Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:01]
Tabs Advertiser
Tabs was built for finance teams managing complex B2B revenue. If your month end still depends on spreadsheets, manual billing adjustments, or disconnected tools, you are not alone. Tabs automates billing, revenue, recognition and collections in one AI powered platform built for accuracy and control so finance can spend less time reconciling revenue and more time driving the business forward. Visit tabs.com to learn more.
- [00:28]
Mike Pesca
If you listen to the Gist, you probably share a certain sense of curiosity. The kind that enjoys following an idea wherever it leads and asking bigger questions along the way. Which is why I want to recommend another podcast I think many of you would enjoy. In fact, some have enjoyed it because I've talked about it before. It's a great podcast called no Small Endeavor, hosted by Lee C. Camp, Liz, a professor of theology and ethics, and on the show he brings together scientists, writers, psychologists and philosophers to explore a deceptively simple question, what does it mean to live a good life? Guests have included Malcolm Gladwell, happiness researcher Lori Santos, and other thinkers who've spent their careers studying how humans flourish. What I like about the show is the range of perspectives Lee brings to the table. Each conversation looks at life's big questions from a different angle, whether that science, philosophy, faith or culture. Need somewhere to start? Try the recent episode with conservationist Paul Rosalie, who has spent decades protecting the Amazon rainforest. It's a fascinating conversation about purpose, sacrifice, what it actually takes to devote your life to something bigger than yourself. Follow no Small Endeavor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. It's Friday, April 10, 2026, from peach fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. I was listening to Matt Ingle. He does the Slow Boring newsletter. I like him very much. He is one of the few people who will ever say this. Oh yeah, that's my idea. I think it's the right idea. I just know it's horribly unpopular. He talks about policy and politics and he will frequently say, oh, it's definitely the right thing to do. And if the Democrats embrace it, they lose the election. No one in politics does this. No politician does this. But no, almost no pundit does this. Every pundit says, and if everyone followed my preferred policy example, they'd also win their next election. But they won't. You know, there is the temptation to say, ah, if they followed my policy and also knew exactly how to phrase it in my way, that clearly appeals to me and you, the person listening to this right now, you'd win the next election. You'd win the next fight in Congress, your approval ratings would go up, but they won't. I think with this war in Iran, which is not working out so well for Trump, probably because Trump is doing it, or maybe you could argue, because there is no way that anyone who would do such a thing could have it work out. But it would be interesting. Not if Trump sold it this way, but if his conception really were, oh, yeah, this isn't going to be popular. I just think it's right. I mean, if that were the case, I think we'd see a lot of different considerations around what he says and actually how he implements it. And I think it's important for politicians, people in politics, not just politicians, advisers and so forth, or people who run think tanks to say, oh, yeah, it's not going to be popular, but let's do the best with trying to do the most to get our policies passed. And sometimes, sometimes there is a conception, like you say something like, well, leadership is doing the unpopular thing. So that's a, that's a acknowledgment that not everything is going to be popular, even though the vast majority of all policy prescriptions by the prescribers are, if they'd only do this, they'd win elections. So sometimes you evoke leadership as an acknowledgement that you don't really have to be a leader if you have popular policies. I think that mistakes leadership also. And then sometimes you'll hear the phrasing or the conception that, well, what we're going to do is we've built up a lot of political capital and now we're going to spend it down a little bit. That is telling you, yeah, people aren't going to like it that much. But my popularity is in the 80s, so maybe after this, my popularity will be in the high 60s after I do this thing to actually, you know, fund a budgetary commitment, for instance. So I give Matt a lot of compliments as far as that goes. And what I also did a few years ago on the show is I gave him a 4 forum with a guy named Richard Kreitner, who had written a little bit of the Yang to Matt's book, One Billion Americans, because so many of our problems are we just don't have the money for it. I very rarely hear, especially Democratic politicians saying, yeah, this is going to be hard. We don't have the money for it. Usually, especially when they're running about against Republicans, Republicans are cruel, or Republicans have weird values, or they're lying or they're venal. But you know, there is the average Republican who just doesn't think we have the money for it. There is a left, I guess, center left fight frequently where the AOC Bernie side will say, oh, why do you always ask if we have money for it now? You never ask for it. And then they'll trot out, you know, some Iraq war or something where they said no one ever asked about the money, but they did. But it doesn't matter if your opponent isn't playing up to the highest level of virtue and honesty. It kind of matters if we have the money for it. And so often we don't. Not saying we don't have any of the money for Medicaid, but reading about Colorado's Medicaid shortfall and spending growth on Medicaid is up 12 and a half percent in financial year 25, projected to rise 8% in financial year 2028. Almost 2 thirds of the states believe they have a 5050 chance of a Medicaid budget shortfall in 2026. It's because this costs so much and we don't have enough money to do the things we want to do and not the things that Alabama and Mississippi wants to do, the things that Maryland and Connecticut and Colorado want to do. States that aren't profligate, aren't stingy, are Democratic, just not always enough money for it. Something to acknowledge, something that maybe would be cured by a lot more people, a lot more workers, a lot more young people. So this is one of the things informing the it's not going to be popular, but we're going to have to cut spending. That's one angle to why I bring this up. And another is maybe with a billion people, we'd have more money for the oldest because the billion, the extra 670 million that we import, wouldn't be the oldest who need the most medical care. Or in Richard Kreitner's idea, maybe we'd break it up and different areas can fund themselves. And then maybe what we'd find is that the blue areas, with all their ambition and criticism of the stingy or lying Republicans, would find that they too can't do everything they want in terms of actually paying for it. All right here now. Richard Kreitner, Matt Inglesias discussing their books. Break It Up Succession Division, the Secret History of America's imperfect union and 1 billion Americans. The case for Thinking Bigger. Have at it, gentlemen.
