Playbook Deep Dive
494 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsWelcome to Playbook Deep Dive, the stories behind the power. From Congress and the White House to bar stools and back rooms, POLITICO Playbook’s Ryan Lizza brings you interviews with the most compelling and important figures who explain what’s really going on in Washington.
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Episodes
Rahm “the un-diplomat” Emanuel reports from Japan
June 30, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutes - 40.1 MBIn American politics, there is a small group of leaders who are – to borrow a term from Hollywood – hit makers. Everything they touch seems to turn to gold. There is perhaps no better example of this in Democratic politics than Rahm Emanuel. For those who need a refresher, Rahm is a former Bill Clinton advisor, turned Illinois Congressman, turned DCCC chair, turned Barack Obama chief of staff, turned mayor of Chicago… and currently, he is Joe Biden’s ambassador to Japan. In his new posting...
How evangelicals are setting the stage for Trump's return
June 23, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutes - 39.2 MBThe big debate in Washington this week is about realism versus idealism. It played out first in foreign policy, when Joe Biden hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a state dinner. Biden has made big claims about how democratic ideals are at the heart of American foreign policy; but he spent two days lavishing time and attention on Modi, who is persecuting Muslims and cracking down on public dissent from reporters and political opponents. Biden needs India to be an ally against Ch...
Why federal prosecutors may have handed Trump a huge gift
June 16, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour - 66 MBTimothy Parlatore spent over a year working for Donald Trump on a number of legal challenges, including the Department of Justice’s probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 and the investigation of all those documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago. Parlatore was inside the secret grand jury room in Washington. He oversaw the search for documents in Bedminster. He coordinated the former president’s response to Jack Smith’s subpoena for the national security files that eventually landed Trump in so much trou...
How gamblers, party animals, and true believers are hitting it big in Washington
June 09, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutes - 46.9 MBBen Terris is a feature writer at The Washington Post, where he’s carved out a unique role: reporting on what he calls, “the weirdo beat.” While Ben’s colleagues focus on what’s happening on the main stage in politics, he keeps an eye on the freak show that’s happening just out of sight. This week, Ben published his much-anticipated book “The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind.” “The Big Break” has a novel ar...
Inside the debt ceiling vote with GOP Whip Tom Emmer
June 01, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutes - 35.7 MBIn this episode of Deep Dive, Playbook co-author Rachael Bade joins House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Chief Deputy Whip Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) just hours before final passage of the debt ceiling bill they shepherded through the House. This is the behind the scenes story from inside the Republican whip's office of how Kevin McCarthy's leadership team convinced House Republicans to raise the debt ceiling for two years and embrace his agreement with Joe Biden, which many on the rig...
How Ron DeSantis went from GOP prom queen to MAGA wallflower
May 26, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutes - 47 MBThis week, the rumors became reality as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott announced their long-awaited presidential campaigns. The contrast between the two events foreshadowed all of the big questions for next year’s Republican primaries. Tim Scott, who is a favorite among his senate colleagues — but who is mostly unknown outside of his home state and the Washington, D.C., fundraising circuit — preached optimism and unity while sharing the stage with his mot...
AOC’s advice to Joe Biden on the debt limit showdown
May 19, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MBIn the last year, a lot has changed in Washington for progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). In 2021 and 2022, with Democrats controlling the House, she and her allies could block any piece of legislation if they held together. Their big fights were with moderate Democrats over how many trillions of dollars to spend on President Joe Biden’s agenda. And they had easy access to the White House with Ron Klain as Biden’s chief of staff. Now they are in the minority and far ...
Moderate Dem says Title 42 was Biden’s border blunder
May 12, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutes - 31.2 MBThis week, after years of criticism from immigration rights activists and many progressive Democrats, President Joe Biden has ended the use of Title 42. That’s the public health law that Donald Trump first used during the pandemic to expel millions of asylum seekers arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Biden’s decision has drawn predictable outrage from Republicans. But perhaps more worrisome to the president is the growing list of critics from within the Democratic Party who are concerned th...
