Primary Everyone

Tyler Austen Harper on taking smart risks in American politics.

In the Enneagram personality framework, there is an important (and arguably underrated, especially in the Trump Era) personality type: The Loyal Skeptic. Every team needs someone who believes deeply in your cause and will also tell you when your ideas are s***.

On our team, we see Environmental Studies professor and Atlantic contributor Tyler Austin Harper as a loyal skeptic of the Democratic party.

Last Summer, after Joe Biden's disastrous June debate performance, we quietly exchanged Harper's posts on X.

After the election, his Atlantic article, 'Of Course Black Men Are Drifting Toward Trump', highlighted how Democrats took key segments of the electorate for granted

Like any good loyal skeptic, Harper doesn't just identify problems - he offers alternatives, pushing the Democratic party to evolve rather than simply tearing it down. We wanted to talk to him because his perspective is clear, principled, and normal. This conversation is part of our ongoing White Board series asking 'Where do we go from here?'

His ideas range from embracing popular policy positions to agreeing with Trump when he's right and supporting primary challengers to some of the biggest names in American politics.

Why?

To give voters a real choice and viable alternative to the same old same old in American politics.

We hope you find this episode as refreshing and thought-provoking as we did.

P.S. He stayed for our outside of politics segment to talk about his extreme fishing hobby

Want more Pantsuit Politics? Subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode and get access to our premium shows and community.

Episode Resources

• Tyler Austin Harper for The Atlantic

• Tyler Austin Harper for The New York Times

• Tyler Austin Harper on X

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers. You're listening to Pantsuit Politics, and today we are continuing our whiteboard series. We're having big picture conversations with folks about the future of the Democratic Party, about where we are in this political moment, and today we are very excited to welcome Tyler Austin Harper. Tyler is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. You'll hear this in the conversation, but we both stalk his tweets to see what he's thinking about and talking about. Always provocative, always interesting. I don't always agree, but I always find something to think about more deeply and in a new way. And we loved this conversation and hope that you will, too. He even stuck around for Outside of Politics where he told us about the most bizarre form of fishing you've ever heard of. It's going to blow your mind.

Sarah [00:00:52] It's going to blow your mind. It's a delight. I'm so excited for everyone to listen. Speaking of delight, our new merch and video messaging section of our website is up and running. If you would like some Pantsuit Politics merchandise or if you would like a custom video greeting or message or pep talk from Beth and I, then head on over to Pantsuitpoliticsshow.com and check it out.

Beth [00:01:20] Is there anything that I love more than giving a pep talk? There isn't. I love making these messages for people. So we hope that you will check that out. One quick note before we share our conversation with Tyler Austin Harper. We had this discussion on Thursday, March 6th, and are sharing this episode with you while our team is on retreat, thinking about the future of Pantsuit Politics and planning more conversations like this one. So we hope that you enjoy it and we'll be back into the headlines on Friday. And next up, Tyler Austin Harper.

Sarah [00:01:59] Tyler Austin Harper, welcome to Pantsuit Politics.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:02:02] Thank you so much!

Sarah [00:02:03] I told you we just pass your tweets back and forth so often that we thought, why don't we just invite him on the show to have a more extensive conversation with us?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:02:12] Well, thank you. I appreciate it. It's good to hear the tweets resonate rather than cause irritation. So always happy to hear that.

Sarah [00:02:22] I know that it's probably a little bit iffy to use the word brave with a tweet, but often you're saying something that maybe we've just said to each other, but not out loud on the show. So there is a component of bravery there, especially in the critique of the progressive left in the Democratic party.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:02:40] I don't know how brave I am, but I'll certainly take the compliment. Thank you.

Sarah [00:02:44] Let's start with a critique of the Democratic Party, unless you are just tickled pink with the reaction during that congressional address. In which case, I'm interested in that opinion as well.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:02:54] Yeah, I really feel like I, like many Americans-- not just Democrats, but Americans in general are just desperate for them to do something other than hold up little signs at a hearing.

Sarah [00:03:05] The paddles didn't work for you?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:03:07] No, paddles and matching shirts didn't really, I think, move the needle. And I think it speaks to a broader frustration that the Democratic Party spent, rightly or wrongly, as a campaign strategy, a whole lot of time saying Donald Trump is an authoritarian and a fascist.

Sarah [00:03:20] And money. So much money.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:03:26] And as soon as he was elected, they've since just played dead. So they spent all this time saying this person's a threat to our democracy, and now the most they can do is wave around some panels and color coordinate their outfits. So, immensely frustrating.

Beth [00:03:41] It feels to me like there's a connection between the party's position and a seemingly disparate topic that you tweeted about recently. Got my attention when you were critical of universities for treating their endowments like monopoly money. This is a pet peeve of mine. I hate endowments because I hate the idea that we're just holding all of our money for the future because the future is when we're really going to play our cards, not today. seems to me to be what's going on with the Democratic Party and has been for the last 10 years. Like we're just in this protective mode, shoring up for whenever the real deal is going to go down. And I wonder when you think the real deal happens for the party, what is going to be the thing that takes them out of that protective mode and into offense?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:04:34] Yeah. I imagine when we get closer to the midterms that some of those wheels will start turning, but I think they need to do more now because people are freaked out or they're frustrated. And I think they want to feel like the people they put in office or who are on their team are doing something to have their say about what is going on. So I do think there is this defensive sort of possum playing that I think is a real strategic error. In part, I think it's a response to-- and not unreasonable sense that during Trump's first term they reacted to every single thing. And they were constantly put in this position of people feeling like, okay, we get it. You're constantly crying wolf. You're overreacting. And there is some danger of that.

