Democrats won’t release their 2024 election autopsy, here is ours

Episode Summary 

This episode is a bit different than usual because it’s a collaboration that I did with my friends at Liberal Currents on their podcast, Half the Answer, about my book, What Republicans Know, which is, as you may already realize, about what Democrats fail to understand about politics, and how Republican consultants and politicians have a much better grasp of things.

As it happens, our conversation is incredibly relevant this week after the new Republic’s Greg Sargent reported that the Democratic National Committee is refusing to release to the public an autopsy report that it commissioned about what went wrong in the 2024 presidential election.

That’s a huge mistake since millions of people want to see the party acknowledge its failures, so that political leaders can be held accountable now and in the future.

My personal expectation is that this outrageous decision will be reversed once enough people realize what’s happened. In the meantime, though, I hope you’ll enjoy the autopsy that Caitlyn Green, Trent Nelson, and I conducted.

The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

08:47 — Democrats are actually funding right-wing media through ineffective TV advertising

15:40 — Republican recruitment tactics and Democratic gate-keeping

19:38 — Public opinion is malleable, but Democratic strategists don’t realize this

27:08 — The undead ‘triangulation’ strategy of Bill Clinton is behind many contemporary Democratic messaging failures

35:19 — The filibuster and governance obstruction

38:06 — You can’t run from your positions, so you should learn to argue for them

40:10 — How liberals can speak more effectively in favor of trans rights

43:10 — Democrats failed to include pro-Gaza voices, and it did matter

45:41 — Republicans love funding unprofitable media, Democrats hate it

50:00 — Thermostatic public opinion and why Democrats have to actually present strong affirmative cases

53:04 — Trump’s somatic politics worked very well for less-informed voters

01:03:53 — Kamala Harris’s positions were more popular, but it wasn’t enough

01:12:00 — Trump’s much more effective pop-culture media appearance strategies

01:24:38 — Howard Dean was right, you have to meet voters

01:30:02 — Progressive vision and community values

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

TRENT R. NELSON: Well, happy days are here again. And understanding a question is half of an answer. And this is of course half the answer. Your host, Trent R. Nelson, and Caitlin M. Green. And, well, I’m a historian, philosopher—I write, I edit, I do a whole bunch of stuff. I talk to you guys every week it seems. And we have Caitlin as well. And she also talks, [00:02:00] she’s a mom, she’s a linguist, she’s a writer, she’s an editor. She’s a guest getter. Watch out. She’s everywhere. You might even see her overseas.

CAITLIN M. GREEN: And an amateur doll maker. Right now I’ve made three dolls that are all terrible and I’m going to be making a fourth one, and maybe that one will be less terrible. We’ll see.

NELSON: Piano player, she’s everywhere. It’s a lot. Well, Caitlin every single week, whether it’s once, twice, or thrice, we’re having fun chatting with wonderful folks.

We’re learning so much, hard to schedule, so much learning, but we manage. Who are we learning with today and what are we talking about, Caitlin?

GREEN: Oh, Trent, we’re getting a peek behind enemy lines today. I have brought with me, Matthew Sheffield, who is a former media and campaign consultant for the Republican Party, and who is now using his knowledge for good.

He is the host of the Theory of Change podcast, author of what Republicans Know and his work has been in Vanity Fair, Washington Post, and The Daily Beast and more. We are so excited to welcome you, Matt. How are you today?

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Hey, good to be here. It is a sunny day finally in Southern California where I live.

GREEN: So yes. A sunny day. Yes, it’s a cloudy day in Portland. How’s your weather, Trent?

NELSON: It is cloudy, but we don’t mind. it is sunny. It’s cloudy. We manage either way. Matt, it’s such a pleasure to have you behind enemy lines. Well, we’d love to get into your story as well, but we know you have a wonderful offering for us today.

GREEN: Yeah. You’ve been working hard, right? Yeah. Tell us about your project.

SHEFFIELD: Sure. Yeah. Well, so What Republicans Know is basically the culmination of years of, so I worked in the Republican world of things for about 15 years, [00:04:00] as a blogger, as a consultant, as an editor, entrepreneur, project manager, website and campaign person.

And basically, after I switched sides, and we can get into that later, what I realized was that the left does not understand just how much these Republican consultants have figured out. The consultants who work for Democratic candidates, or further left candidates, whatever your stripe might be, they don’t really understand how politics works. They have this kind of antiquated worldview.

And so I wanted to put down in a book to let people know what exactly Republicans are knowing. Because, I think as everybody who, as you guys certainly know, the policy positions of the Republican party are not popular. And, but they still manage to win elections a lot.

And so that is one of the things that I set out to explore in the book, and explain how are they doing this? How can they win elections despite the fact that everyone hates their ideas?

GREEN: Right. So there’s been a lot of conversation online in the last couple of days actually, between people whose position is, well, they keep winning because of cheating, because of things like gerrymandering and vote suppression.

And these kind of like technical things that could be fixed by procedural means versus people who say like, actually there are human people that are attracted. To the candidates of these, of this party and that they are being won over by messaging not just that, like they’re outnumbered by people whose votes are being suppressed.

And so where do you fall on that conversation?

SHEFFIELD: Well, so what I usually say to people is that most criticisms of the Democrats are correct. I think that there’s a problem that people who might have more centrist [00:06:00] inclinations or people who might have more democratic socialist inclinations, they think that only their critiques are correct.

But the reality is that most of the things that people say are wrong with the Democrats actually are true. And I’ll give you an example from each side of the debate on that. So like Republicans obviously are using gerrymandering to win elections and whatnot, but the reality is they cannot gerrymander Senate seats.

And so the Republicans have-- well, I, let me step back first to say that, so the Republican Party as presently constituted, is not a conservative party. It’s a reactionary party.

GREEN: Right.

SHEFFIELD: And it’s important for people on the left to make that distinction, because not only is it accurate for historical reasons, but it’s also so you can use those, that, that division between conservative and reactionary for divisive purposes, which you must do.

And so the, when the reactionaries took over the Republican party they basically did it by tricking conservatives who disagreed with them into feeling like: ’Oh, if you don’t vote for us, you’re going to die! Hillary Clinton is literally going to murder you!’

Like it’s, this is not an exaggeration when I say that, but they have multiple podcasters going out there, and saying that Republicans will be hunted if Hillary Clinton won the election, which of course is ludicrous and stupid.

But if you don’t know a lot about politics, then you might just a little bit think that maybe that might possibly be true. So gerrymandering is important, but it’s not the only thing.

And then, with regard to various other isms that the Republican right uses to manipulate people. They use all of them. They don’t just use one. Like that’s one of the things that I want to make sure that people understand as a takeaway from this, is that they use racism, they use sexism, they use [00:08:00] poverty hatred. They, they, they use all of these things, and, and they use religious bigotry.

So they have many tools in their toolbox and we have to recognize what they are.

NELSON: Yeah. And again, I think, Matt, what you just said in the beginning, we talk about it all the time, seemingly here, each and every episode. It seems as though we get back to the fact that Republicans are better at staying on message and hammering home messages.

And the people respond to that and they don’t respond to what they perceive to be the wishy washyness of the Democratic party. What is the remedy for for a party that seems to, to not message well and to lack a spine to some degree?

Democrats are actually funding right-wing media through ineffective TV advertising

SHEFFIELD: Well, I think ultimately the, the most effective things that’s going to have to happen is that, so the Republican Party is, there’s a real split between the political professionals and the ideologues.

And people who have strong ideologies on the left have to make a similar distinction within the party. Because if you, if you want the party to do the right thing, you have to make them terrified of you. That’s really what it comes down to. And so, we have to build power and build our own ecosystems. And so like, stop giving money to the Atlantic.

Stop giving money to the New York Times. Stop paying these mainstream institutions that, that have no interest or belief in what we do. Right? And so don’t, don’t give them your subscription money, like use archive.is to bypass their paywalls. You can do that. And, uh that’s, that’s, we, we, we’ve got to start funding people who actually agree with us.

And that’s one of the central points in the book because like the Democratic party literally funds right wing media. And I’ve got a graph of, of how it works. [00:10:00] Basically, Kamala Harris and her Super pacs. They actually had more money than Donald Trump and his Super pacs, including when you factor in Elon Musk dumping that money in the, in Pennsylvania and, Wisconsin.

But they wasted it on TV ads. Because TV ads-- so here, here’s this interesting paradox is that political scientists the, the, the right wingers are, are correct about this one thing, which is that academia is predominantly, comprised of people who lean leftward. And that’s certainly true with regard to political science.

But the really sad thing is that, that we’ve got a ton of amazing and learned political scientists, and nobody listens to them in the Democratic Party. they were, the party is dominated by these consultants who they don’t actually know very much about political science. They know almost nothing about cognitive psychology.

And so they’ve got this idea in their head, well, we’ll just run a lot of TV ads, but political science has shown for decades now that in presidential races they don’t do almost anything. And so Kamala Harris spent almost the entire Trump campaign budget just on TV ads, and then she had more money on top of that.

And here’s the thing that’s even more outrageous, is that because of these right-wing companies like Sinclair or Nexstar, or Rupert Murdoch’s, Fox, the Democratic Party has literally been paying for right wing media over a billion dollars over the decades. That’s fucking up.

