Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment.

My guest today is the New Yorkers Nick Romano. It has a new book out. It's called the alternative. The central idea behind the book is that despite all of the deep dissatisfaction, almost everyone feels the political status quo in the United States around the world. There are a few examples in our

public discourse of folks actually providing a clear articulation of what the

alternatives to that status quo actually are. So in his book and in this conversation Nick focuses on

actual on-the-ground examples of how across the globe we are seeing alternate

social structures and arrangements that can get at how people feel the economy is so unjust.

Hope you all enjoy this conversation.

I think it's a great starting point on a bunch of different places folks can go.

And of course a huge thank you to the Foundation for American Innovation.

Nick Rameo, welcome to the realignment.

Great to be here.

So I want to start here because you just have a great title for the book that gets at a deeper idea that folks, especially those in the Gen Z audience are going to kind of not really get the reference.

What is the reference to there is no alternative this alternative Margaret Thatcher phrase referring to?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I agree it may be a bit of a deep cut. I think it kind of depends on your

context. So Margaret Thatcher in in 1980, you know, she made a speech in which she used the phrase. It was almost verbatim.

What she actually said in this 1980 speech is, there's no real alternative and she was referring to a kind of

suite of economic policies that came to be known as neoliberalism and which

tended to involve deregulation, the increase of free market thinking

into as many domains of life as possible.

So you know, labor markets, health care, schools, trade, etc.

All of this kind of got swept up in the phrase, there's no alternative. And, you you know it's it's 1980 so memes were not as

viral or as rapid but it became a mean the phrase there is no alternative came

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