The Next Generation of Democrats

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. It's time to build again, folks. Fascism never made America great, but when progressives build, that's where you'll find American greatness. Tonight's guest is Micah Erfan. Micah represents Texas' Congressional District 7 on the Executive Committee of the Texas Democratic Party. He's also the host of the podcast, The Micah Erfan Show. We discuss the current state of the Democratic Party and social media, how the Democrats can win back young men, the impact of COVID and social media on our nation's politics, and what it takes to tell a good story, get your message out, and welcome everyone. After that, we'll be featuring another Radio Abundance New York City update from our friends Catherine Vaughn and Ryder Kessler at Abundance New York. They'll be sharing updates both good and bad on abundance policies at City Hall in New York, plus an update on the upcoming mayoral election. That's coming up right now on Radio Abundance.

0:58 You're listening to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. Now let's get to the show. Please welcome your host for the evening, YIMBY Democrats for America Executive Director Steve Boyle. And to kick things off, here's Steve. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I hate these guys. Micah Erfan, welcome to Radio Abundance. Thanks for being with us. I'm excited. We are stoked to talk to you. You represent the Congressional District 7 in Texas on the Executive Committee of the Texas Democratic Party, and you're killing it as a, yeah, I hate the word content creator, but you are putting out stories, and you are putting out media, and you are spreading the gospel of democratic politics and abundance politics and good ideas. And it's, it's been exciting to watch and exciting to watch it take off. You know, content creator isn't my favorite term, but it's much better than influencer. So I take it.

1:51 And when, when, when do you feel like you became a content creator? When did you first start telling stories and making media? And how did things kind of pick up for you? You know, I've used social media since I was a little kid. Whenever I'd be home alone at, you know, when I was in like, what, fifth or fourth grade, I'd be listening to YouTube videos. I'd be engaging with Instagram. And so like, I've never known a life where I wasn't involved. And whenever I started getting passionate about politics, high school, junior high, that's whenever I started saying, well, you know, if I want to influence other people, I should probably be using social media. So it was in high school, when I first started making content, I actually made YouTube videos, I made podcasts, you cannot really find those things anymore, you can find in some podcasting platforms, like the name of my old podcast, which I won't tell anybody. And you could find that you can't actually play any sort of the old recordings, thank God, because I was kind of cringe back then. But recently, I've been more involved in content creation than ever, a post the election. And that's because in the election, I realized a really substantial problem that people on our side have, which is that we're just not as represented on social media. When people look at their social media feeds, they're seeing a lot of right wing propaganda and misinformation. If you look at platforms like YouTube, Facebook, a lot of these platforms have way more right wing content creators, and way more impressions on right wing content than content that's on our side of the aisle. And in so far that they have content that's on the left, it isn't always the kind of content which is really talking about things maybe in the way that we would agree with. And so I identified this problem, there's this really big imbalance, and it's causing harm in our country. And initially, I was like, somebody else go solve this, you know, because I'm going to go to law school, I'm going to do law stuff, I don't want to be out in the public eye. And then I realized nobody was going to solve it. Of course, I'm not going to solve it single handedly. But I might as well actually do some of the work to contribute a little bit to its resolution rather than just whining about it. So that's how you're solving it.

3:45 Yeah, I mean, I think it's about making content that resonates with people, right? Right wing content creators have gotten really good at creating content, which is effective and entertaining. That's the reason why they get so many views, right? These people are trained. There's a whole production system they have, they tie things to the news, they talk about cultural topics, we just haven't been nearly as effective. And so it's not like my channel is huge. Although I've gone, I've increased my following by like 5000% in the past like month since I've like really started making content, which is nice to see. And the hope is to spread true ideas, to make, you know, policy and important things about the world that seems seem complicated, be more accessible to people. And you know, if we do that to enough Americans, maybe we could substantially shift public opinion.

4:33 Well, you know, you talked about making content that is entertaining, right? Telling stories, making it exciting, making it visceral, making people feel it in their bones, and have it resonate with them. How do you make entertainment out of Democrats and democracy and policy and abundance? So I think most people want to be informed, they want to feel like they know what's going on. And they also want to know like an informed perspective about it. That's why, you know, commentary shows do well on the right, right? And they point to interesting elements of the news, the kind of stuff that's intuitively interesting, right? The kind of outrages the crazy things that happen. And so they offer like information in perspective. And I think that if you offer that for our side, maybe a side that is less, you know, consumed with like a right wing ideology, but more like concern with balls and strikes, calling balls and strikes, I think that could be valuable. And I think a lot of people would would be interested in that specifically, a lot of people that aren't already on your team, right? I think that on in the Democratic space, there's a lot of people, there's already content creators that do well, but they usually make content, which only appeals to people who are already Democrats. And it's like kind of clear that this kind of person would only say negative things about Republicans, and they'd only say positive things about Democrats, and they would never just say what their actual opinion is, right? And I think it's actually better for the Democratic Party, if you have more people who just say what their actual opinion is. And if that opinion clashes with the Democratic Party 20% of the time, well, at least people know that you're real. And a lot of people have their ears open to you and be interested in what you have to say that actually matter, the kind of swing voters that you need to win over.

6:10 You know, thinking of your example of, you know, maybe you're a Democrat, but you clash with the party orthodoxy 20% of the time, that is American voters, right? The down the line orthodox voters barely exist, right? Everybody's got something, especially the less kind of following of politics you are, everybody's got something heterodox, the sort of, which is why there's, you often see like there's people talk about moderation and centrism, but there's not a big constituency for centrism, because what centrism means is just everybody's got their different unorthodoxy. And often those opinions are more extreme than the parties, but they are sort of a smattering of different areas. But what you're talking really, it makes me think about, and I know this has been on your mind too, the question in the Democratic Party, how did we lose young men? How do we speak to young men?

6:57 And I'll tell you my thoughts on this. And then I'm really excited for you to tear in, which is you are a young man. It's been maybe 10 years since I've been a young man, but I have some memories of those times. And what I remember was, you know, when we talk, when you hear a Democratic officials talk about it and we talk about emulating Joe Rogan, it reminds me of when products try to pander to men and you have like toothpaste, but masculine, which I think men hate. My recollection of being a young man is that men like niche passions and they want to hear about what you care about and they want to learn stuff. They like that so much that we have a word for what happens when men get so excited to tell you what they learned about a topic that it comes off as condescending and that's mansplaining. And some of that time is underestimating the person you're talking to. But a lot of it is just exuberance about the thing you're passionate about. And so to me, it seems like exactly like you're saying, speak your truth. Don't pander and tell people what you think they want to hear. Tell them what you care about. Tell them what you believe and tell them very passionately why you're passionate about it. And that's what resonates and makes people go, oh, even if I don't agree with that, that sounds interesting. I'd like to learn more. I'd like to lean into what this person's talking about. Yeah. So I made a video on this topic, which is made it apparently one of my things, one of the things that people associate with me, which is so funny because the reason why I made a video on this is not because I was an expert in this. It's not because even my guest was an expert in this. It's just because they had wrote an article that I wanted to talk to them about on this.