GREEN: Okay. This is something that I wanted to really get into because, one of your kind of tenets or one of your like, main points in this, in, in What Republicans Know is about, [00:12:00] you know, buying TV ads on Sinclair stations, on Fox News stations, on on, on all of these, kind of, these entities that are owned by extreme right wing people is simply just putting money into their wallets that they will then use to create more propaganda against you.

And that, I think, coupled with your point that TV ads are simply not that effective, means that it’s like only lost no gain. Is that what you’re saying?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, basically, I mean, they, they, they get a small, tiny, tiny amount of gain from these ads. You know, and, and they’re, they are more effective excuse me, they are more effective in like local races because most people don’t know who the candidates are.

But at the presidential level, this is Pepsi versus Coke. So yeah, if you see an ad, if you’re a Pepsi drinker and you see a Coke ad, you’re not going to drink Coke. You, you’re just not, because it’s not persuasive to you. And so, Pepsi guy, you know. That’s right. And so the same thing, that’s how it is in the presidential campaign. So essentially, yeah, the, the money that the, the Democratic campaigns and they send a thousand of these Trent, will you help us? We’re about to die here. I need your help there. Need your $5. Even though I have a billion in the bank,

NELSON: The text messages, the emails, do something, do something first. I’ll give you $5 later. Right? Like, do something for us. No

GREEN: help. I’m dying. Help. I’m so weak. Trent, your $5 will bring me back from the brink.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, yeah. And so basically so they have all this money and then they are renting media assets instead of buying and owning and developing them. And, and that’s really true with regard to, these, these newer ones that have come along as, as the popularity of YouTube really skyrocketed.

It’s by far the number one website on the internet now. [00:14:00] And we’ve got you’ve got TikTok and and podcasts these are, and these are all things that, that people are turning to, especially younger people. The, the left is not there.

GREEN: Larry Ellison wants TikTok. He would like to own it, and that means it’s another one

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

GREEN: In, in the right wing bucket.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And he just bought CBS and so and put Barry Weiss in there. So, they are, are really going out there to, to fund and buy up as much media as they can and mm-hmm. You know, this is not something that, I, again, like these consultants tend to be either extremely old, like James Carville is one of these people.

I mean, like, why would you ask for advice from a guy who hasn’t won a, a presidential campaign since 1996? What the hell does this guy know? Nothing.

GREEN: No, that’s right.

SHEFFIELD: he’s irrelevant. And the interesting thing also is that the Republican party, so, and I can say this because I was, there rubbing shoulders with these people.

Like they were, they had the same problem of these defunct consultants dominating the party. When you look at the campaigns of McCain or, or, Mitt Romney but when Trump came in, they hated Trump because they thought he was a liberal. And so they hated him, and he hated them in return, and so he kicked them out of the party and brought in new blood, new voices, new ideas, and they’re just wiping the floor with the establishment Democrats, who don’t know what’s going on.

Republican recruitment tactics and Democratic gatekeeping

GREEN: Yeah. I would say the Democrats have a reputation for rejecting new voices, right? And for keeping people out and for just like slowly just aging without like bringing in the new generation, right? Whereas there’s all these organizations on the right that [00:16:00] are explicitly designed. It feels like to sort of vet young people, train them up and find them places of influence in every direction, right?

Like the Federalist Society for the Judicial, the turning point USA for like these sort of influencer crew, young Republicans, Young Americans for freedom. Like all these groups that are for like college age and even younger. There’s like T-P-U-S-A high school. So scary. Anyway, that’s a whole other thing.

It’s like developing these really young voices and putting them in sort of these mentorship relationships that, that helps keep the messaging fresh and helps keep fresh faces. Because one of the things you point out is whatever the message is, your messenger is really important.

Like, whose actual mouth hole is this coming out of does matter. James Carville is not going to cut it.

SHEFFIELD: No, no. And I’ll give you an example of just how dire the situation is in that regard or the imbalance. So I have a friend who, runs an anonymous Twitter account that mostly posts about basketball, and he occasionally likes to troll politicians in his local area just for his amusement because they’re dummies.

and, and, these are nonpartisan elections though in his area. And he got contacted by a Republican consultant in his area asking him, Hey, you do good stuff. How can I help you?

GREEN: Wow.

SHEFFIELD: So then truly are to an anonymous full account. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With like less than 3000 followers. Yes.

GREEN: So they, they just saw like, Hey, you’re giving some people a hard time who happen to be Democrats.

How about I help help you do more of that? Give them more of a hard time. That’s, yeah.

SHEFFIELD: That, that is exactly what they do. And this fits into a, a larger issue, which is that on the right, they’re, they will take you in for any [00:18:00] reason, as long as you agree with them.

Yeah. Like, they don’t care what your motive is. You don’t care what your background is, just as long as you agree with them. And whereas on the, and you know, and, and I’ll say I, I personally have experienced that people even though I have been out of the right for more than I, I, I left about, about, yeah, more than 10 years ago.

And I still get people saying to me, despite the fact that if you look me up for even five seconds, you can see that I am not, some sort of Republican troll trying to infiltrate and turn people.

GREEN: No, it’s like front and center. Like if you Google you, it’s like, Hey, look who left the right who’s not helping the Republicans anymore and in fact wants to hurt them.

It’s you.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It’s like literally in the New York Times and NBC and all these other places, like you can read it. Uh uh and, and, but I still get people that think that and but, but I will say there may, but there, there, there is some justification for that idea because it is true that some people, people who are former Republicans and, and that Hillary Clinton is one of them, have ha they came into the American left, and have tried to, to draw everybody over to the right.

So like I know that that has happened. but you should be suspicious of those people, not me, because I’m telling you exactly what’s going on here. and, and you know, and because it is like, and, and, and, but they, but they also work in tandem with, intra democratic or in intra center left people who, who never were on the right.

Public opinion is malleable, but Democratic strategists don’t realize this

SHEFFIELD: So like, people like this guy, David Shore, uh who, who have this, like, they think that they’re practicing political science, but they’re actually not like, I hate to break it to you guys, but looking at a bunch of polls and, drawing conclusions from them. That’s not political science. And you guys are No, but they really

GREEN: do think it [00:20:00] is like if you ask them.

Yeah. So,

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Yeah, they do. That’s

GREEN: what it’s,

SHEFFIELD: yeah, they do. And, and like the, the number one thing that they don’t understand is that public opinion is malleable. There’s this idea that, well, most of the people are in the center. Well, well, no, that just means that a lot of people are uncommitted and incoherent.

Yes. And if you present a strong message to them, and you are not just one message, but you present many messages and many messengers to them. They will be drawn to your side. And we, and we, and we saw that with Trump in 2024, but go ahead. Yeah,

NELSON: I’m sorry. It’s very comfortable. I think it’s very comfortable. People, I think do this from an emotional standpoint, almost more than anything else. I mean, I think that for certain type of person perceiving themselves to be right in the middle, right, like right in the sweet spot, I’m normal, sweet spot, right? Everyone else is strange. Everyone else is beyond belief.

But me and like everyone that I listened to and all of the beliefs that I have, they’re all normal. And, and I mean, there was, I, it might’ve been in one of those dreaded publications that we were just talking about unsubscribing from, but I remember seeing a poll where it essentially, like, it noted how many people in the poll considered themselves to be centrist and then where their ideas actually fell.

Like politically speaking, and it’s nowhere near the center because, because it’s, as you noted, there’s an incoherence that, exists broadly through the society as it comes to politics. And yet come the first Tuesday, no. In November, right. We still have to vote. Vote everyone’s voting. So it’s hard to reconcile that incoherence with a functional democracy. No?

SHEFFIELD: Well, I mean, that is something that has always [00:22:00] been a concern within political philosophy for centuries. I mean if you go back to Plato, I mean, that’s what a lot of his writings were about. and so, yeah, like it is like the, the people being uninformed, and, the, the risk of demagoguery and manipulation, these are, these are, these are known commodities and these are, but, but this is how the game has always been played.

And, and this is why it’s so shameful that the Democratic consultant and elite class like they, they complain, oh, well Fox News manipulates people, or Joe Rogan does that, and it’s like, well, this is the rules of the game that have been in place for thousands of years.

Okay. Right. and human psychology has not changed since Socrates was killed for making fun of people’s religion in ancient Greece.

So that’s how it is. So like you have to change yourself. And if don’t, don’t hate the game. Hate the player yourself. In this case. Hate yourself.

GREEN: Hate yourself.

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, but like, if you don’t like the rules of the game, then you have to, you have to win so you can change ’em. Right? and, and like, and, and these guys think that, so like after the 2008 election you know, people kind of deified these people like David Axelrod who were working for Barack Obama.

But the reality is the Republicans had presided over a, economic collapse. So anyone who was a Democrat would’ve won that election, let’s be honest there. And Barack Obama was a really good speaker. So like, you add those two things in, and what these guys did as their strategy was kind of peanuts.

Like it didn’t really matter. Yeah. What, what they would’ve done. And so that’s why you have to focus on how things are, are changing and how they’re different. And you can see this with the Jeffrey Epstein situation. So like the, the Democratic consultant [00:24:00] class has, has been saying that literally everything is a distraction.

Like they use that word distraction every fucking day for the past.

NELSON: We bitch about it here all the time. Yes, absolutely.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and, and, and because they have this idea that you have to have one message. And if you just keep hammering that one message, then it’ll work. But the reality is, if the media thinks your message is boring or uninteresting or not related to the news, why the hell like, are they, are they going to repeat your message? They’re not. Yeah. It’s not going to work. And, and that is why you don’t like people. I do hear people say, well, why don’t I see Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer on the news? Well, actually they’re doing stuff every day, but what they say is fucking crap.

