People often say: 10 years later, are we any safer after this crisis? Do you look around? Do you say to yourself: we’re in a better place? A worse place? We could have another crisis like this tomorrow? “We’re in a different place. We have an America 10 years post-crisis in which there are fewer homeowners. There’s a trillion and a half dollars in student loan debt. There are families who are now 10 years in with no raises, people working two jobs. Families live one bad diagnosis, one pink slip away from financial calamity. And they know it. And they read every headline that says, “economy great” and they think: what the hell happened to my family? And they are right to ask that question, because America’s government has failed them.” For the past 10 years we’ve been talking about banks. “Mhm.” But in the last two years I would contend we’ve started to talk about Silicon Valley. Would you break up the big tech companies today? “Well, the question is less to me about breaking up, and more about what it is they do that is anti-competitive. We have to wrestle with this question about these companies that aggregate and monetize data in ways that do not create viable markets, and that have no accountability to the people whose data has actually just been taken. Gary Cohn. Can we talk Gary Cohn?” Let’s talk about Gary Cohn. “Let’s talk Gary Cohn. O.K. So Gary Cohn works at Goldman all those years. Then moves over to the Trump administration. He’s going to have exactly one thing in his portfolio. And that is, cram through a new tax law. Right. Drive through a new tax law. So what does Goldman Sachs do for Gary Cohn on the way out the door? They hand over somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a billion dollars to Gary Cohn. And money they didn’t have to release. And, you know, you might reasonably ask, would they have done that if he had done Teach for America? I think of it as a – that money – as a pre bribe. So Gary Cohn picks up these sacks full of money, goes into government, and rewrites the tax laws, manages to cram it through. And boy, did Goldman once again show. Savvy investor. In the first quarter, the tax breaks that Cohn pushed through saved Goldman Sachs more than a quarter of a billion dollars.” You know, there’s been a real question about how the party is moving, shifting. Whether it’s moved left with Bernie Sanders on one side. Where you are in that, and where the center is. How do you place yourself in this? “So why do this as party? Because I’ll tell you where I place myself. I place myself right in the middle of America. When you look at core economic issues, where is America? About what? Two out of three Americans think we ought to raise the minimum wage. Three out of four Americans, somewhere in there, think that young people shouldn’t be crushed by student loan debt, that they ought to be able to get an education without having to take on this kind of debt, and that we ought to do something about outstanding debt. Where are we? I don’t know. Somewhere in the 60%, maybe more of people who think we ought to expand social security. There are issues on which we’re divided. I understand that. But this core economic set of issues. Stronger unions. I’ll throw in one more. The importance of better labor rights. On these core economic issues, America is a progressive country.”