time. It's called ada. You know, you go into someone's house and like you say, I'm gonna go there to Ada. Right. Yeah. And, uh, like I think back on, because I actually lived for a year in India when I was seven. So I lived in Calcutta for about a year. And you know, you're just, it's not dinner. It starts with tea in the morning and people just come in all day, you know, your door's open and just the whole day, just people coming in, having tea, having sweetss. We got a lot of diabetes in India and I I know why, you know? Yeah. I, I learned that. But, and it is just like a constant stream of talking about everything, which of course includes. Politics all the time. Right? Like you're just talking about. Um, I mean, back then it was, you know, it was a communist party that was in power in West Bengal. So it was, everyone's just like, bitching about the communist party, but also bitching about the opposition party. There's a lot of bitching about all the parties, to be honest. No one's really happy about anybody, gta, but the most Indian thing is to sit around in a circle and bitch about Oh yeah. Every political person. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I didn't, I always think of myself as having grown up apolitical, but literally as I'm talking about this right now mm-hmm. I'm like, I guess I was surrounded by political talk the whole time, right? Yeah. But it was different in, in, I mean, I'll say in, in the us we didn't talk so much about American politics and there was always, I think growing up when you're an immigrant family, there was like a sense of like, you don't Wanna, be beyond your position to an extent. Right. You don't wanna like push too hard and upset too many people living in Texas as like a brown family, right? Yeah. Uh so I didn't grow up talking about American politics so much, but yeah, I did grow up talking a lot about Bengali politics. For people who are interested in this, Google, the Bengali renaissance to me, the Bengali approach to life and politics and just, just chit chat is, it's supreme. But let's, let's bring this back. Yeah. Uh, If you had to guess, what were your parents' politics? Oh, I mean, they were, it's weird to say left-wing because basically everyone in that era of Bengal grew up with just, a kind of politics of equality, right? Yeah. Like, and I'd say for my parents, they weren't specifically so ideological, because there was like a, formal left wing in Bengal in the era that my dad was growing up and. I'd say my dad didn't like them because it was sort of like the, the champagne. Socialist, you know, they'd show up at the coffee shop mm-hmm. And have intellectual debates. But my parents grew up in this period with a lot of struggle. You know, like my dad especially, he grew up extremely poor. He was, a victim of a partition. So during partition, they divided up India into a bunch of different countries, and my dad was born in Paca and he had to flee overnight with his family at that time. And, uh, wow. They settled and squatted in a abandoned, dentist's office in Calcutta, who, you know, a dentist who had also had to flee, the other way, a Muslim dentist. And so they lived there for a while. They often went days without days without food. And so he really lived this struggle. And to him, some of the like intellectual political debates were very abstract and out of touch. And so I grew up with just this,, kind of raw politics of like, I guess two things. One. Just learning about how people like him became nihilistic. Right. Why they saw nothing. They would see politicians come and go, but their lives were not improving any, right? Yeah. Like the improvement in my dad's life came from the community, you know, it was my grandfather, he was a, a teacher in daca. And so when they got, when they had to leave, he actually started a public school in that place where they were squatting and he taught, the whole community. And a lot of folks kind of got out through that, through education. And it's amazing going back now, I walk around the neighborhood with my dad and everybody remembers my grandfather, you know, they call out to my dad and like, they're still like so grateful, right? But I'd say that, the other thing, that whole experience, just growing up with the stories of his struggle and of so many people who struggled is you just get the sense of life being so random, right? Like when so many people are having such a hard time. Yeah. There's so many people that are so talented, so amazing that my dad knew. And it's just like random life circumstances, a random accident, a random whatever can completely derail somebody or it can lead to complete success. Yeah. Right. And so I think that informs a lot of my politics. So I get really upset when I hear people talking about let's, like as if there's this strict meritocracy where we exactly know, from the start, who's gonna be good, who's gonna be bad. And so it really upsets me when we have a society where we're not trying to give as many people as much opportunity as possible.'cause we don't know. We can't be so arrogant as to think we know. Right? Yeah. Man, that really strikes a chord with me. I've noticed this thing, it's particularly popular in podcasts recently where people will talk about, Americans will talk about how they would do, in a, in a war situation. It's a cute conversation for them, and I love that they think it's about whoever did more cold plunges or, takes their supplements on time as opposed to just the sheer fucking randomness of the death and destruction and just the unfairness of how these things happen. It makes me really angry when I see that.'cause I think as, as if it is, you know, not to jump to this too early, but, and as if all, uh, a child in Palestine had to do was just be better at survival skills, right. It's death and disruption is random and chaotic. Anyway, enough of my stuff. So your, your dad comes to America, and I've heard you tell this story, which is, I don't think a lot of Americans even know about this, but, talk a little bit about the process through which your dad actually got here. Yeah the way my dad ended up coming here was back in the 19 se I always say the 1970s. It might've been the 1960s, I think it was 1970s. We, the US actually had these immigration offices all over the world where we were recruiting people to come.'cause we had just had, decades of huge income and wealth growth in the country. We had put a man on the moon, we were building an interstate highway system. And, we actually had this industrial policy to try to like recruit immigrants to help, do all these jobs that they need, that we need them for. And so my dad's friend took him to one of these offices in Calcutta and this like staffer there, like pitched him on the American dream. The way my dad tells us. He was just like so skeptical.'cause he's this poor guy. He didn't have a pair of jeans, or anything like that. Yeah. And he shows up, there's like air conditioning. He's like, what the fuck's this? Why is the air cold here? And then this was it. Americans working at this office. Yeah. It was like this white lady, you know? And then yeah this nice person is like being nice to him, which is also very destabilizing and kind of pitch him on coming to America, pitch him on, maybe pitch him on the American dream, right? And he just signed up for a visa on the spot. Didn't think too much about it. And then, I think a few years later he was working in, uh, which is like a town outside Calcutta. Mm-hmm. And he got a visa in the mail and it was kind of like a, almost like a golden ticket. Right. And so it was a big decision for him because when you grow up like that, all he had was his family and his community there. And this decision just to like leave, there's no cell phones, there's no way to like stay in touch with your family once you leave, A lot of the folks in his family, I think were really against it. You know?'cause to them it was such a risk because he was one of the few who had made it out and was earning a stable income at the time. But I think it was this promise of coming to the US was so great. Like you were, people were willing to take this just like blind leap of faith and just show up and see what happens. And that's literally what he did. He just showed up. He slept on his friend's couch for a couple weeks in New Jersey, walked around Manhattan with a resume in his pocket and landed a job like that, you know? Wow. It was, it's completely insane. How how do you think he feels about America, or how do you think he felt about America in those early days? He, I mean, he loved it. Yeah. Honestly, like my whole childhood was us going on these epic road trips to national parks eating McDonald's and sleeping in motel sixes. Right? Yeah. And it was, and to him, like, that was kind of like, America also was the cheapest vacation you could, you could find, right? But, but that was, I think his vision of the US was sort of like, it's freedom, right? You come here, you make money, and him coming here was able to lift my whole family in India out of poverty as well, right? But it was just freedom to be able to be who you are, do what you wanna do, and go where you wanna go. But yeah, he loved it. This is another thing that I think gets lost in the immigration debate very often is, you know, my, my wife is the daughter of, Chinese immigrants grew up in la in the Kobe era. Their weekends, every single weekend was going to the beach and barbecuing and flipping burgers. I don't think they realized just how deeply American most immigrants are. The most patriotic people I know, like the kind of people that wear an American flag on a sweater. Those people are all immigrants. I mean it's chosen converts, right? Yes. As people chose to be here and chose to be American. I often compare it to the, you know, the, girl in high school who most tried to convert me to Christianity, like literally every single day mm-hmm. Was this, Indian girl who had converted to Christianity as a high schooler. She was, the biggest zealot, that's the equivalent of people who choose to come to America. Yeah. And be American. Right. The, the very first Indian foreign minister, I'm gonna blank on his name right now, but, uh, the very first one, he was famous for being, wearing these beautiful suits and just being like a very good speaker. And he came and I, I forget if it was a congresswoman or somebody said to him at the time, uh, oh, wow, your, your English is so good. And he said, madam, my English is better than yours. I had to learn it. You merely picked it up. And I think about that with Americanness in general, I chose to be, I moved here when I was 17. Right. And I, so when somebody talks poorly of America, I