8:27 So I don't claim to be an expert on what young men want despite being one of them. But I do have a perspective that I think I've actually developed through the process of really thinking about this issue recently. And it's obviously a confluence of factors. One of the factors that you mentioned is they want politicians that actually believe in things and authentically care about them. And I think that's just a thing that all Americans want, right? Nobody wants to vote for a politician who has a platform created by consultants. Nobody wants to vote for a politician who doesn't really seem like they believe in anything. They just want a cool title. And the unfortunate reality is a lot of American politicians have been that way. They've just wanted power. They've had the consultant constructed policy platforms. They haven't had conviction when they've been in office. But in terms of, there's other issues as well that contribute to, you know, young people's preferences generally in elections. But let's talk about an issue that's kind of unique to young men. And that is, I think a lot of young men feel like they're rejected. They're not accepted by people that are more on the left, right? They feel like there's a lot of genuine, like almost universal male characteristics. You know, using kind of edgy jokes, being inappropriate sometimes, right? Guy talk, all these things that are literally almost ubiquitous amongst men.

9:38 Like almost every man is like this. There's like a 10% or 20% who's not like this. And those guys, those characteristics are shamed and attacked and frowned upon. And this is less the case today than it was four years ago. But it still is the case to a certain extent. Those people are never going to support you if they feel like your cultural group frowns upon them, right? How could you ever support a political institution or a political party that you don't feel like accepts you, right? And that's part of the reason why Democrats have succeeded with some groups like LGBTQ people, right? They feel like the Republican Party doesn't accept them. It's like, wait, you didn't really have to do anything else to appeal to the LGBTQ people. All you have to say is, well, that side doesn't accept you at all. And we do. And so that's one of the worst things that you could do if you want to reach out to a group. And that's the fundamental problem that I think the Democratic Party needs to solve, not out of place of opportunism, but out of place of genuineness. Young men don't like the idea that the Democrats are going to change the way they treat them just to win their votes, right? That's not a good way to approach politics. You should do everything genuinely. It is bad to tell a huge cohort of the American population that just the natural elements of who they are, the things they do every day, are just bad and unacceptable and they need to change. These are almost immutable characteristics. And so I think that's one of the most important things that needs to be changed. And I think the good news is it is changing already.

10:54 You know, it reminds me when I was growing up in the late 1900s, in the 90s and early 2000s, that was the era of like Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush and the moral majority and the Christian right. And as Roth from the New York Times said, if you don't like the Christian right, you're going to hate post-Christian right. And he was right about that. But growing up in that era, that was the side, the right was the side that was censorious, that policed your behavior, that was anti-social and anti-sex and anti, you know, live in your life. And that certainly, you know, certainly I rebelled against that in becoming a Democrat and a progressive. And it seems to me that young men now and growing up, you know, in the area you grew up in, right, the it's the left now that is censorious, that is behavior policing. And a lot of that, most of that comes from a very good place, which is like, let's treat each other better and understand the way our behavior impacts other people. But then it becomes this thing of like, there's all these rules and you don't know the rules. And there's rules about what words you can use and words about rules about what you can do. And if you don't do that, your life might be over and you might be a bad person. And and like, of course, you're gonna hate that. And also that wider thing of like, oh, because you are a man, you are bad because you are white, you are bad.

12:18 And there's we can understand history without, you know, if we we'd know if you were saying if you're Latino, you're bad, if you're gay, you're bad. But that's wrong. It turns out that you need to treat people as individuals and not type them by race and gender. That's an obvious lesson in the Democratic Party. But it doesn't seem one that we apply in our conversations with other people sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's not like every single Democratic person is like hitting on men all the time. Right. It's it's in subtle cultural things. Right. We're like, you know, a guy says some sort of edgy joke and everyone's upset about it or some sort of high profile Democratic influence or gets exposed for, you know, you know, sleeping around or whatever. Now they're canceled. You know, it's over for them. Right. Like these are things that send signals about what you're like, what you view of people and people see that in themselves and they say, well, I'm not the kind of person that they would ever accept it. They knew who I was. They think I'm bad and I can't be part of this. And it's all amplified by this social media point, which is every time, you know, somebody on the left left wing side of the spectrum is judgmental. They're mean. They say something which is really crazy regarding this issue. It's elevated and spread out like crazy to to men. Right. And it's well, what do you expect them to think? To give you one example, my video, which went viral, I have this clip in the in the video where I basically I'm talking about this perspective that some Democrats have, which is that men want bad things. They just want to have sex and control with. And they clipped it out where it just says men want bad things. They just want to have sex and control women as if I was saying that. And there's a video that starts with this clip where the guy says he literally means this. I believe he means this. It has over a million views. So let's not downplay the fact that a lot of this perception is also just built on complete and total falsehoods.

14:05 But there's there's elements of truth as well. And that is something that Democrats should change out of and feel regret for because it's bad to look at men and tell them they're like, you know, some elements of them that they really can't change or just fundamentally intrinsically bad in some sort of way. They shouldn't have to feel ashamed for making some edgy jokes. As long as you're not like doing anything, it's like genuinely hateful. I mean, let guys, most people are doing these things in their daily life. The real question is, can they like if they're publicly exposed for doing them, you know, are they going to be judged for it? No, the Democratic Party should not be the party of, you know, turning their nose at people and judging them and scolding them 24 seven for really and for every sort of minor infraction. You know, there's something I'm thinking about as you say that, right? There's always been artificial gotchas and unfavorable, deceptive edits. It's always existed. But I think there's two things that have changed in the past five, 10 years that really have brought us to Trump 2.0. And one of them is is algorithmic feeds, which is to say you could always speak bullshit to your crowd. But today, bullshit can reach everybody. And in fact, the bigger bullshit it is, the more eyeballs it gets, because it's emotional content that makes people angry. It's interesting when you were talking about, yeah, it is true, of course, that the right is way more viral on social media than the left. But and I wondered if you thought that had always been the case, because starting on social media a little early, and it was funny to talk about you growing up always with social media. Again, for my generation, I graduated high school in 2006 at a time when Facebook was only available to college students. And so graduating high school and getting your college email was a rite of passage, not because you were going to college, but because you got to join Facebook. And in those days, maybe just my community and selection bias was pretty liberal. It started with college students, the first politician to really master it was Barack Obama, who wrote it to the presidency, like, you know, Twitter started it really took off with like journalists and people on the ground. And I know I got in in the Egyptian revolution in the Arab Spring. And I do feel like it shifted. And I don't know when that shift happened. But I also do wonder, as you see, Twitter and Facebook and have shifted to algorithmic feeds.

