I can't wait for the next Josh/Ken podcast. I started off as a LRC fan but ATPL quickly became my favorite podcast of the week. If I may suggest a focus on the Supreme Court and all of its machinations. SCOTUS brings together legal, political, and hot-button topics in a compelling and frustrating package. It would seem to be an area ripe with opportunities. Plus if (when?) Garland starts high-ranking Jan 6th investigations and prosecution, SCOTUS will be in the center.
I make my own mayo every week because of IBS-related intolerances (so I can control the ingredients) and honestly I wouldn't go back even if my chronic issues went away. I love being able to make my mayo extra tangy with lots of vinegar (I experiment with different types) and sometimes lemon juice and/or horseradish. A truly delicious dressing/spread/sauce.
At this point I've decided the secret is that there is no secret. It came on gradually over my early 30s and now after years of fruitless trips to gastroenterologists and allergists it seems this is just life now. I've figured out a group of foods I can cycle through that keep symptoms minimized but never gone completely. It's not a lot of variety - long gone are my days of trying new foods and restaurants every week.
Josh, just yesterday I heard from my nephew that he and his wife (who traveled to Italy with my sister and brother in law over the holiday) have been stuck there. They came down with Covid on 1/2. Their symptoms resolved by Day 5. They have purchased home tests every day since then and have tested positive. If they go through the Italian system, they can be detained for another 21 days. (They initially had flights booked from the 5th). Delta says they need a positive clearance from an American MD to board a flight home. His wife's Dr. refuses a virtual visit, she told her to get evaluated by an Italian Dr. but Delta won't accept that. I recommended he call the American Consulate-- they must have an MD on staff! Anyhow, the got some kind of appointment with a Web-MD and they were told they can return Sunday... But this has cost them thousands of extra dollars and they are afraid they will have lost their jobs when they finally return home. This is a huge problem. I don't know of any American MD that would clear a patient they did not know prior to their trip. I advise anyone I know to consult their Dr. prior to traveling overseas and come to an agreement for their return. If their PCP is too uncomfortable to do this, ask for a referral to an infectious disease Dr. and visit and extract an agreement from them before leaving.
Oh, I agree about the pushed buttons on there... honestly. I have been trying extra hard to just restrain myself from commenting and click Like buttons on comments that even just align with my thoughts... even on a tangent.
James, I missed yesterday's TMD and did a cursory read through today's TMD + comments... about the only comment I found valuable relatively was Ms. SSMs. I suppose it may reveal my partisan leanings... or my skepticism, but I find criticism toward POTUS B's speeches very... hypocritical coming from the Right. I mean, if he made a hypocritcal or partisan speech WF cares? I find that to be his job -- to frame the current situation within a certain perspective. Very different than demonizing all people from a particular party or ethnicity or region.
I would have became a founding member if there was a monthly option for that. For a lot of Americans it will be easier to pay that over the year then to come with it on some random week y’all decide to launch a platform. Especially right after the holiday season. Excited to learn more about mayo culture and centrist policies
I personally was turned off by the Business Insider Twitter and FB. In August I quit Twitter, FB, IG etc. So I was not interested at moment of launch to sign up as a founding member. I thought, maybe if I had more familiarity with Josh, I would not be so hesitative. So I signed up monthly so I can read ... and get a better assessment so I hope he keeps this founding member option open for at least another 6 months to a year and within that time I may resub in that category.
i think I have listened to maybe 2 or 3 podcasts from them! Not enough to recognize names though! Honestly, I have stopped listening to The Remnant/and other Dispatch pods... I honestly don't know why. However, I have realized sometimes I will start a pod and if it begins to produce negative feelz... I stop it and move to another (not always political themed pods).
New Subscriber referred from The Dispatch where I remain a center-left Democrat somewhat spurned by the Center Right Cons there... anyhow, I had avoided your previous platform for what I assumed possessed a very LW/progressive bias... but I am willing to gamble on your POV/Substack because frankly, online Centrist/mod Liberals ideas and commentary are hard to come by on the internets. Anyhow, I agree about your standpoint on political party and honestly, who would want to admit they were an active Republican party member currently? What stinks is that the Republican party has lost it's collective mind and I would prefer to be in a debate with literal old school conservatives vs. this populist/formerly known as TeaParty whacko collective who both not only desire a mass Covid die-off but also randomly label people communist or socialist that don't land on their agenda while simultaneously embrace autocrats overseas.... while not considering that the mass die-off includes their most ardent supporters.. it is a conflict for me--soon/ eventually they will decrease their voter count enough to meet their own electoral sell-by date. We see Trump trying to reverse that trend... but the monster you create will consume you as all the myths and legends portend.
