Cap Times Idea Fest | An Evening with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz

Good evening and welcome to Civic Media's coverage of the CapTimes 2025 IDFS.

Tonight, live from UW-Madison's Memorial Union, we will hear conversations with writer

Evan Osnos and Minnesota Governor Tim Walsh, both moderated by David Marinus.

At 7 o'clock, following Osnos' remarks, Todd Alba of the Todd Alba Show will join us

for some IDFS recap and analysis.

Then at 7.30, Governor Walsh will take this stage.

We go now live to Memorial Union for CapTimes IDFS.

Good evening, it's so good to see so many of you here this early.

There's always exciting traffic in Madison on a Friday night and we know how high it is

to get here.

So we're thrilled you're here early and welcome.

This is the fifth day of CapTimes IDFS and we're excited that you're here.

As I said all week, attendance is so important to us to support the Capitol Times and the

news and opinion journalism we've been doing in this town since 1917 and I just want

to keep repeating that every time I'm out here.

If you're not already, consider becoming a CapTimes member.

One of our plans for the future is to do more events and more member only and member

first events.

So in addition to supporting us, if you're interested in events like this, you might consider

membership.

Please note, our sponsors listed on the banners behind me.

They like your tickets make this week all it is and so I will just point out and thank

them for their support.

Our previous speakers this week have felt the topics have seemed really incredibly timely.

Not always optimistic but incredibly timely.

Even though I just met Evan Osnills for the first time backstage, I feel like he's an

old friend because I've listened to him so long with his wonderful podcast, the political

hour with the New Yorker and I've been a huge and long time fan.

Evan is a celebrated New Yorker, political reporter and author whose latest book was

published in June.

I got an advance copy and read it and it's her sale on a lobby and I believe he'll be

signing copies after this session and also after the Tim Wall session tonight.

It's titled The Have and Have Yots, Dispatches of the Ultra Rich.

It's a collection of essays published in New Yorker that Evan has revised and expanded

to tell the story of how the ultra rich now hold more of America's wealth than even

in the heyday of the carnigies and the Rockefellers.

In it, Evan recalls Donald Trump's inauguration last January in a scene he described as instantly

indelible.

The world watched American politics and embrace plutocracy without shame or pretence, he wrote.

After joining the New Yorker, Evan worked as the Beijing bureau chief for the Chicago

Tribune and was part of teams that want to pull its surprise in 2001 and 2008.

Prior to his China assignment, he reported from the Middle East, mostly from Iraq.

Among his other books was a 2020 biography of former president Joe Biden.

In 2021, when we were talking about this in the green room, he published a best-selling

book titled Wildland, the Making of America's Fury, in which he wrote about how the United

States seemed to have changed in the many years he spent abroad, no longer appearing

to be as committed to the rule of law, the sanctity of truth, and equal opportunity as

when he left that resonates with all of us now.

As I said, Evan is a regular, by mispronounced it earlier, on the New Yorker podcast titled

a political scene, it's one of my favorites.

His New York podcast partners, Jane Mayer, who was here in 2021, and Susan Glasser, who

was here with her husband, Peter Baker, last year, we were joking downstairs that we've

completed our match set of podcasters, and now our goal will be to get them to Madison

at the same time, maybe, on the stage next year or sometime soon.

I just wanted to give one more pitch for the podcast.

I just find it to be fascinating and absent of the kind of off-putting hyperbole, so common

on podcasts.

So David Marinus, who's been here all week, played a huge part, invited Evan to Madison,

and he'll be the moderator tonight.

So with that, would you please welcome Evan and David to the stage.

Thank you.

Hello again, and again, and again, and again.

I'm sick of my own voice by now, but I'm delighted to be with Anas Nose.

I've known Asnose since Evan was an infant.

When I got to the Washington Post in 1977, his dad, Peter, was already a legend there,

and he was in Moscow at that point, but I got to know him as an editor on the National

Staff.

And my favorite Asnose story of all time is when I was the Southwest Bureau Chief for

the Washington Post in Austin, and I went up to Dallas because Prince Charles was there.

So I'm doing the story about Prince Charles, and he's meeting various people, and then

he looks over and sees me.

It says, are you the Washington Post correspondent?

And I said, yes, he said, well, I want to tell you that Peter Asnose, people come up to

him and call him Prince Charles, because he looks so much like Prince Charles.

It's uncanny.

It truly is.

And would, would Peter, when your dad, when I told him that story, boy, was he happy?

He remains pleased.

He doesn't even know you're telling it, but somewhere a warm glow is passing over him,

and he doesn't know what.

So now that he's King Charles, I guess your dad is King Peter.

Oh, he's so pleased right now.

My dad is so thrilled by that.

Which means we have to call you, Prince Evan.

Well, well, dad, I have to say, I can take to that, actually, I have to say it is, as

the other half of this prenatal friendship with David Marinus, when David Marinus sends

you an email, even before you read it, you say, yes, whatever it is, I want to do it,

I want to see you, I want to chat, so it is a great thrill to be here with you.

Thank you, Evan.

And thank you all for coming on a beautiful night outside.

So Evan is one of the many guests we've had who came in from Washington, and each one

of them, I have asked what it's been like there the last three weeks with sort of this

mall cop's police state.

What have you seen, and how would you describe it?

Do I have to go back?

I mean, really, you see, I'm beaming at the experience of being out of Washington.

It has been a very curious occasion, because let's be honest, the site of the National Guard

patrolling downtown, and I will point out they are strangely patrolling around the monuments

and some of the safest places.

I think they're keeping the monuments safe from the tourists or the tourists safe from

the monuments.

It's not clear.

The subtext, of course, is a horror.

A subtext is something that will be a subject for us to talk about tonight and for weeks

beyond, which is that this is not how it's supposed to work.

And we're getting used to what this has meant and what it will mean.

But for the moment, I have to say, Washington has a way of registering its disapproval.

When JD Vance went to Union Station and thought that he would be greeted by rapturous crowds,

it was a little bit like walking into hostile territory.

And I think that was eye-opening.

There is a way in which it feels a little bit, to me, at least, having worked in Iraq,

that the Trump administration operates in Washington a little bit like the Green Zone in Baghdad,

where they kind of stay within the palace walls as much as possible.

And we know from history that when you reside in the land of Oz and you begin to believe

your own mythology and you don't step out in counter-reality, that can lead you into

some disastrous choices.

Yes.

And since we'll get to China later, but I was struck by the protester who threw the

submarine sandwich and the way that the silhouette of that almost became symbolic like the standing

in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square.

Yeah.

I do think the guy in front of the tank would like a word on that analogy.

Exactly.

But it is true that the sandwich has been immortalized with Banksy-style protests, and I sometimes

try to think about what would Gandhi make of this.

If you'd explained to him that this was the nature of civil disobedience in our day

and age.

But look, it is a sign of how people are figuring out ways to register their discontent.

And I think we're at the beginning of a process.

One of the patterns that I look for is the way that citizen power marshals itself.

How does it organize itself?

It takes time.

