Pod Save America

It's a really inefficient way to think about politics, like one 20 minute conversation at a time, but it works and works in a much more durable way than, you know, a postcard or a letter or something like that.

It's more durable and according to the research, more effective. It's also the perfect antidote to a problem called political hobbyism that Hirsch wrote an entire book about.

I just bought my first John le Carr book.

we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

it was we conservatives who are largely silent when the most egregious and sustained tax on Obama's legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us.

attacks Trump for his lies, for his conspiracies, his affection for autocrats and strongmen, his executive overreach and the threat he poses to our values and our institutions.

The book is excellent.

It's about the relation between Brady, Belichick, the Crafts, and Brady's trainer, Alex Guerrero.

The book is Big Game.

It sounds fascinating. I'm excited to read it.

Dan has been talking about it all week.

One is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, which is about the great migration.

Toni Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye in her late 40s.

You literally wrote a book on the subject.

What set him off was a 60 minutes interview with former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe who's out with a new book

It takes place in 1954 and a young congressman comes to town and gets swept up in a conspiracy. And there's a lot in there that is, I think, fun interacting with real people from the time Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn.

And then they say history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I think there's a lot of rhyming. If anybody knows anything about the 50s and Joe McCarthy, there's a lot of rhyming to today.

Learning just a bunch of cool things about Washington and wanting to write about them and also wanting to write about how corrupting Washington can be and how there are good guys and bad guys, but how it's a town built on compromise and how corroding that can be sometimes.

The Hellfire Club available now at fine bookstores and Amazon dot com.

The Hellfire Club. Do you think our institutions are more threatened now or were they more threatened in the 1950s?

The Final Days.

And also These Truths by Jill Lepore is an outstanding history of America that I would recommend to anyone.

I write in my book, which is called The Land of Flickering Lights based on some work we all did together, that Mitch McConnell is impervious to give and take unless he's taking everything, which he almost always is, which is true.

So Dan, did our promo of your book last week do okay? Was that good for you guys?

First let me say thank you for allowing me to use our platform for that but also thanks to our listeners who are awesome.

People were excited. Many people very nicely purchased the book and told me about it on Twitter which allows me to sleep at night.

I'm very excited about how it did to start. I think if we keep this up over the next few months, and I promise I will not do this every week until June 19th, I'll take a break and then I'll come back and do it incessantly in the weeks up to June 19th, but if we keep this up I think we can make a very nice contribution to Swing Left which would make writing this book worth it.

And the more people who buy it, the more we can help Swing Left and the more I can justify the hours I spent between 6 and 8 a.m. in Starbucks every day working on it.

You have to think about slavery and any other great injustice not as something that happens to a mass of people or something that a mass of people do. You have to think about it as something that happens to one person.

Mostly this book started with your book...what made you channel the experiences you had in the news business into a fictional novel?

...it took three and a half years to write...but it's satisfying now that it's out...I also thought that I could get another audience engaged in the news with a novel in a way that I couldn't if I wrote non-fiction.

...first it's about a young woman reporter who's always wanted to cover the White House and she gets the opportunity just as the first lady disappears and so she's chasing the scandal of the missing first lady...

...her management sets her up in a competition to get the White House gig, she has to compete against a former reality TV star turned journalist and whoever gets the highest ratings wins, so it's a commentary a little bit about operating inside an industry that's so focused on ratings...

...and also what it's like to be a woman in this world and that's easy...it's way better than being a dude.

When I first saw the headline that Mark Meadows was too stupid to realize he was revealing something incredibly damning in his book and that Trump had had a positive test days before the debate...

Mark Meadows says that Trump was sick when he got that first test result.

And then Mark Meadows almost as a joke is like his bronze hue had returned before the debate. Did you think I was in a fucking can that you don't that doesn't cure covid, you fucking assholes.

You just put it in his book and then he called his own book fake news during an interview.

I just wrote a book about arguing, debating, persuading a lot of the social great book.

I was in high school. I read On The Road by Jack Kerouac and like all good rebellious high school students. I was like totally inspired and I wanted to be out there and do that thing and the freedom of being on the road. And I realized, oh, I can't do that.

Dallio's Ray Dallio's writing about this double bottom line and triple bottom line where it's not just about your profit, but it's also about some social good.

The Premonition and it wasn't.

The Premonition.