Abdul El-Sayed is a physician, an author, the former Detroit health commissioner, a candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, and most importantly, a former contributor to Current Affairs. At the recent Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans, he joined editors Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Skopic to discuss the Democratic Party’s deep unpopularity, why Medicare for All remains a moral and economic imperative, the bipartisan silence surrounding the genocide in Gaza, and why all U.S. military aid—offensive and defensive—should end.

Nathan J. Robinson

We will talk about the great state of Michigan, but first I want to ask you about polling that recently came out on the popularity of the Democratic Party. The good news is that the agenda of Donald Trump is wildly unpopular. People don’t want to see their neighbors deported and the economy destroyed. People don’t generally like cruelty or genocide. This is a positive about U.S. public opinion. However, the only thing less popular than Donald Trump’s agenda is the mainstream Democratic Party. You have consistently, since your first gubernatorial campaign—back how many years ago to the day?

Abdul El-Sayed

Seven years ago.

Robinson

Seven years ago to the day. We, including Max Alvarez of the Real News Network, were following you and your campaign around, and you were consistently a critic of the Democratic establishment. I want your explanation as to why, despite Trump’s unpopularity, the only thing more unpopular is the Democrats.

El-Sayed

I think it’s a confluence of probably two trends that are hitting each other all at the same time. The first is, I think the real divide in our politics is not left and right. I think the real divide in our politics right now is between people who are locked out and have felt locked out for a very long time, and the people who have been doing the locking out. And too often, you’ve got leaders on both sides of the aisle—both parties—who have been doing the locking out. I think people are very frustrated by them.

On the Republican side, even though Donald Trump is now himself the establishment when it comes to the Republican Party—he has executed a full MAGA takeover of Republicans—people still don’t associate him with the Republican elite that have done the locking out, even though he is actively locking so many people out. But on the other side of it, you’ve got Democratic elites who refuse to give up power to the broader swaths of their party who are demanding something different. And what’s worse right now is when you look at all the failures, both of the party to win elections they say they’ve been desperately trying to win, and then at the failure to just [speak to] the very basic truths that we’re seeing being perpetrated by our government, whether that is sending our money abroad to perpetrate a genocide on the people of Gaza or what ICE is so clearly doing to devastate families and communities across our country—you look at that and you say, why? You all don’t even see the truth for truth, let alone offer a consistent and real opposition to what this individual was saying. And on top of that, you all have been locking us out since way before Donald Trump ever descended that hideous golden escalator.

So the hard part is that we continue to get pressed into this dichotomy of you’re either for Democrats or for Donald Trump. No, I am for people having the basic means of a dignified life. I am for our government working efficiently, effectively, and in our name. I am for the democratic process actually working for what people vote for. And right now, that puts me profoundly against Donald Trump and, unfortunately, also puts me against a lot of the elites in the Democratic Party who continue to plaster the big “D” on their chest and say there is no Democratic Party without me. And what I’m trying to envision in this race is a Democratic Party that is honest with its electorate, that recognizes that people demand an economy that is not bought off by corporations, that actually delivers for them, that they demand the freedom from being oppressed by healthcare companies in the form of a premium or a deductible, and that they demand the freedom of knowing that there is protection under the law. And I think we can offer those things if we are willing to shed a lot of these old models that have not been serving us very well.

Alex Skopic

Yes, and on the topic of shedding old models, one of the big distinctions between these establishment Democrats that everyone is sick of and yourself, and a handful of others coming up, is that you’ve made Medicare for All one of your signature issues. It’s been 10 years now since Medicare for All really came into the mainstream, and some people have either left it by the wayside or actively say they’re against it. So why is Medicare for All so important to you, and why are those people wrong?

El-Sayed

I come at politics as a public health professional, and public health offers you the worldview to be asking, what outcomes does society inflict on people? If people are healthy, that means you probably have a society that is promoting their health. And if you have people who are unhealthy, society is probably doing something to hurt their health. I know definitely that there are things that individuals can do, but let’s be clear, the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, and the healthcare you have access to or don’t have access to in our country—these are functions of a politics, and outcomes in a society that then profoundly impact people’s lives. So that’s the way I look at the world.