Why Asa Hutchinson isn’t scared of Trump, Biden, or impossible odds
May 05, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutes - 41.7 MBIf you talk to Democratic strategists about the 2024 presidential election, there is a certain type of Republican nominee who they fear: Someone who knows how to speak in the language of inclusion; who can discuss abortion and guns without alienating suburban voters; who stands up to the GOP on some of the most fraught issues of the culture wars; who can argue that he or she has almost as much government experience as Joe Biden himself, but is still younger; who handled the pandemic in their ...
Bonus: Live from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
May 02, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutes - 35.8 MBThis past week, luminaries from politics, media, and Hollywood came together for the annual White House Correspondents' dinner in Washington. Playbook co-author and Deep Dive host Ryan Lizza joined forces with Major Garrett, CBS News’s Washington correspondent and host of the popular podcast, The Takeout, at the POLITICO-CBS News reception to bring you this very special live show. The show features guests such as Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.); Asa Hutchinson, the GOP presidential candidate an...
Why this week’s media meltdown was years in the making – and what comes next
April 28, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutes - 46 MBThis week in Washington – more so than anytime in Joe Biden’s presidency – the news has been all about… the news. To start, it’s the weekend of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. But outside of the brunches and parties, a different type of media intrigue has been dominating politics. BuzzFeed News, the colossus of yesteryear’s viral reporting and the entity that published the infamous Steele Dossier about Donald Trump, announced that it was shutting down for good. On Monda...
White House Plumbers
April 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour - 83.8 MBOn May 1, the hotly-anticipated HBO series White House Plumbers will premiere. The 5-episode series takes viewers along on a darkly funny ride with the fumbling ex-spooks and misguided “patriots.” E. Howard Hunt, played by Woody Harrelson and G. Gordon Liddy, played by Justin Theroux. The duo — along with some helpers — use any means necessary to secure the 1972 re-election of Richard Nixon, including breaking into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate Office Build...
DeSantis & the Florida speaker are just getting started. Here’s what’s next.
April 14, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutes - 38.7 MBThis week, Florida’s statehouse cleared the way for Gov. Ron DeSantis to sign a six-week abortion ban. The man who shepherded the bill, House Speaker Paul Renner, joins Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza for this episode of Playbook Deep Dive. You might not know Renner’s name – but you definitely know his work: - A bill to ban surgeries and prescription treatments for transgender minors, which has passed the state Senate and Renner will soon push through the House - One of the most...
How Vivek Ramaswamy thinks he’s got Trump & DeSantis beat
April 07, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutes - 33 MBThe 2024 Republican presidential primary is off to a bit of a slow start. Donald Trump and former governors Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson have entered the race, but other likely candidates, such as Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence, are still sitting on the sidelines. Almost every Republican senator who flirted with the idea seems likely to pass, with the notable exception of Tim Scott, who’s been making stops in Iowa and New Hampshire. Into this vacuum has come Vivek Ramaswamy, who stated his ...
Donald Trump’s indictment: Our reporters dig into the repercussions for 2024
March 31, 2023 02:32 - 21 minutes - 19.7 MBPlaybook Deep Dive host and Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza gathers three of the best journalists in the POLITICO’s newsroom to break down the immediate questions of what Trump's indictment means. Joining him is Jonathan Martin, POLITICO’s Politics Bureau Chief; Meridith McGraw, who covers Trump for POLITICO; and Erica Orden, who is new to POLITICO and is one of the best legal reporters out there. All three have been breaking news on this story – and they’re on deadline. These are their thought...
Porn stars, felons, and spin doctors: Who will jurors believe in Trump’s case?
March 24, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutes - 40.2 MBLanny Davis long ago established himself as the go-to operative in Washington when you’re in the middle of a PR crisis. He was famously the public face defending Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. But today, 25 years later, he’s on the other side of a presidential sex scandal representing Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and self-described “fixer,” who went to jail for a number of offenses, including his role in paying Stormy Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her ...
What Iran and China stand to gain from an Iraq AUMF repeal
March 17, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutes - 30 MBOn Thursday, the Senate began to re-evaluate one of the most controversial episodes in American history: the Iraq war. After a generation of use and abuse, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling a vote to repeal the Iraq AUMF, or authorization for the use of military force, which has been a key underpinning for America’s so-called “forever wars” in the Middle East. But Stephen Hadley, the man who was the architect of many of the national security policies that the Iraq AUMF enable...
