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The 3 N’s - Negotiation, Networking & No with Kathryn Valentine | 327 37:43

منذ 5 weeks37:43

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37:43

Let’s talk about the three things women are told not to do: negotiate, network unapologetically, and say no like we mean it. Most of us have been programmed to default to yes—to the point that we feel guilty saying no, even when it’s the most obvious answer. And when we do say no? We often soften it, explain it away, and sugarcoat it so much that it barely sounds like a no at all. Kathryn Valentine—CEO of Worthmore Strategies and corporate badass helping companies retain and promote female talent—is here to flip that script. With experience advising Fortune 100s and dropping knowledge in places like HBR and Fast Company, Kathryn knows exactly how women can claim their worth, own their voice, and not feel bad about it. From salary talks to schedule shifts, from asking for more to turning down what doesn’t serve you, this episode is your reminder: your power doesn't come from being liked. It comes from knowing what matters and having the guts to go after it. Kathryn even drops her epic list of 76 things you can negotiate (yes, SEVENTY-SIX). So if you've ever softened your no or stayed silent in a meeting, this one’s for you. Connect with Kathryn: Website: www.worthmorestrategies.com 76 Things You Can Negotiate: www.76things.com Related Podcast Episodes: The Hard Truths Of Entrepreneurship with Dr. Darnyelle Jervey Harmon | 313 Toxic Productivity with Israa Nasir | 254 Be A Likeable Badass with Alison Fragale | 230 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Richard Hanania's Newsletter

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Foreign policy, American politics, and social science