What we have right now is a system in which our air is being poisoned by smokestacks from corporations. Our water is being poisoned because of what corporations put into that water or because of our failure to keep up our basic infrastructure. Our food system has been completely corrupted by big agriculture—again, corporations—that sell us ultra-processed foods and tell us that’s the only thing we can afford, because they’ve made all the whole, healthier foods unaffordable, and we have a healthcare system that locks people out if they cannot pay. Now, a lot of what I’ve talked about here is about an economy that has been bought off by corporations. But let’s be clear, anybody who wants to differentiate between the economy and healthcare does not recognize the basic foundational truth that a fifth of our economy is healthcare in this country. And so if you want to fix the most unaffordable aspect of life for people, it’s addressing healthcare. Because healthcare has this unique thing where you can ignore it until you absolutely can’t. It is an inelastic demand curve that shows itself stochastically in your life—if you want to use complicated language.

Skopic

Can you break down what that means? Because I’m not confident I know what it means.

El-Sayed

It means that all of a sudden, shit can go wrong, and you have to pay for it. And that’s the thing: you can’t really predict when shit is going to go wrong. And if it goes wrong, it is so critical to your life that you have no choice but to do your best to pay for it. Otherwise, life is done. And because of that, this issue, in the ways it inflicts upon people, has rendered a society where you have $220-225 billion in medical debt. That is more than the GDP of the majority of US states. So yes, this is an economic issue, and it’s foundational to everything else. So for me, guaranteeing people healthcare is about buying people out of that risk and also recognizing that in the richest, most powerful country in the world, we for damn sure can get about trying to make sure everybody is de-risked around having access to healthcare, as we start to take on all the economic challenges that make them sick in the first place.

Robinson

Public opinion polls show that the majority of Americans—in fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans—are on board with government-guaranteed healthcare, fulfilling a basic right to healthcare. But you talk about Medicare for All, and Medicare for All is more controversial. You probably often have the experience of talking to people who have many complaints about the U.S. health care system but don't think we're ready for a Medicare for All system. And we recently had on the program the wonderful Dr. Elisabeth Potter, who has done a lot of great work exposing what doctors have to deal with with insurance companies. She’s one of the leading critics of the private insurance industry. But it’s interesting, because we asked her, well, how should the American healthcare system operate? She said, as an American, we haven’t had a single-payer system—[there’s] this idea that it would be too radical of a change. She said, I believe in competition and the market—I think what we need is more competition, and physicians should be able to own hospitals. She was hesitant to endorse a full Medicare for All system. When you want to talk to someone who was very sympathetic to all the complaints but is not ready for Medicare for All, what do you say?

El-Sayed

I’m hearing someone who’s 100 percent ready for Medicare for All. You know why? Because the choice we want in healthcare is not the choice of insurance companies. The choice we want in healthcare is the choice for doctors and hospitals and clinics and sources of care. And right now, the private health insurance system has so corrupted our healthcare system that they gatekeep the access that you have. What’s even worse is that this happens at the provider level, which means that if you’re a physician who owns a private practice, you actually can’t compete with hospitals. Those hospitals will negotiate better rates per unit of care they provide in ways that force that private practitioner to sell.

So this is the interesting thing. Medicare for All is not a government takeover of healthcare. Medicare for All is the government freeing the healthcare market to actually operate in fair ways. Everybody comes to this with their equal token to pay for their healthcare that’s given to them by the government. The healthcare system remains private. So here’s the problem, though: right now, with your health insurance, you get different kinds of tokens, and you can only use them in certain hospitals. So if you’re out of network, what that means is, “I’m sorry, but your insurance token is no good here. You can’t use it to pay here.” They basically gatekept the thing that you actually came for, which is your access to health care. So look, personally, I think it’s both. We want a healthcare system that does not introduce you to the risk of getting sick and force you to pay financially for that, that provides every single person access to care that’s not going to break their bank, and that allows the best doctors and the best hospitals to compete and succeed based on the quality of care that they provide. Medicare for All does exactly that without the interference of the insurance system. So I actually think that with Dr. Potter, I’d love to sit down and say, listen, if you believe in the market, I want to introduce you to many of your colleagues who work in private practice and are getting shafted by insurance companies who are paying them literally 10 cents on the dollar that they pay the large healthcare corporation, because the large healthcare corporation is big enough to negotiate a sweetheart deal with the insurance companies.

