DOGE, Democracy, and Everything Between

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Matthew: Well, if people are worried about the future, they’re less likely to buy durable goods. They’re less likely to buy houses. Businesses are less likely to invest in expansion, and that can lower people’s incomes, and so you can have sort of self-fulfilling spirals in which people get spooked. The spookiness leads to lower income.

Everybody has to cut back, and next thing you know, you’re in a recession. 

 

Zachary: What could go right? 
I’m Zachary Karabell the Founder of The Progress Network, and today I am not joined by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive Director of The Progress Network, and instead am going solo. So today we’re gonna be focusing somewhat alas, but somewhat inevitably on the first two months of Trumplandia.

 

Today we’re gonna speak about this with someone who I think is one of the most acute, interesting, sober-minded commentators. So we’re gonna talk to Matthew Yglesias. He writes The Slow Boring Newsletter on Substack, one of the most popular Substack letters, has several hundred thousand followers. He helped co-found Vox in 2014 and co-hosts his own podcast called Bad Takes.

 

So we’re gonna talk to Matt about what’s going on in Trumpland, but also a bit about the nature of media, the nature of writing, the nature of ideas in a caca world. I think that too is something we ought to be thinking about. Like literally why are we we at the Progress Network? Why are we doing this?

 

Why is Matt writing his column? Why do I write the edgy optimist? Why does Emma write the What Could Go Write newsletter? What is the utility of ideas in a loud society where nobody’s really listening to the same thing and change seems to be happening irrespective of any ideas or at least happening more quickly than any ideas?

 

And so it’s, I think, important to ask what’s the role of this? Obviously we think it has an important role, but its role isn’t always obvious. So with that, let’s turn to my conversation with Matt. Matt Yglesias it is a pleasure having you on. I’ve been a big fan of slow, boring and your work for many years, as have several hundred thousand other people maybe.

 

Maybe it’s more than that in aggregate, maybe it’s not-

 

Matthew: No, I doubt it.
Thank you. It’s very exciting to be here.

 

Zachary: And it’s a very catchy title too. A little confusing, but very catchy. So here we are. We’re talking third week of March, end of the second week, whatever. In 2025. We’re about two months into the Laj De Trump part two or Trumplandia, or whatever one wants to call it. Unfortunately, Trumplandia is doing what it always has done, at least what it did from 2017 or late 2016 to 2020, which is suck up all the attention and air and.

 

I suppose for now, there’s some legitimacy to that. It’s a, it’s not slow and it’s not boring and it’s attracting it’s kinetic and it’s destructive and it’s maybe constructive. Who knows? My cohort. I think a lot of our listeners, just given what the demographics are and what we know are in various stages of, if not apoplexy, then deep and profound and perhaps legitimate concern about the future of the republic, the nature of democracy, the sustainability of the American system.

 

We read talks constantly of constitutional crisis, whether we’re there, whether we passed it, what do we do? What do you make of all this? Are we, are things as bad as many people seem to now think? I mean, we, this is a podcast called What Could Go Right? But it’s worth at least considering that this may be one of those times where stuff is actually going wrong.

 

Matthew: It’s a little bit hard to express clearly the right attitude to have kind of. Have somebody take office and take actions. Right. So I think the actions that Donald Trump took at the end of his first term, that led to the kind of January 6th riots and then coming into office, I. Pardoning those people installing one of their lawyers as the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, and then that US attorney starts sending threatening letters to members of Congress about their speech, so on and so forth.

 

That’s bad. It will probably be okay. Like, I think it is not I wouldn’t bet on the collapse of the American Republic or something, but going from a situation in which you could be like, I am 99.99% sure that it’s all gonna be fine to, I’m 95% sure that it’s gonna be fine. Like that is very bad. So people are correct, I think, to view some of this stuff as genuinely alarming, genuinely very bad at the same time, I think there’s a tendency, particularly when there are actual bad things in the mix to kind of.

 

Exaggerate right. To overstate the probabilities of there and to, understate per the title of your show, the possibility that things will go right. So I think it’s, it’s irresponsible to sort of, I. Exacerbate long tail risks, and I think it’s in keeping with Trump’s character as a businessman, he infamously went through multiple bankruptcies over the course of his career, and he came out okay for them.

 

That’s the sort of the purpose of the bankruptcy code, right? It limits your downside. As a country we like. We can’t declare bankruptcy on like the stability of liberal democracy. And so, that, that bothers me. But I also think the most likely scenario is that, more or less ordinary politics happens.

 

I remember being a kid, my parents were convinced that Ronald Reagan was like the second coming of Hitler, that we were gonna be a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Some of what they said about that, I think like. Lewis kooky. Some of it’s not totally crazy, but like that’s not what happened. People always find having their opponents in the White House to be psychologically distressing.

 

Zachary: So Matt, why do you think that the likely scenario is that everything is gonna be fine? I know you’re not saying it’s all fine, but this general sense of it will all come out in the wash. That we’re not sort of headed down a precipice where we will stay permanently. Is it just because of people’s tendency to over exaggerate and over worry and because things have turned out fine in the past?

