Why Does Zach Silk Say Newly Empowered Dems Need to Get Smart about Their Populism?

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik, who has been burning the candle at like, how many ends do candles have? Many ends the last few days. Punditing at our local TV station about this giant blue wave. And I was thinking of asking you, Sandeep, just because you're getting paid for this, have you come up with like any better metaphors? Like I'm hearing tsunami, I'm hearing wildfires, I'm getting kind of tired of the various metaphors.

[00:00:40] But what have you been calling it? No, I've been I've been borrowing the blue tsunami line from actually our governor here in Washington state came out yesterday evening and declared it a blue tsunami. And I followed his lead because I'm a good Democrat. It's the political equivalent of the dinosaurs going extinct. That's my latest ever. OK, today, of course, extinct. I'm not sure it's a dinosaur. We'll talk about the Republicans.

[00:01:08] Yeah. Today, we're going to be talking, of course, about the midterms and to some extent, blue cities with our special guest, Zach Silk, a political strategist and civic leader who's now working with Nick Hanauer as president of Civic Ventures and is the host of Pitchfork Politics, which is a new podcast. We hope you all check out. It's a spinoff in some ways right from Pitchfork Economics, which is a podcast with Nick Hanauer.

[00:01:34] And by the way, check out our interview on Blue City Blues with Nick Hanauer in our archives. But Zach Silk, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, pleasure to be here. Huge fan of the show. Really excited to talk about this. Yes, heck man. Thanks for coming on. This is going to be going to be fun. I mean, you and I spend a lot of time on the phone dissecting politics, national and local. So, yeah, they get to hear our private conversations near now in the public. I'm really, really excited to talk about it.

[00:02:02] Oh, wow. This is this will be more interesting than I thought. Yeah, right, right, right. Well, I'm psyched about your your new podcast, Pitchfork Politics. Oh, thank you. Yeah, listen to the first episode. There's only the pilot in the first episode and you just recorded one today. So I'll be looking forward to that one. Right. That's right. So before we get into some of the city level stuff, big picture, I'm just going to say last night I was watching CNN. I was looking at some various sort of live streams of podcasts.

[00:02:31] I ended up tuning into Fox last night because it was just so much fun to look at their angry, depressed faces. And their analysis was essentially like voters were duped. Some of them kind of talked about the high price of gas. No talk of like Trump's corruption. No talk about the fucking narcissistic and bizarre approach we've had to trade policy. No talk about sort of the cruelty of the way in which the immigration policy ended up being enacted under Trump.

[00:03:00] So I wanted to ask you, like, you know, what you think happened. First off, talking about the Texas governor's race, which is a state that Trump wins by 14 percentage points or nearly 14 percentage points last time. And yet Greg Abbott loses to Gina Hanosa, who is a progressive. Right. Like she is a huge like sort of Sandeep would call it like wokeity woke candidate in some ways.

[00:03:29] Back in 2020. I mean, she's defunded the police on transitions. You name it. She was peak woke during peak woke. But in this race, she runs more as like an economic populace and kind of sets aside all that stuff. So what do you think happened? Yeah. Well, it's not a huge surprise. The Fox commentariat is a little out of touch with the American people. Yeah. Listen, no doubt about it.

[00:03:53] In my view, this obviously was it's even hard to measure how catastrophic this was for Republicans. The we were looking at the numbers, you know, people kept talking about this was going to be a change election and how high were we going to measure the tide? And I've lived through enough of these. Right. Remembering 94 and 2006 and 2010. Those were pretty high watermarks. But this is much more of the equivalent of 1974.

[00:04:23] So, I mean, this is like post Watergate, post Watergate. Yeah. Yeah. Democrats just sweep. Yeah. Just sweep everywhere. And anyway, so it's just it shouldn't really be measured against those wave elections. I guess tsunami. You might call it a extinction level event where it's like we have the the, you know, something like a meteorite came from outer space and just crushed these guys. I'll tell you what it was, though, in my view. Just to stop you briefly, like I will say 74, 76.

[00:04:52] They weren't extinct for very long after that. But anyway, this is a great warning. And I think it's something that we should get into as we talk about this. One of the things that seems to me is that in 2024, to Trump's everlasting credit, he made a promise with the American people that he was literally going to lower your costs and increase your paychecks. He had posters behind him that said those two things. It was like lower costs, bigger paychecks.

[00:05:21] And the truth is, he didn't deliver on either of those things. We actually have higher costs and lower paychecks sitting here today than when he came in. And part of it was this massive distraction on things like the war, his obsession with what all the things he's doing in Washington, D.C., with his monuments and all the rest and the just deep, deep corruption. And, of course, getting into a foreign war of choice, which is also something that he promised he was not going to do.

[00:05:51] So these are a string of incredible broken promises. But at its core, at the fundamental is that kitchen table question of are my costs higher, right, or are they lower? Is my paycheck higher? Is my paycheck lower? That equation really got turned sideways in this last year in particular. And I want to bring it back to Texas because I think you're right. First of all, I think she really represents this transformation on the left, moving away from those politics, the woke 1.0.

[00:06:22] Even AOC has said that was kind of crazy. And everybody is sort of starting to move into a place that is much more comfortable. Frankly, I think the long progressive tradition actually is much more comfortable with this populist economic politics and its return to that. But she did an interview with The New York Times. And The New York Times kind of called her on, well, you're too progressive for this state. There's no way you could win with some version of that.

[00:06:50] And she came back with the definition of what she thought was meant to be progressive. And it leaned just deep into this populist economics. And she effectively turned the page on that other era and just leaned into her personal identity, of course, as a Latina woman, but also talking about hard work and rewards for work and the concentration of power and wealth in this country and the broken promises to help deliver for working people.

[00:07:44] And it was impressive. He's a billionaire now, right? I don't know. He's close enough. He's close enough, right? An early Amazon investor and entrepreneur guy and also a big, big, big Democratic player, donor and player in national Democratic politics, right? Pitchfork economics. You actually had Joe Biden come on that podcast, right?

[00:08:11] You know, it just kind of shows the circles that you guys are traveling in and in terms of national Democratic politics.

[00:08:16] So pitchfork politics, as I understand what you all are doing is you're trying to recenter progressive political conversation around a more economic populist, you know, set of concerns rather than whether it's, you know, the kind of woke shit or whatever else. But you tell us.

