The Realignment: Supercast Ask Me Anything Teaser | Why Rome Matters, Ben Smith Reaction, What Happened to Andrew Yang?, RFK Jr's Presidential Campaign, Tucker 2024?, and the Threat of Nihilism

The Realignment 5/5/23 - Episode Page - 12m - PDF Transcript

Transcript
Show Notes

Marsh from Saga here, welcome back to the Realignment.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the bi-weekly

Realignment Supercast, Ask Me Anything

slash Discussion episode.

The way it works is that if you are a full subscriber

to the Realignment, five a month,

50 a year, 500 for a lifetime membership,

you get access to the full discussion

and the ability to input your questions,

comments, et cetera to the episode.

If you'd like to subscribe to get flexed to this episode,

go to realignment.supercast.com.

Okay, I wanted to kick off this episode

before getting into a bit of discussion

on the Ben Smith episode we did yesterday

by reading a listener comment about a previous

Ask Me Anything discussion we had.

If you are not a full subscriber,

the quick summary of the discussion was

Saga and I were talking about ancient Roman

and Greek history and we're very, very dismissive

of the topic, we're not particularly well read

on the period and we said that listeners

should really focus on 18th century

and 19th century, 20th century history instead.

One of our listeners said,

Jaha actually wrote a great response in

and this sort of sets the standard for audience response.

So I want to read this response

and it also kind of inspires me to a better job

of not just dismissing things casually on a podcast.

So here is the comment.

Disagree with the comments on the AMA on Roman history

and found it uncharacteristically reductive.

There's definitely a cringe Ryan holiday type person

that's weirdly only into Roman history

at the expense of a broader syllabus.

However, we only have to look past that cringiness

is that every influential person involved

in the creation of the systems of democratic government

since the fall of the Roman Republic

has used the events involving Caesar, Cato, Cicero,

Augustus, Cleopatra as a framework

to thinking about restraints on the executive

and legislative branches of government,

not limited to the United States.

Sager mentioned reading about the birth

of the French and American nations.

Instead, the Federalist Papers are written

under various pseudonyms that are from the cast

of characters of the fall of the Roman Republic.

That's not just a historical nod for the centuries.

The Roman story was very much top of mind

for the founding fathers as it relates

to the rise of well-meaning tyrants

and the arming of other parts of the government

with the tools necessary to contain them.

Two books that love in the period,

if you guys have the broader listenership

or interested are Tom Holland's Rubicon.

It's a bit pop history-esque,

but it's very readable for anyone with no context.

And Adrian Goldworthy's Augustus,

about the creation of the Roman Empire in its early days.

Though I share the feedback,

thanks for continuing to put out a great stuff.

Happy to be a subscriber.

So yeah, like I said, it's easy during these episodes

to get a little casual and just dismissive of things,

but I appreciate people who will hold us accountable.

I'm definitely gonna check out the books that Sid suggested.

I'll also mention Sid has a great sub-stack

called Snapshots.

You should check that out

if you found his incisive skewering of Sager

and my overstatements particularly helpful.

All right, Sager, let's discuss a little bit

before we get into the paid exclusive section

of the discussion.

Yesterday, folks heard our episode with Ben Smith

about just the rise and fall of social media

driven digital media, Buzzfeed, Vice, Gawker.

I said this at the start of the episode,

but just like the best book timing of all time

that this came out the week that Vice declared bankruptcy.

Obviously, Ben would have some inkling

of the fact that Buzzfeed news was gonna get shut down

because he was the editor-in-chief,

but just that coinciding really just spoke

to how precarious the situation is.

I do wanna discuss with you though,

the place where the podcast ended,

which was just me asking Ben like,

hey, look, what's your advice for young journalists?

A lot of people in the audience send us questions about this.

So I wanted to talk about this a bit.

His answer was like get scoops

and I actually just really disagree with that framework.

I'll get into my kind of beef with that,

but I'm just curious like what you thought

about that last section.

Like what would your advice be?

Like what's your conception of this?

So I understand where Ben is coming from.

Ben grew up in the 2008 era.

The reason he thinks scoops matter

is because at that time,

publishing the scoops on the internet

genuinely was interesting and revolutionary.

So Ben got his start at Politico in 2008.

