I'm a writer at Civic Ventures and the way that I came to writing was through book selling actually. I was a bookseller

at Elliot Bay Book Company, which is the finest independent bookstore here in Seattle.

And I was also a books editor at The Stranger, and I, in my spare time time run a site called the Seattle Review of Books and really book reviews are sort of how I learn to interact with the world and books are still obviously very important to me and one of the things that I liked most about

Civic Ventures when I started here was that everyone here reads all the time.

One of the nicest things about my first interview for Civic Ventures was coming up to

Nick's office which is just like piled high with books everywhere and they are obviously well loved books.

You can tell when you walk into someone's office

if they actually read the books or if they're just

there for decoration and Nick's books are thumbed through and some of the spines are broken and he can, you know, pick up and quote from the books to prove a point or to argue a point or what have you. Books are a significant part of our inter-office

conversation and that works out real well for me. So I wanted to take a little time on the podcast to talk about books that we're talking

about or books that have influenced our thinking and share them with you.

If you're interested in pursuing a specific lane of thought,

these might be additional sort of guideposts

for your journey.

So I wanted to talk first about Thomas Frank.

He is one of the first writers who sounded the alarm against Donald Trump

before the 2016 election.

He published his book Listen Liberal or

whatever happened to the party of the people in the fall of 2016 before the

election.

That book is an argument that the Democratic Party has become controlled by wealthy, over-educated

elites and that they've lost touch with the working class people who used to make the backbone of the Democratic

...