34 حلقات

#Richard Hanania

Richard Hanania's Newsletter

15 subscribers

updated منذ 7 أيام

منزل السلاسل•Feed

Foreign policy, American politics, and social science

34 حلقات

#Richard Hanania

كل الحلقات

1
Coffee, Cherry Pie, and the Nostalgia Trap

منذ 7 أيام

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Twin Peaks originally ran for two seasons on ABC from 1990 to 1991. A running joke on the show was that FBI agent Dale Cooper, the protagonist, really liked coffee and cherry pie. He was always complimenting establishments on their coffee and cherry pie, while recommending them to other people. To an audience in the early 1990s, this must have been very funny. But the humor of a guy really liking coffee was lost on me watching in 2025. In the 2017 remake of Twin Peaks on Showtime (spoilers beginning here), Dale Cooper returns in a catatonic form. This Zombie Cooper really likes coffee and cherry pie. Whenever we arrived at a moment where his old self comes out after he has seen coffee or cherry pie, I would feel this sense of anticipation and enjoy the predictable punchline. Man likes coffee is not funny to me. But a character I’ve grown to know and love returning after a quarter century in a different form – and liking coffee – is a thought that brings me overwhelming joy. “The past is a foreign country.” With the invention of TV and movies, we can visually and audibly experience the kinds of situations and jokes people once found funny, what they feared, how they expected the sexes to relate to one another, and more. Even if previous eras put less emphasis on realism in art, we at least learn what was expected from individuals in terms of ideals, prototypes, and norms. Becoming familiar with characters living in one culture and watching what they are like in another, through the passage of time, can be a surreal experience. Of course, all of us who were alive in 1990 and are still here today have had to adjust to new social realities, but in real life the shift is so gradual that its shock is diluted throughout countless small experiences reminding us that the past is always incrementally slipping away. Only through fiction can we fully experience getting to know characters living in one generation and then suddenly seeing what they are like in the next. The fact that this premise is so interesting is why you’ll often see novels, shows, and movies about an individual waking up from a coma, or in a variation of that theme, people living in a foreign country and then coming back, which is the premise of the King of the Hill remake. This is part of the appeal of the Twin Peaks story. Tyler Tone originally convinced me to get into this universe, and he now joins me to discuss the series, with a particular focus on The Return . We spend time on the aesthetic shift between the original and the remake. As argued by Jonathan Foltz , the story is much more thematically and geographically sprawling than the original, reflecting what has happened to American culture since the early 1990s. The first series offered an idealized vision of small-town America – albeit with a dark underbelly – while the 2017 series feels haunted by economic decay, addiction, and disconnection. We reflect on how Twin Peaks originally brought tens of millions together on network television, while The Return premiered on a premium TV channel and streaming service with orders of magnitude fewer viewers. The conversation begins with a discussion of the subplots and character arcs, before getting into larger questions about the series. We reflect on how The Return withholds the Cooper fans expect, offering instead Zombie Cooper as Dougie Jones and the evil Mr. C. I take the fact that we don’t get the Cooper we remember until late in the show as a sign that he’s too good for the culture we’ve created. As viewers have come to expect anti-heroes, an unblemished classic hero is difficult to imagine. I talk about how pro wrestling changed over the 1990s, reflecting the larger cultural shift, and the move away from clear cut good guys and bad guys. There is something similar going on with the original Sheriff Truman, who is omnipresent throughout conversations and via his brother and namesake, while never actually showing up. At some point, we also discuss how the original “Bob” really doesn’t work in 2017. I guess in 1990, a plausible symbol of evil was a guy who looks like a janitor in a denim outfit? Such a figure is laughable today. Maybe Bob takes whatever form represents evil in a particular cultural context. If so, it’s interesting to think how out of place the original character looks from our vantage point. I was hit hard by the storyline with Bobby and Shelly. David Lynch first led us on to believe that they were still together. Then in the middle of what looks like a family discussion, the young criminal comes out and takes Shelly away. Bobby is defeated. The entirety of Shelly’s past is seen in a different light. She wasn’t a victim of Leo; he was the kind of man she sought out, with her daughter falling into the same patterns. The seeming revelation that something similar happened between Ed