Saikat Chakrabarti: 52:16
You know the answer to this one. Yeah, I'd say, why is it FDR? He came in during this great depression. And he could have very easily, just like, kind of gone back to the gilded era, done nothing really. But he just took this approach. He was an entrepreneur. As a president, he was like, we're gonna do bold, persistent experimentation. We're gonna try stuff to see what's working. And I would actually argue that during the New Deal half the stuff they tried didn't really work. They did a bunch of good stuff. But then there are also other things where they just didn't go far enough, they created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was meant to be this engine of industrial growth. It was investing in banks and making loans, and trying to get the economy going. And it wasn't until the mobilization for World War Two where they finally had to, like, build this whole new war economy, that they unleashed the RFC and let it do whatever it needed to do to build that economy. And he took this sclerotic economy that wasn't able to produce anything and turned into thisindustrial powerhouse, and basically created the playbook that every other country that developed in the post war period, whether you look at Europe or all the Asian countries, they copied that playbook, I think is just such a visionary thing. I mean, I don't think it all came from him, but he was—he led in such an amazing—there's this great book about his leadership style called the defining moment as his first 100 days of being president. But he led in this way where he wasn't some genius, but he kind of knew how to get the right experts in power or in the right places and trust them to an extent, but also check, like, he would call up low level employees to see what's actually going on on the ground. He just seemed interested in doing the job, and actually getting somewhere. And he organized, like, he put the country on this mission, and he actually organized society to do it. And I think it's like he was the last president who really showed us how you get the country unstuck, because we were so stuck in the Great Depression and so many arguments that I hear today about why we can't do it now were present back then, because I hear arguments like, Oh, we're a rich country now. We can't develop at that scale anymore. Everyone was making that same argument back then. America was a rich country, relatively back then. And people are saying, you know, the problem was maybe that we've overdeveloped. We have too much industry, we have too much manufacturing. And he just kind of had this—I don't know, this way of of actually putting the country on a mission, getting society organized, building the institutions, and creating the kind of structural power to make this all happen, and doing in a way that benefited workers. It wasn't just blank checks to CEOs. He was very, very skeptical. Capital on its own is going to do this stuff. And a lot of the story of that mobilization and the New Deal was the government kind of kicking the capitalist butts to get stop being lazy, start investing. Start building stuff we need to build.
Chai Mishra: 55:13
I'm fascinated by so many great books about FDR. One of my favorites is Jon Meacham wrote this book about him and Winston Churchill, and I forget if it's called, if it's called Winston and Franklin or Franklin and Winston, but whichever one it is, I think it's the same thing when people like the job, they're better at the job. And I mean, I can't—I don't know the guy. I don't know if he liked being president, but he was interested in doing a good job. And I think that that has such an impact. Tell me about this. At what point you know you do this thing at AOCs office, congressional office. At what point does it pop onto your radar that you should go out and challenge Nancy Pelosi?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 55:54
That was probably—I mean, probably a couple weeks before I tweeted out that I'm challenging, I don't know I was getting matter and matter, after Trump won the second time. I basically my first thought was like, all right, I got to go back to recruiting Canada. I've been working on policy for the last five years fun to work on the mission for America. We've been doing this on new consensus. But to actually get that anywhere, we need actual political power. We need candidates running. And I thought, now I gotta go out and recruit candidates. And then I heard Pelosi go on Ezra Klein, and she was just like, the Democrats did nothing wrong. We don't need to change. And I was like, Oh my God, are the Democrats? Are you really gonna do the same thing you did the first time Trump was in power? And so at some point, I was just like, well, if I'm going to recruit Candace to run I might as well run myself, because no one's going to challenge her. You know, no one else is going to challenge her in San Francisco. And then, yeah, I kind of launched my campaign by tweet, I think.
Chai Mishra: 56:54
Wow, that might be the most Trumpy thing about you, and is the fact that you launch your campaign by tweet.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 57:00
Sorry about that.