take it as a personal offense. Yeah.'cause you're talking, it's like talking poorly about, the city I choose to live in, or about the car I choose to drive. But that turned up to an 11. Yeah. But again, enough about me. Let's come back to you. Well, I was gonna say on that, it's like that I love the, this is a James Baldwin quote, which I always misquote, he's like, I choose to criticize America because I love America. Right? Yeah. I can, I can bitch about it. Right? I can criticize it, but yeah. When other, when I go to Europe and people are talking shit about America, it's like, fuck, you don't know. Right? Because you don't know what we got. Oh, yeah. I could rant for hours about being in Europe and having Europeans talk smack about America. Right. And like, oh, you know, America has no culture. Why don't you tell me that when you're not wearing a Kobe jersey? I'm like, why don't you tell me that when you're not playing Jay-Z? Right? Yeah, that's right. Uh, but at this point, so you grew up with this America loving immigrant father. Who's gone through so much hardship. Right. You know, having these odd doess,, at your home and at presumably other Bengali family's homes in Fort Worth. What was your plan at this point? What were you thinking as a, let's say seven, 8-year-old i, seven, 8-year-old. I was gonna be a tri sport athlete in basketball, baseball, and football. Right. Yeah. I was gonna play on the Cowboys and the Mavericks and the Rangers all at the same time. I was, I just played all day outside. Right. Yeah. And that was one, honestly, one of the things about living in India when I, I moved there when I was seven. Mm-hmm. I did school there for about a year. We lived in an apartment building. There were like 40 kids who lived in the two apartment buildings, next to me. And literally every day we get outta school. We just played cricket for five hours, you know? Yeah. Straight. It was so much fun. Yeah. And I always think back to that as like this ideal childhood, and I as in, in a way of, it's like so much freedom for a kid, right? I often think about that when I think about what should society here look like? Clearly, I'm must say, we should have all the parts of Indian Society. Yeah. But how do you, how do you set up society for kids in a way, in a place like San Francisco where kids have that kind of freedom to go and just play in a neighborhood. Right. And it was, it was amazing. But yes, that was, I was playing and then I, became a, a big nerd sometime around fourth or fifth grade. And I just got into like what genre of nerd? Computer Nerd. Okay. You know, video games. I remember picking up a book that was like. Web programming. I, I think it was like HTML 1.0 or something. I just like read this book. Yeah. And made a website about Pete RAs and, uh, I, I made one my Boris Becker. Yeah, there we go. That's what we were doing back then. And yeah, I just, I really got, in that era, this was this kind of the first.com era, so there mm-hmm. Some of that stuff was around. Right. And, I was kind of inspired. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna do stuff on the internet. I remember it literally having a thought. I was like, man, if only I was born, 10 years earlier than I could have been doing stuff on the internet. But the internet's done that. Everyone's already made all the things on the internet. You felt this way in like, I felt this way when 99. Yeah. Like when I was in sixth grade or seventh grade. But yeah, I was a big nerd. And then, you know in high school, yeah. I was doing all the math and science stuff. Science fair. It is weird because I went to this inner city school in Fort Worth. So we had a very diverse group of people who went there. It was like a very black and Asian, majority school. And so my culture in high school was like math, hip hop, and basketball. Right. Nobody loves hip hop and basketball. Like a teenage Indian boy in America. I know. It's embarrassing to think about it, right?

SAIKAT EDIT FULL: 18:04

do you remember your Harvard application essay? Uh, no. I, I remember my MIT one, which I got rejected from. It was about, uh, we used to put on this math competition and just like going deep here, we, we used to put this math competition in school. I wrote the software for the registration and the website, you know, and all this stuff. And,, I just had, it was like a dumb story about. How the day of the event, the teacher's back room got locked and I, all the stuff was back there and I like climbed the door to go get the stuff. I broke my glasses in the process. Oh wow. And so then I had to do this thing. So it's a story of hardship, like having to do this thing without my glasses for the day. But now, but now I'm like, and you're telling me they said no to this essay. I'm realizing why they said no to this essay. Yeah, dude. Um, this whole, we didn't expect this when I started the podcast. This is now me revealing my own. Yeah. People weren't watching this video. I love it. Just how Indian I am.'cause I have asked every single guest that went to a really good school, how they got into that really good school. You are the first person who's asked me that, which is revealing to me how Indian you are. Yeah. Well, it's also I think to me, what is interesting about it? Because I was telling you, um. You know, we've had a lot of people in this sort age bracket, you know? Yeah., Our age, our generation. And what I find about, to be where you are so early in life, you need to have so much forward vision from such an early age. And I think like it especially shows up when, you take, they take a 17-year-old and they take a college application in, in their face, and it just, it's crazy that we do that as a culture, but it's also, that's where you really see like the earliest signs of this sort of ambition. Yeah. I mean though, I will say the whole college process, because I talked earlier about like how luck determines, determines so many bad things, but I feel like the whole college process actually radicalized me a little bit. Yeah. Because there's a bunch of us in school who did like the exact same stuff. A bunch of'em had better essays than me. We all applied to Harvard, just like a random selection of us got in, right? Mm-hmm. And., To some extent getting into a school like that is basically like this, this ticket, you're just like, you know, you're gonna be able to get a job afterwards, you're gonna be set. And other friends of mine, who did the same stuff, got into other schools, perfectly fine schools, but they had to work, you know try much harder. And I know they're just as smart as I am. I know they worked just as hard as I did. And yeah, I, I think that that actually left a real impact on me on just how random some of this stuff is. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think you have this incredible, arc, right? And I'm like, I'm gonna compress a lot here, but I, I,'cause I'm, I'm trying to arrive at a point, I want to get your thoughts on this. You are raised by this by these parents who've had like seen incredible hardship and then all of a sudden, you go to Harvard, you come outta Harvard, you work at Bridgewater. Uh, you go from Bridgewater, you work at, I'm sure I'm glossing over many things here, and you go work at Stripe and you are all of a sudden in the deepest, I mean, that is the heart of American wealth, right? Like those three places,, Harvard, Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. What did that, what was that experience like going from, you know being raised by people who knew the absolute absence of wealth to being surrounded by so much wealth? Like what, how has that shaped how you think about wealth? I've noticed a difference in how you talk about it, about wealth and people with money, compared to how even some people that I think would normally put you in the same bucket with, right? Like somebody like Zoran or, or even a OCI think talk about it and, but I'm I'm curious, what, what did that experience do to you? How do you, how did it shape how you think about wealth and just people who have. Yeah. I mean, I will say, I think I'll, I'll split up Bridgewater and the Stripe experience.'Cause they were pretty different. Bridgewater really was jumping into a thing where it was that Wall Street culture. It had its own weird culture as well, but it was like that Wall Street culture, it was just so much money and there's so much of kind of this show of, it's very ostentatious, you know? Mm-hmm. Like, we, I remember one of the people who worked there, like his thing to do was just like, buy the most expensive bottles of wine wherever we went and not even finish'em. Right. And then, and it was, it didn't, it was weird. It was like, I, I, I felt very much like, this is not my, these are not my people. You know? Like it is just, it felt very wasteful and, there are parts of the Bridgewater work experience that. I think we're valuable. And I often tell people that it's actually just to build up skills. It is useful to work at places like that. Like I mm-hmm. Learned to be a good programmer at Bridgewater.'cause there are some very excellent programmers at Bridgewater, you know? Yeah. But, but the culture was not me. And I, and I remember very specifically, there's this guy who was like a, a vice president at Bridgewater, you know, and he, he had been there for a long time. He was making a ton of money and he was, he one day just like, kind of as half of a joke, just told me like, the most depressing dream that he had. He was like, my nightmares are just a series of, of little inconveniences that happen all through the day. Oh my God. And then I go home and there's nothing for me. And I was like, I do not want to be that guy. Yeah. Holy shit, right? Yeah. And I was like, I gotta do something else. And so when I came out to, San Francisco and, you know, originally I, I was doing my own company. It was really different. Like, it, it was much more at that point. About the work. Like there was this joy of building stuff, and I'd say Stripe in the early days was also that, we didn't have that much money at that point. It was very early. We were just trying to build something and launch something, and that was a part that I really did have a lot of fun with. Yeah. Trying to, just working with really talented people on a shared project in this close-knit way was similar in a lot of ways to that high school experience I was talking about, you know? Yeah. Where you're just like trying to get something done and you do it and you feel so proud of yourself. So that was really fun. And I'd say that at that point, you know, I don't think there was like some weird cultural experience about it, right? Mm-hmm. It, it