We sometimes forget that it took 20, 30, 40 years, in some cases, for great movements

to achieve their definition of success if you're talking about the suffragettes.

If you're talking about achieving the first legislation during the Gilded Age to try

to bring in that period the trusts under control.

It took 17 years between the time that Mark Twain named it a Gilded Age, and you had

the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

So my message is settle in.

This is a marathon, not a sprint.

As a citizen, this takes attention, and it takes persistence.

It's not a problem that gets solved overnight.

That's another translation of what Stacey Abrams said the other night.

Oh, is that right?

No, no.

I mean, it was different, but it got to the same place.

And it was a measure of optimism that I think people were looking for in that sense.

I mean, it is, I think we're all at this point in some ways looking for what history can

tell us.

There's a seductive comfort, which can be misleading too, to say, oh, you know, we've

been through this.

We've had moments like this before.

That means we'll get through it.

No, you know, as Robert Putnam likes to say, pendulum happens in history, but you sometimes

have to push the pendulum.

And I think the message there is that this is a set of values and a set of relationships

that often happen face to face, you know, one of the great lessons of the progressive

era, how we went from the gilded age to a progressive era, was that it took first a change

of culture, in effect, a moral awakening of a certain kind.

And then it led to civic action, people getting together, meeting in organizations, meeting

to have talks and to exchange ideas and to throw out proposals to one another.

And then the third step is actually policy.

So in a way, the power begins in the hands of people who are interested in seeing an

alternative way of living.

You said the pendulum needs to be pushed.

You started your career at the Chicago Tribune in Chicago, and JB Pritzker, the governor will

be here tomorrow night, and he's done some pushing, and it seems that that hadn't effected

in Chicago.

How would you interpret what's happened?

Yeah, it's very interesting.

Because part of the Trump strategy is a bit of the old probe, you know, you push until

you see if you hit bone.

And I think he began to get a sense that Chicago might not be such an easy place to invade.

Because, you know, Trump always mentions these friends of his, like he's got this guy

in Paris named Jim, who tells him about things that are happening.

I'm always tempted to know if he had a guy in Chicago who called him up and said, this

isn't going to work.

You're going to get, you're going to, you're essentially going to organize the city in response

to you.

I mean, look, I think there is, there, it matters the sequence.

He started in Washington.

Washington is, as you know, David, a kind of municipal, it's a very strange political

creature.

It doesn't have any of the ordinary powers that a city has.

Chicago, where I came up, starting on the Metro desk, you know, wrote a profile in the

New Yorker of Mayor Daily, Richard M. Daily, the son of Richard J. Daily, who I, in an

immortal phrase used to refer to the rest of the country as the New York's, the LAs

and all that.

And Chicago, as you know, has a kind of steel in its spine.

And the idea that people were going to come in and tell the city that it was overrun,

as Trump would say, by immigrants, by crime.

Americans will tell you, where are the only ones who get to criticize Chicago?

Right.

That's great.

So night after night, the guests from normalizing to Stacey Abrams, to Garrett Graf, to Eugene

Robinson, have talked about where we are on the road to tradition, to autocracy.

And two out of the four, say we're already there, I've sort of listed to you about this,

but I'd be interested in your perspective on how close we are to a total totalitarian

state.

Well, I mean, having actually lived in something close to totalitarian state, China under

Xi Jinping, I can give you some points of reference, I visited North Korea.

Look, I think the reason I don't mean to be joky about it is that when we use our level

of alarm, we have to be sure that this is the moment that we're mobilizing people for,

meaning that if we actually say that Trump has reached the maximalist position of what

he can take, that there is nothing left to be done within democratic politics, then what

you're doing is essentially telling people that the democratic system is unavailable to

you.

It's failed.

And that's not actually the point where we are.

The point where we are is that we're in the run-up to a midterm election in which we

could have some reasonable effect, some ability to contain his powers, some ability at least

to begin to make the Congress function again.

We could also, let's remember, begin to talk more seriously about how this country could

say, revive the tradition of amending the Constitution.

We used to do that every, about, on average, every 10 years.

The last time we really amended the Constitution was 1971.

We've lost the tradition.

We've lost the memory of our founding system, our founding documents being a malleable

document.

I'm not suggesting that we're in any political position to begin amending the Constitution,

but I think you have to begin to tell people to shift the over-ten window, as we used

to say a few years ago, an idea that's almost been exhausted, to tell people that politics

is still an arena in which we have our best chance of peacefully bringing about the pushing

of the pendulum.

You brought it up, amend the Constitution.

What would you think, what would that amendment be, what would the first one come to your

mind?

Well, I suppose there's a few things that one could imagine.

I don't know if it would take an amendment of the Constitution to make DC a state, but

this is an idea that has been rattling around.

I will secretly admit here that there is a fantastic book, just coming out right now by my

colleague at the New Yorker Jill LePore, on the subject of the Constitution and the power

of amendment, and relearning the muscle memory of what it means to make this a living

breathing document again.

So I commend to you all that book.

I'm going to be talking to her in Washington next week.

Great.

Yeah, well, Jill LePore is a national treasure.

She is an absolute national treasure.

And by the way, she somehow, in her spare time, manages to write 700 pages on the history

of the Constitution, while raising nice children and gardening, and teaching at Harvard.

We're teaching, yes.

So we're going to get into what's happened the last few days, but I want to set some

context for that first.

And I think it was 2015, you wrote a piece, The Fearful and the Frustrated, about the

alt-right.

You sort of saw it coming.

Did you know the way that would attach to Trump over the years?

Yeah, that was an experience of the value of going away and coming home.

I'm an American, I'm a reporter who had come up here, not gone overseas for a decade.

And I came back, and as we all remember, Trump announced his candidacy for President

in 2015.

It happened to be that I was working on a piece at the time that had been inspired by

this horrific shooting by Dylan Roof, who was a white supremacist, who walked into a

mother-manual church and slaughtered parishioners.

And that story was about this inco-ate group of people who imagine themselves as white

nationalists.

Who was this group?

What was the origins of this crime?

So I was working on that piece, and I got a call from my editors at the New Yorker,

and they said, you know, Trump has announced that he's running for President.

And it was being treated as a great big joke, you remember, because in New York, of course,

he's a piece of the kind of permanent media clownish furniture.

That's the way that he was regarded.

And so it was assumed he'll be out in a few weeks.

This is all a publicity stunt.

And they said, would you quickly pivot from the white supremacist story and do a profile

of Trump, the candidate?

And you better move fast, because he's probably going to be out in a couple weeks.

And I said, okay, so I went out and stopped meeting with these white supremacists and started

going to Trump rallies.

And I wrote to my editors after about a week of this, I said, this is one story.

And we need to merge these two into one story.

Because what this is about, it turned out, was a set of ideas that had been hatched.

Really I would argue around the idea, around 9.11, and the beginning of the war in Iraq,

the idea of twilight war.

The idea that we are beset from enemies.

In that case, after 9.11, it was such a shock to our system.

The idea that we would be attacked in a way we hadn't been since Pearl Harbor.

