So just your assessment of the threat level that you discern from this rise.

Well, I think the threat is real.

It's riding on the wave of inflation that's been caused by the huge debt we have and also the way the Federal Reserve has handled the markets.

You know, the Fed caused home prices to go up 50 percent after COVID by doing way too much.

So we're now reaping the whirlwind, if you will.

The Democratic Party has been migrating left for a long time, as you know.

So this is not particularly surprising.

I mean, it's that sort of, you know, populist fascination with communist puppet shows that Bernie Sanders has.

I think it's an interesting place where you started to how you got to this place from here.

Well, OK, I started my life growing up in a very political family in Washington.

My father, Richard Whalen, was the biographer.

Joe Kennedy worked for Harry Luce at Fortune.

And then he comes to Washington and ends up as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon.

He was the sous chef in the Reagan kitchen cabinet.

He and a couple of his buddies wrote the first acceptance speech, Family, Neighborhood, Freedom.

Yeah.

But everything's fine.

Yeah, well, you know, the progressive experiment is coming to an end.

This portion of the process that you just described so nicely with Elon Musk, I think just typifies a society that is it thinks it's affluent, but it's not because it's all based on borrowed money.

And even now, you know, Congress is pressed to come up with ways to spend new money, although they do like to just increase everything 10 percent a year.

That's easy, right? You don't have to do anything.

But the financial pressures are extraordinary.

And I think that we're pretty close to the point where you're going to start to see a kind of pushback by members of both parties, including some moderate Democrats.

And so I wonder I wonder what you think the lessons from that episode were that we have assiduously not learned over the subsequent almost two decades.

And so so so, you know, where does the you know, where does this sort of balance out if it does?

Well, what you're seeing is older, more affluent people leaving New York State, and you're seeing lots of younger people move in.

Your point, right? They see opportunities to go out and make money.

Some parts of the city have come back in terms of commercial real estate valuations.

Others have not.

You still have many parts of lower Manhattan, for example, that are trading at deep discounts.

simply because there's not enough use for office properties, for example.

So is what's going on here an expectations game mainly, or is it a real decline in the standard of living?