Pod Save America interview

In August, I sat down with Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau in Los Angeles to talk about treating cost disease, upholding law & order, and taking on the social media corporations that treat our children like products.

Our conversation centered around the aim of this Substack: that Democrats must move past defining ourselves by opposition. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are where they were 10 years ago. Democrats need to offer relevant and refreshing ideas that explain what we’re for, not just who we’re against.

Check out a few highlights of my conversation with Jon Favreau below:

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How the Democratic Party can disrupt the status quo

Jake Auchincloss: Americans believe that this country is stuck in a corrupt status quo that is a threat to the American Dream. And they associate the Democratic Party with the status quo. Until we demonstrate that we are willing to disrupt that status quo—not just by fighting Trump, but also by being willing to take on our own received orthodoxies as a party—we are not going to be able to earn back voters’ trust. And I think there are three vectors in particular where we need to have big ideas: cost disease, corruption, and classrooms.

A system that can’t be hijacked by health insurance or social media corporations. A system where the vast majority of congressional races are not actually competitive. And then finally, classrooms. This is an issue, education, Jon, that neither party has talked about for five years. The school closures were a catastrophe. Twenty-five million American students are grades behind on reading and mathematics. And because Democrats haven’t put forward muscular plans for how we are going to fix it, we’re stuck having to talk about bathrooms, when we should be talking about classrooms.

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Treating cost disease

Jake Auchincloss: Inflation is not evenly spread across the economy. Some sectors inflate really fast, and in some sectors actually prices have actually gone down, like electronics. And the sectors that are most infected by cost disease are housing, health care, utilities, and local taxes. The reason is because they’re very labor-intensive and they’ve had low productivity growth. When you get your rent bill, when you get a utility bill for energy, when you get a health insurance premium, for sure, that bill is afflicted with cost disease. And Democrats have got to be doctors of cost disease.

We should be specific that our goal is to treat cost disease within housing, within health care, within utilities. So how do we do that? One, we should cut regulations that are making it too hard to build stuff. Housing here is a great example. We need to build five million more units of housing across this country in the next five years. We should adopt technology where it takes out cost. Energy is a great example. We should be building five Hoover Dams’ worth of nuclear power over the next five years. Nuclear power is safe, affordable, reliable. We need to build a lot more of it in a standardized way. And then we’ve got to take on special interests where they are artificially keeping prices high.

Health insurance is a superb example. Jon, your old boss helped Democrats see that fighting health insurance corporations turns out to be good policy and good politics. I would like us to rediscover that. In President Obama’s tenure, the central thrust of the fight was about coverage. Right, let’s get more Americans covered, preexisting conditions, up until 26 on your parents’ plan.

Jon Favreau: We started talking about costs.

Jake Auchincloss: You did.

Jon Favreau: And the more politically popular thing to do was to focus on government.

Jake Auchincloss: And vital, and Medicaid expansion. And we got work to do. We got 90% of Americans; we got 10% more to go. I think that inflection point has arrived, though. It’s about cost now. People have health insurance, but it doesn’t feel affordable. If it’s going up 15% year over year and your out-of-pockets are $20,000, I think the Democratic Party should say quite simply: “We don’t think anything is free in this world. You pay health insurance premiums, but if you then get sick and a doctor tells you you need something, you don’t have to pay out-of-pocket costs. You’re not paying twice for this service. You pay one time and you get the service.”

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Social media corporations have become the merchants & miners of dopamine

Jake Auchincloss: We are stuck in a society where increasingly you've got these merchants and miners of dopamine—whether it's online gambling, whether it's pornography, whether it's the social media corporations whose entire business model is about taking young people in particular and monetizing their attention span.

…The average kid will spend more time on their screen than they will outside. The average inmate will spend more time outside than the average American child. That's not acceptable. The Republicans just tried to pass a law that would forbid states from regulating AI for the next decade. So it's not like they're pioneers on this issue. Let's seize it from them.

Jon Favreau: What do you think we should do?

Jake Auchincloss: So, first of all, strip the special privileges and immunities that these social media corporations have enjoyed since the mid-1990s. They can't be sued. You publish deepfake nonconsensual pornography on Facebook—it's not Mark Zuckerberg's problem. It needs to be. Rescind Section 230. We need to raise the age of internet adulthood. Right now it's 13—not enforced. It needs to be at least 16, enforced.

And then, I think we’ve got to start taxing these corporations. The wealthiest, most powerful corporations in the history of the world pay virtually no taxes. I think we should tax their digital advertising revenue and route those dollars towards the construction of trade schools, toward surging one-on-one tutoring to American students in reading, math, and writing. Help them get back up to grade level and be prepared for success.

We’ve got to stop treating these social media corporations like they're these autonomous digital empires and make them accountable to the American public.

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Building a future without AI friends for my kids

Jake Auchincloss: We can't be caught unawares, as frankly, we were with social media. I think a blanket point of view on AI is not going to serve us well, because it's a general-purpose technology. So I give you two examples: if we're going to use AI to accelerate drug discovery and narrow the number of endpoints that a new therapeutic could target, and thereby make clinical trials cheaper, and make it cheaper to get drugs to market—great. Let's do it.

If we're going to use AI because Mark Zuckerberg [thinks it’s OK for Facebook] to have “sensual,” quote “sensual conversations”—according to Facebook documents—with 12-year-olds, not signing up for that.

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How Democrats must be the party of law & order

Jake Auchincloss: I think Democrats need to do two things simultaneously. One is we’ve got to reject what he is doing, as we did with Los Angeles. We have to reject what he’s doing with the District of Columbia and support home rule. We also have to explain to Americans how we would do things differently. …And this is a hard conversation we have to have as a party: open-air drug use, homeless encampments, shoplifting, and quality-of-life violations. We do have to take those seriously so that we don’t get associated with degradation and decline in quality of life. And we can say, actually, we’re the law and order party.

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Founding Majority Democrats

Jake Auchincloss: So I've recently helped launch this group called Majority Democrats—32 of us, a handful of Members of Congress, but actually the majority are mayors, lieutenant governors, governors, or soon-to-be governors. And what we're trying to do is demonstrate that Democrats can deliver again, and we can deliver in a way that is picking fights with government or bureaucracy or corporations.