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The Realignment
560 | Nancy Scola: How to Win the New Ideas War in Washington
01:03:02
Nancy Scola, Contributing Writer at Politico Magazine, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Nancy discuss the varied factors that determine which new ideas win out in Washington, the role of the mainstream and alternative media ecosystems in shaping politics and policy, the case study of former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and the revival of the antitrust movement, and which ideas are on the rise in Washington six months into the second Trump administration.
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- [00:02]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment hey everyone, welcome back to the show. After my fourth of July break, I usually break a little later in the summer, but this whole new father thing motivated me to go a little earlier this year, so I'm looking forward to publishing on a regular schedule the rest of the summer. For today's episode, I'm joined by journalist and political magazine contributing writer Nancy Scola. Nancy and I discuss something near and dear to the Realignment's heart what explains which ideas and figures win out in D.C. and how does the evolving media ecosystem, both legacy, alternative and new, shape that debate? We cover a lot of topics in this conversation, so I really hope you enjoy the episode. Before we dive in, I wanted to share a quick job announcement in the news you can use category for anyone interested in diving deeper into the topic. Pythagorea Element spends increasing amounts of time focused on that topic being, of course, abundance. Back in March, I mentioned that Open Philanthropy was hiring for the leadership of its Abundance and Growth Fund. They ended up hiring Matt Clancy and Matt is now hiring four new members for his team. They're seeking one to two generalists plus one to three specialists with expertise in housing policy, energy infrastructure, state capacity, healthcare, economic dynamism, high school, immigration, or building Abundance Progress Studies communities. They are seeking to expand their $120 million plus program that's focused on accelerating economic growth and reducing the cost of living through strategic grant making and research. You can apply to the job for full consideration by July 27th. Also note that if you know anyone who's a good fit, you can earn $5,000 if your referral results in higher. All of that is linked in the show notes. Once again, hope you enjoy this conversation. Nancy Scola, welcome to the Realignment.
- [02:04]
B
Thank you Marshall. Thank you for having me.
- [02:06]
A
Very excited to chat with you. We're going to hit a bunch of different things. We're going to discuss the results of the New York Mayor election where Zoran Mangani won the ranked choice voting primary for the Democratic nomination through the specific lens of a lot of reporting you've done around Lina Khan. She was the FTC chair and notably she campaigned with Sauron in a way that is sort of different than the way she's approached things before. So we'll talk about it. Specifically for that line, I'm not going to ask you to talk about different boroughs and different different outcomes there. But at a broader level, this conversation is about something that's really obsessed me in the past few years, which is the way that ideas flow in D.C. and why these debates are a weird combination of electoral results, elections and personalities, but also the fact that you have people in power who have to make decisions around big topics that voters might not necessarily be even interested in. So maybe we just sort of start there. How would you explain to a policy and politics interested listener or viewer what the idea of ideas flowing on Washington even means in the first place?
- [03:17]
B
Just to give a little bit of background for folks who might not be familiar with me, I tend to write about technology, politics, public policy, a little bit of economics, long form journalists, sort of traditional long form journalists. Recently I realized that what I really write about is this idea of idea flow in Washington. How do ideas get started? Sort of seeded into this, you know, the public discussion around politics and policy. What ideas thrive, what ideas die, and what are the various factors that fit into each of those situations. And it's very situational. It depends on the topic, it depends on the personalities involved and the. One of the, you know, as a, as a quote unquote traditional journalist, I'm supposed to be a little bit cynical about how politics in Washington work. But one of the defining things that I've been in Washington for a long time, one of the defining things is that ideas do matter. If someone has a new idea, people seem to be attracted to it, it can gain traction, it can be put into practice, and it can be tested in the real world of politics and government. So just studying that idea of how ideas get started, whether they succeed or not, it fascinates me. And you mentioned Alina Khan. I think she's sort of a prime example of somebody who came out of nowhere, came out of law school, had a new idea, got some people interested in it, and became chair of the FTC on the basis of that single notion.
- [04:33]
A
Yeah, and Linacon is the perfect example here because I sometimes get in unhelpful wars with YouTube commenters who I just beef with unnecessarily because their thoughts trigger me. And a thought that really triggered me, that Lina Khan's example was the perfect riposte, is that during some episode about a year or so back, I was talking to this wonky person about this wonky idea that I just knew really mattered. But this wasn't like an incredibly high performing episode. This wasn't as if this was what the people were desperately looking to spend their Monday morning commutes listening to. But this person basically said like, this stuff doesn't matter. It's just sort of like think tank people sort of like celebrating each other to no avail. And I actually literally replied with, if you read Lina Khan's CEO Journal review essay or it's not just an essay, it's like a long piece. She wrote this in 2018, and I did an interview with her, especially when she was definitely like, new to media. She wasn't a political figure. I could see a bunch of people commenting, who's this random person you're bringing on the show? This is super wonky. This doesn't really entertain or excite or there are a bunch of people who do antitrust work that are far more interesting than her able to present things. Better yet, Lena's idea actually transformed this debate. So please jump into my comment beefs and sort of like talk about Lena from that perspective.
- [05:59]
B
I'm going to purchase a little bit from the side. And I. Part of what I do in my work is I teach journalism. I teach journalism at Georgetown on occasion. And one of the topics we talk about is what makes for a good source. When I'm looking for a source to base a story on, base an investigation on what makes the sort of person that I will rely upon and go back to again and again. And we talk about the idea of, first of all, credentials, credentials matter still in Washington. And you look at Lena Khan, she Yale Law School was sort of an easy entry point for folks to say, okay, this is somebody who maybe we should pay a little bit of attention to. The second part that we look for in a source is somebody who is consistent. Every time you go back to them, they have the same explanation for the same topic for the same policy questions that I have. And you say, okay, again, this is somebody who I'm willing to base the story on because I know when somebody goes and interviews them after the story runs, they're going to give the same sort of explanation for their ideas for the events that we're reporting on. I know that seems a little bit obscure when we're talking about Lina Khan, but the idea with her was, first of all, she was credentialed. Second of all, every time she was asked about these topics that she made her name on, she gave coherent explanations in consistent ways. And that you can look at that and say, shouldn't everyone who's a policy expert on a particular topic be fairly consistent? And they're not. They're just part of reporting is talking to people on one day and then the next day they sort of changed their tune a bit. And she never did that. So she was a consistent source. She was, well, credentialed. She's personable. And I think in Washington, it still matters very much if people look at someone and say, okay, that's someone I can relate to. She seems like an understandable human being. I get why her family and friends love her. And I think with Lina Khan, the people. When folks on Capitol Hill would meet her, some of her most vociferous critics would meet her and say, okay, this is a reasonable person, even if I dislike her politics or a policy perch down to my bones.