really, I, I do enjoy building stuff. It's a, it's a fun part of it. What, what employee number were you at Scribe? I was the third employee. Wow. Yeah. That's incredible. I think this isn't gonna mean as much to people outside of San Francisco. But in San Francisco, that's one of the biggest flexes in the world. That's incredible. So you, you're in San Francisco and I, I, I kind of feel like there's this point that I don't totally understand in your story, and I don't think I've heard you talk about it very much, but after, what is it, eight, almost 10 years of working, corporate jobs. You decide to go and join the, the Sanders campaign, the Sanders 2016 campaign. What was that? Am I correct to understand it as this sort of like, come to Jesus moment or this kind of like, is it an existential crisis? How does that happen? Or was that always just part of the plan that you were gonna go do this? No, there was, I'm not a big planner, but I'd say it was a couple things. I mean, first of off going to Bridgewater. I was definitely just going there to like make some money, right? Mm-hmm. You know, when you grow up with a family that's barely making ends meet. Yeah. And you know, we're middle class, I'm not like, we weren't struggling, but I went to public school, you know, we had a budget. If you, if you have the opportunity to try to get your parents to, have a more comfortable life, have your family to have a comfortable life, you, I think you take it. And I don't fault anybody for taking that opportunity outta college, right. But basically I couldn't handle being there for more than about a year. I was like, this is not for me. I, I had a goal to stay there for a year and make some money. I was like, after 10 months I quit. And, with Stripe, when I first joined at Stripe, I really was this true believer of, Silicon Valley kind of being the way we're gonna tackle some of the biggest challenges in the world. And I do think some challenges were being tackled by tech. But after working there for a couple years. It became clear like this is a company that's just gonna grow and become a big company someday. And that's not what I was interested in. Like I've had fun building products. I had fun, fun, like launching stuff. I wasn't gonna go there to like, be a vp, you know? Yeah. Or, or be some big manager. And so that was part of what led me to quit. And at that point I was like, well, what do I actually wanna work on? Right. And, it is like almost cheesy to talk about it, but I, I just wrote a list, I wrote a list of like mm-hmm. I wanna work on poverty, income inequality, and climate change. And I, I didn't, I was completely apolitical. I was honestly thinking about like, maybe I'll look at what nonprofits are doing or, or something else. that was in Bernie came out in 2015. I started volunteering for him and I was trying to do everything I could just,'cause he was talking about these issues. I didn't know if he had the solutions, but he was talking about it and I was like, well, campaign's only a year, so lemme go try this out and see if this is a way to make some real change and make an impact. And that's, how I got into the political world. What was that experience like for you going from, you've hit the, the big, uh, sort of like rung all the bells of, of American life, right? To from like, I mean the greatest university to, wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and now you're all of a sudden you're in politics. Those are all the centers of sort of power and and interest in America. What was that transition like for you? you know, I always like to go into anything where, when I'm changing. Careers, not careers, like changing, you know, doing something new with just a, an approach of trying to learn everything. Like I knew going into Bernie's campaign, I didn't know anything about campaigning, so I just kept my mouth shut and tried to help as much as I could. That's follow people around. Yeah. Like I, I think it's a good lesson for anybody who wants to try to like, learn something. So it was really like, if I'm being honest, it was very chaotic. I, half the time I had no idea what was going on or why I was doing what I was doing. And, and later I learned that it turns out campaigns in general are very chaotic. And that campaign in specifically was extremely chaotic.'cause it was, Bernie's 2016 campaign. Was a campaign where anybody who was a professional campaigner would not work on that campaign. You know, because you didn't want, you didn't wanna get blackballed by the Hillary campaign, by the entire democratic establishment. So, it was sort of a, we got the misfits and, and did what we could, but it was so exhilarating, like just being able to build these tools and organize and see people feeling inspired. And we didn't win, but it felt like we could have, it was, it, it really felt like I could use my skills towards something that would be a way larger impact than anything I had worked on previously. And once that bug bites you, it's really hard. Yeah. To the go back to work on anything else. It makes me, when I think about the Bernie campaign, I read this thing one time about the Velvet Underground. Mm. Um, it was the rolling Stoner put together this list of the 500 greatest songs of all time or albums of all time. They had this, they had other musicians write about these albums and whoever wrote about the Velvet Underground album, it was their very first one said, this album only sold 10,000 copies, but 5,000 of the people that bought those copies went out and started their own bands. Right. And I feel like the Bernie campaign, I mean, it's not fair to say that it only,, that it was small in reach. It was massive. But it had I think an impact that was a cultural impact that was disproportionate. Yeah. To, maybe the electoral impact. Can you explain something to me? I am like scouting character logically don't tend to be very conspiratorial, but, and so I have a lot of friends who've, I've heard this thing said often that the Bernie campaign was that the DNC at some level sunk the Bernie campaign or that they did them dirty somehow. I just sort of, as a matter of character and principle, just ignored things like that. But I'd love to understand from somebody that was actually on there, in what ways was the establishment unfair to Bernie in 2016?

29:17

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SAIKAT EDIT FULL: 30:25

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's, there's like more the structural ways, you know, things like, it was very hard for them to hire good people. There was some, uh, like fighting to get access to certain tools that we had to do, but I, don't think it was the kind of thing where like the establishment came in and like changed the votes and held Bernie back. Right? I, in some ways I think that happened a bit more and. 2024, or sorry, in 2020. And the version of it there, in my opinion, was that when it seemed like Bernie was about to potentially actually win a few states. Yeah. Everybody dropped out in coal on Biden. It happened in like two days. It was like a, yeah, it was like an overnight, like it was clear that was organized. Right. Yeah. It wasn't some organic thing and I mean that's politics, right? That happens. Yeah. And there's nothing illegal about that, but it, I do think that happening really gave, put a taste in people's mouth of man, everybody else will go to any lengths, just to stop this guy. Yeah. How much did that affect your experience with that and the taste of that left in your mouth? How much was that a part of starting Justice Democrats? It was not so much a part of the establishment coming after us. I'd say the thing that really inspired Justice Democrats, which originally was something called Brand New Congress. Yeah. Was actually seeing this wave of campaigning that Bernie did. Right. Like he came out, he literally like walked on to a lawn and launched the Senate campaign to like a few reporters. It was a really funny launch. Yeah. And, that sparked the cycle where people were so excited just'cause he was talking about something exciting and some sort of structural change that a bunch of money poured in. And then money pouring in meant media reported on it, which meant more money poured in. And he was able to launch a real, an actual serious campaign against Hillary Clinton, who at the time, it was like very hard to imagine anybody could run run a campaign against her. And so we. Had this idea to, to basically say, and at the time it was like, well, if Bernie wins, Congress is gonna stop him.'cause Congress has basically stopped Obama from doing a bunch of stuff. Yeah. So we're like, what if we use that same model but for Congress? And, and the theory here is like, it only works if people think that this thing happening will require, will lead to actual change. Like I think part of what made Zo On's campaign work in, in New York was people really understand that if I, if I vote for mayor, the things he's saying he can do, maybe not all of them, but he can do a lot of them. Right? Yeah. And so we're like, what if we actually ran 400 people, but in this presidential style race where it was like one campaign operation and just ran it like a presidential and said, if you vote for these people, you're gonna get Medicare for all. You're gonna get, universal childcare. Could that take off in the same way and become this huge national movement. And the short of it was in that election cycle, we just couldn't get it all the way there. We couldn't actually recruit 400 people. We never got this big national movement going. So then it really turned into a, I'd say a smaller project, which became justice as Democrats, which became more about, just running primary challenges in places where we could get support. Yeah. And one of the ones we ran there was AOCs and, and she was one of the recruits.'cause we were trying to recruit non-traditional politicians to run mm-hmm. To do this. Yeah. Do you call her a OC or do you call her Alex? I call her Alex. Yeah. Okay. This is a thing, but no one else does. I, I was listening to podcasts with a congresswoman and she was like, yeah, everybody calls her Alex. And I was like, how has this been kept from the American people for so long? But, uh actually, yeah. Tell me about the experience of recruiting her'cause, now it's, it all seems so intuitive and makes perfect sense, but yeah, it must have been a counterintuitive choice at the time to to run with her. Tell me how you first came to know of her. What impressed you,, all so much about her? Like how did that come to be? Yeah. Well so set to the stage for this we were really still trying to do this product of recruiting hundreds of people, right? So