Steve, welcome back to the realignment. Hey, good to see you again, Marshall. So this is actually the first episode. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of things on today's conversation, but this is an episode that I've actually wanted to do because now that my own conference season is sort at it's midpoint, I've actually had a month of just saying, hey, I'm Marshall Kosloff and I work at the Niskanin Center. That is my full-time job. It's not one of my six weird podcasting hats. And I get a question from folks saying, hey, what is the Niskanin Center? And when they look into the Niskanin Center, they'll often cite like a 2023 Molly Ball, Peace in Time magazine, or in a scan was referred to as, quote, the most interesting thing taken in American politics,

or there reads some stuff from 2015, where in Ascanon is this, like, libertarian, heterodox think tank

that's thinking about carbon taxes.

So part of my job and what I'd love to do with this episode, because the realignment is now

firmly in Iscanan Center podcast, to spend a little bit of time before we get to other topics, just talking about Niskanin. And I don't want this episode to sound like a paid ad or anything like that. But I love to just sort of give people the like, hey, you want to know what Niskanin is? Check out this episode. that Steve and I think, Steve, you're one of Niskanin's longest reside. You came in 2017.

Yeah. Scanan is, check out this episode. I think Steve, I think, Steve, you're one of Niskanin's longest

reside. You came in 2017. Yeah, so this actually may be a good place to say what it is. And so

just to give you a little level setting of what I do. So to my day job, I am at the School of

Government and Policy at Hopkins, but I'm a political scientist, and within political science, I'm in a field called a kind of a tradition called historical institutionalism.

And, you know, I often say what it means to be a historical institutionalist is I always answer the question about what something is

by talking about how it came into being, right? Because most things we talk about, whether they're

political institutions or parties or interest groups or political movements are, you know,

moving, changing things rather than just some sort of, you know, longstanding

essence. And that's true of Niskan. So I came in, honestly, right after the election of Trump.

And Jerry Taylor, who had then been the president, had asked me to get involved.

He'd asked me to be on the board.

And I wasn't quite sure that that was exactly what I wanted to do because I was an academic.

And having that kind of think tank relationship might not be entirely appropriate.

But I did kind of think, I mean, not to put it too overblown, but I did kind of think, I mean, not to put it too

overblown, but I did kind of think of this as my war work, right?

That this was going to be a really weird era.

And my sense was that it was going to be really important to have some think tank that had

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