 

Or is it that there are also concrete things that you’re looking at and that you see as pillars of or foundational to American democracy and that’s showing signs of life?

 

Matthew: The system has a lot of equilibrating properties. Trump took office. He was more. Popular than he’d ever been before, and Democrats were freaked out and he started issuing all these orders and there was this take that like he’s dazzling us with the speed and aggression of his action. All that’s happened is his approval rating’s gone down, his disapproval numbers have gone up.

 

It’s hard to make durable change in this country. Again, it’s not to urge people to be complacent. It’s like. These equilibrating properties require individual people to take specific actions. But I think there was that moment on Inauguration Day when he was standing side by side with like the CEOs of all the biggest companies, and it made a lot of people’s get a kind of a pit in their stomach that it was gonna be just like pure bandwagoning.

 

There, there’s tensions inside his coalition. There’s disagreement about how they should approach policy toward Iran, how they should approach policy toward Russia. Not that all the decisions that are made will be good, but I think again, the most likely thing is that political controversy just continues to happen.

 

What we should worry about is like what harms get done along the way, and also, if any, like what opportunities exist. I try as a mental discipline to like. Make sure in any given week that I clock that, he’s doing some things that I agree with. That like even a president you don’t like is like, well he’s making 70% of the calls bad, 80%.

 

Nobody’s a hundred percent wrong. I think. I hope we’ll never get to that president.

 

Zachary: In many ways it’s breaking apart with even more intensity and more alacrity. What we began to see in 2017 to 2020, and in many ways was halted by covid and halted by. The grownups in the room as they were somewhat pejoratively, called around Trump, and now you have an unbridled set of policies that have been germinating in the beltway for years that are very much anti the administrative state, anti the use of certain types of government power pro, the use of certain types of executive power.

 

Not all these things cut in the same direction, and many of which are the kind of representation of. We have been functioning in a system that clearly isn’t working for a vast swath of people, and a vast swath of people are fed up with it, right? I mean, that’s the genesis of this. I mean, is there something about that?

 

I had looked at Brazil a bunch of years ago and you, it was hard to figure out whether all the anti-corruption and all the problems in Brazil were a function of a decaying state or a thriving democracy. Right? Mean like discontent. Yeah.

 

Matthew: Lemme put it this way, so I’ve been looking at the USAID situation quite a lot because I think. Think that what Trump is doing there is very harmful. You know that a lot of good programs that help a lot of people are getting curtailed, are getting stopped, are getting unfunded Now, at the same time, several years ago I wrote a piece about, official development existence, and I was saying that the vast majority of the good of American foreign aid was being done by a minority of the programs, right?

 

Like those programs were so good. That on balance, USAID was very good, but it was also completely true that a large share of the programming was very low value.

 

Zachary: Which ones before you go on that did you think were constructive?

 

Matthew: The global public health programs are very helpful. You can save tremendous amounts of lives by deploying proven western medical technologies. But a lot of what USAID does is this kind of – So you might say that the public health stuff is a little superficial, right? Which is true.

 

It’s like we’re treating kids who are sick, but we’re not like fixing whole societies. The problem is that we don’t really know how to like. Regenerate civil society in Nigeria, this, so there’s a lot of programming that goes to things that like would be good ideas if they worked, but the problem is like too hard.

 

We don’t have a solution for it. And a lot of the budget ends up going to Western based NGOs who are doing compliance, et cetera, et cetera. So my critique of Trump on all this is that like he is not doing a thoughtful reform of these programs. At the same time, it’s also true that the Biden administration wasn’t doing a thoughtful reform of these programs.

 

Now, what they did do at Samantha Power, very smart, very intelligent person, she understands all this much better than I do. They hired like a chief economist to do program evaluation efficacy, and like they, they were producing the work that showed that a lot of their spending priorities. But it’s just not in the nature of the contemporary democratic party to rock the boat on that level and to say, you know what, like we’re pulling the plug on a bunch of stuff that we’ve been doing for a long time and we’re gonna just put all of our money into the good stuff.

 

But if Trump burns it down, you do have the chance to, as Joe Biden used to say, like, build back better. And it’s like the brush has been cleared and like now we can cultivate the thing that we actually believe in. The thing that we’re actually good. Not every government institution is like that.

 

It doesn’t work in every possible area, but there are just absolutely areas of policy where the thought leaders, the smart people inside the Democratic party had a reform agenda, but they weren’t gonna do the reform agenda because that’s just not what Democrats. Do. But I do think that when things have broken down, they will come back.

 

They will come back better in a certain kind of sense. Even more narrowly, but like more clearly optimistically, I think the Trump administration wants to turn over some federally owned public lands and give them to the private sector to use as housing so that we’re gonna, build more suburbs in Salt Lake City, in Western Colorado, in Nevada and other parts of the mountain west.

