Big Technology Podcast - The U.S. and Tech After Trump: A Conversation With the Realignment's Marshall Kosloff and Saagar Enjeti

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

Marshall Kosloff and Saagar Enjeti, hosts of the hit podcast The Realignment, speak about the shifting state of U.S. politics on their show each week. And while they focus on political change, they spend a surprising amount of time focusing on technology, recognizing the industry’s power. The two joined this week’s Big Technology Podcast to discuss how they see the U.S. political system realigning after Trump and what that will mean for the tech industry.

All right. Realignment in the house. How's it going, Sager? Hey, what's up, man? How are you? How are you, Marshall? Good. Thanks for having us. Thanks for being here. I will read the ad and then we can get it going. Let's do it. The Big Technology podcast is sponsored by MediaOcean, looking for a job in Big Tech. You might want to take a look at MediaOcean. They were just named the number one place to work in advertising technology by ad age. Go to MediaOcean.com slash Big Tech to learn more of

about the company and check out their careers up. MediaOcean is building the mission critical platform for Omnichannel advertising. If that sounds cool, hit up Mediaocean.com slash big tech and browse their job listings. And a big thanks to MediaOcean for supporting the Big Technology podcast. Okay, let's do this. Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. If you've been listening to this show, you know that technology and politics are not distinct. We often talk about how tech companies influence politics

and how politics influences tech. The future of tech is indeed tied directly to who's in charge of government and how they view these companies and what they want to do to them. Now that Joe Biden has taken office, we're about to enter a new era and we're going to talk about it today. On today's show, I'm bringing on two guys who host one of my favorite podcasts called The Realignment that takes a similar view to this one, but from an opposite approach. Marshall, Kossloff, and Sager and Jetty focus their show on politics, but they spend a lot of time talking about tech, sometimes a surprising amount of time, realizing its importance. Their beliefs are more conservative than liberal, which we'll get into, and I like them

because they root themselves in fact and speak to the heart of the issues. So in today's show, we'll talk about the direction of the U.S. after Trump and then spend time at the end talking about what it means for tech. So buckle up. We'll have a political discussion first, and then we'll move on to more technology aspects. Although I anticipate, we will talk about technology throughout. Marshall and Sager, welcome to the show. Yeah. Hey, good to see, Alex.

So I love the name of your podcast, The Realignment. We're certainly going through multiple realignments, you know, both in tech and politics. politics and culture, as you point out. And that's about to heat up. And in fact, like, I wonder if we're going through even more now that, you know, Trump has obviously left office in a pretty dramatic way. So I'm just kind of curious, like, where do you guys think the state of U.S. politics is today?

And what sort of realignment are we going through? Or are there changes to the realignment that you were seeing beforehand? now that we've experienced these past two or three weeks. Yeah, the funny thing here is a lot of our listeners, especially when we started in July 2019, thought a realignment meant populism is rising. It means Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are going to duke it out for the future of American politics, and that big vision is going to determine everything. But we saw the literal exact opposite happen.

You saw Joe Biden win in a very crowded field. You saw him really dominate in a way the other people didn't see, and you saw him and then win the presidency. People look at that fact and think that that means the realignment thesis wasn't correct, but the key to look at, and Saga will expand on this is how did Joe Biden win? Joe Biden won by winning more and more suburban voters. Joe Biden won by education. Joe Biden won by the fact that if you have a graduate degree, you are more likely than ever to vote for the Democratic Party. That is a fundamentally different Democratic Party than the Democratic Party of the 19th. 80s when Ronald Reagan actually won college-educated voters, something that no one could imagine

today. Yeah, the really important thing to hear to understand about the realignment, also why I love the name of the show, is that it's value neutral. Yeah, in the beginning, in 2019, maybe we started the show, I think it was a reasonable supposition to say populism is rising on the left and right. And now that Joe Biden has won the presidency with 80 million vote, a record number of votes in U.S. history, it's also reasonable to say there was a realignment. So what happened? Which is that the theory of the case that Biden and them put forward, the Democrats, was that we are going to win back white working class voters into the fold. That's why we're going to nominate Joe Biden from Scranton. He's going to win those guys back and we're going to take the presidency. And that's just simply not what happened. What actually happened. Well, it happened a bit on the margins, but it wasn't the determinative factor. The determinative factor was suburban college educated whites were largely the people who flee to the Republican Party. and voted for Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. This is the most, I think the most fascinating part of this dynamic is Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in the House lost every single toss-up race.

She has them one of the narrowest margins, I think since the 1800s in terms of a House majority. And Republicans kept Maine. They kept North Carolina. I mean, they blew it out in places like South Carolina. I can't even remember all the races, which were supposed to flip and just which didn't. And so you have this constituency, which was willing to vote for Joe, Joseph R. Biden, not willing to vote for Democrats down ticket. The ultimate battle of American politics right now is what are those people going to do in a Biden era? Are they going to be satisfied by, you know, Joe Biden putting forward just a vaccine, coronavirus relief, that type of stuff?

Are our cultural issues going to maybe push them back into the fold of the Republican Party? That's the real question. And it's one that we've been talking a lot about on the show recently. Yeah, I was just thinking during the Biden inauguration of all those people that voted for Donald Trump. And they voted to break the system, like actually break it. And Biden was the vice president. So they voted to break Joe Biden's system. And I wonder what happens to those folks.

I mean, obviously, like, there hasn't been much of a discussion about it because, the riot in the capital seemed to have been like a conversation ender for many people. But that issue doesn't go away. So what happens there and how do the parties vibe for their affinity? And why has it been so difficult for the Democrats to capture them? Yeah, you're getting to a huge debate that Saga and I actually have a lot on the show, which is what did 2016 mean? I'm not quite sure it's true that there was this great majority of people

who are voting to overthrow the neoliberal post-Cold War order in 2016. Because if that were true, I don't think you would see a resounding Joe Biden victory. I think you had a lot of people who did not like the political system. We've consistently seen since the 1980s people switch from Reagan to George H.W. Bush, to Bill Clinton, back to George W. Bush, then to Barack Obama. So there's this percentage of the country that is dissatisfied of both ends of the political class, and they are always up for grabs. So in 2016, it happened to be that the Democrats nominated someone who represented the exact set of the establishment that that group of people wouldn't want to support, and Trump was the person to throw up there. But let's not forget, he did not