- [07:46]
Tabs Advertiser
Tabs was built for finance teams managing complex B2B revenue. If your month end still depends on spreadsheets, manual billing adjustments or disconnected tools. You are not alone. Tabs automates billing, revenue recognition and collections in one AI powered platform built for accuracy and control so finance can spend less time reconciling revenue and more time driving the business forward. Visit tabs.com to learn more.
- [08:16]
Mike Pesca
This is a little bit of a different kind of segment than we usually do. I usually do an interview and sometimes I have two people on maybe in opposition to each other, but I have with me two esteemed thinkers who have recently written books that I think are a little bit in dialog with each other. One of them is Richard Kreitner's Break It Up, Secession, Division and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union. And it's not really a book of advocacy, it's a book of history with some analysis. Richard, thanks for coming on.
- [08:50]
Richard Kreitner
Thank you.
- [08:51]
Mike Pesca
And my second guest is Matt Iglesias, who has written 1 billion Americans the Case for Thinking Bigger. And I will say this, this is, this is not a sprawling book, but it's a sprawling idea. And Matt has just the one of the most interesting minds going. And much like in Miracle on What is it, 30, when one Santa said, you know, maybe you should buy that at Gimbals, I'm going to recommend. If you want to hear a really good interview with Matt, go to Conversations with Tyler. Matt was on that one. Or the Ezra Klein podcast. Talk to Matt for a while. It's really worth spending an hour and a half with Matt and Glaciers talking about what he wants to talk about. But today we're going to talk about something a little bit different. But anyway, thanks for coming on this show, Matt.
- [09:33]
Matt Iglesias
Oh, thank you.
- [09:34]
Mike Pesca
Okay, so your book A Billion Americans is about let's have so many more Americans. And Richard's book Break it up is the idea of less Americans. We're gonna get into that, but first I'd just like to gift you each a minute or so to tell me about the parts of your book, of your, each of your books that really maybe we won't be touching on, but are important things to think about. So, Richard, you may go first.
- [09:57]
Richard Kreitner
Okay, thank you. I'll just say, you know, my book's really not fewer Americans and more Americas as opposed to more Americans, you know. So as you say, I'm glad you pointed out, my book is a history. It's not really an argument for breaking it up. Break it up is the theme rather than necessarily the argument. And I survey, you know, four centuries of American history, and I try to argue and show that the United States has never really been united, that we've always been divided by race and region, religion, culture, class. And there have always been movements to break it up. And even after the Civil War, you know, of course, the idea sort of goes away or gets repressed, as I say, this idea that maybe we shouldn't be one country, but it's returned in kind of strange and odd ways through the 20th century and even today. And so far they're fairly marginal. But I suspect, I suppose, that they might get more and more central to mainstream political discourse. And I think we've actually already started to see this in the time that I was working on the book.
- [10:49]
Mike Pesca
All right, that'll be interesting. And we're going to ignore most of it. Matt, your book's a spine, a clever spine that you could attach different arguments to tell me about 1 billion Americans and what we might not hear about for the rest of this conversation.
