Saikat Chakrabarti
speaker
279 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 1 Jun
Saikat Chakrabarti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And what happens when you create a political moment that's bigger than any of these forces, you can actually blow past it. And we're kind of seeing that with Trump and tariffs right now. Dark abundance. Yeah, dark abundance. Because, you know... I'm sure all the businesses are calling up Trump right now and being like, what the hell are you doing with these tariffs?
And they're calling all their congresspeople and senators. But Trump's created such a political moment and reality within the Republican Party where you've just got to go along with the tariffs. The Republican congresspeople can say, sorry, this is just too popular in the party. My hands are tied. I've got to go with the president.
Yeah, I think it's not just about not pissing people off. I think it's a complete abdication of responsibility of leading. I think it's a lack of realizing that we need new ideas and we need an actual vision for how to do stuff. Because it's not just, you know, groups on the left.
Like, I went to a training when I was in Congress that was a training on how to get ideas from corporate lobbyists, right? I tweeted about it and I pissed off some people. But it's really hard to push new ideas.
It was very matter-of-fact.
They do come to you. But in the training, it was like, you know, if you're writing a bill, here are the people you can contact to get expertise, right? Similar to what you encounter in the Dean campaign. And, you know, I think it's just this complete abdication responsibility of your role to actually put out solutions that'll solve real problems.
Like the culture is more, we'll figure out ideas from everybody that's around us and kind of cobble it together into this Frankenstein monster. We got in trouble with the Green New Deal. Like when we put the Green New Deal out, The week before we announced it, I think it was like 70 environmental groups wrote a letter saying they're going to denounce it because we were pushing something new.
Because at that time, the environmental groups were really focused on just keep it in the ground stuff.
They would probably say it was substantive. I don't think I'm going to say it wasn't, but it was more the latter, right? Like it was more that we weren't operating in the idea space that everyone else was operating in. But I'd say, you know, in general, like the pipeline example you brought up is a really interesting one, right?
Because I think when you abdicate responsibility from actually pushing for new ideas and solutions, what you're saying is the interest groups, which I think often, as you're pointing out, Zephyr, are the big corporate interests, they're going to fight it out. So in the case of the pipelines you're talking about, I'm sure there's interest groups on both sides.
So 20 years later, we'll come to some resolution. But in the case of natural gas pipelines, we streamlined all that, right? We put permitting under FERC. We made it happen super fast. We have 3 million miles of natural gas pipelines in this country right now. We built it super fast because there wasn't really a big enough opposing interest group.
And so that's sort of what I see happening in the Democratic Party is there's a real resistance to putting out actual solutions and putting out real ways to solve these problems and just deciding that we're going to take ideas from everyone. And I agree with Zephyr that that tends to be the corporate powers that have more influence there.
It's a major problem. It's a major problem. And that's why, you know, as you get into lower levels of government, lobbyist capture is even higher. Like in California state governments, worse than it is in Congress because they have even less funding. What people actually want is not what Doge is doing. They want effective government.
And effective government happens if you have either a very well-paid civil service, as they do in Singapore or Finland or any of these countries that have effective government. But in America, the tough part of that is you're competing against Google salaries and all these high-paid salaries.
And so I think one way you do that is, hey, you do need to increase the salaries, you need to fund this stuff, but you also have to make it exciting. I think it's very radicalized. It's very underreported. It's because they're going in there and they're making a real sacrifice.
All these people could be making, you know, half a million dollars in a lobbyist firm, but instead they're taking a huge pay cut to do something good. One of the things I learned when I was in Congress was if you're a former member of Congress, you can be on the House floor. So what do lobbyists do? They hire former members of Congress so they can whip votes on the House floor.
They're not supposed to. It's technically against the rules, but, you know, come on. How do you think about this question of state capacity?
Yeah, and that's a really important point because if we actually embark on these big missions and make it exciting enough to be in government, we don't want to just be anti-people who know how to do stuff. Like when we did the World War II mobilization, The guy who ran a big part of it was this guy, Bill Knudson, who was actually the CEO of GM.
But he had come up as an engineer, you know, through the factory floor. He understood how that whole economy worked. And that was why we were able to organize all the other CEOs and the entire economy to do war production. You know, FDR almost hired like a banker who did the World War I mobilization, which wasn't as good. And that guy said, no, you got to get someone who actually knows this stuff.
And we need to have people like that now. And unfortunately, Elon Musk is now going and just destroying government, but we need a Bill Knudsen today.
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