Josh - here's my devil's advocate for supporting Republicans and I hope you take a minute to read it.
I 100% agree that Democrats are the more competent, less evil party. Republicans are a mess and an embarassment.
That being said, I think the last 2 years has shown that every single governmental bureacratic organization is filled with people significantly to the left of the median American. So when Democrats are in power - even moderate Democrats - they're free to crank up the dial on the craziness. Think the vaccine prioritization by race controversy - but that happening in every institution and people not finding out about 99.9% of it. The most insane progressive ideologies will bleed into every institution and in 50 years they will all look like the San Francisco School Board - and most will avoid scrutiny.
On the other hand - because of this same exact reason - when Republicans are in power, nothing will get done. Because of the fact that bureacracies are staffed up and down with progressives, there will be endless leaks and internal revolts (see Trump admin). Prestige media will also relentlessly attack any Republican admin in a way that they won't with Democrats (except for not being progressive enough).
ALL that being said - my counter-counter point is that really all that matters for the success of a country long-term is that we can attract smart people to the country (smart fraction theory). We need high skill immigration because our current native population is fairly weak due to mass Central American illegal immigration (see California's disastrous PISA scores). And high skill immigrants very much so prefer Democrats due to better branding and media as well as just those kinds of people being more socially liberal in general. Some of that may be outweighed by the fact that Democrats think it's offensive to differentiate between an Eastern European physicist and a Nicaraguan farmer, but the effects on immigration are still probably marginally better on the Democrat side (especially since Rs have gone much more nativist).
To your travel advice: yes, the plan to fight inflation should be every American household stops spending so much on fancy goods and saves up enough to take their family on a 2-3 week international vacation. Somewhere you've never been. Support other economies, drive down demand here, destress (for the kids too) and expose yourself to how non-americans live.
Commenting from vacation in the mask-mandated Bahamas. Here in Nassau there are Covid tests available everywhere, although we also brought them from home. You MUST get a Covid health visa to enter the country and it includes insurance covering $7000 of quarantine if you can’t return to the US. We flew here on Southwest with two bags free in a socially distanced cabin.
You didn’t answer the implicit question: will Ken get a pay raise for this now that public radio is no longer leaching free/subsidized content from you gullible fools?
I'm not sure that question was implicit! I would not characterize public radio as "leeching," and we weren't working for free. (Nor are we subject to a non-compete, which you asked about yesterday, and besides which non-competes can't be enforced in California.) But yes, since you asked, we do believe the show will throw off more income for the three of us as a commercial venture. (I'm going to choose to interpret aggressive comments like this as fervent enthusiasm for Ken and me to be making audio again -- a fervent enthusiasm I share.)
Man, you really can’t win, can you? Gullible fool on public radio, or substack sellout. And, even if you get comfortable with one of those reputations, you’re also still widely reviled as a mayo aficionado.
I, for one, am rooting for you regardless of your naïveté or greedy villainy. Hope this thing is so wildly successful that you decide to move to Austin for the vibes, food, and culture (read: taxes).
I joined just to tell Fritz and Josh that Delta just announced all credits are extended for booking by end of 2023 and travel through 2024! And also will see how the content here is :)
Re: Airlines -- the reason people squabble over overhead bin space is because in an attempt to save money they're trying to maximize carry-on capacity and not have to check bags in. The downside is slower planing and deplaning, which I assume leads to delays for airlines in some non insignificant way. This is anecdotal, but I fly a lot of Southwest and the free two checked in bags reduces the number of carry-ons I see compared to when I fly other airlines.
Thanks for responding to my question Josh! Your arguments for staying with the Dems are very close to my own. I'm very skeptical of a lot of the cultural left stuff gaining influence in the Democratic Party (because a lot of it truly is borderline illiberal and also electoral poison) - my follow up question to you is how to reduce that influence? Do you see any exit ramps from this rhetoric? Is there any hope that the Dems will eventually move away from it? Maybe getting Klain to read more of your and Yglesias's stuff?
I'll have thoughts on that in some coming issues but one problem here is "this rhetoric" very often isn't coming from elected officials -- it's coming from activists or other cultural actors or even HR departments. It's a distributed phenomenon and it can't really be stopped from the top down, it's going to require pushback from the bottom up, and not really through what you'd normally think of as the political process.
