Based off of the video version of the pod:
Chai Mishra: 04:19
Saikat, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 04:22
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Chai Mishra: 04:24
So I've been getting this question a lot for—I'm trying to think about the exact moment that it started. I don't think it was Bobby Jindal, but it was one of the fellow Indians when they got into politics. I started to get this sort of barrage. And it does seem to have picked up. And definitely up with Zohran Mamdani 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 going to be on—And the thing I tell everybody is, if you just had dinner at any Indian family's home, you would know. Dinner table conversations are so political. Tell me to the degree your parents would be comfortable with what were dinner table conversations like at the Chakrabarti's?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 05:16
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. In fact, we have a whole term for just the idea of shooting the shit for hours at a time. It's called "adda". You go into someone's house and, like, you say, I go there to "adda," right? And I think back on—because I actually lived for a year in India when I was seven. So I lived in Kolkata 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 doors open, and just the whole day, just people coming in, having tea, having sweets. We have a lot of diabetes in India, and I know why I learned that, but, and it's just like a constant stream of talking about everything, which, of course, includes politics all the time, right? Like you're just talking about—I mean, back then it was the communist party that was in power in West Bengal. So everyone's just like bitching about the Communist Party, but also bitching about the opposition party. It's just bitching about all the parties, to be honest. No one's really happy about anybody in Kolkata.
Chai Mishra: 06:19
Most Indian thing is to sit around in a circle and bitch about every political thing.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 06:23
Oh yeah. So, you kind of grow up I would say, like, I didn't. I always think of myself as having grown up apolitical, but literally, as I'm talking about this right now, I'm like, I guess I was surrounded by political talk the whole time, right? But it was different. I mean, I'll say 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 a sense of, like, you don't talk—you don't want to be beyond your station to an extent, right? You don't want to push too hard and upset too many people living in Texas as a brown family, right? So I didn't grow up talking about American politics so much, but I did grow up talking about Bengali politics.
Chai Mishra: 07:07
For people who are interested in this, Google the Bengali Renaissance. To me, everything about it is it's some of my favorite parts of being Indian are just Bengali—the Bengali approach to life and politics and just chit chat. It's supreme, but to the degree that you can, let's bring this back, if you had to guess, what were your parents' politics?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 07:34
Oh, I mean, they were like, 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, 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 kind of—didn't like them, because it was sort of like the champagne socialist, they'd show up at the coffee shop and have intellectual debates. But my parents grew up in this period with a lot of struggle, like my dad, especially, he grew up extremely poor. He was kind of a victim of partition. So during partition, they divided up India into a bunch of different countries. And my dad was born in Dhaka, and he had to flee overnight with his family at that time. And they settled and squatted in an abandoned dentist's office in Kolkata, a dentist who also had to flee, the other way, a Muslim dentist. And so they lived there for a while. They often went days without food. And so he really lived this struggle, and to him, some of the intellectual political debates were very abstract and out of touch. And so I kind of grew up with just this, I guess, kind of raw politics of like—I guess two things. One, just learning about how people like him really saw—like, why they saw nothing change. Politicians come and go, but their lives were not improving at all, like the improvement in my dad's life. It came from the community, as my grandfather, he was a teacher in Dhaka, and so 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. They call out to my dad and they're still so grateful. But I'd say that the other thing that whole experience just growing up with the stories of a struggle, and of so many people who struggled, it's you just get the sense of life being so random, right? When so many people are having such a hard time, 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 can lead to complete success. 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 going to 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, because we don't know. We can't be so arrogant as to think we know, right?