win by a crazy high number of votes. And that also justifies why in 2020, you saw many people in that swing either stay with Trump or go back to Joe Biden. So it's a complicated picture. Yeah, it's really interesting, Alex, because the way I see it is, I agree, which is that if you'd ask me before the 2020 election, I would have been like this was about a lot more about trade and a lot more about immigration. It was a lot more about a policy case. And that's just not true. I'm very, you know, I'm mad enough to admit it. I was wrong. What it is is it's a cultural and affectational backlash against the system, quote unquote. It is largely grievance, which is directed. not necessarily to any one thing, but at like stature in life, at the sense that the country's changing, at the sense that they don't recognize where people grew up, et cetera. And that's why I think that you had a situation where Trump could abandon basically all the stuff that he ran on policy consensus and still win 75 million votes. I mean, 10 million more votes than he won last time around and increased margins within minority communities, despite, you know,

a lot of the stuff that we heard in the media. The problem, though, is that he, in many ways, poisoned the well of his own even, quote, unquote, success, despite the fact that he failed pretty miserably as president in order to do much of what he wanted to do, which is that the stop the steel phenomenon has, and the QAnon and the empowering of that narrative within a decent segment of the Republican Party, about 68% as far as we know right now, has led to something which I believe is irreconcilable. So, like, I believe that you have about 15 to 20 percent of the Republican Party, people like Liz Cheney and people like Mitt Romney and others who are just like, no, like we're done with Trump. We want to impeach. Like, we're totally against this, et cetera. But that's not a sizable portion. Let's not get ourselves. But that wing can no longer live with the Q&ON, stop the steel wing.

You see this now with primary challenges being lobbied against Liz Cheney. I actually believe that Trump, in the way that he handles defeat, actually sowed the destruction of the modern Republican Party. And the only way that I could be wrong about this is if the Democrats or Biden in particular does something which can unite the entire right. Because that's the thing is that all parties are coalitions. In many ways, the left was united under the hatred of Trump. And it changed their coalition dramatically. The right was always reunited for the last 12 years.

let's be honest, they hated Obama. That's what the Tea Party and all of that was all about. Under Trump, it was loving Trump because he pissed off the people who loved Obama. Okay, but Biden is not Obama. He's not the same culture warrior. He's a much more affectationally moderate guy. So the question is, is with that gone, the boogeyman, so to speak, what are they going to do? And look, I mean, don't underestimate the ability of many Democrats to screw that up. It's very possible. I just think it's much less likely in the next couple of years. That was my second thought about Biden when he was inaugurated. I wondered if he was potentially that moderate who could just go out and speak to economic issues, which to me, I think there's room for a party to come in and talk to the people who care most about the economy and the money they make and providing for their family and potentially can solidify a pretty large.

coalition around a common sense message about that that speaks to everyone. So do you think, do you think Biden has an opportunity to do that or am I a little bit? Or do you think that's even possible in America today? Or am I a little bit fanciful in thinking that's a possibility? I don't think it's crazy. Something Sagan and I spoke a lot about is the focus that Joe Biden needs to bring to the presidency. So if his focus is vaccines, checks a stimulus package, some form of competence, there is a majority in favor of that. Now, that being said, it gets difficult to talk about common sense when it comes to the economy because as we get closer and closer under the nitty gritty of the big issues, it becomes less

true. So, for example, if you were to talk a lot of people in our audience who are on the Democratic Socialist left, they'd say, what's common sense is student loan forgiveness. Well, there's a whole portion of the country who didn't go to college or has already paid their debt already, who doesn't think that's common sense. So, I think the closer and closer we look at the econ issues, the less we're going to see if there's any form of consensus. But on the big ones, aka a desire to eventually reopen the economy safely, that that's how you get the vaccine, the desire to actually have competence, which is something that everyone really underrated. An idea we're really obsessed with is the idea of state capacity as mattering. People can see the fact that Wuhan China is opening up again with the rave.

I'm sure you saw that on Twitter. It was a really sort of depressing thing to see, and they want that. That's for a common sense. I don't think there's a broader opportunity there. Yeah, it made me cry a little bit. Yeah, that's right. Look, it breaks down whenever you look at some stuff. But on the top line level, there are universal options which cut through.

I believe that the way out of the culture war, and I believe the culture war rules our politics today, is great policy, which is in the 75 per 80 percentile. of support. So, you know, what's something I mean by that? Put a vaccine in my parents' arm. That's something that happened, you know, in Texas before it happened in other places. Governor Greg Abbott, I have a lot of disagreements with the guy. Honestly, I am going to be looking at him very differently for the rest of my life because of this one decision materially impacted me and my family. That's how a lot of people think. And, you know, a lot has been written and about the Latino support for Trump in South Texas, my own home state.

look go read the articles they asked them they said why did you vote for trump and it's not it's not that they were Hillary voters and then Trump voters is that they were not voters and then they came out huge numbers for Trump relative to the previous election what happened they're like look I got a check with the man's name on it and that meant a lot to me and my family that's the type of thing which can cut through so much you can cut through immigration it can cut through abortion it can cut through guns nothing really in America cuts through that stuff except for When you're down and out, like right now, what helps you? Money in your bank, a vaccine in your arm.

This is why I think Biden has the opportunity to be the most popular president of my lifetime, accepting George W. Bush post 9-11, as in like not in a rally around the flag moment. He's inherited this divisive crisis. If he can actually do 100 million vaccines in 100 days and pass $2,000 checks, which you get with Biden's name on it, I think it will be dramatically. popular. And I think if I was him, that's what I would be doing all day long is focusing on that goal. Asaga, you also mentioned that you think the Republican Party is going to break. I think we should focus on that for a minute. And this all matters in terms of the direction that the technology

industry is going. You know, we are called the big technology podcast, but right now, technology and politics are pretty interlinked and we'll get to that soon. But I'm curious what you think's going to happen if the party breaks. And, you know, just kind of a follow-up to that. do you think Trumpism is diminished in any way? I mean, now that sort of ended with the riot at the Capitol, which not, I mean, you know, some people must have supported, but I'd imagine a large number didn't. The storm never came for QAnon. And he talked about, you know, for months, how the election was rigged and stolen. And it was proven not to be the case and he had to walk out of the White House. So I just want to toss that all over to you. And then Marshall, you can

refund it afterwards. But I'm curious what you think there. It's a great question. Alex, and yes, I do think the party is, I'm not saying that it's, you know, immediately going to go the way of the wigs, but I'm saying that directionally and functionally, that's essentially what matters. And the reason, okay, let's talk about tech, right? Which is the reason why it matters for tech, which is that we had a guest on our podcast recently named Michael Lind. And he made a very profound point, which I think all conservatives need to reckon with, which

is that the only debate in America, which matters today, is the debate between the center left and the progressive left, aka like what the intra-democratic coalition says. And this is obvious for a variety of examples. Marshall has a great point about Pornhub, which I'll let him expand on, which really does make the point. But before we get to that, the reason why I think that it all matters, quote unquote, is because if you're trying to understand where political pressure and elsewhere is going to come to bear, the right is not fundamentally serious about governing. They might win elections in the future. It's very possible. Look, some culture war issue is going to come up and the Fox effect and all that is going to ramp up. And they might win control of the