Chai Mishra: 57:02
Did you mentally—Was that a shift for you from being not the person on stage to—Because, yeah, I mean, we were talking kind of briefly about this earlier, before we started rolling. But you look great, man. You look well. Thank you. And you were talking a little bit about this kind of glow up process that you went through, but I think you looked great when you wanted the two. But did that require some mental shift to be like, No, I'm gonna be the guy that's on stage, or the person that's on stage.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 57:37
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm used to being behind the scenes. I like building stuff. I like building structures, even when I was doing campaign work. For me, the satisfying stuff was like actually figuring out the numbers for how to win this stuff and how to build the organization to make it happen. And we're the candidate, that's not what you do. You can't do it. It's very difficult for me to not want to get involved in that stuff as much as I do now. But I think like doing that whole AOC experience, I wasn't the candidate in front but just because I was, like her chief of staff, I ended up doing way more media and stuff than you usually do as a chief of staff. And I think that experience gave me enough confidence know, like, okay, I can do it. It may not be like, what comes to me naturally is like, the thing I love doing the most, like, I love solving problems, I love building but I know I can do it. I know I can talk about this stuff, and I've been working on this stuff for so long. Yeah, I don't know. It's just one of those things I'm gonna try.
Chai Mishra: 58:39
The funny thing is, I forget who said this to me? But somebody—I forget—Maybe it was just a comment on one of your posts, but somebody was saying, like, Oh yeah, you know another young person running on social media or something like that, and that was the first time I've had this reaction. I was like, Look, dude, I don't know Zohran, I don't know Congresswoman AOC, I don't know any of those people, but I was like, this is very heavily the racial stereotyping what I'm about to do. But I was like, I know this fucking guy. I just know the category of Indian man. This guy is he is about the issues. He knows his stuff. You can disagree with him all day. But what I know is not true is that he is a surface guy. He is not a vibes based dude. He knows his fucking shit. I will not be debating him on his facts. I just, I think you being Bengali fed into my stereotyping, where I immediately was like Bengali Renaissance. This guy's a fucking Nobel laureate.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 59:41
My favorite comment by far, on a YouTube video so far, is some guy who was like, This guy is no Zohran Mamdani. And I hate it when people are so racist to just like, lump all the brown guys together. This guy's clearly more like Ro Khanna now.
Chai Mishra: 59:57
I saw this little double helix happening. I was watching a live event that you did yesterday on Instagram, and I was on a plane, I'm watching, and there are these two trolls, and they're kind of trying to troll all the supporters in there. And one guy's trolling all the supporters and saying, Oh, you guys are definitely anti semitic. I just know you're anti semitic. And then they the other guy is making, like, other sort of vague, you know, and like, liberal tears, kind of points. And they're sort of going back and forth, but slowly starts to become clear that the second guy is actually very anti semitic. So there is this like unraveling, falling apart of the Alliance that happens because you see the two guys that have been trolling together, one of them goes like, Wait, dude, are you anticip—just start to collapse.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:00:40
Do a podcast, bring them together, have them have a chat right here.
Chai Mishra: 1:00:43
Oh, that would be way better than anything I could do. But my other favorite comment from yesterday's live when I told you this is, I like this guy, he can definitely bench more than Pelosi.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:00:53
It's a low bar.
Chai Mishra: 1:00:54
Unfortunately. I hope this is not me thinking political stance. I'm confident you can bench more than it. But actually, let's take a step back from, from Speaker Pelosi. And you know, you launching a campaign. I want to try to get to a greater worldview here. And we sort of did this with the FDR thing. But let me actually, let me put forth a thesis, and tell me what you think of this. And this is just a layman.