16:17 TikTok is all about algorithmic feeds. Reels is all about algorithmic feeds, serving you the content, not from the people you like, not from your friends, not from people you know, but the content they think is going to entertain you. And by entertain you, I mean, keep you on the platform so they can sell ad dollars. Yeah. So I think that this is not an accident. It is deliberate. I think the reason why right wingers dominate social media starts back in 2015, when they started making huge investments in media companies on social media platforms and nonprofits to prop up right wing influencers. And the right did this really around the world. I think it's because, you know, in mainstream media, they obviously had no place. They had no think tanks. All of these more formalistic institutions were not areas of political expression for this, like, really nationalist extreme right. And so where could they express themselves on social media? And they started to develop communities there. And they developed, they figured out how effective this was and started getting big money behind them. And they got these organizations, people know them, The Daily Wire, TPUSA, PragerU, et cetera, et cetera.

17:17 These organizations lifted up tons of people, which used to be nobodies, blasted them out in front of tons of people, largely often using advertisements to get their message initially out and grew the audiences of these different creators who each, whenever they became independent, were sufficiently sized to monetize their viewership and become financially self-sufficient so they could continue to create content. And as this went on, there became more right wing organizations and more creators doing this. And it's a constant churn of new creators. And not only are there more creators, but there's actually more viewers, right? Because these guys, they're, it's not like everyone's static. There's just a certain number of right wingers which watch these shows. There's a lot of apolitical people that started watching this content and got radicalized by it. I know two people in my life which started out as democratic leading up independence, and now they're fully far right.

18:10 They only watch right wing content. It's because of social media, right? So this, they have this huge army of influencers. If you look across platforms and you try to rank political accounts, you try to tabulate the number of Republican aligned large political accounts, it's just completely outweighs Democrats in almost every single platform, except for maybe Instagram and TikTok. And it's even TikTok is like surprisingly not Democrat leaning. The Republican presence on there is really extraordinary, which is very strange given the demographics. So this is deliberate. It's a huge problem. Now you mentioned a different point, which is, well, maybe they have, maybe the algorithms actually give them an advantage. And I think the algorithms give an advantage to extreme messages. Yep. There's extreme controversial messages, but that doesn't always mean right wing. You can have extreme controversial messages that are from the left. Now, do we want a world in which the left dominates with extreme controversial messages? Probably not. Like it's not ideal either. But the skew, I think, is it distinctly, is a strategic issue. Algorithmic content itself, the entire system of social media, I think, is destructive to democracies around the world. And that's why you see institutional decline all over the place. Now, to change that, you need laws or responsible social media companies.

19:30 I think both are very unlikely, like really, really unlikely. And so I don't really worry about that question, but it would be nice. I mean, you look at Blue Sky. Blue Sky doesn't have an algorithm. That's part of the reason why nobody uses it. Because while algorithms are terrible for democracy, they're also great for entertainment. It turns out people choose, make social media choices based on entertainment. It is extraordinarily fascinating to me that you just said that social media is bad for democracy, which is probably true. But in 2011, everybody said social media is death to authoritarianism. It is how democracies surface and rise. It took down dictators across the Middle East. And again, I think the transition from social media being the enemy of authoritarians to social media being the enemy of democracy and pro-authoritarianism probably, yeah, comes from algorithmic feeds.

20:22 And as you're saying, comes from deliberate efforts, whether it's to directly, you know, to buy exposure, to launch new brands, to run ads, or in the case of Elon Musk, just buy the platform and make the algorithm do what you want it to do. You said a couple of things that were really, really fascinating to me. Um, and, uh, you know, one was, uh, the, yeah, the deliberate campaign to, uh, uh, to use money to, uh, to make social media work for you. Uh, uh, before Republicans were doing that with, uh, uh, social media, you know, reminds me they were doing that with, uh, local newspapers and local broadcast stations, right? That was the crisis, uh, some years ago where, uh, all these local news stations that people watched back when that was a thing, uh, all of a sudden were owned by the same big Republican companies and speak in the same messages. And it was sneaky propaganda. What do you think about that?

21:08 Yeah. I think that you look at what, what makes, uh, what determines a political movement's success. I think one element is messaging, which we talk about a lot. And another element is reach, which we don't talk about enough. The democratic party, every time they do poorly, they, they have a fight. They have a civil war over messaging. Are we talking about the right things? Are we talking about them in the right way? Right. Messaging also includes substance, right? It is whatever you're talking about. So you could be saying we want a public option. We want Medicare for all, right? This is that debate is contained within the messaging debate, which, what policies should we champion that are best for us electorally? What, what focus should we have? That's an important debate to have, right? Um, that, that also contains authenticity of your politicians, how, like how charismatic they are. All of those are messaging questions. The other question is how many people actually see those messages, right? If you want to be successful, you need to have messages that are actually effective. That means that whenever people see them, some of the people that don't agree with you currently start agreeing with you. So as people see these messages more over time, more people should be agreeing with you. And eventually if they seen enough, like you won, right? Reach is how many times you're hitting people with that message. The Republicans are not good at messaging a lot of the time. A lot of their messages are crazy. Like right now there's the Alex Padilla situation where a senator asked a question to Kristi Noem at a public press conference. And then he was manhandled by the FBI and then like thrown to the ground and, you know, had handcuffs put on it. That's a crazy thing to do. The response to this is he was actually trying to physically attack. That is the, that is the stance that they're taking out on this. And not only a lot of these right-wing influencers, not only was it right to the way they responded, he should actually go to prison for multiple years. That's what Tim Pool said, for instance. That is a crazy message. And they're not doing themselves any favors because they're including the original video whenever they say. It's like the video shows that he obviously was not trying to physically attack her. What are you talking about? He's trying to physically, like, what was he trying? That was his plan to go in there and just take out Kristi Noem? And what kind of plan is that?