- [08:03]
A
And just to put a little more meat on the bones of the meat you've already provided. I love your point around consistency, because the way that I would describe this, I've started tweeting more, but I was a longtime lurker on Twitter, and one thing you really pick up when you lurk on Twitter, when you're following the relevant people, is you could see people pivoting on things. You could see when someone was known, for one thing, they start doing some light pivots and the pivot really accelerates and they're doing some other thing. And I think that's how I would think of the consistency thing. Because the thing is, when I see someone pivoting to something, it's not that the thing they're pivoting to is incorrect or it's not that it's not an idea worth exploring. But I'm usually interested in actually talking to the person who was already there beforehand or was sort of like a little more rooted in it. So I think that's just like a way that I would operationalize that idea. Something I'd love to ask you about, though. So many questions from your opening. Let's talk about credentials, because I should note that this episode, you've been a listener for a while, we follow each other on Twitter. But this episode came about because I put out a tweet about some reporting that indicated that a big issue that emerged during the debate over whether or not the US should bomb Iran was over the fact that Tucker Carlson did not have that much influence over Trump and the administration anymore. And Tucker is the apex of an independent, alternative media, decentralized ecosystem that has really emerged over the past few years. And on paper, this faction of the maga, right, had a lot of big wins. Trump is inviting them into the White House press room. They're doing all these events during the inauguration, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But then it did not end up mattering when it came to the actual debate. And the specific quote that I was referencing said President Trump did not See Tucker on Fox anymore, therefore Fox did not matter, therefore his perspective wasn't really included. And my point was, what independent media really misses is that for all the tech, tens and millions of views, for how irrelevant and flailing CNN and MSNBC are in a bunch of different business and entertainment focused categories, this is just a true reality. Right? Like if I'm a publicist working in Hollywood, I'm seeing the Late Show. Doing the talk shows like the late night TV shows during a press tour is much less significant relative to a whole bunch of YouTubers who are doing that.
- [10:24]
B
You go on that hot wing show, I still don't understand where they eat hot wings. Right? That is where you.
- [10:28]
A
No. 100%. Yeah. Example, which is hot wings is literally taking mindshare and mindspace away for millennials and zoomers and even some Xers from the Late show. Where that metaphor does not apply at all is DC because even though the views are falling, even though there's all this triumphalism, Washington itself is still focused on this more legacy context. So I'd love for you to talk about this within this sense.
- [10:55]
B
Yeah, that's one of the. I think Back to Ron DeSantis. Remember Ron DeSantis when he ran for president in 2024 and he had this great quote of. He said to all you legacy media outlets in D.C. and New York, you have to understand, we don't care what you think anymore. Right. It was sort of this big, bold statement. And I remember at the time, the reason it stuck out to me was I was writing a story for Wired at the time about a person named Tara McGowan who works on the left side of politics. She's starting an organization called Courier Newsroom. And the basic idea was, let's replicate the right media ecosystem on the left by building out a series of local websites that talk to people about local in addition to politics. And the idea on the Left was Ron DeSantis has it right. He knows how this world works now. He knows he needs to go on, you know, talk to podcasts and, you know, go on sort of obscure, fairly obscure, what we used to call bloggers, that sort of thing. And then Ron DeSantis came in second in Iowa and said, whoops, you know, I should have been doing. He said, I should have been doing corporate media. I missed it. And I think the challenging thing is a lot of folks like me who write about the day to day of politics want to say, this is the podcast election. This is the substack election. This is where. This is the Fox News election. And the complicated thing is it's this confluence of all these different channels that seem to matter. And what the mix is on a particular topic can be very different. And when you're talking about bombing Iran and the President of the United States, the current president, United States, it's Fox News that is the means of conveying new ideas to that president is Fox News. And that obviously would not be the case with the different presidents. So studying this sort of exact dynamics on a particular topic of how that media, media, that idea flow we talked about works is fascinating. And I think it's too easy to dismiss the okay, mainstream media doesn't matter anymore, or it's simply substack, or it's simply podcasts. We have to really kind of be students of these dynamics on each and every policy topic that comes up.
- [12:57]
A
And when you put it that way, what I'm thinking about is the fact that my biggest beef with all sides of the spectrum that aggressively over aggressively push alternative media in comparison to legacy media is it's so ideological. It is an ideological non empirical statement that you don't matter anymore. Because obviously you could find 15 different ways that Fox News, MSNBC, CNN obviously matter. So when you say that it's dead, that's actually a very ideological statement that you have to separate your ideology from my pers. If you're like working on his campaign, you need to separate your ideological take from an actually empirical analysis of what you're really trying to do here. And the way that I would describe this is like, look, if you are Donald Trump and you're in the closing weeks of the election and you are trying to like, really like lean into the fact that you really appeal to like young men who don't usually vote in elections, who like, might not have gone to college. Fox News, cnn, msnbc. That is a disastrous way to try to do that. You're trying to get people to know you. So Rogan, Theo Vaughn, Andrew Schultz, et cetera, even the all in podcast, these are great formats for that. What they are not great for is policy debate, to your point. Oh, okay, so what's actually happening vis a vis Iran, Israel, the United States, the uae, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that is not what those alternative media products are sell, set up to do. They don't report by their very definition. They are not widely studied in public policy debates. That's part of what makes them appealing and interesting and fun. Like they don't sometimes I have to fake. What do you mean by that, Nancy, what you're referring to this cnn, what is cnn? And it's never quite the same thing. It's like sometimes like Theo Vaughan is genuinely reacting to something that the audience has never heard before from the same perspective. So he's so good at that and better than anyone in legacy media will ever be. But these are just different products. So I think it's just so key to understand that if you at these things, you should understand, hey, different functions, different purposes, these are different structures and levers for gaining power. And I should be able to look at them empirically and not just sort of make overly ideological statements about them being dead or not.