Chai Mishra: 1:01:29
If you look at the numbers, what was it the American economy as a share of global GDP when Reagan left, was about 25 ish percent, and the American share of global GDP, when Biden left, was about 25% so this story of this incredible global decline, at least at a national level, I don't think, is borne out by the data, even if you look at just more recent times, like no major economy recovered as Well from the recession as the American economy did. Now that said, at a macro level, this is all true, but at a micro level, people's lived experience of America is not what that data would suggest, right? And there are many problems to it, but the one big one that I see is you can call it a lot of things, but if I'm trying to pick the most reduction, reductive term possible, I'm going to call it affordability. And I find that if Democrats want a chance at winning and being back in power, they need and I think this is what Zohran did very effectively. You need to speak very that needs to be the center of the bullseye, and how you're actually going to go about doing that. And there's of course, and then you get into the abundance agenda and all that stuff. And you know, there are so many different ways to attack that problem of affordability. I think you take a more as from what I understand, you take a more government, state capacity and industrial policy approach that we need to build things, and that is how we will make the cost of living in America better. Again, this is one problem. You talk about a lot of problems, but to me, the central problem of our political time for Democrats is the problem of affordability. You react. What do you think of that? Yeah.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:03:19
I mean, I think I start with the with the narrow, which is, yes, I think affordability and downstream from that, it's, it's a it's just this feeling that your kids are not going to do as well as you, right? And that becoming more and more true, that's, that's downstream from, like you can't, they're not gonna be able afford their own house. You know, healthcare is bankrupting people. And then if you step back, you look at the actual systems in place, right? Like you look at our healthcare system, the costs are skyrocketing. There's no real solution for how to get that stuff down. And it's clear we actually have to do this hard work of actually changing at a structural level, from figuring out what the new system is. And no one wants to do that, right? I think there's these structural problems now, when it when you talk about like us, share of GDP globally, like my larger worldview here is that, like that, societies that have managed to improve, there's no like silver bullet policy. Societies have managed, managed to improve the lives of people and get people out of poverty and develop and do all this stuff. It's just this like process of you actually really try to do it. You know? It's, if you look at China, it's like, what was China's policy to get millions of people out of poverty? And a lot of it is just like, they kept picking targets, and they went at it with intention. They built institutions to make it happen. They and then they try to figure out what the bottlenecks were along the way. And it's really kind of, it's like, if you're building a company, this is how you do it, right? Like, if you're trying to ship a product, you don't set some policies and set incentives for employees and hope a product gets shipped. It's like the will of leadership actually matters quite a bit, and you have to keep going, going going, going, right? So I. Think that there's there like all the all these countries go through these phases, or all the countries currently have gone through these phases where they did this huge amount of investment and this whole operation to build up infrastructure, build up housing and build up industries. All you know, at some point during the 20th century has happened in every European country, every you know, Asian country that's developed today, and after they got rich, we kind of are coasting off the wealth that we built. And I think with the US, yes, there's sectors that have, like, really, you know, Tech has been a sector that's built a lot of wealth has been in these pockets, but for a big part of the country, I think the reason the lived experience has gotten poorer and poorer is because they've gotten poorer and poorer, right? And we haven't done the project of saying, Well, what are we going to build there, right? And there's, it's not just going to naturally, going to pop up on its own. That's part of it. The second part that I think is a sign of American decline is, I do think we're starting to, you know, we for a long time, we have this, we had this huge edge on research and development, on being on the cutting edge of stuff, even if we're not the ones manufacturing everything, we're at least inventing things. Yeah, and I think we're starting to get behind on that. And I think once we lose that, what do we have if we're not the manufacturing powerhouse, if we're not the ones inventing stuff? I think we're looking at a future that could be like the UK, you know, we're just like, slowly, slowly getting poorer and poorer and getting more and more unstable as a result.
Chai Mishra: 1:06:28
Yeah, I think one thing that happened, especially that sort of feeds into this, is when I was going to school, when I was going to Berkeley, the thing that everybody and I'm sure you and I are around the same age, every young, ambitious person wanted to go and work and live in China and wanted to see what it was like. And at some point we just stopped doing that. And the covid really sort of—So it's created this perception of China, but at a broader level of the world that I think a lot of Americans are very misinformed about how far along the tech into these other countries is. I mean, going to China in pieces feels like being in the future. And again, their use of state capacity, their use of their whole approach to making cities compete over new technologies. And like picking those out and picking them out, well, you don't really get a sense for American decline until you step out of America, yeah. And I think, it's such a it's a very powerful experience, like I go to even, I've had to fly a lot this year, and I was at O'Hare, and I was at LAX, and I was at JFK just a couple days ago, and I was just thinking about what the experience of if I were—if it was my first time in America and I showed up and JFK was my first door in