[00:08:46] Yeah. Yeah. I think just for some background here. So Nick famously wrote an essay in 2014 and that essay was in Politico magazine. And it was loosely entitled The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us Plutocrats. And he was anticipating as he was looking at the radical rise of inequality. The thing that I really appreciate about Nick is he's extremely curious mind. He's self-critical of his own class.

[00:09:15] He would call himself a class traitor or maybe his own class would call him a traitor. And he was recognizing that this concentration of wealth is just completely unsustainable. And the two things that come out when you do this kind of highly concentrated inequality, high concentrations of wealth and inequality, you basically get an uprising or a police state. And that is pretty much the case all over the world for almost all of human history.

[00:09:42] And he was warning in that that if his plutocrats and his plutocratic friends didn't get busy trying to fix the system, the economic system for people, that we were going to see the rise of pitchforks. And, you know, we can discuss about what that meant. It's funny. He was writing that long before January 6th, to be clear. But it was really a prediction of this very angry populist energy was going to be unleashed in the country.

[00:10:10] And it was likely going to punish people like him and other elites. And I think in a lot of ways it was pre it was previewing what happened with Donald Trump and the rise of MAGA. And out of that, we've been busy working on what is it going to take for Democrats and progressives in this country to recognize that is the animating force in American politics, not just America. It's all through the West. In fact, probably not even all through the West. It's all through the world.

[00:10:38] It's taking place in South America, places all through Asia. This is this problem that we have with populism, and it's either going to be directed and captured by the radical right or by responsible figures on the left or by radical figures on the left.

[00:10:56] And I'm like, so for us, what we really want is to recapture that energy and do it and direct it in a way that is old school, liberal, small liberal, pluralistic, and is for the better of the country and the world. And I really think for the democracy, you just can't have a sustained, stable democracy with these levels of inequality. And to your point, why did we launch this other podcast? Well, we wanted to talk about the nexus of economics and politics.

[00:11:26] And absolutely, we want to have a conversation with Democrats and progressives, but frankly, some people on the other side of the aisle who want to have an honest conversation about how to fix our politics by fixing our economics and how you can run on economics and win elections. So, I mean, is this this sort of harkens back, you know, pitchfork economics to the old progressive era. I mean, that's the kind of shit that Teddy Roosevelt was saying that, like, we better regulate capitalism to save it from itself, essentially.

[00:11:56] I mean, is that where Nick's coming from and where you're coming from? Yeah, that's basically it. I have come to call myself a paleo progressive. So, you know, my problem with these... Your affinity to Pat Buchanan is not lost at any time. Pat and I have one thing in common, which is... The paleo. Yeah, you're both paleo, yeah. Yeah, your diets.

[00:12:20] What I mean by that is this neo-progressivism actually has really lost what the original progressive impulses were in this country and the original progressive movement, which was exactly as you pointed out, David. It was born out of the last era of great concentration and economic disruption, which was effectively the, you know, industrialization era and what then became the, you know, the gilded age and the high concentrations of wealth then.

[00:12:49] And the response to that by progressives was to democratize the economy and regulate these highly concentrated powers to be able to be in service of a democracy. And honestly, the thing that ultimately came from that focus on that was what really was the New Deal in the post-war era, which I just want to remind people was also an era of unbelievable growth in this country.

[00:13:16] Economic growth, economic growth that unleashed economic growth that we have not seen since. And economic prosperity for the broad working class. Now, I want to be clear. There was a lot of problems about who had access to that. We... There was still a tremendous amount of racism and obviously sexism and repression of women rights and all these things. But in terms of the economy and how the economy worked, that progressive era is what we're harkening back to. And that is absolutely what we want to get. We think progressives ought to get back to that kind of business.

[00:13:46] There's any number of different places we can go into this conversation. I mean, and I want to get into some of these things with you as we go forward, like for about some of the debates that are roiling the left and the Democratic Party, right? Between sort of capitalism versus, you know, socialism or anti-capitalism, right? There's debates there. But before I do that, let me just ask you a question in this way.

[00:14:13] Like, I 100% agree with you that, you know, extreme levels of inequality are really corrosive to a democratic, pluralistic society of the sort that we want to live in, right? I mean, if the American experiment is predicated on two big ideas, right? One, democracy and the other, capitalism. You got to figure out how to make the two of those things work together.

[00:14:42] So all of that stuff, yes. But then when I hear the current version of economic populism that comes from the left, from, say, the Bernie Sanders or AOC crowd, they, you know, you hear these sort of they rail a lot about oligarchy, right? They talk about, you know, they have adopted this label of socialism, whatever that quite means. I mean, we can't. I'm sure they know.

[00:15:12] Yeah, right, right. And, you know, it's rooted in some truths and stuff, but a lot of it strikes me as pretty simplistic. Sure. Oh, sure. And so anyway, I don't know. Where do you fit in terms of the AOC Bernie wing of the party and kind of where they're going with their oligarchy and populism message? Yeah.

[00:15:41] Well, to the credit of AOC and Bernie and then lately Mamdani, I mean, the incredible thing, through some crazy, weird misfortune, somebody decided that they were going to adopt the label Democrat. You know, they're going to be socialists. Right. I mean, DSA is a peculiarly named thing that is a very peculiar American invention. There is really nothing quite like this in most of the rest of the Western world.

[00:16:08] And I think we could all agree what they're basically describing. And I think Bernie himself has said this. He's basically describing Scandinavia. And if you've ever spent any time in Scandinavia, that is a very highly functioning capitalist market society. Denmark is rated a more capitalist country than the United States. I think somebody pointed out they had they very recently they've been producing more startup companies than than the Silicon Valley.

[00:16:37] Now, that may change under this AI thing or whatever, but it is a very capitalist country. It has very highly functioning markets. The biggest difference is, of course, it has a very high floor, social social welfare floor and levels of taxation, high levels of taxation to both pay for it and to keep people in this common wealth. This feeling that we are all in this commonly together, which is one of the things that often gets lost on taxation.

[00:17:05] One of the reasons that Social Security is so popular is, A, it's an awesome program and a lot of people get it and it provides a great floor. But also most Americans pay into it. And that makes it really, really durable for popularity purposes. And that's a lot of what those programs are throughout Scandinavia. But setting that all aside, listen, they're they're very popular figures that those three figures are very, very popular figures. By some accounts, Bernie is the most popular political figure in America.