- [11:03]
Matt Iglesias
So, I mean, so much of 1 billion Americans is about looking at the logistics, right? Because obviously a billion is a higher number than 330. So people have questions about parking, transportation, housing, you know, where do people go? I love urban policy. I love transportation policy. So, you know, the book really sort of gets into all the nitty gritty, and there's a lot that you could learn and take away from it about, like how to improve transit systems and how to improve housing policy. Even if you do, don't ultimately end up embracing my big crazy idea. But, you know, I. I think here we're probably going to talk about, you know, the virtues of bigness versus the possibilities of split up, which is right at the beginning of my book, you know, sort of making the case for a bigger America. But a lot of it's about the details.
- [11:47]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. Okay. So, Richard, most of the arguments for secession is, well, then we will define new countries more in line with the thoughts and thinking and predilections of the residents. Or are the arguments against breaking up. How often do they rely on the economic? Like, no, we're better off together just because of our economic force.
- [12:09]
Richard Kreitner
That's definitely one strand of the thinking. The other is that it would just be very messy and possibly even violent. You know, the one time that. That anybody actually went through and tried this in the 1860s, it turned, you know, notably violent to an extent that would equate to eight millions dead today. So I think we have a very justifiable fear of secession, and I try not to be blithe about that. To the extent that I am arguing for secession or at least suggesting that we should consider it. It's really not to try to get down to these homogenous, these politically uniform polities. I think that can only lead to violence and certain forms of cleansing. My concern, my interest is that it might be that bringing things down to a more local level is simply more democratic and more efficient as a way of sorting through our many disputes than arguing over everything in Washington.
- [12:57]
Mike Pesca
Matt, what about what Richard was talking about? Just if you grow bigger, you get further away, the governed get further away from the governors, and that's a problem in terms of democracy.
- [13:10]
Matt Iglesias
So I actually really like this argument. You know, to me it resonates with the themes of my book, which is that it is, I think, totally true that if you want to find a really well governed country, you normally looking at like Finland or Singapore, Denmark, like really little places, people are really close to the issues. It's constructive in some ways. And then if you think though about, well, like, would we really want the United States to be like a tiny patchwork of little Finlands? Wouldn't that be sad? And I think it would be sad. Right. And the reason it would be sad though, right, is that the United States has never been, I think, the world's best governed country. But we have played a unique role in the world that, you know, New Zealand does not play. And it has not always gone perfectly well. But at critical moments, the United States of America has done really great things and we're stuck with the bigness and unwieldliness of the United States. But what we risk right now, as the Chinese economy grows larger than ours is being overtaken in the virtues of bigness.
- [14:17]
Mike Pesca
So, Richard, part, part of the American creed is this embrace of sprawl to some extent and diversity to a large extent. When you look at secessionist movements, are they a rejection of diversity or are they more of an assertion of diversity, essentially saying we're diverse in a way that's not being accommodated by the America that exists right now?
- [14:41]
Richard Kreitner
Yeah, I think they're more typically an assertion of diversity. I mean, and not all forms of diversity are good. You know, the South's argument for secession was that they were a diverse region. I don't like that they were, you know, I don't like what made them a diverse region. But it was an assertion of dissent from this kind of national norm that was forming in the north and in the West. The more interesting question to me is about sprawl, as you call it, or expansion, you know, in the 19th century. And what's interesting to me about the 1 billion Americans idea is these historical parallels where what I found is that every effort to make America greater or to make it larger, to expand, was always met with a secessionist movement. These were movements that were meant to make the country more united and they ended up making it less so. So the Louisiana Purchase, for instance, which we all, you know, celebrate as this kind of great nation building moment, was an attempt to basically squash Western separatist movements in the Mississippi River Valley. But all it created was this massive secessionist movement in the Northeast where New Englanders realized that they were about to lose power in this expanded Union and tried to secede from the Union, climaxing at the very end of the War of 1812. And I wonder. I've read one billion Americans over the weekend and I really, really enjoyed it, but I found that there was no discussion. I'd be really curious to hear you talk about this, Matt. No discussion of the political or constitutional democratic implications of this. You know, what would need to change constitutionally in order to make a country of this size work? You know, the House of Representatives is already way too small. It hasn't been expanded in over a century when the population was one fourth of what it is now. So I'd actually love to hear you talk about that.
- [16:26]
Matt Iglesias
Yeah, I mean, look, I think there is a need for. There has historically been a lot of tinkering with the American Constitution, and I think we need more of it going forward, you know, sort of one way or the other. The reform I'm actually most taken with is Lee Drutman came out with a book recently arguing quite forcefully that moving to more proportional representation type systems could alleviate a lot of the polarization dynamics in American politics. And I used to think that that was sort of unworkable or irrelevant in the Madisonian system with a single elected president. But he really convinced me that that's not right and that a thing that we should do that doesn't have such a high bar to change is to try to address the gerrymandering issue by pushing states to use proportional representation to elect their state legislatures and their members of Congress. And that helps generate a politics that's less sorted by region and it injects a little bit more complexity back into things. Also, trying to have, whether we're talking a billion or 330 million, trying to have just two political parties sort of encompass such a vast and sprawling country leads, I think, necessarily to a lot of discontentment.