AI is advancing faster than Congress. Here’s why that’s a bug
March 10, 2023 10:00 - 28 minutes - 26.5 MBLast November, when the artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT launched, an old science fiction question suddenly became very real: How long until the machines are smarter than the humans? It marked the beginning of a new era in technology – one that has enormous implications for the economy and the nation’s politics. On the Hill, members of Congress suddenly needed answers about the coming disruption. The expert they turned to for those was a video game developer from Southern California...
Finnish Ambassador: Here’s the right way to poke the Russian bear
March 03, 2023 10:00 - 35 minutes - 32.5 MBThe war in Ukraine is just over one year old. There is widespread talk of a major spring offensive from both sides. War in Europe, once unthinkable, is now the new normal. But for one nation on Russia’s northern border, this feels like deja vu. Like Ukraine, Finland knows what it’s like to share a long border with Russia. The Finns have had Vladimir Putin as a neighbor, and they’ve been performing the same delicate dance of decoupling under his very watchful eye. Before his posting to Washi...
How to investigate the president, his predecessor & keep your job
February 24, 2023 10:00 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBUntil last month, Anthony Coley was Director of Public Affairs at the Justice Department and a Senior Adviser to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Coley was in the middle of some of the most extraordinary episodes at DOJ over the last two years: The appointment of two special counsels investigating one current and one former president. Responding to the drama around the investigation of the president’s son. Taking incoming from right-wing pundits saying Garland was protecting President...
What experts get wrong about Nikki Haley’s run
February 17, 2023 10:00 - 47 minutes - 43.4 MBNikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, and President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, is running for president. But not everyone on the right is impressed. In a brutal Valentine’s Day editorial, The Wall Street Journal said that there is “no clear rationale for her candidacy.” Over at The New York Times, the paper assembled 10 pundits to assess Haley’s candidacy, and the majority opinion was that she shouldn’t be taken very seriously. On this episode of Playboo...
Have China hawks flown the coop?
February 10, 2023 10:00 - 37 minutes - 34.5 MBIn Washington, there is now a bipartisan consensus around being tough on China. This was happening even before the Chinese sent a spy balloon drifting across the United States. Last month, by a vote of 365-65, the House created a new “Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” And with China hawks now dominating the thinking of both parties when it comes to Sino-U.S. relations, Deep Dive host Ryan Lizza decided to check in with Max ...
Why Kevin McCarthy thinks he’s already won
February 03, 2023 10:00 - 1 hour - 59.3 MBA small group of longtime Kevin McCarthy aides who decamped downtown to lobby are suddenly some of the most influential and sought-after people in Washington. They remain intensely loyal to the new speaker and serve as crucial sources of insight into his thinking and strategy. Ben Howard, now at the Duberstein Group, was McCarthy’s floor director. He was with him through all of the fraught moments of the John Boehner era, including in 2015 when Boehner retired and McCarthy lost out on securi...
Behind the RNC's anti-Trump revolt
January 27, 2023 10:00 - 36 minutes - 33.8 MBAfter losing both chambers of Congress during Trump’s presidency and after waging a disappointing campaign to recapture them in 2022, the Republican Party is having a lot of intra-party feuds. This week, the post-election search for new leadership moved to the Republican National Committee. Right now, there’s no agreed-upon leader of the party, so like the recent battles in the Senate and the House, the RNC election has turned into a fight to define the GOP’s future. And once again, Donald ...
The people of New Hampshire vs. Joe Biden
January 20, 2023 10:00 - 52 minutes - 47.8 MBWhat do you do when you are one of the guardians of your state’s most precious political and cultural institution — the very thing that defines New Hampshire — and the president you love and the party you’ve served your whole life, tells you to destroy it? To find out, we spoke to Ray Buckley. Buckley has served as the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party since 2007 and he was involved in every New Hampshire presidential primary campaign since he was an organizer for Jimmy Carter. ...