 

This a good idea. This is, again, something that the Biden administration looked at, and then they I don’t wanna say they workshopped it to death, but they did a very small amount specifically in the suburbs of Nevada because a lot of like local progressives wanted them to, but they wouldn’t act in Utah because the whole Utah.

 

Political establishment is Republicans who they don’t like. So, conservationists we’re just completely whirling the day there. So, it’s good to see change. It’s good to see institutional reform. It’s definitely true that a lot of the institutions of the American. Government or not working that well.

 

The critique that what Trump is doing is not the like, thoughtful, smart, good version of reform, I think is true. I’m not always sure that’s the right way to look at it, because it’s, if there’s something nobody has ever tried to reform, then like by all means like let’s go do it in the smart, thoughtful way.

 

But like I was talking to people who. Worked at the transportation department for Obama and for Biden, and they know that there’s like big problems with the way the grant making works and program management, product execution. This is something Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson talk about, not in a high level way in, in their new book.

 

What strikes me about that whole subject matter is that people have known in a high level way. The way civil engineering and made sure public works projects in the United States function isn’t good. For a long time they’ve known that it’s not good. What they haven’t done is like actually change it.

 

And we’re seeing with Trump that like you can make bigger changes in these institutions than people thought. If you ask the agency general counsel to think harder about that, or you get someone who’s not an agency general counsel to give you an outside opinion there’s more that you can do. We are less constrained than people sometimes like to think.

 

Zachary: I think that, the challenge is, well, two challenges. One, I think on the constructive side there is a degree to which. If you cut too close to the bone of many of these programs that many people thought they disliked you may find greater consensus about what people actually did value and do.

 

Like. Now again you raised the question of how much damage will have been done apriori before you can restore or recreate, and that’s certainly a challenge. Although I’m not sure any of these things are not reconstructible with some ease and some funding. And then there’s also this, the, I think the challenge of too much executive authority even over the executive branch is you don’t want complete oscillations every four years.

 

One, one president comes in and has a completely different administrative agenda than the next president. These things, I mean, that’s kind of a recipe for so much constant flux and change that it’s hard to get anything done. It’d be like having a new CEO. Completely recreate the company every four years.

 

By the way, and I’m not trying to say the president is like a CEO, I’m just saying it’s a similar problem.

 

Matthew: I mean, I agree. I, I, something I’ve been thinking about is how do you actually get policy continuity, right? I. Where does it genuinely come from? Because, in the UK right, their institutional setup is completely different from ours. There’s no checks and balances. Parliamentary majority can do whatever they want.

 

Lots of European countries have that system. I. But most of them, like Germany, right, has a proportional electoral system. So essentially every political coalition that in Germany is some kind of like centrist coalition. So they could change policy a lot, but they don’t because the pivotal parties in parliament tend to be similar.

 

But the UK is first passed the Post. They have these really luring majorities. They have no constitutional constraints on the government. And yet they have a fair amount of policy stability over the longer haul, which sometimes is like. Bad. The Town and Country Planning Act, which I’ve heard is their, like main housing thing was adopted in the forties and I think has been disastrous for housing and land use in the whole situation there.

 

But they have a functional society in which the basic frameworks of liberalism and democracy hold not because you’re counting on. Judges, I guess, to like save your bacon, but because it’s a functional society in which David Cameron and his colleagues sincerely did not wanna set themselves up as dictators and nor does care starer.

 

Then I look at America and I think like. This is crazy, man. If you have total executive control over the FTC, you’re just gonna have insane policy swings back and forth, and that’s gonna be worse for everyone than if we have some kind of consensus minded system. But. Maybe it goes the other way. Maybe what we need is to have more flexibility in administration, which forces everyone to behave a little bit more responsibly.

 

In the Senate, right? You need 60 votes to pass a bill to overcome the filibuster. So one thing that happens with that is a lot of members of Congress will sign up for stuff that you know, their base wants. That they kind of privately acknowledge is maybe not that good idea. And then they’ll just assure people like, there’s no way that’s gonna happen.

 

That’s filibuster ball. I’m just kind of signing on to give ’em what they want. And I feel like that’s a little bit corrosive to society in the longer haul when people aren’t responsible for their own actions. And don’t sort of have to, temper themselves. So I don’t wanna be totally Pollyanna-ish about, the risks of kind of executive over aggrandizement.

 

I think these presidential political systems like we have in the US tend to be quite unstable in lots of Latin American cases. Is not a great idea, not best practices necessarily. But at the same time, the old way of counting on veto points to sort of safeguard things I feel like has helped like drive everybody crazy in a way that’s not that productive.

 

Zachary: Within all this, what exactly is the Democratic party supposed to be doing? There’s a lot of internal debate now. There’s the Jim Carville. They should just play possum. Wait for Trump to wait for these various things. To create enough chaos and blow back, and then you’re there kind of the rope of dope, possum, whatever you’re gonna call it.

 

Then there are other people saying, you gotta stand up. It can’t just rely on the courts have to be some sort of credible, vocal, vehement, oppositional force. And then given that this debate is unresolved, the optic is the Democratic party is frozen.