[00:17:34] And part of it is that he is speaking a certain truth about this economy and how it doesn't work. And he speaks it in a very plain and angry language that people understand. I would give Mondani credit for the evolution of that, that he actually speaks about it in this happy warrior way, in this millennial, very quintessentially millennial optimistic way.

[00:17:54] And he's a he's a digital native who communicates in the way that regular people now communicate, which is largely on our phones through short video. And he's an unbelievable communicator. What I think they get lost on. And I actually think Mondani is a bit of an evolution away from this. But they have more of a grievance populism. And Bernie, in particular, is a grievance populist. And, A, I'm not sure that that is weird. What do you mean by grievance populism?

[00:18:24] Well, getting to your accusational language around oligarchs and billionaires, and they like to make corporations of all stripes at all times the perpetual enemy. They are looking for similarly aggrieved enemies that you find on the right. This the populist right is a grievance populism, too. And again, I think I've seen an evolution as I've been watching.

[00:18:46] I'd be curious if you think something similar to this, where you go from where Bernie is, who's his, you know, he's a very, you know, flamboyantly angry guy. And Mondani, who's just always got a smile on his face. And he's got a softer populism than Bernie. It's a little less of that. I would still say it's in the same bucket that there are these particular enemies and we need to take them on. I think there's another populism that's rising. And you saw a lot of that in this election, which is more of an aspirational populism.

[00:19:15] Like, I'm aspiring to something better in this country and where we're going. Tallarico really represented that. He was not afraid to call out billionaires and their problems, but he was calling to a higher calling about what this economy should look like, what our country should look like and what we could do. That's an example. What God should look like in Tallarico's case. Well, he also had ideas about what God should look like. You know, so, I mean, huge victory for Democrats, some big victories for progressives.

[00:19:44] But, like, I hear some people, including Erica last night, saying, you know, this was a huge progressive triumph, like, across the board. And, like, that's not really right in a lot of ways, especially if you think about, like, the big upsets, right? Most, if not all of the big upsets were, you know, kind of centrists, right?

[00:20:03] If you look at Kansas or South Carolina or Iowa or North Carolina, you know, even Texas in some ways, people didn't run as unapologetic progressives, except for maybe Abdul Saeed in Michigan, if that can be considered an upset. So, yeah, there's a case you could make for populism and economic populism.

[00:20:24] But what about the counterargument that somebody is going to make, which is that, like, people were pissed about – I heard this on Fox News, by the way – but people were pissed about high prices. Yeah. And the people running against the incumbents won. Oh, yeah. Do Americans know – like – and also, like, the second piece of that is do Democrats have a plan to lower prices? Yeah. And make this country more affordable? Yeah, that's a different question. Like, what's the plan?

[00:20:52] Because Katie Wilson won in Seattle saying the price of pizza is going to get lower. Erica hates it when I bring this up. It's now November. I think the price of pizza has gone up. I hate to say it, you know, because it ain't easy. No. It ain't easy to lower the price of pizza. Well, I've got a lot of thoughts on that. But let me start on your front end, the front end of that question, which I think is right. Well, listen, we spent a lot of time on this, and I really – we care about it enough that we watch all of these candidates and literally want to hear what they're saying on the economy.

[00:21:20] And are they connecting with people on the economy? And if you watch the track, actually one of the most interesting tracks is Maine because you may remember the last time that they tried to beat Susan Collins. They ran a woman who ran against her, and she was a well-known politician in the state. And her ads – we can complain about progressives, but her ads were the most pablum ads you've ever seen in your life. They were so boring. They did not connect.

[00:21:48] They were like cooked up in a third-way incubator. And they were put on television, and they inspired exactly no one, and she got beat. She got beat by Susan Collins. Susan Collins overperformed something like eight points or something. Nine points, I think. Nine points, yeah. And it was predicted that she was going to lose. And I want to be careful to say it's true that centrists were doing very well this last wave moment.

[00:22:16] And a lot of places that surprised were moderate temperamental people. They were moderate on temperament, and they were probably self-described centrists. But on the economics, they were remarkably consistent on the economy. They talked about this economy not working for working people, and they identified specific ways that it was not working for people. And they absolutely had the advantage of running against a Republican who was completely out of touch on this question of the economy.

[00:22:44] And I found more resonance commonality. So there was a common refrain from Hamilton, who won in Kansas, and Tallarica, who won in Texas, and Syed, who ran as an unabashed progressive in Michigan, and a peculiar progressive in Maine, in Jackson. None of those people have similar backgrounds. They don't look or talk the same. And yet they all had very similar critiques of the economy.

[00:23:13] And I think that's probably the common thread that helped lift this. And we all know, you show me who is trusted on the economy, and I'll show you who won the election. And this election, that was really, they trusted Democrats no matter what their particular ideological identification was, centrist, moderate, progressive, whatever it happened to be. And that, to me, is heartening. I mean, the burden is the thing you brought up, David, which is now what do you do about it?

[00:23:37] Yeah, and let me jump in, and I'll get, let me restate, I guess, the second part of David's question. Because I do agree with you, like, when you look at somebody like Tallarica, you know, these guys are, they're changing the cultural package, right, of how they sort of present themselves.

[00:23:59] And they are getting away from, you know, this elite coded sort of wokeness thing that progressives got hung up on, you know, in a actually pretty off-putting authoritarian way. You know, for a while there, when they had cultural ascendancy. But you're right, like, policy-wise, there does seem to be a consistent thread there around some of this economic stuff and conversations about the economy and affordability and what have you.

[00:24:29] So, but the question is, how does that now translate into this era of divided government, right, where now Democrats could control the Senate and the House with significant majorities. So, there's a real expectation that they're going to do something about some of this stuff. So, what's the agenda? I didn't see, I didn't hear a lot of specifics or, you know, I did hear the critique from these folks about what's wrong with the economy.

[00:24:56] Yeah, yeah, critique, but there wasn't that much of a kind of fleshed out agenda going forward. So, where is that conversation? Yeah, that's the great danger. And David, I agree with you. I thought the great danger of running on the price of pizza is that if the price of pizza goes down in Seattle in four years, it's because we're in a deep recession. If we're in a deep recession, you are unlikely to win the election. Yeah. Yeah, because we have faced economic catastrophe.

[00:25:26] Correct. Yeah. And by the way, that might happen. Yeah. No, absolutely. So, I don't think that that's, like, in general, you know, just as a basic economic point is that it's actually the levers of government are very challenging for controlling prices unless you have, unless you're living in a price-controlled, truly socialist economy, which we're not. We're in a market economy and it's very hard. The levers are hard and there are things you can do, and I do think we will see some of them.