The strategist who didn't believe in the red wave
January 13, 2023 10:00 - 1 hour - 57.2 MBIn off-the-record conversations and private emails, AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer argued that the pundits focusing exclusively on the fundamentals of the race — Biden’s approval rating and the dismal economic indicators — were missing the bigger picture. Yes, presidents usually lose an average of some two dozen House seats in similar circumstances, but that wasn’t the whole story. While many analysts argued that inflation would be more important than the diffuse issue of democ...
The unauthorized history of the House Freedom Caucus
January 06, 2023 10:17 - 53 minutes - 49.1 MBIn late 2014, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) was traveling back to Louisiana with his wife when he had an idea: a plan to empower arch-conservatives to push back against their Leadership, led by then-Speaker of the House John Boehner. Soon after, he and eight Republican colleagues founded the House Freedom Caucus – the same group that is determined to deny Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca.) the speaker’s gavel. If you want to understand the roots of this week’s far-right rebellion, then you have to unde...
The anti-McCarthy faction teases a shadow speaker
December 23, 2022 10:00 - 37 minutes - 34.6 MBRep. Bob Good (R-Va.) and his allies are trying to end Kevin McCarthy’s reign as leader of the House Republicans. Good is one of five Republicans in the far-right Freedom Caucus vowing to block McCarthy’s path to the 218 votes needed to become Speaker of the House. The two have a history. In 2020, Good was running for Congress to represent Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. Incidentally, also home to the race between James Madison and James Monroe to be the district’s first representativ...
Will the fusion breakthrough ignite a Congressional chain reaction?
December 16, 2022 10:00 - 23 minutes - 21.7 MBDepartment of Energy announced a breakthrough in the decades-long quest to recreate on Earth the process that powers the Sun: nuclear fusion. To simplify slightly, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California recently fired a bunch of lasers at a piece of hydrogen. The lasers used 2.05 megajoules of energy to hit the hydrogen. The resulting reaction produced 3 megajoules of energy. For the first time in the history of fusion research, scientists achieved ignition — ...
Gov. Chris Sununu surveys the field
December 09, 2022 12:35 - 1 hour - 66.5 MBGov. Chris Sununu was recently re-elected to his fourth term in office. The Republican governor has been positioning himself for the 2024 presidential primaries for a while now. Before Election Day, there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical about his chances. He’s a New England moderate in the party of MAGA. He endorsed DONALD TRUMP twice, but he’s also been a stinging critic. And he’s pro-choice, which might be seen as a non-starter in a GOP primary. Trump’s recent decline has emboldene...
True or false: Colorado is a swing state
December 02, 2022 12:28 - 34 minutes - 31.7 MBMichael Bennet is the senior Democratic senator from Colorado, a famously purple state. In the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterms, Colorado seemed to be a place where Republicans might flip a few seats. But as it turned out, not only was there no red wave in Colorado, there was something of a blue wave instead. On this episode of Playbook Deep Dive, host Ryan Lizza visits Sen. Michael Bennet on the Hill to dissect the 2022 midterms and pick his brain on 2024 presidential campaigns and what...
Sen. Markey vs. Musk’s Twitter: The freed bird might get its wings clipped
November 18, 2022 10:00 - 31 minutes - 28.9 MBThere are some members of Congress who have famously struggled to understand the online world. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) prides himself on not only understanding the internet, but also for passing some of the key legislation that he likes to say helped lay the foundation for the digital revolution. More recently, Markey has been leading fights to enhance online privacy and regulate social media. So when Elon Musk took over Twitter recently, Markey was paying close attention to see what kinds ...
How to flip a GOP stronghold: be a normal politician
November 11, 2022 10:00 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MBWhy were Democrats seemingly able to by and large defy history and avoid a catastrophic result in the midterms? Across the country, Democrats successfully defended seats that Republicans had confidently expected to pick up, while also adding wins in gubernatorial races in five swing states that flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020. There are many explanations: backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, exhaustion with Donald Trump and some of the candidates that he backed, and a big turn...
Democrats' 'optimistic apostle' offers hope for the midterms
November 04, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutes - 50.9 MBSimon Rosenberg is the head of the progressive think tank NDN, and he has a message for jittery Democrats on the eve of the midterms: cheer up! This week on the Playbook Deep Dive podcast we sit down with the Democratic Party’s apostle of optimism. “I'm not sitting here and telling you we're going to win,” Simon told us over lunch this week. “What I'm telling you is that the narrative about this election, about there being a red wave— there isn't one. There never has been.” If you spend a l...