- [17:44]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, but there's a lot of good political science, as you know, that says that Our first past the post system just generally adheres to two political parties. I don't know, if we don't change the system, we change the number of parties.
- [17:55]
Matt Iglesias
No, no, I mean, I agree, but I just think that is a system, it's changeable. Right. There's a provision of the Voting Rights act, the way it's written, that actually prohibits states from creating multi member districts. And they did that for very specific reasons related to a sort of a very particular fear. And they wrote in an overly broad way. And I think you could facilitate a shift away from first past the post for Maine, for example, has now adopted ranked choice voting and Massachusetts is considering it. And I would go further down that line. I think that's the. There's a lot I might change from the Constitution if it was blue sky. But working within the framework we have trying to move away from first past the post seems good.
- [18:38]
Mike Pesca
Now Richard, here is when I read your book, obviously the Civil War and that secessionist movement looms large, maybe so large that it, it precludes us from actually considering the good arguments that some secessionist movements may have raised. Now in general, usually, and this isn't so bad, this is human nature, a secessionist movement is essentially saying, no, we'd like to secede because we think we could get more resources for our people or whoever we define as, you know, the real people. But were there any in your survey of the different movements that actually raise good points, Virtuous, civically virtuous points?
- [19:16]
Richard Kreitner
Absolutely. I mean my heroes for the book are these disunion abolitionists who, you know, in Massachusetts and throughout the north from the 1830s to the 1850s were arguing for northern secession from the Union to protest, and not merely to protest, but to actually undermine the institution of slavery. Historians have kind of cast aspersions on this idea and accused them of favoring their own, you know, moral purity more than actually caring about the slaves, who would they. Who they would have relinquished into bondage. But when you actually look at what they were saying and what they thought, they really had a practical program for why northern secession would actually possibly lead to the end of slavery. And I think that's a very bold and courageous argument and possibly one that has something to say to us today when you know, the north was basically these abolitionists were observed that southern slave owners who basically had every had all control of the federal government in the years before the Civil War were still complaining that they didn't have enough. And we're constantly fighting unfairly in order to get their way. And the abolitionists were simply saying to Northerners that they should do the same thing, that they should stand up and play what we now call constitutional hardball and then fight dirty as well and say that the Union exists not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. And that end is liberty, actual liberty, not slave ownership liberty. And if it's not going to serve that end, then we should break it up and start a new country. And that might lead to the end of slavery.
- [20:43]
Mike Pesca
Are they huge countries doing better for their average citizens? It would seem to me that, you know, I don't know that China is. It seems certainly Russia to acquire. Its hugeness subsumed a lot of what are now independent states. Indonesia, you can make a case about that. I don't know. I don't know if the. I don't know if hugeness helps the average person.
- [21:05]
Matt Iglesias
Well, so there's, you know, two different.
- [21:08]
Mike Pesca
Right. The counterpoint is America seems to have. Right. Wouldn't you rather be an American?
- [21:13]
Matt Iglesias
America is very big. You know, we're doing well. So the United States is a very sparsely populated country. I mean, the bottom line, factual information I want people to know about this is that a billion Americans sounds like a lot, but if we had a billion, we would have the population density of France. We would have half the population density of Germany. And so basically the United States is. It's a great country, high standards of living. We've got a crazy president, but still, life is. Life is pretty good in the United States, notwithstanding all the rest. But it's an underpopulated country. We have lots and lots of room and lots of resources to have more people come here. Historically, our population grew quite rapidly because we, you know, have been welcoming to the world and that has slowed down for sort of fundamental reasons related to family life and bad choices related to immigration. But growth, I think will continue to help us. It'll help us repopulate and revitalize some of our struggling cities in the Midwest. It'll help us reverse the decline of the population in rural areas. We will lead on the international stage. And so much more.
- [22:26]
Mike Pesca
And in a minute, more with Richard Kreitner and Matt Iglesias.
- [22:37]
Tabs Advertiser
Tabs was built for finance teams managing complex B2B revenue. If your month end still depends on spreadsheets, manual billing adjustments or disconnected tools, you are not alone. Tabs, automates, billing, revenue, recognition and collections in one AI powered platform built for accuracy and control so finance can spend less time reconciling revenue and more time driving the business forward. Visit tabs.com to learn more.