And so it’s boring. And it’s useless.

GREEN: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: and irrelevant.

GREEN: because what are you going to do? You’re going to be like breaking news today. Hakeem Jeffrey said that your life is unaffordable still. And you know that to be true already. And so like, here we are, you know?

SHEFFIELD: It’s not news. It’s not news. Yeah. And so like that’s the, the thing that Trump has, I the Trump has an idiot savant quality to himself that the guy is obviously a war on, he has an IQ of 80 something like that.

But like he has this innate marketing sense. And and, and is never, he never stops selling. And no, he’s always pushing the, pushing any narrative possible out there because like that, that was the thing in, in, in 2024. You know what, what we, what we’ve found in, literally every survey found was that.

A lot of the people who voted for him had no idea what his positions were.

GREEN: No. Had no idea. No. He was like a famous guy. Yeah, yeah,

SHEFFIELD: yeah. He was the famous guy, or you know, he, he or they were just, they thought, well, he said the prices would go down if I voted for him. Kamala High Prices, Trump, low prices.

That was literally a sign. I, I went to, to go do some work for the Harris campaign in, in [00:26:00] Arizona. Like they had that damn sign everywhere I fucking went. And I was like, oh shit. there again, sure enough, yeah. She lost Arizona. Yeah. And which was that, was that really

GREEN: hurt? because we had gone blue before and then we reverted back to red.

Yeah. I say we, I didn’t vote in Arizona that year because I don’t live there anymore, but it, it sucked anyway.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so like, but, but the other thing also is that the, the Trump campaign and the, and the ranking elites they just, they were, they want to let a thousand messages bloom and a thousand messengers.

So they like, you know what I was saying with my friend, like they, they will just give you money if you agree with them. Yeah. Whereas on the, on the left side of the aisle, people who were doing media are having to beg and plead for them to pay attention. And usually they don’t. And so that’s why we have to rely on crowdfunding and things like that because the party establishment has their head up their

NELSON: So wait, you’re saying that isn’t giving us all money?

Now every time.

The undead ‘triangulation’ strategy of Bill Clinton is behind many contemporary Democratic messaging failures

GREEN: No, but that’s a great story that they would love to keep keep recirculating. And that’s the thing is like the logic of it is so simple, right? It’s like if you are a person who’s getting any amount of attention for saying Democrats bad or Republicans good, then you are worth putting money into and they’ll just do it right?

And like to think that like we could, that’s like so simple and so achievable that like if there’s anybody out there who’s already getting a little attention for saying actually Republicans bad, like why can’t they have a little money? That’s pretty interesting. like, we’re not doing that. Also, I, this is, here comes like a proper screen, possibly. Watch out. There we go. So the consultant thing, right? The co consultants. Keep saying this line [00:28:00] of you don’t want to be alienating or insulting to your potential voters by, I don’t know, saying words like heteronormative or whatever, which is like, no, Democrats are not saying heteronormative, but whatever but they always are like, oh, it’s so alienating.

It’s so, it like, it, it’s signaling to your potential voters that like you feel like you’re better than them or you’re smarter than them or whatever. Meanwhile, what does it actually do to people who hear the message out of like Hakeem Jeffries or whoever that like, hey, all that stuff that you are interested in hearing about and paying attention to.

Like, for example, the Epstein stuff. that’s actually a distraction. You’re getting distracted. You rube, you dummy you. Absolute baby, pig animal. Like, what do you think that that actually does to people who might potentially vote for you? I think. That’s more alienating than a four syllable word.

SHEFFIELD: yeah.

Well speaking of that’s Norma Distract six syllables. And speaking of distraction, my dog just walked in, so I had to get up there for a second.

GREEN: Oh she wanted you a fourth co-host.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. She hates closed doors. So she didn’t even want to, she doesn’t even want to be in here. She just literally is like, what’s going on?

Wait, she’s like, that needs to be

GREEN: open. She’s like, Anna from Frozen. I’m going to bring it back to Children’s Media now. She’s Anna, she just hates the closed door. That’s fair. Same thing happened

NELSON: in the Walker interview. is C Oh yeah. Like, hey,

GREEN: that was like, this isn’t cool guys. Why are we closing the door now?

Nah, no way.

SHEFFIELD: It’s like Eric

GREEN: Adams and his child. You can’t have any

SHEFFIELD: privacy please. Yeah. Well, okay. So, but to your question though, Caitlin, so yeah, the, these consultants, yeah, they’re, they, they’re constantly bashing the party and actually damaging it when they say things like that because Right. The party leaders-- like Democrats in Congress do not say [00:30:00] these things.

Correct. Like, this is a literal fabrication. You can look up the things that they say, like people have databases of the, the emails that they send out. You can look up the transcripts. Oh yeah, we talked to DC not saying any of this stuff. We talked to her.

GREEN: Yes. She told us all about it.

SHEFFIELD: So they’re not saying any of this stuff.

And, and, and so when you, when you put forward this lie, what you’re doing is you are tainting the brand of the party, by making these, these false criticisms, right? You are.

GREEN: And it’s not validating, lie. It’s like saying it’s like a lie that the Republicans have been saying too. because it’s like, oh well, and that’s what I was going to

SHEFFIELD: say.

Yeah. They can point to that and say, oh well even the Democrats say that they do this so you don’t have to take my word for it. And so like, this is seriously damaging lies what they’re, what they’re doing, and they got to stop it. why? because you know, yeah, go ahead.

NELSON: Why are we always just why, why, just why Matt? No. why are we always playing by their rules? Why are we always, validating their statements? Why can folks, as you just note, come up to me and say, well, it’s not just Republicans, Trent, it’s Democrats say the same thing. I’ve seen Democrats go on the Fox News, quoted in the New York Post as saying the same thing.

it’s not just us, Trent.

GREEN: Oh yeah. Those Democrats, they’re out of touch, lefty elites, and they’re always doing all this academic jargon and they’re always like, they’re, they’re for the trans and not for you and me. You know, it’s college for they them is what I heard.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yep. Well, um. Yeah, it’s, it. So this goes back to their outmoded origin.

So thi this was Bill Clinton’s strategy when he was the president. And they called it triangulation, so that they would put him as the, as the reasonable person against the left of the Democratic party and then the Republican [00:32:00] right? But what they failed to understand is that’s a strategy that only can work for a party that actually has a vigorous and powerful left.

And so you can’t, so if you don’t have that, then what this strategy does is actually moves the country to the right. and that has been what we’ve seen except for on cultural issues where people actually have managed to stand up for themselves. Um that, uh but when it comes to things like deregulation or taxes or various, spending programs like they, they really don’t make the case for that.

And so as a result of that, the default comes over to the Republican side. And you see that also in the legal world as well, where on the left there was this stupid delusion of legal [formalism] as it’s called, like the, the idea that there’s an objective legal standard, and by golly, it always seems to support what the left believes about stuff. But it’s objective, it’s science! We have a science of judging!

And it was always bullshit. Because law is just simply politics in black robes, that’s what it is. And the right never bought into that.

And so they’re like, nah, the law is whatever the judges say it’s and that, that has been their theory of jurisprudence. That’s why they focus like a laser beam on the judiciary and made it as a centerpiece in their campaigns to their voters. And that was the number one message of Trump 2016 was, look, you don’t have to like me. you might think I’m a liar. You might think I’m an asshole, I’m a massager, whatever. That’s fine. But I’m going to get these judges that are going to go after the trans people. I’m going to get these judges that are going to do all the things that you want that will overturn Roe versus Wade. Et cetera, et cetera.

And it was very effective [00:34:00] and I knew a number of people who would spit that argument back to me. They’re like, yeah, I don’t like Trump, but, gosh, he’s going to, but he’s delivering, he said he’d appoint these Federalist judges and and sure enough he did.

And and like that’s, and even to this day, after, like we’re seeing from these popularist people, that’s what they call themselves. we’re seeing them say people like as Ezra Klein saying, oh, well maybe we should run pro-life candidates in various areas. And it’s like, look, if they can, if they can come up on their own and they can win, then look, let ’em do it.

But we’re not going to actively solicit people who are trying to undermine, especially on an issue where we have the majority, what the fuck?

GREEN: Right.

SHEFFIELD: How are you building the majority by attacking women’s rights, when and when we have the majority opinion. And we see that in all these valid, in issues that keep passing.

GREEN: Right. They always, so what was the actual justification that he provided for that idea of like, pro-life Democrat? Was he, was he just saying like, oh, in those small areas where pro-life is not popular, like we could get a Democrat in and then that would be good for us.

SHEFFIELD: That is, that is the general theory of what, what he says. Yeah. Yeah.

GREEN: And you know, and look, but then what happens, they get into office and then they don’t protect our rights because they don’t believe in them. Yeah,

The filibuster and governance obstruction

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And like, I mean it’s it’s complicated because like, I don’t, I don’t think that any one particular candidate, like, it’s not a one size fit fits all country.

So somebody who’s like Joe Manchin is not going to win in in New York or somebody like, Zohran Mamdani is not going to win in Indiana or something like that. But at the same time, you have to actually have some real partisanship, and understand how the game fucking works.