and Nora at first compounded the original despair, but their relationship then moves in the opposite direction. Tyler and I speculate on why the two love stories end up differently. We discuss David Lynch’s politics. Tyler informs me that he voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. I note that the clearest tell that he was a rightoid is that he didn’t cast many nonwhites in the series, except for Asian females. See in particular the scene where the tiny girl is put on the ground and crawls on the floor. Relatedly, there’s the fact that the Twin Peaks universe caters to the male gaze as a more general matter. This appears to be the role of Tammy, who serves as the sidekick to Lynch himself. As mentioned in my review of that film with Rob, I’ve always thought that the point of Mulholland Drive was to put two beautiful actresses in sex scenes together. We spend some time on the Dr. Jacoby storyline. To me, it’s interesting that the two people who we see enjoying his show are Nadine and Jerry. All three of these individuals are B characters throughout the series. Are those the ones who get into paranoid right-wing politics? Tyler questions whether Dr. Amp is actually right-coded, but I think I convince him by pointing to the shovel scam and the Americana iconography. It is true there are some more left-wing critiques in his rants, and this shows Lynch being ahead of his time, given the MAGA-MAHA convergence we have witnessed. Ben Horne makes occasional appearances to show us how men have changed. Before, he had sex with his subordinates. Now he doesn’t. Not because he’s afraid of being cancelled, but because that’s not what we expect from older men in positions of power anymore. He’s kind of dead inside, compared to the energetic and jovial character he was a quarter-century ago, so this really doesn’t seem like a celebration of the feminization of the world. And then there’s Audrey. I was in shock watching her first appearance. You can see the same facial expressions, patterns of speech, tics and eccentricities. But what was cute or could even make a man fall in love with a woman in her twenties – the frivolity, indecisiveness, arbitrary and fierce passions – is unsettling in one who is deep into middle age. Only the mole remains unblemished as a commemoration of the past. Shelly in contrast is still beautiful, and it seems like Lynch made Audrey look particularly bad to drive the point home. People talk about her storyline, and much of The Return , as an assault on the concept of nostalgia, but here the lessons are heightened as we’re reminded of one of the cruelest facts of human existence: women age. After exhausting some of the main subplots – I don’t think we could’ve gotten to all of them, even with much more time – we move on to larger themes. The show, we agree, is less about solving mysteries than about resisting the very idea of resolution. Tyler emphasizes that he doesn’t particularly like the idea of worrying about plot details, but rather seeks to experience the director’s larger vision. He mentions the four and a half hour YouTube video that seeks to explain the series, which I’m just starting to get through. I ask about the significance of the episode centered around the detonation of the atom bomb. Tyler argues that we shouldn’t think about this as a scientific explanation of the main plot, but rather see nuclear weapons as a symbol of man becoming alienated from his nature and losing control. We talk about nuclear weapons as the symbol of man-made danger versus AI, with me arguing that the latter is much more depressing as the crowning achievement that might destroy us. Nuclear weapons are cool. They’re just machines that are doing more of the thing that machines do, that is rearranging matter. AI cuts to the core of who we are, and while there will be a lot of great applications going forward, it is also drowning the world in slop. Fine, slop is not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I don’t know, I find slop worse. This is the technological version of hating pronouns more than genocide , even though I’ve become so polarized against MAGA liars that I can’t even hate pronouns all that much anymore. And of course, if you listen to Eliezer, AI is much more dangerous than nuclear weapons anyway. We close the conversation by discussing the final episodes, particularly Cooper’s surreal re-entry into an altered timeline. Does he really believe he can save Laura Palmer? Was the lesson that he was being too hubristic, or something else? Tyler presents a popular theory that the ending was, despite all appearances, a happy one. I like having that out there as a possibility. Regardless, if there’s one rule of watching Twin Peaks , it is to remember that the point is not narrative closure. The show is a reflection, telling us who we are and what we’ve become. I don’t think the reality of our modern culture is as dark as Lynch believed it was. But we can’t lie to ourselves and say we haven’t lost something. And we cannot find redemption in nostalgia in a world where rapid societal changes are constantly making a mockery of what we have loved.…