Senate. They might win control of the House. And they might even win the presidency again. It's very possible with the current coalition. But under that circumstance, there is no animating policy force behind it. And you saw this, you know, in a tech perspective throughout the entirety of Trump's presidency, which was, oh, like, we're pissed off that, like, Gateway Pundit got banned from Twitter. So let's, like, you know, go after Section 230. And you're like, you don't want to go after Section 230. That's not, you just want to punish your enemies. Like, this has nothing to do actually with the policy or with anything. And at the end of the day, what happened? Or they're like, oh, well, China's, you know, infiltrating our markets and TikTok and all that.

All true. 100%. I was for the TikTok ban. But guess what? On the day that Joe Biden inaugurated president, TikTok's still available on the Apple iPhone because the Trump administration is incompetent. And I think that that is just a feature, not a bug, of Trump, the presidency. I think it is a feature of the entire Republican Party, which is unserious about governance. I'll let Marshall expand more. Wait, hold on. Before Marshall goes, what happens to the Republican Party then? What happens to the Republican Party? Look, you, they will find a way in order to remain coalesced. Like right now, everybody's coalesced around Biden's illegal immigration orders that just came

forward in terms of the legislation that he's passing. They'll say he's like, you know, he campaign on unity and this is something he's passing. So like I said, they will still win some elections. But I think that if Biden governs the way that I think he's going to win, they will become rulers of an increasingly small kingdom. So I was on Megan Kelly's podcast recently, she was like, is Trump going to be the kingmaker? I'm like, yeah, he's going to be the kingmaker of a very, of a tiny kingdom, which is that you know, about 39% of the American population, right? And in a deep red Georgia and primary system, which is low turnout and which is base driven anyway, you're going to have the incentive in order to go along with Trump and stop the steel.

I believe that stop the steel is now the litmus test for the modern Republican candidate. But the problem, as you find out in Georgia, is you can do that. You can get the Trump people behind you, but you're not going to win a statewide election. And so I think that that is the modern trajectory of the party. and increasingly shrinking minority party oriented around grievance, but don't underestimate the power of grievance. It can actually be very powerful in the future. So the former centrist Republicans then go over to the Democrats.

Yes, which is already basically what happened. And that's the realignment. That's the point. The realignment is former country club Republicans no longer vote because it's not the party of George H.W. Bush anymore. They vote along with their other college and graduate school education. peers for the Democratic Party, which is a huge problem if you are on the Bernie left because your whole underlying theory no longer makes any sense. But I want to pick up first with the what happens with the Republican Party point, which is the Republican Party is going to continue to win

elections. The reality, sorry you hit this, Trump won more votes than he won last time. Trump himself is not reputed in the party. What is done, however, is the Republican Party, largely as a governing force capable of implementing its vision for the world. The Democrats are, so let's take Section 230, something Saga talked about. The Democratic Party is capable of passing legislation, having a comprehensive opposed to Section 230, but all of the different wings of the party will largely agree with. Senator Ron Wyden from my home state of Oregon and Bernie Sanders will probably fundamentally agree on Section 230 reform, which places more impetus on tech companies to moderate their

platforms more severely. At the same time, though, when Republicans were in power, it is just not true if there ever was a comprehensive conception of what moderation, Section 230, or anything of the like, would actually look like. There was just a lot of misinformation about platforms and publishers and a lot of fake kabuki theater hearings that were more about getting points with the base back home and actually implementing change. That's the culture world dynamic. Yeah, so I'll just go to the Pornhub example that Sagar brought up, which illustrates every single dynamic that we're talking about here and applies to tech companies in general. For years, you've seen socially conservative politicians, socially conservative organizations,

et cetera, bemoan, porn hub and its various, in many ways, really terrible behaviors around miters on the platform, safety, et cetera. There are activists on the left and on the right who worked on this issue. However, all of that activism and talk by conservative organizations and by conservative politicians led to nothing. It's not the threat of hearings that causes change. It's not the threat of picketing that causes change. What it actually is, though, is Nick Christoph writing in the New York Times, wait, Pornub was really bad that gets MasterCard, Visa, et cetera, to kick it off the actual payment platform within five days. So that is the dynamic that the right is fundamentally going to struggle with. And frankly, it's why if I were to tech company, I would not fear conservative tech backlash in any way whatsoever.

Because frankly, the conservative movement right now doesn't have any ability to wield the actual societal influence required to actually affect change and those functions. It used to be at the start of the Trump presidency that tech companies were concerned about the hearings. They were concerned about tech about Trump tweets. What clearly emerged is that they discovered that if they ticked off Trump, yes, there'd be a White House social media summit, but a bunch of right-wing grifters who no one cares about would show up and then nothing would actually happen. So that's the underlying dynamic here. that's fascinating i mean correct me if i'm wrong but you guys um you know tend to have like more conservative beliefs so how do you feel about what's happened i mean look alex i've i've said this before too which is like in terms of conservative beliefs yeah i mean that's definitely

where i am more on the spectrum but if you have to be honest about your ability in to influence discussion about how much power you actually have in your society about where it lies. And if you want to effectuate change, work with the people who have the power to effectuate that change. And this is something that I pointed out. And people were very angry with me a lot. There's a lot of social conservatives who make a lot of money conning their supporters and their email list and others being like, we're sticking it to porn. I was like, no, you're not. That's the truth. Nick Christoph is the one who stuck it to porn hub. All he did really was aggregate the work that they've been pointing out for 10 years. But the point is, is you don't

matter. So you should ask that question. Why don't I matter? Should I keep giving money to the same organizations, which tell me that they're making a difference when they're not? And so the way I look at it is, yes, I can believe whatever I want, but what I actually care about is getting something done. And that's just not something the right is interested in right now. And you're getting to my desire just to reject the label of conservative because in many ways something that you'll, look, Half of what I say on the podcast, I was pretty consistently pro-Joe Biden, because guess what? Joe Biden is doing the things I really support. So, for example, the last act of Secretary Pompeo, we've had on the podcast, was saying that what's