The quarter-billion dollar PAC driving a red wave
October 28, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutes - 54 MBDan Conston is the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Rep. Kevin McCarthy with the singular mission of making the California Republican Speaker of the House. Most forecasts suggest that Conston and CLF are on the verge of success. In a candid hour-plus interview, Conston took Playbook behind the scenes of CLF’s operation. We talked about the issues and demographics of this election, emerging GOP opportunities in the final days of the campaign and the i...
Weaponized (un)truths: Has the GOP ‘lost its mind’?
October 21, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MBRobert Draper's "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind" focuses exclusively on the GOP during the crucial 18-month period after January 6 and vastly adds to our understanding of the Trump era. Far-right representatives Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz are part of a new breed of Republican party fighting with their GOP elders. The subtitle of Draper's book — emphasizing when, not how — Trump-inspired elected officials helped the former president so...
How we predict elections
October 14, 2022 09:00 - 32 minutes - 30.1 MBScott Bland is POLITICO’s national politics editor and leading all of POLITICO’s 2022 midterm coverage. To do it, he has a team of about 15 reporters around the country following campaigns. Despite the cooling temperatures, this is when people like Bland start to sweat. His job is to ensure readers and listeners aren’t surprised on election night — that POLITICO has considered and reported on all possible outcomes, including the outliers — those black swan scenarios with seemingly low pr...
Dream job disappointment: Testifying against Trump
October 07, 2022 09:00 - 53 minutes - 49.4 MBSarah Matthews has a political resume similar to a lot of conservatives her age. At Kent State, she joined the College Republicans and made her first pilgrimage to the annual CPAC conference in Washington. Sarah interned on Capitol Hill for John Boehner and Sen. Rob Portman, both of Ohio. And then she got a job doing comms for Republicans on the Hill. But a few years later, in June 2020, she was working for Donald Trump. Like a lot of her colleagues, she was well aware of Trump’s flaws, but ...
Giorgia Meloni's Hard Right Playbook
September 30, 2022 09:00 - 29 minutes - 27.9 MBLast Sunday, Italians voted for the most right-wing government since Benito Mussolini. The controversial politician leading the winning coalition, Giorgia Meloni, will become Italy's first female prime minister. Meloni has become a darling of sorts for many Republicans in America, who invited her to speak at this year's CPAC conference. The "Brothers of Italy," co-founded by Meloni in 2012, was a fringe party with neo-fascist roots. It rebranded itself in recent years as a socially conservat...
The untold story of Trump's botched impeachments
September 23, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour - 60.3 MBIt’s hard to imagine a political event that was covered more intensively in real time than Trump’s two impeachments. But only now, 18 months after the Senate acquitted Trump a second time, we are learning crucial new details about what happened behind the scenes of those proceedings. And only now are we starting to reckon with what those two failed impeachments have wrought for Congress, the presidency, and the Constitution — and who was responsible. That reckoning comes courtesy of Playbook...
The Bitter End to democracy? Hindsight is 20/20.
September 16, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour - 57.6 MBUCLA political scientists Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch and Vanderbilt’s John Sides argue that political party identity has become increasingly “calcified” in surprising new ways. Their latest book,“The Bitter End,” describes both the long-term trends and short-term shocks that shaped the 2020 presidential election and continue reverberating today. What’s driving the increasing distance between the parties and the growing homogeneity within the parties? Playbook Co-Author Ryan Lizza...
Kara Swisher knows when to fold ‘em
September 09, 2022 09:00 - 48 minutes - 44.5 MBKara Swisher has hosted the annual Code Conference for the last twenty years. Recently she announced that this was her final year organizing and running the event, which concluded on Thursday in Los Angeles. At the final big panel on Wednesday evening, Swisher ended things where she started: with a conversation about Steve Jobs. She gathered the famous Apple designer Jony Ive and the widow of Steve Jobs — Laurene Powell Jobs — and the CEO of Apple — Tim Cook — who flew to Los Angeles for Sw...