[00:25:54] There are things you can do to increase supply, abundance-oriented stuff, right? And there seems to be a lot of commonality. I mean, Elizabeth Warren sponsored this housing bill that Trump did not sign in the end, but it ended up becoming law. So, and that was a bipartisan bill. And I heard a lot of the candidates talk about there's even more they could do federally on housing. And then you heard even more conversation of these candidates being elected to governor really wanting to tackle that.

[00:26:22] And I think that's a positive legacy of the abundance conversation people are having, which is putting more things into the market is going to help. Secondly, you know, there are some things you could do around energy costs and some other. There's some regulatory things that are available, some levers. Unfortunately, most of that is controlled by the executive, although at the state level, I think you can see some things. But the truth is, on the cost side, it's tough. It really is. And that's, I think, a trap.

[00:26:48] Not just Katie Wilson is finding this, but, you know, those governors who ran in New Jersey and Virginia, they ran on the same thing. They said, we're going to lower your costs. And they've been running into real headwinds because they got into their legislative sessions and there wasn't much they could do to really lower costs. The place that you can pull a lot of policy levers is on the other side, which is on their paychecks. There you probably know we have not raised the federal minimum wage in this country for a very long time.

[00:27:18] It is still seven dollars and twenty five cents. It's I do. I am very curious if Democrats were able, they could put a very high minimum wage on Donald Trump's desk. And I don't know what he would do about it. He might sign that thing. Yeah. And that would actually help people. In fact, this is something you and I have talked about a number of different times. Right.

[00:27:37] And I remember when right after Trump got took office in January of of of twenty twenty five, I tweeted out, you know, if Donald Trump turn around and said, I'm going to do a ten dollar federal minimum wage right now. Well, he would cement a durable, multiracial, you know, majority in America.

[00:28:00] Frankly, you and I talked about the fact that Joe Biden had an opportunity to do something like that when he ran on a fifteen dollar minimum wage in twenty. He didn't do it. He came into office and because he couldn't do fifteen because it was at the time Mitt Romney saying, I'll do ten dollars an hour and Joe Manchin saying I can do eleven dollars an hour in West Virginia.

[00:28:24] And he went to Bernie and people like Pramila Jayapal from Washington, who was the head of the Progressive Caucus. And they said fifteen or nothing. And he backed off. He didn't do anything on that. And I thought so I agree with the first party that actually like raises the federal minimum wage at seven twenty five, which is still the minimum wage in 20 states in America. Absolutely. And big states, by the way, some very big states are seven twenty five, including, of course, Texas, Pennsylvania. You're talking about places that would have a huge impact in those places.

[00:28:54] And that, to my view, it may be a bipartisan thing that could happen and would be good for the country. Sure, it's delivering a win for Trump. But at the end of the day, it's proving that you ran on this question. You're delivering for people. And there's a few other things like that. There's some policy levers like that around. You could imagine dealing with a few, you know, there's there's things you can think about on the paycheck side. And I do hope that they calibrate when they talk about affordability.

[00:29:22] Most families, they don't think about simply how much something costs. They also think about what's coming in. It's the old classic kitchen table economics. Right. Like you're sitting to paying your bills. You know what your income is and you know what your outgoing expenses are. We have some control over those income, particularly for working class people. And I think that that's a real, real place that we ought to go. I don't know. Like so under Biden, there's a little bit too much spending that contributed to inflation to some extent. Sure. I disagree.

[00:29:51] But I think that's true. Tariffs obviously have led to inflation, you know. So where the Democrats are going to be on tariffs, it's hard to know. But I mean, Trump has not had a coherent or rational fucking tariff policy that would bring back manufacturing. So hopefully whatever tariffs we have, they'll at least make some kind of sense. The war in Iran obviously raised prices. But like when it comes to raising the minimum wage, like I mean, Trump doesn't believe in anything other than himself.

[00:30:18] However, if he does believe in something, it's kind of a protectionist view. He wants tighter labor markets, like if there is an ideology. And so I mean, it's hard to see him then choosing to raise the minimum wage. But I mean, stranger things have happened. Right. Like, you know, I guess if there's pressure put on him, but it doesn't wouldn't it wouldn't make sense given everything that's come up until this point or or what Republican economics seem to be like right now. Well, he lifted the thing on taxes on tips. Right.

[00:30:45] You know, like he ran on that and then actually actually did it. And look, I think that's I think that's economic slop, frankly. I don't think that's actually a good policy. I mean, it's a politically popular policy, you know, which is what Trump cared about. But it's not actually good economic policy. Most people who are making significant tip income make way above the minimum wage. And they're actually not in some, you know, circumstance where taking that.

[00:31:12] Anyway, it just and let me reframe David's question about this in a way, because that slop coming from Trump. But I also see a lot of slop populist economics coming from the left, too. Right. You know, and David's point about the eight dollar pizza slice and, you know, OK, that may be good. A good video, but it's kind of slop. Right.

[00:31:36] And so are we actually going to get to like populist economic policies on the left that are real and do something? Or are we going to do this performative? I don't know. I mean, yeah, and by the way, I will just say I support raising the minimum wage. Oh, yeah. Trump probably doesn't. But yeah. Well, the funny thing, you know, you lived through this, Sandeep, as a person who was part of those negotiations in Seattle. I'm 15. Yeah. The thing I loved about that experience.

[00:32:06] Just for our listeners, I've got to say that Seattle was the first big city in the country to do a $15 minimum wage. It was a complicated negotiation with the business community and others that the then mayor did, who I was advising at the time. And yeah, we did a $15 minimum wage. And then it spread from Seattle. In a way, all these other big cities around the country sort of adopted higher minimum wages after Seattle. You can hear our episode with David Rolf, where we talk all about it. Oh, yeah, we do. That is great. I will.

[00:32:35] And the point I wanted to make about that, there is a slopulist version of that. Yeah. Which the slopulists would have said, 15 now. Yes. Full stop. Right. And that would have been like some very ideologically driven, extremely sloganeery style. Yes. Frankly, Shama Sawant. Yes. Our socialist firebrand at the time was threatening to do exactly that. She was going to run a ballot measure to do that.

[00:33:04] And which is part of our motivation for trying to do something different. And to the credit of the left here and frankly, the business community, to their incredible credit, they saw the writing on the wall, the mayor had really a desire to do this and was willing to put political capital behind it. And the left was willing to sit in negotiation and design smart policy. That was not $15 immediately.

