Derek Thompson

That's a failure.

And it's a failure that we inscribed with decades of cover-your-ass rules that forced scientists to essentially become bureaucrats.

It's to say, again, what do we want to accomplish with NIH?

Don't we want an abundance of scientific breakthroughs?

And isn't a good way to do that, to unleash the productivity of scientists and unburden them from some of the paperwork requirements that we've added in the last few decades?

Let's find a way to allow scientists to be scientists by reducing that burden.

That's an approach that I would like to see a quote-unquote good doge lean into in 2029.

I have two statements and a question.

I had a 35, maybe 35 and a half minute conversation with Zoran Mamdani last year over Zoom.

And the one sentence that fell out of my mouth that got the most yep, yep, yep on the other end of the Zoom recording was when I said, you know, it sounds to me like you're saying that Democrats cannot ask government to add more functions until it proves to the public that government can function in the first place.

I think he recognizes that despite the attempt to distinguish common sense ideas from ideology, you just heard from Sanders, in many cases, it is the ability of the left to act with common sense that preserves the popularity of the ideology.

To add government functions, you have to prove that government can function in the first place.

That's statement number one.

Statement two is that I think it's notable that

In that quote, he says that common sense, good governance is not an ideology, but caring for the working class is.

And that's interesting because I think that what he's just describing in the inability to build a health clinic is essentially the idea that if Vermont politics were more commonsensical, it would be more likely to help the working class.

So I'm not sure I have the same distinction between – or I see the reason to –

distinguish between a common sense policy and ideology.

I think that the problems that America faces are not a shortage of ideologies, but a shortage of good governance and a shortage of common sense governing.

And so I wonder if, I wonder to what extent you, as my co-author, prize the degree to which abundance is an ideology to the exclusion of it being a sort of mere common sense approach to governance.