we had come up with this whole process of trying to recruit. Kind of like amazing community leaders. And the idea was we tried to build this team of non-traditional candidates running it. They weren't all gonna be 26-year-old, former bartenders from New York. It was gonna be like people from all walks of life. Former baristas. Yeah, exactly. Former baristas. Former, wait. Anyone in the restaurant industry is welcome. Uh, it is actually funny on, on Alex's campaign, AOCs campaign. Almost everyone except me had worked in the restaurant industry at some point. I dunno how that happened, but yeah. We were trying to recruit people who had, worked in business and, and as factory workers mm-hmm. And nurses and doctors and teachers and everybody. The, the challenge was actually convincing people who are doing really serious jobs in their community, convincing them to run for Congress. And we had a really hard time doing that. Right. But we did end up recruiting. About 12 or 13. A OC came our way through, I think her brother nominated her.'cause we had this forum where you could nominate people. Oh, wow. And our specific thing was like, you can't nominate yourself. Right? Yeah. We don't want anybody who's just like gonna spam us with their own like, congressional race. So her brother nominated her and we were just reaching out to everybody who was gang nominated. And, I think the first conversation someone had with her was not me. It was, it was someone else on the team. A lady named Isra. And, uh, she was just like really impressed,, she was like, Hey, I know she might not be the exact profile we're looking for. Mm-hmm. But you all have to talk to her. She's seems like her heart's really in the right place. And, and she's an incredible person. And so, yeah, I met her I think at a restaurant in New York in March, 2017. I was gonna say, is she still working the bartending job? No. Uh oh. She was, yeah, she was still working. She, at that point, I think she was. She was waitressing, I think. But um, but yeah, I mean she was like, that honestly feels like a demotion. Yeah. I don't know. I'm trying to remember.'cause I think she was like helping to manage the Yeah. The front of the house. And, she was great. You know, she, she clearly cared. And that's the thing that we were really looking for is people. Who clearly cared and wanted to learn and wanted to, yeah, just be the best representative they could be. And she was that, but it's one of those things where it wasn't, she's clearly got superpowers. I I don't wanna take that away from her. She's amazing, right? Like, she does magic on a stage that I am still, now that I'm running for office, I'm just like, holy crap. How did she do that? Right? Yeah. But I wouldn't say in that first batch of people that recruited that it was obvious that she was some standout star, right? Like we had a lot of amazing people in that batch who were incredible orators and speakers and had all kinds of backgrounds. And, and I'd say this is inspirational'cause it's like we were able to find amazing people like that in a moment. We're just like random. People off the Bernie campaign, just like pitching you to run for Congress, right? No one has taking it seriously. There's so many people in this country who are incredible, who would be amazing leaders in Congress and in our government who aren't there right now, and who'd be way better than who we have in there today. Right. I think it's, that's the real hope. Like going through that whole process gave me so much hope for what could be possible if you had actual good leaders going into dc what did you think of the reaction that she got when she comes out onto the national stage? Honestly, I thought it was a momentary news story, but I don't know anything. Yeah. Um, I was not that her campaign was short-lived, but just people's fixation with her, quite honestly. It's what, how many years later? Eight years later. And I still don't think the fever is broken. BB on both sides. I think that people are fixated on her in good and bad ways. Yeah. I would say actually, honestly, I'm in particular fascinated by, the, the right wing fixation on her. Were you surprised by that? Did you expect it at all? What was your reaction to that? We, we expected for a bit, yeah, same, similar to you.'cause she was going up against Joe Crowley, who was the third most powerful Democrat at the time, and, and being off 20 years at that going on. Yeah. I think somewhere around to 2019. Yeah, I think you're right, man. I forgot. But yeah, I think you're right. And, a funny thing about Joe Crowley is, I actually think he was like the youth coordinator for the Democrats at the time. He was like 55. So he was a he was a spring chicken. Yeah. And,, but. We thought her beating Crowley was gonna be like David Brat beating Eric Cantor. This is like old political history knowledge, but people don't, that's too deep of a cutting for me. Yeah. So, so Eric Cantor was either the speaker or he was about to be speaker. Sure. And he got primaried from the right by this guy named Dave Brat. Okay. And he lost and it was a big deal, but it was, a new cycle for like a week. Right. So that's what we thought was gonna happen. Mm-hmm. And so our reaction to her winning was, we've gotta make the most of this. And so she did like, a hundred shows. I don't know how much it was. Wow. But she was like, we, we were all up all night for the campaign. None of us had slept for 48 hours. We went home, slept two hours, woke up, and then she just went on tv. Starting from there all the way through that Friday and did every major show she could get. Right. Ended with like Colbert. And so that just kept going. Like, I did not realize it was gonna keep going. I think part of it was there's nothing else happening at the time. Yeah. But then another part of it was she was amazing, like she just went on these shows and delivered these lines and was able to just be a real person and people were able to connect to her Yeah. In a way that I think was so refreshing. It was just like a glass of cold water in the middle of this Trump era. Yeah. And, I think people couldn't have enough and I think the right reacted to that with, they're like, oh my God, here we've got an actual talented politician. Mm-hmm. Who's actually connecting with people. She's a threat. We gotta start attacking her right away. Right. Yeah. Do you think the attacks on her, and I'm, I'm gonna later in this thing I'm gonna ask you about, Zoran too. Do you think the attacks. Hurt her or do you think they helped her more than they hurt her? It's really hard to know. They certainly upped her profile and I think they, I think her ability to, to react to it so well, and Spar back, I think really solidified her identity as this fighter. She's just, she's not gonna just take it, she punches back. Yeah. And people wanna see that, right? People wanna see that in, in Democrats. So in that sense, I think it really helped her in the Democratic Party. And the thing I've learned is if it, often, when one side's attacking you, if people don't know her, then yeah, like I'm sure amongst Republicans is probably hurt her, image. But if she actually goes out and talks to folks in red districts or in Purple District, she did a little bit of this, right after she won, she actually went and campaigned for a bunch of candidates in like Kansas and stuff, right? Yeah. And. If it's like hard to hear her speak and meet her and not like her. Yeah. So I think overall in the long arc, I think is gonna end up having helped her tremendously. It upped her profile and now it's on her to be able to go and make her case. Well, one of the things that you all did, so you of course, you recruit her, you run her campaign, and then you become a chief of staff when she's, gets selected, which I can't even imagine, the night that she gets elected. Did you, what did you think the odds were that night? And you can be, be totally honest here. Oh, I, the odds like 5%. I mean, yeah, we had run a poll or I forget someone either we had run a poll or Crowley had run a poll, but there was a poll a couple weeks ago that showed her 15 points down, wow. And so, uh, yeah, I mean, going into that night, I did not think we were gonna win that election night video, of her reacting. To the, to the results. Yeah. It's still, I think, one of the better election night videos. Oh yeah. It's'cause it's genuine. That is, no one is that good an actor. Yeah. No, I mean it's absolutely genuine. She didn't think she was gonna win that night for sure. Yeah. It's amazing. Uh but one, one of the things that you all did that I, was quite frankly back then, surprised by,'cause there's this. Thing that I've seen just as an observer of American politics, that you sort of morph into this influencer figure. Hmm. And you sort basically stay away from doing anything too substantive. But, and honestly, again, with having no knowledge of her and just looking from a distance, I think that's how I, and a lot of people expected her to bathe. But that's not what you all did. You put out how much time between her? Getting an office, and you all putting out the Green New Deal. What, what was that time gap? Do you remember? She technically proposed the basics of the Green New Deal on her first day in orientation, so before she went into office. Wow. Yeah. So this was the first day and it was in November. They do it right after Thanksgiving, I think, or May right before Thanksgiving. But there's a longer story behind that.'cause it wasn't like we just came up with a green New Deal after she won. Yeah. Because we had started this think tank new consensus at the same time. Mm-hmm. That we did justice as Democrats. And the premise of that think tank was, we really wanted to push these ideas around industrial policy if we actually wanted to build a bunch of wealth and build industries in America. How do you do that, right? What have we done that in the past? Have other countries done that in the past? And there were no think tanks working on this, but there were a bunch of economists all around the world who had been talking about the, like Mariana Matsu Kato and and Pettifor and mm-hmm. And, uh, Kate Raworth, a bunch of folks around the world,, were talking about this stuff. And so we started this think tank to try to actually work on the ideas. So the Green New Deal, a lot of the, the kind of foundations of it came from that work over the previous two years that one of my colleagues, Zach actually was had been doing while I was doing the Justice Democrat stuff whole. Theory behind that Green Deal launch was, after she won, everybody wanted to a, there's a big spotlight on her, but everyone wanted to write the story about a OC versus