[00:33:30] It was actually a very complicated formula, very thoughtfully thought out and negotiated. I don't know that anybody walked away perfectly happy, but it was really good, smart policymaking. And my view is a lot of what we are hunting in terms of successful economic policy needs to be treated in the same with the same care, negotiated, stakeholder, thoughtful. How do we implement it? How do we weigh tradeoffs?

[00:33:58] And the I will say the progressive left has gotten away from that. They've gotten they've fallen into the same sloppulous track as the Republicans. Trump stuff is also sloppilism. I mean, it's just mostly insane policymaking. If you look at his tariff charts, they were like literally pulled off of some intern's spreadsheet. He did some formula in AI and it got put on as implemented all over the country, all over the world.

[00:34:25] And the tariffs thing for him, though, you know, the tariffs thing for him is just a little quick aside on Trump and the tariffs, because we had Peter Goodman on on BCB last year. He's a New York Times correspondent who does global economy stuff for them. And he really pointed out to us. I thought was really insightful.

[00:34:47] Trump loves tariffs, he said, not because of as an instrument of economic policy, but as an instrument, because it makes him kind of king. He's got it gives him the power. It's a political power. And people have to come to him and bend the knee, whether you're a CEO of Apple or you're the prime minister of Britain. You come to Trump and you ask for him to lower the tariff or give, you know, do that. And he can dispense that or. Yeah, exactly.

[00:35:16] Or punish you if you don't do something like. And that's what he loves about it. Right. Like it's an instrument of political power and authority has nothing to do with good policy. Yeah. It's not about bringing back manufacturing. It's about bringing wealth to the right. If it's economic at all, it's crony capitalism of a kind of global supersized variety. Right. I just want to bring up the fact that, like, you know, on the Democratic side, I remember 2022 interviewing Kim Schreier and saying,

[00:35:42] what are you going to do about this inflation stuff, which my editor at the time was like, don't do a story about that. Only talk about like abortion because that's the big issue. Kim Schreier being a congressional candidate here. Eighth congressional district candidate. Pediatrician flipped that seat in 2018. I think it's held on to it ever since, you know, pretty effective lawmaker in a lot of ways. But I asked, like, what's you know, what's your plan for prices? I'm hearing from farmers. I'm hearing from other people kind of complaining about prices.

[00:36:08] And and the only thing she had for me was like price gouging. And I expect that we're going to see a lot more of that this time around as well. Oh, my God. All the price gouging, the Democratic corporate price gouging stocks. And I'm kind of like, well, if it's all price gouging, why? Why is the price of gas pretty expensive in Canada and England and Europe and everywhere in the world? Like if it's just price gouging, how does that explain that? It's like, well, not necessarily a clear answer on that.

[00:36:34] But, man, if I if I interviewed people in Seattle today and asked them is price gouging a huge reason why prices are high right now, like they would fall for it. They would say, yeah, that's a big issue. I'm not saying it's a non issue, but for fuck's sake, it's a it's pretty weak tea. I don't know. Maybe you can get away with just like bullshitting people on prices. But like at some point, if they don't go down, that's the problem. Yeah, I think this is the problem with this sloppulous stuff on both sides is it doesn't actually at the end of the day, you have to address people's real problems.

[00:36:59] You could promise tax cuts on tips, but at the end of the day, they are going to sit and look at. Did I get a tax cut on my tip? Wait a minute. I did not like like or any number of promises made on the right about how they're going to lower prices and how this great, big, beautiful bill is going to put more money in your pocket. They you really can't fool people when it comes to that. But it's on the left to the they have a variety of boogey men that they end up pointing out, one of which there is legitimate price gouging.

[00:37:28] I want to be clear that should be addressed. But the idea that that is what is driving up all of our costs is just it's it's not it's not believable. And it is a distraction because it prevents you from actually designing policies that can do that. And I would like to see policy design like to get back to being serious policymakers. I mean, one of the things that one of the reasons I consider myself of the left is I actually consider policy and government as positive forces to help people.

[00:37:56] And the only way that works is if you're serious about design. And for a long time, we were the serious people about design. And we got away from that. I hoping and I I have some hope about this. I will say, you know, our own mayor, Katie Wilson. I think she's more serious about that than predecessors of hers on the progressive side. And Momdani is more serious about that than others on the progressive side.

[00:38:23] They this is a new strand where they feel a responsibility, this sort of sewer socialism responsibility to deliver, to make results. They talk results oriented. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I think that I think that that they're certainly talking that game. Yeah. Now, whether whether whether we're going to actually see the results from them, I think, is still an an open question. And I still see Momdani doing things like freezing the rent. Right.

[00:38:51] Which is, I think, terrible economic, you know, indefinitely. And I was just reading a headline yesterday about how, you know, affordable housing starts are collapsing in New York City because the capital won't flow to building new housing stock because there's this permanent rent freeze in place. And people are like, you're not going to be able to ever make it. You know, it's not good investment. Right. Like, you know, private sector investment will flow elsewhere because it's just shitty, stupid, sloppiest.

[00:39:21] I get it's popular among, like, you know, Gen Z millennial kind of midwit progressives or whatever. But, like, it's just not that's not good policy on Momdani's part. Right. You know. But you're right on some other stuff. They are like like on things like housing. They are kind of looking at how do we harness the private sector and markets and capital to increase supply. Right. You know. Yeah.

[00:39:50] And so it's a mix. It's a mix. And I think there's a real emphasis on how do I get from my promise to a result fast, which is good. And some of that is on transportation, both here in the city of Seattle and in New York. They're speeding up buses. They're making all kinds of things move faster. There's little things they could control. And that is what people want from their government is they ultimately want promises made promises kept. I mean, that's as old as it goes in all politics at every level.

[00:40:19] And we on the left have gotten away where we make either faulty or false promises and no longer believe in the delivery mechanism. And that makes us in some ways no better than what has happened to the right, which is, you know, they're forever breaking promises on this. And they actually don't want government to work. Like, you know, on the right, they don't want government to actually deliver for you. They kind of are committed to a whole other ideological program. So, well, on the left, we want government to work, but to work for who exactly?