And then gradually, over time, you began to see that they said, okay, it's not just

it's not just jihadists that were fighting in Afghanistan.

It's also jihadists coming over the border.

You remember that moment, there was even a congressman, Longsense, whose left politics

named Tom Tancredo, who for the power user, that is a name.

If you recognize that name, you deserve a door prize.

But he made this leap from saying, this is not just about fighting for Western values

overseas, it's about defending us from the enemies within.

And that over time, animated the birth of the anti-immigration movement.

And Trump, of course, saw that and latched onto it and seized it.

That is some authentic issue for him, particularly.

It was congenial to some of his pre-existing attitudes, but he picked it up.

And you had this fusion of these two movements.

And it was a piece called the Fearful and the Frustrated.

And it was about he had awakened a gene within us that's been in our national soul from

the beginning.

And it comes and it goes.

And he turned it into the politics that we inhabit today.

And that was 2015 when Charlie Kirk was what, like, 20 or something.

But he took that whole, I don't even know if you called it ideology, but whatever the

movement was in those 10 years.

Yeah, I think that Trump, as a phenomenon, meant a lot of different things to people in

the beginning.

There were some people who thought he is the manifestation of what I don't dare say

out loud, but what I feel, which is perhaps this fear of the country changing, particularly

for white men.

There was also a piece of that caucus who felt like they were actually reenacting some

vision of a 1980s era Reagan style, individualist ethic.

That's what they thought that they were signing on to.

And it was this conglomeration of different ideas.

And then over time, as we know, Charlie Kirk started talking about young people.

And I was reminded of this today, actually, we were taping the podcast this morning.

And Jane Mayer, our friend who has done a lot of work over the years, she'd interviewed

Charlie Kirk.

And the thing that had started him down this path was that in his mind, this is what

he would tell people.

He thought he could go to West Point, he applied.

And in his mind, his seat was taken by a woman, and a woman of color.

And he began to tell himself that this was a grand injustice.

And he took this idea, and he went out into the world.

And he found people who felt that they had been treated unjustly.

And he was able to tap into this.

And in a way, he sort of picked a lock of something that was out there in the world.

And it was very, very powerful.

And he looked at the other reason, I don't know if you ever interviewed him, but part

of the reason it worked was that he was masterful at code switching.

He could figure out who he was talking to at one moment or another.

And I think we don't need to, you've been talking about it all week, but we're at a very

dangerous moment in this country, we're at a threshold moment.

And the idea that the small, deep democratic method of change, which is that we can get

into a room and disagree with one another, perhaps even violently disagree with one another,

but do it without taking up arms.

That idea is fundamentally in peril right now.

And it has been growing steadily since 2015.

And we're at a point where, as a political class in Washington, the people in who serve

in our name, the only way we know from history, and this is very well documented by the scholars

who fight against this, is they have to repeatedly, emphatically, creatively and authentically

renounce violence.

They have to say, there is no place for this in our politics.

There is no place for this in our country.

And if they don't do that, then this process builds over time.

And Trump renounces certain violence, but only the violence that suits his political needs.

Yeah, that's where we are right now.

That's where we are.

So let, you know, we were-

So is this the sunny turn in the conversation where we begin to talk about hope?

And light?

No.

No.

But we're sort of easing into China a little bit more.

Karen Tommelty-

The authoritarian communist regime.

You know, it's sort of, but it gets to not to Charlie Kirk, but to young people, which

was Karen Tommelty cited a study or a poll or something the other day that really fascinated

me.

Now, the sort of the young people's perspectives on autocracy.

And that part of why they're more less disturbed about it has to do with China.

And all of the things they get from China, you know, from their cell phones to TikTok.

Yeah, I think there's also a way that they've grown up in a period when they look across

the Pacific.

And what do they see when they watched the Olympics a couple of years ago or in 2008?

They see a place that is growing, that is building, that is putting up skyscrapers, that

is laying down railroad track at a pace that was like us at the end of the 19th century.

Now what they don't get, of course, is the other side of the story, which is the people's

voices who are silenced as a result of being in an oppressive autocratic regime, of being

in essentially a life in a one party state.

So if you look at China from over here and what you're experiencing is TikTok and inexpensive

housewares and the site of spectacular infrastructure on TV, you can begin to say, you know, it seems

like they're doing what we used to do only bigger and better.

But I think there's something else going on.

And I actually think this begins to get to why inequality is a piece of the puzzle.

Is that I think what young people who are attracted to the seductive idea of a strong

man, what they're really responding to, it's almost like a kind of referred pain.

It's not exactly that strong man rule is so attractive.

It's that they're looking at the present conditions in our politics and they're saying this

system is not in any way reflecting the needs and the and the plaintive cries of people

out in the country who are saying, what happened to the promise of what the mythology of this

country is, which is after all that you can, let's say, you know, out earn your parents.

If you were born in 1940, you stood a 90% chance about earning your parents.

Young people today stand less than half that chance.

There are a lot of young people out there who say, if only we had a CEO.

Now, it is a, in my view, a radical misjudgment of how you actually achieve meaningful productive

political reform, but it is an expression of, in a way, a kind of politics of despair.

That's true.

And this might not be true of the last few months, but in my experience of reporting, I've

always found that the people who are most optimistic about America are the ones who have the

least reason to be.

Black women, Hispanics, you know, and it's, I don't know, I just don't know.

And I also have end immigrants.

End immigrants.

I mean, I think to myself, you know, look, I am, you're kind of mentioned, my dad at the

outset of this conversation, he came to this country as a refugee.

He was a Polish Jewish family that they left Poland.

They went on this odyssey as so many families did, families here, I'm sure.

He was eventually born in India of all places.

My dad's birth certificate says, cast Polish, true story.

And he was given the middle name.

Where did that fit of the cast?

No, he's out, they kicked him right out of India.

That's where you were on the cast list of if you were Polish.

And his parents had lost everything.

My grandfather was one of seven siblings.

He was the only one to survive the war.

My father was given the middle name Winston after Winston Churchill because of just the

idea that indeed, in word, you will put the idea of vanquishing fascism on a page, on

a birth certificate right there next to cast Polish.

And they came to this country and as, you know, he says I started here in this country

in a basket and the people who come here who fight and we know all of us, no people

who have fought incredibly hard to get here.

Those are the people who still believe in the American idea and I know Chinese immigrants

for instance, who have tracked from China through the Darian gap all the way up through Central

America to get to the southern border with the United States because they want to get

out of the Chinese system.

So when we look across the Pacific and we say, God, it is nice how they're able to

generate, you know, build the new airports.

Let's remember that actually what we're fighting for here, it's a word I don't use as much

anymore because I think it's layered.

But what fighting?

Yeah, I've become a little bit more self editing about the language of the language of combat.

I'm not sure it's necessarily the kind of language that is on my mind right now.

I'm thinking more about the language of putting a shoulder to the wheel.

You know, people sometimes ask these days, you know, what gives you hope?

And I keep thinking to myself, I don't say it very often, but I think that's the wrong

word.

It's a different four letter word.

