The Realignment: Supercast Ask Me Anything Teaser | Assessing Biden vs. Trump's America in 2025, Looking Back at 2016-2021, Twitter Influence, Millennials to the Suburbs, and Why Can't the Defense Budget Build Munitions?

Marshall and Sagar here, welcome back to the Friday bi-weekly Supercast edition,

where we talk about questions from our AMA, given to us by listeners,

current events, all those good things.

If you'd like to get access to the full version of this episode,

you can go to realignment.supercast.com or click the link at the top of the show notes.

You'll get the ability to submit your own questions, comments, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Once again, the full version is unlockable at our Supercast site.

Quick, open question for you, Sagar.

I thought of this as I said it.

There's been a Twitter debate this when you say bi-weekly, do you think it's

every twice a month or is it twice a test week, which is it for you?

I mean, yeah, I hear twice a week, but I know that it's wrong.

I've just been in the beginning.

Here's the thing.

I've had to run my own business and do my own accounting.

So now I know that it does have a dual meeting.

But before that, I did not know that it had a dual meeting.

I'll put it that.

Okay.

Yeah.

No, I just, when I said it out loud with the bi-weekly, I was like, oh, I saw a big

Twitter thing.

There is a lot of legitimate debate on this one.

So let's just, uh,

I just say bi-monthly.

It's easier, but those are different for, see the reason why they're different is

cause it's different for pay period, but colloquially, I would just say bi-monthly.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

Once a month is different than every other month or every other week in terms of

paycheck, I forget which one is one more paycheck.

Accountants can fact check us.

That folks is the utter horror of the late stage creator economy.

Saga is in business band mode and not merely, uh, conversational or in every

mode, but let's just, uh, jump into the questions today.

Um, first one is actually a fun one, which I actually don't have a good

answer to looking forward, looking back.

If 15 to 20 years from now, a teenager asks you for a piece of pop culture made

in the post-2016 era, movies, TV shows, books, video games, et cetera, that

captured the zeitgeist.

What would you recommend?

So this is a tough question because if we move the timeline back, like forward

to back forward, whichever to 2011, 2012, 2013, the obvious answer to this

question is girls.

Um, if you want to understand the world of post financial crisis, New York,

media culture, it's that show.

That show explains everything.

Um, it's, we're, we're obviously dunking on Lena Dunham for a variety of like

outside the TV show level, but like that show actually is just like the perfect

way of understanding that pre-Trump moment.

Another thing that I think would be relevant to watch too would be Madman.

Obviously Madman takes place in the 1960s, but so much of early 2000s to

mid-2010s culture was shaped by it.

The skinny fit suits, the slim ties, someone was making a joke on Twitter

about how it was weighing wayfarers.

Like it was the sixties, like there was a whole bit of pop culture that was

shaped by Madman.

That was also an example of the prestige TV era that is coming to a close

right now, especially given the fact that ESPN is going to go streaming off

of the Gila bundle, but saga to the actual question, unless you have any

comments of Madman and, uh, girls, was there a single bit of post-2016 culture

that's going to last or explain?

No, I mean, maybe I would send them the clip of Ricky Gervais roasting the

stars at the 2000, I want to say 2019 Golden Globes, because that's a good

view into like anti Hollywood traditional dying, crumbling, getting

made fun of and Ricky embodying the like, I would almost say the like vulgar

anti establishment, hearing ism that you could find on the internet.

So that would be a good, that'd be a good clip, I think.

Another, okay.

That's a smart point because it's not about a literal TV show.

It's about clips, you know, a clip would be a perfect explainer that would

have explained the next five years.

Um, Elon Musk smoking pot on Joe Rogan that first time.

Yeah, that's true.

That was the pivot of Elon from like Steve Jobs, Elon to counterculture

Elon and all of its consequences for good or for ill.

That was another defining one.

Let's get a third.

Oh, you know, I'd say, no, but I would say that, um, the 2016 bit of culture

to understand everything wrong with Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Remember the celebrity video that played?

Were they saying where they was the song?

Um, yes, we can, but that was Obama.

So it wasn't, it wasn't, yeah, it was, um, you guys, you guys could look at

basically a bunch of celebrities singing a song for the 2016 Hillary campaign.

And it's just terribly out of touch in a way that just was instantly dated.

Um, it's also the definition of something you produce when you're not

campaigning in Wisconsin.

So that, in a way, in the terms of that, but yeah, I think that the fact

that there is very little strong culture that came out of that moment is

that it kind of speaks to, um, the black hole.

I'd also suggest people watch the, remember when celebrities,

we're talking celebrities here, but they produce pop culture.

Remember the video that, um, Gal Gadot did early COVID with the

celebrities were singing?

Imagine that was, that was the peak of something, but there was no coming back from.

So those are three suggestions from that era.

And then a couple, uh, 2010s callbacks, such a, such a tough thing.