[00:40:49] Often it's to work for bureaucracies or it's to work for interest groups. Right. But I think I mean, I think there is a sort of clear message here. It's like raise taxes on people can afford it, build more social housing. That's coming out of sort of Mondami, Katie Wilson's social democracy ideas, you know, but also to some extent kind of the pitchfork economics piece of it. If you're going to save capitalists from its capitalism from itself or be good economists like let developers build some shit and get out of the way as much as possible.

[00:41:19] Like let capitalism also do its work to get the prices down. And it's kind of like, why are we not able to do both? It's just not that complicated, but it seems like such a difficult thing. I don't want to get to Seattle specific, but, you know, we have this affordable housing program that needs some tweaking. And the mayor has been kind of reluctant to do that. And so it's just kind of frustrating to see folks who have that promise to balk at the last minute due to kind of ideological blinders when it's just sometimes it's a matter of just fix some shit.

[00:41:48] Well, and to bring this back to our congressional and national elections, they are about to inherit. They're going to have very large majorities in both chambers. And they have inherited now the burden of trying to solve some problems. And they're going to have to negotiate internal strife, external pressures and a demand by their own voters to deliver on the promises they made. So I agree that it's easy to be committed to these things on the campaign trail.

[00:42:13] Once the governing starts and the stakeholdering begins and the outside pressures begin and the arguments internally begin in your caucus, that's where the rubber meets the road about whether they're going to be disciplined about delivering. So one of the premises of your new pod, Zach, and we'll talk about a lot in the initial episode that you all put out, which we'll link in the show notes.

[00:42:40] But you really see working America, right? Working families, the working class in America. And we can talk about what the definition of the working class really is. But you see the working class as fundamentally the new swing vote in American politics between left and right. And they swung to Trump in 24 for reasons we could.

[00:43:08] And now they're we just yesterday. They swung really hard, really hard against Trump over the things we've been talking about, not seeing, you know, their paychecks go farther and stuff like that. Um, so so speak to that. What what you know? Yeah. Yeah. What is this working class swing vote? Yeah. You speak. Well, I think the insight.

[00:43:32] Well, first of all, I think the most important thing is to say that there are always swing voters. Right. That's the nature of election. There is a group of people that are willing to change their mind. That's effectively a swing voter. And that swing voters, though, are not the same almost era to era. The era I grew up as a young political pup. Soccer moms were the swing voters there.

[00:43:56] They were, you know, they were, let's call them middle and upper middle class suburban women who had were willing to accept. They were willing to go with either party. They weren't that party affiliated. They had a whole series of motivations for what they were looking for from their electorate. And they were willing to, for example, vote for George W. Bush and then Barack Obama. Like that was not incoherent for them. They saw those two as good choices. 2004 to 2008.

[00:44:25] Obviously, that was a lot of the decisions. And that led to very competitive suburban congressional and legislative seats. In the Trump era, something changed. Those group, that soccer mom group, actually became a very dependable group of people who voting for Democrats. By and large. And with that, the suburban areas became a lot less competitive because they just became. They're blue. Full stop. Yeah.

[00:44:54] And one, that doesn't mean that we lost swing voters. The new swing voters really became these working Americans. And we can discuss what that means. I think it would be worth. I love your thoughts on it, too, because it's not a clear definition. But let's just say for the sake of argument, people that make less than one hundred thousand dollars a year, some college, but not college completion. They work for a living. They get a W-2. Right.

[00:45:20] This group, they are extraordinarily diverse in terms of ethnicity, background and geography. They live in cities. They live in rural America. They live in exurban America. You find them in every corner in America, including in the deepest, richest blue cities like San Francisco or New York. And you find them all over rural America. And they actually have been swinging. One of the things that I say swinging is new to them for a very, very long time.

[00:45:49] They were either anchored to the Democratic Party as its base or did not vote. As part of the anchor of the New Deal coalition. The 100 percent began in the New Deal. And it had this long legacy that lasted 60, 70 years. And then I would not actually credit Trump with this. What I would credit is the Great Recession broke that bond. They got fucked more than anybody else in the Great Recession.

[00:46:17] They typically if they scraped together enough to buy a house under those weird mortgages that everybody had access to, they got screwed out of their home and they were then bankrupt and homeless. And there was nothing the federal government would do for them. They had their wages were held flat for almost 40 years. And that accelerated during that period of the Great Recession where they were flatter than ever. They've had very little economic power because unions have declined.

[00:46:44] And even if you weren't in a union, unions were helping low wage workers with their negotiated rights and wages. And they really ran into the modern economy and they detached from the Democratic Party. And that left them kind of floating. And here's what I'll say. The Democrats didn't realize it. They had no idea they had lost their base. They they were treating them famously as this is a solid base that we can have demographics be destiny on top of.

[00:47:11] And they started pursuing all these other groups to build on their to build majorities out. But if you lose your base of support, of course, you can't win. And we saw this group swing in 2016. They swung towards Trump. They swung back actually back to Biden in 2020. Biden really performed well with this group, even though Democrats generally did not. Biden spoke to them in a very visceral way. It's hard to remember because at the end of his term, he was not himself. He became an old man.

[00:47:41] And but in that in that 2020 race, part of it was because it was under covid and it was tightly controlled circumstances. But it still was middle class Joe talking to them. I grew up in Scranton. And let me tell you about my dad and like how he went to work every day and the dignity of having a job. And, you know, he believed it in his bones. It wasn't just bullshit talking points. He believed it deeply. And the thing I really appreciate about a working class perspective, they have intuitions about whether you believe something or not. It's not your words you say.

[00:48:10] It's something about your vibe about it. Yeah. They can smell bullshit. Right. And then finally, in 2024, just let me finish my point, which is they swung hard everywhere to Trump. You guys saw those maps, the New York Times maps with the red arrows. It didn't matter if you were in New York City, San Francisco or rural Texas. You swung that group of people swung to Donald Trump. And that means that they're swinging. And we just saw it.

[00:48:38] I actually saw the data analysis this morning. Washington Post did. And if you counties that whose average income is below sixty thousand dollars, the household income, they swung 20 points to Democrats. Counties in America making less than sixty thousand dollars. Household income swung 20 points to Democrats last night. That is how much swing is available in this group. That is one of the largest groups of swingers in this election.

[00:49:05] And it helps explain how can you win Kansas, Texas, Mississippi and Georgia. Georgia, it's because you are capturing working people at 20 points compared to 2024. I think I have a couple of questions about it. Like one is, well, first, I wanted to mention that in 2016, I did this kind of dumb story saying our soccer mom's back. Oh, because to explore the gender gap. And I got to interview that pollster, James Zogby, who happened to be in town about it.