Robinson

And if people want the case in 300 pages with endnotes, the book you wrote with Dr. Micah Johnson is also excellent from Oxford University Press. Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide goes through every single piece of this in detail and refutes every single anti-Medicare for All argument. You’ve gone through this at great length because you were an academic before.

El-Sayed

I’ll tell you, what I really appreciate about you all is that you guys are in the business of educating the broader public and offering information. Writing books is a part of that too. One of the things we have to recognize is that the reason a lot of these misconceptions exist is that the insurance companies spend huge amounts of money actively mis- and disinforming the public any time there’s a conversation about Medicare for All. It is part of their business model. They succeed because they disinform the public to make them think that somehow, if we pass Medicare for All, we’d all lose things, when really, all we have to gain, in so many cases, is life itself.

Robinson

Actually, people should listen to the interview we did with Wendell Potter, who was the insurance industry whistleblower a few years ago who explained exactly all the myths that he helped spread and exactly how they do it, the exact playbook.

Skopic

I want to ask about the other side when it comes to combating corporate power, the insurance companies, and the hospital administrations. There’s the political side, which you’re working on, and there’s also the labor side. We’ve seen across the country strikes of nurses and hospital workers who are underpaid, who are working too many hours, and who are not staffed well enough. So I want to ask, what is your relationship like there? You’re running to represent Michigan, which is UAW (United Auto Workers) country. What is your relationship like with those unions and with the labor movement overall, and if you get into the Senate, what will you do for labor?

El-Sayed

I believe that you should be able to join or form a union in every sector of American life. I believe that unions are one of the most important bulwarks for the dignity of work in a moment when AI is coming for a lot of that. And I say that as somebody who's been a proud card-carrying member of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers), of the UAW, and of the National Writers Union. And I don’t just encourage people to join unions. I have myself been a proud member of unions, and I’m never going to forget, my wife was a member of her house officers union when she was a training physician, and after the birth of our first child, she had some complications, and they were trying to get her to come back to work before it was going to be physically safe for her to do that, and she turned to her union. And you’ve got to imagine, this is somebody who’s being compelled to come back to work in a hospital who just gave birth and cannot do it for health reasons. It was her union that stood up and fought for her. And so the value of unions and the impact of unions in building the kind of America when we were our most prosperous cannot be oversold. I think if we’re serious about having the kind of economy that is both productive and equitable and produces value that returns for everyday people, we’re going to have to go back to unions, and that means that we’ve got to stand up for legislation that empowers them to form and empowers them against the corporations that they're so often organized against.

Skopic

And what does that look like in terms of legislation? Is that the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act? Is that card check?

El-Sayed

I think the PRO Act is a really good start. I think as we start getting into unionization in the service sector, we’re going to have to think about the kinds of challenges that come up. One of the ways that the fight for unions has been curtailed in the first place has been to make it illegal for unions to carry out the full extent of possible actions in certain sectors, and I think we really need to reconsider that. I’d love to see a doctors union. One of the best ways to stand up to big healthcare and huge consolidating healthcare corporations that have turned into localized monopolies across our country is to make sure that doctors themselves can stand up and unionize. And if that happens, I think you’re going to start seeing both far safer hospitals and far more equitable healthcare.

Robinson

I want to go back to what you mentioned briefly, but I want to go into more depth on the unfolding Gaza genocide. And you said the word “genocide.”