- [23:07]
Mike Pesca
We're back with Richard Kreitner. His book is Break It Up, Secession Division, the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union and Matt Iglesias, author of A billion Americans or 1 billion Americans? The Case for Thinking Bigger. This is the debate that happened on the gist in the year 2020. Just as relevant or maybe you could say just as far fetched in 2020 as it is today. Richard, what do you think are the big problems with a big country?
- [23:34]
Richard Kreitner
I mean, as I say, I think, I think they're political ones. I feel like our representative democracy has withered in the century since the house has been expanded and in the times that the country has grown, I think that democracy, Democracy suffers. Yeah, I want to talk about, just touch on what Matt was just talking about. You know, I went to school in Canada, at McGill in Montreal. Canadians are very happy. It's a large country, physically a small country, fairly small by population. Canadians are very happy and prosperous people. And they don't have this kind of manic pursuit of greatness. They don't, they don't feel like they need to be number one. You know, and then I found that had as that there was a certain psychological burden that they did not have that most Americans have, you know, which I think is basically the burden of empire, the burden of always having to be number one. There's a great passage in the book where Matt's talking about we should focus more on family and community and less on work. I'm putting that crudely, but does that basically summarize it, Matt?
- [24:36]
Matt Iglesias
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
- [24:39]
Richard Kreitner
And I feel like that might not be, be consonant or, you know, you can't both make that transition towards more quality of life rather than the quantity of the goods that you produce or amass and maintain this insistence on being number one. And Canada is kind of a country that I think does very well without that kind of manic pursuit of greatness. So I think quality of life kind of withers and yes, and you know, this is my fear is that in trying adding in becoming a billion Americans, in making our country the same size as China, we become more and more like China, which I think would be, you know, altogether a loss.
- [25:23]
Mike Pesca
Okay, so the last question is let's look to the future and obviously we default to what's already happened. There was a secessionist movement, it failed and we have tripled in population. In fact, by my counter, I think we've tripled four times. The first census was about 4 million people up to 1236, then past 100 million, and now we're at 330 something million. So that's four triplings. I'm not going to ask which we will do next, secede or triple. But do you think that tripling will happen? And do you guys think that secession actually has a real chance? Matt, you could go first.
- [26:00]
Matt Iglesias
Secession. I'm super skeptical on will we triple our population again? You know, we've done it in the past. We' roughly tripled over the past 80 years. So I think we could do it again over the next 80. You know, will we? Actually, it all depends how many people buy my book. But I think it's perfectly realistic.
- [26:19]
Richard Kreitner
I mean, I think it is possible that the population is going to triple. As you say, we've done it four times. You know, the population is still increasing, if at a slower rate. Whether or not that comes as part of some kind of program like, like Madison talking about, I'm not so sure. My fear is that it actually would produce the, you know, the type of secession and disintegration that I'm talking about, if not paired or really preceded by the kind of constitutional reforms that I mentioned and that Matt mentioned as well. And it seems to me that if we want to avoid that scenario, regardless of what happens to population size, we do need to take a hard look at the Constitution. That's, that's the argument at the end of the book. You know, as I said before, it's all history. The one sort of prescriptive point is that I think that we need to look at the Constitution and probably even have another Constitutional Convention if we want to avoid some kind of fracturing. You know, we fought a civil war, wants to avoid breaking apart. My concern is that we may have to break apart in the future to avoid another civil war. And both those, I think, would be horrible situations and I hope that we can avoid them. And I think the way to do it is to think seriously about the structures that have gotten us to the, you know, what seems like the end of the road as far as our present system goes.
- [27:33]
Mike Pesca
Richard Kreitner is the author of Break It Secession Division and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union. And Matt Inglesias is the author of One Billion Americans the Case for Thinking Bigger. Richard. Matt. Oh, and they both have excellent beards. Gentlemen, thank you so much.
- [27:48]
Matt Iglesias
Thank you.
- [27:49]
Richard Kreitner
Thank you very much.
- [27:58]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. Corey War produces the gist. Kathleen Sykes runs the gist list. Ben Astaire is our booking producer and Jeff Craig runs our socials. Michelle Pesca oversees it all. Benevolently improve and thanks for listening.
- [28:20]
Tabs Advertiser
Tabs was built for finance teams managing complex B2B revenue. If your month end still depends on spreadsheets, manual billing adjustments or disconnected tools, you are not alone. Tabs automates billing, revenue, recognition and collections in one AI powered platform built for accuracy and control so finance can spend less time reconciling revenue and more time driving the business forward. Visit tabs.com to learn more.