Just I still, I, and the other thing too is that, uh, you and I are both

really interested in the 80s, 90s.

There's lots of 70 stuff.

I think a defining reality of the 21st century is a lack of zeitgeist in the

first place you could pick individual things.

So I could say, oh yeah, like, um, juicy sweatpants in the 2000s, or I could say

my space, I could say Facebook, but you're not saying over sixties where there

was this new moment where we were feeling or the seventies.

Yeah, we were coming down from the crash of the sixties or the eighties.

It was, you know, uh, morning in America, the nineties were the end of history.

There's just nothing like that.

And what we're probably going to do if we look back 15 to 20 years from now is

probably bracket September 12th, 2001, basically until the 2030s as one big

lost era full of promise of disappointment.

I was going to say, it's just 9-11, 9-11, 9-11 kicked it all off the era of

malaise, we're still in it.

I don't know when it went.

Honestly, given the fad actions and everything, I think we're

stuck in it for a while, maybe another decade.

I wrote the fed for a second.

Yeah.

I mean, just given the zero interest rate or sorry, the end of the zero interest

rate environment, uh, a return to that, but with all the consequences of zero

interest rate behavior, like our housing market, employment market, uh, inflation

also post COVID, post financial crisis, screwery, Iraq.

I mean, all of that, just where we are right now.

I don't see us crawling out of this for a long time.

I mean, housing, housing confidence actually is currently at the lowest of all

time since they started tracking it over a Gallup.

Most of the reason for that is interest rates and mortgage payments.

People just can't afford it.

And that just really removes a lot of the, not only number one way to attain

wealth, like net worth over the course of your life, if you're a middle class

person, but a lot of optimism.

Cause when you get screwed day in and day out on, on mortgages and then on top

of that, you're dealing with consumer inflation.

Here's a consumer inflation thing.

I hadn't been paying attention for a while.

I was booking flights.

Flights are out of control right now.

I was reading there at a six year high.

They were so great immediately after COVID, but now they're crazy again.

They're a six year high for international travel.

And I, I actually, I'm going to India soon and I booked my India tickets and

they were, they were so much more expensive than normal for basic economy

seats.

I was just like, what is happening here?

Uh, but it's not just me.

It's the, it's everyone and everyone is just stuck in this thing where

everything is super expensive, but nothing feels very exciting right now.

And yeah, I don't think there's going to be an end to that for a while.

Speaking of homeownership and millennials, uh, did you see that big

Axios piece revealing that after a bit of a delay, millennials are

leaning hard or privileged millennials, like in the obvious case, I'm using

that term on ironically, are leaning into the suburbs.

Cause this is also an interesting kind of post nineties, 2010s thing, because

there was just a lot of discourse, just do some basic Amazon.com or

Googling about how like, Oh millennials, like they love urban regions.

They want to be in the city.

They don't want to drive like this, this, this, this or that.

But actually, um, recently, just like in the past year or so, you just, you

know, a lot of millennial pivoting to suburbs.

You and I have both pivoted to suburbs.

I feel like we're in this wake of a 1990s moment where think of American

beauty, think of office space, like hell was defined as like living in a cookie

cutter suburb.

So what do you think about the millennials pivoting to suburbs point?

And then also like, what do you think about like the nineties portraying,

um, driving and commuting and suburbs as being hellish?

Yeah.

I think that, uh, it was obviously an overcorrection, um, but also there was

something there in the 2010s crime genuinely was at a 30 something year low.

And it actually looked like it was completely over.

Competent governance seemed to be there.

It didn't seem, uh, the current trajectory of a lot of the worst ills of all of these

city cities did not even look, um, did not look like anything that we currently see.

So I guess I'll defend it for a bit and just say, I think that I don't think it

was irrational to think some of it.

That said, um, I do think with the current dynamic, I think it probably

couldn't last forever if that makes sense.

Uh, and so I think that that's the reason why we're back to where we are,

because the deal was premise, not only on quality of life, but upward mobility.

And when that quality of life took, went down and the upward

ability went away, then you revert to what's easier.

Cause look, there are pains to living in the suburbs.

You know, I live like 15 minutes or whatever outside of the city.

There's annoyances that come with that.

Nobody really wanted to quote unquote deal with it with the, when the trade was different.

When the trade on the other side goes down so precipitously in value,

then what previously has basically remained static is either going to rise

or it's going to become a lot more attractive.

Yeah, well said.

So now we're going to transition into the paid portion of the Q and A.

This was a preview.

Once again, if you'd like to get the full, um, episode, go to realignment.supercast.com

and you can submit your own questions like the people we're reading from today.

Okay.

We're going to go with a GSC one to start with, which would be worse for America,

Trump or Biden 2024 between a 2025 Trump admin and a 2025 Biden admin,

which would be worse or better for America.

You could dissect this on foreign policy, the economy, social policy,

SCOTUS appointments, Supreme court, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.