Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment.

Well, I got to say this is not a typical realignment episode.

Folks will remember back in not a typical realignment episode.

Folks will remember back in the early summer period

I had Steve Talies of Johns Hopkins University

and the Niskanin Center on.

We did an episode discussing the abundance agenda and a recent paper

he put out on the factionless feature of American politics.

We ended a follow-up episode and frankly the response to those two conversations were the most

positive reactions I had in a really long time. We were discussing the future and not just

sort of rehashing post-2016 takes in a way that I think

was found really refreshing. So Steve and I decided that we're going to sort of

mix up the realignment's programming schedule by setting up for start a monthly one-on-one more opinion-centric rather than interview

conversation between the two of us but all that said there are going to be a

bunch of listeners who did not listen to those two episodes but

we have a lot of content here. So Steve, how about you just sort of take the floor and introduce yourself,

we'll go over both of our origin stories, It's a helpful time to do this.

Yeah, so that's great and I think it'll be fun to do these things regularly so you don't

feel like we have to get everything into each podcast. We can always leave some stuff in the locker room.

So, yeah, I thought it was actually interesting for both of us to talk a little bit about

how we got to the ideas we got because you know I saw a teacher at

Johns Hopkins as well as at Niskannon Center and especially students often have a

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