It's a family friendly word, but it's work, it's work, honestly.

It's the idea of actually getting together with people who are concerned, getting together

with people who believe that there is something to be done.

And it's not, there's only wrong with saying we're going to fight, but I know work is right.

I mean, Marty Barron, my editor at the post, you know, you'd say we're not at war, we're

at work.

Yeah.

It's very good.

That's pretty good.

I want to have an aside here with, you know, Peter was, Evan was talking about his father,

Peter.

One among many notable things of Peter Oznos was that he was the publisher of Barack Obama

before anyone knew it was Barack Obama.

He published dreams for my father.

It's first edition when it, I don't know what it sold, but it's sold in the high two figures,

I think.

Yeah.

And you know this, they got that book because Obama had signed with a bigger publisher and

he'd gotten an advance and then he missed his deadline, the bane of every author.

And so the book was basically put back out on the market like a tired old, you know,

mule or something or somebody will pick, I mean, at that point he hadn't really, he wasn't

yet Barack Obama and so, but to my dad's credit, he bought this book and I remember him

saying, well, I've never said this, but I remember him saying at home, I think this guy could

be president of the United States.

Yeah.

I can counter many people who said that, but if you, if you, if you read the humanism and

the, the Americanness of that story in all of its complexity and its flaws and its rupture

and its repair in all of those elements, it's candor, it's, it's all of that.

You said to yourself, that's sort of what, that's sort of what we aspire to be and that

in the end, it was kind of the, you know, I, I think about this as an author and that having

a, a literate president is a, is a powerful tool.

Yeah, they're few and far between, but they're, there's some good ones there.

I'm going to go back to China a little bit just to get to know you a little better.

Did you know Chinese before you went there?

When did you learn it?

It's a very difficult language.

You must be great at linguistics.

Well, I started in college, I got the bug as a college freshman.

Really?

It was a great professor who had a whole class on Tiananmen Square and the uprising at

Tiananmen Square in 1989 and he was a kind of Oxford Don type, he was teaching here in

the US, but he, he said it, it was a wonderful approach.

He said, if you want to understand what happened on a single night, June 3rd in Beijing in 1989,

we have to go back a thousand years.

And it was such a seductive way to teach because he said, and if you really want to understand

it, you should probably learn the language.

And that was the beginning of a process and I started studying it as a college freshman

and it became a, in some ways, the guiding line of my life.

I met my wife in China, she's an American, we happened to meet over in Beijing and the

only reason she would call me back is because there weren't very many Americans.

And you got there in 2005, and what's your name in Chinese I saw about it?

Oh, even.

Oh, even.

Oh, even?

Yeah, yeah.

My last name is essentially it means European, which is a generous way of just saying big

nose.

It's kind of, they gave me that, and then even, yeah.

And how, what was the daily life like there for you?

It was a golden age of journalism, of foreign correspondents in China.

And I say that because it was this period when we were, you remember China had embarked

on this grand experiment in 1979, which Deng Xiaoping said, we're going to emancipate

our minds.

That was the quote.

And what they meant was, of course, not give up political power, but try to create a

much space in society where you could live a life without giving up the monopoly on force

and power that the Communist Party had.

And so what that meant was they said, we're going to allow foreign correspondents to come

in.

And so I came in as one of these foreign correspondents.

They'd started doing it in the late 70s, early 80s.

And you could travel all over the country.

I had these kind of magnificent experiences like for a month, I decided to just

walk in Sichuan province and kind of see what would happen.

And the cops would come pretty much every day.

And they would say, I just love the image of what they were getting some calls from somebody.

People would say there seems to be some lunatic western or walking in town.

Can you come check them out?

And they would come.

But you could work.

I did at one point a story where I said I wanted to understand what it felt like to be Chinese

going out into the world for the first time.

And so I joined a Chinese bus tour of Europe.

Thirty.

Better than a Japanese tour, I guess.

I wouldn't have understood a word on the Japanese bus tour.

But it was 39 Chinese tourists and me.

And most of them had never been out of Asia before.

It was all kinds of small town folks.

And we covered five countries in ten days.

We were moving fast.

And I could tell you, we went to Marx's birthplace, little known place, not a place many of you

have been perhaps in Germany.

But we were only there for 11 minutes because we wanted to get to Paris in time for Louis

Vuitton before.

So we had to be repeating impulses.

And I will say that the reason I call it a golden age for foreign correspondents was I

was able to live in a little house in the middle of town in a very Chinese neighborhood.

You didn't have to live anymore in these old compounds where they had already installed

the bugs into every light fixture.

They were really bothered that they had to come and install new listening devices in my

little house.

But it was right before the advent of a new piece of technology, of a whole new world

of technology, things like cell phones that everybody had with them that they could monitor

your text messages that they could see where you were at any moment.

It was just at the tail end in effect of the analog era.

And so you were able to go over, I would leave my cell phone at home so that if they were

monitoring my cell phone, they would think, this lazy guy is just at home another day.

And I could go out to all kinds of places in the country.

Today, that is simply not possible.

I was there most recently reporting in 2023 for the New Yorker.

And it is very, very hard now because you worry about the effect on your sources because

people who agree to talk with you, you have to be thinking foremost about what's going

to happen after I walk out the door.

You don't worry as much about yourself.

But what will the police and the state do?

And so it's become incredibly difficult to do a lot of work on the ground now.

My hat is off to the correspondents who are based there who are figuring it out because

it is almost like, it's a little bit like, there are that many.

There's a very few.

There's very few.

And you are actually quite literally, in some cases, aware of the fact, I had this experience

in recent years of reporting there where you contact somebody about an interview and then

they get a phone call from the state security saying, you shouldn't go to that interview.

And even if that person is very brave and says, I want to do this, as a reporter, there's

a level of almost informed consent you need from that person.

You say to yourself, do they really know the full implications of talking to me?

Because if they talk to me and that story is instantly available everywhere around

the world, what will happen to them?

So it's made it a lot more complicated.

And as a result, we know a lot less about what's happening.

Yes.

But that's another reminder that for whatever's going on here, we're not there yet.

You're absolutely right.

And I think that's an important point to mention.

I mean, I think that in the press, these days, we have an allergy to being pushed around.

That's kind of how what people who go into this business are a little bit ornery by disposition.

I think you would agree with that, right?

My wife, mate.

Yeah.

She's been doing a longitudinal study for some decades.

And we're now in a position where we're being called every day by this government, the

enemy of the state or whatever the latest version of that is.

And I think that people are using the muscles that they have in all the right ways right

now.

So let's turn now to have and have yachts, which is one of my favorite titles of all time.

Well, hasn't it to ask you this, but how did that title come about?

I was working on this topic and I heard that expression in the UK.

Oh, really?

Yeah, and I thought, boy, that is a wonderful little bit of language.

And I said, I wonder if there's ever been a book by that title and there hadn't been.

And I said, you know, I really need to do this as a, and you'll appreciate this being

both a reporter and an editor at various points.

Editors are convinced that writers never know how to title their own pieces.

I just want you to.

Yes.

It's true.