the establishment a OC versus Pelosi. And we really wanted to direct that towards something substantive. And so she gave the media what they wanted by doing the cita in Nancy Pelosi's office with the Sunrise movement. Right. And they're like, oh my God. A fight.'cause they love reporting the fights. Yeah. And she did to introduce the Green New Deal, right? Yeah. And specifically we were introducing at that point a, legislation for a select committee. It something Pelosi could have actually done. We were introducing legislation to push her to create a committee, to make a 10 year plan, to build the industries to, tackle climate change. Yeah. And we had some principles of like, these are the industries. We got builded, here's some tools we can use. Here's how you do public financing. And just point some ideas out there. And then eventually the actual resolution happened in March. Which was also timed with the presidential primary debates. So the whole Green New Deal thing was best seen as like a political strategy, right? Like we were trying to get these ideas, two, two big ideas out. One idea was we should not be talking about solving climate change as simply stopping fossil fuel infrastructure or just put a price on carbon. We actually need to talk about how do you invest to build industries? How do you, industrial policy. Industrial policy, right? Yeah. So talk about climate change as a way to actually build the new economy, to create wealth, to create prosperity and jobs. And the second piece was, we gotta go way bigger. Like, the biggest climate plan at the time was Bernie's 2016 plan, which was 80% reductions by 2050 through carbon taxes. Yeah. Like we got up the ambition here. Yeah. That's not enough. And so our whole strength. As, work inside, outside with new consensus And Sunrise movement introduces legislation. Sunrise showed up at all the presidential debates to try to pressure the people running for president mm-hmm. To respond to a Green New Deal. And basically everybody responded with their own climate plan that adopted industrial policy. And even Biden had to, respond with Build back better. Yeah. Which became the Inflation Reduction Act, which ended up being actual legislation largest investment in climate change, in history. Yeah. Uh I, two things I'm really struck by about the Green New Deal. One was how much it worked on both of the levels that I think you all intended it. Two, one being in, I don't wanna say divert, but one in sort of. Yeah, catalyzing a different conversation.'Cause I remember it was like two days after you all released it, and my Republican friends and actually also my Democratic friends were asking me like, Hey, what do you think of this? I was like, it's been fucking 48 hours, man. What do I think about it? I I have a job. I, I, I don't know. I I, I don't know what's even in it yet. Right. And, uh, I think it, it immediately became such a, both positive and negative lightning rod that I think it really accomplished that goal that you were mentioning. But the other thing was, as we do, we lose attention and we forget and start to think about other things. What I don't think a lot of people realize is how much, whether you like it or, or dislike this, how much it became actual policy. So much of it does show up in the ira, right? Yeah. And it, I think changed this posture that, I mean, actually, I'm curious about your take on this, but. Biden was the first industrial policy president in such a long time. Yeah. And, so much of that industrial policy was Green New Deal Climate Industrial Policy. This brings up a related question that I didn't have on my list, but who is your favorite president and why Is it FDR? Um, yeah, you know the answer to this one. Yeah. I'd say, why is it FDR? Is he, he came in during this Great Depression, right? Mm-hmm. And he could have very easily just like. Gone back to the Gilded era, just like done nothing really. Yeah. But he just took this approach. He was an entrepreneur as a president. Yeah. He was just like, we're gonna do bold, persistent experimentation. Yeah. We're gonna try stuff to see what's working. And I would actually argue that during the New Deal, half the stuff they tried didn't really work. Mm-hmm. They did a bunch of good stuff. But then there were also other things where they just didn't go far enough. They created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was meant to be this engine of industrial growth. It was investing in banks and loan making loans and trying to get the economy going. And it wasn't until the mobilization for World War II where they finally had to like. Build this whole new war economy that they unleashed the RFC and let it do whatever it needed to do to build that economy. And he took this sclerotic economy that wasn't able to produce anything and turned into this like industrial powerhouse and basically created the playbook that every other country that developed in the postwar period, whether you look at Europe or all the Asian countries, they copied that playbook, you know? Yeah. I think it is just such a visionary thing. I don't think it all came from him, but he was, he led in such an amazing, there's this great book about his leadership style called The Defining Moment as his first hundred base being president. But he led in this way where he wasn't some genius, but he knew how to get the right experts in power or in the right places and trust them to an extent, but also like check, right? Mm-hmm. Like he would call up low level employees to see like what's actually going on on the ground. He just seemed interested in doing the job, and actually getting somewhere. And he organized, like he put the country on this mission and he actually organized society to do it. And I think it's like he was the last president who really showed us how you get. The, a country unstuck, you know? Yeah. Because we were so stuck in the Great Depression and so many arguments that I hear today about why we can't do it now. Were present back then. Like when you, because I hear arguments like, oh, we're a rich country now. We can't develop at that scale anymore. Everyone was making that same argument back then. America was a rich country relatively back then. Mm-hmm. Right. And people are saying, the problem was maybe that we've overdeveloped, we have too much industry, we have too much manufacturing. Right. And he just had this, I know this way of, of actually putting the country on a mission, getting society organized, building the institutions and creating the kind of structural power to make this all happen and doing in a way that benefited workers. Right. Like it wasn't just blank checks to CEOs. Yeah. Like he was very skeptical that capital on its own is gonna do this stuff. Yeah. And a lot of the story of that mobilization, the new deal, was the government kicking the capitalist butts to get, you know, stop being lazy, you know, start investing, start building stuff we need to build. I'm, I'm fascinated by, by the way, so many great books about, FDR, one of my favorites is, uh, John Meacham wrote this book about him in Winston Churchill, and I forget if it's called Winston and Franklin or Franklin and Winston, but whichever one it is, I think it's the same thing, like when people like the job, they're better at the job. Mm-hmm. And I mean I, I can't, I don't know the guy, I don't know if he liked being president, but he was interested in doing a good job. Yeah. And I think that that has such an impact. Tell me about this. At what point, you do this thing at the, at a O C'S office, congressional office, at what point does it pop onto your radar that you should go out and challenge Nancy Pelosi? That was pro, I mean, probably a couple weeks before I tweeted out that I'm challenging Nancy Pel, I dunno, I was getting like mad and Matter after, after Trump won, the second time. Yeah. Uh, I, I basically, my first thought was like, all right, I gotta go back to recruiting candidates. I've been working on policy for the last five years. It's fun. It is, fun to work on the mission for America. We've been doing this on new consensus, but to actually get that anywhere, we need actual political power. We need candidates running. And I thought now I gotta go out and recruit candidates. And then I heard Pelosi go on on Ezra Klein and she was just like, the Democrats did nothing wrong. We don't need to change. And I was like, oh my God, are the Democrats? Are you like, are you really gonna do the same thing you did the first time? Yeah. That Trump was in power. And so, at some point I was just like, well, if I'm gonna recruit Candace to run, I might as well run myself.'cause no one's gonna challenge her, you know? Yeah. No one else is gonna challenge her in, in San Francisco. And and then, yeah, I kind of launched my campaign by tweet. I think. Wow. I, that might be the most Trumpy thing about you, I know, is the fact that you launched your campaign by tweet. But sorry about that. Um, did you mentally, was that a shift for you from being, not the person on stage to, because, yeah, I, I mean, we were talking kind of briefly about this earlier, uh, before we started rolling, uh, but you look great, man. You look, oh, thank you. Um, and you, you were talking a little bit about this kind of glow up process that you went through. By the way, I think you looked great when you wanted the SC KA too, but yeah. Was that, did that require some mental shift to be like, no, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna be a guy that's on. I'm gonna be the guy that's on stage, or the person that's on stage. Oh, absolutely. I'm used to being behind the scenes. Yeah. I like building stuff, I like building structures. Even when I was doing campaign work, for me, the satisfying stuff was like actually figuring out the numbers for how to win this stuff and how to build the, the organization to make it happen. Right. And when you're the candidate, that's not what you do. You can't do it. It's very difficult for me to not wanna get involved in that stuff as, as much as I do now but I think doing that whole a OC experience. I, I wasn't the candidate in front, but just because I was like her chief of staff, I ended up doing way more media and mm-hmm. Press stuff than you usually do as a chief of staff. And I think that experience gave me enough confidence to know like, okay, I, I can do it. You know? Mm-hmm. I, I, it may not be like what comes to me Yeah. Naturally is like the thing. I love doing the most, like, I love solving problems, I love building, but, I know I can do it. I know I can talk about this stuff and I've been working on this stuff for so long. Yeah. I dunno, it's just one of those things, it's, I'm gonna