So like the filibuster thing, if a candidate isn’t going to commit to overturning the filibuster, a Senate candidate’s not going to commit to getting rid [00:36:00] of the filibuster, then they should never be elected regardless of their positions on any other issue.

GREEN: Right.

SHEFFIELD: Because we can see that with the shutdown, like it would absolutely in the short term have been advantageous—and Trump was calling for them to get rid of the filibuster to stop the Democrats from blocking them.

But John Thune refused to do it because he knows that the entire point of the filibuster is to break governance and to break the ability to accomplish good things; because they know as soon as we get something done, the people fucking like it and they won’t let it be taken away from them.

NELSON: It’s right there in the name. Philip Buso, if to, to be a free booter was literally as, as some of us know it, it was quite popular in the 18th and 19th century for like white folks to like go down to South America and try to start revolutions of like minority power. and that’s where the term comes from in the political sense.

It is literally, as you noted, the hijacking of, of power from the majority. And yeah, it, it’s, it’s wild. I don’t, I, I just keep coming back, Matt, to the fact that we don’t seem, we need to find people that stand for stuff. You know, we’re always talking about like, well, maybe we should, compromise here.

Would it be, well, that’s fine and well and good, but. But the Republicans now, Trent, they stand for the stuff that they stand for in New York, that they stand for in California, that they stand for in Arkansas. How is it that their people are all over the map? But, but it just, it sounds to me like.

GREEN: Like you’re advocating for like purity testing and like ideological purity and we can’t have anything like that.

Like we, we can’t expect for our democratic nominees to have, the same [00:38:00] ideologies and values as us. What if the polling tells them that it should be different?

How liberals can speak more effectively in favor of trans rights

SHEFFIELD: Well, and yeah, and like, actually that, that is another point that’s in the book is that polls are not for, you don’t use polls to determine your positions.

You use polls to determine your strategy and how you talk about your positions. From a, a strategic standpoint, that is a very critical difference between the two parties. So Republicans, when they take polls, they’re, they are about, how should we say this thing that we want, or in their case they say, well, maybe we shouldn’t talk about it at all. and like that’s what they, that’s what they’ve done since they, they, they, got the court to overturn Roe versus Wade. They don’t talk about abortion at the national level, but they’re still going for it at the, at the state levels.

And so like that’s, that’s a much more strategic standpoint. So, and you know, whereas on the Democratic side, they look at polls and they say, oh gosh, we have a position that’s unpopular, so I guess we shouldn’t have it anymore. because people, people will like us if we get rid of it. And it’s like number one, Republicans will still tie you to that position whether you have it or not.

in fact, like Kamala Harris didn’t even say anything about transgender issues during her campaign at all. When she was running, that was not a thing for her. She didn’t talk about ever. But it didn’t matter. So because they still, they still were like, no, Kamala Harris loves transgender people, so you can’t run away from, from your actual positions.

and, and, uh despite what you want to say. And the same and, and Trump did the same thing with, regard to Project 2025. Yeah. You know, he tried to say, oh, well it’s not me. I didn’t do it. but you know, people, they looked at it and they’re like, oh, well obviously you did you were in favor of it clearly.

Yeah. Or at least people who paid attention like they understood that he was very closely linked to, and of course when he got in Russ Vought [00:40:00] is once again back in the same seat and was the man behind the curtain for Elon Musk. and so so, so your positions, you can’t, you can’t run from them.

SHEFFIELD: But what you can do is get people to talk about things that are more interesting or you make your position not threatening. So like on the trans issue, this is trans rights do not affect almost anyone. Like, that’s the reality. There are almost no trans people in the world. And getting people to understand that, look, it’s no big deal for you.

And, and, and, and we’ve seen like gyms, it just have transitioned to that people, get dressed in stalls and whatever. So like, there’s no discomfort that people can have. And if you’re worried about something like that, and in, in, with regard to athletics, women’s athletics, ncaa, the president of the NCAA said there are fewer than 10 trans athletes out of more than 550,000, so--

GREEN: Right.

SHEFFIELD: This is not a national conversation. This is, you know.

GREEN: Right.

SHEFFIELD: This is just a handful. You are

GREEN: unlikely to play against a trans woman, let alone lose to her.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And also when they play, they don’t really do very much better, like in the, in the Olympics they have had a handful of trans athletes compete and none of them has ever won a gold medal.

Not one. So the idea, so like, but, but instead of just explaining this stuff and explaining the reality, the historical reality that trans people have existed for the entire history of humanity. And that we can see that in India where there is a very literally multi-thousand year old trans tradition of the hira there.

But like, this is not some newfangled thing. So basically you have to explain, look, this is no big deal if you’re concerned about it, get over it. It’s not going to hurt you. They’re not going to hurt you. And the same people who are saying this bullshit to you are the same ones who were saying that if you have [00:42:00] same sex marriage, right. your your daughter, your son’s going to come home. We’re going to be marrying dogs, right? Yeah, yeah. Or your son’s going to come home gay.

Well, guess what? It didn’t happen, right? So your son is not going to come home as a girl from getting a surgery at the school, which is what Trump has said, which is--

GREEN: He literally said, the teachers are giving them surgeries out of control lying, right? Yeah. And, and yeah, it should be really easy to counter as long as you’re not scared, right? So I think that’s a absolutely right to just be like, listen, some people are trans, some people have always been trans. It’s okay to protect their right to live their own lives, and it is not going to hurt you.

And here’s all the reasons why it’s not going to hurt you. And also protecting the bodily autonomy of a small minority group only helps you to safeguard your own bodily autonomy, like--

SHEFFIELD: Absolutely.

GREEN: As, as the as a feminist, as a woman, it’s always been pretty clear to me that like my friend’s ability to get his, gender confirmation surgery is the same Right.

As my right to take care of my reproductive health. Like easy.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right.

GREEN: Yeah.

Democrats failed to include pro-Gaza voices, and it did matter

SHEFFIELD: This is bodily autonomy. And and, and the other thing that these squishy non-data driven consultants don’t get is that when you discard positions that are core to your political philosophy, you demoralize you were voters the, the people who would vote for you and like, and, and we saw that also, uh and, and it’s, it’s unclear as much, uh how much of an issue that Gaza was during the 2020 four campaign, because it hadn’t flared up as badly as it did once Trump came into office.

But the, the reality is a lot of people were felt, did feel very demotivated by the Biden Harris positions on that issue. And, and they did a terrible job of, of, making people comfortable with their viewpoint, which, I mean, I disagreed with their [00:44:00] viewpoint, but they, they should have had like the, we’re supposed to believe in democracy over here.

So like, you should let people have their say if they have a viewpoint. Especially if it’s the fucking majority in your party, right? Yeah,

GREEN: Yeah, yeah. I think I re like, one of the moments that I remember from the Harris campaign that was really painful was the I am speaking moment where like, somebody interrupted an event to, to say something about Gaza and then Kamala Harris was like.

I am speaking, I am speaking, and a bunch of people took that on as like a hell yeah. Girl boss moment, right? Of like, oh, she reclaimed her time. Like, how cool. And then like, but for some people it was like, ah, it was a chance for like, for her to notice that she was off. Key on a certain issue that like she, she was not reaching her intended audience in the way that she needs to in order to win.

And instead she went, girl boss mode. And like, yeah. It, it was like, it was demoralizing, I think to a, a sub a, a subset of voters for sure.

NELSON: Well, I mean, if, if your political consultants are telling you that those people who are heckling you are only a small portion of your group and are not actually a substantial block, then I guess you can decide to blow them off.

But once you realize that, yeah, this is, as Matt noted, this is like a mainstream position for our party, this is what a, a good majority believes in. It would seem politically suicidal to do something like that.

Republicans love funding unprofitable media, Democrats hate it

NELSON: And you, you find yourself reflecting and asking yourself, how much of the people that are giving the strategy, getting paid? How much money are we wasting that on? How are they, right? Like we are buying slots on Fox News and Sinclair and we are also giving them a [00:46:00] salary? Like that is unbelievable because this from a lay person seems to be to be bad news.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s actually, they get even more money on top of that. They get commissions on top of that.

And that’s a huge reason why they keep doing all these wasteful ads, is that the more ads they buy, the more money that they made. And Mid Romney in 2012 actually did, something that, that nobody has copied since, which was a great idea, which is that, and I’m not saying that you, you should get rid of all TV ads. I’m not saying that. But if you’re going to buy ’em. You assign someone who’s is a salaried employee and it’s their job to, to work with the stations to get these ads on. and they don’t get paid anymore. regardless of how many ads are placed or sold or made, it’s just their job to do this stuff. And and he saved a lot of money by doing that.

Like this is, this is a no-brainer. that should be an immediate policy. And it would save a lot of money. You know, and it would remove the perverse incentive that these consultants are getting to push this ineffective strategy. Because it doesn’t really do much for the campaign, but it does a lot for their wallet. And that is why they do it.

We have to shift things to a more entrepreneurial standpoint. Biden Harris had with their pacs basically more than a billion dollars than Donald Trump did in the campaign.

And if they had diverted like a hundred million of them into media, into paying for people to have a livelihood, that all of that money would still be in play right now. And a lot of that, those things would be profitable. Like, that’s the thing that the right has really figured out. And, and, and it’s in the book, I’ve got a graphic of the cycle that they’ve done where they each, each of [00:48:00] their each of their class of, of operatives, they reinforce each other.