El-Sayed

Because let’s be clear, what do you use? What is the word? Well, for folks who don’t want to use this word, my question is, what do you call killing 60,000-plus people—18,500 of them kids, at least—using food and starvation as a weapon of war, rendering their homes unlivable, bombing out their schools and hospitals, and then trying to push them into other countries because they happen to speak the same language? I'm just like, what is the word for that? And if people will hesitate on the question of intent, I understand that the vast majority of people in Israel do not want genocide for the Palestinian people, but I also understand that the people in power have articulated an antipathy for the Palestinian people in a way that connects the dots and demonstrates intentionality. So look, I’m just using the word that describes the thing.

Robinson

Well, and the word that you are using is also the word that is now being used by every mainstream human rights organization: Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel. It’s a very long list of organizations that have, and each one has produced a report explaining why they have reached the conclusion that what is going on is genocide. I emailed every U.S. senator’s press office a week ago [asking about this], because I’d seen Bernie Sanders on CNN. Marjorie Taylor Green said it was genocide, and Bernie was cagey. And I know you’re an admirer of Bernie, and we’re admirers of Bernie, but he was cagey. He would say, well, it doesn’t matter what you call it.

It does matter what you call it, in some sense, because there are legal implications to the obligations that we have to stop genocides. But I got only one response from any U.S. senator’s press office, and it was just a “we care about all the Palestinians.” I wanted to follow up with what the human rights organizations say. No U.S. senator would say what you just said. And so let me ask you, why is it that you think there is such a reluctance, even for someone like Bernie, who has done more than anyone in the Senate to try and cut off weapons to the genocide? Why is there such a reluctance to endorse a mainstream human rights conclusion?

El-Sayed

Well, I’ll tell you this, I have to admire all of Bernie’s work. And also, when you look at the work he’s doing to try and organize opposition to military aid for Israel, no U.S. senator has done more on that front. And while we might have disagreements about what we call it, I’ve got to just admire the work and the effort he’s put in. And also, as a matter of legislative strategy, I think that sometimes Bernie will choose language carefully to try and build the biggest coalition around action. And I do think that’s a part of the job.

I also think that there’s legislation, and then there’s the broader public who elect their representatives. And I think the hard part is, if we do not comport with the thing everybody sees and they hear their elected representatives saying something different, it breaks public trust in democracy and the democratic process and their elected officials generally. And the thing I think is so important for us to understand is that, just like we talked about the role of the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry in obfuscating and disinforming the public about what happens, you have collections of MAGA billionaires, many of them backed by the most right-wing, messianic religious fundamentalists, who have amassed a lot of money to disinform the public, specifically in electorally important ways.

And so, I want to be clear about what AIPAC is. Number one, AIPAC and the Jewish people are two very different things, and I think everybody has to understand that, and we have to talk about it. There is no space for antisemitism. There is no space for equating either AIPAC or the actions of the Israeli government with Judaism and the Jewish people. AIPAC is about a very particular foreign policy end funded by MAGA billionaires and backed by messianic evangelicals. And what AIPAC has done is they spent a whole lot of money in elections to reinforce a language that dehumanizes the Palestinian people and renders the question of Israel a bipartisan consensus. But here’s the interesting thing: you have a political consensus that’s forming among the general public that this is a genocide; that it’s crazy that in an era where our kids’ schools are crumbling and kids here are starving, we are sending our tax dollars abroad to perpetrate it, but you have a maintained political consensus that says that we cannot actually talk about it. And I just think that democracy works best when our elected officials are speaking to the things that the public is seeing and rendering solutions for that.

To me, my solution has always been that our tax dollars should not be used to fund foreign militaries. And I say that about Israel. I say that about Egypt, where my family immigrated from. I say that about Jordan. I say it about Saudi Arabia. I’m pretty consistent. And if we’re not funding foreign militaries, that includes offensive, defensive, or nuclear weapons of all sorts. I don’t pay my tax dollars to buy weapons for other people. That’s not a thing I think any of us are like, yes, that’s a great use of my tax dollars. I see that my neighbor over there is struggling, but I definitely want to make sure that we’re buying weapons for other people. It makes zero sense.

Skopic

And in fact, it’s connected to the healthcare struggle, because we are buying the weapons instead of healthcare.