try. The funny thing is I, I forget who said this to me, but somebody I, I forget, maybe it was just a comment on one of your posts, but somebody was saying like, oh yeah, another young person running on social media or something like that. And, that was the first time I've had this reaction. I was like, look, dude, I like, I don't know, I don't know. Zoran, I don't know, Congresswoman, a CI don't know any of those people, but I was like. This is is very heavily the racial stereotyping what I'm about to do, but I was like, I know this fucking guy. Okay. I just know the category of Indian man. This guy is, oh, he is about the issues. He knows his stuff. You can disagree with him all day. But what I know is not true is that he's a surface guy. He is not a vibes based dude. He knows his fucking shit. I will not be debating him on his facts. Like I just, I I think you being Bengali fed into my stereotyping review where I immediately was like, Bengali Renaissance, this guy's a fucking noble laureate. Like he knows everything. I mean quite that. My favorite comment by far on a, on a YouTube video so far is some guy who is like, this guy is no Zoran momani. And I hate it when people are so racist to just like lump all the brown guys together. This guy's clearly more like Ro Kana. That is, that is amazing. Dude. I, I saw this little double helix happening. I was watching a live event that you did yesterday on Instagram and I was on a plane and I watching and there are these two trolls and they're both, they're like, they're kind of, uh, tr trying to troll all the supporters in there and one guy's trolling all the supporters and saying, oh, you guys are definitely anti-Semitic. I just know you're anti-Semitic. And then they, the other guy is making like other sort of vague, and like liberal tears kind of points and they're sort of going back and forth. But slowly starts to become clear that the second guy is actually very antisemitic. So there's this like, unraveling, oh man, this falling apart of the alliance that happens because you see the two guys that have been trolling together, one of them goes like, wait, dude, are you antic? Just start to like, collapse. Should do a podcast, bring them together and have them have a chat right here. Oh, that would be fun. That, that would be way better than anything I could do. But the, my other favorite comment from yesterday's live, I had told you this is, I like this guy. He can definitely bench more than Pelosi. It's a low bar. Unfortunately. I hope this is not me think in political stance. I'm confident you can bench more than Pelosi. But actually, you know, let's, let's take a, let's take a step back, from, uh, speaker pillows eight, uh, and you know, you launching a campaign, um, I, I wanna try to get, uh, to a greater worldview here. Yeah. And we sort of did this with the FD thing, but, let me actually, let me put forth, a thesis and tell me. Tell me what you think of this. Um, and this is a, a just a layman,, if you look at the, the numbers, uh, you know, the, what was it? The American economy as a sheriff, global GDP,, when Reagan left was about 25 ish percent. And the American share global GDP when Biden left was about 25%. So this story of this incredible global decline, at least at a national level, I don't think is borne out by the data. Even if you look at just in more recent times, like no major economy recovered as well from, the recession as the American economy did. Now that said. At a macro level, this is all true, but at a micro level, people's lived experience of America, is not what that data would suggest, right? Mm-hmm. And there are many problems to it, but the one big one that I see is, you can call it a lot of things, but if I'm trying to pick the most reductive term possible, I'm gonna call it, uh, affordability. Mm-hmm. And I find that if Democrats,, want a chance at, winning and being back in power, they need, and I think this is what Zoran did very effectively. You need to speak very, that needs to be the center of the bullseye and how you're actually gonna go about doing that. And there's of course, and then you get into the,, abundance agenda and all of that stuff. And, you know, there are so many different ways to attack that problem of affordability., I think you take a more. As from what I understand, you take a more, government state capacity and industrial policy approach that we need to build things, and that is how we will make the cost of living, in America, better. Again, this is one problem. You talk about a lot of problems, but to me, the central problem of our political time for Democrats is the problem of affordability. Um you react, what do you think of that? Yeah, I mean, I think I'll, I'll start with a, with a narrow, which is yes, I think affordability and downstream from that, it's just this feeling that your kids are not gonna do as well as you. Right? And that becoming more and more true. That's, that's downstream from, like, you can't, they're not gonna be able to afford their own house. You know, healthcare is bankrupting people. And then if you step back and you look at the actual systems in place, right? Like you look at our healthcare system, the costs are skyrocketing. There's no real solution for how to get that stuff down. And it's clear. We actually have to do this hard work of actually changing it at a structural level from figuring out what the new system is, and no one wants to do that. Right. I think there's these structural problems now when it, when you talk about like US share of GDP globally. Mm-hmm. Like my larger worldview here is that, that societies that have managed to, to improve, there's no like silver bullet policy. Societies have managed to improve the lives of our people and get people outta poverty and develop and do all this stuff. It's just this like process of you actually really trying to do it, you know? Yeah. It's, if you look at China, it's like, what was China's policy to get millions of people outta poverty? And a lot of it's just like they kept picking targets and they went at it with intention. They built institutions to make it happen. They, and then they tried to figure out what the bottlenecks were along the way. And it's like if you're building a company, this is how you do it, right? Like, if you're trying to ship a product, you don't. Set some policies and set incentives for your employees and hope a product gets shipped. It's like the will of leadership actually matters quite a bit and you have to keep going, going, going, going right. So I just think that there's, there like all the, all these countries go through these phases or all the countries currently have gone through these phases where they did this huge amount of investment and, this whole operation to build up infrastructure, build up housing, and build up industries. All, at some point during the 20th century has happened in every European country, every, Asian country that's developed today and after they got rich, we kinda are coasting off the wealth that we built. And I think with the US yes, there's SEC sectors that have. Really, you know, tech has been a sector that's built a lot of wealth, has been in these pockets, but for a big part of the country, I think the reason the lived experience has gotten poorer and poorer is'cause they've gotten poorer and poorer. Right? Yeah. And we haven't done the project of saying, well, what are we gonna build there? Right. And there's, it's not just gonna naturally gonna pop up on its own. That's part of it. The second part that I think is a sign of American decline is I do think we're starting to l you know, we, for a long time we have this, we had this huge edge on research and development on being on the cutting edge of stuff. Even if we're not the ones manufacturing everything, we're at least inventing things. Yeah. And I think we're starting to get behind on that. And I think once we lose that, what do we have if we're not the manufacturing powerhouse, if we're not the ones inventing stuff. I think we're looking at a future that could be like the uk, you know? Yeah. Where you're just like slowly, slowly getting poorer and poorer and getting more and more unstable as a result. I. I think one thing that happened, especially that, that sort of feeds into this is, when I was gonna school, I was gonna Berkeley every young, ambitious person wanted to go and work and live in China and wanted to see what it was like. And at some point we just stopped doing that and the COVID really sort of affected that. Yeah. And so it's created this perception, of China, but at a broader level of the world that, I think a lot of Americans are very misinformed about how far along, the tech into these other countries is. I mean, going to China in pieces feels like being in the future. And again, their use of state capacity, their use of, their whole approach to making cities compete over new technologies. Right. And like picking those out and picking'em out well, you don't really get a sense for American decline. Until you step out of America. Yeah. And I think it's, it's such a, it's a very powerful experience. Like I, I go to even, uh, you know, I've, I've had to fly a lot this year and I was at O'Hare and I was at LAX and I was at JFK just a couple days ago. And, uh I was just thinking about would the experience of, if I were, if it was my first time in America and I showed up, and JFK was my first door in, in America, I would think a lot of things. But one of the clear feelings I would have would be this is a declining power. Yeah. Um we, you know, we were the first to build airports at this scale. This is, I think I'm picking airports as an example of what you're saying. We. We were so far ahead of the curve, and we were the first to really have massive commercial aviation. So we built these great airports and everything, and we built them a little too close to our cities. And, then all of a sudden what you have is like, the rest of the world catches up and they almost had the, the benefit of building'em later. And they kind had a sense for how things were, but we've just, at this point, we just keep adding attachments to JFK, instead of just having the power to go, no, fuck this, we're gonna have a world class airport. Yeah, I mean, if all you saw of the world were its airports, you would think America was a dying nation. Right. And I think it just speaks to the, our. Our belief that we can do big things has been really meaningfully hampered, I think. I think, yeah. The thing that really upsets me is, I remember 10 years ago when we were talking about like cars in, in China or car manufacturing in China, right? Everyone was just so sure, yeah, they're never gonna catch up. You know, their