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What Really Happened in the 2016 Election

منذ 12 يومًا

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Last month, Tulsi Gabbard in her capacity as the head of DNI released a number of documents pertaining to Russiagate. On the right, an entire mythology has grown around the idea that the Obama administration, Hillary, and Deep State actors fabricated the idea that Russia helped get Trump elected, along with the narrative surrounding ties between his campaign and the Putin regime. Even as someone who hasn’t followed all the twists and turns of this saga, I knew enough to understand that some of Gabbard’s most sensationalist claims were laughable. With great fanfare, she informed the world that the Obama administration knew that Russia had never hacked the voting machines to deliver a Trump victory. Under the headline “New Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency,” the DNI press release lists the following bullet points In the months leading up to the November 2016 election, the Intelligence Community (IC) consistently assessed that Russia is “probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means.” On December 7, 2016, after the election, talking points were prepared for DNI James Clapper stating, “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.” On December 9, 2016, President Obama’s White House gathered top National Security Council Principals for a meeting that included James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe and others, to discuss Russia. After the meeting, DNI Clapper’s Executive Assistant sent an email to IC leaders tasking them with creating a new IC assessment “per the President’s request” that details the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.” It went on to say, “ODNI will lead this effort with participation from CIA, FBI, NSA, and DHS.” Obama officials leaked false statements to media outlets , including The Washington Post, claiming, “Russia has attempted through cyber means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election.” On January 6, 2017, a new Intelligence Community Assessment was released that directly contradicted the IC assessments that were made throughout the previous six months. The problem of course is that the administration never claimed that Russia manipulated the vote tally! Everyone who is familiar with the most basic facts surrounding Russiagate knew this already. Go back to the first bullet point, with the quote that Russia was “probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means.” Now look at the complete passage here, on page 2 , taken first from the email of an unnamed Obama administration official: Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to? (sic) influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure. Russia probably is using cyber means primarily to influence the election by stealing campaign party data and leaking select items, and it is also using public propaganda. [emphasis added] Another email in response concurs with this judgment and repeats the phrase. The dishonesty is staggering. Put aside all other claims that Gabbard makes, this is so blatantly in bad faith that it’s immediately discrediting, and should make you skeptical of everything else these people say. Especially when this lie is combined with calls for Obama to be prosecuted. The Trump administration is speaking to an audience that it knows is misinformed, or unable to understand the distinction between “Russia tried to influence the election” and “Russia tried to change the election outcome by manipulating voting machines.” This recent news renewed my interest in the Russiagate story, so I invited my friend Renée DiResta ( X , Substack , personal website ) on a livestream to talk about it. She is a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, and the former research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She also did work on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. I used to take a very dim view of the misinformation crowd, and there are many researchers out there who give the field a bad name . I once saw institutions like the Stanford Internet Observatory as being at the center of a vast censorship complex that sought to simply stamp out all dissent from leftist orthodoxy. As someone who was repeatedly suspended under the old Twitter regime, I joined many on the right in seeing these people as a personal threat to my right to speak. If only the world could have stayed so simple! I could be a free speech absolutist, and never take any position that risks giving power to people who might eventually censor me. Yet recent years have shown that we need something like a community of responsible academics, intellectuals, and curators of content watching over the misinformed mobs that have been mobilized in the era of social media. If the flaws of the misinformation studies community made many of us believe in the desirability of an internet without any public or private regulation at all, the Trump movement and Elon’s X have made the best case against that position one can imagine. The flaws of the media and liberal establishment can be dealt with through appeals to morality, compelling counterarguments, and attempts to hold people to their own stated principles. In contrast, there is no way to take a similar approach to MAGA. These people simply lack any interest in building or maintaining truth-seeking institutions, and are appealing to a political base that is so misinformed that it allows them to get away with what more sophisticated observers will recognize as absurd lies. All of this is to say we need people like Renée. She walks me through the latest Russiagate news, and dissects Gabbard’s claims one-by-one. We start with the aforementioned non sequitur about the Obama administration knowing that Russia did not hack voting machines. We then go on to discuss whether Russia preferred Trump in 2016, the Durham annex, and more. One important point that needs to be emphasized is that the Senate Select Committee Report, with Marco Rubio serving as chair, concluded that the Russians tried to help Trump in 2016. This hasn’t been controversial until recently. The two House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence reports quibbled with that conclusion. Note that the HPSCI was chaired by Devin Nunes at the time, whose job is now literally being the head of Truth Social, and working as an aide was Kash Patel, whose job is now literally being the head of the FBI after a time writing children’s books teaching kids to worship Trump, and of course getting consulting fees from Truth Social. Arguments should be judged on their merits, but it tells you something when the mainstream of both parties agree on something, while the only ones who take the opposite position are known grifters and Trump lackeys. And even the HPSCI reports don’t put forward the most radical claims spread by MAGA influencers and Michael Shellenberger types , like the idea that Putin actually preferred Hillary, or that the DNC hack wasn’t carried out by the Russians. We close by discussing why this matters, what is at stake when we continue to debate Russiagate, AI slop, and what can be done to make social media better. Important documents January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment 2019 Mueller Report Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report (August 2020) The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Report (filed September 2020, released July 2025) (not to be confused with the HPSCI report from 2018) The Durham Report and the annex (May 2023) Articles Renée, “Reconning ‘Russiagate’” ; her conversation with Shellenberger NYT 2015 report on Russian internet troll farm Read more…

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The Latest on Jeffrey Epstein and Sydney Sweeney

منذ 15 يومًا

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Michael Tracey joins me on the stream this afternoon to talk about the latest in the Epstein saga and additional things he has learned about the accusers. It seems like every time Michael looks into one of the accusers or one of the journalists who has taken up the Epstein cause, he uncovers new problems. His last article is on one Nick Bryant , who responded to Michael asking a simple question about his source for a sensationalist claim about human trafficking by calling him a pedophile. We also talk about Ghislaine being moved to a minimum security prison, and whether Trump has a plan regarding what to do with her. It looks like she may have worked out some kind of understanding with the administration, and in the coming weeks and months we’ll be finding out exactly what the terms are. Finally, we close with a few Sydney Sweeney takes, and respond to the revelation that she registered as a Republican a few months after my big article last year. The stream ends with me getting stabbed in the eye by my own eyelash, so become a paid subscriber if you want to see that. Read more…