 

Matthew: Yeah, I think stepping back, right, so there’s this question of like tactically, how should Democrats address Trump? It’s important, but I think in some ways, like less important than people make it out to be. The big difference if I look at the politics of my adult life and my career is that in 2001, George B.

 

Bush is newly inaugurated. Bill Clinton is still very popular. 2017, Donald Trump is newly inaugurated. Barack Obama is still very popular, so Democrats lost those elections. There’s reasons that they lost them. There’s reasons that their candidates fell short. But I think that you could reasonably say as a.

 

Baseline Democrat, anywhere in the country that like our party and its leadership, like we hold our heads high and the question that we have now is how do we respond to the new president? How do we re-up our tactics? How do we just like do better at the next election? That is not the situation now.

 

Trump didn’t win via some kind of fluke. Trump won because the incumbent Democratic party president was very unpopular. The nominee who had her strengths and her weaknesses as a candidate, one of her weaknesses was that she was dogged by the accusation that she would be just the continuation of. Biden very different.

 

Like the knock on Hillary Clinton wasn’t, oh, you’re gonna be just the same as Obama. Right. That wasn’t like the theme of the critique. ’cause Obama was popular. So Democrats are going to have to present something new. Some kind of new idea, some kind of outsider figure, some kind of different message. And there’s a lot of different thoughts and ideas about what that could be.

 

But there’s an inherent tension because when you’re in opposition mode, right, like the most important thing is you wanna get your people together. You wanna unify so that you can oppose in a tactically effective way so that you can have a coherent message that people hear. But the way that you unify is you suppress points of disagreement.

 

But if Democrats wanna win in 28, they need to. Have a bigger tent, they have to have a new coalition and that’s gonna have to mean leading into some kind of points of disagreement, having it out and sort of, creating a new party. So there’s just like two separate tracks that need to coexist.

 

One is gonna be legislative leaders trying to round all their ducks together so that they can have a message that people hear. But the other is gonna be independent minded leaders, putting forward new ideas for what the face and the brand and the image and the message of the party should be in the future.

 

And that’s just necessarily gonna be a dissonant process. People are gonna find it unsatisfactory as they watch it play out in real time. But we’ve also seen parties do this all the. Time, Obama era Republicans, by the end were like really united in opposition to him. Even as Trump was like trashing the party establishment.

 

It looked, we, I mean I remember watching it at the time, you’re like, this is odd. Like how are they marching in lockstep in the House of Representatives and like tearing each other to pieces on the debate stage. But you just do it because that’s politics. And I think we’re right now in the early stages of that, and.

 

You can’t quite see the process but it’s not like something new will happen in 2028. But that might be better and it might be worse.

 

Zachary: I think there’s also this other question of what the impact is on the world and there’s been a look, a long belief over the past. Really 75 years, if you think about 1945, maybe 80, that the United States is as Madeline Albright once famously equipped the indispensable nation that we are the fulcrum, we are the linchpin of global peace and security.

 

And that if the United States ceases to play the role as protector of the rules all hell will break loose. Or as Robert Kagan has famously said, the jungle will grow back. A world of anarchy. And I, I see this in my son’s generation. There’s an increasing willingness to sort of view the world as an essentially an anarchic place that there are no rules, particularly now that we have said that we don’t think the rules have any value, and that will lead to kind of a, an antinomian dog eat dog world where the, I’m just gonna use another famous million dialogue from th acidities.

 

The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they might. That’s it. I know what I think about this and I’m kind of skeptical of that view. But I’m curious, has, when you think about this and the world, what you think

 

Matthew: I mean, on a certain level. The dream of an American sort of unipolar global order died some time ago, and so did the idea of a kind of lightly liberal cooperative order. I mean, this is not really about Trump, right? We were moving to a more multipolar dynamic. Democratization did not. Work in Russia.

 

The relative power gap between the United States and China narrowed quite a lot. That meant that, you know something simple, right? Like would America truly dominated the world? I. If we said there’s gonna be sanctions on militaries that lead a coup, we could really sort of make that stick. And it’s not that coups never happened, but they tried to transition very rapidly back to democracy, et cetera, et cetera.

 

In a multipolar world, if you lead a coup. The State Department says, well, we’re gonna cut you off from aid. Then the cool leader says, back to the State Department, well, we’re just gonna align with China and Russia now, so they are not as deterred by us. It undermines the credibility of our own threats, and we started backing away, not just under Trump, but under Biden, from our commitment to some of these kind of human rights ca type things because we’re talking about, bare knuckle geopolitical competition.

 

Trump, though seems to me to. Sort of take all those observations and then sort of add like M dash and that’s good. And I don’t totally know why he sees it that way. Like I think it’s true that we’re in an increasingly competitive geopolitical environment that is gonna have some anarchic qualities that we need to face reality in a kind of a square way.

 

We could also sort of regret that. And try to avoid accelerating it or pouring fuel on the fire or doing things like, for example, picking a giant fight with Canada. That’s not really about anything because the US and Canada having a peaceful relationship that. Predates, the WTO and the United Nations and all these kind of things, right?

