The new normal

Any politician will need to be coherent for 2 hours to run for President

On the way to Calgary for Andrew’s high school graduation last night, I listened to Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan. I don’t agree with most of what he says, but I’ll give him this: the future of politics will require long-form clarity. A president who can speak, unfiltered, for two hours about their views—Rogan-style—is now table stakes. The era of soundbites is over. As is that of “hyper managed” appearances. Say what you will of the Democratic Party but Biden and Harris were the two worst candidates they ever could have run: one couldn’t talk, the other one shouldn’t.

I appreciated Bernie’s passion but, he keeps misdiagnosing the problems—and missing the tradeoffs.

For example, he says billionaires corrupt democracy with money—but doesn’t acknowledge that billions spent on climate messaging do the same. If money can distort elections, it can distort science. Narrative capture is bipartisan.

He says we need a $17 minimum wage so people can afford a $25 sandwich—but ignores that it’s decades of loose monetary policy and stimulus that made that sandwich $25 in the first place. You can’t print trillions and act shocked when prices go up. And then you can’t print money to raise wages without expecting … even more inflation.

Bernie says AI should lead to a 32-hour workweek. But AI doesn’t eliminate work. It amplifies leverage. The top performers—founders, athletes, CEOs—use it to go from 70 hours a week to 90, not the other way around. Minimum wage jobs don’t scale. That’s why they don’t pay. It’s not a moral failure. It’s math. If you want to succeed, to pull your self up, to love the American dream, you should realize work-life balance is a lie, and the faster to get to 10,000 hours doing something, the more differentiated you will be.

He slams corporate control and names BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard as villains—without realizing they’re passive index funds. They own everything because retirement savings are built to buy everything. That’s not conspiracy. That’s indexing.

On health care, he calls it a human right. But no one wants to have the second conversation: when do we let people die? 75% of lifetime health care costs happen in the last six months. At some point, care isn’t curing. It’s just prolonging. “Rights” don’t solve that tradeoff. Someone still has to say no.

And then the biggest miss of all: he acknowledges that work gives people purpose—but has no answer for what happens if the robots take the jobs and everyone has universal basic income and health care. What do people do when they have nothing to drive them? Not everyone wants to go to law school for a second act…Because lost in the populist rhetoric is the fact that the real issue isn’t wages or hours. It’s meaning. And meaning is tied to progress. As Jonathan Haidt writes, happiness isn’t about absolute income. It’s relative improvement. Forward motion. Growth. Earning more. Doing more. Being needed. That’s what people want. That’s what makes us feel alive.

So yes—Bernie taps into a real pain in the system but he keeps swinging at symptoms. The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed. The problem is: we don’t like the tradeoffs. And no one—on the left or the right—is ready to talk about that honestly. Nonetheless, conversation is always good and it’s a worthy listen.