23:06 That's a crazy message. But they have such volume that they can pummel people with this message over and over and over again. And we know that people's opinion, when people hear a specific perspective, a huge number of times, they become more receptive to it. So even if it wasn't compelling the first time, and it isn't compelling the third time, and it isn't compelling the 10th time, they see it 50 times, they see it 60 times. It seems like it's hegemonic. It seems like it's the view that most people have. People like to move to the view that most people have. People are ultimately conformist, actually. If they feel like a position is popular, they want to hold it. Here's my theory of political ideology. I think people hold the views that it feels the best to hold. I don't think that people hold views or ideologies based on rational logic. Now, if something feels rational to you, it seems like this perspective is really logically consistent. That makes it feel better to hold. That is one thing that makes it feel better to hold. It also feels better to hold something if everyone agrees with you, right? There's a lot of things that can contribute to that. And social media dominance, making it look like everyone holds this position or a critical mass of people support this position is a way to make that position more popular. And so I think that so many times Democrats think that their issue is their messaging and they just need to fix their message and everything will be great. The reality is they need to fix the reach. That's one of the most important things they need to reach. That's the reason why Democrats are always playing defense and Republicans are on offense. Because every time Democrats try to go on offense, it doesn't land. Let me give you an example. Hunter Biden laptop story. What is that? Why is it something that we all remember and we all know everything about? It's because they repeated it and we saw it so many times. Now, let me think about all of Trump's scandals, the Qatar jet. Have you heard about the Qatar jet recently? No. There's such a huge volume of scandals that are much bigger than anything that happened under Biden. They're happening every single day.

24:58 But whenever the election happens in three years, no one's going to remember any of them because we don't have enough volume to hit people with the same message enough for them to remember. That is a serious problem. I love that you've talked both about reach in terms of the volume of people that you hit, but also repetition in terms of the amount of time those folks are each getting the message. And I think it's really interesting when you talk about and you sort of phrase this as as people not choosing their policies based on the policy or the rational side of their brain and the analytic side, but on what feels right. I think that is there's a lot to that. And I would frame it a little differently, which is like, you know, we talk about emotional intelligence. I think there's also a level of emotional reason. It can certainly betray you. But communication is more than the words you use. It's more than the logic. Even before we get to like videos and music and stuff like that, when it's just you as a person speaking to there's the words you choose. But there's also the volume. There's also the pitch. There's also the duration, the length that you take to say a word, how you articulate it and pop things, your gestures, your movements, like all of this. All of these are little knobs and metrics and dials that you use to change the story you tell.

26:14 And only one level is the words you pick and what they mean. There's a lot of different ways in which the information reaches you emotionally. And that's just a single person communicating with their voice in their body before even talk about making videos and making audio and formats and platforms and things like that. Right. And this were other things like brand come into that they're actually relevant. Right. They think about the phrase make America great again. It's a brilliant slogan that's clearly been very effective. Do we think the Republican Party today would be as successful if MAGA was not a phrase? If the red hats didn't exist, it's cultural foot that would decrease a lot. Why? Because if it's just about substance and policy and what Trump says, then that shouldn't have any impact. But it does because brand has impact. People like the red hats. They think they look cool. People like the phrase. It tells somewhat of a very basic story, which it doesn't even align with what Trump says all the time. But it's a very simple idea that people can grasp onto. It's the thread that you can try to tie the entire ideology to. And this is to transition from reach to messaging. Here's the fundamental thing that I think that the Democrats do need to change. They need to have a meta narrative, a single or a collection of simple stories. They can tell people about politics that accurately capture their worldview. The Republican worldview is very easy to understand. America used to be great. It's not anymore. And why is that? Well, because we've had mass immigration, which has eliminated our national identity. It's increased crime. It's reduced our ability to be unified as a country. It's destroyed our economy. We've shipped jobs overseas. We have a, you know, the deep state and the academic institutions in the media has lied to us and perpetuated all of these policies for a long period of time from both parties that are out of the line with the interests of Americans. It's like, you know, a few stories like this. And so, well, that's actually kind of compelling. Why? Because people feel like the existing system isn't working for them.

28:28 They don't like the status quo. And they're looking to somebody that offers them a succinct explanation of why things are bad and how they can be better. Now, does it matter that none of this is true? Clearly not. Clearly not. Because, you know, people aren't walking around with like sophisticated policy knowledge about the entire history of America and whether, you know, mass deportations is going to raise wages or not. They don't know these things. Democrats, meanwhile, haven't offered a succinct story of American politics. The only story the Democrats have had since 2016 is that Republicans are bad. That is the only story, which it happens to be compelling to me. That's probably why me and you are Democrats. The main reason why we're Democrats is because we think Republicans are very bad. But you need to tell a story about why the status quo isn't working and how you're going to make it better and how everything got messed up. And right now, there isn't a compelling story that Democrats are unified on telling.

29:23 Micah, can you tell me a compelling story?

29:27 Yeah, yeah. I think the compelling story is the truth, which is like if you look at every element of American policy, the decisions that our government makes, it is woefully dysfunctional. It's very easy to see the ways that it could work better. Let's just talk about a few examples. The tax code is riddled with deductions, credits, exemptions, and loopholes that we've talked about for decades and decades. If you look at some of these special tax breaks which exist, which if you combine their total value, we spend more on these special tax breaks than any program in the U.S. government, more than Social Security. It's about $1.8 trillion. Some of these breaks are for ridiculous things, and almost all of them disproportionately benefit the wealthy. Let me cite a specific example. In Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it included a deduction not for health care, not for, I don't know, child care, but for private jet purchases. Yes, that's correct. You can deduct a private jet from your taxes. If you look around the tax code, you see a litany of policies just like that. Another example is found in what we actually spend money on. We spend over $100 billion a year just on special subsidies for corporations.

30:49 We give subsidies to fossil fuel companies. Why would we ever do something like that? We give subsidies to huge agribusinesses. We have regulations put in place clearly, not to benefit American consumers, but just to reduce competition. Why does all this happen? Why do we have a national debt that's so out of control? Why is our health care system a freaking mess? It's because ultimately the politicians are not incentivized to serve us. What's in their best interest is often to do something which is not in our interest, right? There's a cabal of lobbies and special interest, which politicians are always trying to serve. They're trying to serve themselves. They're trying to get reelected. And that is because our political institutions are broken, right? Like the only way the government starts working for us is if the best thing for a politician to do, the thing that's in their interest to do is the thing that actually benefits us. That's the only way that they change because what they're, do we expect them to be altruists? Do we really think the politicians go up there and they're ready to vote, right? And they say, what is the best thing to do for the American people?