So we’ve you’ve got the, the activists are turned into donors. The donors give money to the campaigns, then the campaigns, give money to the right wing media, which then in turn creates more activists for them. And that’s the reality.

Whereas on the left, there have been a couple of, of things that were, were, that were kind of mass media oriented, that were launched, like Air America, like Current Tv, but they weren’t immediately profitable.

And so the people that, that were funding it were like, oh. It didn’t make a profit immediately. Well, got it. Gotta throw it all away, put it in the trash can. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch was unprofitable with Fox News and with Fox for years and his New York Post newspaper, that’s never been profitable, never!

The Washington Times newspaper in DC, the right-wing paper owned by the, the Mooney Church has never been profitable. And they started in 1982. Never been profitable.

So like that’s, uh like everybody’s so obsessed with their tax deductions and then whatnot, and it’s like, guys, you can write off a business loss in the same way.

It’s a hundred percent deductible. There’s no maximum deduction that you know, that, that, that you’re up against. in, in terms of campaign donations or whatever. Like, so if you just shifted some of this money that you’re raising, and made it more effective. You could do so much and, and, and there are so many people out there that really need that help and they want to carry the me the message.

They want to be the messenger, and they do a great job at it, but they can’t get funded. And so they quit. Like, are what, what kind of political movement says, oh, this person’s, uh is, is trying to help us. Let’s do nothing for them.

GREEN: Yeah. Let’s just let them, let’s just let them wither on the vine. That’ll be just fine. [00:50:00]

Thermostatic public opinion and why Democrats have to actually present strong affirmative cases

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And like and, and, and instead, what they, so, so within political science, there’s this idea of what they call thermostatic opinion. And that is that a lot of people’s viewpoints about politics are about more what they’re against than what they’re for, because they don’t really have a conception of governance or ideology, so they don’t have an affirmative agenda.

and so what happens is that a lot of people. Who are politically incohate, they just respond very well to negative messages. And so Democrats have benefited from that thermostatic alignment whenever Republicans come in and actually start enacting their policies. Like, we have a disaster.

Every Republican president has a disaster. Whether it was like, and this is no exaggeration here, you got Reagan.

NELSON: No, it’s not.

SHEFFIELD: and so like, they cause giant problems because of their incompetence and their extremism. Uh and so, and the public is like, holy shit, what the fuck? let’s, let’s get these people out of there.

And then Democrats come in and fix things. And then people are like, oh, okay, well I guess it’s okay to vote for a Republican now. You know? And like, so Democrats need to need to be able to say, look we have. Actual positive ideas. We’re not just about fixing the Republican messes, we’re about making things better and we’re going to have a better future.

GREEN: We’re future, we’re not just the cleanup crew in between Republican administration.

SHEFFIELD: That’s right. Yeah. Like you have, you like Democratic, the Democratic establishment has basically made it so that the politics is like fought midfield all the time. Instead of saying, what can we do to get these politically inco people to come over to our side? Um and, and how, how can we reach them? like, like people, they’re suspicious of these ads. Like, and because everyone hates Adver, like, name me one, not one person in this world likes advertising. Not fucking one. Right, okay. Except for the people who work in that industry, [00:52:00] and even they don’t like it, I can tell you.

and so like, if that’s your strategy to, to not talk to people for four years or talk to them every, every two years, that’s the only time you’re going to talk to. Why the hell would they trust you? Like, imagine if you, if your relative, came to you only every two years and they don’t talk to you at any other time, and then they’re like, Hey, vote, gimme money.

Give me money. Yeah. Like, you’re not, you’re not, no one’s going to trust a relative who treats you that way. And you, and no one would trust a party that behaves that.

And so you have to stay in touch. And you actually have to listen to what people want, you know? And the reality is, since 2000 I think in 2005 or so that a majority of Americans have, have disagreed with the idea that Americans heading in the right direction.

And so, like if you can’t, if you can’t listen to that, then people like Trump are going to listen to that. And Trump’s very good at the gloom and doom message, and very good at telling people everything’s going to hell. And it worked.

Trump’s somatic politics worked very well for less-informed voters

SHEFFIELD: There’s this myth that a lot of people on the left have that everyone who votes for Trump is a racist.

Everyone who votes for him is a misogynist. Everyone who votes for him is a Christian supremacist. No, they’re not. They are. A lot of people are. And even Hillary Clinton, didn’t say that. Like, she was like, oh, it’s about half of them are the deplorables. That’s what she said. So if you, if you’re one of those people that still likes her, you got to listen to what she told you, which is that it’s not all of us.

GREEN: She didn’t even say half, she just said there’s two groups. She didn’t say the relative sizes. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, okay. Okay. Yes. Yeah. And I, I didn’t remember that, but yeah. But no, and, and it’s true like, psychologically it is the case that a lot of people have a, more kind of intuitionist. non, rational viewpoint about everything.

and that is kind of a, kind of a, evolutionary, legacy that we [00:54:00] have. And we all have I mean, we all use our, our intuition and our, our somatic reasoning, as I call it, to, it works very well for us. You know if you’re driving to the grocery store and you know where exactly where you don’t, you’re not thinking, okay, oh, I’ve got to got to turn over here at the fifth block.

You’re not thinking that you need to autopilot for you. So, like somatic reasoning, it works fine for us most of the time, but it’s not good about actually learning new things. And, and so we have to we have to be able to, to speak somatically to the public instead of letting somebody like Trump come along.

And, it’s,

GREEN: it’s an old lesson for teaching that, um I learned a long time ago, which was, if you want somebody to learn something new, you need to try to make them laugh or make them cry. Like you have to jolt them out of their path of reasoning so that they can accept new information.

And I think that’s probably right for political messaging as well. And then on the other side of it you, you can absolutely sell the message that the people who are in power in the Republican party are freaks and evil and weird and like child predators and fascists and like all of this stuff that you can sell because it is backed by evidence, right?

But then if you turn around and go, my treasured colleague in the Republican party you know, my, I I want to do bipartisanship with these people, like mm-hmm. You are again going to demoralize, right? Where you’re like, oh, you just told me that they were literally Satan and now you’re telling me that you’ve co-authored a bill with them.

Like, what are you talking about? Like, I do, I think a little bit more. conviction of the, like, this is actually our opponent could go a long way.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. well, and yeah, like it is yeah, it’s a real problem that the, the left-leaning, non-political junkies [00:56:00] don’t have that strong partisanship and don’t understand what’s at stake for that.

There were a lot of people also who did develop this very simplistic viewpoint of that, oh, well if somebody’s, we, when we talk to people, we’ll only talk to them based on what their demographic group is. So if, so we’re not going to talk to women about anything other than abortion. Because women don’t care about anything other than abortion. Black people don’t care about anything other than racism.

Uh and like, and, and you see it saw it with some of these, there was, there were always such a disgrace with these, when they, when they have these Democratic debates and they, like, they, they will be hosted by like two white people or a white person and a black person.

And then they will walk somebody out and be like, okay, here’s a Hispanic person now to talk to you about immigration. It’s like, yeah, what the fuck is that? Like you are, you are, you are disgracing yourself. if you suppose that, that people who are Latino only or concerned about that topic, right? No. And then yeah, they’re like tokenizing and then you’re forcing them to do it in that way.

And and the reality is most well like the va I think the majority of Hispanic Americans have no connection to the immigration system. So this is not a message that’s relevant to them. And that’s far more harmful than some college professors saying Latinx.

NELSON: And, and, and that is one thing that Trump has recognized, fully and wholly. And if you watch him go out, he talks to black folks about making money. He talks to everybody about the stuff that he’s interested in, and he pulls people out of the different communities and, and you see them up there saying like, yeah, like Latinas for Trump folks everywhere.

He talks to them in a more authentic way than the Chuck Schumers. Than the Hakeem Jeffries. And I, I return to that often, right? The [00:58:00] authenticity, whether we like to admit it or not the American public to some degree sees what they’re doing over there as being more authentic than, as you noted, marching people out to ask token questions about stuff.

You know, people want to feel part of the whole, they don’t want to feel necessarily picked out and, and made, made a an illustration of because what, they’re black they’re Spanish. The what, what is that supposed to mean? Right? we have to talk about the stuff that’s uncomfortable, but, but Matt, the polls say that that doesn’t, we shouldn’t talk about that.

GREEN: The polls, Trent, the, the polls.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and again, like, they, they just don’t, they don’t know how to, how to talk to people. I mean, that’s really to, to what you just said there, Trent, like, Trump during all of his campaigns did. Massive numbers of rallies in his campaigns more than any of his opponents, and like doing a campaign rally in an area that’s actually more effective than running TV ads in that area because-- and, and it makes total sense because again, like most, most of us, uh we, we want something interesting and fun. Like most people want that. and so if you got some a presidential campaign coming to your town like that doesn’t happen most of the time. and you can go to it and you can hang out with your friends, even if you don’t really like the candidate or even know much about him.

You know, it’s a fun time and and, and if it’s Trump he’s going out there telling jokes and, and mixing it up and talking shit, and like people like that, like it. And we can, we can say, oh gosh, I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish it wasn’t a form of entertainment.

I wish it it wasn’t this and that. Well, it is okay. So if you can’t be entertaining and you can’t be fun and you can’t laugh at yourself then get the hell out. That’s what it comes down to, you know?

