from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, August 12.

This is my first show since Tim Walz was chosen to be Vice President Harris's running mate.

And I want to start by playing an

excerpt from a speech of his as governor of Minnesota that someone sent me that is a little

different from the straight up political analysis that's been going around. I had the time in

the last few days to listen to some extended clips, and we always have the luxury of time on this show

compared to the newscasts. So I want to play about a three-minute clip. The context is that as

governor of Minnesota, he's giving a speech to something called the 2024 Esri User

Conference. Now, Esri is a company that makes what they call geographic information

system or GIS software. Remember those initials GIS because they come up in the clip. The company

says GIS promotes problem solving from a geographic approach. And remember, Tim Wallace was a high school geography teacher for a long time before going

into politics.

And at this conference earlier this year, before the Biden debate changed the election year,

before Walls was being considered to run for vice president, therefore, he gave this talk.

He described working on a farm early in his life where

there wasn't much to do during his breaks, but there was a pile of old National Geographic

magazines that wound up sparking his interest in the people and places of the outside world.

And so he went to school for geography to become a geography teacher. And we pick

this up as he tells a story of being a geography teacher in 1993 using the GIS software for a class

project on what, on predicting where the next genocide might take place in the world. Now, as background,

he describes getting interested in the subject of genocide or more interested in it when he was

invited to be a teacher representative from Minnesota to an important conference at an important

...