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The Mentally Unstable Epstein Accusers

منذ 27 يومًا

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Michael is back for yet another Epstein podcast. In this one, we spend a lot of time going over Ross Douthat’s recent interview with Julie K. Brown, who has been the most important journalist covering the Epstein story. Michael shows how she glosses over the credibility problems of the alleged victims who were supposedly trafficked to men other than Epstein, even implying that one of them was killed. We talk about Michael’s article on what Bannon is hiding. I encourage him to send it to Democratic members of Congress, and he follows my advice by DMing Ro Khanna as we’re speaking. If Democrats start discussing the need to subpoena Bannon in the coming days and weeks, you’ll know why. We also take some questions from the audience. Read more…

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Trump’s Love Letter to Epstein

منذ 4 weeks

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Alright, I really thought we were done, but with the revelation that Trump wrote a love letter to Epstein about their shared secret interest, I guess not. As I tell him, I was in the gym and had to go outside and record in my car. For something this funny, one finds a way to post. Read more

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The Epstein Files: A Democrat Plot?

منذ 5 weeks

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I thought we might be done with Epstein, but Trump decided to start calling his supporters morons for ever believing in the conspiracy, which means the scandal is not going away. Michael is therefore back to discuss. See our first conversation here , where we go over the background and basics of everything Epstein. Michael and I are both of the opinion that there is probably something here that Trump doesn’t want the world to see. The Bannon angle in particular seems underexplored. I encourage Michael to write something on the topic, and he says he’s going to take my advice. Later in the discussion we talk about the specifics of the Ghislaine Maxwell conviction, and whether it might get overturned by the Supreme Court. See Michael’s thread on the topic here . This strikes me as a terrible miscarriage of justice, given that there was practically no evidence against her other than the decades-old recollections of supposed victims who had a financial incentive to lie. Something we forgot to mention is that there’s now a discharge petition that might force a vote on the Epstein files on the House floor. I’m excited to see where this goes politically. The substantive truth of what Epstein was doing doesn’t seem that interesting, but this has become a fascinating political football, having more of a divisive effect on MAGA than perhaps any other issue since the movement began, or at least since it has entered its more cultish phase. Read more…

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Can Sex with Rightists Solve Polarization?