America. I would think a lot of things, but one of the clear feelings I would have would be, this is a declining power. We were the first to build airports at this scale. I think I'm picking airports as an example of what you're saying. We were so far ahead of curve, and we were the first to really have massive commercial aviation. So we built these great airports and everything. And we built a little too close to our cities, and then all of a sudden, what you have is, like, the rest of the world catches up. And, you know, they almost had the benefit of building them later, and they got out of sense for how things were running. But we've just, at this point, we just keep adding attachments to JFK, instead of just having the power to go, No, fuck this. We're gonna have a world class airport. I mean, if all you saw of the world, where it's airports, you would think America was a dying nation. And I think it just speaks to our belief that we can do big things has been really meaningfully hampered.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:08:52
I think what really upsets me is, I remember 10 years ago when we were talking about, like, cars in China, or car manufacturer in China. Everyone was just so sure, like, yeah, they're never gonna catch up, their technology is never gonna be there. And then as soon as they caught up, and their cars are not better than ours, yeah, it was like, well, we can never beat them? It's like 10 years—Why Can't We? Like, we're so far ahead and but to me, that feeling clearly, we are helpless, that to me, is like the big problem. And I think that means that whenever we see a big problem in front of us, like our healthcare system or housing crisis, or affordability crisis, anywhere, we can only think of small solutions. And we have this one shot to try this one thing, and if it doesn't work, we're screwed. It's the opposite of what FDR did with bold, persistent experimentation. China really operates their country as an entrepreneurial state. They're constantly trying things. They try to make sure the 1000s of companies, I think I heard recently, even with AI, the deep sea thing happened, but now they're funding. 1000s of companies to try to compete, to create this little fitness lab for all the companies to just outdo each other, and we don't even think on that scale. For us, the IRA was industrial policy, and it's so minuscule compared to what a real serious country who wants to do this would be doing.
Chai Mishra: 1:10:18
One of the things that I want to kind of just say out loud, because I I'm surprised by how often people get this wrong. They'll hear the terms American decline and think that this is an anti American which I can't wrap my head around. They think that this is an anti American stance. Which is the exact opposite of that. It is the most pro American stand. It is believing so deeply in American dynamism and American capability. But let's make this a little more narrow. Why is this something that Speaker Pelosi, who's been, I think if you just, are you just reading the rap sheet? Has been an incredible has had this unbelievable political life. I want to read out some of the stuff just to be sure I don't miss anything. First female House Minority Whip, first female Minority Leader, first female Speaker of the House, the highest ranking woman in US history. Once you know there would not be any Obamacare without her, you could argue I think that the first Trump term would be much worse without her. Why are these things that she is incapable of taking on you think.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:11:27
I think her position and her kind of experience in politics makes us that she kind of has to sort of be a cons, be not conservative in a Republican sense, but be conservative and so in terms of the ideas she can Yeah, because Be careful. She has to be she has to keep her caucus in line. Caucus in line, right? That's her skill is, kind of holding the status quo intact. And I think part of it also comes from her feeling, I assume, of just knowing her Republican colleagues for so long. You know, she went in there in 1987 and Republicans still believe in democracy. Two years old. I was one. Yeah, I'm nearly 40 now, but you know, Republicans back then, they believe in democracy, believe in climate change. And I really think she and a lot of Democrats think that they're just under the spell of Trump right now, are they going to come back around? Any moment now, if we just beat Trump, the Republicans would come back and work together on climate change. And I just feel like that whole thing is dead. And I think she is someone who really doesn't like bigger, structural new ideas taking hold, because she sees them as kind of a threat. She's like that might lead us to lose. We saw this with a Green New Deal. And when we launched it, her reaction to the Green New Deal was to call it the Green new dream. And, you know, and try to attack it right, instead of trying to figure out a way to promote it or make it part of what they're trying to do in the caucus. And so I just think we're at this point, like, the way I sort of view our history is, we kind of had this FDR era, from the New Deal to pretty much late 70s, and we had stagflation, and that kind of led rise to the Reagan era, you know. And in these eras, both parties have to govern within the confines of that era. Eisenhower governed is like a New Deal Republican, Clinton, I'd say governance kind of a Reaganite Democrat, right? And I think that Reagan era really, really collapsed with the Great Recession, you know. And I'd say the war, the failed war in Iraq, and then the Great Recession, people have, they just lost faith in the adults in the room and the institutions. And people have been voting for new ideas every, every single chance they get. I think Obama was really like, you know, was hope and change, right? He campaigned on Main Street, not Wall Street. Trump was that again, right in 2016 and so I really think the battle right now is define what the next political era will be. You know, is it going to be this, Trump Maga Era where this is the confines of which we govern, or do we have something to offer. That's the, you know, I would say that our vision should be, what do we do to actually build to invest and develop America, to build stuff in America in a way that is going to make people prosperous and really prove the point that we can do this in a democratic way. We don't have to just do tariffs, which isn't going to do it anyway, and authoritarianism to do it.