El-Sayed

That’s exactly it. As our conservative friends always tell us, money is fungible. And if that is true, then every dollar spent on a bomb for someone else is a dollar not spent on healthcare for someone here. Every dollar spent on a bomb somewhere else is a dollar not spent on our infrastructure over here. Every dollar spent for a bomb somewhere else is a dollar not spent to provide food for a child who’s struggling here. And I’m running for senator from Michigan, where there are many starving children, many crumbling schools, and many failing hospitals that I would desperately like my tax dollars to be spent to fix.

Robinson

You just reminded me there, in the New York Democratic mayoral debate, all the candidates were asked, what foreign country are you going to go to first when you’re mayor of New York? And everyone said, I can’t wait to visit the holy land. And then Mamdani was like, I’m going to be the mayor of New York. I’m going to stay in New York and care about New York. And you’re like, I’m the senator from Michigan.

El-Sayed

I went to med school in New York, and it’s interesting. New York is the one place in America where you can go and can quite possibly taste food from any other country or hear a language spoken in any other country in the world. You really can just get a taste of the whole world by traveling the five boroughs in New York.

Robinson

But in Michigan—I was just in Dearborn recently. And I tell you, I think Dearborn is the place the American Right doesn’t want to talk about. All the things they say they believe in, like family values and hard work—it’s like the most wholesome place. Nobody drinks, so everyone just eats pastries late at night. It’s this incredible, beautiful place. And it’s the only majority-Muslim city in the country. All the scare stories—I’m like, you can’t talk about Dearborn because the moment you acknowledge its existence, so many of the right-wing myths just crumble.

El-Sayed

And that’s the thing. America is this incredible place that, for a long time, has created space for people from all over the world to come and embrace a value and become something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. That’s the reason that my folks came over, and that’s the reason your folks came over, from two very different parts of the world. And the thing about it is that I grew up in this house where my dad was an Egyptian immigrant, and my stepmom, Jackie, is a Daughter of the American Revolution. In any given summer, I’d hang out with my teta [grandmother]abroad in Egypt and my grandma, Judy, on a lake in Montcalm County, Michigan. And the thing about it is one of the things I learned as a full-blooded, born-and-raised American is that love and that love are the same, and the thing that America has always known and always been about is that’s a truth—that’s a truism. And I think you have this right-wing movement that’s trying to say that some people’s love and some people’s value and some people’s bodies and some people’s existence are more important than others. And I think it is high past time for us as Democrats to take that on, because I know the truth is on our side. And it’s this weird thing right now where people are like, well, they’re going to self-indict, so you really don’t have to say anything. And I just don’t subscribe to the tactic of politics where you don’t say anything. Because what’s the point of doing this if you’re unable to just name some very basic truths?

Skopic

Yes. And on that note, you mentioned a little while ago that there’s no place for antisemitism in U.S. politics, which is quite right. But the other side of that is that Islamophobia is in U.S. politics quite a lot. I follow you on Twitter. I see you dealing with people making horrible comments all the time. Same with Zohran in New York, and Omar Fateh in Minneapolis. Where does that come from, do you think? And how do we overcome that?

El-Sayed

I’ve been Abdul my whole life. Nothing I hear or see on Twitter is something I’ve never heard before. And there’s a lot of fear. There is anxiety about what is unknown. I think one of the amazing things that America has been able to do is to make the unknown known. I think every politician who’s ever come before me is going out to people and talking about the things that we all need together, whether you’re a Muslim American in Dearborn or whether you’ve never met a Muslim in your life and you live in Escanaba, Michigan. You still need healthcare; you still need a good job; you still want to know that you can afford your home or stay in your home. And it just might be that this Muslim American dude with a very odd personal life story might be the guy who really cares to give it to you. And I’m okay with the fact that people come at this with a certain amount of skepticism, a certain amount of fear. I don’t expect that people will be able to surpass that on their own. I take it very seriously, and I’m grateful and honored to be able to do work that is about introducing different parts of America to itself, because that was the life I grew up in.

