The Realignment

Senator Josh Hawley returns to The Realignment to discuss the right’s fraying relationship with the tech industry and what antitrust enforcement can (and can’t), accomplish.

We’re on vacation this week, but rather than not publish anything, we’re releasing a special episode featuring the entire team that puts together the show. Join Marshall, Saagar, Phil, James, and Emma for episode, book, and podcast recommendations to hold you over until next week.

Cade Metz, technology correspondent with The New York Times and author of Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World, joins The Realignment to discuss the past, present, and future of AI and the actors and players that will shape the technology’s future.

Buy a book using our bookshop link: https://bookshop.org/shop/therealignment Julia Galef, author of The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t and host of the Rationally Speaking podcast, joins The Realignment to make the case for embracing the “scout” mindset in order to make better decisions and avoid tribalism and wishful thinking, as opposed to the knee-jerk bias of the “soldier” mindset.

Note: During today’s episode, we discuss our plans to launch a Supercast subscription in May: https://www.supercast.com/product. A bunch of you have already written that you’d like to support the show financially, so please email us at realignmentpod@gmail.com if you’d subscribe to a paid Realignment membership, plus we’d love to hear any suggestions with what additional features we should add to make it worthwhile. Don’t worry though, we won’t paywall the Tuesday, Thursday, or Reboot episodes we already offer. Marshall and Saagar answer the backlog of Realignment Qs on the impact of a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East and Central Asia, whether you need elite credentials to impact policy in D.C., how to skeptically discuss marijuana without sounding like a NARC, how to support the show (financially or otherwise), and more...

Buy a book using our bookshop link: https://bookshop.org/shop/therealignment Zachary Carter, Writer in Residence at the Omidyar Network and author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, returns to The Realignment to discuss the government response to COVID, how capitalism will and won’t change after the pandemic, and how economic policy debates played out over the past three decades.

Email us your thoughts about this episode, or any episode, at realignmentpod@gmail.comBuy a book using our bookshop link: https://bookshop.org/shop/therealignmentDr. Kevin Sabet, President and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and author of Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know, joins The Realignment to reflect on the failures and success of the war on drugs, the effects of recent state decriminalization initiatives, his time as a drug policy official in the Bush and Obama administrations, and why the rise of a “commercialized,” multi billion dollar marijuana industry should be a cause for concern for opponents and of decriminalization/legalization alike.

Subscribe to The Realignment’s Substack, now released on Thursdays: https://therealignment.substack.com/ Check out Elliot and Admiral Stavridis’s Bookshop recommendations on the U.S. and China, foreign policy, and warfare: https://bookshop.org/lists/2034-admiral-james-stavridis-and-elliot-ackerman-book-recommendations Elliot Ackerman, co-author of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War and Marine combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, joins The Realignment to follow up on the pod’s conversation with Admiral James Stavridis, the legacy of the “forever” wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, what history teaches us about a future U.S.-China conflict, and of course, the weakened state of the two-party system.

Bookshop link for Lisa’s books, plus recommendations discussed in the episode: https://bookshop.org/lists/the-realignment-episode-116-lisa-napoli-books-recommendations Lisa Napoli, author of Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR and Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News, returns to The Realignment to discuss the past, present, and future of the news media, and why the challenges and opportunities facing the industry today perfectly rhyme with those of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Subscribe to Frank’s YouTube channel on realignments: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyI2l4jUJ-GqtbtMhCvsWzg Frank DiStefano, author of The Next Realignment: Why America’s Parties Are Crumbling and What Happens Next, joins The Realignment to explain why realignments are a regular feature of American politics, the need to move beyond 20th century debates between conservatives and liberals, and why the collapse of the current party system will lead to renewal and reform.