Chai Mishra: 10:27
Yeah, man, that really strikes a chord with me. I 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 war situation, and 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, because I think as if it is not to jump to this too early, but as if all a child in Palestine had to do was just be better at survival skills. Yeah, death and destruction is random and chaotic. But anyway, enough of my stuff—So 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.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 11:36
Yeah. I mean, the way my dad ended up coming here was back in the 1970s. I always say the 1970s—It might have been the 1960s but I think it was 1970s, the US actually had these immigration offices all over the world where we were recruiting people to come because 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 interstate highway system, and we actually had this industrial policy to try to recruit immigrants to help do all these jobs that they need, that we needed them for. And so my dad's friend took him to one of these offices in Kolkata, and this, like, staffer there, like, pitched him on the American Dream, the way my dad tells us he was just so skeptical, because he's this poor guy. He didn't have a pair of jeans or anything like that. And he shows up, there's like, air conditioning. He's like, What the fuck is this? Why is the air cold here? And then—
Chai Mishra: 12:29
Was it Americans working at this office?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 12:31
Yeah, it was like, this white lady, and then this nice person is being nice to him, which is also very destabilizing, and trying to pitch him on, like, coming to America, pitching on the American dream. And he 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 Jadavpur, which is like a town outside Kolkata, and he got a visa in the mail. And it was almost like a golden ticket. 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 like, no cell phones, there's no way to stay in touch with your family once you leave—leave everything behind. A lot of the folks in his family, I think we're really against it because 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, 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 of weeks in New Jersey, walked around Manhattan with a resume in his pocket and landed a job like that, which is completely insane.
Chai Mishra: 13:52
How do you think he feels about America? Or how do you think he felt about America in those early days?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 13:59
I mean, he loved it. My whole childhood was us going on these epic road trips to national parks, eating McDonald's and sleeping in Motel 6s, right? And to him, like that was kind of like America—also the cheapest vacation you could find, right? 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 yes, part of it is like, that's 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 want to do, and to go where you want to go. Yeah, he loved it.
Chai Mishra: 14:40
Wow. This is another thing that I think gets lost in the immigration debate very often is, you know, my wife is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Grew up in LA in the Kobe era. 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. I'm gonna address this, because it's gonna—there's so much background noise, more than we've ever had on any episode, we'll do our best to take it out. But if it isn't taken out, just know it's shot in the mission in San Francisco, and it's whatever you're getting. It's raw. This is uncut, but I don't think people really realize how like—and I'm making this even as a political point, just as an observation, the most patriotic people I know, the kind of people that wear an American flag on a sweater, those people are all immigrants.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 15:36
I mean, it's chosen converts, right? As people chose to be here and chose to be American. I often compare it to the girl in high school who most tried to convert me to Christianity, like, literally, every single day, 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 and be American, right?
Chai Mishra: 15:59
The very first Indian Foreign Minister, I'm going to blank on his name right now, but the very first one, he was famous for being wearing these beautiful suits and just being like a very good speaker. And I remember he came, and I forget if it was a congresswoman or somebody said to him at the time, oh, wow, 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 Americans in general. I chose to be—I moved here when I was 17, so when somebody talks poorly of America, I take it as a personal offense, because you're talking—it's like talking poorly about the city I choose to live in, or about the car I choose—but then turn it up to an 11. But again, enough about me. Let's come back to you.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 16:45
Well, I was gonna say on that, you know, it's like that. I love the James Baldwin quote, which I always misquote, but you know, he's like, I choose to criticize America because I love America. I can bitch about it. I can criticize it. But, yeah, when other—when I go to Europe and people are talking about America, is like, fuck, you don't know what we got.