منذ 5 weeks

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I am not big into the art scene. But when a Dutch girl reached out to me to be part of one of her projects , I saw who she was with, noticed that they were within a twelve-minute drive, and decided that this could be fun. As it turned out, Christiane is part of Keeping It Real Art Critics (KIRAC), which is perhaps best known for its project getting Michel Houellebecq to agree to have sex with two of its members on camera. This led to him writing a short book denouncing his former collaborators and filing a lawsuit to try to stop the film from being released. You can read about the feud in the New York Times here, and watch the trailer here. While engaging in their latest project, I got to talking with members of KIRAC, and they described another movie that director Stefan Ruitenbeek had made called Honeypot (2021). The premise is that Jini Jane, one of the girls who was set up with Houellebecq, publishes on a conservative Dutch website a call for right-wing men to have sex with her. She ends up settling on a far-right voter from the working class and a philosopher named Sid Lukkassen , and the film centers on her meeting up with them as part of her quest to solve political polarization. Upon watching the movie, I decided to return to the house where I first met members of KIRAC and interview Stefan and Jini about Honeypot . To mark the occasion of the release of this interview, Stefan has today posted the entire movie on X. You can watch it here , and I would recommend doing so before listening to this conversation. As promised in the interview, here is the safe-for-work version, though it only has the first twenty-one minutes. What I ended up being fascinated by was the contrast between the two kinds of rightists and how they interact with the same woman under vulnerable conditions. The film ended up telling us something important about the differences between those who land on the conservative side for organic reasons, working-class men who this kind of politics naturally suits, and the thinker who is as distant from members of his own coalition as he is from his fellow intellectuals. The foreplay, the sex scenes, and the aftermath of the second encounter brought home the depth of the pain and sense of cognitive dissonance felt by some right-wing intellectuals. While we often see incels and trads as hateful misogynists, their views are in many cases an outgrowth of extreme sensitivity. They seem to be less equipped than other men to deal with being rejected by a woman. I simply could not relate to the emotional neediness Lukkassen displayed, and him accepting his role as the supplicant in the meet-up. The working-class guy did not have this problem! The insecurity that such rightists feel ironically makes them behave in ways that repel women, turning their fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t believe that Jini went in expecting this or manipulating the situation so she would accept the first man and reject the second. I felt that these were organic interactions that showed how a romantic situation can go one way or another depending on what the man reveals about his soul. You see Jini getting progressively angrier, and, like most women, unable or unwilling to put into words exactly what is turning her off, she latches on to these various excuses, which Lukkassen is not sophisticated enough to see for the pretexts that they are. Stefan explains to me what about the man he finds offensive. It’s not that he’s clueless, but rather the lack of curiosity. I speculate that this is what right-wing politics often is – retreating from complexity into a rigid inner life that creates a vision one uses to try to mold the rest of the world. In the interview, I question the two guests on different scenes in the movie, including the parts that blur reality and fiction. I express some confusion about why a trad or incel-adjacent right-wing philosopher would agree to have sex on camera in the first place, as this would be unthinkable in the American context. Another cultural difference: in the Netherlands, feminists took the side of the right-wing philosopher. I enjoyed having the opportunity to question Jini regarding what exactly about Lukkassen’s behavior turned her off, and how he was unable to redeem himself in her eyes, even screwing up his attempt to give her a spanking. Don’t be this guy! Lukkassen ends up humiliated here, so much so that it made me feel some unease about watching and promoting the movie. That said, he was an adult who consented to being in that situation. My mind was fully put at ease upon hearing from Stefan that Lukkassen was once again friendly with him and had come to accept what had happened, despite the film turning into a major scandal in the Netherlands. Viewer discretion is advised regarding this interview, and especially the film, which has sex scenes that we discuss in detail. You can follow Stefan , Jini , and Christiane on X, subscribe to KIRAC’s YouTube channel , or support them on Patreon and get their other films here . I’ve never been much of a connoisseur of performance art, but what KIRAC has done with Honeypot is give us the best version of it, provoking in this viewer at least thoughts about what women really want, the state of contemporary politics, and the various sorts of men who end up on the right in opposition to a left-wing elite monoculture. One may watch for the implicit commentary on modern conservatism, but there are more generalizable lessons here on relations between the sexes, and also how the personal and political are not so easily separable.…

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The Inverted Reality of Epstein Conspiracy Theorists