happening in Western China is genocide. And guess what? Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State designate, said, I support that too. So great. Joe Biden did that. That's really great. The thing that's most boring about media, and we've talked about this when you came on our podcast before about the dynamics around newsletters and podcasts is you're incentivized to promote

these fake narratives because your niche audience is interested in it. And look, the real talk thing is that guess what? On a lot of the issues that I care about, Joe Biden's doing a pretty good job. And guess what? If he does a bad job, if he, no offense to Bob Iger, nominates Bob Iger to be ambassador to China, I'll call him out for it. I mean, not that that would change his mind, but I'll call him out. But if he doesn't do that. And Tony Blinken actually makes a decision that puts Disney in a difficult position, especially considering where Mulan was filmed, I'll say, good job, Joe Biden. If you're actually going to do what the three of us are trying to do, which is provide analysis, we basically have to drop the idea that our fundamental job is to be

conservative or be progressive or be liberal in this media environment. Our job is to tell people what the truth is. Our job, because Saga has a lot of credibility of rising, is to actually have a conservative audience and tell them the truth. And they get ticked off about that. They get ticked off. Yeah, and let me just pick up there before you come in, Alex. We, at the beginning, we're talking about realignments. Let me give you an example, which is the child tax credit. That's a policy that I deeply support. A lot of people who are on the right, conservative kind of reformers have been pushing that for over a decade, right? Well, guys who just proposed the biggest child tax credit expansion in our history. Joe Biden as part of his COVID relief plan. It would be foolish

for me to be like, oh, you know, this is terrible because Biden is doing it. No, that's insane. This is policy that I support. And I'm glad to see him do it. And if you didn't do it, then I would, you know, I'll be get upset about it for it. So this is, again, to the point of realignments, which is that an easy way for politicians and for political coalitions and others to move is to adopt and change their policy. I'm not going to say that it's going to win over everybody, but it can change on the margins. And the margins are what won Joe Biden, the presidency. And they're also what lost Donald Trump the presidency. They're what lost, you know, Kelly Loughler and David Perdue, their Senate seats. We're talking about a few 10,

thousand votes here. That's when it starts to matter. And that's why I urge, when I say my biggest critique of the right has always been they don't actually care about policy. It's mostly about cultural grievance. I think almost everyone in Silicon Valley would probably understand what I'm talking about there. Because at what point has anyone ever proposed a comprehensive moderation standard? It's all just like my friend got banned from Twitter. And like if that's the, is that as close as you're going to get, then you suck. Like you fail. And they should laugh at you. They should not care what you think because you're not going to do anything. If I'm Mark Zuckerberg and them, I'm scared of Amy Klobuchar and of, you know, of these other people who are running the government.

They actually will come after you. Like, I understand why they're doing many of the things that they do. But on the right, that's just not a serious thing that's going to happen. And we just have four years of evidence to show you that that's not true. What I like about you guys among many things is that you speak true to the issues. You know, you guys don't spin or fall back. back on talking points, you actually like attack stuff from like a reality-based position. Why do you think there's so little of that now?

Do we blame social media or what's going on in our politics where these type of discussions are so rare? Two things are to blame. Yeah, two things are to blame here. Number one would just be polarization as a whole as a phenomenon. the more and more every political question comes down to do you have a college degree or do you not you as a politician are more incentivized to deliver to your audience it exists on either end of that spectrum so that's the number one issue i on the so at the same time social media is under that

in the sense that social media makes it easier and easier and easier for you to identify and target the audience that you have. But at the same time, I really object to, look, we've dunked on the right a bit. I'm going to dunk on the left a bit. I am not happy when people on the left act as if social media just creates things as a whole. Oh, if it wasn't for the Twitter social algorithm or it wasn't for Facebook, we would be kumbaya and it's all Mark Zuckerberg's software district. No, like the reality is that the Twitter algorithm amplifies dynamics that already exist in our country. The reality around college education, the idea that our country is polarizing more around class and education instead of race, that actually means something.

It's not Facebook's fault that in a state like California where you're living right now, the state actually did not pass an affirmative action bill despite being a strongly blue state. That's the underlying dynamic there. But here's what I do think is to blame for the lack of truth telling in media right now, which is the internet. So that's a little different from critiquing social media because the internet and the models of what we're doing. Think of your, think of your substack. Like, you're not monetizing it now with a subscription, but the easiest way for you to monetize with a subscription would be to say, look, I've got, let's say my 10,000 readers, I need 1,000 of them to pay me $10 a month. What you would obviously do is deliver niche specific content

to that audience that would make it so that you do not have to speak to an actual middle. It would be very hard for Sagar and I to monetize or build the podcast by doing the balls and strike position. So it requires a bit of strength on our part not to do that. And it's very distressing to see people both on the left and the right give very poor analysis. It's basically structured on this short term. We just want to look really great. But what I would say at the same time, though, is that's also where there's a lot of opportunity and why I think I'm excited for all three of us to vote our platforms because it's a short.

term value destroying decision to just serve everyone their clicks and their hot takes. It is a bad decision for you to be one of these people who is a former leftist, quote unquote, who goes on social media, becomes very pro-Trump, and then all of a sudden starts supporting Stop the Steel. Guess what you've done to your audience in three years? They're going to wake up as you're a liar. The same way that the people, you know, I'm sure you all have seen that Q&on forum on Reddit where it's all of the people who are hyperventing over discovering the QA.

on isn't fake. And the people who lied to them, I'm sure they got a huge, huge boost and got all this grifty money in 2019, but now they're totally done. And that's the dynamic. Yeah, I believe in karma whenever it comes to these things. It would be easy in the short term to lie to people and say, look, it's the easiest thing in the world in order to make money on the right is in order to just be like, the left sucks. Look at the left. It's so boring. also Marshall and I could make oceans of money or it could have two years ago been like he's black and I'm Indian and here's why we support Trump like literally we're looking at a Patreon in the high six figures right with a bunch of like boomers in the Midwest we're like by donating $10 to this I feel like I'm not racist um look that is all very easy to do but look we're on a tech podcast you want to build a podcast or a show or media which can survive as a business throughout the ages. That's not something that you can do.

Look at actually successful media companies which have survived turmoil within business and payments because I think we all know, I'm not going to say subscription fatigue is a thing. I don't necessarily think that that is true. But at some point, something's going to get figured out here. But the second thing is that look at like the New York Times, Fox, MSNBC, and others.