And so I submitted this title as the title of a piece in the New Yorker and my editors

said, I don't know, you really seem, I don't know.

And I said, no, I'm going to die on this hill.

Like this is the hill.

I'm going out on this one.

And so they said, let the guy have his title.

The only times that the editors, the publishers won on a title are the ones I regret.

Right.

Well, that's true.

So I think for you to get it, but I also want to say, you know, I've read this book twice.

And the first time I turned into a socialist, and the next time I turned into something

even more to the left, I mean, you can't read this book and not just react in that, I'm

exaggerating, but you know what I mean.

So let's go through some of that and start actually with what's in the title, the culture

of yachts.

First you go down to Florida and describe sort of the, I mean, it's a fascinating and disgusting

subculture.

Well, I got this.

It was actually the idea of my editor, David Remnik at the New Yorker, who said, you

know, and this is the best kind of story is a story that can be suggested with just

a single word.

He said, what's the deal with these yachts?

And I said, say no more, I'll be reachable in six months in Italy, I assume.

But I had a real puzzle, which is, you know, I said, I don't really know the first thing

about these things.

And, but this is where being a correspondent, your training is basically you just go, you

just go, and you start chatting with people.

And I went down to the Palm Beach International Boat Show.

First I looked in my closet and I said, do I have anything that would be plausibly recognizable

as a yacht?

Come on, this guy.

Well, to be perfectly honest, I got down there and somebody asked me for directions.

I was like, well, all right, I'm guilty.

But what you quickly discover and the reason why this became of interest to somebody who

covers politics and foreign affairs is that these objects, these machines are, in a way,

they are floating symbols of so much of what we've been talking about in this conversation,

about politics and about economics.

I mean, just as a practical matter, the biggest yachts in the world will cost you about

the better part of a billion dollars.

There is long as a football field, as long as a city block.

They are, in fact, the most expensive objects that the human species has ever figured out

how to own, more expensive than any real estate we've bought or sold in this country, more

expensive even than the most valuable work of art, which was Salvador Mundi by Leonardo,

which not incidentally now hangs on the wall of a yacht owned by the Saudi crown prince.

So there, we're all socialists now, I think.

But the truth is that I just decided these objects, look, there is a great tradition of

a kind of writing at the New Yorker that appeals to me, which John McFee in the 1960s wrote

a magnificent book about frozen orange juice.

And the reason it was frozen orange juice that he wrote about was, this was a new thing

in the United States of America that you could wake up on a January morning in Madison,

Wisconsin, and have a spectacular glass of sunshine in a bottle.

And it was partly because we developed the technology during World War II that we used

for processing blood plasma and were able to apply it then to processing frozen orange

juice.

And it also tapped into all of the new marketing power and the new ideas we had about publicity

or propaganda, and this kind of ascendant moment of American optimism.

And he said, I'm just writing a book about orange juice, oranges, oranges.

And in a way, I said, I'm just writing a book about boats.

But you can within that begin to tell a story about how some of the most powerful people

in our society imagine their responsibilities, their opportunities, their luxuries, and

ultimately, in some cases, their seclusion.

I was fascinated by the caste system within that elite group.

You know, you're in Florida, you're at what you think are the mega yachts, and then

what happens?

Yeah, I was, I was sitting there, a slack job standing in front of this enormous, yeah,

thinking, wow, I have gotten to the belly of the beast.

And a guy taps me on the shoulder, one of the attendants, and he says, if you want to

see the really big hardware, you got to go down to the other marina.

And so I went down to see, I made a date to go meet some of the brokers who were buying

and selling these.

And I will tell you, if this hasn't touched your life personally, you may not know that

we are living through the golden age of super yachts in the world.

There has frankly never been as many of these things, or as big as they are selling for

the prices they are.

And I went to see a broker who I was later trying to describe his mood, and I decided

to describe him in the book as exhibiting an almost post-coidal level of satisfaction.

He had sold one yacht the day before, he was selling one that particular evening, and he

was levitating into a kind of blissful stratosphere that I said, I'm going to need to try to

contain this for the purposes of getting it on the page.

These objects, these machines are, as you say, a part of a caste system.

And one of the things that's always the goal, if you're a writer, if you're trying to get

inside a non-fiction world of some kind, is not to look at it from the outside, like,

you know, me, and just saying, gee whiz, these things are awfully big.

But to try to get in and say, what does it feel like to be one of these owners?

Yeah, well, you almost did.

Well, I had this experience.

In Monte Carlo, all right?

I had a moment.

I had a moment.

I went to Monaco, and by the way, Hazard Pay was not forthcoming here.

I've been asking about it ever since, but so I'm at the Royal Yacht Club of Monaco,

and I check into my room there at the Yacht Club, and the Yacht Club is styled like a giant yacht.

And I realized in that instant that I would never be fully satisfied anywhere else again.

And the next morning, I'm out on my terrace, and I looked down, and I see a guy on a yacht,

and I was there.

I was eating an omelette, and I had this glass of, like, preter naturally fresh orange juice,

an ode to McFee, I guess.

I didn't even know it.

And I'm looking at this guy down on this kind of mid-tier Yacht, and he's looking up at me on my

perfect terrace, and there he was.

He was juiceless, and I had this feeling that just started somewhere in my chest.

It was a strange sensation, and it kind of worked its way out.

And I realized, this is what superiority feels like.

There was a moment that really brought this home for me, the owner of one of the world's

fanciest yachts told a guest, one of his friends, who told me that this owner had said to him

in the end, you know, why do I have this thing?

He said, because he said, you and I both fly on private jets, he said, to his friend, the guest.

You and I both have chefs.

He said, so the only way I can tell the world that I am in a different

effing category than you is the boat.

And I thought when I heard that, I said, that really does capture the heart of this matter,

which is about a kind of insatiability, a sort of hole within that people are trying to fill.

And I think all of us now can look out into our public culture in this country at this moment.

I don't need to name any names, but I'm just maybe a few people whose names rhyme with Elon Musk.

And imagine, and imagine why it is that a person does what they, why do they keep acquiring,

why do they keep exerting their control or their ability to shape the world in the way they do.

And on some level, it is about insatiability.

So since you've visited Marx's birthplace for 11 minutes,

are these the excesses of capitalism or the inevitable ends of capitalism?

I think that we have lived through moments in our history that rhyme with this.

Sometimes people will say, well, you know, the Gilded Age was pretty bad.

We had, I mean, this is true that during the Gilded Age, there were parties in New York City

in the 1890s where people would arrive at a ballroom and be shown their way to a horse.

And they would get on the horse and eat dinner in black tie on a horse with champagne in the saddlebags

just because they could. There was another party, a memorable one that made the papers,

where people arrived and were given a little golden trowel and were told to go and dig rubies and

gems out of a giant pile of sand and they could take home what they wanted.

Now, that process had it been allowed to continue, had that period in American life continued.

There was a pretty deep belief, a growing belief among a lot of Americans that this country

was cooked, that there was no way that you could continue on that way. You had vast inequality,

you had life expectancy among the working poor that was declining.