- [15:17]
B
Yeah, I don't disagree. I think the thing about the podcast not having these policy debates, I think where that debate about Iran and regime change and the possibility that American, quote, unquote, bunker busters, which actually be effective in eliminating the nuclear capabilities, that debate happened six months ago, happened a year ago on podcasts, and then eventually it sort of bubbles up and gets on Fox News or even gets to Tucker Carlson. So I think that the. I always go back to the antitrust movement just because I think it is the most successful out of nowhere battle of ideas that we've seen recently. I think the, the people who seeded that movement started seeding it years ago. Right. There was a lot of Twitter fights that happened before you saw alina Khan on 60 Minutes, which she did at the very end of her tenure when she was trying to keep her job, which I think we could talk about the role of 60 Minutes. I think it's not sexy at all, but it still plays a very, very strong role in shaping American politics to a degree I think people would be surprised about. I used to work on Capitol Hill 20 years ago, and we used to say, if you want to know what bill's going to be dropped into the hopper during any particular week, see what was on 60 Minutes that Sunday night. Members of Congress and their staff go, please, no.
- [16:35]
A
No. So here's my pushback to you saying that the debate happened a year ago. I don't think there was actually any debate around Iranian intervention in the sense that if we just pulled these, I don't call them Republican, I don't call them conservative, but I will call them right wing. I think Andrew Schultz is not a conservative, he's not a Republican, but I think he is decently right wing. I think the same thing is true of the Ovan. I think the same thing is true of Joe Rogan. Obviously, everyone has heterodox POVs have to offer, offer all those sort of like provisos. But these are shows that like, lean right, in a way that like Donald Trump is better suited to than let's say like Kamala Harris. But if we were to poll those outlets, they would all conclude, oh yeah, we shouldn't intervene in Iran, regime change, wars are bad, intervention is bad, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if we're looking at this debate from like a media perspective and like ideas moving up the ladder, why from your perspective would the let's say like non mainstream ecosystem, like not win out, quote unquote in this sort of fight?
- [17:39]
B
That's, you know, I think if you, I'd be curious for your take, right? You do this day in and day out, this podcasting thing. I think if you look at some of the podcasts you mentioned, the all in one podcast, for example, that is a debate of ideas, right? In some ways it's often a very nuanced debate of ideas. And that's the sort of thing you're not having on msnbc, cnn, the real sort of particulars around some of these topics. So I think how do we create a podcast ecosystem in which those are the conversations? It's not just a sort of folks sitting around table with similar politics patting each other on the back. I think you do that, right? You have folks on that you don't necessarily disagree with and you sort of push, push back and forth. That model seems to do well. It seems to do better in some ways than in the mainstream media where people are not necessarily looking for diversity ideas. They're looking for either street reporting or reporting that's going to confirm their point of view. So I think the not abandoning the idea that podcasts can be the place for those discussions to be had because we're not. There's not a ton of other places that those conversations are happening. And this one of the interesting things in Washington over the last six months, eight months, I spent a lot of time going to conferences, panels, that sort of thing. We now have the rise of the mono panel where you have a lot of these conference sessions are people with the exact same viewpoint on a topic. And we can discuss, if you're interested, we can discuss why that is, right? There's a lot more corporate sponsorships, think tank sponsorship that really is looking at these sessions as a way of confirming their point of view, not necessarily having the discussions that these panels used to be. For better for words, they used to actually be, be mediums for those conversations. So those aren't happening in the same way we traditionally would have these conversations. So I don't know if we, if we don't have podcasts, I think we're going to. There's a little bit of a challenge. What are the spaces in which we have people actually debating over ideas? There's not a ton of them anymore.
- [19:28]
A
No. And I think the thing I'll build on then I'll ask you more about your point around panels becoming very focused on one pov because I think a lot of people who this is where I can't just have empathy with like a listener. I feel like a C span panel in 2003 was just as like mono idea centric. So I'm interested in like you just telling the story of like the evolution of those spaces. And I get what you mean by the corporate sponsorships, like driving discourse. So I'd love you to expand on that. But one quick, quick response and I think you've gotten to meet me to be generative and offer actual advice to like the podcaster space when you were, when you were discussing like ideas and debates specifically within law and podcast, one I would think about would be when Jason Calacanis got Trump to say the we're going to staple green cards to foreign students who come to our universities, making the very sort of centrist Silicon Valley case for like high skilled immigration, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And Trump said yes. And they treated this from an all in podcast perspective at this big triumph. Because in many ways, like the all in podcast serves as a slainer for getting certain people who are in a more heterodox position to vote for Trump. But the reason why they ended up not just not winning that debate from a are we going to increase green cards? They actually like lost it at even deeper level because obviously you see the administration waging wars against universities. And I think there's a real critique of alternative media in comparison to sort of Alina Khan person. They don't have a strong focus on power and how it actually operates. So the all in podcast would have this conversation and they're like, okay, cool, Trump now says that they're going to do this. And then Jason then spent the next two months tweeting, see, I could push Trump in a more moderate direction. What Jason did not do and what the podcast did not explore as they unpacked afterwards were, yeah, but like, who is Trump going to appoint to these different positions? Who is going to actually lead immigration policy? To what degree is a president who can just Say anything on a podcast going to be focused on these day to day to day to day, very procedural issues, especially when since Congress is so slowed down, a lot of these things are just sort of the executive branch just making fiat decisions and kind of taking pics here. And the power analysis that really mattered here was, hey, if you're deeply sourced within the MAGA movement and the immigration restriction is right, you would have known leading into the 2024 election that Stephen Miller is going to play an elevated role on this topic. And there is no world where Stephen Miller, he would never openly go on the all in podcast and say, oh, ignore President Trump. He was wrong about this, should play an inside baseball DC game, which has led us to where we've actually gotten. Now, this is why you see the reporting around Trump initially dialing back how aggressive ICE was when it came to migrant farmers, people in the building industry, because Trump's people who work in the business community were saying, wait, this is crazy. And then Trump's like, oh, yeah, I don't support that at all. That isn't my sort of understanding of illegal immigration. I'm focused on the criminals. Stephen Miller wants the criminals, and he also wants the people in building, in farming, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I just think that the big issue with the way the alternative media debates these issues, to your point, you're correct. They debate is they still just really lack the real focus on what's actually happening, which is where legacy media and traditional journalism with sources is so good at doing.