[00:49:31] So it was it was all about the 96 race, I guess, between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton. That's when it was originally first coined to describe those kind of fiscally conservative, but socially liberal suburban moms and stuff. And crime, but also. Yeah. But taking it to the present on Election Day, I was talking to a person who happens to be undocumented about her views and sort of her community.

[00:49:56] And this person was telling me that, like, look, in 2024, a lot of Latinos were going for Trump, you know, because like we were pissed at the Democrats for all kinds of reasons. Pissed about crime, pissed about the economy. And actually, like the weirdest thing that I thought from this conversation was pissed about immigration policy. Like thought that the borders had gotten out of control and there's there's people coming in here and the sort of. Yeah, you should like kick these fucking criminals out. I mean, not me, because I'm a hardworking person. That's not what you're talking about.

[00:50:25] And then he comes in with his incredibly cruel, sadistic immigration policy. And everyone's like, what the fuck is this? You're going to you're going to denaturalize my kid now. Like, you know, the huge flip. Right. So I guess my question is, like, yes, there's a working class, but there's there's a lot of different subgroups within the working class, including Latinos who, you know, the Republicans thought they had a good shot at before. Like Trump came into office. He actually did swing some of them.

[00:50:53] But a boy, if Republicans pursued a different kind of a policy that went for folks who are a little bit more socially conservative, many are Catholic, like they're here for opportunities. A lot of them support kind of entrepreneurial capitalism. I think that's different than like what Eugene Victor Debs is talking about when he talks about the working class in terms of like where people sort of ideology is. So so what about that? Yeah, we saw this stuff and happen.

[00:51:16] And my last piece of my larger point slash question is, yeah, I mean, all those folks were pissed off about the price of gas, because if you're not making very much money, you really fucking felt it. Whereas all the kind of like luxury progressives in Seattle, like it's it doesn't affect them. First, first of all, we're just taking our bikes to work anyway, or we're just not feeling because we make so much money that like the increase in the price of gas doesn't affect us that much. But, you know, if you're truly working class, you're going to feel it.

[00:51:42] It doesn't it doesn't say much about what you want politically next. Right. You know, yeah, that's my question. I mean, it's a great question. I think first and foremost, it's a complicated definitional question. And part of it is it it's a little bit you just know it or feel it. Are you working class or not is a thing, right? Like you just feel it. It used to be, by the way, this is a huge change in the last 20 years or so.

[00:52:10] It used to be almost everybody would describe themselves as middle class. You could be in the top 10 percent. You would describe yourself as a middle class. You could be in the bottom 20 percent and you would aspirationally say, no, we're a middle class family, even by any normal definition. You actually were poor and they would not want to say that they would say middle class. There is a rise, a real identification shift in the last decade, pretty much associated with the Great Recession and the change in how we talk and think about ourselves,

[00:52:39] where overwhelmingly people now something like 60 percent of people to describe themselves as working class. It's a very different way of thinking about it. So that's one. Two, we also with the rise of college education, as you guys know, more and more people get college educated. It's almost like a high school degree was 40 years ago. It is not one of the reasons I hate the college as a definitional way of describing people. Non-college versus college educated as a as a dividing line. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:53:09] That a the part of the Trump base that is most dependent on him is rich, non-college educated. Yeah. You know, those people running around in boats with flags behind them. Yeah. How expensive those boats are. Those are two hundred fifty thousand dollar boats. Yeah. You are likely. I do. As a matter of fact, David's a boat guy. You are literally the owner of a car dealership and you plumbing company or. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You are. You are actually a capitalist.

[00:53:38] You are literally the managerial class. You are not working class, despite the fact that you don't have a college degree. But in our screwed up lexicon, which is mostly driven by elites who decide who is working class or not, somehow that person is working class definitionally because they're non-college. But that the person who works on the shop floor for them and got a history degree is somehow college educated and thus not working class. So I hate that definition. Number one. Number two.

[00:54:08] It is increasingly the case that people are working really very hard and they may actually be making a pretty good amount of money, for example, one hundred thousand dollar household income. But in this expensive world we have now post the inflation of covid that no longer it's still very difficult to get by at the end of that month when you're doing the kitchen table economics of what's coming in and what's going out. You may be on the edge. You really might be, even if your household is still making quite a lot of money.

[00:54:38] And so there's something changing here. I just I just want to name it because we're living through it as we're trying to understand what's going on with voters and how they're thinking about the economy. It's very complex and it hasn't been really well settled yet. Now, I think it is really complex. I mean, this idea of who is the working class is a very, you know, you know, a deceptively complicated question in some ways, because you cited back the Great Recession.

[00:55:06] And I think there's a story there. Right.

[00:55:08] But that that's that's a piece of it, I think, because the story of the Great Recession to me from the stuff I've seen and read coming out of it is there's a whole kind of cohort or generation of young millennials coming of age, often college educated in that in that period who were essentially proletarianized.

[00:55:37] Right. Like like like they were, you know, to borrow the Marxist term, we had John Judas on who talks about proletarianization. Right. They they were kind of ended up as baristas or bike messengers or, you know, even though they have or working at a nonprofit but not making very much money.

[00:55:55] And they definitely see themselves in some fundamental way as, you know, economically left behind and deprived and, you know, probably downwardly mobile right in there. Unable to afford their own homes. Yeah. Yeah. And they're living in expensive, expensive cities like Seattle, where the cost of living is 40 percent higher than the national average. And they're seeing all this wealth and affluence created by technology around them.

[00:56:21] They're not sharing in any of that. And it really creates a self-identity for them as a as a working class. Right. Yes. As a depressed working. So that's one piece of it. But I would go back to the 90s and like Clinton era, right? NAFTA and like the whole trade stuff that Democrats and Republicans is a bipartisan thing where. But the salespeople. Yeah, I agree with you, Sandy, but this is an important point. It was a Republican deal. NAFTA was literally a Republican deal.

[00:56:50] It's George H.W. Bush's negotiated deal that Clinton inherits. And he could have done one of two things, right? He could have scrapped it, done nothing with it, but he decided to sell it. And he put Al Gore, you may remember, literally is on CNN and he's debating for NAFTA. Like this is the Democrat who decided he was going to go out and and we have this crazy story. This guy, Trey Crowder, who's known as the liberal redneck.