31:54 Clearly that's never what's in their mind, right? Like that is, if that's what happened, things would be very different. No. They think, how can I get reelected? How can I make it through my primary? And we have this system which is rigged in so many ways. One of the ways is we have partisan primaries in gerrymandering. The politicians draw their own districts. And then the only election that actually matters is not the general election. It's the election of just the most extreme 5% of the population, the people who vote in primaries. How do we expect politicians, which are only accountable to the 5% most extreme part of the population, to do what's best for the 100%, for the other 95%. Well, it turns out they never do. So we need to change these rules. We need to fundamentally change our political institutions so our government starts being by the people and for the people, and not for a bunch of special interest groups, which profit from making the rest of us poor.

32:50 Something like that. Give it to the marketing guys. But that's the truth. Can I take an off the cuff stab and you give me feedback? Do it. Do it. First, Donald Trump is the sum of all the enemies the United States has ever had. Our founding fathers led a revolution against a king and a tyrant who wanted to make decisions for us and make us his subjects. We fought a civil war against people who wanted to tear down and separate the United States in order to preserve a hierarchy of people where people who had power and status would get more and people who had no power and status would have less and be subjects. We fought the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, who obviously wanted wanted their power and a hierarchy of people and to bring fascism and to send people to concentration camps and round people up, which Trump is doing. We fought the Soviet Union, which wanted to rigidly control the economy and what industries you could do and what projects you could do and who you could be and what you could say. And then we fought Al Qaeda, who had tried to bring violence to American streets. But when they tried to attack the Capitol, we took that fucker down. And Trump, though, was able to do it and do more here than Osama bin Laden or Hitler ever dreamed of. He is part of a movement to preserve power and status among people who have it and deny it to other people. He is part of a movement to he is leading the movement to try and consolidate privilege, our privilege, but our old privilege, our old status in a way that is trying to recapture and protect past, but is only devastating our present and our future by building walls against creation and new ideas. And what America needs right now is not just a vision for the future, but a belief in the future, an idea that we can build our way out of it and build a world where everybody rises together, where we lift everybody up and where everybody is able to express their full creativity, where you as a citizen can create and build and bring new ideas and see them work, where governments can take on big projects and build and create better futures at scale with and for all of us and where we don't fear the future. We dream of the future and we have a manifest destiny still, right? We may be out of land, but we are not out of sky. There are higher heights for America to reach in the coming decades. Uh, and, uh, and we have everything we need to ascend to our greatest heights yet. But, uh, first we have to beat, uh, the big bad boss at the end of the video game. Yeah. Trump is Bowser. This is, we call this the abundance meta narrative. Okay. The build more shit of meta narrative. You know, I really do think, you know, the challenging thing about meta narratives for people that are very policy oriented is that the truth is more complicated than fiction, right? And this is why some people don't even think that we should have meta narratives. We should even try to sell, tell simple stories because simple stories are necessarily reductive, right? This, this actually something that Derek Thompson said at welcome fest, uh, which was a big conference where a lot of abundance folks were present and where I got this sickness, which is still impacting my voice. Um, but he said, you know, simple stories are for children and they're fictional and we should tell people the truth. I think that the truth can still be made easier to understand. And that's what a simple story is. It's a story that's very easy to understand. It also includes bad guys. This is something else that people in the center don't want to do. They don't want to talk about bad guys. Who's to blame for things being wrong.

36:36 And I think that's a problem because there are bad guys in the real world. Take anything that we want to change, right? Housing is a great example. We want to change housing laws. We haven't changed housing laws all across the country. Why not? Because there's people who disagree. And a lot of those people disagree for bad reasons. And we call them NIMBYs. And you know what? The term NIMBY, the caricature of what a NIMBY is like and what their intentions are, have been incredibly powerful for the YIMBY movement. There is no YIMBY without NIMBY. There isn't. There is no takeoff of the YIMBY movement without some sort of story about an America that doesn't build anymore. And the grandmas which veto every single time we try to do anything cool, right? If it's just about wonky land use laws and this land use laws increase the cost of each unit by this much per square foot unit, that's not interesting, right? Think about all the other areas where there's not a medi-narrative. Think about occupational licensing. Are the occupational licensing laws in America efficient? For those who don't know, that's the laws that require you to have a license to do certain professions. We see around the country that there's huge variations in the amount of licensing requirements. Some states, you need a license to be a gardener. Some states need a license to be a sumo wrestler. Other states like Kansas, you barely need a license for anything.

38:10 Do we see differences in safety between those states and like how many people are just randomly dying because of their gardeners or whatever? No, you see actually almost no difference. So you can make an argument that our occupational licensing laws are really terrible in all these different ways. Just like you can with against NIMBYism. But there's no term. There's no basic story about what's happening here that's compelling to people. And that's why there's a billion NIMBYs and there's 1,000 guys that are anti-occupational licensing restrictions, right? Like stories are what give movements life. And so even if it's more challenging for us to find a way to tell compelling stories that are true, we have no choice but to get good at it or we lose. And I really don't want to lose.

39:01 I like stories. Speaking of stories and simple stories and children's stories, the other day we just released a podcast with Jeremiah Johnson from the Center for New Liberalism. And he gave me this perfect cue to play a speech by Sean Astin as Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings. I did in the campaign, raised about 100K for Kamala throwing D&D games, Dungeons and Dragons. And Sean Astin, the actor came to one of them and he surprised us by by reading his speech from The Two Towers in The Lord of the Rings. And it goes like this. He said, it's all wrong by rights. We shouldn't even be here, but we are. It's like in the great stories, the ones that really matter, full of darkness and danger.

39:48 They were and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think I do understand. I know now folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back. Only they didn't because they were holding on to something that there's some good in this world and it's worth fighting for. So I like stories, even children's stories. Look, I want to we're going to have to come to a finale soon. I want to make sure that we get in a few more thoughts on abundance, your thoughts on welcome fest. What politicians and other creators do you think embody this, the spirit that you're going for and your favorite clips and moments and episodes that you have made? We will get to that. But first, I have a question I am dying to ask because earlier I mentioned I thought there were two big world changes that brought Trump back to power. One was the algorithmic feeds. The other for me was COVID. And speaking of young men, you know, if you pull young people, if you pull Gen Z, if you pull young men, it doesn't tell the full story because of the arbitrary endpoints of what ages you select. And if you go age by age through young men, the turn to conservatism is abrupt and stark. And it has to do with when in your life and your social development COVID hit. You're a younger guy. I'm curious where in your life COVID hit and what that experience was when suddenly you might not see your network every day. You might not be socializing. I don't know about you, but maybe some for young men with as many women with as many people, you know, versus just your internet friends, which has a lot of poison to it. I'm just curious how that showed up in your life. And if there's any lessons there that us old farts, uh, should learn from. So this is actually a really interesting question. And I think it's, I think almost uniformly for everyone, COVID was a radicalizing experience.

