Little known New York State Assemblyman

Zoran Mam Donnie took the internet by

storm this week. Shocked the world,

beating out Andrew Cuomo for the

Democratic nomination. Here's the poly

market chart. Just crazy. One month ago,

Cuomo was at 93%.

Zoron had a 6% chance. My lord, what a

flip. A couple of things happened that

led to this. Obviously, a bunch of viral

moments. He's a great speaker. Reminds

me of Vake in in that regard. Really

good. uh you know in debates and and

speaking publicly started rising in the

polls got a ton of endorsements from

millennials Gen Z AOC endorsed him as

well and uh now he is mom Donnie is the

75% favorite to beat Eric Adams but

looks like Eric Adams is going to get a

shocking amount of support because

people don't want a Democratic socialist

who's got some really unique and

colorful history

of becoming the mayor of one of the

greatest cities in the world, my

hometown. He wants to have free buses.

Doesn't sound like that big of a deal.

He wants to freeze rent and triple the

development affordable housing.

City-owned government grocery stores.

That sounds crazy. A $30 minimum wage.

New York's at 1650, by the way. Uh he

wants to defund the police, replace the

cops with social workers in high crime

areas. A bunch of really wacky

interesting proposals. And uh you were I

think on to this early Freedberg in your

predictions last year. You saw this

coming again. If you listen to the

number one podcast in the world, you're

going to get this information a year

earlier than everybody else. That's why

we are the number one podcast in the

world. Freeberg, maybe you talk a little

bit about your prediction last year and

uh where we are right now and your

reaction to this. I don't know,

perplexing, shocking. Is this

perplexing, shocking, or obvious to you?

For me, it feels like actually a little

bit of a beginning of a wave that's

going to continue to sweep over this

country starting in cities. And I think

that we're at the very early stages. I

think we'll look back and I jokingly say

that Kla Harris is going to look like a

conservative candidate pretty soon. And

I do think that this is a broad kind of

reaction to the economic condition of

the United States. And I've talked a lot

of people don't quite recognize and see

how important the debt and the deficit

is with respect to how it's ultimately

going to lead to socialism as it has

every single time in history when you've

had a free voting democracy, a

representative democracy that becomes

encumbered with too much debt. So Nick,

if you'll pull up this chart, it'll just

show you a microcosm of it and

specifically how it played out in New

York and how it will continue to play

out in cities. This is the total amount

of student loan debt. In the last 20

years, the student loan debt has

ballooned from 500 billion to two

trillion. Four million college graduates

per year in the United States. About 40%

of them have student loan debt that they

leave. That means that in the last 20

years, 80 million people, young people

have graduated from college. And they've

accured $ 1.5 trillion of new debt. And

based on the percentage and the

distribution, that means the average

debt for these individuals is sitting

around $60,000.

So you're a young person. Where do those

young people go? Where do they live? And

remember, there's about 32 million of

them. They live in cities. They don't go

back to rural towns. Most of that

population sits in cities. It sits in

New York, sits in Los Angeles, sits in

Seattle, sits in San Francisco, sits in

Portland, and sit in Chicago. And what

we're seeing in those cities is a

massive political shift. People call it

left, but it's actually quite different

than just being more traditionally left.

It's really a revolution against the

system that brought them to this moment

because the promise that we gave in

America, the American dream was if you

will go to college, you will graduate,

you will have income, you will have

stability, you will be able to buy a

home. And what we did is we increased

the government's role in making that

dream possible. And in doing so, we

created effectively a system where we

gave unrestricted access to capital

which inflated the cost of education.

People could go to school like Zoran and

major in African studies at Bowden

College. They could get a a loan and

graduate with 200 $300,000 of debt and

then never get a job. The guy has not

had a real job. And this is the truth

for 32 million young Americans. They

find themselves living in places where

they cannot afford to pay their bills

every month and they will never get out

of the debt cycle that they were thrust

into and believe that they were going to

be able to graduate from and excel in

the world and increase. They all have

what is called negative capital. They

have debt and they will never be able to

get out of that cycle. So where do you

turn in that moment? You don't go turn

to corporations to solve your problems.

You don't go turn to your friends and

your siblings and your family. They're

not going to bail you out. You turn to

the voting booth and you hear a guy like

Zoran show up and say there can be a

better path forward. The better path

forward is the government can and should

do more to help. And in doing more to

help, we will increase government. We

will tax the rich. We will tax the

corporations. We will take all of that

capital and we will redistribute it in

the form of services and checks and

support for all of the people that find

themselves unable to take care of

themselves. And this becomes a tipping

point when the majority of the voter

base ends up in that situation where

they're that deeply in need where they

have negative capital. And that is the

situation America finds itself in today.