Easy to dunk on all four on CNN. It's easy to dunk on all four. they're also tremendously successful today even with the ratings going lower they're actually making more money than ever on cable okay so they figured out a way in order to keep their medium survivable throughout this and every single time when it comes down to it i really believe this in terms of niche audiences is when you lie you will pay a price look at fox right now they're number three in the ratings because they indulged to stop the steel but then they weren't willing to go all in and now they're screwed they literally have no idea what to do they're like fire half of their staff. MSNBC had the same problem. Rachel Maddow lost 500,000 viewers in a single night after the Mueller report came out because people are like, oh, wait, like she's just been feeding us complete lies about Russiagate. This always happens. I think the same thing is going to happen for a lot of, let's just say it. Like, I think a lot of these former leftists on YouTube, yeah, I hope the traffic was good and I hope you're saving because I'm from Texas. You know,

we're very familiar with like the oil workers like in the boom times they save a lot of money because sometimes in midland you ain't working for two or three years until the price comes back and that's exactly what I think this is happening it's like a boom bus cycle of grifting and so I think that if you want to build a steady environment yes will we lose some people on the margins 100% guarantee it's already happened people get mad at me all the time but it's one of things I love about my other show Rising, which is that when you're truly right-left, and I mean that in terms of the makeup of the audience, you can piss off half every day. One half, you know, they're pissed.

It's okay. The other half is cool with it. You piss off the other half and this one's cool with it. And by and large, there will be a core group of people who say, you know what? I like that they call it. Sometimes I don't agree, but I'm going to keep watching. And I think that that is the core value proposition basically of our show whenever it comes to, you know, bigger, bigger analysis that we do and the work that we do over there.

And I think, you know, success on both platforms probably bears that out in terms of a business decision to keep going. Yeah, I've been meaning to tell us to break, but the conversation is so engaging. So screw the break for a minute. Last question of this side. Why didn't populism work the way that you guys anticipated? We talked about that at the beginning, but I'd like to close that loop before we move to more tech subjects.

that's the big debate. What's frustrating about this question is there's a bad faith version of the question, and you're not asking it. And then there's a good faith version of the question. And I've been stuck on both sides of this question. So this really comes back to where we started the conversation, which is what did Donald Trump's election mean in 2016? The thing I think of when I saw Donald Trump's election was, wow, Donald Trump, race and this seems so silly to say, but racism aside, had some very interesting things to say when it came to the primary campaign, campaigned against the Iraq war, exposed the fact that a huge portion

of the Republican Party's base, now that they were out of the post-9-11 era, had no interest in the neo-conservative democracy-promoting vision of the Bush years. Huge development for America in the world. Two, he campaigned on not cutting Social Security, which was a another huge thing that was very important during the Bush years. During his looser moments, he said things like, yeah, I'm actually totally fine raising taxes on the rich. They don't vote for Republicans anyways. That's the underlying dynamic too. So you look at that and you think about it purely intellectually and you're thinking, holy crap, he could actually affect a complete realignment of American politics. Because that version of good Trump, who said things like,

let's just do popular things, not the war in Iraq, not cutting entitlement programs that pretty much everyone likes, not, you know, expanding Medicare in the states, so expanding Medicaid in the states, that's a Republican Party that could actually win elections because the key thing about the pre-Trump party is Republicans lost the popular vote. And at that point, seven out of the last eight elections. So you have a huge problem. Now, I gave the positive vision, which I think entranced a lot of good faith people, even look at how things actually implement. And when it actually implements, you don't actually have President Trump focus on increasing taxes or even keeping taxes stable. He does tax cut. Instead of saying, hey, we're not going to go out

for entitlement programs that people actually like. The first thing he does is try to cut Obamacare. Instead of saying, hey, let's pass an infrastructure package. To this day, I do not know why President Trump didn't show up in a city like Baltimore or Detroit for majority African-American population and just say in his Trumpy way, I know you didn't vote for me, but we're going to make America great again for everyone. The conservative boomers would have loved it. No one would have known what to say. It would have been a real unifying moment for him whether or not it actually happened, but he didn't do it because then you had the travel ban. You had Charlottesville. And it just just brings a question, is there a good faith

version of populism, which doesn't descend into honestly like white identity politics, grievance and those cultural issues? it's a great question Alex and look I've thought a lot about it and why did it fail it's because of what's some of a dynamic michael lynde who's like kind of our north star he wrote this book called the new class war and he said it's actually pretty clear most populists are grifters and that's basically what happened why didn't trump go to uh Detroit and declare an infrastructure package because it's easier to sit at the oval office and tweet about joe scarborough's missing or dead intern Right? Or to solve the case of like Mika's facelift or to call Stormy Daniels horse fate.

I can go on and I was a White House correspondent. So I'd suffer through all of this. There's a long list of insults. There's a long list of just, it's just pointless. But see, the key there is insult. Insulting the opposition in favor of a positive like program. I'm actually cool with that as long as you're actually trying to do something. But that's not what any of this is about. It was literally outside the political rem for no. other reason than except to protect his ego. I think it's pretty perfect that Trump's very last act as president was pardoning Judge Janine's ex-husband for tax fraud. And his previous act of that was rescinding the executive order that he had signed in his first days of his

administration banning lobbying of his aides for the previous five years. So yeah, like what did it devolved to into grifting of an unsurious person? But, and this is where I want to present the positive case. And my friend Michael Brandon Dardy over at National Review recently pointed this out. Trump was a grifter. No question. Almost 99% of the people around him were also grifters. But you cannot take away the reasons why 75 million voted for this person. And the structural problems are society, culture, what the left represents, and more that led to that. I'm not saying that a more competent Trump or whatever is coming. I have no idea whether any of that is true. But know that that manifests itself in some form in our politics. And that's up to Joe Biden. That's up to

whoever is going to be the leader of the Republican Party in order to parse out. And it will lead to changes in our political life in America. I have to quickly interject with one thing on that. Not to argue with my co-host on a different person's podcast. The problem is Trump did all the grifting that we just talked about. And he won more votes. So that's why I'm on the negative. of can populism right now turn into a good thing? He didn't give the speech in Detroit. He did tweet horse face. He did do all the things we didn't like. Anyone more votes. So I am just skeptical that politicians will choose the good version of populism when it turns out that not only will the bad version when you re-election, but also frankly, it's great for selling podcast tickets and

it's great for driving subscriptions and like Newsmax viewership. Yeah, no, I actually think you're Right. I'm deeply cynical. I'm saying if there was any positive version of this, it might manifest itself in that way. More likely, it doesn't. Yeah, it's a shame. I mean, we see it in the tech world, too, that the people who are the most vociferously negative or positive on one or other, you know, another side of an issue are the ones whose voices tend to rise to the top and define the debate. And, you know, this show is supposed to be a bit of an antidote to that. We're supposed to have nuanced conversations here. And I do feel, you know, so kinship with you guys because it seems like that's, you know, something that you guys are trying to do as well. Okay, we spent, we spent 40

minutes not talking, not really talking about tech on a big technology podcast. Let's take a break and go through the home stretch talking about what these realignments mean for technology. We'll be back here right in a minute or two on the big technology podcast. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers

break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back for the second half of the big technology podcast here with Marshall Kost. off in Sagar and Jetty from the realignment podcast. You might also have seen Sagar show The Rising with the Hill on YouTube. And if you haven't, you should subscribe to both the podcast and the YouTube channel.