Well I'd certainly agree it's more important for people who might do even a minor amount of activism, such as encouraging friends to vote for a candidate for local office, or who writes publicly about politics as I do.
But I also think, at a mass level, politicians are responsive to people they perceive as "part of" their party coalition. If voters like you withdraw from the party, politicians perceive voters like you won't vote in their primary, and they'll act accordingly.
One individual won't have a perceptible effect on how politicians perceive the mass of the party, but then, an individual's vote is highly unlikely to change the outcome of an election either. You could look at that fact and say voting is irrational, a waste of time. But I think that intangible influence, like voting, is something people do as part of a civic compact to make government work. If everyone opted out, the effects would be quite bad.
As for primaries, I too would prefer a ranked-choice, all-party election system, although political scientists keep telling me it doesn't actually do what I expect it would do (produce election winners closer to the political median, and therefore closer to me).
You can also vote for party officers, platforms, etc. In particular, I interpreted Josh's comment there (I've not read the BI article, so take this with a grain of salt) as suggesting that you should align with a party that you want to influence, not necessarily one of the big two. Obviously, with one of the big two, your influence matters more in terms of who actually gets elected, but it depends on what your goals are when voting.
That being said, we should have ranked choice voting! The Democrat/Relublican duopoly does real damage to our politics.
Yeah I don't think third parties are important. But I do wish that we had more meaningful local political parties, like some other countries do. In Vancouver, the city has its own political parties, separate from those in the province of British Columbia, which are in turn separate from the federal parties, so that in each case they can align to ideological camps that actually reflect the spread of views within the jurisdiction.
This conversation reminds me of a point made by Jude Wanniski in his 1978 book "The Way the World Works". He wrote, "In so far as elections are honestly conducted, they always turn out right."
He also deduced that individual participation or non-participation logically led to the same correct outcome.
There are downsides to open primaries, too. The American political system is already a pretty open one, and open primaries have the tendency to reduce the influence and impact of party insiders and leaders. This can be a good or bad thing, but one way it can be bad is by empowering motivated extremists to come in and take over. (There is a version of this story behind Sanders in the Democratic party and Trump in the Republican party but don't take it too literally or too far)
I can't wait for the next Josh/Ken podcast. I started off as a LRC fan but ATPL quickly became my favorite podcast of the week. If I may suggest a focus on the Supreme Court and all of its machinations. SCOTUS brings together legal, political, and hot-button topics in a compelling and frustrating package. It would seem to be an area ripe with opportunities. Plus if (when?) Garland starts high-ranking Jan 6th investigations and prosecution, SCOTUS will be in the center.
I make my own mayo every week because of IBS-related intolerances (so I can control the ingredients) and honestly I wouldn't go back even if my chronic issues went away. I love being able to make my mayo extra tangy with lots of vinegar (I experiment with different types) and sometimes lemon juice and/or horseradish. A truly delicious dressing/spread/sauce.
Stuart.. I also suffer from IBS and please tell me your secrets.
At this point I've decided the secret is that there is no secret. It came on gradually over my early 30s and now after years of fruitless trips to gastroenterologists and allergists it seems this is just life now. I've figured out a group of foods I can cycle through that keep symptoms minimized but never gone completely. It's not a lot of variety - long gone are my days of trying new foods and restaurants every week.
Josh, just yesterday I heard from my nephew that he and his wife (who traveled to Italy with my sister and brother in law over the holiday) have been stuck there. They came down with Covid on 1/2. Their symptoms resolved by Day 5. They have purchased home tests every day since then and have tested positive. If they go through the Italian system, they can be detained for another 21 days. (They initially had flights booked from the 5th). Delta says they need a positive clearance from an American MD to board a flight home. His wife's Dr. refuses a virtual visit, she told her to get evaluated by an Italian Dr. but Delta won't accept that. I recommended he call the American Consulate-- they must have an MD on staff! Anyhow, the got some kind of appointment with a Web-MD and they were told they can return Sunday... But this has cost them thousands of extra dollars and they are afraid they will have lost their jobs when they finally return home. This is a huge problem. I don't know of any American MD that would clear a patient they did not know prior to their trip. I advise anyone I know to consult their Dr. prior to traveling overseas and come to an agreement for their return. If their PCP is too uncomfortable to do this, ask for a referral to an infectious disease Dr. and visit and extract an agreement from them before leaving.
What a mess. And yeah this is a huge issue -- and all the more reason to get to a point where we can treat COVID like any other respiratory illness.