 

I mean, there was a time, I think in 1812, we did try to invade Canada and just say, you know what? Like, we’ve got a larger military, you’ve got a lot of natural resources, we’re gonna take them

 

Zachary: There was another 1840s 54 40 in fight where there was a debate over the border of Canada and Washington, even though that was, they were still in the British Empire then,

 

Matthew: But we settled it down, right? The idea of a kind of a loose, respectful collaboration between like-minded liberal societies in the us, Britain, France, Canada, the British Empire, that’s earlier, right? That predates World War I. To say that like we would like to have cooperative relationships with other countries when we can, that peace and trade and commerce and tourism are good.

 

That values count for something, that open exchange of ideas is useful. Those are ideas that predate the kind of formalisms of the international order and that, Kant wrote about, much, much, much earlier. Trump also doesn’t explain himself very clearly. Like you can’t find anywhere an authoritative statement of like, why has Donald Trump decided to blow up the US Canada relationship?

 

He says things about it, but there’s no like. Explanation. He’s never given an address. This is a little hard to know what to make of it, but I think it’s like it’s quite bad. It is throwing away one of the advantages that we have in market capitalists, liberal societies, which is that we can make kind of credible commitments to one another.

 

We can, like, we don’t need to invade Chile to get Chile and copper. We can just. Buy it because just like if I want copper from America, I buy it. Right? Like we’re living in a society and so we can have cooperation across borders and we can have mutual respect. And the breakdown of that kind of stuff strikes me as actually counterproductive to the sort of like hard nosed, we need to face reality aspect of this.

 

Zachary: I do think there is a theory of the case that has been stated, whether or not it’s stated consistently and. deficits are a, we’re, we subsidize the world to the tune of a trillion dollars or thereabouts, and that manufacturing that is not here and is there, there being anywhere else other than here is bad.

 

And that in an ideal world or the world that they wish to re to create, not recreate, is a world of either balanced trade or imbalance trade in the US favor and the United States essentially making everything that it consume. Which is a theory of the case, and in many ways, it’s similar to what China kind of ideally wants for itself, although China is far from that because 50% of China’s economy is trade, about 25% of the US economy is trade.

 

So that’s the theory, right? Or that’s the goal. We make everything. I mean, at least that if you listen to Howard Lutnick and you listen to Trump, I think the problem, of course, is none of the policies that are meant to serve that aim. Can actually get you there. Like the incentives are not great enough and the penalties aren’t great enough.

 

The tariffs aren’t high enough to force companies to abandon global supply chains, and there’s not enough money for companies to voluntarily build domestic supply chains. So it’s like, to me, it’s a policy that is doomed to failure. The problem, of course, is in the interim it’s doomed to failure, meaning it can create a lot of chaos without any particular outcome.

 

I mean, do you agree with that as a.

 

Matthew: Yeah. I mean, but I also, I think it needs to be said like Archy doesn’t make sense as a policy goal. I mean, it’s one thing to say, okay, we are going to identify a finite set. I. Of products where we feel it’s important for strategic reasons to have like a home sourced supply chain, right? So right now, as I understand it, American nuclear reactors mostly get their fuel from Russia.

 

And so, a reasonable person might say like, that’s not a good idea. I believe in the promise of nuclear energy. It’s cleaner than fossil fuels, but we have oil and gas at home and we don’t really have a uranium reprocessing industry. So we need to do things to create that, right, which means minds, it means the reprocessing facilities.

 

It maybe means the parts. I don’t know how to build a nuclear reactor, so apologies if there’s some errors there. But you know, to say, okay, there’s a specific set of things that like we want to ensure we are self-sufficient to say, well, we need that in everything simultaneously. The only countries that have ever been like that are just super duper poor.

 

Like it, it’s not how the world works. You import raw materials from poor countries because deploying huge amounts of labor and capital in raw material extraction is like a low use of people’s time. You need, you want to have, in an advanced society, a large share of people performing face-to-face human services for.

 

Each other medical care is important. Childcare teaching children, even just nice to haves, I I get my beard trimmed by a professional so that I can make the line look correct ’cause it’s all fucked up when I do it myself in the mirror. And that means like. Sure, like we’re gonna import some manufactured goods.

 

Now, you don’t want necessarily to be importing stuff from your worst enemies in the known universe, but that’s part of why you have friends, right? I’m gonna be on a flight tomorrow. It’s gonna be on an Reyer plane. It’s built in Brazil as I understand it. And that’s fine. It’s good that we have an aviation industry in the United States.

 

I would not want us to have zero airplane manufacturing, but it’s. Good for consumers, and it’s ultimately good for the vitality of American business that we have Boeing building planes in the United States. We also have Airbus, which is a European company, but they build some of their planes here. We have planes from Canada, we have planes from Brazil, like that’s healthy.

