I’ve no idea just how well known this is , presumably much more so in the US , but it’s become compulsive viewing / listening for me recently. Apart from being as sharp as a knife , these guys are also funny as fuck with it.
‘Elon Musk , the guy with such a bad personality that he makes people sell their cars.’ 
I think they are really great. They have been doing it long enough now and are big/successful enough that lots on the left fucking hate them because that’s what the left does, but I think despite the temptation for business needs to pull them away from their primary focus of being a pro Dem media company, I think they’ve done well to stay aligned with that vision. Vote Save America I think is one of the most effective electoral resources anyone has ever put out. I think most of the criticism of them comes not from them selling out, but of a segment of the Dem coalition (the Blue MAGA) not being to tolerate the idea that sometimes a party needs to have serious conversations about its direction.
Lovett is genuinely very funny for someone who comes from such a nerdy background. He was one of Hillary’s senior speech writers and got invited to join Obama for the general simply because the team thought if they were going to be working 14-16 hour days for the next 6 months they wanted to work around people whose company they enjoyed. That is the dynamic they still have on the show, where is mostly there to amuse the others, which only makes his moments when gets serious and shows really how sharp he is that much more impactful.
I dont know if you listen to any of the other Crooked stuff. Tommy has a great once weekly Geopolitics show (Pod saves the world) with his old boss from the Obama team, Ben Rhodes. Favs has another good side project called Offline that focuses on the various ways being too online can pickle you, what the forces are that creates that environment, and approaches to get more “offline”.
I’m a fan, they’re pretty good.
Lovett cracks me up. (His was the Musk quote 
) I can’t believe how young this lot were when they were working the Obama campaign , I suppose we’ve (well me anyway) kinda forgot just how groundbreaking that campaign was and what they achieved. Thanks for the additional info , I’ll be sure to check the other guys’ stuff out too.
It’s the dirty secret of politics. The people doing important stuff away from the camera are young enough that most of us would question if they’re even old enough to wipe their own arse, let alone write an important speech, or write a new government policy.
If you have time to trawl through some of their archive, there is an interview they did with Hillary in the summer of 2017 that is absolutely fantastic. She really did disappear after the loss and this was one of the first substantive conversations she had with anyone afterwards. It was really apparent she’d taken time to process it, but also that her relationship with Lovett (and possibly the realization that her career was almost certainly over so she didnt need to be so guarded and poll tested in her responses anymore) made her let her guard down and showed a side of herself that you very rarely see. As someone who never warmed to her as a candidate but obviously wanted her to win in 2016 it was maddening because you left thinking “if she showed even half of this version of herself she’d have won 400 electoral votes”. I’ve long thought that the biggest issue she had was that she was stage managed to an inch of her life, something that was probably a very reasonable thing to put an ambitious women through in that time when being a successful woman meant being a man in a pant suit. There had to be something more compelling underneath to what she ever showed publicly to make so many in the party establishment love her so much, and even to have attracted someone like Bill in the first place. That interview was the first time I ever saw that side of her that I long assumed had to exist.
Mike Duncan of History of Rome fame has come out of no where to drop the first two episodes of an unannounced new series of his Revolutions podcast. Weirdly, it’s a fictional take on a future Martian revolution. I thought it was a prank, but I’ve got through the first two and he appears to be entirely serious.
These guys ended up in my YT algorithm, and from memory I have heard Sam Seder refer to them a couple of times. Always enjoyable.
I’ve pretty much given up on the polls and the news coverage. This is about the only thing keeping me sane atm.
Pablo’s podcast has become one of the best there is. This talk with Tim Simons (Vep’s Jonah Ryan) had me crying
Math was invented was muslims. Algebra…more like Al Jazeera. Math teachers are terrorists
Recommended
Not a big fan of Men in Blazers in general, but Roger Bennet has some really good stuff away from that brand. Over the weekend I listened to his series on the disaster of the US’ 1998 world cup campaign, American Fiasco, and it is fantastic.
I was seemingly one of the few people who did not know the reason John Harkes missed that tournament was because he was kicked off the team for sleeping with Eric Wynalda’s wife
I’m not sure whether I knew and had simply forgotten or had also not known this. It does make me now wonder whether the WAGs attended the tournament and if so whether Wynalda’s wife was with them…if she was, how might that have impacted the social dynamics of the group?
It’s not clear from the retelling in the podcast, but it wasn’t a bit public blow up like the Bridge-Terry affair. A third player on the team found out and felt he had to tell the manager, but outside of those two only Harkes and Wynalda knew, and even Wynalda only had suspicions at that time. Wynalda claims now that he argued Harkes was too important to cut and as only they knew it wouldnt spill over to the team, but the manager felt it was too much of a betrayal to overlook but was seemingly willing to go to his grave with the reason for it until Wynalda started speaking about it publicly over a decade later.
Sampson was a shit manager, but clearly a very honorable man.
I’ve pushed Pablo’s podcast a few times now, but this is episode is near perfection.
Pablo’s spoken a few times about knowing that Zuck is a weirdo and not a good guy from their Harvard mutuals, and so this piece started out as the pursuit of a “feel good” story about him getting choked out. It turned into an interesting exploration of the fascination silicon valley types have with BJJ, and ended up unexpectedly resulting in a grudging hat tip to Zuck over the whole episode
The Scared For Life podcast is returning next week:
I really loved the first series and if you grew up with slightly disturbing popular culture from the 1970s and 80s then this should appeal.
I’ve been on a binge of non-political podcasts and so worked my way through a lot of Pablo’s back catalogue. This just keeps getting better.
One the things that brought Pablo to national prominence was a Sports Illustrated 15 years ago on the sociology behind professional athletes going broke that was turned into an episode of ESPN’s 30 for 30. This was him revisiting that 15 years later
This is a discussion about a TV remake of Field of Dreams NBC commissioned the great Mike Schur to make. It sounds like it would have been amazing, but the episode is worth it just for Shur’s description of how insane the story of the film was.
A fascinating discussion on the 180 turn Dana White has taken on controlling the speech of fighters under his control.
I’m not sure if this is best here or in the music thread.
Anyway, a new podcast, “Bang! 101 Songs about nuclear war from the 1980s”. They start out with OMD and Enola Gay, so it’s from that period of TOTP when pretty much every video featured a mushroom cloud or wasteland.
Not the Two Robbies. Listened to it once.
Once.