Chai Mishra: 1:14:21
Give me your theory of victory here. And you're an engineer. I'm most of the way dropped out, but I could do most of
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:14:32
We got Claude code and stuff. Now you can do it. We're good.
Chai Mishra: 1:14:36
Let's even get into the numbers, if you want to. But actually, even before going into the numbers, if I had to guess, at some level, it seems like the most likely path to victory here for you would be that Speaker Pelosi looks at what happened in New York, looks at her, her own incredible and illustrious career, and says, You know what? Fuck it. It's just not worth it at 85 to do this and, like, if it's even kind of close, like, well, how is that worth it? And she just says, You know what? Let him have it. Am I right that that is the most likely path.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:15:10
She's not gonna let me. Are you kidding me? I mean, I think, there's definitely a chance she steps down. I have no idea what's in her mind. It's hard for me to imagine she would step down and not have someone she wants in that seat after her for a while. I know people have been talking about her daughter potentially, but I really don't know. I mean, it's I feel like—one thing I've learned in all my years in politics is people who spend a lot of time in politics think completely differently from how I think, and so I don't even try to guess what they're trying to think.
Chai Mishra: 1:15:45
But tell me your theory of victory. Tell me how you think about this. What's the path there?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:15:51
I mean, I honestly think my theory of victory is just that. I think we're in in this moment where stuff can change really like there's a huge appetite for change, and things can change really fast. If there's anything I've learned over the last 10 years, is that political sentiment is shifting faster and faster and faster, and right now we've got the appetite for change in the Democratic Party, I think, completely dwarfs what I saw in 2018 when AOC won, and that whole race happened because people are just so pissed off that Democrats allowed Trump to win, I think people are really mad at the current Democratic Party. They're looking for what comes next, what's the actual answer to that? And so my theory is, if I can come into that with an actual message of, this is what I plan to do. And my background, you know, I'm not just some fly by night Canada. I've worked on this stuff for the last. This stuff for the last 10 years. I'm a serious candidate. I think people will switch their vote, you know, and so it's just a matter of getting that in front of enough people. And so far, we're canvassing or knocking doors and talking to voters on voter calls. We've talked a lot of people who've been voting for Pelosi their whole lives, who are willing to change their vote, just because a they're actually surprised she's running again, they can't believe it. And there's like, yeah, she's great, but we got to figure something else out. You know, there's kind of a consensus that whatever the establishment Democrats have been doing clearly did not work.
Chai Mishra: 1:17:13
Yeah, well, I'm curious about this one part of it. So I was in New York a couple days ago, and I was talking to my mom on the phone, and she was like, hey, so who are you interviewing next? And I said, Well, there's this guy. He's Indian, and he's Indian American, and you know, he's running for office against this really famous politician, Democratic Party. And my dad, he goes, "I know this guy, Mamdani." And I was like, "No, it's not Mamdani, Dad."
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:17:46
There's literally a mic drop moment where he spells his name.
Chai Mishra: 1:17:49
Yeah, exactly. I wanted to send him that clip, but at some level, as I'm curious about how the Mamdani victory, because the point of bringing that up was the abstracted out details of what you're doing are very similar. And though I don't love the X comment, he's no mom, Danny, he might be I'm not trying to do that, but I do think that there's she could take the Indian thing out of it. Just I think, like, what you're attempting to do here is, I think, just as bold, if not bolder, quite frankly, yeah. How did that what happened in New York? How did that affect your calculus of how likely this is?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:18:33
I mean, it certainly helped the campaign, right, like, anytime there's, anytime there's some sort of victory against the establishment, it sort of proves that something's possible. I think the biggest impediment to winning this campaign is largely people not thinking it can happen. Is this weird, self fulfilling prophecy. Like, the more people that think it can happen, the more likely it is to happen. And that's so much of just what campaign theory is, you show momentum that more people take it seriously. I mean, I remember Obama, he was so far down in all the primaries in South Carolina and everything after Iowa, and then he won either Iowa or New Hampshire.