There is no easy answer and there is no

easy solution out of this. But I can

tell you one thing for sure that in

historical perspective we have seen it

time and time again across dozens of

countries that have embraced socialism

to get out of the debt cycle that

ultimately absorbs and and swallows up

the young. It swallows up every family.

It swallows up every person in the

working class with debt. They're

swaddled with it. And they all try and

get out of it by increasing government

and embracing these socialist concepts.

And it has never ever worked. More

government is not the answer. Less

government is. We can get into that. But

if you look at the results, Zoran won 61

to 39 with college educated. Young

people voted for him. Old people did not

as much. White people voted for him

because they went to college. Non-white

people did not as much. At the end of

the day, young collegeed educated white

people elected this guy and that is the

beginning of a wave that will sweep over

America. And I really do worry about

where this takes us. So way to go

dummies.

Yeah. I mean the you're correct. He won

amongst Asians why it's college

educated. And to put a finer point on

it, Freeberg, it really isn't just

college. It's the cost of college.

Increases in the cost of college degrees

have outpaced the wage growth of

entry-level salaries by 10x over the

last 20 years. You could go 300,000

400,000 not in debt, but that might be

what you paid for those degrees in those

major cities and you don't believe in

capitalism anymore and you believe that

you need to tax the rich. Just one

warning for people in these states, in

these cities. We saw this sax in San

Francisco. We saw the the the doom

spiral. You and I worked on the

Chesodine recall and now they have Dan

Lori there and things are starting to

slowly turn around a bit in Los Angeles.

We saw this with Karen Bass. They didn't

vote for Rick Caruso. He would have been

an amazing mayor. They voted for

incompetence. And these people are

voting for incompetence and a plan that

will not work because twothirds of the

tax base in New York is paid for by the

top 10% who are leaving. People will

leave. They will see that Austin and

Miami are fantastic cities to live in at

half the price, a third of the price,

and you get a tax break, and you can

always go back to New York and

California and hang out for a month and

get whatever values left in those cities

that hasn't been destroyed by these

socialists and the incompetent people

running them. Saxs, what are your

thoughts on what's happening in New York

City specifically? Well, you're right

that every generation seems to need to

learn this lesson for themselves because

they don't study history and they they

don't see that socialism always fails

wherever it's tried. San Francisco went

through this. I mean, it was a doom

spiral. Uh now, I think we've turned the

corner. LA is in the midst of going

through it and a large portion of LA

just burned down because there's no

water in the fire hydrants. Basically,

all the public services have been looted

and New York is about to learn this for

themselves. So it just seems like every

generation just has to learn this.

There's no way to teach them. So I do

think that that is one thing that's

going on. I I do agree with Freeberg

that a big underlying root cause here is

the student debt. It's the fact that

these kids have negative capital.

They've got no skin in the game. They

graduate from college with worthless

degrees and massive amounts of debt.

That debt was not used to make their

education better. Universities have been

using the spiraling tuitions to fund

massive amounts of bureaucracy, you

know, for DEI and woke and all sorts of

stuff like that. And these kids have no

prospect of getting out of debt or being

able to buy a home. So, they just have

no skin in the game. And so, this is

part of why they're they're turning

against capitalism. One thing we need to

do, by the way, is we need to make the

student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy

is one of the it's the only kind of debt

that you can't get out of through

bankruptcy. And if we were to make that

change, at least these kids would have a

way out. They have no skin in the game.

The universities have absolutely no

incentive to keep prices down and create

a competitive or economic incentive for

making sure that their degrees work. The

only group that possibly could would be

true capital lenders, people like banks

or underwriters that are saying, "Here's

a loan because I expect you to be able

to pay it back." There's no underwriting

in student loans today. There's no

underwriting. The student loan program,

the federal student loan program needs

to go away because when it goes away, if

it goes to zero, and people might say,

"Oh, that's awful. You're taking away

education." What will happen is the

capital markets will flood to fill that

hole. Banks and lenders will show up and

they will say, "You know what? We'll

underwrite the loans." But they'll

underwrite it by saying good colleges

get the get get loans and bad colleges

don't. Good degrees get the loans, bad

degrees don't. And people that are

expected to pay back the loans will now

get loans. And all of the rest of the

money that's caused everyone to end up

in this debt spiral will stop and we'll

be able to kind of recover from it. It's

ironic that a problem that is being

caused by government is going to lead to

socialism. It's going to lead to maximum

government which will then create the

next spiral of problems. But I agree

with you. I think this is very sad.