42:04 Now radicalization is more durable for young people because people's older people's views are much more rigid, much more developed mentally. The plasticity reduces. So why was it a radicalizing experience? Because everybody goes on the internet and on the internet, we have these algorithmic feeds. Right. And so I was on Twitter a lot, uh, during COVID. And because I was on Twitter, I think I went way to the left of like where I even am now because on Twitter, it's like everybody was a socialist during COVID. I mean, everybody was like really, really left wing. Now I imagine that many young men either went to places like Twitter and were like, wow, these people hate young men. And back then 100% correct. On Twitter, if you are a white guy on Twitter, you are getting cooked by everybody 24/7. I mean, that was not a great time to be a white guy on the internet. I imagine also they went to other websites, other websites, which weren't skewed so much to the left, but actually had right wing skews. One of this manosphere content comes from starting in that period.

43:06 And those people, I imagine they got radicalized the other way around. And so insofar there was a COVID effect, I think it was that. Now, maybe it also might be the case that in general, liberal perspectives are related to your openness to experience or open-mindedness. Some things that are related to social activity, people in urban areas, even if you adjust for all other variables, are more liberal. And the explanation, which is very popular for why that happens to be the case, is because whenever you come into contact with more perspectives and more different types of people, a more diverse array of folks, you tend to be more tolerant and open-minded. That's what we mean by liberal here and not just like liberalized and left wing. Well, if you're in lockdown during COVID, you're not talking to like anybody, but the people you choose to talk to. So what does that make you more open to experience, more open-minded, more happy with diversity or less? I think less, right?

44:05 And like we said, this most acutely affects people that are young. So I am people that were young during the pandemic. So I, if you ask me like you did on the spot, what is my theory? That's my theory. Do you disagree? How off am I?

44:24 Are you asking me or are you asking me? Yeah, I'm asking you, how, how off am I? No, I mean, I, I think, look, I think, I think that's dead on, right? I, I think it was a poisonous radicalizing time. I think that, uh, we are seeing a larger issue. We call it the loneliness crisis, right? Is the fraying of our society and obviously COVID tore it to bits. There's also so much unprocessed, uh, grief because a million Americans died. Um, there's, uh, yeah, you were just binging stuff and content. You mentioned earlier, you know, it's not just right wing stuff that goes viral. It's, it's hardcore leftist content that makes you angry. Uh, and the thing about both hard right content and hard left content is that they both seem to woo people to the conservative Republican side of things. Um, uh, I said, conservative Republican, I don't mean conservative at all. I mean, far right wing, there's nothing conservative about what Trump is doing. He's breaking down the existing quarter.

45:15 Um, and so, uh, and then I just think that that lack of social content, and it's something we see in, it's something to me that's a part of the Yambian abundance movement, which is like, we need places where people can be together. Coffee shops in your neighborhood, third spaces, public squares, pedestrian streets, farmers markets, outdoor gatherings and parties and festivals, parks. Like the, if you, if your whole life is contained to your room and your phone and your car, you will be miserable. You will be alienated. And Paul fascism is the politics of alienation. It comes from a lack of trust from other people. We know that when people come into contact more with other races, they're less likely to be racist. We know that when people come into contact with undocumented immigrants more, they're less likely to want to deport them all.

46:08 Right. And it's like, well, yeah, it's kind of harder to hate people and want to destroy the lives of people that, you know, and that's part of the reason why, as you said, Yimbyism is so important because right now we live in an alienated, separate society, right? We live in a car-centric society where people, they get up, they drive to work. Maybe they stop at a drive-through. You know, they drive to school to pick up their kids. They drive to the grocery store. There is no community places. The only community places which really exist are churches where you have some like routine, a communal interaction, but those are actually declining. And so it's like, well, yeah, like we're, we live in a built environment that's made for vehicles, not made for people, not made for a human interaction. And it turns out, well, in that kind of built environment, there's not a lot of human interaction. And then the few cities where we actually engineer them well for like people living nice lives, we don't allow us to build anything else there, right? Of course, you can't build anything new there for all the people that want to live there. And so it is a very, it's an experience that is scarce and held for the few. The economically well-to-do, the ones that can afford this lifestyle that we've made illegal for the rest of the population. It's a shame. And I think that changing this would not just help with affordability, walkability, people's health, all these other things. It would also help combat radicalization.

47:35 Yeah. Look, we are so much richer than Europe, at least for the moment, but we enjoy it in our little isolated fortresses. Uh, and it's, it's poison. Look, people are all we have. I mean, it's just us, uh, you know, how you're right that people, you, you become more tolerant and you become more happy and you become more secure in yourself because of the people you meet. How did I be go from a 12 year old saying that's gay to a 14 year old passionate about, uh, uplifting gay rights and supporting people. I met gay people and I realized that people I knew and loved and liked and respected and admired and looked up to were gay. How did I go from, uh, you know, uh, making fun of all these pronouns to, uh, caring a lot about it and, and putting a lot of respect into it and thought into it. I met trans people. I met non-binary people and I realized people I already knew and loved were trans and non-binary people to know people is to like them and to, uh, and, and to empathize with them. But if you're seeing only examples on the internet, then you're going to have the weirdest, most poisonous versions of this. And, and so I think that really just coming together in the public square and coming together as, as people, it's, it's the only way out of this and it's the only way forward because we are all we have. Uh, and I really enjoyed being with you for a little bit, Micah. Um, I, uh, I know we got to kind of come to a close in a second. So, uh, look, floor is yours, uh, to bring us home with flair and flourishes. I, uh, I am, uh, dying to know about some of your greatest hits. What's next for you, your time at welcome fest, uh, your, your thoughts on the, the world of, uh, abundance and where all this is going, any responses to what we just said? Uh, this is, uh, this is free time for you. Anything I didn't ask about. Uh, but, uh, You certainly gave me a lot of ideas about what to talk about. Welcome fest was a fantastic experience. Of course, though, everybody, a lot of people got sick. So I think that was an FBI plot actually by cash Patel. He knew that we were going to cook and he wanted to, to punish us for it.