They're very good. Okay, so you guys focus a lot on tech, like a surprising amount given your interest in politics. What realignment do you see happening in the technology world? And why are you so interested? Yeah, I'm so glad you, A, invited us on the podcast. podcast, but B pointed out the amount of tech we focused on because it was something that people pushed back on very early. I remember back in November of 2019, this is one of the first time someone tweeted about the podcast. They said, hey, I like the realignment, but they keep

talking about tech so much. And I don't get it because they're in D.C. And they should be talking more about politics. And this is, once again, our whole idea of we need to focus on long-term value and not short-term clicks, well, we talked about tech because all tech is politics and all politics is tech right now. If we look at everything from U.S.-China Cold War II, guess what? Tech and TikTok. You look at debates about free speech, moderation, censorship. Tech. Does Trump stay on Twitter? Tech. Is there a divide between people who are receiving the fruits of globalization and those who aren't? tech. Who gets to work in our white collar, excellent Zoom-fueled COVID situation? That once again is text. What affects everything. But in terms of the actual realignment, here is what it's

actually meant. What it means is that no, and let me take a quick step back. The biggest impact that Trump made on the way Republicans talk about political issues is it revealed that the base of the Republican Party, separate from the culture war issues, doesn't. really have that much interest in the rhetoric of tax cuts, the free market. So I always remember you see a lot of Republican politicians saying things like the GOP, this is, for example, Representative Dan Crenshaw from Texas, who's a young millennial politician. He says things that the GOP is the party of Uber. Unlike the Democrats of their taxi unions, we love innovation and the free market. And I don't think any of that's true at the actual base level. So what

that's meant is, as you've removed the articulation that that thing is true, you've seen something out substitute, which is tech is now the equivalent of Hollywood within the Republican Party, in the sense that for decades, Republicans and social conservatives, for a variety of good reasons and bad reasons, have said, hey, Hollywood doesn't reflect our values. We don't agree with it. We don't like the people who work in the industry, and we think they are opposed to what we believe in. They also donate to the politicians and the causes we oppose. But at the same time, no one actually does anything because there's nothing could be done. Because the issue of Hollywood is people who live in L.A. and work at Netflix are not social conservatives. So obviously there's going to be a

disagreement and there's no law you could pass. Conservatives are not going to support a furtive action bill forcing Netflix to hire 50-50 left right. Well, tech is now the same thing. So because you no longer have the adjuration of the market and the adoration of innovation, all you have is the true fact that despite all the debate about politics and antitrust in Section 230, Everything on the right comes down to the fact that even if you broke up Amazon, for example, let's say you hate what Amazon with AWS did to Parlor. If you broke up Amazon into six different companies, AT&T style from the 1980s, all six of those companies would also not serve Parlor. A startup created out of YC out of Stanford would also not host Parlor. So the objection people

on the right actually have isn't even policy. It's not the decisions executives are making. It's just to the fact that a certain part of the country, but is realigning away from their political beliefs, has control over these institutions. Yeah, exactly. And look, on a more like philosophical level, why do we care about tech? Because Marshall and I realized very early on, if you care about politics, what you actually care about is the study of power. And this is something that I think has actually been lost in a lot of political journalism.

But if you care about the power and power distribution in America, and if you especially care about democracy, then democracy is about litigating who in America gets to have power over what. And technology is, you know, look at the apart, how much of tech is our GDP? How much of tech controls the way that we interact with each other on a day-to-day basis? How much of it controls the very basics of commerce? Commerce, despite how a lot of libertarians would like to talk, is not separate from politics. we conduct business is the very definition of how we conceive of ourselves as a society. That's why they have literal rules in the Quran about doing business with each other in certain ways. It's

because this is a reflection of your values. And so we cared about tech from very early on because I think we saw how it was colliding increasingly with Washington, but not just Washington, with the very basics questions of power themselves around political movements. All political organizing today is done on social media. All political donations, the vast majority of them that are taking place here are taking place on the internet, facilitated again by online drives and more. So understanding where that was coming was very important. And I think we saw a lot of this from the beginning.

It's interesting, you know, way before the pandemic and the before time. Marshall and I had, we had dinner with a couple of like, you know, a couple of big, big people in Silicon Valley, some paper billionaires, which is probably normal for you, Alex, but I was like, oh shit, this guy's worth like 1.2, whatever. And so we're talking to him. And one of the most insightful things that was said there was that before like 2017, you could form a unicorn company and you would not have to think about the government. And that's just not the case anymore. I just don't believe that that's the case. And so that, that means that you have to care about politics and that politics has to care about you. And I think that again, increasingly, especially in terms of the amount of wealth that's being generated, in terms of the power that's being exerted over our society, this is value neutral. Like, I'm not judging them and saying that it's necessarily a bad thing. It's empirically just the way it is. And then you add on to this geopolitics and the interaction of now our most important, you know, economic sector and its interaction with our geopolitical enemy rival. I'll choose enemy. Others are probably

choose rival, which is China. And you add on once again something, which is all reminiscent of the debates that we had in this country a hundred years ago about financial capital. When finance became truly international, London was the center of the universe and the interactions of the UK and the British Empire and the American capital financial system and its own control over our politics and more. This is not new. It's just different. And so like once again in order to bring it back to one of my favorite quotes, it's from Mark Twain, is that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. And we could see that tech was rhyming with a key parts of our political economy and the debates around that from pretty early. I wouldn't say, you know,

like we were like the first to discover it. But in Washington, we were definitely looked at as weirdos who care. They're like, why do you guys care so much? But now, you know, it's like we're sitting pretty. Yeah. And it's, interesting that, Marshall, you mentioned the parlor example because I wrote a question down before we got on the line that I really wanted to ask you guys, which is that these companies are more powerful in some ways than the state. I mean, Donald Trump got banned from Facebook and Twitter. We haven't heard from him since. I mean, of course, he could have found ways around, but he was basically gone from public life, even though he was the president of the United States.