Oh, I agree about the pushed buttons on there... honestly. I have been trying extra hard to just restrain myself from commenting and click Like buttons on comments that even just align with my thoughts... even on a tangent.
James, I missed yesterday's TMD and did a cursory read through today's TMD + comments... about the only comment I found valuable relatively was Ms. SSMs. I suppose it may reveal my partisan leanings... or my skepticism, but I find criticism toward POTUS B's speeches very... hypocritical coming from the Right. I mean, if he made a hypocritcal or partisan speech WF cares? I find that to be his job -- to frame the current situation within a certain perspective. Very different than demonizing all people from a particular party or ethnicity or region.
I would have became a founding member if there was a monthly option for that. For a lot of Americans it will be easier to pay that over the year then to come with it on some random week y’all decide to launch a platform. Especially right after the holiday season. Excited to learn more about mayo culture and centrist policies
I personally was turned off by the Business Insider Twitter and FB. In August I quit Twitter, FB, IG etc. So I was not interested at moment of launch to sign up as a founding member. I thought, maybe if I had more familiarity with Josh, I would not be so hesitative. So I signed up monthly so I can read ... and get a better assessment so I hope he keeps this founding member option open for at least another 6 months to a year and within that time I may resub in that category.
i think I have listened to maybe 2 or 3 podcasts from them! Not enough to recognize names though! Honestly, I have stopped listening to The Remnant/and other Dispatch pods... I honestly don't know why. However, I have realized sometimes I will start a pod and if it begins to produce negative feelz... I stop it and move to another (not always political themed pods).
New Subscriber referred from The Dispatch where I remain a center-left Democrat somewhat spurned by the Center Right Cons there... anyhow, I had avoided your previous platform for what I assumed possessed a very LW/progressive bias... but I am willing to gamble on your POV/Substack because frankly, online Centrist/mod Liberals ideas and commentary are hard to come by on the internets. Anyhow, I agree about your standpoint on political party and honestly, who would want to admit they were an active Republican party member currently? What stinks is that the Republican party has lost it's collective mind and I would prefer to be in a debate with literal old school conservatives vs. this populist/formerly known as TeaParty whacko collective who both not only desire a mass Covid die-off but also randomly label people communist or socialist that don't land on their agenda while simultaneously embrace autocrats overseas.... while not considering that the mass die-off includes their most ardent supporters.. it is a conflict for me--soon/ eventually they will decrease their voter count enough to meet their own electoral sell-by date. We see Trump trying to reverse that trend... but the monster you create will consume you as all the myths and legends portend.
Welcome! I hope you find this interesting.
Josh - here's my devil's advocate for supporting Republicans and I hope you take a minute to read it.
I 100% agree that Democrats are the more competent, less evil party. Republicans are a mess and an embarassment.
That being said, I think the last 2 years has shown that every single governmental bureacratic organization is filled with people significantly to the left of the median American. So when Democrats are in power - even moderate Democrats - they're free to crank up the dial on the craziness. Think the vaccine prioritization by race controversy - but that happening in every institution and people not finding out about 99.9% of it. The most insane progressive ideologies will bleed into every institution and in 50 years they will all look like the San Francisco School Board - and most will avoid scrutiny.
On the other hand - because of this same exact reason - when Republicans are in power, nothing will get done. Because of the fact that bureacracies are staffed up and down with progressives, there will be endless leaks and internal revolts (see Trump admin). Prestige media will also relentlessly attack any Republican admin in a way that they won't with Democrats (except for not being progressive enough).
ALL that being said - my counter-counter point is that really all that matters for the success of a country long-term is that we can attract smart people to the country (smart fraction theory). We need high skill immigration because our current native population is fairly weak due to mass Central American illegal immigration (see California's disastrous PISA scores). And high skill immigrants very much so prefer Democrats due to better branding and media as well as just those kinds of people being more socially liberal in general. Some of that may be outweighed by the fact that Democrats think it's offensive to differentiate between an Eastern European physicist and a Nicaraguan farmer, but the effects on immigration are still probably marginally better on the Democrat side (especially since Rs have gone much more nativist).
To your travel advice: yes, the plan to fight inflation should be every American household stops spending so much on fancy goods and saves up enough to take their family on a 2-3 week international vacation. Somewhere you've never been. Support other economies, drive down demand here, destress (for the kids too) and expose yourself to how non-americans live.
Commenting from vacation in the mask-mandated Bahamas. Here in Nassau there are Covid tests available everywhere, although we also brought them from home. You MUST get a Covid health visa to enter the country and it includes insurance covering $7000 of quarantine if you can’t return to the US. We flew here on Southwest with two bags free in a socially distanced cabin.
