No Images? Click here
"If you’re tired of 24 hour news, the constantly evolving news cycle, and rank punditry— this podcast is for you."
- Reviewer on Apple Podcasts
Kick off your Labor Day weekend with The Realignment, Hudson's new five star-rated podcast. Each week, hosts Marshall Kosloff and Saagar Enjeti sit down with a leading public figure to track the shifting fault lines of politics, culture, foreign policy and more.
Below are some highlights from the first month of The Realignment.
J.D. Vance on Tech and Politics
Excerpts from The Realignment's interview with "Hillbilly Elegy" author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance
What is it about current venture capital and government policy that's holding back innovation in technology?
We've lost our willingness as a society to say that certain technologies are valuable and we're going to commit the public resources necessary to get them off the ground so that they can eventually be commercialized and turned into real products that create businesses and make people's lives better.
The reason why Google and Facebook’s business model works is network effects—the more people who are on Facebook, the more valuable of a business it is. That's not necessarily true for a biopharmaceutical company. But you need protectable, defensible patents that you can actually sell that at some sort of higher price to justify all of the R&D sunk costs that went into developing it. But if everybody's just going to steal it, then you're going to get more businesses that are built around network effects like Facebook and Google than you are around real intellectual property assets, you know, like a drug that cures cancer or Alzheimer's.
How are you thinking about China in the context of national conservatism?
China's pursuing an industrial policy by shifting entire supply chains away from the U.S. It makes their economy more vibrant. It gives them an edge in new, emerging technologies. And it also makes it really hard for Americans who haven't gone to postgraduate school to have good jobs…I work in venture capital, and if you invest in a real technology enterprise, you have to be worried that when a company hopefully goes global and scales, it may have the very thing that makes it a good investment stolen by the Chinese.
The word "nationalist" is considered a dirty word in a lot of circles. How do you think the term should be approached from the right?
It’s a broadly shared notion that, no matter where you came from, no matter who your parents are, if you're committed to the vibrancy of this country, you belong as part of the American nation; you have responsibilities to it, and it has responsibilities to you. Our leadership class assumes that American nationalism is fundamentally about race or ethnicity and not about a very basic recognition that's as true in Texas as it is in Ohio, that people think that their country should look out for them. And if their notion of who belongs in their country is exclusionary, then we should push back against it.
The above remarks have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Washington Post columnist and "Conservative Sensibility" author George Will debates the impact of technology, the next steps for the conservative movement, and how societies maintain their faith in the forces of dynamism amid rapid change.
Episode 3: Silicon Valley vs D.C.
Open Markets Institute Fellow Matt Stoller and the Lincoln Network’s Head of Policy, Zach Graves, join The Realignment to discuss the origins of the populist backlash against Silicon Valley technology companies.
Episode 4: John Walters, Drug Czar
Former White House Drug Czar and Hudson Institute COO, John Walters, joins The Realignment to discuss drug control policy at home and abroad.
Hudson Institute
1201 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Suite 400
Washington, DC 20004
