The Realignment: Welcome to 2021

Realignment interviews of the week, our new mugs, video back on YouTube, listener mail, and more

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• YouTube (We’re posting videos again!)

Welcome Back to The Realignment

Thanks for checking out our Substack. And a special welcome to everyone who joined us in the new year.

If you’re new, please hit subscribe to get future issues delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

We’re going to let the dust settle a bit before we comment on what happened in the Capitol on Wednesday.

Check back here next week for our expanded thoughts.

This week, we aired three episodes: Sachit Gupta, Program Director of the On Deck Podcast program and host of Conscious Creators; Joe Weisenthal, Bloomberg Editor and co-host of the Odd Lots podcast; and Helen Andrews, a Senior Editor at The American Conservative and author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (available Tuesday, 1/12).

If you enjoyed our conversation with Helen and would like to preorder/purchase Boomers, check out the link to The Realignment bookshop below—we get a 10% commission, and you help support local booksellers.

Ep. 88: Helen Andrews, How Boomers Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

[Audio] [Video]

Ep. 87: Joe Weisenthal Returns! Stimulus Checks, Stocks, Bitcoin’s Surge, and 2020 Finance Recap

[Audio] [Video]

Bonus Ep. 86: A Realignment Podcast About Podcasting with Sachit Gupta

[Audio]

Next Week’s Episodes

On Tuesday, we’re bringing back Eric Weinstein and on Thursday, Erik Torenberg will make his debut on the podcast. Let us know what we should ask them in the comments!

The Realignment’s Bookshop.org Storefront

As a reminder, we’ve created a Realignment podcast affiliate shop for guest books at bookshop.org. The shop features our guests’ books, including books from Michael Lind, Scott Galloway, Reeves Wiedeman, Ross Douthat, Matt Stoller, and Lisa Napoli.

We’ve built out three Bookshop lists:

1) Our list of the best books we read in 2020

2) All of the books we’ve read so far in 2021

3) Books written by Realignment podcast guests

If you purchase a book using our link, we get a 10% commission, a local bookseller gets supported, and you get an awesome book! Watch this space for new uploads and future lists by topic.

Mugs!

The long-promised mugs are finally, finally almost here.

The design features the Realignment logo with our definition of the show on the back. We’ve got two sizes. We’d like to know which you all prefer? We’re leaning towards the bigger one.

YouTube

We’ve finally started putting video back up on The Realignment’s YouTube channel, starting with Joe Weisenthal and Helen Andrews. It’s still a little shaky, but we’re also going to start putting up clips from episodes.

Listener Mail

Adding the Realignment Qs section was one of our favorite things about relaunching the podcast in July. We take a question an episode, along with the monthly Q&A shows. Still, there usually isn’t enough space to respond to everything, so we’re going to use this space to feature questions and feedback. As on the show, you can reach us at realignmentpod@gmail.com.

Tim writes:

As a small business owner, I found the episode with Joe Weisenthal problematic and frustrating. There were plenty of things he said that I agreed with but when it came to PPP in particular, he seemed to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the program.

He described the program as government assistance that was intended to keep business afloat. That is false. PPP went to rent and payroll and therefore was intended to keep commercial real estate afloat and workers employed. I have two businesses myself and many friends who own businesses in a wide wide variety of sectors from farming to aerospace who received PPP. NO ONE has anything good to say about the program. Why? Because in perfectly Keynesian government fashion, it assumed it knew how to allocate resources better than the individual business owner. If PPP was really intended to keep businesses afloat it would have just issued checks or been limited in the restrictions of use rather than very restrictive in use. Many businesses probably need to trim payroll and use the money elsewhere in order to stay in business. Instead that money went to very specific areas of overhead and simply delayed the closure of businesses by a few months. 

The ironic part of this was his statement of the welfare state coming out of this crisis looking better than the regulatory state. That might be the case but I doubt it. Regardless of the outcome, it seems fair to say that Joe sees PPP as part of the welfare state when in fact it was a regulatory program meant to ensure that businesses stayed open in a very specific way government found acceptable.  

Finally, his statement that we don't need pain in the economy for it to get better might be the most childish thing I've ever heard said on a serious podcast. Only a child could believe pain is avoidable that and it suggests he fundamentally does not understand economics or the world itself. The world we live in does have crises and it does have bubbles and they are painful. And in fact, they must be painful in order to prevent future moral hazard. Unfortunately, many in government and Big Business agree with Joe. The more big business and government work together to regulate and "manage" the economy the more we find government and big business creating and then trying to fix the very crisis and bubbles they created, all the while seeing to it that those who created the crisis in the first place feel no pain.

Love the show. Keep up the great work in 2021!

See you next week!

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Let us know what you think about this, or any week’s, episodes. Please share it with anyone who’d enjoy the podcast.

We’re excited to build out this newsletter, so we’d also appreciate any suggestions. You can reply directly to this email or send us a note at realignmentpod@gmail.com. Have a great weekend!