Chai Mishra: 17:02
Oh, yeah, don't even—I could rant for hours about being in Europe and having Europeans talk smack about America and like, America has no culture. Why don't you tell me that when you're not wearing a Kobe jersey? Why don't you tell me that when you're not playing Jay Z, but at this point, so you grew up with this America loving immigrant father who's gone through so much hardship, having these addas at your home, and presumably other Bengali family's homes in Fort Worth. What was your plan at this point? Did you see—what was—Yeah, to the degree that you had any kind of ambition or plan for your life, what were you thinking as a, let's say, seven, eight year old.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 17:41
A seven, eight year old. I was going to be a tri sport athlete in basketball, baseball and football. I was going to play on the cowboys and the mavericks and the Rangers all at the same time. No, I mean, yeah, I was I just played all day outside. And that was honestly one of the things about living in India—When I moved there, when I was seven, I was at school there for about a year, and something about like we lived in an apartment building. There's like 40 kids who lived in the two apartment buildings next to me. And literally, every day we get out of school, we just played cricket for five hours straight. It was so much fun. And I always think back of that as this ideal childhood, and in a way of—it's like so much freedom for a kid, and the reason I say that is, like, I often think about that when I think about what should society here look like? I'm not saying we should have all the parts of Indian society. But 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. And it was amazing. But yes, I was playing. And then I became a big nerd sometime around fourth or fifth grade, and I just got into, like—
Chai Mishra: 18:58
What genre of nerd?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 19:00
Computer nerd, video games. I remember picking up a book that was on web programming. I think it was like, HTML, 1.0 or something. I just, read this book and made a website about Pete Sampras, and
Chai Mishra: 19:15
I made one of my own—
Saikat Chakrabarti: 19:17
Yeah, there we go. That's what we were doing back then. And I really got—in that era, this was kind of the first “.com” era, so some of that stuff was around, right? And I was kind of inspired, like, I'm gonna do stuff on the internet. I remember literally having a thought 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.
Chai Mishra: 19:44
You felt this way even then.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 19:45
I felt this way. In the sixth grade or seventh grade, but yeah, I was a big nerd. And then in high school, I was doing all the math and science stuff, science fair. It's weird, because I went to an inner city. It was an Inner City School in Fort Worth. It's got a very diverse group of people who went there. It's like a very Black and Asian majority school. And so my culture in high school was like math, hip hop and basketball, right?
Chai Mishra: 20:18
Nobody loves hip hop and basketball like a teenage Indian boy.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 20:23
It's embarrassing to think about it, right? It's like, literally, I forget, there's some movie with like that had the exact stereotype of the kind of Indian kid, can't remember, is like the nerd kid. And I can't remember now—
Chai Mishra: 20:35
But do you remember your Harvard application essay?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 20:39
No, I applied on the Common Application. I remember that they used to have a common application to apply to, like, 12 schools or something.
Chai Mishra: 20:46
Do you have any—If you had to guess, what do you think you wrote about? Because it probably wasn't hip hop and basketball.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 20:52
No, I remember my MIT one, which I got rejected from. It was about—We used to put on this math competition. And just like going deep here—We used to put this math competition on school. It was called the Halloween Invitational. It was so much fun. There's the other thing I realized I learned back then that I just had so much fun putting on events or putting on stuff for other people. And the thing that was fun about that whole contest was we would write the tests ourselves. We did a little haunted hallway. We organized the whole thing. I wrote the software for the registration and the website, 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 all the stuff was back there, and I climbed the door to go get the stuff. I broke my glasses in the process, 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 I'm like—
Chai Mishra: 21:49
You're telling me they said no to this essay.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 21:50
I'm realizing why they said no to this essay. Yeah.
Chai Mishra: 21:55
Dude, this whole we didn't expect this when I started the podcast. This is now me revealing just how Indian I am. Because I have asked every single guest that went to a really good school, how they got into that really good school you are.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 22:10
The first person who's asked me that, which is revealing me how Indian you are?
Chai Mishra: 22:13
Well, it's also—I think, to me, what is interesting about it? Because I was telling you, we've had a lot of people in this age bracket, 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 they take a 17 year old, and they take a college application in their face, and it's crazy that we do that as a culture, but it's also that's where you really see the earliest signs of this sort of ambition.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 22:49
Yeah, I mean, though I will say the whole college process because I talked earlier about how luck determines so many bad things. But I feel the whole college process actually kind of radicalized me a little bit, because there's a bunch of us in school who did the exact same stuff. Most of them had better essays than me. We all applied to Harvard, just like a random selection of us got in. And to some extent, getting into a school like that is basically this ticket, you're just like, you're going to be able to get a job afterwards. You're going to be set and other friends of mine who did the same stuff, gone to other schools, perfectly fine schools, but they try much harder. And I know they're just as smart as I am. I know they work just as hard as I did. And yeah, I think that that actually left a real impact on me, on just how random some of this stuff is.