So whenever he would get a scoop,

it would get a ton of traffic

and it would get a lot of eyeballs

because there wasn't as much attention

for genuine like new-ish type of information.

Politico kind of invented what I call the scooplet.

That's what other people,

like little mini-bikes of information

that are meaningless to 98% of, 99% of people,

but useful to the 1% of Americans.

So anyway, understand where he's coming from.

That said, I do not believe

that that will make or break any new person in media

and I'll give you a reason why,

which is that the,

and actually I talked to him today on breaking points.

Here's the deal, like all media today,

information in and of itself is a commodity.

And what I mean by that is in the eight,

basically the day that Twitter was invented,

X is happening, no longer is a purview of the news.

As in like two planes just hit the World Trade Center.

That used to be an actual monopoly on news networks,

newspapers.

Now it's just out there.

So what's the story?

What do news organizations do?

What do you and I do?

What do I do at breaking points?

What do New York Times do?

We explain it.

We add a little bit of context.

We're like two planes out of the World Trade Center,

CIA, officials, suspect, Osama and Laden.

That's one type of news.

Here's where they animated the 9-11 hijackers on 9-11.

Who are the people that they met?

These are all derivative, all of this is news,

but it's not how you used to think about the news.

So I just think that he's kind of wrong

in that he doesn't understand that all media today

is explanatory journalism, effectively,

because we're all basically working

from the same set of facts.

So if I go on the front page of the New York Times,

for example, four proud boys, including ex-leader,

are convicted in Jan 6th sedition case.

This is not something that they have a monopoly on.

That's public information.

So why would I even want to read this?

Okay, so I'm reading.

Well, it's not just public information.

Anyone could put it out there, right?

So like, I could sort of sub-stack right now

and post that exact story.

Well, more what I'm saying though is that that story,

the facts of this story are released by the US government,

by the US Department of Justice.

All of us, I don't need to read the New York Times to this.

So why should I read it?

I'll read it because they're gonna have a quote

or something in here from some guy.

Let me just read.

Yeah, down they go,

several decisions by the presiding judge, Thomas Kelly,

and they do an explaining job

because they had a guy in the courtroom

who was there who can add some color and some context.

Once again, I think that's great.

Foreign journalism for sure.

Is it a scoop though?

Not really.

And I think that that's just kind of

where modern media is today.

Yeah, here's the second page, Marshall.

This is exactly what I'm getting at.

The second story on the front page of the New York Times.

Analysis, Kremlin blasts were real.

The rest is hazy, maybe intentionally.

So it's like explain your journalism thing.

That's not really true.

I mean, that's not really like a scoop.

It's just adding context.

So everything today is about context.

Ever since information itself became a commodity,

which is essentially free in the public domain.

Yeah, and the thing is in Ben's defense,

you could think of someone like Olivia Nuzzi.

So she's at New York Magazine.

She came to prominence because she hyper covered the,

what was it?

Yeah, Anthony Weiner series of scandals in New York.

She wasn't particularly distinguished,

but she just covers, covers, covers,

and then like goes to the Daily Beast

and continually uplevels herself to the point

where she's appearing in succession.

And then she's also getting a TV show, I think,

an AMC on like journalism, this for that.

That is a specific example of how like one like young person

was able to get that scoop and leverage from there.

But the general advice that I would really suggest for folks,

and you can really see this playing out,

and you know, you're in my career.

Sagar is just answering a couple of basic questions.

Question number one, where do you fit?

Are you an institutionalist or are you an anti-institutionalist?

I'm an institutionalist.

Therefore, the type of people who are interested in my work

are gonna be people who are like more into the New York Times.

Sagar is an anti-institutionalist.

It means that he's gonna play more

in the independent media space.

I think an advantage that two of us have

is that despite those facts, I could be a think tank dude

and still attend a breaking point show and have a good time.

And you, when you need to,

can go to the White House for a press event.

Most people in our spaces can't do both.

So that's another suggestion.

If you could figure out a way

to swim in both different worlds at the same time,

while still leaning towards one, that's another one.

Point number two, what is your format?

Are you a podcaster?

Are you a YouTuber?

Are you a TikToker?

Are you a Reels user?

Are you a thread poster?