منذ 5 weeks

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I never paid much attention to the Jeffrey Epstein thing. The idea that he was some kind of spy obtaining blackmail material on powerful figures by trafficking young girls to them has for years been pushed by figures like Tucker Carlson, Jack Posobiec, and Eric Weinstein, which convinced me that there wasn’t much to look into, since I can’t recall a situation where this crowd has ever been correct about anything. But until I read Michael Tracey’s recent article on the topic in Compact , I didn’t realize how flimsy the conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein actually are. He joins me to discuss. If anything, it appears that the establishment took sensationalist claims surrounding Epstein’s behavior way too seriously, which led to large payouts for alleged victims while stoking conspiracy theories. As it turned out, our society does not go out of its way to cover for sexual abusers. Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s handling of the issue has caused a major headache for the MAGA movement. As someone who has constantly harped on the misinformed and conspiratorial nature of modern conservatism, I’m enjoying the poetic justice of seeing the chickens coming home to roost. Figures like Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Trump himself have gained power by playing to the paranoia of their gullible supporters, and now that they’re running the government they have nothing to offer them. I’ve often gone back and forth on whether the problems I point out with the Republican Party will get better or worse after Trump is gone, and this entire episode has convinced me that the next iteration of the right is probably going to be even stupider than the one we have now. The Trump Cult is the relatively non-conspiratorial wing of conservatism! The left seems to see an opening . In an era where more voters appear inclined to prioritize a conspiratorial worldview, it is probably naive to expect Democrats to completely refrain from swimming in these waters. One wonders if we’ll see them continue to harp on Epstein’s connections to Trump, which are more well-sourced than almost everything MAGAs believe about him. Just as liberals have had to inch away from woke in order to be better positioned to win future elections, becoming slightly more conspiratorial might be another way to meet voters where they’re at. After going through the nonsense behind the Epstein story, Michael and I discuss the wider culture of hysteria over pedophilia and sexual abuse. I bring up the online “pedo hunters,” QAnon, Epstein’s role in the cosmology of Rogansphere types, and how all of these things fit together. We also debate how much this will actually hurt the MAGA coalition. On the mood at the Turning Point USA conference, see this story . Also, I speculate a bit on whether there was anything in the Epstein materials that was embarrassing to Trump, based in part on this claim by Michael Wolff that he saw pictures of him with topless girls that were in Epstein’s safe. Read more…

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Scott Wiener on the YIMBY Victory in California

منذ 5 weeks

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Today, I’m excited to welcome on the podcast State Senator Scott Wiener. He serves as Assistant Majority Whip and chairs the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Housing Committee. Senator Wiener joins me to discuss AB 130 and SB 131, the newly passed reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). We explore what these laws do, including how they affect single-family and multifamily housing, what density and affordability standards apply, and what else remains to be done. The conversation gets deep into the weeds, as Senator Wiener explains why these reforms passed as part of the budget process and discusses the crucial role played by Governor Newsom , as well as the broader political and activist ecosystem — including YIMBYs, environmental groups, and the influence of public narratives like the debate set off by Abundance . I ask how much of the housing affordability issue could be blamed on CEQA, and he gives me a ballpark estimate. I never cease being amazed at how dysfunctional housing policy has become. Senator Wiener provided me with a surprising new tidbit, explaining that if your porch is rotting in San Francisco, you need to jump through hoops to make sure you do not cause too much damage to the environment when fixing it. Beyond housing, we talk about other abundance issues. He brings up energy and childcare, and I, more excited about the libertarian aspects of the philosophy, ask where occupational licensing and immigration fit into his thinking. This conversation also gave me an opportunity to ask about the nature of power. How exactly do environmental groups influence legislators? Is it persuasion, intimidation, or some combination of the two? And why have environmental organizations been so bad on housing , as seen in the “NASCAR letter” ? Given that the abundance movement has prominent spokesmen like Senator Wiener, and the arguments on its behalf are being made in the most prestigious, well-read outlets in the country, where are attempts at persuasion coming up short? Finally, I ask Senator Wiener whether the time he got his cell phone snatched in San Francisco, before he bought it back from the thief, influenced his views on criminal justice issues. As someone who lives in California and is raising three children here, I’m glad to see legislators taking the issues facing the state seriously. I hope you find the conversation as useful and informative as I did. Links My interview with Derek Thompson Institute for Justice on occupational licensing Story on the cell phone robbery The “NASCAR letter” from environmental groups Read more…

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Is Israel Waging Forever War?

منذ 8 weeks

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Murtaza Hussain ( X , Substack ) is a journalist who reports on the Middle East and foreign conflicts more generally. He joins me to discuss Israel, Gaza, his travel to Syria, the future of the Muslim world, and immigration to the West. I disagree with Murtaza on most things related to American and Israeli policy, but have always found that his work provides an interesting perspective. We discuss a few of his articles here, including “Did Al Qaeda Win the War on Terror?” and “The Iran War and What Comes Next.” See also his reflections on his time recently spent in Syria. Note that Trump’s ceasefire announcement broke as we were recording this episode. Read more…

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مرحبًا بك في مشغل أف ام!

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