But then there's most of the people who are getting the benefits don't have that time.

No, they don't.

And I think that this is a universal thing, right? I think that high income people are facing the same poor service delivery that low income people are.

It's just that they're facing less of it, right? Because we tend to administer programs for high income Americans, either through pretty efficient bureaucracies or through the tax code.

So if you are a wealthy 68-year-old, how are you dealing with the state, right? You probably go to vote in a pretty good jurisdiction that doesn't make it impossible for you to vote, doesn't make you wait in line for three hours.

You probably vote by mail, right? Or maybe early vote.

And then you're dealing with Social Security.

But like, how hard can it be? And shouldn't people be able to do this if they're going to get this government benefit?

But there also has to be some expectation management about if they take back the House, if they take back the Senate, putting aside the fact that the president will bar every effort that they make, sort of just the running room they need to deliver.

Yeah, absolutely.

And look, this is an issue where it is not so easy, necessarily, to take on health care prices and child care prices and all of these things.

But there are ready policy solutions.

And they start with just not doing the stuff that Donald Trump is doing.

to make things worse.

So in terms of gas prices, stop the war with Iran.

What would it look like to actually have policy that worked for people? Because if we get past the democracy crisis— that making government work for people becomes the next crisis.

So what is different about this bubble versus, you know, the bubbles of yore, like the dot com bubble, the housing bubble?

Sure.

There's two things that I would identify.

So the first is that this is happening during a time when we have fairly high interest rates.

So we normally think about bubbles as being a low interest rate phenomenon, right? The economy is running really, really hot.

It's cheap to borrow.

There's just a lot of cash flowing around.

So what would cause this whole thing to pop?

Most people listening now can remember how devastating and long-term the effects were when that bubble burst in 2008.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think that the fact that most Americans are not involved.

Right.

You and I could not right now decide to go invest in anthropic and open AI.

Right.

Those are those are not public companies.

Are there contrarians here to the thinking that you've been laying out who think, no, this bubble actually, this actually is not a bubble and these valuations are going to be paid off in profits?

institutions.

And then I think that social media has had, and the media environment has had a big role in all of that.

I think that go back to a moment in American life when there was more trust in institutions, even if conditions were in a lot of ways tougher.

You know, we have less trust in institutions and each other now than we did during the civil rights movement, right? The extraordinarily painful period that leads up to the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.

Less time than during Vietnam, right? less than when Abu Ghraib was revealed, less than we invaded Iraq.

And, you know, we really, really, really don't think of the political system as responsive to us anymore.

We don't trust each other.

Yeah.