Jon Lovett: “This is not Policy Making. This is Vandalism”
The Best People with Nicolle Wallace
MS NOW, Nicolle Wallace
4.5 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is not policymaking. This is vandalism. And that's part of what makes it so upsetting. It's not that they have some set of overarching goals. They are cavalier and glib about institutions they benefit from, that provide data they benefit from, that helps us understand the economy, |
| 0:21.6 | understand our world, but in decadence, in cruelty, in wanting to own the libs, they are doing |
| 0:27.9 | vandalism. |
| 0:30.6 | Hi, everyone. |
| 0:31.4 | I will admit to being a little nervous about this week's guest, because where I am a podcasting |
| 0:35.9 | rookie, this is the podcasting trailblazer. Don Leavitt |
| 0:40.5 | is here. It's the best people podcast and it is made to tap into people who have the best insights |
| 0:46.9 | about the moment in which we live, the moment in which we're all trying to survive our politics |
| 0:52.0 | and something we talk about a lot, how culture can |
| 0:55.2 | help our politics out of this death spiral it seems to be in. So this is the best people, |
| 1:01.1 | and this is John Lovett. Thank you so much for being here. |
| 1:05.6 | Thanks for having me. I think Trailblazer, it was a, the trail had been blazed. There was a pretty, there were ruts in the |
| 1:12.7 | ground. We were, we were in the right place at the wrong, at the right time, well, the wrong time, but you |
| 1:16.5 | understand. Well, I think that when I look at where all of the energy and the heat is, I mean, you can, |
| 1:23.6 | there's like a volume business of stories every day about the death of legacy media. |
| 1:28.2 | And you guys were way out in front of where not just the heat, but where the trust was going in the media, with Cricket Media and with Pod Save America and with all of your individual projects. |
| 1:38.8 | Well, I feel really proud. So we started Pod Save America. We realized we wanted to do it right after Trump had won in 2016. |
| 1:45.6 | We launched in 2017. |
| 1:47.5 | We called it a media company, but really it was a blog post on Medium and a podcast feed that we started from scratch. |
| 1:53.8 | Like that was our media company. |
| 1:55.6 | And we were fortunate that it was at a moment where people were checking out podcasts. |
| 2:02.5 | It was a moment where people were looking for political analysis that treated people like |
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