Chai Mishra: 23:39
I think you have this incredible arc. And I'm like, I'm gonna compress a lot here, because I'm trying to arrive at a point I want to get your thoughts on this. You are raised by these parents who've had seen incredible hardship, and then all of a sudden, you go from—you go to Harvard. Come out of Harvard, you work at Bridgewater. 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—those three places, Harvard, I know Bridgewater is in Wall Street, but sort of vaguely, Wall Street and then Silicon Valley. What did that?—What was that experience going from being raised by people who knew the absolute absence of wealth to being surrounded by so much wealth, like, 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—people would normally put you in the same bucket with, somebody like Zohran or even AOC, I think, talk about it but I'm curious what did that experience do to you? How did it shape? How you think about wealth and just people who have money?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 24:59
Yeah. I mean. I will say, I think I'll split up Bridgewater and the Stripe experience, because they're pretty different. Bridgewater really was jumping into a thing where it was that Wall Street culture, had its own weird culture as well, but it was like that Wall Street culture, there's just so much money and there's so much this show of it's very ostentatious, I remember one of the people who worked there, you know, like his thing to do was just like, buy the most expensive bottles of wine wherever we went and not even finish them, right? And it was weird. It was like, I felt very much like, this is not my—these are not my people. It's felt very wasteful and there are parts of the Bridgewater work experience that I think were valuable. And I often tell people that it's actually just to build up skills. It is useful. But work at places like that, I've learned to be a good programmer at Bridgewater, because there are some very excellent programmers at Bridgewater, but the culture was not me, and I remember very specifically, there was this guy who was a vice president at Bridgewater, and he had been there for a long time. He was making a ton of money, and one day, just like, kind of as a half of a joke, just told me the most depressing dream that he had. You're like, Yeah, yesterday, my dreams. He was like, my nightmares are just a series of little inconveniences that happen all through the day, and then I go home and there's nothing for me. And I was like, I do not want to be that guy. And I was like, I gotta do something else. And so when I came out to San Francisco, and originally I was doing my own company. It was really different, 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, right? 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, trying to just working with really talented people on a shared project in this close knit way, was similar in a lot of ways that high school experience I was talking about, where you're just, like, trying to get something done, and you do and you feel so proud of yourself. So that was really fun. And I'd say at that point, I don't think there was, like, some weird cultural experience about it. I do enjoy building stuff. It's a fun part of it.
Chai Mishra: 27:28
What employee number were you at Stripe?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 27:30
I was the third employee.
Chai Mishra: 27:32
Wow, that's incredible. I think this isn't going to 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're in San Francisco, and 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. I mean, it's a startup, not corporate, but in working jobs, you decide to go and join the Sanders 2016 campaign. What was that? Am I correct to understand it as this sort of come to Jesus moment, or 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?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 28:22
No, I'm not a big planner. But it wasn't exactly eight to 10 years I because I joined Bridgewater in 2007 and I left Stripe 2012 so about five years. But I'd say it was a couple things. First off, go under Bridgewater. I was definitely just going there to make some money. You know, when you grow up with a family that's barely making ends meet, 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 have the opportunity to try to get your parents to have a more comfortable life, have your family have a comfortable life. I think you take it. And I don't fault anybody for taking that opportunity out of college. But basically, I couldn't handle being there for more than about a year. I was like, This is not for me. 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 going to 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 going to grow and become a big company someday, and that's not what I was interested in. I had fun building products. I had fun launching stuff. I wasn't gonna go there to be a VP 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 want to work on? And it's almost easy to talk about it, but I just wrote a list—I wrote a list of like, I want to work on. Poverty, income inequality and climate change. And I didn't—I was completely apolitical. I was honestly thinking about like, maybe I'll look at what nonprofits are doing, or something else. And that was in Bernie—started campaigning in 2015, and I guess I left Stripe in 2013 and then I was still working on my own little startup. But then, yeah, Bernie came out in 2015 I started volunteering for him, and I was trying to do everything I could because he was talking about these issues. I didn't know if you had the solutions, but you're talking about and I was like, well, campaigns only a year. So let me 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.