 

You want entry, you want competition. Otherwise you’re gonna end up with a very stagnant, very kind of monopolized society. And as you say, they’re not even going about this in a. Where like the lines connect, it seems driven by, well, it’s hard to say what it’s driven by. I mean, they have this kind of big picture story about trade deficits.

 

But when you look at the specifics of like, why this tariff now on this country, like what are you actually doing? They’ll have these very shifting rationales about reciprocity, about China, about all different kinds of things, and it just doesn’t add up to very much.

 

Zachary: So let’s turn briefly to. More the question of like, what’s the role of someone like you in this ecosystem today? You write a column, you’ve got readers, you believe in the power of ideas. I do the same thing. We do this podcast.

 

Matthew: was gonna ask you what’s your role?

 

Zachary: right? So I mean, it’s an interesting question of in a cacas time where influence is ever more atomized.

 

I mean, yes, the New York Times has 8 million subscribers, but. Some huge portion of that is, is wordle and cooking and spelling bee. So what is the role of ideas in a really cous ecosystem where even these legacy social media platforms are, they’re not really atomizing per se but in a weird way, their influence is also more unclear.

 

Are we just talking to people who like us? Are we, is this part of the mix of changing the climate? Is it just, let’s. Throw out some observations and hope some of them have an effect.

 

Matthew: It’s an excellent question. I’m trying to make a. Living. That’s one thing. 

 

Zachary: I’m just a guy trying to make a living, man. Gimme a break.

 

Matthew: I mean I think, I think part of what I’m doing, you are doing hopefully hopefully we’re all doing, is trying to impact the people of the future. There’s always a lot of media ends up being preaching to the choir and.

 

That’s fine. I mean, I’m a business person as well as a writer and it’s like I love my longtime subscribers. There is nobody who I cherish more than the people who’ve been subscribing to my newsletter for five years At the same time, those people probably, I am not changing their mind about anything at this point.

 

They’re like locked in. They’re just getting it. The hits, what I think has the most impact on the world is if, college students and people in their first jobs and politics and things like that are reading, right? If new people are introduced to these things, because, it’s like, why is the choir there at all?

 

Right? It’s like trying to make the service entertaining. You’re trying to, you’re trying to get. Get butts in the pews, right? Like it’s, it, the it, the whole ecosystem probably gets its margin from a minority of the people who are there, who are genuinely open-minded, who are first forming their worldviews, who are first being introduced to ideas.

 

But that’s how a lot of change ends up. Happening. We have cohort replacement across different kinds of institutions and you wanna see people who think slightly differently coming into different sorts of roles and doing things. And I’ve seen a lot of change over the past. I. 10, 15, 20 years on topics that I’ve been involved in about housing and land use regulation as the conventional wisdom has really pivoted thanks to, hard work and entrepreneurship from a lot of people.

 

But also just thanks to forceful repetition of ideas that when I was young and was pitching these stories to editors, they would just look at me funny. They’d be like, who cares about this? Like, is this even a, like a subject? We would run columns on. But by banging down the door and saying, look, like I write really fast, I could just give you two columns that you think are good ideas and then just run mine Also, it, it becomes a legible subject that now everyone’s like, oh yeah, housing.

 

It there’s people who cover that as their beat, which is, wasn’t true 15 years ago. So hopefully change happens. It’s true though, like the landscape gets ever more dissolved. There’s TikTok controversies that I don’t understand on any level. It’s harder to know, where the big chains of influence are gonna lie.

 

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Zachary: And by the way, in those TikTok controversies, I mean there’s increasing numbers of people who don’t even watch the TikTok or don’t watch the Instagram reel. They read the comments about it, like their entire experience of. Even that is meta. Right. And look I mean, I certainly wrestle with this question of, particularly in the world of substack, which you’re quite prominent in.

 

It is definitely a case of narrow casting versus broadcasting, right? So you could have very high affinity for your ideas and your writing, but not the same kind of reach as the legacy platforms. I mean, not inconsiderable reach, if you wrote a op-ed for the Washington Post today. Unless it’s like featured on the homepage for a day and is totally on some sort of zeitgeisty daily thing, the amount of people who actually will read that versus read your substack are probably not that different in terms of just sheer numbers.

 

Even though the Washington posts overall audience is huge, the New York Times may be the one exception to that, but even then there’s a lot of content that a lot of people don’t read, but you know, it ends up being a narrow casting world, not a broadcasting world. The magical thing is sometimes you notice that even with all that narrow casting, that there are memes, there are trends, there are ideas that seem to percolate suddenly, right col the collective consciousness of the weird thing of the internet.

 

So, I don’t know. It’s a, it’s this question of like, what does it mean to have influence is increasingly unclear as well.

 

Matthew: Well, so PEs you’re saying, right? So I mean, attention is more fragmented, right? There’s nothing, you’re talking about newspapers, but I think the real contrast is broadcast television. It used to be that if a segment aired on CBS news, a very large share of the population was going to see that. And there’s just nothing that’s remotely comparable to that, front page of the New York Times, like everything is a drop in the bucket compared to classic broadcast television news, especially because those broadcast news segments were short, right?