So what happens when you have a dynamic like that? And what does the same? state end up doing? I have to push back on a bit of the premise. I strongly disagree with this rhetoric about tech companies having more power than the state. Look, Donald Trump was kicked off of two social media platforms when he actually has the presidency of the United States. He could air as many pressers as he wants. As Donald Trump proved, the press will cover him no matter what does. So I just don't think it's philosophically true that tech companies have more power in the state. The state, if it wanted to, it could be capricious in incredibly different ways that would actually overwhelm it. So I just don't think that that premise has been proven.

But that being said, there is a difficulty in the current situation. And this is where I do not believe tech companies are equipped to handle. So for me, it's not that tech companies have more power in the state. It's just that they've gained more control and power in areas the state has traditionally not been concerned with. So traditionally, aside from a rate from the rate from concerns about racial discrimination, the state has not been concerned with the way that you run your private company or your private club. So let's say we have a country club and separate from racial discrimination, we just say, you know what, I just don't like Alex or I just don't like Sager, because every other week, Sager gets too drunk at dinner and embarrasses me at the

club, and I just don't want him there. He brings a bad bite. That's not a question the state has any concern over because it doesn't have anything to do of racial discrimination. Well, that's basically what happened with Twitter. Trump was intolerable on Twitter. Trump behaved to a point where he repeatedly violated all the rules. I think Twitter was correct to basically keep him on the platform until he had been democratically repudiated. I know, Mark and Jack are getting a lot of crap for this. But no, I think it would have been a terrible decision to take him off the platform before he lost re-election. That would have not been a good thing for American society. With that being said, he broke the rules. So once again,

that's not that they have more power from the state. It's just that a question the state has not concerned itself with, which is moderation, who gets to be part of what, has now taken on greater importance. And the bigger concern I have, and I know Saga could follow up on this is I feel as if a huge issue driving this problem is that Twitter and Facebook have the exact wrong enemies to produce the optimal outcome. When what you're doing is banning QAnon folks and Alex Jones and Donald Trump as he's literally instigating violence, you have no action. No one's going to actually question you. Every single critic of Facebook is like, oh yeah, you know what, that was the right decision. Good job. Like, good job, Mark. You finally got it right for

ones. I would much rather we had a situation where, frankly, I want to see someone on the center left who matters. I'm not to sound calis when I say this. I want a situation where a Black Lives Matter activist who has a lot of sympathy in the institutions in our society maybe gets deplatformed and there's actual backlash that matters for Twitter. I want Twitter to actually have to sit down and say, wow, this backlash on this decision, because we made it on the fly, because we didn't think beforehand was so bad that we had to make sure this never happens again. When Twitter took Hunter Biden, when Twitter banned the New York Post story over Hunter Biden, everyone largely agreed that was a huge mistake. You go to the Atlantic, you go to the New York Times, and you'll

find a critical consensus that was the wrong decision. But they didn't actually suffer for it because once again, the victim was a right-wing newspaper, but frankly doesn't really matter that much in the corridors of power. If that had been the New York Times, the situation would completely different. So that's the problem we're trying to shift through. Yeah, it's fascinating. And again, it goes back to what we said earlier, which is that the only debates in America, which matter, are debates between the center left and the progressive left, which is that intra-left debates are largely ones that rule power. I mean, even look at tech companies. That's basically what we're talking about, right? Where we have like free speech wing of the

free speech party, that's left libertarianism. It's not libertarianism, which is aligned with the Republican Party versus, you know, some Twitter employees. Same thing with Facebook. Like, Mark Zuckerberg is like a pretty typical, like neoliberal, like, that's fine. Like, whatever. But it's like him versus, and it's like generic commitment to liberal values and all of that, versus an increasingly vocal, you know, element of his face, of his own employees. That's the only debate, I think, which actually matters in America. And it's you're right, which is that, And yeah, look, let's not mistake this. The state is obviously more powerful.

Like, they could shut Twitter down tomorrow if they wanted to. They don't necessarily have the political will in order to do so. But that doesn't obscure the fact that Twitter does have power overwhelms, over realms of our society, which we are not previously capable of understanding as needed of government intervention or even of government thought. And so that, again, though, I think this is a good thing. This is politics, which is that the reason the Democratic president, process and system exists is specifically for us to litigate new, you know, challenges to our discourse, to our society and more and say, okay, like, how the hell do we handle this? And I actually

am increasingly, I mean, if I was, you know, like hard ride or something, I would be pretty depressed because it's like Marshall said, you could break AWS off of Amazon and AWS would still be a phenomenally, you know, profitable company. They're still going to make the exact same decision. So we were really talking here as about ideological capture. And when we're talking about ideological capture of a specific sect, the specific sect of our entire economy, and then that part of our economy is more dominant, knows how to scale itself to billions and trillions of dollars,

then what you're really saying, the only alternative viable alternative you actually have is nationalizing it. This is the U.S. is not going to happen. So what are you going to do? And I increasingly tell people on the right who are like, I want to do something about this. Like, we need to see, you know, the Twitter change. I'm like, okay, you should start getting to know people like Alex Cantorwitz or, you know, talking to the New York Times because what they write is the only thing that matters.

I'm like, what you think literally doesn't matter. You could go and get a Republican senator to say it. And if it's the right Republican senator, Facebook would actually be better off in the eyes of the people who matter, ignoring that senator than actually indulging them. And this again is a power dynamic, which nobody really wants to admit because there's an entire grifting ecosystem of political dollars raised upon grievance, but which if you're actually interested in effectuating change within the industry, this is where it would come from.

Yeah. And I said that they have powers over the state in some ways, not fully. But I do appreciate that, yeah, the state could kick Twitter's ass in a second if they wanted to. So where does this go? Because eventually people want to strike back by people, I mean the government. So this is the thing that's interesting, which is where eventually I'm more and more obsessed with Antonio Garcia Martinez and Jeff Jarvis's invocation of the Gutenberg era and the 30 years war as being the framework to understand our moment. So the printing press happens, the print in the 1400s. You get the printing press. You get the Bible distributed more. Literacy goes up. That literacy leads to debate and contestation with the Catholic Church. You then see horrific warfare that leads to millions and millions of death, huge percentages of the population and countries such as Germany dying away, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, all this terrible stuff. And it eventually culminates in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, which is a new consensus. around the nature of the nation state and the limiting of the power of the Catholic Church.