49:40 Um, of course the conspiratorial mindset, I'm sure that would actually do well at TikTok. If I made that into a video, um, that's click. Maybe I should, uh, in terms of yeah, my content. Yeah. I'm trying to consistently make videos. I think that's important on social media, on Twitter, a lot of, uh, always respond to everything that's going on. And I think it's important. Actually people always say the internet is not real life. Well, everybody's on the internet. My grandparents get their news from YouTube. Now they don't watch the news media anymore. My sister gets her news from Instagram. My mom gets her news from Facebook. I remember talking to her after the election. I asked her, mom, who did you vote for? And she says, well, Micah, I know you're a Democrat, but I saw on Facebook, she literally said this. I saw on Facebook that Kamala wanted to get us into world war three. And I just couldn't support that. And I was like, you know what, mom? I don't support world war three either. And so if somebody was running on that, I would find that not very appealing, but that is actually not something that she supports, obviously. And that's kind of a crazy thing to believe. But if that's the only part of the news that you see, can you really blame somebody? I mean, would you vote for the world war three candidate? I doubt it. Right. Um, unless you're a, one of those, you know, doomsday cults.

50:50 And so, yeah, it is important. The internet is real life. And you, if you, if any of y'all are watching this, um, on YouTube, I have a YouTube channel. You can just look at my name, Micah Irfan. If you're watching this on a podcasting platform, you can actually find my podcast on all podcasting platforms. So I really encourage you to do that. Regarding, uh, this organization, I was a supporter of the formation of this organization before it even existed. And I really appreciate you for all the work that you've done, taking that from an idea, which is what I had into actual practice, which is not easy to do. This is another example of me saying, this is a great idea. I hope somebody else does it and you did it. And thank you for doing that. I think that you've been really successful. And then I think the abundance movement is having a moment moment, but it needs to constructively engage with the people that are criticizing, because I think a lot of the people that are criticizing abundance that are, have real concerns, ultimately have concerns that can easily be resolved. They're come, they come out of a place of being concerned that abundance might be a front movement, trying to do bad things, trying to displace progressive policies. When the truth is for many people, at least myself, and I know for sure you, um, we don't, we want abundance. We want more housing. We want to fix all these inefficiencies in government and to do plenty of progressive things.

52:12 We think that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege, right? We think that a big trust should be breaking up and that anti, uh, anti-competitive policies by companies should be banned, right? We supported a lot of the things the FTC did, right? To, to get rid of, for instance, non-competes, which restricted, uh, the ability of workers to leave one employer and go to a competitor for a better wage. So the policy, the abundance movement is not a movement that is in opposition to these other issues. It is just bringing to the fore, talking about all of these problems in our government that has made it systematically unable to build big things to get things done. And so, um, I think we need to engage productively, uh, with critics. And if we're able to do so, I think that abundance, um, can really take over the democratic party and start changing policy in all of these states and cities and hopefully one day the federal government where Democrats have failed to consider effective governance to try to strengthen our, you know, our efficiency and our ability to do things so that one day we can actually build things like high-speed rail and we can have housing that my generation can afford. And whenever people go, uh, to get their driver's license, right, they don't have to wait in line for five hours, right? This is the kind of, this is a very simple vision that our party should champion. And I think one day we're going to make us champion. Uh, I think, uh, I think we will win this by engaging as you're saying, because, uh, and it's why I talk about the idea of Progressive Abundance. Just like you're saying, if you want housing to be a right, not a privilege, you need to build the housing. If you want a new 21st century FDR, well, guess what?

53:57 Government has to be capable and allowed to pursue big projects that has to be legal. It has to be legal for them to build public housing, green energy, public transportation, infrastructure without any, uh, random person outside of elections being able to say, no, no, thank you. Uh, if you want, uh, to build a more progressive future, well, guess what? You gotta build it. Uh, and Micah, I appreciate you too, because you are, uh, you're really building something special and honing a message and honing a story and getting that reach and repetition, uh, and taking it to the people. And it is, it is an attractive and compelling message because it is, it is not just the right message. It's the right ideas and the right policies. And when you combine the right policies with the right story, man, you can, I think, bring people back together and, and, and really lift them all up. So that's very special.

54:48 We're going to save America one YouTube video at a time, guys.

54:54 Just save the country. Just speak it. I mean, you can speak, speak it into existence. If we keep saying it and more people say it, that's the first step to doing it. Look, Micah, you didn't, you told us about your podcast, but you did not tell us what it was called. Where can we find you? Did you just look up my name? Micah Irfan. I, if you look it up, you could find me on pretty much every single platform, even Facebook surprisingly. I, yeah, I, I wanted to make a, uh, what is it? My space. Isn't that the original social media? Oh, I was, I don't know about original, but that was, uh, I was good stuff back in the day. My original. I tried to make an account.

55:26 I still don't have a MySpace account. So I'm a little bit behind, but you can also look up micahirfan.com and you can find links to everything. Uh, cause I've been, I have a fancy, uh, fancy, uh, website, but yeah, that's where you can find all my stuff. And thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this. Thank you. That's Micah Irfan, M I C A H Micah, E R F A N Irfan, micahirfan.com. Micah, thank you for joining us. This was so much fun. I'm really glad we got to talk about, uh, everything that we got to talk about. We haven't, uh, gotten to cover a lot of these topics on this podcast yet. Uh, they are very important and dire, and, and this was a blast. Thank you for joining us.

56:01 Now it's time for Radio Abundance News Bulletin from New York City. Please welcome Radio Abundance's new New York City correspondents, Catherine Vaughn and Ryder Kessler from Abundance New York.

56:17 Hey, Radio Abundance. I'm Ryder Kessler. And I'm Catherine Vaughn. And we are the executive directors of Abundance New York, a political community here in the city for folks who want more housing and really more of everything we need to thrive. Radio Abundance New York City update chapter one, good policy news. We are back to talk about what's new in the MB and Abundance world out here on the East coast of New York City. So obviously the mayoral race is coming up in a few days, but let's talk policy, get it out of the way. Last week, I think I got to share the good news. So why don't I pass it to you for the things we can celebrate in housing policy in New York this week? All right. Well, so we've got a rezoning moving forward. It's in Midtown South. It's a great plan and it's making use of the lifted floor area ratio cap or FAR cap. It's almost 10,000 units and it was approved by the City Planning Commission and it's now moving to the City Council where almost assuredly it will be passed. And just thinking about kind of floor area ratio, why it matters that the state legislature lifted the cap last year, you know, a lot of buildings that are really iconic and that make New York City what it is would actually be illegal to build these days after the imposition of the cap. And it's also contributed to this kind of like the super skinny, super talls going up, you know, the buildings that you see around Central Park that are, you know, a lot of people consider them an eyesore and, you know, just are not kind of efficient use of land area. And so this is, you know, seeing buildings in already dense areas go up that are, I think more contextual and that will house a lot of people. It's a huge win.