You had acts of abuse in mines out in Colorado, out in West Virginia.

You had examples of grotesque abuses in the slaughterhouses in Chicago and on and on and on.

And there was in a kind of awakening among some people that this can't go on.

And it sounds perverse perhaps, but it was Teddy Roosevelt and later Franklin Roosevelt,

who believed that in order to save capitalism, that what you had to do was reign it in from its

most egregious excesses and abuses. I think it's worth saying, look, we're at a moment right now,

where the United States is capable of producing enormous wealth and capital, enormous opportunity

through technology in many cases. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to settle in the

hands of a group so small that half of all American adults will tell you that they don't have

a thousand dollars to spend in the event of an emergency expense. That is not how you build a

country that is a muscular, thriving, stable, admirable model for the rest of the world.

That's how you build a society that is something closer to oligarchy.

So I guess we're waiting for our next Teddy Roosevelt or FDR.

It's not as crazy as it sounds. Here's why. What did Teddy Roosevelt, what did he represent?

Here was a guy who was a privileged son of the country. They both were. They came out of

tremendous advantage. Teddy Roosevelt had also lived the life. He'd gone around the country. He had

been a rough writer. He had real jobs. He'd done things. He contained multitudes to borrow

the expression. And so when he came back and he said, look, all I'm saying is that we owe people

a square deal, which is essentially the offer that he was making to people. They took him seriously

on that idea. And they said in a way, maybe he has some credibility because he's coming from

the top of society. Why would a man with so many advantages bother to metal in this question?

I mean later, of course, FDR was, as he said, proud to be a traitor to his class. I'm not saying

that we need to rely or wait on the most powerful people in society to decide that they're going to

give up some of that privilege in order to make changes. But they are a part of the process.

Right now, you see in clear, unambiguous terms in New York City, the choice of Mamdani as a

candidate, his success in that race is a blaring alarm about affordability in this country.

About people who say, this is not the bargain I was promised in this country. And we do know from

history that there are people who are at the top who begin to say, this doesn't work. I mean,

already, curiously enough, I quote some in the book, people who are the titans of the hedge

fund industry, guys like Paul Tudor Jones, who say, look, if you look back historically in

equality of this scale, only ends with war or revolution or his particular concern, very high taxes.

But clearly, clearly that little cabal of manhat and landlords and developers doesn't

feel that way, they're trying to defeat Mamdani. I think that's right. It's backfiring, I think.

It totally is. They're discovering that there's no market for what they're pushing as an alternative.

You know, it's an amazing statistic to me, David. I've spent a fair bit of time over the years

reporting from West Virginia. It was where I worked. My first job out of college was at a little

paper called the Clarksburg Exponent Telegram. I was a photographer there. I was a very bad

photographer. How did you end up there? It was my first time as well. I got a job. I sent out

applications to a bunch of places. Do you ever heard of it? I hadn't until I applied, but I

expressed rapturous affection. And most importantly, they said, yeah, we'll give you a job

two hundred thirty bucks a week. And so I came down. And one of the things that is very notable to

me is West Virginia, we think of now in shorthand in journalism as Trump country, right?

Like the reddest place you can go. But in the 2016 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders won all

55 counties of West Virginia. An amazing fact. And when he became unavailable as a candidate,

and in fact, this data suggests that in a one-on-one contest, he would have beaten Trump.

I mentioned it to say there are people all over the country who, if given the right opportunity,

the right kind of candidate, the right combination of qualities, which we can't always predict in

advance, they might be responsive in a way that would surprise us. Another book that you wrote

has to do with Joe Biden. And I'm curious about your perspective about Biden going in,

coming out of the book, and then what happened after that with him.

Yeah, I got interested in Joe Biden strangely through the side door back in 2014 when I first

moved back to the United States. I come back. I moved to Washington, David. I didn't know anything.

I didn't know anybody. And all I knew was foreign policy. I knew foreign affairs. And I knew that

Joe Biden was working on a whole lot of foreign affairs. He would get a lot of, as he would sometimes

say, I go to the places that Obama doesn't want to go. So he was in charge of a whole lot of tough

patches, places like Iraq and things like that. And so I, and you know, look, Biden in Washington

was a little bit of kind of, again, a piece of people that sort of stopped noticing he was there.

He was in the most maligned office in the land, the vice presidency. But I kind of, I said,

oh, maybe I can get an interview. So I called up. I said, you know, I'd like to request an

interview with Vice President Biden. And they said, sure, yeah, how about tomorrow?

I said, oh, okay, okay. I guess we can. And what I discovered was that, as you already knew,

the man could talk. And he would talk and talk and talk. And you watched the faces of his PR

people. And they would just be ash. And because he would say things, you know, he would say things

like, you know, I shouldn't be telling you this, which is the sweetest expression I've ever heard.

And so I'd start and I'd go back. And I'd go back. And I'd go back. And I'd go back. And I'll

tell you the thing, the reason why in that period in 2014, when I started writing about, I wrote

a profile of him in the New Yorker, essentially what seemed like the end of his political career was

a kind of swan song story about this guy who'd been in public life all these years, never really

grasped the brass ring and that kind of thing. What was interesting to me was that he had lived

a real life. He had lost terrible things. He had lost his, as we all know, he had lost his wife

and his daughter. He had bombed out of the presidency for plagiarism in 1987. Didn't even make it to

88. We sometimes say the 88 race, but he was out even before then. He then had two aneurysms

right afterwards. They said you might not ever speak again. That's what the doctors told him.

He was read his last, and by the way, when they told him that it was after the plagiarism scandal and

he said, you know, they could have helped me actually a few months ago. So all of this stuff

that happened, and the reason why it was interesting to me is Washington is a place where usually

people have led lives. The reason they got there is because they had the road scholarship and then

they cruised into Washington and started measuring the drapes. So they haven't lived all that much

Joe Biden was a sort of silver medalist's mindset like he was constantly aggrieved. He had a chip

on his shoulder and that was this engine that powered him. And eventually through the strangest

turn of events, you know, in 2016, of course, he didn't really get the nod from Obama. Obama

supported Hillary and at that point Biden had lost his son, Bo, a kind of one more piece in this

puzzle of loss. And when he ran in 2020, it was almost like his life was this strange, perfect

opposite of Donald Trump's life. You know, Donald Trump had started life with, as you'll recall,

as he said, a small loan of a hundred million dollars from his father and words to that effect

and had led this life of of gilded opportunity and had declared bankruptcy over and over again.