You didn’t answer the implicit question: will Ken get a pay raise for this now that public radio is no longer leaching free/subsidized content from you gullible fools?
I'm not sure that question was implicit! I would not characterize public radio as "leeching," and we weren't working for free. (Nor are we subject to a non-compete, which you asked about yesterday, and besides which non-competes can't be enforced in California.) But yes, since you asked, we do believe the show will throw off more income for the three of us as a commercial venture. (I'm going to choose to interpret aggressive comments like this as fervent enthusiasm for Ken and me to be making audio again -- a fervent enthusiasm I share.)
Man, you really can’t win, can you? Gullible fool on public radio, or substack sellout. And, even if you get comfortable with one of those reputations, you’re also still widely reviled as a mayo aficionado.
I, for one, am rooting for you regardless of your naïveté or greedy villainy. Hope this thing is so wildly successful that you decide to move to Austin for the vibes, food, and culture (read: taxes).
I joined just to tell Fritz and Josh that Delta just announced all credits are extended for booking by end of 2023 and travel through 2024! And also will see how the content here is :)
Re: Airlines -- the reason people squabble over overhead bin space is because in an attempt to save money they're trying to maximize carry-on capacity and not have to check bags in. The downside is slower planing and deplaning, which I assume leads to delays for airlines in some non insignificant way. This is anecdotal, but I fly a lot of Southwest and the free two checked in bags reduces the number of carry-ons I see compared to when I fly other airlines.
Thanks for responding to my question Josh! Your arguments for staying with the Dems are very close to my own. I'm very skeptical of a lot of the cultural left stuff gaining influence in the Democratic Party (because a lot of it truly is borderline illiberal and also electoral poison) - my follow up question to you is how to reduce that influence? Do you see any exit ramps from this rhetoric? Is there any hope that the Dems will eventually move away from it? Maybe getting Klain to read more of your and Yglesias's stuff?
I'll have thoughts on that in some coming issues but one problem here is "this rhetoric" very often isn't coming from elected officials -- it's coming from activists or other cultural actors or even HR departments. It's a distributed phenomenon and it can't really be stopped from the top down, it's going to require pushback from the bottom up, and not really through what you'd normally think of as the political process.
Well I'd certainly agree it's more important for people who might do even a minor amount of activism, such as encouraging friends to vote for a candidate for local office, or who writes publicly about politics as I do.
But I also think, at a mass level, politicians are responsive to people they perceive as "part of" their party coalition. If voters like you withdraw from the party, politicians perceive voters like you won't vote in their primary, and they'll act accordingly.
One individual won't have a perceptible effect on how politicians perceive the mass of the party, but then, an individual's vote is highly unlikely to change the outcome of an election either. You could look at that fact and say voting is irrational, a waste of time. But I think that intangible influence, like voting, is something people do as part of a civic compact to make government work. If everyone opted out, the effects would be quite bad.
As for primaries, I too would prefer a ranked-choice, all-party election system, although political scientists keep telling me it doesn't actually do what I expect it would do (produce election winners closer to the political median, and therefore closer to me).
You can also vote for party officers, platforms, etc. In particular, I interpreted Josh's comment there (I've not read the BI article, so take this with a grain of salt) as suggesting that you should align with a party that you want to influence, not necessarily one of the big two. Obviously, with one of the big two, your influence matters more in terms of who actually gets elected, but it depends on what your goals are when voting.
That being said, we should have ranked choice voting! The Democrat/Relublican duopoly does real damage to our politics.
Yeah I don't think third parties are important. But I do wish that we had more meaningful local political parties, like some other countries do. In Vancouver, the city has its own political parties, separate from those in the province of British Columbia, which are in turn separate from the federal parties, so that in each case they can align to ideological camps that actually reflect the spread of views within the jurisdiction.
This conversation reminds me of a point made by Jude Wanniski in his 1978 book "The Way the World Works". He wrote, "In so far as elections are honestly conducted, they always turn out right."
He also deduced that individual participation or non-participation logically led to the same correct outcome.
There are downsides to open primaries, too. The American political system is already a pretty open one, and open primaries have the tendency to reduce the influence and impact of party insiders and leaders. This can be a good or bad thing, but one way it can be bad is by empowering motivated extremists to come in and take over. (There is a version of this story behind Sanders in the Democratic party and Trump in the Republican party but don't take it too literally or too far)