- [22:49]
B
Well, there's a couple. You've raised a couple interesting points. One of the questions I have is, well, one of the challenges we still have in more traditional media is there's no guilty to intellectual consistency in the part of the Trump administration. There used to be a little bit of a sense of embarrassment if the President said one thing and then the staff the next day said, oh, no, no, we're not actually doing that. But that doesn't matter in Trump's Washington. I think President Trump would admit, I'm free to change my mind day in and day out. So I think in journalism, we're constantly coming up with models for understanding the world. We're reporting on, how do we interpret new facts we're seeing. And I think we've gotten better with the Trump administration. We don't report on the Trump administration the way we would report on previous administrations, including the first administration. So we're getting a little bit better at that. I think the idea of power is very interesting. In that we're also coming to terms with power. Doesn't look like it did in past administrations. And the idea that it's simply a Stephen Miller making these decisions. And I agree on immigration, right? That is the reason Stephen Miller gets out of bed in the morning is immigration. So yes, he's driving these decisions. I think on a lot of other topics we have no idea and I think totally appreciate the idea that podcasters aren't sitting down necessarily looking at org charts to figure out who's actually pulling the levers on this stuff. I don't think we're in more traditional mainstream media actually doing a particularly great job at figuring out who's pulling the levers on stuff either. One example I think of is I look at the Federal Trade Commission, President Trump, you probably well know, removed to sitting Democratic commissioners and now there's a battle in court over whether or not they were actually properly removed. And I say President Trump removed those folks. President Trump did not remove those folks. Some staffer sent an email saying you're out of a job. And we look at that and we say, okay, in project 2025, Russell vote right? Said we don't even believe in the idea of independent agencies. So it sort of naturally flows from that. Is he really the decision maker on this or is Russell vote the decision maker on this? Or are there other folks interpreting those ideas to say this is we don't believe in independent agencies. Let's test the law Humphreys executor's law, the Supreme Court decision on this. Let's test Humphreys executor by removing these two FTC commissioners. And I don't know that it's as clear cut as we think it is. And I think we could do a little bit of a better job on the mainstream press side of things, just understanding this power dynamics as well. The other. Sorry, please.
- [25:27]
A
No, no, please. This is your show. Go for it.
- [25:29]
B
No, no, no. And I think, you know, I think about when we talked about the anti monopoly folks, Lena Khan, the folks around her, the pushback against abundance, right, which you spend a lot of your time on. I think part of the pushback that Ezra and Derek have seen is that there's a sense that they are not necessarily grappling with power, with the way they're interjecting these ideas into the ecosystem because of who they are. They get a lot of attention and they look shiny and new. And so people are rushing to at least kind of pick them apart or have it be the top of the day without people Saying without necessarily doing the work that people on the anti monopoly left and I have no dog in this fight. But I think, think why we see them so react so negatively to some of the abundant stuff is you've. Yes, okay, build more high speed rail. Right, That's. But there isn't the sense that they've done the work of understanding a lot of how power works in these places where these decisions actually have to be made to bring about. You know, they talk about building more, building more of the stuff that we need to have sort of a positive future. So I, I think one of the neat things I think about podcast, and it's funny somehow the podcast advocate on this, on this, where I mostly write words and have them printed, but is that they're so iterative. Right. That you have a conversation with somebody else next week and it's going to be a different conversation, I would imagine, based on our conversation. And so you see that learning process happening with folks. And I think the best podcasters feel like they are uncovering new information, uncovering new power dynamics, putting them out back into the ecosystem and seeing how people react to them. So I think, you know, I just, I, you know, my abundance mindset is the abundance of media is a good thing. I think, you know, we have people in mainstream media doing great work, we have podcasters doing great work, we have people on Twitter doing great work. And just again, coming back to the idea of part of our job, part of my job is understanding how that work all fits together. And the exciting thing is it changes every day, it changes every election. Are we going to be talking in the 2028 election about Joe Rogan? Maybe. But is he going to be the sort of gatekeeper that he was in 2024? I don't know.
- [27:52]
A
Yeah, I think just to quickly follow up that I've got two more specific questions before we zoom back out to D.C. and ideas. So one is just a statement to your point about Ezra and Derek in power. I am a little less well read into the policy areas of specific antitrust stuff, but I think a fascinating thing, and this is why I conduct the podcast the way I conduct it. I talk to a lot of people across the different spectrums and I think something you gain from that is you really understand at a structural level how these different worlds and ecosystems look like. So like my favorite, when I was back in Oregon with my family last week and I was talking about the left with my dad in the context of abundance, and I was differentiating between the Elizabeth Warren left and The Bernie Sanders laugh. And he's like, wait, what do you mean? Like, these are. And then I was talking about the center left and he's like, wait, like this is confusing. You're talking. But actually this desperately, desperately, desperately matters. Especially when you're trying to actually enact big policy change in a somewhat revolutionary sense, in the way that Ezra and Derek are framing the project. Because famously. Not famously famously, if you're in a very specific ecosystem. Ezra, a month or so into his book podcast, into his book tour, did an episode where he had Zephyr Teachout. So like antitrust lawyer, policy expert, but also like three time candidate in New York. And so I got Chakravarti, who's challenging Nancy Pelosi, and he had them on. And at the start of the episode he said, I'm doing this episode because I was really shocked by the pushback against this book. Not that I didn't expect pushback, but I expected the pushback to be from degrowthers, from people who are going to say, we're on the degrowth left. And actually you're saying we need more things, actually we need less things. That's the only way we're going to address climate change. And we're going to attack this in this very degrowth, very Malthusian, very sort of 20th century, 1970s, these environmentalist sense. And then what Ezra said though, is. But most of the backlash is actually within the antitrust left crew. So to me, I was not shocked by that. Because of my realignment work, I spent a lot of time with the left antitrust populist crew. And I would define these people as Warrenites. They are not Bernie people, they're not socialists. They're also not de growthers. They don't really focus on climate policy quite in the same way. So I just think it's so helpful. Part of what I think the critique of, I think the process leading up to abundance is that Derek and Ezra and Derek's gonna come on the podcast in a few weeks. So this is me practicing for things I want to talk about them with if they wanted to, because Derek himself is writing about how he's been shocked at how, you know, the sort of populist left responded the way they did. Part of what you need to do is understand, like, even if it seems like wonky or unhelpful. No, like there is no such thing as the left. There are like three or four different parts of the left. And because you're fighting a fight or a factional conflict within, like institutions that is where it actually matters. Because the Roosevelt Institute is different for the center for American Progress, which is different from the Nation magazine, which is a little bit, but kind of different than Current affairs magazine or with Nathan Robinson. So I just love this stuff. So I really want to note that part of what understanding power is about isn't just understanding how the levers work. Where a lot of the left critiques came from, that's what they're felt. There's someone you're referencing anti Trump trust, but it's also about saying, like, who am I actually talking to and how should I understand them? At like an empathy level and how.