57:50 Radio abundance, New York City update, chapter two, bad policy news. All right. What's the bad news? Yeah. Well, first I'll just say, yes, the Midtown South Arizona moving forward is great. A lot to celebrate. And as you said, almost 10,000 units. We should really emphasize that that's a fantastic bit of progress. And we do have to cling on to those bits of progress because at the state level, we're not really getting any. So the state legislative session just ended, which means lawmaking is done for the time being at the state level, unless the governor decides to call a special section session, which probably will not happen vis-a-vis housing policy, although we're definitely in an emergency. This year, what housing advocates were really pushing for, as we talked about last week, is the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act. This was the second year that it was being pursued, and it was a relatively straightforward piece of legislation to allow faith institutions to build affordable housing on their land. And I think the idea was, first, that this would help create tens of thousands of new units across the state, but also that it would show that New York State can pass pro-housing policy, that we can build coalitions of faith leaders and community members and advocates who understand that we have a severe housing shortage and that we need to unlock opportunities for new housing. Unfortunately, it still couldn't get over the finish line. And it's very frustrating to see that even these very common sense kind of first steps are not politically feasible under the current political conditions. So it makes us, you know, really have to step back and reassess what is the EMB policymaking strategy at the state level in New York, and how can we move forward? I think, you know, next year, 2026, we have state legislative elections. And I think this goes to show we need pro-housing folks in the state legislature, putting more pressure on state legislative leadership and other members of the caucus to really prioritize this stuff. So not great news for now, but of course, there's always tomorrow. And speaking of, in a few days, we are going to have our mayoral primary. Early voting is going for a couple more days. And we've seen really big increases in turnout relative to early voting four years ago. It's not clear whether that will mean higher turnout overall, or if just people are getting used to voting early. And so, you know, the turnout would be maybe relatively flat, but with more votes cast early. In any case, we have this mayoral election right on the horizon. And what is going on? I think the stakes have not changed, but maybe the dynamics have in the last few days. Yeah, absolutely. If you're not living under a rock, you've probably heard a little bit about Brad Lander, the current city comptroller and one of the mayoral candidates.

1:00:35 He's having a bit of a moment right now. He was arrested by ICE the other day. He has been making a practice of going to immigration court and sitting with families and then helping escort them to the elevators to get out of the building afterward because ICE has been showing up at the courthouse to essentially detain people as they're showing up for and leaving their appointments as they're trying to do the right thing and get status as immigrants. So we went down there when he was detained to support Brad and also to express this idea that, you know, the abundance agenda requires democracy and also that, you know, we're kind of doubling down on on New York's values of being welcoming to all people. Totally. And before I pass it back to you to talk more about how this is affecting Brad's position in the mayoral race, I'll just say, you know, also in the last couple of days, we saw the Supreme Court hand down a decision upholding a ban on gender affirming care for trans youth, which means that now 20 states, I think, have these bans in place. And, you know, at a meeting I was at the other day, some elected officials representatives were saying that, you know, obviously, in New York, we really condemn that kind of ruling, but that New York is a safe haven for trans kids and families of trans kids. And they just, you know, during Pride Month, we have to think about whether we really are that safe haven. Are we a safe haven for folks, whether they are immigrants, refugees, folks who need gender affirming care or abortion care, if it's not affordable to live in New York? I wrote a piece for our Substack, abundanceny.substack.com. People can check it out about growing up as a gay kid in New York and feeling very affirmed by this city. But now as an adult, recognizing that this city is not providing that opportunity to other kids like me. And that's so much of what motivates, I think, our Yimbyism, our abundance drive is to actually create a reality where New York is that haven, which requires having much more affordable, abundant housing. But anyway, back to what the latest developments mean for Brad and the mayoral race.

1:02:34 Yeah. And I mean, I think that idea that really living our progressive values requires an abundance philosophy, I think Brad Lander kind of exemplifies that. He's been on our list of folks to rank for a while. And he's kind of surging right now. I mean, we'll see what the poll numbers tell us after Tuesday. He had a really strong debate. He went after Cuomo, but he also kind of demonstrated, you know, how he really puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to progressive policy and to, you know, ideas like building more housing here. He went, the New York Times put out a, they had a panel of experts that were weighing in on the mayoral race. And seven out of the 10 experts interviewed, recommended ranking Brad first. And he also got the nod in their later op-ed, which was a little odd and didn't really endorse anyone. But, you know, they did commend Brad for his record of leadership. And then as recline, you know, kind of stepping in where the New York Times decided to step out of endorsing mayoral candidates, delivered a much stronger endorsement for Brad this past week and really talked about his combination of progressive values and kind of technocratic policy expertise and managerial competence.

1:03:42 Yeah. And so, you know, I think Brad is having a moment and I think people are seeing him as we have long seen him as this kind of combination of big picture, transformative vision. He has a plan for 500,000 new homes and really shows his work and how he would get there. He defended congestion pricing when the governor paused it and led litigation to get it unpaused. He really does care about these issues. And he has this big vision and a record of experience and competency to get it done. And as we've seen over the last few days, he also is willing to put his body on the line in defense of his values. So I think that's not to say that he is likely to win the mayoral primary. The latest polling we have still shows the former governor Andrew Cuomo and the 33 year old Democratic Socialist are on Mondani as the front runners. But, you know, four years ago, Catherine Garcia got the third most first place votes in rank choice. But by the end, she had leapfrogged Maya Wiley and was the last person standing with Eric Adams. And it's possible that Brad has a similar path to leapfrog one of the front runners during tabulation and maybe even to win, but still not not the likelihood of possibility. But it's just interesting to show the contours of how abundance politics really is taking shape in New York where, you know, Cuomo in the centrist lane and Mondani in the clear left lane are both kind of not fully encapsulating what abundance looks like. It's really a different axis that is not a point on the left, right spectrum. And it's an axis that someone like Brad is helping to define. So we'll be back after next Tuesday's election with a deeper dive debrief, not just on the mayoral results, but on the results of races up and down the ballot. And we look forward to talking again soon.

1:05:34 This has been a Radio Abundance News Bulletin from our Radio Abundance New York City correspondents from Abundance New York, Katherine Vaughn and Ryder Kessler.

1:05:48 Thanks so much for listening. If you want to find out more about what we're up to and what's happening in New York, come find us at abundanceny.org and check out our voter guide from one all the races up and down the ballot at nyc2025.com. We'll talk to you next time. Bye.

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