When Senator Leahy laughed with Raul Castro
August 26, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutes - 33.1 MBOn Tuesday, Leahy, who is retiring this year after representing Vermont in the Senate since 1975, released “The Road Taken,” an engrossing memoir that covers his long career, from his politically fraught vote against the Vietnam War to his account of rallying his fellow senators back into the chamber on Jan. 6 after they fled the mob that stormed the Capitol. In between, you meet dozens of politicians, Supreme Court Justices, presidents, world leaders, musicians, and Hollywood celebrities. ...
Ron Klain says ‘season of substance’ could save Dems
August 19, 2022 09:00 - 25 minutes - 23 MBThe White House suddenly has a lot to brag about. And the president’s aides, led by chief of staff Ron Klain, are reaching deep into the 20th century to make the case that Joe Biden is a transformational president with “historic achievements.” We ventured over to the White House and sat down with Klain in the Roosevelt Room to review the last 18 months of the Biden presidency and talk about what’s next. At the start of the summer, this conversation would have been vastly different. Now, gas p...
Byrd nerds: Why the byzantine process of budget reconciliation exists and how it actually works
August 12, 2022 09:01 - 51 minutes - 47.4 MBThis week the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 using the process known as budget reconciliation. The upside? No filibuster is allowed. You only need a majority to approve a reconciliation bill. And the downside? There are strict rules about what can be included. On the last episode of Playbook Deep Dive, Eric Ueland and Greg D’Angelo, two GOP budget nerds, previewed the final challenges that the Inflation Reduction Act would face to pass the Senate. They even nailed one of ...
Biden’s big bill: Two GOP strategists on how to kill it
August 05, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBThe biggest remaining obstacle for the Democrats is now Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who will continue to host Democratic and Republican aides behind closed doors today (no press allowed) to scrub the reconciliation bill for potential violations of the Byrd Rule. MacDonough broke the hearts of progressives on several occasions last year, including when she nixed the minimum wage from the Covid relief bill, which was passed using reconciliation, and rejected three different ve...
Legalizing the trip: One ‘shroom advocate’s playbook
July 29, 2022 09:00 - 34 minutes - 31.7 MBHere’s something about Washington, D.C. that even a lot of people who live here don’t know: Psychedelic mushrooms are basically legal. In 2020 voters approved a ballot initiative that made growing, purchasing, and distributing mushrooms the lowest law enforcement priority for D.C. police. Cities and states are way ahead of the federal government. There are movements in more than two dozen states to either study, decriminalize, or outright legalize mushrooms and other psychedelics. It’s happe...
He was right about inflation. Biden wasn’t. Larry Summers on what’s coming next
July 22, 2022 09:01 - 40 minutes - 37.1 MBRyan caught up with the former treasury secretary — and thorn in the side of Biden White House economists — Larry Summers on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Forum for a wide-ranging interview about last 18 months of economic debates, why so many policymakers got the inflation debate wrong, what Summers thinks about Joe Manchin blowing up Build Back Better over inflation concerns, what Biden — and Pelosi — are getting wrong in their approach to China, and why we are almost certainly headed...
LA wants to recall its most progressive prosecutor. Inside the DA’s hostile office
July 15, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBTHE PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW: GEORGE GASCÓN — Gascón was elected district attorney of Los Angeles County in November 2020 with 54% of the vote. “I won handsomely,” he reminisced Wednesday during a 90-minute conversation at the Hall of Justice in downtown L.A. “I got over 2 million votes.” It was a big victory for criminal justice reformers: the leading progressive prosecutor in the country taking over the movement’s top target, the largest county in the country and one that has long been hostile...
Why haven’t there been more Cassidy Hutchinsons?
July 01, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour - 82.9 MBThe question of why so few Republicans have stepped forward to testify about what they heard and saw in the Trump White House, is very much at the heart of much of the House Jan. 6 committee’s work — and of Tim Miller’s new book, “Why We Did It,” which, by chance, was released the same day as Hutchinson’s explosive testimony. Miller’s arc is, by now, somewhat familiar: At the dawn of the Trump era, he was an in-demand Republican strategist and a top aide to Jeb Bush. He watched in horror as ...