All that's said, and Biden just by being a decent guy was in his own way kind of an alternative

already in 2020, there was concern about his age. It was clear at that point, he would be the

oldest president we'd ever had. And he said, he made and we all remember this, he made a promise

in effect. He said, I will be a bridge. I'll be a transition candidate. And you know, we tried

to kind of weasel out of it a little bit. People say, are you saying you're only going to one for

run for one term and he'd say, no, I'm not saying that, but I'll be a bridge. And everybody

interpreted it for what he was hoping they would take him to me. And I think in a way, what happened

in that story is that he lost sight of that promise and he broke that promise to Americans

on a level that offended them more than he understood. You know, he thought, well, they're going

to reward me for my performance. They're not going to want to usher me out, particularly when

the alternative is this guy who I drove out of the White House. And he didn't understand that

his very presence, he himself aging so visibly and in violation of the compact that he had made

with the public, became essentially ineligible for the presidency. And he never grasped it. And

the more that the data, the more that the evidence became clear that he would not win the more

he dug in and that old chip on his shoulder became a diabolical problem and became in a way

a blinding effect. And he and his people around him

blinded themselves to the reality of what they were facing.

You're listening to W-A-U-K Jackson Milwaukee W-M-D-X Columbus Madison W-C-F-W-H-D-2-W-2-2-A-E-P-Chible

Falls W-F-H-R Wisconsin Rapids W-L-A-K-A-M-R-E and W-L-C-X La Crosse, a part of the civic media

radio network. So on every day on TV, he had this very clotted voice. He was kind of weakening.

That was quite obvious. We all saw that. I remember mentioning in the article that he had these

cards that he was using. And it was, you know, it was prompting him. It was not particularly

strange. He was using it to reel off quotes from Trump that Trump had said, odious things and

so on. But what struck me most of all, David, was that he was defiant. He was completely defiant.

No matter how many times I ask the question of, but what about the fact that people expected

you to run or ask the question of, but what about the fact that the polls show today that you

are trailing in a way that you never were in 2020? His answer was always the same, which is,

I'm the only one who's beaten him. And it was, it was a kind of, it was a, he'd become

convinced that there was something special about his moment. I think January 6th had a transformative

effect on his imagination of the presidency, that watching it, watching this assault, not only on

democracy, but on the building where he really felt at home in his life. He was always a creature

of the Senate, that he felt by the time he got there 14 days later, you know, literally two

weeks standing on those steps, that he felt as if it was almost like a calling. And it was a tragic

and really a calamitous misunderstanding of his mandate, of what the country asked of him and

what the country wanted of him. And what, what saddens me as a person who found so much decency and

humanity in his life before that was that he marred his legacy, he marred his record by staying too

long and making that catastrophic decision to run and to stay after the world was telling him

the time has passed. That turned into a sort of a tragedy. Absolutely a tragedy. Yeah.

It is a tragedy and it is like so much in his life. It is a, it's been a life of improbable success

and almost incomprehensible staggering losses and some that fate visited upon him and some that

he created himself. He's, you know, I, I think that over time we, as we have with some other one

term presidents like George H. W. Bush or Jimmy Carter, where we will look back on the things they

did and begin to say that maybe they were laying in elements of our future that weren't recognized

at the time. That's certainly the case with Biden's infrastructure investments, drug prices,

climate to the degree it hasn't been unwound under Trump. But that can't compensate for. It

doesn't erase what was in the end a violation of what he set out to do which was to save us from

a second Trump term. And that anybody who pays attention to politics and pays attention to

the mind and the psychology as you have of politicians has to find that fascinating.

So I know that I'm asking you to mind read, but does he understand that now? Do you think or do

you think he's rationalizing it today? I don't think he understands that. I'm not sure he'll ever

come to terms with it. I think that he became, look, the presidency is a bizarre thing to want.

And you've written about this. At the core of when you write about presidents, the question we're

always trying to ask is what makes this person get up out of bed in the morning and think not

only I can be, but I should be the president. I mean, that is if it wasn't slightly glamorous,

it would be pathological. I think it still is. I think it may be both in a lot of cases.

And in Joe Biden's case, he had the guiding mantra of his life had been that when the world

pushes against you, that you push back harder and you are a walking icon of resilience.

The problem is that there are moments when the right answer, they answer for yourself, for your

legacy and for the country God knows is to say, actually, I've run my race and it's over.

And he missed that cue. In a way, he almost became, I'm afraid to say, he became persuaded of a

simplified mythology of his own life that wasn't as complex and real as the actuality was.

Since I want all these people to go out and buy your latest book, I will go back to that for one

more story, which is the Florida story. I don't know if this is a crowd that might not even know

who the Florida is. I will say, this one will stay with me forever.

I wanted to write about the phenomenon as part of the Havz and Haviots books.

As part of that book, I wanted to write about the phenomenon of pop stars doing private

gigs for people at home. Because it used to be, if you were the wealthiest guy in town,

you would buy front row seats at the arena or maybe you would get then later, you'd get a skybox.

And now, as a drummer said to me when I was interviewing about this experience, he said,

you know, it used to be that nobody could afford to have the food fighters in their backyard on

a Thursday. But now you can. And so I faced this reporting puzzle, which is nobody wanted to talk

about it. The artists didn't want to talk about it because it was kind of embarrassing to be doing

these money gigs. The clients didn't want to talk about it because they didn't want to showcase

how much they were spending. So I started calling artists after artists and I was getting a whole

lot of nose. And then I was talking to an agent. He said, I think there's somebody who might say,

yes, he said, do you know flow rider and flow rider, not the target audience, I think. Flow rider,

I'll tell these people that this may not be the hall for him. But flow rider is a hip hop star

from the state of Florida, sings about, you know, apple bottom jeans and the boots with the first.

And some of the younger people here will know what I'm talking about. Yeah.

So I called the flow rider who does a lot of these events. And I said, you know, could I

report on this? Could I come along? And he said, yeah, why don't you come along? And so I ended up

embedding with flow rider for a bar mitzvah in Chicago. And I tell this story in the book,

but I mean, it was an embedment, you know, it was, but it really was. I really did come home and

I called my wife and I just said, I think I can die happy as a journalist. I've done all,

all I can ever want to do. So I'd like to close with honoring our fathers. You know, I do this

event because of my dad and the captives. And I know you came up in a journalism family as well.

Tell me about the lessons you learned from Peter Asnos and your family.

I guess what I learned from my dear dad is that we live in this place, this country that has

this tradition of a free press, which is an astonishing right. It is a, I grew up with the idea that

being a reporter is just about the greatest job you can have in the world because it is a passport

to go anywhere. You can find yourself sitting on that ridiculous terrace in Monaco,

or you can find yourself trying to blend in with flow riders on to Raj in Chicago.

Or frankly, at moments of much greater significance, you can find yourself sitting across from

a president in the Oval Office, asking yourself, is he making a catastrophic choice and what will

happen to this country? It is, it feels often, I think, like a tremendous weight because you say to

yourself, my God, I've got to get this right. But having lived in places where people don't have

the luxury, they don't have the chance in China or in places like Iraq to go out and ask people

in positions of power and privilege to explain themselves. It feels to me like the greatest gift,

and I'm just grateful to have the chance to do it every day.

And by God, you do get it right. Thank you, Evan so much. Thank you, David.

You're listening to Civic Media's coverage of the Cap Times 2025 IDFS. We'll be back with more

right after this.

And good evening, everyone at the Civic Media World Headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin.