- [31:22]
B
Will this be read? I think that was part of the critique around the Abundance Law was it seemed like it would. You know, someone explained to me this was a book written on the presumption that on the assumption that there would be a President Harris. Right. This is an operating manual for let's build more, you know, infrastructure. And it reads very differently in. Under Trump administration when the left is trying to figure out an operating model. And I think there's absolute diversity of schools of thought and opinion and different slices of the left. I think the left also more than the right. In my experience in reporting, the left tends to converge on one operating model at a time, one way of explaining the world. And at a time where the right seems very comfortable having these sort of like, no, you're wrong. No, you're wrong. No, you're wrong in a way that. And that's okay, right? Like we can all sort of. And then we can come together and vote for the same person. That's fine. Where the left kind of tries to. Each cycle, some way of thinking about the world tends to win. And I think the Lena Khan Zephyr Teachout operating model, they thought we figured out something that seemed to have some traction, seems to have some popular appeal, seems to. Seems to have the ability of actually being implemented in government. I mean, those folks in Biden's Washington ran the show and so they, I think not to speak for them, look at it and say, we figured out an operating model that was doing pretty well, and then these folks parachuted in with an operating model and tried to replace ours. And I think that's why you see the sort of very vehement pushback against it is it's sort of replacing yours with ours when ours was just getting off the ground. I think that they took pretty negatively.
- [33:00]
A
Yeah, no, and I think that's several things to your point. So, A, it wasn't just that the book anticipated a Harris administration. It's that the book was actually supposed to come out last year. So it was supposed to come out. Let me put it this way. If the book had come out in, I can't remember what the original publication date was, but when you saw Kamala Harris campaigning on we're going to build 3 million new homes, she would have been the way that many democratic sort of center left people have been saying we need abundance. And whether or not that would have worked is a different issue. But like that is the way that I think people on the left kind of miss the nature where the book was. But what then happened? And this is why I'm so glad we're talking about. See, we're talking about. The topic of this episode isn't any one specific idea. It's how these ideas actually transmit and work in dc. What then happened though, is when the. And actually. And one other thing too, the thing that's also funny. I had a lot of left populists on to discuss the abundance topic and for a lot of them, and this kind of fell apart after the book came out because I think Derek and Ezra could have done a better job engaging with like the more serious people. Because there's all the people who are writing like the angry Twitter threads and the people who were like writing negative book reviews. But there was like an institutionalist left that was interested in the project. And these tend to be people who worked for the Biden administration and, you know, Chatham House Rules. So I won't say you told me this, but this person was like, look, to be honest, I would have dismissed this book as like neoliberal centrist hogwash in 2020 or 2019. But as someone who came in with this war night, Lina Khan centric sort of policy view of how we could actually use power to make the world in a different place. The whole idea of there being bottlenecks and the whole idea of state capacity not being where it is. I'm interested in that project in a way it wouldn't have been. So the point is that person would have had a much friendlier reaction to the book if it came out before the election. Because the take would have been not just how do they actually build infrastructure and things during a Harris administration or a second Biden administration, it would have been how do we complete this project that we started. We passed the ira, we passed the CHIPS and Science act, and we're still waiting to finish and deliver them. So this book is about getting to the last step of the thing and doesn't diminish on our project at all by this happening after the election. It just totally changed the valence of that. And one other thing, because I'd love to hear your response to this. The other thing that happened is a new faction emerged after the 2024 election and that was sort of like the Democratic centrist project, which was really about this. Sort of like, hey, how do we move on from the Biden years? And I think parts of that Democratic centrist project, because they knew they needed something offensive to say. Not offensive, but offensive like moving forward. They were just sort of like, ok, great. Like, we're going to take abundance and we're going to talk about abundance. And Ezra Klein is like, relevant and he's big and he really matters. So we're going to say like, abundance centrism is the answer here. And they are very much in opposition to the antitrust, like, populist crowd, like, there is no yes ending and that fight specifically. So that's also a way that this idea was received differently because some of the people talking about it are people who are like, oh, no, like, I don't want to talk to Lina Khan at all. Or we are going to make sure Lina Khan can't get a job in the next administration. This is very much something that happens. Happens.
- [36:23]
B
Yeah, there's a lot of borrowing audience happening. Marketers talk about borrowing audience, right? That you, you, if you want to get your point made, you, you engage with people who already have a big platform and Ezra has a giant platform. And so I think some of the folks engaging Twitter warriors look at that and say, okay, I'm going to, you know, he's been responding to tweets. So if, and Derek's been responding to tweets. So if I engage with him, I'm going to get more attention. Right. That's sort of cynical. But. But I think it's true. I think one of the other. You mentioned this idea that part of the book was meant to say, if the President Harris says let's build 3 million homes, how do we actually go about doing that? So that at the end of the day, homes are built on budget. That is sort of a very simplistic way of thinking about it, but it is. We make these political promises, politicians make these political promises. How do you actually execute upon them? And it, it doesn't happen a lot of the times. So let's solve for that. I think there's actually a really interesting thing happened in that the conversation around implementation has been going on for A while you can look@healthcare.gov President Obama, the Obamacare passes. They're going to implement a website so people can go and find their insurance options. The website does not work and there's a round of conversation around we can't make these policy promises without actually being able to execute upon them even as something as simple as a website. It started the US Digital service. It spawned a lot of different projects of thinking through how do you turn these liberal progressive big government promises into actual tangible things that people, real Americans can feel. The, the idea that this is a brand new and I'm being judgmental and I'm a reporter, I don't have opinions on these things. But the idea that this was hey, sometimes people say things and then actually don't build them. And if people want to keep getting locked that they need to fix for that that conversation was like well in progress. Right? The healthcare.gov was one was 20 trying. I'm blanking here. 20 between 2008 and 2012. Right. So it's at least 12 years old. And so you see a lot of that work already happening. And I think there was a sense among some people that again this idea of parachuting in and discovering problems that people had discovered 12 years ago. Interestingly though, I think some of the people I think about it, Jen Palka, some of the folks that were More around the U.S. digital Service, how do we build state capacity side of things, looked at the abundance traction and said okay, let's borrow audience there, right? That's how do we piggyback on that and get our project a little bit more amplified. And they saw that as we can partner here, we can pick off the parts that resonate with the people that we're already talking to and grow our ideas rather than we can grow our ideas by fighting against them, which folks in the anti monopoly left chose to do. I think this. Can I make one. This is very tangential point that I think the. And it's very often people say personnel is policy in politics, right? The people you pick to implement policy matter a great deal. And politics very often comes down to you peel back the curtain. There's five people Baron Gaines on a particular topic. It's an American inspiring but also a little bit terrifying. People can really kind of grab hold of a conversation and shape it and they become the deciders on it. I think the people if you look at the anti monopoly work, this is a little bit in the weeds. But the antitrust as a project, as a field, even as a business field it's very male dominated. For a long time you go to antitrust conferences, meaning the people actually work in the field at law firms doing billable hours or on antitrust. Guy, guy, guy, guy, guy. It's just like, it's just a very male field. And some of the leaders you saw emerging in the last eight, 10 years that said, okay, the old way of doing things, the antitrust consensus isn't effective anymore. We need a new way of thinking about these things. They tended to be women, which is interesting. Look at Lina Khan, Zephyr teacher, Fiona Scott Morton, even Gail Slater now, who is President Trump's Assistant Attorney General for antitrust. So there's a little bit of sense that this was a policy topic that had traditionally been very male. These women sort of took hold of it, crafted it in their own image and likeness in some ways and were doing pretty well with it. And then people came in and said, okay, that's not the way of thinking about the world. And I don't want to be too reductive here. Like, obviously there's a lot more going on, but there was a little bit of a sense of a big footing. I think that you had two guys who do great work and have certainly put in their own time on these topics, but there was a little bit the sense that they were coming in and stealing a little bit of the limelight.