Chai Mishra: 30:39
What was that experience for you, going from—you've done this very—Yeah, I mean, you've hit the big, sort of, rung all the bells of American life, I mean, the greatest university to Wall Street, and then Silicon Valley. And now you're, all of a sudden, you're in politics. Those are all the centers of sort of power and interest in America. What was that transition for you?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 31:03
I'd say, I always like to go into anything when I'm changing careers, doing something new, with just an approach of trying to learn everything, I knew going into Bernie's campaign. I didn't know anything about campaigning, so I just kind of kept my mouth shut and tried to help as much as I could. I follow people around, I think it's a good lesson for anybody who wants to try to learn something. And if I'm being honest, it was very chaotic. Half the time, I had no idea what was going on or why I was doing what I was doing. And later I learned that. It turns out campaigns in general are very chaotic. And that campaign specifically was extremely chaotic because it was Bernie's 2016 campaign, was a campaign where anybody who was a professional campaigner would not work on that campaign, because he didn't get blackballed by the Hillary campaign and by the entire Democratic establishment. So it was sort of a—We got the misfits and did what we could, but it was so exhilarating, just being able to build these tools and organize and see people feeling inspired. And we didn't win, but it really felt like I could have used 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 to the go back to work on anything else.
Chai Mishra: 32:28
It makes me—When I think about the Bernie campaign, the 2016 campaign, I read this thing one time about the Velvet Underground. It was the rolling stoner put together this list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, or albums of all time. 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 5000 of the people that bought those copies went out and started their own bands. 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 I think that was a cultural impact that was disproportionate to maybe the electoral impact. Can you explain something to me? I am like scouting characterologically. 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, by the 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.
Chai Mishra: 33:48
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Saikat Chakrabarti: 34:56
Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's more the structural ways, things like, it was very hard for them to hire good people. There was some fighting to get access to certain tools that we had to do. But I don't think it was a kind of thing where, like, the establishment came in and changed the votes and held Bernie back. In some ways, I think that happened a bit more 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, everybody dropped out for Biden, it happened in two days. It was like, yeah, it was like an overnight, it was clear that was organized. Wasn't some organic thing. And, I mean, that's politics. That happens. There's nothing illegal about that, but I do think that happening really gave put a taste in people's mouth of like, man, everybody else will go to any lengths just to stop this guy.
Chai Mishra: 35:58
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?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 36:11
It was not so much the 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, was actually seeing this way of campaigning that Bernie did, he came out, he literally walked onto a lawn and launched a Senate campaign to a few reporters, some really funny launch, and that sparked the cycle where people were so excited, just because 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 very hard to imagine anybody could run a campaign against her. And so we had this idea to basically say, and at the time, was like, well, if Bernie wins Congress is gonna stop him, because Congress has basically stopped Obama from doing a bunch of stuff. So we're like, what if we use that same model, but for Congress, and the theory here is, like, it only works if people think that this thing happening will lead to actual change. I think part of what made Zohrans campaign work in New York was people really understand 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. And so we're like, what if we actually ran 400 people, but in this presidential style race, was like one campaign operation, and just ran it like a presidential and said, If you vote for these people, you're going to get Medicare for all, you're going to 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 just as Democrats, which became more about just running primary challenges in places where we could get support. And so one of the ones who ran there was AOCs, and she was one of the recruits, because we're trying to recruit non traditional politicians to run, to do this. Yeah.