technology's never gonna be there. And then as soon as they caught up and their cars are not better than ours. Yeah. Everyone's like, oh, we can never beat'em. You know? I was like, come on, why? Like, they did this in 10 years. Why can't we, like, we're so far ahead and, and is that's, but that to me, that feeling that, clearly we are helpless. That to me is like. The big problem. And I think that is, that means that whenever we see a big problem in front of us, like our healthcare system, our housing crisis, our, affordability crisis, anywhere, we can only think of small solutions. And we can only think, we can, we have this one shot to try this one thing, and if it doesn't work, we're screwed. It's the opposite of what FDR did with bold, persistent experimentation. Right. You know, China really operates their country as an entrepreneurial state, you know? Yeah. They're, they're constantly trying things. They, they, they try to make sure thousands of companies, I think I heard recently, even with ai, the deep seek thing happened, but now they're funding thousands of companies to try to compete mm-hmm. Create this little like fitness lab Right. For all the companies to, to just outdo each other. And we don't even think on that scale, for us the IRA was industrial policy. Yeah. And it's so minuscule Yeah. Compared to what a real serious country who wants to do this would be doing. One of the things that I want to kind of just stay, say out loud,,'cause. I'm surprised by how often people get this wrong. They'll hear the terms American decline and think that this is an anti-American, which I, I can't wrap my head around. They think that this is an anti-American stance. Right. Which it is the exact opposite of that, right? Yeah. It is the most pro-American stance. It, it is believing so deeply in American dynamism and American, capability. But let's make this a little more narrow. Why is this something that Speaker Pelosi, who's been, I think if you just, so you're just reading the rap sheet has been, an incredible, has had this unbelievable political life, right? I'm gonna read out some of the stuff just to, just to be sure I don't miss anything. First Female House Minority Whip, first female minority leader, first female speaker of the house, the highest ranking woman in US history. Once, You know, there would not be any Obamacare without her. You could argue, I think that the first Trump term would be much worse without her. Why are these things that she is incapable of taking on, you think? I think her position and her kind of experience in politics makes it so that she has to sort of be a cons, be cons, not conservative in a Republican sense, but be conservative instead of in terms of the ideas. She can, yeah, just be careful. She has to be, she has to keep her caucus in line. Caucus in line. Right. That's her skill is holding the status quo intact. And and I think part of it also comes from her feeling, I assume, of just knowing her Republican colleagues for so long. She went in there in 1987. And Republicans still believed in democracy. You were two years old. I was one. Yeah. I'm, I'm nearly 40 now. But you know, her Republicans back then, they believe in democracy, believe in climate change. And I really think she and a lot of Democrats think that they're just under the spell of Trump right now, or they're gonna come back around any moment now, if we just beat Trump, the Republicans are, come back and work together on climate change. And I just feel like that whole thing is dead. And I think she is someone who really doesn't like bigger structural, new ideas, taking hold.'cause she sees him as a threat. She's that might lead us to lose, we saw this with a green New Deal. You know, when we launched it, her reaction to the Green New Deal was to, call it the green New Dream and, and, you know, yeah. And try to attack it, right. Instead of trying to figure out a way to. Promote it or make it part of what they're trying to do in the caucus. And so I, I just think we're at this point, like the way I sort of view our history is, we kind of had this FDR era from the New Deal to, pretty much late seventies, and we had stagflation and that kind of led rise to the Reagan era, and in these eras, both parties have to govern within the confines of that era. Eisenhower governed as like a new deal, Republican Clinton, I'd say governed as kind of a reaganite Democrat, right? Yeah. And I think that Reagan era really, really collapsed with the Great Recession. You know, and I'd say the war, the failed war in Iraq and then the Great Recession, people have just, they just lost faith in the adults in the room and the institutions and people have been voting for new ideas every, every single chance they get. I think Obama was really like, was hope and change, right? Mm-hmm. He campaigned on Main Street, not Wall Street, Trump was that again? Right? In 2016. And so I really think the battle right now is define what the next political era will be. Is it gonna be this Trump maga right era where this is the confines of which we govern, or do we have something to offer? That's the, I would say the, our vision should be what do we do to actually build, to invest and develop America, to build stuff in America in a way that is gonna make people prosperous and really prove the point that we can't way, we don't have to just do tariffs, which isn't gonna do it anyway. Right? Yeah. And authoritarianism to do it. Give me your theory of victory here. I'm, and you're an engineer. I am, most of the way I dropped out, but I, I can, took most of the classes. We've got Claude code and stuff. Now you can do it. We're good. But, let's even get into the numbers if you, if you want to, but actually, even before going into the numbers, if I had to guess. At some level, it seems like the most likely path to victory here for you would be that, speaker Pelosi looks at what happened in New York, looks at her her own incredible and illustrious career and says, you know what? Fuck it. It's just not worth it at 85 to, to do this. And like, if it's even kind of close, like, how is that worth it? And she just says, you know what? Let him have it. Um, am I right that that is the most likely path? She's not gonna let me have it. Are you kidding me? Um, yeah. No, I, I mean, I think there's, there's definitely a, a chance she steps down. Yeah. Um, I have no idea what's in her mind, right? Like I, it's hard for me to imagine she would step down and not have someone she wants in that seat after her for a while. I know people have been talking about her daughter potentially, but I really don't know. I mean, it's, it, I feel like one thing I've learned in all my years in politics is. People who spent a lot of time in politics think completely differently from my how I think. And so I don't even try to guess. Yeah. What they're trying to think. Well tell me, but tell me your theory of victory. Yeah. Tell me how you think about this. What's the path there? Well, I mean, I honestly think my theory of victory is just that I think we're in this moment where stuff can change really. Like there's a huge appetite for change and things can change really fast. If there's anything I've learned over the last 10 years is that political sentiment is shifting faster and faster and faster. Right. And right now we've got, the appetite for change in the Democratic Party, I think completely dwarfs what I saw in 2018 when a OC won and that whole race happened because people are just so pissed off mm-hmm. That Democrats, allowed Trump to win. I think people are really mad at the current Democratic party. They're looking for what comes next, what's the actual answer to that. And so my theory is if I can. If I can come into that with an actual message of this is what I plan to do and my background, I'm not just some fly by night candidate. I've worked on this stuff for the last 10 years, I'm a serious candidate. I think people will switch their vote, Yeah. And, and so it's just a matter of getting that in front of enough people. And so far, we're canvassing or knocking doors and talking to voters on voter calls. We've talked a lot of people who've been voting for Pelosi their whole lives, who are willing to change their vote, just because a, they're actually surprised she's running again. Mm-hmm. You know, they, they can't believe it and they're just like, yeah, she's great, but we gotta figure something else out. There's kind of a consensus that whatever the establishment Democrats have been doing clearly did not work. Yeah. Well, uh, I, I'm curious about this one part of it. So I was in New York a couple days ago and I was talking to my mom on the phone, and,, she was like, Hey, so who are you interviewing next? And I said, well, there's this guy. He's Indian American. And, you know, he's running for office against this really famous, politician in the Democratic party. And my dad, who's the most brown dad thing from a distance, he goes, oh, I know this guy, BUMED, Donny. And I was like, no, it's not Bu Donny dad, of course, it's literally a mic drop moment where he spells his name. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to send him that clip, but, but at some level, as I'm curious about how the momani victory, because Yeah, the, the point of bringing that up was the abstracted out details of what you're doing. Are very similar. And though I don't love the, that guy's comment, he's no momani. He might be a ana. Like I, I'm not trying to do that. But I, I do think that there's, you can take the Indian thing out of it. Just I think what you're,, attempting to do here is, is I think just as bold, if not bolder, quite frankly. Um, yeah. How, how did that, what happened in New York? How did that affect your calculus of how likely this is? I mean, it certainly helped the campaign, right? Like anytime there's. Anytime there's some sort of victory, against the establishment, it sort of proves that something's possible. Like I think the, the biggest impediment to winning this campaign is largely people not thinking it can happen. It's this weird self-fulfilling prophecy. Like the more people that think it can happen, the more likely it is to happen, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that's so much of just what campaign theory is either show momentum that more people take it seriously. I remember, like Obama, he was so far down in all the primaries in like South Carolina and everything after Iowa, and then he won either Iowa or New Hampshire. That was the whole focus of their campaign. Yeah. And by winning the first state, all the polls flipped in the other states. Yeah. Right. So like, if people think you can win, then you can win. Yeah. Um, and so from that sense, yeah, just Zoran going up against Cuomo and it's different a lot of ways. So I wanna be clear about that. But him going against Cuomo and watching the entire Democratic political establishment kind of circle the wagons around Cuomo. They brought Bill Clinton out, and all this stuff. And then him still winning and none of that mattering it, it really proved that this is possible. Right. And I did see a big surge in people signing up and, really people. Yeah. Oh yeah. I think my social media doubled overnight from Zoran winning. Yeah. Wow. Um, um, I'm curious about, well, did you know, you knew him personally before this? No, I've never met Zoran. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I had this interesting, and I think a lot of people have had this sort of, like a lot of brown people have had this,, particular experience with him where we vaguely became aware of him and we saw the videos of him talking in Bangla and, and Hindi and, and Spanish and, we all thought it was cool and it, the, the graphic design and all of that was just really, I think, spoke to us. But, I would say I was Zoran curious at best. Yeah. And his, some of his policies I disagreed with. Some I thought were interesting and I just didn't really have too much of an opinion. Then he goes out and he pulls off this incredible upset and just as a sports fan, if nothing else, I was like, this is something, right? This is something I need to pay attention to. Um, he beats the Scion of this incredible political family, right? And this empire. But, but then after he gets elected, the intensity and the, just the cruelty, the grossness of the backlash that he gets took me from somebody that, again, I still don't know where I'm at on his policies, but I feel so protective of the man. They made him darker and they made his beard bigger and they said that he should get deported because he eats rice with his hands. I know. And it just pissed me off so much. And I actually, you know what, if you have anything to say about it, feel free to add it. But what I want to talk about actually, is when they did this to you. With the T-shirt. Oh, yeah. Are you cool talking about this? I can, I, yeah, I'm cool talking about the T-shirt. All right. Well mostly, I wanna get your feelings around what happened, you know, was it during the OOC campaign? When was it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was during the aoc, so you should probably give context about this. You give not me. Yeah. Yeah. Basically I, for context, I wore a shirt with,, UBA, Shand, Bo's face on it. And, I got like, so much attack, so many people were like, attacking me for wearing this shirt because it turns out at some point, sub Babo shook Hitler's hand, right? Yeah. And so I must be an antisemite. And so for context of like where this whole thing even came from, a, this is why nobody normal ever freaking runs for anything, right? Yes. Like so for me growing up as a Bengali, like the, like Boose is such a household name in b in Bengal, but also in India, like the airport flying into Calcutta is called Net Bo Airport, right? And you drive around Calcutta and there's posters of his face everywhere. So growing up,, at some point someone just gave me this t-shirt, you know, I didn't really know very much about him other than he was a freedom fighter. He fought for Indian, you know, independence. He was revolutionary and the airport's named after him. Mm-hmm. And so the story of the picture is I was going to a Netroots conference and this was a T-shirt I had in my closet and I put it on Yeah. This, someone took a picture. Yeah. You know, that's how these, these pictures get taken. Yeah. And then it becomes this big thing and, and the story of like why he ends up meeting with Hitler, which of course I don't think he should have done, you know? But. The context for that was, Churchill was, was instigating a famine, a mass famine in Calcutta that killed Yeah. You know, people, estimated between 1,000,002 million people. It was a huge deal. And so this was during, in the middle of the Indian Revolution, while they were trying to get independence from the British and Bo's philosophy, he was in some ways kinda like the Malcolm X to Gandhi's, Martin Luther King. Right? Absolutely. Like he was the one who wanted to actually use, force to try to get,, independence and in the, and you can kind of understand where he was coming from.'cause like millions of Bengals were being slaughtered. So he tried to find,, the enemy of my enemy. He went over to Japan, to Germany to try to do independence. And I don't think he should have done it. I honestly didn't know that when I wore the shirt. But it's, it's wild. You know this. I think that's the kind, like this, that shirt story to me, I was like, oh, this is why when I ask people to run for Congress. Yeah, I never will.'cause who knows, maybe I have a shirt with somebody who has like talked to somebody who is a pedophile or something. Right? Yeah. Who ca is is really, really it's difficult. And it was difficult as a staffer to deal with that.'cause I wasn't able to defend myself, yeah. Uh, like, it wasn't like these right wingers were trying to get me on their show to explain myself. They were just attacking. It felt so unfair. Yeah. It, it just, it felt very unfair. And I, I mean, even down to, even understanding Bose, and I'm not gonna defend anything he said or did, but just, if your house is on fire, you run outside and there's a guy standing there with water, or not even standing there with water. There's just a guy standing there and you just, you talked to, you're like, can you help me? Can you do this? It's almost like saying, why didn't you ask for the guy's political affiliation? Why didn't you check his criminal record before you asked him for water? Right. It's, that's what Bose did. Bose like a lot of Indians and a lot of Bengalis was just looking for a way to end the pain. Um, and I think like, but to the, to the broader point here, which is. And I wanna end with this, that there's this thing that I've seen done to you. I've seen it done to Zoran, I've seen it done to, to congressman, a OC, I, you, you as a normal person, when you try to run, uh, the attempt seems to be, to clip the more kind of nuanced, interesting parts of your personality and your background and to flatten you into a meme. Um, and, um, you know, a lot of what you've said today, a lot of your platform is trying to replace this sort of geriatric, ruling class that we have with young people, with new ideas. And I think you talk very beautifully and very often about, how we get the geriatric ruling class out. I think we actually don't talk enough about how we get, new young blood in because if I know a lot of people in this generation and, we look at this political system that just has not worked and seems permanently broken, we seem everyone like you, that when they try to do something about it, they get flattened. The people, they sort of circle the wagons, around whatever status quo, exists. Even if they six months ago were shitting on that status quo. And they do everything they can to ruin your life. And they're, most of the time it doesn't work. Yeah. So I guess my point is, what advice would you have? What tips would you have for somebody that's young, cares deeply about this country like I do, like a lot of my friends do, but feel scared,, to do what you've done? Yeah, any advice would be helpful. I, I have two pieces of advice, I guess, one, I know this is true for a OCI assume this is probably true for Zoran. It's definitely true for me. Yeah. You're gonna get all the negativity online, but I think it's really important actually to find the places where you have support and find the things that encourage you to keep going.'Cause if you just talk to people in your community, if you try to do a people powered campaign where you're going out, you're meeting people at first, it's very scary, but having people get to know you and then having other people come out and vouch for you as a result is really satisfying. And it does. It's like you're always trying to. Keep the, the negativity from trying to define you well, that means you have to find something else to define you. Right? And that's gonna be the people who are supporting you, the people you're trying to actually win at the end of the day. And I know that was like a big source of, what kept Alex going or a OC going, right? Is, she would just continuously just be in our community, do these events have, and talk to people and, it was even the little things like we would be walking around and be like,, the delivery driver driving by, stopping by and be like, just keep going. We got your back. And that really helps. And that, I think that's a big part of why you can keep going and it is really positive. It's it's such a positive experience to go through that and find that kind of support. The other part is. The reason I keep, I'm trying to do it again. I'm trying to do the brand new Congress thing again, where I'm trying to recruit people to run. I'm trying to build a slate of people who are gonna go in there because I, I really suspect that, like me, a lot of people who actually wanna solve this stuff, don't want to go in there to do politics. You wanna go in there to actually solve these problems, right? Yeah. And that's, and I'm hoping that if you have a team of people who are going in with that mindset, that's how we actually get it done, right? And that's actually in both, in terms of how we get the problem solved, but also how we recruit the people to join. If, I know you're not gonna wanna run by yourself, but what if you're running. With a hundred other people who actually, if all of you get in, you can do something right? It's gonna be bigger than you. So if that sounds encouraging, then, please nominate yourself for someone to run on my website. That's something I'm trying to do right now. I do want to, I, I think it's both possible to do because we've seen movements like this pop up all over the world. We've, we've seen a, bizaro version of it pop up in this country, in the Republican party. And I just think it's necessary. I think, the politics of, it's not even just geriatric politics, it's just the politics of not really trying to change anything. Not, thinking we're just in a normal political moment where the pendulum's gonna swing back and forth, that has to die, and we have to actually solve these structural problems. We gotta refactor our code. I'm sorry to make the engineering joke, but we actually need to like, change, change things at this point, ze, roberti,

Chai: 1:21:20

let's go change some things. All right. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me.