- [41:26]
A
You know what I'll say.
- [41:27]
B
Does that resonate with you? I'm curious.
- [41:28]
A
So you're going to be not shocked, but shocked. Thomas. This resonates with me because my dad, who I was talking about this with, has a public policy PhD from Berkeley. He worked in the climate change space and he is one of the people, not that he's publicly doing this, but he would always angrily call me after I do an abundance, saying, this is just implementation studies. My PhD thesis was about implementation studies in the 1980s. Why is this new? Why are you acting like this is new, like this is not new? This isn't in depth? I'm doing the follow up reading. It's not that actually helpful, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this isn't just a problem of sort of like people who don't work in public policy, like encountering this sort of like what's new here? This is actually people who are experts in the space. And my real answer to my dad and my also my other answer to people who are saying that, you know, Derek and Ezra are parachuting is I just believe in the idea of like policy entrepreneurship. Right? That is kind of like. And this speaks to, like, the realities of power. Like, so, for example, a lot of my friends, left, right and center are Hill staffers. And what I will tell you is if I sat down with them in the year 2022 and talked about the word implementation, it would. They would understand the concept, but it wouldn't just, like, stick, right? Like one of those generic airport books that I've never read. Because you just need to read the title to get the deal. It's called Made to Stick How Ideas. Like Spread. Whatever.
- [42:49]
B
Absolutely.
- [42:50]
A
Abundance is a sticky idea because now when I go back to D.C. to talk about abundance, people, everyone's like, oh, yeah, like abundance.
- [42:57]
B
It's that thing.
- [42:57]
A
It's that Derek and Ezra thing. So my other. Another quote I'll bring in here. One of my favorite lines in the Social Network, Aaron Sorkin's movie about the founding of Facebook is when Mark Zuckerberg, you know, by means of Jesse Eisenberg, goes, if you'd invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook when he's talking to the. To the Winklevoss twins.
- [43:15]
B
Yeah.
- [43:15]
A
So it's like, sorry, sorry, father, sorry, implementation people in D.C. specific. Because here's the thing. I'm not talking academically, right? I'm not talking from the sort of Encyclopedia Britannica sense. Not in the Wikipedia sense. The Wikipedia page about abundance does not reference implementation studies. Then that's genuinely an academic failure of the platform. I am talking about dc, the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of ideas amongst staffers and policy oriented people. Sorry. Abundance, by the way, is a controversial term. If you talk to anyone who works on abundance, they will all start with this, like, it's gotten a little better since the book was a New York Times bestseller. But for the year before the book came out, we'd have to do this, like, awkward paragraph of. I know that abundance is kind of a lame name and blah, blah, blah, blah. But what I've learned about abundance and why everyone is stuck with the name is it sticks. Whether you hate it, whether you would love it, whether you lukewarm, you remember Abundance. So my advice for anyone working on public policy issues is that if you do not find. If you are trying to influence the policy debate, if you are trying to give people who are working on these questions day to day at the CHIPS and science office, or working in the White House or the National Security Council, you need to have a sticky framework. Because dc, as you know, is just covered in ideas and covered with people who are selling their ideas. And one year someone's really cool. This funny thing that happened during the episode of Ezra. And then I'll throw it back to you for this last section. You could take this wherever you want to go. Is Ezra ran into this because Ezra, I brought up how when I was interviewing Ezra, I brought up like, hey, like, something that the left has brought up in their critique of abundance is that it doesn't really deal with or take healthcare seriously as a topic. And, you know, they're wondering, like, what does abundance have to say about healthcare? So Ezra goes, and this is on the episode we check this back. He goes, oh, I don't think I need to prove my credentials on healthcare. And I had to pause for a second. I was like, oh, I heard that. That was 2011. Ezra Klein, long guy, made his name being one of the most serious analysts of healthcare. And it was so funny because I didn't publish the video the episode yet. But, like, I just gave some light post where I was like, hey, Ezra, like, no offense, man, but, like, you're still pretty young. You started really early. A lot of these people were critiquing. You were like, in elementary or like middle school during that era. That was a couple Ezra clients ago. And on the video, he actually pauses and like, you could see him being like, oh, actually, I'd never thought about it that way. People know me as Rocks Ezra. They know me as Podcaster Ezra. They know me as, like, I moved to Brooklyn and started working out a lot Ezra. They don't know him as Wonk Blog Ezra. And that speaks to how people DC think about things, right? Like, people are. That's kind of what I mean by you are selling ideas. You have a mode, you have a perspective. And it's so helpful to think about things that way.
- [46:06]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think when the book came out, I went to an Abundance themed happy hour that was one of the abundance institutes. And I can't keep the names of these organizations straight. It's called the Was it Inclusive Abundance? It may be Inclusive Abundance, but I apologize, I don't remember exactly, but they around sort of in conjunction with the book. There was a book event that Eric and. Excuse me, Ezra and Derek did in dc. They did an abundance theme happy hour. And you went and it was the big event, the night. It was every. Every. Everybody in D.C. who cares about this stuff even a little bit was gathered at this bar and, you know, there was no talk of abundance. It was just a chance to. To get together and have cocktails at a rooftop bar in D.C. but you mentioned you know, have I ever been to a state capacity happy hour, you know, an implementation happy hour? It just, you know, it just. Yeah, it is. The stickiness of the idea is like, it's a. It's a good word. It's also a good word that's, you know, everyone's sort of pro abundance, right? Who's, you know, there's not a lot of scarcity advocates running around. So.