Chai Mishra: 1:19:15
That was the whole focus of their campaign.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:19:17
And by winning the first state, all the polls flipped in the other states. Yeah, right. So, like, if people think you can win, then you can win, yeah. And so from that sense, just Zohran going up against Cuomo, and it's different a lot of ways. So I want to be clear about that. But him going against Cuomo and watching the entire Democratic political establishment kind of circle the wagons around Cuomo, and they brought Bill Clinton out, and all this stuff, and then him still winning, and none of that mattering. It really proved that this is possible, right? And I did see a big surge in people signing up. And really, yeah, like, I think my social media doubled overnight from Zoron winning.
Chai Mishra: 1:19:54
Wow. I'm curious about, Well, did you know you knew him personally before this?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:20:00
No, I've never met Zohran, really, yeah.
Chai Mishra: 1:20:02
Well, I had this interesting, I think a lot of people have had this, sort of, like a lot of brown people have had this particular experience with him, where we kind of vaguely became aware of him, and we saw the videos of him talking in Bangla and Hindi and in Spanish, and, you know, we all thought it was cool, and the graphic design and all of that was just really, I think, spoke to us. But, you know, I would say I was Zohran curious at best. Yeah, and his, some of his policies I disagreed with, some I thought were interesting, and I just didn't really have too much of an opinion. But then he goes out and he pulls off this incredible upset. And just as a sports fan, if nothing else, I was like, this is, this is something, I need to pay attention to. You know, he beats the scion of this incredible political family, right, and this empire, but, but then after he gets elected, the intensity and the just the cruelty, the grossness of the backlash that he gets took me from somebody that, again, I still don't know where I'm at on his policies, but I feel so protective of the man. They made him darker and they made his beard bigger, and they said that he should get deported because he eats rice with his hands, and it just pissed me off so much. And I actually would, if you have anything to say about it, feel free to add it. But what I want to talk about, actually, is when they did this to you with the t-shirt. Are you cool talking about this?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:21:34
Yeah, I'm cool talking about the t-shirt.
Chai Mishra: 1:21:35
All right. Well, there's this thing that if you're not Indian, or if you're not Bangla, you will not relate to but there is not a child in a Bengali family that grows up without seeing Bose face everywhere. Actually, you know, I'm doing my best to describe the story, but tell me I mostly, I want to get your feelings around what happened. Was it during the OC campaign?
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:22:05
Yeah, it was during the AOC so, basically, for context, I wore a shirt with Subhas Chandra Bose's face on it, and I got like, so much attack. So many people are attacking me for wearing this shirt. Because it turns out at some point, Subhash Chandra Bose shook Hitler's hand, right? And so I must be an anti Semite. And so, for context of, like, where this whole thing even came from, a) this is why nobody normal ever freaking runs for anything. So for me, growing up as a Bengali, like, Bose is such a household name in being in Bengal, but also in India. The airport flying into Kolkata is called Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose airport. And you drive around Kolkata, and there's posters of his face everywhere. So growing up, at some point, someone just gave me this t shirt, I didn't really know very much about him, other than he was a freedom fighter, fought for Indian independence. He was revolutionary, and the airport's named after him, and the story of the picture is, I was going to a net roots conference, and this was a t shirt I had in my closet, and I put it on someone took a picture. That's all these pictures get taken, and then it becomes this big thing and the story of like, why he ends up meeting with Hitler, which, of course, I don't think he should have done but the context for that was Churchill was instigating a mass famine in Kolkata that killed people, estimate, between 1 million and 2 million people is a huge deal. And so this was during in the middle of the Indian revolution, while they're trying to get independence from the British. And both his philosophy, he was, in some ways, kind of the Malcolm X to Gandhi's Martin Luther King. He was the one who wanted to actually use force to try to get independence. And in the end, you can understand where he's coming from, because millions of Bengalis were being slaughtered. So he tried to find the enemy of my enemy. He went over to Japan, to Germany, to try to do independence. And I don't think he should have done it. I honestly didn't know that when I wore the shirt. But it's wild. I think that shirt story to me. I was like, Oh, this is why, when I asked people to run for Congress, I never will, because, who knows, maybe have a shirt with somebody who talk to somebody who has a pedophile or something right, who is really simple. And it was difficult as a staffer to deal with that, because I wasn't able to defend myself, it wasn't these right wingers were trying to get me on their show to explain myself. They were just attacking.