[00:57:18] He's a comedian. He's got this great story about how in his town in Tennessee, when NAFTA passed, everybody came around and said, this is going to be great for everybody. The economy is going to be great. And they love Al Gore, son of Tennessee. They believe him. And as soon as NAFTA passed, within a year, the factory that sustained the economy of that entire county moved to Mexico and the county never recovered.

[00:57:43] And those people who live there never forgave Gore or Clinton ever. That was the the giant sucking sound. I think that was the giant sucking sound that led to that. No, I remember when I was covering the 2004 election. Right. And I was in Iowa right before the the first caucuses in January of four.

[00:58:06] And I remember, you know, I was at John Kerry was speaking at some event and I was interviewing an older guy in the audience there. And like it was in this little town in Iowa and they had a Maytag plant and it just shut down. And he said to me, you can't print what I have to say about all of these politicians. Right. You know, and I said, actually, I could. I wrote for the stranger back then. I said, I actually could, but he wouldn't he wouldn't go there with me.

[00:58:34] He would actually say, but, but, but, but, but the anger, you know, was, was, was real and it was rooted in economic loss and deprivation and, and, and, and circumstance. Right. I mean, so anyway, I mean, it is a complicated question of who fits into this category and what the antecedents and, you know, defining events are right. And I, it, there's, there's no singular cause of what's sort of generated. Do we think, yeah.

[00:59:05] Do we think the Democrats could run on a platform of actually bringing some manufacturing back to the United States and win on it at this point? Or is Trump's efforts so tarnished that the country's moving away from that? I mean, it seems like economic nationalism is still here to stay or here to stay to some extent in American politics right now. And the left could, could, you know, conceivably say like, we could actually do it where this guy didn't. I mean, what do you think?

[00:59:30] Oh, I think, well, first of all, we're about to enter, you know, it's going to be an open seat presidential. There are going to be literally a 20 plus candidates running. I think there will be a lot, a wide range of opinions on this particular question. And I'll be curious to see how they all slot themselves.

[00:59:50] I don't think there will be an absolute free trader among the Democrats, though, in the way that they're really, I mean, to be clear, Barack Obama was a free trader. And and John Kerry largely Hillary was running on basically absolutely ran. And then in the middle of that 16 campaign, she flipped because they figured out that this was killing her politically. Right. Absolutely.

[01:00:15] Because Trump had figured out that the voters you needed most, particularly in the Midwest, hated this stuff. And he totally nailed her. And because he's so unprincipled, he had no problem flipping himself. And it really put her in a bind. And I I do think that'll be. And what I mean by that, I want to be clear. I think you could be very markets forward.

[01:00:34] And I think that there could be people who would have really thoughtful design about how to design trade agreements that work for American workers without these kind of enormous trade barriers and insane sort of power plays that Trump is doing. And I'll be curious to see how they they navigate this. This is Canada wouldn't actually disagree with. Correct. Well, this is a sort of Orrin Cass argument. Right. He's coming at it from the right.

[01:00:59] But he's saying that there is a tariff policy that is really a subset of, you know, industrial policy. Right. That is about about rebuilding a kind of industrial infrastructure in the United States. And with it, you know, proud and well compensated working class in America. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know whether that's real or not, but that's a hugely divided.

[01:01:25] I mean, the abundance people think that Orrin Cass is a lunatic. Oh, yeah. I mean, this will be one of the great, interesting debates, partially because J.D. Vance loves Orrin. And if J.D. is running, if he ends up being the the he'll certainly be a front runner for the Republican Party, he's going to be running hard on that stuff. It'll be very interesting. And this is where the left and right stuff becomes kind of horseshoe. Right. In the populism space. Right. Yeah. Very.

[01:01:55] Yeah. I mean, David Rolf, who was on our podcast, right? David mentioned earlier to talk about, you know, the labor unions and the and the urban working class. Like he has a relationship with Orrin Cassidy. You know, David is one of the primary architects of the $15 minimum wage movement as a labor leader at SEIU. And yet he's, you know, playing footsie with Orrin Cassidy. You know, there's clearly a meeting of the minds there on some. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:02:25] Well, and as you know, Teamsters were very comfortable getting cozy with Trump and his team, partially because they like some of this protectionist programming for their members. And I think this will be equally confusing and interesting and a big part of the debate, David, when we're when we're headed into this next part of the primary. And J.D. Vance just seems like I mean, Republicans, they're not going to anoint J.D. Vance. I don't believe it. They don't do it. Right. I mean, Mike Pence was not their their nominee.

[01:02:56] Dan Quayle wasn't there. I mean, they have a history of not necessarily sticking with their vice presidential candidates. And I just think J.D. Vance is like he's a pretty smart guy. I guess we'll see what happens. So we're coming up on time, Zach. So just by by way of a closing question, where are you taking your new podcast now? Right. Pitchfork Politics. What should we expect coming forward from it? It sounds like you've got some guests lined up.

[01:03:25] Stuff like that. Yeah. Tell us about about where this is headed. Well, the conversation we had today is going to be a lot of the kind of conversation we have over on Pitchfork Politics. And if you're interested in that, you should certainly give us a follow and you can find us wherever you find your podcasts. We expect we're going to talk to some of the top economic thinkers in the country and help that they're going to help us decipher what's going on in the economy and what it means for politics.

[01:03:52] We're going to talk to a lot of the leading political characters. So people that will be running for president, people that were just elected and will be headed into office. We're going to hear from them specifically about what they're going to do about the economy. And we're going to ask them some hard questions about how they could take these promises they just made in the election and fulfill them. And then overall, we're going to be able to react to the news. I think it's an opportunity for us to have a conversation.

[01:04:19] There isn't a week that goes by where something that's both relevant to our politics and the economy. And we'll be unpacking that. So I'm excited for what it will bring. Zach Silk, thank you so much for coming on to Blue City Blues with David and I. It's fun to actually have you on the pod and jibber jabber about this stuff with you. Yeah, you guys, thank you so much. Zach, thank you. That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues. He's Sandeep Kaushik. I'm David Hyde.

[01:04:47] Thanks, everybody, so much for listening and for donating. If you want to help keep this podcast coming your way, including live events, we just did one. It cost us nearly a thousand bucks. We need your help. Reach into your pockets right now. Five dollars a month, ten dollars a month. Whatever level's right for you. Nick Hanauer, if you're listening, we would appreciate it. It's patreon.com slash Blue City Blues. That's the place to go. And again, thanks, everybody, so much for listening.