- [47:10]
A
So before I ask you the last question, I just want to follow up on one thing you said which is really helpful for people on the left and the center. Left and the center to understand your point around how the right is much more comfortable with a bunch of different frameworks, ideas at the same time in comparison to like, left spaces is such a helpful one. And because I spent just like a bunch of time on the right, did a bunch of academic seminars, like, I actually know the history, right? This is the thing, right? Like, part of what 20th century conservatism accomplished was this. So there's two ideas here. So one is just like fusionism, which was William F. Buckley, like after the Cold War starts, after World War II, after you have the Eisenhower presidency, not really deliver the right's hopes in terms of repealing the New Deal. The Right, through William F. Buckley and other people at National Review, they come up with the idea that, hey, we've got all these different, like, we've got the Birchers and we have like the isolationists. We also have like the Cold warriors and we have like the people who hate taxes and don't like the expansion of government. How do we, like, combine this thing into a coherent whole? And even if we can't answer that question perfectly, that is kind of the goal. The left does not have a fusionist instinct at all. Like, there's no sort of like, hey, if we actually. And this is why the right was better at this, and this is why the left lacking a leader who could just like, force this conversation is a real problem right now. Now you need someone on the left who could say, look, raise your hand if you're copacetic about a J.D. vance presidency in 2028. No one from the center to the left will raise their hand, okay? Therefore, we have to work together to some degree. So how do we mash this into something that's probably not going to make everyone perfectly happy, but gets people 85 to 90% of the way there on their chosen policy areas? So I think the left needs much more of a fusionist instinct. And then the other thing that the right had and this evolved going into the Reagan era era is just the idea of a three legged stool of conservatism. You have the fiscal people who care about the dead, who care about taxes. You have the foreign policy hawks, they care about winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union and pushing back communism. And then you have the social conservatives that emerge after Roe v. Wade and sort of the future liberalization of American society. All three of those stools, you could find ways to make them relevant to each other. Legs of the stool, but they don't have anything to do with each other. And a healthier left would say, hey you will you focus on the question of state capacity and getting things built. You're focused on how the concentration of power has like really hampered American democracy or is through an inequality. These things actually technically have nothing to do with each other. And if anything we could find various ways they can intersect. So maybe like adding. And by the way, the problem for the left is that you'd have to have like a ten legged stool. And you could question whether or not, not maybe there needs to be the bench. The bench, the bench metaphor is not sticky, but I just think there's so much the left when it comes to uniting around 2020, you can learn from just the idea that like, hey, there isn't just one thing here that's okay. We're all operating under this left liberal coalition that's trying to like win the presidency. And we could then fight things out at a staffing level after that.
- [50:16]
B
And we're having to debate where those issues, where those three legs or however many legs we have intersect and where they come into conflict. That's a good problem to have in a way. Like you worry about that down the road when you've actually achieved some of your core priorities and then say, okay, how does immigration intersect with, you know, it's a, you know, it's a monopoly policy. There's a lot of work to be done before you actually get to the point where you have to worry about those things fighting against each other is. You mentioned the idea of President Vance and folks on the center left not being too enthusiastic about that. And that seems, you know, goes without saying, that's hot take, entire hot take right now. It would have been, I mean the, it would have been a hot take in 20. Trying to get my years right. JD Vance was seen as a figure in Republican politics who folks on the left could work with. Right. He was saying things about, you know, industrialization and the, you know, damaging effects to the middle of the country. To some of some of these various economic policies that folks on the left were growing concern about. He could have been the vehicle for some sort of fusion right, center, left. I don't even know what that would look like. But he and I raised that to say, like, could you are our politics such now that you're just never going to have that anymore? You're never going to have a figure who actually, you know, brings people together in that way and then gets into office and stays that person. He clearly came into office and said, I mean, this is a Very, very. J.D. vance. Excuse me, very, very different J.D. vance. I don't think anyone could deny that he's a different person in public than he was in public only a handful of years ago. So all I mean to say is, aren't politics such now that you can't actually get elected and successfully govern with your base's continued support by being somebody who actually brings people together?
- [52:06]
A
I think you actually can and I think, think this is such an unsexy answer because it's just like the generic DC answer. The issue is Donald J. Trump. So JD's central skill set, right, which people could say is a positive or a negative, is that, like, jd, like, knows how to appeal to the person who he needs to, like, advance and to succeed in his job. And that person, Audience of one, and the audience of one here is Donald Trump. And the issue is JD, especially when it comes to 2027, when the Republican primary starts, JD needs that Trump endorsement in the face of probably Secretary of State Rubio. Maybe they're trying to convince Donald Trump Jr. Not to run, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the person who could do because, and I will say, like, as someone who thinks the first 25 years of the 21st century have been a disaster and thinks like a real political project is like moving paths. So it's doing two things. It's saying, and this is where my politics are both centrist but also populist. It's like, hey, elites really did blow it after the Cold War on basically any possible issue you could imagine. I think the way that American society is structured, everything from education to capitalism to electoral politics is fundamentally broken. I think centrists do not. If centrists don't start by acknowledging that point, I think they're kind of frankly useless. But why, like, moving past that is a key thing. And I think anything that's going to sustainably move past something like come to some sort of settlement is going to have to bring in people from the other sides. The reason why I'm just sort of morbing a little depressed with the JD Side of the project because I've seen JD do this in the room. I went to an antitrust event that Bloomberg and Y Combinator hosted, and you had Lena Khan there. You had Rohit Chopra here. You had plenty of people on the left. And then JD Was there. And then JD Shows up and the room gets sort of quiet. People are kind of, like, hostile. This was after JD Pivoted to being much more right wing. But JD Gave, like, an amazing set of remarks after, like, man, like, he's so good and he's so smart. Why can't we have leader? Like, I. I still think white JD is still smarter than, like, 99.8% of most politicians. I like, engage if I knew JD personally before he was elected to office. But I think that is, like, regardless of whether you're happy with his actual takes. I think, like, JD Is deeper than most politicians. So you saw people on the left, on the center saying, like, there's something there there. It's just that Trump isn't interested in that project. So I think that's gonna have to find itself in some other area. So just for one last quick question for some news you can use for the audience I loved at the start of the episode, you said, quote, like, I study or you report on what ideas are up or what are down. What is an idea that is up right now in Washington that wasn't up? And what's an idea that was hot, was cool, but is now down?
- [54:58]
B
Oh, that's an interesting question. I wish I had a minute to think about it.
- [55:03]
A
Actually. I'll give you one to make.
- [55:04]
B
Yeah, you team me up.