Not a beautiful September evening. I'm Todd Allball joined by producer engineer Aaron

Zommers at 16 minutes now past the hour of seven o'clock. As Civic Media is ongoing coverage of

the Cap Times IDFS 2025 continues here. Just got done with a fascinating presentation and a

discussion with Evan Osnos, the panelist there, along with David Morales.

Marinus. Thank you very much, Zommers. Marinus there was the moderator. And I thought it was

just a fascinating discussion. And we're going to continue here at the bottom of the hour or

shortly thereafter with another discussion with Minnesota Governor Tim Walls as the panelist

and John Nichols, the great John Nichols, Capitol Times author and independent journalist himself

is going to be here. This is all coming to us just down the street on the other end of state street

at Shannon Hall at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union live and they're setting things up

here for for Governor Tim Walls. And we're also going to take a few minutes to listen to some of the

other ideas fest activities this week in which it continues and more of it continues over the

weekend. We're going to preview that. But right now I want to bring on via phone from Morale Union

Hall at the University of Wisconsin Madison campus, the site of this evening speakers for IDFS 2025,

the political editor for Civic Media and the founder of the recapobulation area, the one you'll

need Dan Schaefer. Dan, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Todd. It's always a

pleasure. Were you in the room for part of the the Evan Osnos presentation? I sure was and I

thought it was a fascinating conversation touched on so much that we you know that we talk about all

the time on your show and across the Civic Media Network and at the recapobulation area talking

about issues of inequality, talking about the politics of the day, talking about Donald Trump.

I thought he had some fascinating insights into Joe Biden there right at the end of the discussion

as well. And yeah, just a really compelling conversation and glad we're able to carry it here

on Civic Media. I couldn't agree with you more that I mean, I know the title of the discussion was

the have and the have yacht sketchy title, by the way, apparently, as a I do like a good pun.

Exactly. But I thought the best part of the entire evening in terms of his discussion was this

insight as someone who has followed Joe Biden for many years, I could offer that unique insight

into Biden towards the end of his political career. And also just this traveling around as well.

So I was I was glad it went off on a tangent as we say around here. Yeah, that's right. It was a

good tangent too. I think that's why the conversation format early was great for this type of

event instead of just having somebody to give up and deliver a keynote style speech or something

like that. I think the conversation format really allowed for things to go in a variety of

different directions. And I don't know if that Joe Biden segment was really planned or anything

like that. But he talked about coming back from working over in China for quite some time and

then coming back to the United States in 2014 and having a really easy time getting an interview

with the vice president. And then a decade later, having another interview with Joe Biden when he

was, you know, as he kind of characterized as the as often as characterized, breaking his promise

in a lot of ways to to run for a second term, you know, and the decisions that and kind of like

all of the different machinations and influences that that fuel those types of decisions. I thought

it was just absolutely fascinating. That's part of what IDFS cap times IDFS 2020 is 25 is about

bringing folks here within Madison and different locations throughout the week, different folks,

different voices around the country. I think it's just a great idea. It continues tomorrow, by the way,

here in in Madison, Dane County Executive Melissa Agard and Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes Conway

will be talking with John Nichols about Madison in this in this political era. Also the afternoon,

or yes, in the afternoon as well, Ben Wickler, former Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman,

is going to be giving a talk as well. The rise of Christian nationalism is going to be on the

docket tomorrow, particularly a pertinent timely timely indeed. Mike Lucas would say given the events

of the Charlie Kirk assassination and Dan and I, you and I talked about it on our show earlier

this afternoon. It appears as more information comes out that this alleged assassin against Charlie

Kirk may have been radicalized by the right online and part of this thing they call the

Grapers, which is the something that a lot of people, as you said earlier today, think of magas being

right. Well, it may disturb people and others even a more far right. So probably couldn't be a

more timely discussion of the rise of Christian nationalism, Dan. Yeah, it's an important conversation.

It's one that I think is, you know, a little bit flying has been flying under the radar in certain

ways and I think it's good to have a forum to discuss these types of issues and I think it'll be

a good conversation. It's like, you know, the way that this has embedded itself in our politics

and it's just kind of intersection of religion and politics in so many ways. I think, you know,

now's certainly the right time to be having these types of conversations. The star of the show

in terms of IDFS tomorrow ends up back where you're at tonight in Shannon Hall at Memorial Union

on campus. It's a one on one with Illinois Governor Democrat JB Pritzker and now we're seeing again

ripped right out of the headlines of the day that in part Dan appears that part of Governor

Pritzker is kind of standing up to Donald Trump on the Trump administration trying to come into Chicago

with more ICE agents and possibly keyword possibly National Guard. That has deterred Trump

as we hear now. He's moving his attention to Memphis, Tennessee. So be interested and see what

Governor Pritzker says on that tomorrow. Yeah, and on a host of issues, you know, I think it's

Pritzker has become a pretty prominent national figure and you know, we've got a we've got a great

week of hearing from some Midwestern governors Tony Evers obviously spoke the other night. Tim

Walls speaking minutes away here and JB Pritzker. So we've you know, we've got most of the NFC

North coverage here. We absolutely do. Now, if only we could get the different quarterbacks in,

I mean, that'd be even better. You're listening to continuing civic media coverage of I

cap times IDFS 2025 live from the University of Wisconsin Madison campus here in Madison. I'm

joined by a political editor for civic media founder of the recon population area Dan Schaefer

over the phone. Dan speaking of sports earlier, one of the cool things about IDFS. It's not just

all politics. And Mike Lucas and Tom Oates, great sports reporters here in the Madison area.

They have a podcast Oates and Lucas or Lucas and Oates with the cap times. And I was there at their

IDFS presentation earlier this week. I want to take a clip. They sat down and talked with four

men's hockey coach, Badger hockey coach, Tony Granado. And it wasn't just sports. So I want to

pick it up here in the program where they're talking to coach Granado about something that has

touched both coach Granado and Mike Lucas, the subject that touches far too many people. And that's

cancer. Tony's involved in a project, a document, a series title fight for life. Can you explain

what path you've gone down with this? Sure, you know, this started about a year and a half ago. I

had three buddies that were kind of, I don't want to say they were looking out for me. I was going

through my chemo treatment. I was right here in Madison. And my buddy said, Hey, you can't sit

around just waiting for your next treatment. We need to keep you busy. We've got to find something

for you to do. And they're in the TV and the sports industry. And they said, how about, you know,

you think of an idea? We'll put a studio down in your basement. You can break down plays.

You can figure out, you know, how to put something that we can get out there so people can watch

you describe the game of hockey in some way, shape or form. And we just started throwing ideas

at each other. And you know what it's like going through treatment. Look, there's some really

tough days. And there were days where I was looking for things to be inspired by and be motivated by.

And fortunately for me, I had lots of people, including yourself, that would reach out to me

regularly and kind of share the journey and what I was going through. And lots of those people

had either dealt with cancer or different things in their lives. And they became inspiring to me.

So we came up with this idea that if things are inspiring to me, of hearing of other people's

stories and their journeys of beating whether it be cancer, whether it be a life trauma,

those were inspirational for me. And so we decided to break down Doug McLeod, who is