Chai Mishra: 38:19
Do you call her AOC or do you call her Alex?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 38:22
I call her Alex, yeah, but no one else does.
Chai Mishra: 38:25
I forget who I was hearing, but 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 actually, yeah, tell me about the experience of recruiting her because to somebody. I mean, now it all seems so intuitive and makes perfect sense, but it must have been a counterintuitive choice at the time to run with her. Tell me how you first came to know of her. What impressed you all so much about her? How did that come to be?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 38:54
Yeah, well, to set the stage for this, we were really still trying to do this whole project of recruiting hundreds of people. So we had come up with this whole process of trying to recruit amazing community leaders. And the idea was we tried to build this team of non traditional candidates running, they weren't all going to be 26 year old former bartenders from New York. It was going to be people from all walks of life—
Chai Mishra: 39:20
Former baristas?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 39:21
Yeah, exactly former baristas. Anyone in the restaurant industry is welcome. It is actually funny on Alex's campaign, AOCs campaign, almost everyone except me had worked in the restaurant industry. I don't know how that happened, and we were trying to recruit people who had worked in business and as factory workers and nurses and doctors and teachers and everybody. The challenge was actually convincing people who were doing really serious jobs in their community, convincing them to run for Congress. And we had a really hard time doing that. But we did end up recruiting about 12 or 13—AOC came our way through—I think her brother nominated her because we had this forum. We could nominate people, and our specific thing was like, you can't nominate yourself. We don't want anybody who's gonna spam us with their own congressional race. So her brother nominated her, and we were just reaching out to everybody who was getting nominated. And I think the first conversation someone had with her was not me—It was someone else on the team, a lady named Isra. And she was just really impressed. She was like, Hey, I know she might not be the exact Profile we're looking for, but you all have to talk to her. She's, seems like her heart's really in the right place, and she's an incredible person. And so, I met her, I think, at a restaurant in New York in March 2017 I was gonna say—
Chai Mishra: 40:41
Still working the bartending job.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 40:43
She was still working. At that point, I think she was waitressing, I think—
Chai Mishra: 40:49
But, yeah, that honestly feels like a demotion.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 40:54
Yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to remember, because I think she was helping to manage the front of the house but 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 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 don't want to take that away from her. She's amazing. She does magic on a stage that I am still—now that I'm running for office. I was like, Holy crap. How did you do that? But I wouldn't say, in that first batch of people I recruited that it was obvious that she was some standout star. We had a lot of amazing people in that batch who are incredible orators and speakers and had all kinds of backgrounds and I'd say this is inspirational, because 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. No one is 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 would be way better than who we have in there today. I think that's the real hope. Going through that whole process gave me so much hope for what could be possible if you had actual good leaders going into DC.
Chai Mishra: 42:12
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. 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, but on both sides, I think that people are fixated on her in good and bad ways? I mean, I would say, actually, honestly, I'm in particular fascinated by the right wing fixation on her. Were you surprised by that? Did you expect it at all? What was your reaction to that?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 42:53
We expected for a bit, similar to you, because she was going up against Joe Crowley, who was the third most powerful Democrat at the time.
Chai Mishra: 43:02
20 years at that point?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 43:04
Yeah, I think you're right man, I forgot, but yeah, I think you're right. And, you know, 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, he was a spring chicken but we thought her beating Crowley was gonna be like David Bratt beating Eric Cantor. This is like, old political old political history knowledge, but people don't that's too deep of a cut. So Eric Cantor was either the speaker or he was about to be speaker, 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, you know, a new cycle for like, a week. So that's what we thought was gonna happen. And so our reaction to her winning was, we've got to make the most of this. And so she did like 100 shows. I don't know how much it was, but she was like, we, you know, 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 and with, 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, you know, 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 the strong era, you know. And I think people couldn't have enough. And I think the right reacted to that with genuine fear, you know, they're like, Oh my God, here we've got an actual talented politician who's actually connecting with people. She's a threat. We got to start attacking her right away.