And in the beginning of her [01:00:00] campaign, Kamala Harris before these, because when it was only her, her people from California that had, were advising her, she was running a much better campaign than when she got the Democratic nomination. And all of these people glommed onto her the, the Carville brigade and just ruined like Tim Walls, he was on fire like his weird attack. Like people fucking loved that. they, they loved to hear funny shit. and that’s because.

The economy sucks. You know, like all this, all, all this, all these horrible things are going on. Like, we want a break. And, and if we can get a break from somebody who also has ideas that we agree with, then we’re, we fucking want that. And so, tell call these people weird. Call them dumb asses, call them whatever.

Say whatever you want about them. Like they’re fuckers. And they need to get fucked.

GREEN: Well, yeah, right? Like, oh my God, we do not actually want them to win, right? Yeah. Should we act like it? Yeah. I think like one of the things with Harris was like, she would do something a little silly, right? She’d say the coconut tree thing, and or she’d have that laugh, and for a lot of people that was like, oh, a real person. How exciting. And like a person who has feelings Yeah. And who like isn’t just a robot, right? If, if that was the direction, but like, it felt like they were embarrassed of her. Like they, they wanted to just like. Well, let’s, let’s just ratify a little bit and then Yeah.

Wal as well, because he was just like, dad, man. Like his brand was so strong. Yeah. And hopefully, hopefully he’s able to continue to, to work that because it’s a really good brand.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah. And absolutely. And yeah, like they, they, they bottled up their per personalities, and were like, no, we’re only going to talk about the issues.

GREEN: And that’s not anything else is a distraction Again, this distraction thing. It’s so superior, it’s so condescending. It’s, it’s down anything [01:02:00] interesting.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And like and just like embracing who they are, just even as people like, like Trump himself had literally said that he he was like, oh, I’m more attractive than Kamala Harris.

So like. He was, he was sensitive. I see ca for the audio listeners, that’s Caitlin gagging over there.

GREEN: It’s just that like, okay. So I’m like, I’m not like Kamala pilled, right? I am not coconut pilled. I mm-hmm. Am quite left. And so, like she disappointed me in several ways. However, she’s a beautiful person.

Her smile, oh my God, like, just give me a second to just be like, that was a smile that could light up a room if they would just let her, right? Anyway, Trump more attractive. Okay. Not even when he was 25 years old was he more attractive? And like as a young man, he was gross. He made the girls want to cover their drinks.

SHEFFIELD: And the dude tall was born greasy. Like the guy fell out of a frying pan. Truly.

Absolutely. But they could have done just so much with that, with Tim Wallace’s dad energy—like Trump said it he was like—oh his people were worried that people thought Kamala Harris was hot.

So like, why the hell would you not play into that? Why can’t we have a president who’s hot? They could have totally done that.

GREEN: We deserve one!

SHEFFIELD: That’s right. We haven’t had one since, JFK, so like, why can’t we do that, right? And they could have done that, and it would’ve been a lot of fun.

But they were like, no, no, you have to be serious, you have to get people to vote for them. They must eat their vegetables.

GREEN: We certainly certainly can’t have a hot lady president. We can’t even have a lady president. Full stop. We can’t have a hot one too.

Kamala Harris’s positions were more popular, but it wasn’t enough

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then this is just it’s just one of a thousand different things, because again, like they, [01:04:00] they’ve got this idea that the people only care about issues. But people don’t even know what the positions are.

And like Harris’s campaign, because it was run by these consultant people, her positions were perfectly calibrated to have majority support. And in fact, so YouGov literally did a poll about Trump’s positions and Harris’s positions, and almost all of Harris’s positions had majority support.

GREEN: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And it did not matter because people do not vote on the issues—or most a lot of people don’t. And so they vote on what they think of the candidate as a person. They vote on general vibes. And just how the state of the economy was.

And Biden/Harris really dropped the ball on that. Like the polls were showing that people thought that inflation was bad. And instead of saying, look. Yeah, it is bad. And, and here’s the 10 things that we’re going to do to lower inflation. And we’ve already lowered inflation quite a bit, and we’re going to keep going for it.

And we’re going to do this for you, and we’re going to give you that to help you get a leg up and we’re going to add support systems.

They didn’t do that. Instead, they were like, no, the economy’s fine. We’re doing great. And when people would ask Harris what’s the one thing you would, what are things you would do differently?

And she’d be like, I wouldn’t change anything. And then, and then finally she was like I would appoint a Republican to my cabinet.

NELSON: (guffaws)

SHEFFIELD: Who the fuck wants that?

GREEN: No, thank you. No, thank you, ma’am.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Like, so like, and, and, and it was like, that was a bit of a tricky question, because of course she was the vice president, so like—

GREEN: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: It was designed to try to drive a wedge between her and Biden. But you know, she could have said, well, I mean there’s any number of things, she could have said and done it in a way that was diplomatic. And was safe, and was [01:06:00] responsive to what people--

GREEN: Politics being ostensibly her career. Like she should know how to do something like that. Right? Like, that should be in her skillset.

SHEFFIELD: And even if it’s just simply saying, well we, we wanted to do this thing in the beginning, but we didn’t you know, it didn’t, the Republicans stopped it or whatever. Like that’s how you do it. You are like, we tried to do this. The Republicans blocked it. Well, I’m going to come back and we’re going to finish the job.

GREEN: We’re going to keep trying.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And that’s, and that’s how you do it. But instead she was saying she’ll appoint a Republican. Like the whole point is, these assholes have stopped all the good things that we want in this country. And if you can’t say that, then what are you in this business for?

NELSON: Well sometimes you got to sound like an old person for a second, you got to break a few eggs to make an omelet. You know, like if we need to say that Joe Biden wasn’t the best president, or we need to say that we weren’t as effective as we wanted.

And so, like you said, Matt, we have, when we regain power and we have a a, a great majority that we can work with, yeah. Here’s are the things that we want to get done, and the reasons we want to get them done. But this, again, we play so much into what the Republicans say about us. You know, weak willed, we weak spirited.

just, just let it go because you don’t want to say something bad about Joe Biden. Well, that’s okay. I’m sure Joe Biden would’ve taken the bad things for his policies to be continued. I suspect, I don’t know for a fact, but I suspect yeah,

GREEN: He would’ve tolerated a couple of less than flattering statements out of his vice president. We can keep it going. If it meant that. If it meant that Trump wouldn’t win.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, and you know, and, and speaking of Biden, I mean the reality is he should not have run in 2024. Like, he should have let people decide. Especially given again, like, and his people knew that [01:08:00] people were concerned about him, not having the energy to do it.

Whatever you think about whether Biden had dementia or not, the reality is the guy wasn’t matching Trump’s rally energy. Like he like if you want to win, you got to be out there doing these rallies. Like that’s, that’s the name of the game at this point, especially if you’re up against Trump, who will when he was when he needed to, he was doing three, four rallies a day, and Biden was doing zero. You got to put in the work. You got to put in the work if you actually want to win. And you got to, you got to welcome people into the tent. And instead of saying, well, if you don’t agree with me on everything, then go get fucked. And it’s like, well, that’s a way to lose.

GREEN: Yeah. Right. Well, yeah. And while simultaneously accusing the people you just told to get fucked of, of purity testing. Purity. Yeah. Like, cool. Okay. So double insult. Thank you for like, I guess I’m out. I don’t know what to do with that. How do I, I am not in, I am clearly not invited to the party, right? So Yeah, you got to, you got to invite people into the party.

You’ve got to stand by your conviction. Like if you say something, you got to stick to it. Gee, imagine that. And, yeah, be interesting that, that was something that we’ve learned, I think, is that like, it doesn’t really matter who you are, who, whatever your personal quirks are, or you know, your kind of identity and how, how your branding sort of works.

Like, it doesn’t matter the specifics as long as you like show them to people, right? Like you could be Tim Waltz, the dad, you could be Kamala Harris, the like, kind of. Silly lady with the fun smile, who also like, gets really tough all of a sudden. Like, that’s all very fun. You know, you could be a zoran momani, like the really smiley dude who just like, loves his city, right?

Like you can do all any of those things, but you have to do them. You can’t just like be the Democrat party robot [01:10:00] amalgam machine. No. That doesn’t work. People don’t like it.

SHEFFIELD: No, they don’t. And also you have to tell people if you if you get blocked by the opposition from doing something, you have to explain that this happened.

So, like Biden Yeah. Did a good thing with the student loans. And then the Republicans sue. So like, again, you talk about a perfect hand silver platter campaign issue. He was literally stealing, the Republicans were stealing money that was given to young people in America. And Donald Trump improved his margins among young people.

Like what in the hell? That Republicans literally took money that Joe Biden gave to them. and, and, and Joe Biden had nothing to say about it, and, and had nothing much to say that in the Republican Supreme Court said, oh, you can’t do this. What? Right. Why? Why, why is that not, a thing that he’s outraged about?

I’m talking about every goddamn day for a month, or a board, right? Like, wasn’t happening. So like, if you can’t, if you get blocked on something you want, then you got to explain it like Trump is very good at that also like, yes, peace. when he encountered opposition on things, he would explain, well, this is why I didn’t do this thing that I promised.

and, and people notice that,

GREEN: Well, I’m like again, what if the Democrats put their money into not Sinclair, Nexstar, CBS, Fox, whatever, and they used that money to figure out ways to tell people those things, right? Because like we’ve come up against that wall a lot where we’re like, oh, well we can massage and finesse and perfect the messaging as much as we want.