 

Each network news only aired 22 minutes worth of content, and there were only three of them. So if you could break through that, it’s like, man, like I, I’ve made it.

 

Zachary: By the way, even today, A B, CCBS and NBC, I think at about 7 million views each, right? I don’t know anybody who watches any of those, like I don’t. When was the last time you watched the nightly news?

 

Matthew: my God. It’s unthinkable. And you can forget. Yes. Local television news also has surprisingly large audience, even though it’s falling. On the other hand, you can have these attention attract in a way that you didn’t use to. It’s stochastic. But people in our fragmented landscape like to talk about things that other people are talking about.

 

So. If something gets above a certain level of attention threshold, it like goes everywhere, right? And so suddenly it’s like everyone is discussing it, whereas in the past, NBC could just ignore what CBS. Was doing right. If some idiosyncratic idea got into Dan Rather’s head, it wasn’t like everybody had to follow the leader, but things can happen now where I feel on my substack, I’m like or my Twitter feed or whatever.

 

It’s like, oh, everybody’s talking about this. Like, I gotta weigh in. Like, what? What are we doing? What are we saying? The question I have is, do we get engagement with certain ideas? That’s too shallow. So, the week that we’re recording, this is the week that this big abundance book came out.

 

I see super abundance on your shelf behind you. So I’m sure you’re familiar with these ideas. So everybody’s gonna like, give a take on abundance for like a 10 to 20 day period maybe. But my question is like, will anything result from that? Because all of these ideas, this is not a critique of the book, but it’s like it’s very high level and then you you dig in and it’s like, well, what would we need to do to like be more abundant?

 

And there’s a lot of niggling details behind everything in life. And if everyone just kind of runs around and like, oh, we didn’t, we just like all agree like back in March that we’re for abundance now. And now it’s April and we’re onto the next thing. Black Lives Matter. I mean, not to be dismissive, but struck me as having some of that kind of quality where there was this like explosion of attention to an idea of racial justice.

 

An idea that like something had to be done, that the status quo wasn’t satisfactory. And like a lot of people like said a lot of stuff. And some like crazy things happened and it felt like there were all these convulsions and now we look back from 2025 and it’s like, well, what actually, like what happened?

 

Like what? Like what changed? Like what did we do here? And it feels like not that much, right? Even though there was an incredible amount of drama, because like examining social institutions and understanding complex problems is hard. And like retweeting and sort of denouncing and counter denouncing and posting squares and having yard signs, and then kind of walking away from it.

 

Embarrassed when it turned out that some of the ideas about policing didn’t work is not, that’s not like a real social movement. That’s not how, that’s not how change occurs with that kind of like low touch virality.

 

Zachary: I mean, I’ve always thought. And I, at least I think I’ve tried to practice the view of it’s way easier to write something than it is to do something now. Yes, writing something is doing something. You are writing something that is published. But in the sense of anyone can write an op-ed and I’ve done this, I’m sure I’ve been guilty of charge, urging X to do, Y companies should do this.

 

Government should do that. But of course as anyone who’s been in any actual position of doing something, the doing of it is infinitely more complex than the writing of it. And that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be written. I just think it’s important for all of us to be mindful of the fact and I think the Abundance book is an example.

 

Of, yes, it’s very important to identify a problem. Locate a mindset suggests that we could think things differently. That’s useful. It’s useful for all of us as a, huh. And there may be people who are awakened to the fact that we’re kinda looking at the problems wrong. That being said, getting to that point of implementation is devilishly difficult.

 

And one thing that’s, I think fascinating two months into Trump landia is much easier to deconstruct than to construct. I would argue at least right now, the only thing Trump has done is tear things down. And I guess in the case of tariffs, build walls, right? And maybe a little seven miles of border wall, that’s easy to do.

 

It takes whatever, takes two hours to implode a building. It takes a year and a half to build it. And basically, until we start constructing something, I’m not sure any of this is gonna matter hugely. Right? I mean, it’ll matter destructively, but I don’t think it’s gonna be necessarily. Just by destroying something before.

 

Matthew: Yeah. I also think, I mean in terms of your distinction between writing and doing, there’s even different modes of writing. Something I think there, there was a brief period in my life when I was involved in like, middle management in a business enterprise. I mean, it was a media company, but I wasn’t just like doing the takes, I was like working in a corporate structure.

 

And so I would see the difference between when we would write an article. That was meant to be published. And the point of publishing an article ultimately was to get a lot of people to read it. Was to be viral. But sometimes I would write a memo, right. For internal consumption about decision, ’cause like I, I wanted like money to go do something, right?

 

And you a reasonably well run company, right? When you try to have a culture with your memos, with your business proposals where. You’re not trying, you’re not supposed to phrase things in the maximally agreeable way. You’re supposed to be really specific about like what it is you want to happen because just like all these different people involved, right, and I’m trying to say, I want you to like give me money.