So, personally, I knew what I was in for, and having grown up here and tasted my fair share of that, I know that all of that, that complex between fear and hate and anger, the only antidote to it is love. It’s proximity, it’s engagement, and sometimes it’s humor. And I try to bring all of that to what we do, and what that allows me to do sometimes is to take other people’s fear, hatred, and anger and demonstrate what we can be. If you face that down with a little bit of humor, with a lot of love, and without the same fear—without going back and entrenching into your own corner, but in a way where you engage it—you see it for what it is, and you try to heal it, and that’s what I’m hoping we can do both in the movement. I always tell people, you might hate me, but I love you enough to make sure that I’m fighting for your healthcare. I just want you to know Medicare for All doesn’t mean Medicare for some. It means for you. I want you to have better healthcare, a better job, and better housing, and I want you to face down the idea, when you’re putting your head on your pillow, that there’s some dude named Abdul El-Sayed, who you might fear and hate, who really wants to make your life better. Because that’s the only way we get past it. So I get it. I understand. But the only way around it is through it. So we’re going to keep walking forward with love and hope and joy and a bit of humor.

Robinson

One thing we’ve always liked about you is that you said you fight for people, and we like that you don’t back down and you actually have to fight. And even Alex was saying to me recently that someone online made some jihadist comment, and you were like, maybe a jihad on medical debt. And I was like, good. He doesn’t fear those people taking it and putting it in a New York Post headline. “Candidate promises jihad on medical debt.”

El-Sayed

Take it and put it everywhere. Because you know what, I think a lot of people would sign on.

Robinson

Jihad on medical debt!

El-Sayed

A lot of people would be like, I’m joining.

Robinson

But listen, as I mentioned, in 2018 for your campaign for governor of Michigan, we followed you around. The house was packed, and AOC was there that weekend. She’s the only person I’ve seen speak publicly who is better than you at speaking publicly. I couldn’t believe what a good public speaker she was. Those were such exciting events. Those were really, really incredible. But then you didn’t win, and you must have thought a lot about this. I saw this campaign, and I was like, I love all the policy, I love the feeling in this room, and then I saw you doing 40 hours a week of donor calls just to keep the thing going. And I was like, how can a candidacy like this win? So obviously, in the time since, you’ve reflected, and you’re going at this again after that experience of putting all of those hours in and then not getting over the line. What have you learned? How are you going to win?

El-Sayed

Number one, I think the structure of these races matters a lot. In the last race there were three of us. There was the current governor, and then there was a guy who’s a current congressman named Shri Thanedar, who spent $12 million pretending to be me, and that cost us quite a bit. And then the other thing I learned is that a campaign is an intervention on our politics, whether it wins or it doesn’t win. And I think when I ran in 2018, we built something, and that something has since manifested in different ways. And so it’s not like I'm starting from scratch again. When I go around the state, almost everybody I see, even if they don’t remember exactly what we did, is like, I remember you and remember what you were talking about. And so now I have 10 years in public service where I’ve been talking about the same things, and that consistency matters a lot. And so I’m not picking up from scratch again. I’m picking up from where we left off. And I think that that really matters.

The other thing I’ll tell you is that in that time, I said something I think people were just not ready for, which is that Donald Trump himself is not the disease of our politics. He’s just the worst symptom of the disease. The disease is the system that allows corporations to buy and sell politicians to rig the system against us, and that’s only gotten worse. And I’ll tell you, as a doctor, if you only take on the symptom, it only comes back worse, and that’s exactly where we are right now. And so I hate to say it, but time has demonstrated a certain truth of what I was trying to say back then, and I’ve been saying the same thing consistently. I think for a lot of people in Michigan, they’re like, we tried that other thing, and it didn’t really quite work, so maybe let’s try this way.

And then the other part of it is, to the point that you asked, I was asking people to trust me when they didn’t know who I was necessarily. Now, people kind of know me. I’ve got receipts. Not only have I been saying the same things, but when I got the opportunity to go back to public service, I led Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services. We built an air quality monitoring system that gives you real-time information about the air quality in your community. We put Narcan vending machines in nearly 100 different locations. We erased about $700 million in medical debt for a county that was ranking number eight nationwide. So all I keep doing is the work. And when I’m asking people to support me, they’re like, well, he said he was about a certain set of things, and for the last 10 years, he’s just been about those things. And I think that consistency, particularly when your name is Abdul, matters a lot. And I’ll tell you one thing about my name that is a real positive: when you hear my name, you don’t soon forget it. And in an era where people need to know who you are, I think that matters.