Chai Mishra: 44:48
Do you think the attacks on her, and I'm gonna later in this thing, I ask you about Zohran too. Do you think the attacks hurt her, or do you think they helped her more than they hurt her?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 44:59
Yeah. It's really hard to know. I mean, they certainly upped her profile. And I think they, I think her ability to react to it so well and spar back, I think really solidified her identity as a spider. She's not going to just take it. She punches back, and people want to see that. People want to see that and Democrats. So in that sense, I think it really helped her in the Democratic Party. And the thing I've learned is, often, when one side's attacking you, if people don't know her, then I'm sure amongst Republicans, it's probably hurt her image. But if she actually goes out and, like, 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 Kansas and stuff. And if it's hard to hear her speak and meet her and not like her. So I think overall, in the long arc, I think is going to end up having helped her tremendously. I think it upped her profile. Now it's on her to be able to go and make her case.
Chai Mishra: 46:07
Well, one of the things that you all did—so you, of course, you run her campaign, you recruit her, you run her campaign, and then you become a chief of staff when she's gets elected, which I can't even imagine, the night that she gets elected—What did you think the odds were that night? And you can be totally honest here.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 46:24
Oh, the odds like 5% I mean, 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, and I mean, going into that night, I did not think we're gonna win.
Chai Mishra: 46:41
That election night video of her reacting to the results, it's still, I think, one of the better election night videos. It's because it's genuine. That is no one is that good an actor?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 46:53
Yeah, no. I mean, it's absolutely genuine. She didn't think she was doing that night for sure.
Chai Mishra: 46:57
It's amazing. But one of the things that you all did that I was quite frankly, back then, surprised by it, because there's this thing that I've seen, just as an observer from American politics, that you morph into this influencer figure, and you basically stay away from doing anything too substantive—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 into office and you all putting out the Green New Deal. What was that time gap? Do you remember?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 47:35
Well, she technically proposed the basics of the Green New Deal on her first day in orientation, so before she went into office. So this was the first day, and it was in November. They do it right after Thanksgiving, I think, or maybe right before Thanksgiving, but there's a longer story behind that, because it wasn't like we just came up with the Green New Deal after she won, because we had started this think tank, new consensus at the same time that we did just 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? 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—like Mariana Mazzucato and Ann Pettifor and Kate Rayworth, a bunch of folks around the world, we're talking about this stuff. And so we started this think tank to try to sort of actually work on the ideas. So the Green New Deal, a lot 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, you know, after she won, everybody wanted to a—there's a big spotlight on her, but everyone wanted to write the story about AOC versus the establishment, AOC versus Pelosi, and we really wanted to direct that towards something substantive. And so she gave the media what they wanted by doing the sit in Nancy Pelosi's office with the sunrise movement. They're like, Oh, my God, a fight, because they love reporting the fights. And she did to introduce the Green New Deal. And specifically, we were introducing, at that point a legislation for a select committee, or 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 solve, tackle climate change. And we had some principles of these are the industries we got built. Here's some tools you can use. Here's how you do public financing and just putting 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. We were trying to get these ideas, 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—industrial policy, right? 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 got to go way bigger. The biggest climate plan at the time was Bernie's 2016 plan, which was 80% reductions by 2050 through carbon taxes, we got up the ambition here, that's not enough. And so our whole strategy was 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 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, which became the inflation Reduction Act, which ended up being actual legislation, largest investment in climate change in history.
Chai Mishra: 50:56
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 to. One being in—I don't want to say divert, but one in sort of catalyzing a different conversation. Because 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 have a job. I don't know. I don't know what's even in it yet. And I think 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, and I think this is something that, and of course, 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 dislike this, how much it became actual policy. So much of it does show up in the IRA. And 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. 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?