 

I want this person in management to do something differently and so I need to like spell it out. And people don’t like it. I never wrote like a good idea that everybody was just like, that’s fucking genius, man. Like, let’s go do it. Everyone’s like, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

 

The way I do things already is really good and important. Right. Because like, that’s life. If it was obvious and totally uncontroversial that like, you should do it my way, it would already be done that way. Right? Whereas when you’re going on the internet and you’re trying to get people to retweet you.

 

It’s the opposite, right? Like, you wanna be as generic as possible. Just maximize the number of people who will be like, yeah, like let’s go, we gotta do things differently. It’s hard to steer institutions on that kind of level. Like I do think that if you want things, if you wanna build things, but even if you wanna change things, right?

 

If you want reform rather than destruction. You have to delve into the specifics and address the pain points. Because think housing, right? The whole reason we have the phrase nimby. Not in my backyard. Is it? The easiest thing in the world is to get people to agree that like abstractly speaking, there should be like new starter homes for people and there should be apartments and like there should probably be sober facilities for, homeless people who are trying to kick a drug habit, right?

 

There’s all kinds of things that if I’m just like. There should be some of this stuff somewhere. Everyone’s gonna be like, you’re right, and we should have electric transmission lines and we should have a new subway. Right? It’s like all this great stuff. The reason that stuff doesn’t happen is that people don’t want it on their block necessarily.

 

And so then you need to have a process through which we reconcile our like general view that like there should be homeless shelters. So that people aren’t sleeping in the park with our specific view, that the homeless shelter has to be somewhere and that nobody particularly wants that to be next to where they live.

 

So like how are we gonna do it? Right? And if I just wanna get people to agree with me, I’ll say like, we need to do something about homelessness in the city. We need more housing and we need more. And people mash retweet, be like, we sure do. And if I’m like, you need to stop litigating against this project that’s across the street from your house, they’re gonna be like, no, Matt.

 

Like, and like that’s what makes it challenging. And I think that the internet form of engagement with issues, rewards abstraction. In a way that’s not that constructive to certain kinds of things. I mean, it’s good for other things, it’s like we can all stay on top of the latest developments in artificial intelligence in a way that would’ve been totally impossible.

 

Relying on like a, local daily newspaper, like you can follow specialists, you can dive deep in things if you want to. But I think with the thorny social problems, it’s like it’s not good to be as elevated and superficial and like here today, gone tomorrow as we tend to be.

 

Zachary: Well, we could continue this conversation. If not infinitely, certainly considerably longer. But we are out of our time. I wanna thank you for your writing, for your thoughts,

 

Matthew: thank you.

 

Zachary: for your eclecticism, for your always thoughtfulness. It’s inspiring, it’s important. Back to our, like what’s the point of all of it?

 

I think we both believe that in some un chartable, not easily discernible sense, ideas do matter. They kind of. Are thrown into the ether and have an effect over time, particularly in aggregate, meaning lots of different people saying lots of different things. It’s not really about power per se, it’s about, we trying to shape a climate of awareness and change and and that I think is vital.

 

And look, you’re really good at not ringing unnecessary alarm bells, just because I know you said before you’re, you’re also making a living, but you’re not making a living by gratuitously. Saying in doing that, which will gratuitously get attention, kneejerk attention, which is usually outrage and usually hyperbole and usually shouting as loud as you can from whatever, as the tallest soapbox you can,

 

Matthew: Trying. Thank you.

 

Zachary: I think you’re quite good at that, and it’s important, right?

 

I think these, it is important that, that be a pr, a pronounced element of how we go about these things, and that’s essentially what we’re trying to do at the progress network too, which is bring the temperature down a bit in the belief that. That is the climate in which you can actually make constructive change, and that whenever the temperature is so heated, it’s almost impossible to do anything other than scream.

 

So thank you.

 

Matthew: thank you.

 

Zachary: So again I think that was a fascinating conversation we have with that. I wish Emma had been around to join. She will be back with me and with us next week. Please tune into our progress report, which is our shorter form. News of the week, news you may have missed as well as this, the longer form what could go right, podcast.

 

I think this question of what the role of ideas is in a noisy time. What the role of narrow casting, what the role of broadcasting, just what the role of ideas is in a world where we are focused almost entirely on things happening. And I like that discussion at the end with Matt about literally like, why are we doing this?

 

What’s the point of a podcast? What’s the point of a column? Clearly we think it has a point, but it’s important to think about what the point is. To be aware of what the point isn’t. So I’m glad we had that discussion at the end. Again, I’m quite dedicated to the proposition that ideas do matter. They just don’t matter in the same way that actions matter, they shape the climate in which actions take place.

 

They form the framework for us to understand the world around us and to think about what we want that world to be, and particularly given that the future is only an idea, there is nothing concrete about the future. It does not yet exist. And it’s therefore an idea shaping our ideas about the future in particular, and some of that shaping is about what we think about.

 

The present is part of the process of shaping that future, and I believe that firmly. I will stick with that. Thank you all for listening. Thanks to the Glomerate for producing and thanks to the people at the Progress Network for everything they do. We’ll be back with you next week.