Robinson

You are one of the one-name candidates now. You want to end up being a Bernie or an Abdul. In that article that I wrote about you back then, one of the things I said was, I don’t trust young, flashy Rhodes Scholar politicians naturally.

El-Sayed

Neither do I.

Robinson

I don’t trust 40 Under 40 list people, but you came along with a list of very specific things that you’re going to do, and “here’s how these things are going to improve your life—I’ve worked in the health department, and this is what I did at the health department.” So, like you say, you have receipts.

El-Sayed

I could have made very different decisions in my life. I grew up spending a lot of my time at the knees of my grandmother, who never got to go to school. There are a lot of people with big, flashy degrees who assume that their value is about what some pseudo-meritocratic system says about their value. I learned very quickly that my value is about my values, and I am grateful to carry the same values that my illiterate grandmother carried. And so that dictates that when you get certain privileges, you do different things with your privileges. So, I’ve always tried to say, look, I know what my life would have been if not for the opportunities I got. I watched my cousins live very different lives, and they were just as capable as I was. My job is to build more opportunity for people who don’t have it, and that’s what I’ve tried to make my life about. And I see this as part of that.

Robinson

You didn’t consider McKinsey.

El-Sayed

I did not.

Robinson

Well, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, I thank you so much for returning to Current Affairs.

El-Sayed

Always a pleasure, gentlemen. I appreciate you. It’s nice to get to do this in your backyard.

Robinson

Yes, welcome to New Orleans! We hope New Orleans has treated you well.

El-Sayed

I love the town. It’s no Dearborn, but—

Robinson

Don’t come back, because you have a race to win.

El-Sayed

You are all welcome to Michigan anytime. Come follow us. Michigan is a great state. I just don’t recommend coming in February.

Robinson

Okay. Well, we wouldn’t have recommended coming in August. They decided this.

El-Sayed

So maybe you need to come in February, then.

Robinson

I got a big puffy coat.

El-Sayed

I will tell you this. At some point, you can always put more clothes on. You just can’t take more clothes off. And with this humidity, you’re like, I’m done. This is it. I’m going to sweat through the shirts and the next one and the next one.

Skopic

Oh, that’s real.

El-Sayed

This is why I’m not wearing a tie.

Robinson

Didn’t the RNC come after you for something about sweat recently? They’re like, sweaty Abdul.

El-Sayed

Everybody makes a big deal about, why do you always wear a black V-neck? I’m like, guys, it’s the most versatile shirt you can ever have. Number one, it doesn’t show sweat. Number two, you can put a jacket on it. It looks suitably dressed up. You can take it down. You look suitably dressed down. Number three, most importantly, it’s comfortable. Number four, it’s what I'd wear if I wasn’t running for office. And one of the things I said this time around is too many candidates cosplay a politician. And I felt the last time I ran, I needed to wear a suit, look professional, etc. I’m like, looking professional looks different all the time. And you’re just wildly uncomfortable. This time around, I’m like, no, this is who I am.

Robinson

I think I remember you attempting to do suits and ties, and the tie was just not working.

El-Sayed

It’s just not. Sometimes you have to wear a suit and tie, and I’m happy to get dressed up in a suit and tie. Just not every day.

Robinson

I remember this. I remember it did not look comfortable.

El-Sayed

I’m trying to find a happy medium. I don’t have to be John Fetterman about it. At least the man is not lying about how he would show up. I assume his wardrobe is authentic to who he is, and mine is authentic to who I am. If you saw me on a weekend, maybe the one edit would be I’d probably be wearing a ball cap. But at some point people have got to see your face.

Robinson

Well, you’ve got a flight to catch, but we thank you so much for coming by.

El-Sayed

I appreciate you. Thank you, gentlemen, so much.

Transcript edited byPatrick Farnsworth.