But if we’re only telling people who are already a fan of us, those things, then we’re not going to get very far. Right? Yeah. So, like, what we need is to be using the money better to create a more effective megaphone that actually reaches people. And yeah, buying TV ads is just not going to get there. [01:12:00]

Trump’s much more effective pop-culture media appearance strategies

SHEFFIELD: No, it isn’t. And the thing that everyone thinks about politician campaign ads is that they’re lies. Like generically, that is what you think of all campaign ads, and that’s what everyone thinks. so like you’re using a medium, everyone associates with lies as your primary delivery me vehicle, like this is idiocy.

Like people believe a message that they have encountered you know, in other places like that. So whether it’s from somebody that they like as a podcaster whether it’s somebody that they, watch as a like from, from some sort of lifestyle show. You know, like that’s, they’re much more likely to believe that because they trust that this person has given them advice that they liked on some other thing whether it’s, I mean, again, like, again, you don’t have to agree with these people, but you know, like let’s say somebody likes Joe Rogan’s weightlifting or workout advice like, because they’re like, oh, well look at him. You know, he’s, he’s pretty buff. I’m going to do what he says.

And and maybe it works for them, whatever. It so they like him. And then when Joe Rogan tells them, well you should vote for Donald Trump. They’re going to believe that more than Donald Trump telling them, you should vote for me. You know, and, and, and being a part of the culture. because that’s what you

GREEN: expect to hear from Donald Trump.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, of course. Donald Trump’s going to tell you to vote for him. Yeah, exactly. Uh and, and, and being a part of culture and actually listening to people like when, what because Trump did a zillion of these podcast appearances on random shows and stuff shows. No. And it, most people had never heard of these shows.

and yet here he was mixing it up with him. And and being, and whereas Harris. Generally speaking, did very few of these things. and, uh she had the opportunity to be on Joe Rogan’s show. He, he said, I would love to have her on the show, and they dithered about it until it was too late.

And [01:14:00] then, uh then she lost that opportunity. You know, and, and so that’s, you have to, you have to be out there with the people. You have to be where they are. It’s no different than back in the old days of the politician going to the parade and kissing the babies. Well in the 21st century, you got to kiss Joe Rogan’s butt, or, do

GREEN: we have to, well,

SHEFFIELD: you at least have to come on liberal currents.

How about that?

GREEN: Okay.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

GREEN: We are the Joe Rogan of the left, obviously. That’s us. That’s, that’s the role that we’re filling. I, yeah. It. That’s, that’s always a question that I struggle with too is if you have somebody who’s clearly sort of like a, like more friendly to one side, which is not your side, like do you do you send Kamala Harris onto Joe Rogan’s podcast?

Do you send Kamala Harris to talk to somebody who’s like catering to kind of more of a right wing audience? It, yeah. What’s the cost benefit there, right? Like, are you legitimizing them and are you actually like, again, leaning into their branding or are you reaching people you wouldn’t have reached or it, it’s a question anyway.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, with Rogan the reality is Joe Rogan voted for Democrats for a long time. Yeah. So he’s not

GREEN: right. He doesn’t really lean anywhere. He’s just a credulous weirdo. Yeah. I mean, well

SHEFFIELD: he’s, he’s kind of libertarian, I think that’s fair to say. Yeah. but that’s more of his position, kind of very uninformed libertarian, like that’s his viewpoint.

And you know, and, and so there’s plenty of things that she could have talked to him in that regard. And there’s a lot of things that from a libertarian standpoint that Donald Trump, even back then, so obviously now, like, with all of his, uh raids and whatnot and privacy [01:16:00] invasions, like, obviously that’s all bullshit.

But he was still, he still had Russell vote on his you know, giving him advice and, and saying he was going to have a job in the Trump white like. If you’re a Joe Rogan fan, wouldn’t you want to know that Donald Trump’s top policy guy says he wants to criminalize porn? Yeah. Seems like that might be something that you would want to know if you’re a, a a, a weight lift bro.

That one of your favorite pastimes, Donald Trump wants to criminalize it. Like, or at least his guy does. You know, and like, seems like that would be important. Or talking to them about abortion because Joe Rogan is pro-choice. So yeah, you could talk about that. I mean, there’s, there’s any number of, like, if you can’t talk to people who don’t agree with you a hundred percent and you’re a politician.

Yeah. What are you, what are you doing this for? You screwed Sharon. And, and, and I think she could up. And I think she could have done, she would’ve done fine.

GREEN: There’s a rea there’s a difference between like sending Kamala Harris onto the Joe Rogan podcast, the Joe Rogan, what is it? Experience? Yeah. Versus like, you wouldn’t send her on like fresh and fit or something that’s like extremely red pilled and like misogynist, right?

SHEFFIELD: Oh, those guys are Nazi. That, that wouldn’t work. So yeah. black Nazis. But yeah, no, you exactly. No, that’s exactly right, Caitlin. You go around the margins and you know, and you, so like, and again, like you wouldn’t send her on to somebody like these, far right.

Christian hosts either who know,

GREEN: of course, of course.

SHEFFIELD: But I mean, gosh, there’s so many intermediary spaces with like, we still have those in society. And even though it might be easy to think that we don’t, there’s still, a lot of places that people can be a part of and like here and just as another example of, of just how culturally illiterate Democrats are, so every year during the Super Bowl they let the president have something to say. And like, I mean, for, in my case, I, I would turn it off regardless of who the president is. I don’t want to see that. But you know, a lot of people are just leave it on. Joe [01:18:00] Biden refused that offer.

NELSON: Yes.

SHEFFIELD: He refused to do it. For

GREEN: what? ’

SHEFFIELD: cause he was like, what did he

GREEN: have going on that was more important?

SHEFFIELD: He thought it was unseemly or whatever. And it’s like, again, if, why, why are you in this business? Wait,

GREEN: Wait, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sorry. It’s unseemly for the leader of a country to appear and speak at one of its most popular events like cultural events? That’s bizarre.

SHEFFIELD: It is bizarre. Yeah. It’s, it’s stupid is what it is. and, and and like this is a, like, this is a tradition whether you like it or not, so just fucking do it even if you don’t like it. And like, why would you turn down being present at the number one rated thing all year?

NELSON: Like, yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Who the hell is advising you?

NELSON: Trump. Trump has, has, he went to a football game I think several weeks ago. He was, I think the first president to go as an active president to go since Jimmy Carter, I want to say. It was a long time ago, but. to your point, Matt, if you look a year over year at the top 100 rated television programs every year, seven out of 10 of those are American football games.

They, unbelievable popularity, and he understands that. I mean, again, people who don’t think that he has some type of intelligence, they’re, they’re under rating it. He, he has, as you noted, Matt, he has a savvy, he has an intuition. He sees that everyone watches football. He always wanted to be involved in, in the NFL going back into the eighties.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he was involved in XFL.

NELSON: Absolutely.

GREEN: Yeah. It’s just that like absolutely. I, I don’t like any sports really. I don’t like a single sport. Sorry, but, but like I recognize the status of the Super [01:20:00] Bowl and the NFL as cultural entities, right? Like they’re, they’re an important part of American culture. We all know this.

Yeah. Like, that’s so silly. And like the, the president is understood to have a role as like a participant in American culture, right? Yeah. Like we, they decorate for Thanksgiving, they decorate for Christmas, they decorate for Halloween. Like they do these things. They host like Easter Egg, whatever. Who, who cares? I don’t care. Whatever knows the cow, but they just cultural. Stuck.

NELSON: He knows the power of bread and circuses. All right. He understands this. I mean, look at what he is doing, with the UFC to celebrate anniversary, right? American anniversary. Yeah.

GREEN: Well, it’s a chance to, to reinforce the concept of the imagined community of America, right? Like that’s what it’s for.

NELSON: It’s, it’s to enforce all of these things. Reimagine community, spectacle. the president is doing things for us. I mean, it, he, he gets it all and it’s all him. He gets to be the star of it, right? It, it, its perfect. And you juxtaposed that with, as you were saying before, Matt, right?

Like, I forget if it was all four, four years or if it was just one or two of the years that he, that he didn’t. But yeah, just a massive opportunity. Just a massive oppor. You, you are passing up Joel Rogan. You’re passing up the Super Bowl. Do you want to win?

GREEN: Do you want to win and do you want to be part of this country? Like, do you want to act like you’re one of us or no? Like, yeah, that’s so weird. But, but of course that would be a distraction, wouldn’t it, Trent? And we’re better.

NELSON: Correct.

GREEN: We’re above distractions.

NELSON: Correct.

GREEN: We’re all of your petty interests, your footballs and your Epstein’s. We’re above that. We don’t have to think about that stuff.

NELSON: Yeah. Oh my goodness gracious. Now time to win an election, right?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I mean, look, there’s, so the, I, yeah, I agree with everything you guys said. And, uh I’m, I’m, I am crowdfunding this book here, so it, I’m [01:22:00] looking for people to, to buy it. So I can definitely use people’s support with that because Yeah. I’m not getting my Soros check. I don’t know where it is. Maybe it’s in lost in the mail. That’s right. Or something’s and, but yeah, I mean, look, we, we. We have to be in the scrum. Like that’s, that’s the reality. Like politics, I mean there, there’s all these sayings that about politics ain’t beanbag whatever.

