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I am here with Matthew Iglesias. Matt, thanks for joining me. Oh, thanks for having me.

So how would you describe your journalistic and political background before we jump into the deep end of the pool of democratic politics?

Sure. You know, I started writing a blog sort of in my spare time when I was a college student around 2001, 2002.

Graduated, worked for kind of a small progressive magazine here in D.C. called the American Prospect for a number of years. I've been doing different things, but mostly,

you know, kind of digital journalism from Washington, D.C., writing about politics. I was working

at Vox.com. I left there a little bit more than four years ago I go off on my own, start a substack.

Like a lot of people, I think I felt a little pushed out of the currents in progressive

politics that have been churning in the late teens, circa 2020. I've been doing my own thing

since then. You know, consider myself liberal, left or center, a Democrat. I've voted for Kamala Harris.

But, you know, with the kind of increasing unease about where things had gone. And sad that Donald

Trump won the election, but I also hope this can be an opportunity to kind of set things right,

do some, some course corrections in left of center politics. Yeah, yeah. So you and I are in a

similar spot politically. Perhaps there's some daylight between us, which we can explore. But how would

you say the Democrats have lost their way? If you had to summarize the destroyed fortunes of the Democrats politically in this last cycle,

what would you give as the primary reasons?

I mean, there's, you know, you lose your way in many ways simultaneously.

But, you know, I mean, I think primarily Democrats have gotten sort of out of touch with kind of mainstream cultural

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