- [55:05]
A
And then so the one. And this one is very up for grabs right now. This one's in a weird state, specifically, like, trade policy. So it was very easy to say after Covid. We've come to a new bipartisan consensus that our supply chains are too brilliant hurdle. We need to friendshore. We need to reshore in critical industries. That is a hot up in Washington idea. Because I could literally go to the furthest left person or even the furthest right person, and everyone would nod along because there was some form of, okay, let's pick these 10 critical industries that matter. Let's focus on these supply chain vulnerabilities. We all remember how clogged the port of LA was in terms of things from China coming here. We all saw that we didn't have chips for a year, so that was Just very hot. Now that you've had Liberation Day and tariff policy was expanded beyond just great power competition with China or supply chain resiliency and critical goods, you have a lot of people on both the right and the left saying, no, actually, trade is just like a disaster. And after this Trump moment is over, we need to be much, much, much more trade friendly. You've seen Democrats start thinking much more of trade funding themselves. So that's the example of an idea that was very hot across the total spectrum that now is not over. I think the thing that driving because trade is driven by foreign policy concerns, it's left the, it's left the reality where politicians are only thinking about it through the lens of, like, voters. They are thinking about it through the lens of like, oh, wait, okay, let's say China seizes. As long as politicians are thinking, let's say Taiwan is seized by China whether or not we intervene, they have to worry about that. If the Iranians are going to close the Strait of Hormuz after you actually have, they didn't end up doing this, but there's where they close the Strait of Hormuz in terms of oil, in terms of, like, goods and shipping and the Houthis after the bombing strike, you have to care about supply chains. So it's, it's an idea that, like, is going to always have a strong foundation because it's just once again, it's rooted in a thing that voters aren't focused on as much. But that's, I think, a good example. So now that I've ranted, but yeah.
- [57:12]
B
No, I think supply chain is actually this. Yeah, no, I think supply chain is interesting. I think, you know, post Covid too, I think that the, it's more visceral for a lot of Americans. So I think it's actually a real time about the entrepreneurialism around ideas. The person who sort of wins the supply chain, you know, explains away the challenges that people see in the, in the supply chain is going on there seems like a lot of traction there. Right? Because very often you're going to say, hey, you couldn't get Christmas presents. Here's the supply chain. You know, here's the diagnosis for that. I think that's still up for grabs. The one I don't have a great answer yet on what's down. There are a lot of ideas that are out of fashion right now. I think the one that is, you know, on the upswing is the idea of money, rethinking the nature of money. And I know that sounds Pretty pretty fuzzy edge. But the we I actually just wrote a story it'll be out soon for Washingtonian and that's about the, the, the mainstreaming of betting on politics. Right. Prediction markets and, and money being invested in them. And that seems really on upswing and Trump's Washington in part because the you know, the Trump family is pro this idea of actually betting money on elections. Donald Trump Jr. Recently became a strategic advisor to Cauchy, which is one of the big companies in this prediction market space. We saw the passage of the Senate the Genius act, which creates a regulatory regime for stablecoins which was something people just found icky for a long time and now it's being mainstreamed and you see seeing Democrats that traditionally on a lot of these issues on crypto. Right. That that's an interesting question of idea flow. Is that crypto very bipartisan when it entered the Washington idea complex and became red coded. Right coded very quickly for various reasons. And now you're seeing a little bit more openness. I think I'm both the, I mean very much on the right. Right. Crypto is part of how the, the right's view of the world right now, how the world should work. You're also seeing a little bit more openness on the lefty idea that maybe I'm not necessarily pro Bitcoin bitcoin certainly on dogecoin, that sort of thing. But people are seeing a little bit more openness to some of these different financial products. So that seems to be, you know, if I was starting up a new advocacy group, not that I would ever do that, but some, something in that space of saying the way that money has worked hasn't served Americans as well as they could be served. And let's use our, our imaginations, put our thinking caps on and think of new digital products that could serve them better. I think there's a lot of opportunity there.
- [59:51]
A
And the one thing I'd add to that because I thought you were going to take it this direction too. There's also just debates about the currency. Currency the dollar. And currency is an incredibly relevant space right now because once again it hits the foreign policy stuff and it also hits the trade and industrial policy stuff. That's also something that people are now you'll notice that there's a million and because I book podcast gifts sometimes a little lazily off of like what's getting published by publishers, there's a million new books on money and the future of the currency specifically that aren't just doing a like 2010s era like crypto's gonna change everything take. So that's something that I have been meaning. I've got a bunch of summer reading I need to do and I need to really pay better attention to that policy area. Nancy, this has been really great. I've really enjoyed having you on the show. We're gonna do this again to do like maybe a yearly check in in terms of where the idea is based on says because to your point too, this is the wrong. I'm glad I asked my question about what's up and what's down because it's a good anchoring question for people to really think about. But we're still in this weird everything is unsettled. And I will say that like the other thing that unsettled things is Trump started strong and then Liberation Day happened. So people had to like go from wow, like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are bending the knee at the inauguration. I guess it's just going to be like the Trump Renaissance, us shifting from that to something else. Same thing of Mandani beating Cuomo last night. That just means that like the playing field itself is unsettled and you can't be no one really knows what's up and what's down. And one other thing I want to know we said before the episode Lina Khan was going to was going to Mandani's events and very much associated herself with that part of the Democratic Party Mr. Ron's campaign. So she cannot be dismissed, I think the way certain centrists want her to be. Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman thinking she needed to be fired. Will not now that the election happened, be the last word on what happens with her and the movement?
- [61:48]
B
You look at. Absolutely. You look at the, the New York City example and you say the fascinating the fun part for me to get a chance to report and write on this stuff is it all, it all matters. That is Mamdani, you know, the Democratic, the nominee for in in the New York City mayoral race because of his discussion around freezing the rent or government run grocery stores or is it because he's, you know, he's like a good looking young guy who puts on sneakers and runs around the city and makes compelling social media videos. And it seems like the answer is yes, right? The answer is all these different factors and it's really hard to parcel with that. That's the fun part, right? It is, it is the policy. It is the personalities. It is what's trending, what's up and, and what's down and it's the reason I would love to come back on the show. And there obviously would be plenty to talk about because it's ever changing. Like, that's, to me, the part about not to the part of living in this country is the fact that it is constantly changing. Like, there's always the possibility that the new idea takes hold, that something, you know, something's tried and failed, something's tried and succeeded. Like that, to me, is still, still worth investing in, being a part of.
- [62:56]
A
That perfect place to end. Nancy, thank you for joining me on the realignment.
- [63:01]
B
Thank you, Marshall. I appreciate it.