Chai Mishra: 1:24:48
It felt so unfair. It felt very unfair. And even down to understanding Bose, and I'm not going to defend anything he said or did, but if your house is on fire, you run outside and there's a guy standing there with water, or not even standing there with water, there's just a guy standing there and you talk to me, can you help me? Can you do this? It's almost like saying, Why didn't you ask for the guy's political affiliation? Why didn't you check his criminal record before you asked him for water? That's what Bose did. Bose, like a lot of Indians and a lot of Bengalis, was just looking for a way to end the pain. And I think, like, but to the to the broader point here, which is, and I want to end with this, that there's this thing that I've seen done to you. I've seen it done to Zohran. I've seen it done to Congressman AOC. You as a normal person when you try to run the attempt seems to be to clip the more kind of nuanced, interesting parts of your personality and your background and to flatten you into a meme. And you know, a lot of what you've said today, a lot of your platform is trying to replace this sort of Geriatric ruling class that we have with young people with new ideas. And I think you talk very beautifully and very often about how we get the geriatric ruling class out. I think we actually don't talk enough about how we get new young blood in because if I know a lot of people in this generation, and you know, we look at this political system that just has not worked and seems permanently broken, we seem everyone like you that when they try to do Something about it, they get flattened the people. They sort of circle the wagons around whatever status quo exists, even if they, six months ago, were shitting on that status quo. And they do everything they can to ruin your life, and very most of the time it doesn't work. So I guess my point is, what advice would you have? What tips would you have for somebody that's young cares deeply about this country, like I do, like a lot of my friends do, but feel scared to do what you've done? Yeah, any advice would be helpful.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:27:16
I have two pieces of advice, I guess you know one, I know this is true for AOC. I assume this is probably true for Zohran. It's definitely true for me. Yeah, you're gonna get all the negativity online, but I think it's really important actually to find the places where you have support and find the things I encourage you to keep going, right? Like, because if you just talk to people in your community, if you try to do a People Powered campaign where you're going out, you're meeting people at first, it's very scary, but having people get to know you, and then having other people come out and vouch for you as a result, is really satisfying. And it does. It's like you're always trying to keep the keep the, the negativity, from trying to define you. Well, that means you have to find something else to define you. And that's going to be the people who are supporting you, the people you're trying to actually win at the end of the day. And I know that was like, a big source of what kept Alex going, or AOC going, as she would just continuously, just be in her community. Do these events have, and talk to people and it was even the little things, we would be walking around and the delivery driver, driving by, stopping by and being like, just keep going. We got your back. And that that really helps, you know, and that, I think that's a that's a big part of why you can keep going. It is really positive. It's such a positive experience to go through that and find that kind of support.
The other part is the reason I keep you know, I'm trying to do it again. I'm trying to do the brand new Congress thing again, where I'm trying to recruit people to run I'm trying to build a slate of people who are going to go in there. Because I I really suspect that, like me, a lot of people who actually want to solve this stuff don't want to go in there to do politics. You want to go in there to actually solve these problems. And I'm hoping that, if you have a team of people who are going in with that mindset, that's how we actually get it done. And that's actually in both in terms of how we get the problem solved, but also how we recruit the people to join. I know you're not going to want to run by yourself, but what if you're running with 100 other people who actually, if all you get in, you can do something. It's going to be bigger than you. So if that sounds encouraging, then please nominate yourself for someone to run on my website. That's something I'm trying to do right now. I do want to—I think it's both possible to do, because we've seen movements like this pop up all over the world. We've seen a bizarre version of it pop up in this country, in the Republican Party. And I just think it's necessary, you know, I think the politics of—it's not even just geriatric politics. It's the politics of not really trying to change anything, thinking we're just in a normal political moment where the pendulum is going to swing back and forth, that has to die, and we have to actually solve these structural problems. We got to refactor our code. I'm sorry to make the engineering joke, but we actually need to change things at this point.
Chai Mishra: 1:30:15
Saikat Chakrabarti, let's go change some things. All right. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Saikat Chakrabarti: 1:30:19
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