I think we are in this 30 years, in this 30 years war moment when it comes to social media. Social media is the equivalent of the printing press. The thing is with that point, and this is as libertarian as I would get on this question, is there's no putting social media away. There's no, we're going to pass this bill, but reform section 230 to the point which Facebook goes away or Twitter goes away. We are stuck with it. There's no putting the toothpaste back in the container, the horse is out of the barm.

That's the dynamic. Now, the good news is that it's not as if we're actually, all of the warfare has become purely social, mostly. So obviously there's a death at the Antifa protests in Portland in July. There are five deaths at the Capitol, and that's tragic, and that's terrible. But when we look about comfort, it's never going to look. look at that 30 years war scale. But the whole point of the metaphor and why it's the right construct is we are just going to have to get through this current struggle, especially in the 2020s, to the point where we eventually have to have a new consensus be formed. Now, the problem

and where I'm least optimistic is that right now we don't actually have a political class, which is actually trained to create consensus. So we don't have democratic politicians who could say, hey, look, we're on the left. We don't like the right for various reasons. But it is definitely true that Jack Dorsey and Twitter do not have any form of fair adjudication of claims by people on the right. We all know that's true. It doesn't exist. It's slap dash. That's not a partisan point. We should pressure Jack Dorsey to actually do something about that, even if those people are not our voters. At the same time, you don't have Republican politicians who are incentivized to basically lie to their voters by saying things like, well, section 230 means that there's publishers and

platforms, or they lie and say things like, if you elect me, I'll finally spank Jack Dorsey enough to leave. So what we need is a development of a new political class that reconceives of what its role in society is, which is rather than fighting for our little tribe or militia, we need to govern for the whole country. Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Marshall. And to even borrow from that, that's why I think I said previously, I think this is a generational question. I don't think the current political class has what it takes in order to tackle that. And it did take 30 years of 30 years war and more in order to litigate these questions of power, democracy, and more. In the near term, here's what I think is going to happen.

I think that the Democrats and Trump Biden and others are wholly convinced that like Zuckerberg and Twitter did not do enough in order to combat Trump. And that with unified democratic government, something will happen. I think that that something will actually be very bad for people. who are, I wouldn't say dissonance, but people who are outside the mainstream on Facebook and Twitter. As you've discussed on your own podcast, Alex, the removal of Section 230 would actually impact. Actually, it was so fascinating. One of your most recent guests, I forget who it was, was like, oh, yeah, if I was Nancy Pelosi, I'd be like, yeah, oh, AOC. I'm going to use their anti-monopoly rhetoric in order to crush AOC's ability in order to fundraise on Facebook, which is genius,

actually, if you're Nancy Pelosi. And if you're a mainstream Democratic politician, totally true, which is that here's the truth, censorship, and particularly empowering Facebook and Twitter in order to take objectional content off of its platform would be a devastating to the right and it would also be particularly devastating to the progressive left. So whenever we think about that, what we're going to see is a series of yo-yo-like decisions, just like we saw with printing the printing press or in the early days of internet, whenever people would like ban YouTube. Remember when like Turkey banned YouTube because that one video that, one that that was mean to Atta Turk.

It's like stuff like that. I was there. I was in Turkey when YouTube was banned. Yeah. I spent a semester there. We used workarounds to watch YouTube. Yes. Even still.

And in China, they use VPN. It's like you can only put the internet so far back in the toothpaste too. Exactly, though. And then that's my point, which is that you're going to see a series of decisions in American politics over the next 30 years, which are just going to create more backlash. So I think the left, the mainstream left, right now they hold real power in America. They're going to do what they think needs to be done because they're like, oh, we need to punish Mark Zuckerberg by censoring him even more. So they're going to do that.

And then that's going to create a right-wing backlash. And maybe we'll see, you know, the Signal Foundation is actually, I think, a preview of something in my, in the future for my opinion, which is a nonprofit-based entity, which is basically inured from market backlashes and market boycotts, which will become the home of dissidents. And then eventually, those dissidents will once again gain power because at least we do live in a democracy and some of that will get rolled back. So if you know, if you're in, if you're in tech, like buckle up. It's going to be fun. I really think it is going to be a wild ride in terms of public policy over the next like 20 years. Oh, I agree completely. And I do think, I mean,

I think we're, you know, speaking of realignment, I think we're aligned on the fact that the intersection of tech and politics is going to be freaking fascinating over the next few years. And we're at the beginning of the story, nowhere near the end. So, I mean, I will keep following along with you guys. I'm a fan of the show. I'm a fan of the podcast. Do you want to let everybody know where they can find those and find you guys online? Yeah, absolutely.

We're at the realignment pod on Twitter, realignment the realignment on and wherever you get your podcast. And we have a substack, weekly substack where we give out transcripts and, you know, listener feedback and more at the realignment.substack.com. And what am I missing, Marshall? Oh, and the realignment on YouTube. There we go. Yeah. And you can find Saugger at E. Sager and me at M.A. Kozloff on Twitter. Yeah. And when you go over there, folks, make sure to give them a five-star review on their iTunes. And likewise, give this guy a five-star review. Give him a five-star review and write him a five-star rating because it really helps him on the algorithm. That's true.

It's all about those big tech algorithms. Well, I appreciate it. It's true. At the end of the capital riot, Mitt Romney came up and said the way that you respect people is not by playing into their fantasies, but by telling them the truth. And I think that you guys are a standout example of folks who will tell people the truth, even when it's unpopular. We may not agree on all the policies, but I think discussions like this are.

are super productive and, um, and I appreciate what you guys are doing. So absolutely, it's a thrill to have you on. We'd love to have you back at sometime soon. And I really love the discussions about tech, uh, on your show. I learned a ton from them. So thank you. Thanks, man. Anytime. Thanks, Alex. Well, to everybody listening, if it's your first time listening, uh, would love it if you could subscribe. We have a new episode every week. Uh, if you're a long time subscriber, as Sager mentioned, a five star review or even a review goes a long way. So, uh, if you'd be willing to do that, that would be great. I want to thank the folks at Red Circle for hosting and selling ads on the show and Nate Gwattany for editing and mastering this thing. It's not an

easy task. And that will do it for us this week. We'll be back next week with another episode. It will be a recording of my conversation with Glenn Greenwald for a story we just published on 100. So stand by for that. Thanks again for listening and we will see you next week. Thank you.