Like, that’s the reality. Like if you, if you can’t take the rough and tumble, if you can’t have fun, if you can’t mix it up, if you can’t be silly, you can’t be angry, you can’t be authentic, then get out. Yeah. Yeah. Let people who want to do the job, do the job and, and let people come in, invite the, this, this whole credential crap that they’ve got going on that, well, if you didn’t work in a campaign 30 years ago, then you don’t know anything.

And it’s like, well, what do you know? You don’t know. Yeah. Very much.

GREEN: You haven’t really shown us what you actually know because you happened to be employed during a campaign that was like unable to fail.

SHEFFIELD: That’s Yeah, that’s exactly right. You know, and politics is always changing and you’ve got to change with it.

And

NELSON: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And that’s how you win, is by adapting. And like, and we don’t have to copy all the dishonesty and, the hate that, that the right is constantly pushing out. We don’t have to do that. But these guys, they, they are pros and they know their stuff because they have to be, like their, their issue positions are unpopular.

Like, that’s the bottom line. And we can complain about gerrymandering, or small states in the Senate and all that. Well, that’s the rules of the game. Like this has been in place for 200 years, guys. Like, you can’t start now saying, oh, the system is against us. Bro, that’s how it is. And that’s how it’s always been.

And, and if you want to change that, you got to win within the current game if you want to change the [01:24:00] rules. It’s just that simple. Yeah. and you got to actually compete everywhere. You know, like when Howard Dean was the DNC chairman, he pushed forward a 50 state strategy. He was like, look, we’re going to compete everywhere.

And, and that was very important, not just necessarily because they were going to win in these very red areas. It wasn’t that it was, that they could get, the people who lived in these places would get a chance to see a real Democrat. and that they weren’t the evil Satanic caricature that Fox News was telling them that they were, they could see, oh, this is someone who has some ideas that I actually like.

Fifty-state strategy and meeting voters

SHEFFIELD: This is someone if I’m a farmer that actually does support farms and and, and wants farmers to have good things and, and have not have tariffs destroy their industry. There’s being out there, we have, you have to be there with the people and you have to invest in media and to carry the message to them,

GREEN: Right. And study up. Like show that you know what is impacting their lives and think about what your policies can do to help them, right? Like when you’re going to visit the farms, you need to know why and how Trump is hurting them. So you can talk about how you can fix it, get them something better. Create a life that is actually even better, better than just fixing it, right?

We’re not just the cleanup crew. I think that’s really important. I think that like Trump can throw a rally that’s like exciting and where he’s like fun and funny, but like the prevailing energy is like, fairly mean, right? You’ve got your grannies with your best deportations now. Signs, you’ve got, the fuck your feelings t-shirts, like you got all that stuff going on.

Y you know, they, they still, they haven’t really broken out of that like, bully vibe. It’s like a bully brand, right? And like the Democrats have this whole field that they can [01:26:00] occupy to create events and, media and whatever like that has a much more fun vibe than that. Like, fun is extremely available to be had at this point where you can throw these events where like, everybody’s having a good time.

Everybody’s expressing themselves, right? Like you can go to festivals and things and like the Republicans pull up at like a farmer’s market and half the people have to duck under a table in case they’re going to get, like thrown into a van. Democrats, you can show up and the party will just continue.

Like, why not take advantage of that?

NELSON: Sounds like a whole bunch of distraction talk though, Caitlin. So oh, I’d love

GREEN: distractions. Distract me more.

SHEFFIELD: yeah, no, that, that’s a great, a great point. And, and you know, from a more like political theory standpoint what you just said actually jives very well with the kind of meta narrative of the left and the right.

So the, the right, the right wing narrative is tragic. It is. The world is fallen. We are a fallen people. Nothing will ever get better. So we should just submit to the rich and powerful and hope that we can benefit a little bit from their opulence and greatness.

GREEN: It’s bleak. It, it’s bleak. It’s bleak.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and, and whereas the, the, the point of the left is supposed to be, well, if we work together and care about each other and care about society. And, we can have a better society and we can have fun while we’re doing it. You know, and yeah,

GREEN: it’s literally a barn raising, like we could just like do that, right?

Yeah. It’s like somebody needs something done. Okay, I’m going to go really childish here for a second, but I’ve been reading this story to my children called We are definitely Human. It’s amazing. It’s a picture book and it’s about some aliens that crash [01:28:00] land in a, like, behind a barn. And they approach the farmer and they’re like, we are for sure a hundred percent human.

We promise our car has broken down. It’s definitely a car. It is not anything that’s not a car. And the, the farmer is like, okay, well the store’s closed. Like we can’t really do anything right now. It’s midnight. Why don’t you just come sleep in my living room? So they sleep in the living room and then the next morning they go out to the general store and everybody in the town hears about these like very strange people with their very strange car that need help.

And so they go out to where the car is, quote unquote, and the whole town is just there. Somebody’s playing music, there’s food, there’s like, people have brought their tools, their expertise, they fix the UFO I mean the car, the car. And then the aliens leave and they bring with them the experience of like, oh, humans are helpful.

and when somebody is in need, hu the humans will come together and do that. And when we meet somebody in need, we will do the same thing. Right? Like that is literally the ethos of the barn raising. That is the party vibe that we could bring if we just let ourselves do it right. Not only is it fun, but we’re working together to create something or fix something or build something better.

It’s so simple. It’s let me run the Democratic party.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah. Well, exactly. And like um, and, and, and it’s, it, this is what we have to do because again, like these people want to impose this tragic worldview on it, on all of us. And if we, if we, we put just say the thing, that government is all of us.

And in the same way that you, if your aunt or uncle needs a, a, a cancer surgery or something, and you do a GoFundMe for them and your community comes through for you, that’s wonderful. Well, guess what? That is what government is. it is the ultimate [01:30:00] GoFundMe. Like that’s,

GREEN: why don’t we just say that?

Progressive vision and community values

GREEN: What if government just did that already and you didn’t even have to make the GoFundMe.

SHEFFIELD: Exactly. Well, that’s what I’m saying. Just tell people, tell them the truth: other countries have done this with healthcare. We can have all have healthcare.

We can not have to worry about going bankrupt. That’s a wonderful thing. And it’s a solution. This is not a newfangled, imaginary thing that’s a far distant wild dream of the liberals. It’s achievable and we know it.

GREEN: Yeah. because people have already done it.

NELSON: The part of this work has to be, getting back to the Republican dominance of messaging. We have to decouple community from communism. We have to decouple society from socialism, right? When people hear that, like we’re going to have maybe buses that everyone can take in New York City, paid for by taxes.

People think that’s an outrageous Right. Grabby pearls, right? They’re doing the same communist stuff in the great socialist state of Georgia. Right. Where you can get, take a free bus in Athens,

GREEN: right? I mean, I think Yeah, and we, we have to own the idea that like, you’re, you’re going to have to do a little bit for your country in order to have the country that you want, right?

Like ask not what your country can do for you. Like if we want to have the kind of society that does provide. The things that we think a society should provide, then yes. Those of us who have something to give, ought to be giving some, and that’s not something to run away from. And I do feel we’ve been running away from that idea.

Yeah. Like, oh, yeah. What will you pay for it? Like, oh the, well, we can’t raise taxes on anything the same way we pay for everything else.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, the same way that Trump is paying for his deportation force. Like, we’ll just take some money away from that. There you [01:32:00] go. Yeah, no, exactly like this idea that, you have to nickel and dime every fucking thing like it’s crap.

And, and in the same way the, the right, it had us propagated this complete lie about, oh, if you cut taxes, you get more revenue. Like, that’s bullshit. And it’s never been true. That

GREEN: message has never been right?

SHEFFIELD: No, it’s never. And like that was actually one of the things that made me get out of the Republican party was, so I was, I was, the managing editor at the Washington Examiner, and I had people that would sometimes send me articles that would say that in them that if we cut taxes, we’ll get more revenue.

And I would always say, well, show me evidence of that and like, give me a citation of that, a study that says that. And if you want that in there, that you have to do that. And they, no one ever sent me anything. so I would just strike it out. and then eventually I started thinking, huh, well what if they’re wrong about a lot of these other things?

And, uh one thing led to another,

GREEN: and here we are and I’m so glad that we are here. and I think it’s about time for us to wrap up. So I will finish by saying if you go to Matt Sheffield’s, it’s the Flux website, right? Yeah. You’re flux community.

SHEFFIELD: And yeah. Yeah.

GREEN: And it’s called What Republicans Know, and you can pay $15 to get the whole thing, and that will help Matt to fund his next phase of the project, which is developing it into a full book, which is what we want.

We want that book. So please help.

SHEFFIELD: Yes, yes. Thank you. and you can follow me on blue Sky. If you go, if it’s, it’s, matthew.flux.community. You can follow there too.

GREEN: Amazing. and you can be found on Blue Sky and maybe Twitter slash. Yes. Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: I still post on there for the normies at me.

Yeah. [01:34:00]

GREEN: I, I have given up on the place, Matt, but thank you so much and this has been half the answer, where understanding the question is half the answer. And it is also it is also, what is it, Matt?

SHEFFIELD: Theory of Change. Yes, yes, exactly. I thought you were trying to make a pun there or something!

But yes, also this is a crossover of Theory of Change. So, glad to put this on there as well for everybody.

GREEN: So thank you Theory of Change audience. I hope you guys hope you enjoyed us and will listen to us. Thank you Half the Answer audience, we hope you’ll listen to Theory of Change and we will see you next time.

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