[00:05:16] But I think they went from, in Trump's first term, overreacting to everything, when there were some things you could just not fuel the flames and just let it burn out, to this time really underreacting to everything. You have some folks like Chris Murphy and Bernie Sanders, he's going around and filling packed rooms and talking about what's going on in the country. But a lot of other Democrats are just putting out little videos and more or less playing dead. So I really think we have to go on offense. I understand, like I said, maybe there's some sense that in the past we were too on offense and people got sick of hearing from us. But I think we've really overcorrected the second go round.

Sarah [00:05:52] I always really appreciate your perspective. It always feels a little bit removed from the elite consultancy class as we are. And that's what I worry about because there's still a lot of reacting. First, it was a constitutional crisis and then it was a coup. And the language keeps getting more incendiary and alarmist. And there seems to be a lot of understanding that the party faithful are frustrated. But I don't know how much the persuadable middle is crying out for these harder reactions. Chris Murphy's from Connecticut. Love him. But you know what I mean? I want to see someone who understands this is what people who are persuadable, who maybe voted for Biden, then voted for Trump, this is what they care about. This is what they're paying attention to. And my gut tells me it's not harsher language about how awful Donald Trump is.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:06:55] No, I totally agree with that. I think there's a real problem where the democratic leadership and intellectual class is totally out of touch with both regular working class Democrats, but also the middle of the country. I think we can see that show up in a number of ways. I on Twitter have often complained during the campaign about Liz Cheney and Harris touring with Liz Cheney. But the reason I focused on that so much is it's a proxy for this broader issue that the Democratic consultant class is totally out of touch with regular swing state Americans. I am from a working class part of central Pennsylvania. I know a lot of Republicans and a lot of moderates. People there do not have positive views of Liz Cheney because they view her as somebody who dragged us into disastrous wars and sent their friends and family members overseas to come back with no legs.

[00:07:45] And so if they just had a few working class people from those kinds of places in their consultancy class, anyone could have told them that actually in the Rust Belt, they're not a big Liz Cheney fan, so you doing this tour is really disastrous. I think you've landed on a really important problem. It's not just an inaccessibility issue, as progressives would say; that there are not more working-class people in the Democratic Party. It's a huge strategic problem because there are not people in the room that can tell them, hey, when your response to Trump's address is about how Reagan was great and Trump would have lost us the Cold War, that's not a talking point that resonates with folks in the Rust Belt who are like worried about egg prices.

Sarah [00:08:27] And who hate Reagan.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:08:28] Reagan, yeah. That's something that moderates in Arlington, Virginia care about, who are all of your friends. And so there's a real issue, not just we need to economically diversify the Democratic Party for some moral reason, but we need to diversify leadership for reasons of strategy because otherwise we keep stepping on these particular rakes that I think are really unhelpful.

Beth [00:08:50] But even the egg prices messaging is just hard to hear in an authentic way from Democrats right now. Like the idea of people holding empty egg cartons that was floating around, I thought, please don't do that. I've seen you in a number of articles say this outreach was condescending. And I wonder what can be done that's not condescending. It feels to me really challenging right now for this party to communicate a message in an authentic way that gets to that persuadable middle voter.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:09:24] I think one of the huge problems the Democratic Party has is that many folks in leadership don't want to admit that they've been wrong about anything, so they will just not talk about it. So whether it was the sense they got that they got in 2020 over their skis on certain issues related to gender and race and defund the police, instead of acknowledging that, they won't talk about it during the Harris campaign. They're just going to bury it as though it never happened, right? And people know that you said these things. And I don't think that's the reason she's lost. I think that's way overplayed. But my point is there is this move that Democrats tend to resort to, which is just if we did something unpopular we'll not talk about it. And I think this also relates to the egg prices issue. During Biden's presidency, the Biden administration, Democratic spokespeople repeatedly said voters feel like the prices are too high. But, in fact, the economy's never been better. They're just wrong. It's a vibe session, as people called it. Whereas, people were saying, no, my groceries are more expensive. And so they felt gas-lit by the Democratic Party.

[00:10:22] And so I think you're right that they have less credibility now to wave around cartons of eggs. But one way to get that credibility back is just to be forthright and say, you know what, this election was a wake -up call to us. We realized you were right. Prices are too high. We didn't take it seriously enough. We bandied about this term vibe session and dismissed the concerns of regular people. We were wrong to that. But the Republican Party right now is screwing you we are in a position to make things better. And so I just think you have to confront some of that honestly. But there's been a real reticence, I don't know if it's a fear of showing weakness, but to acknowledge in a kind of forthright way any of those previous errors. And there's some of it that's going on. But I think the way to get credibility back is just to say, hey, we did stuff wrong. This is how we think about things now. And it's also to bring in some new folks into the Democratic Party who are not associated with any of these catastrophes.

[00:11:18] My friend Jay Caspian Kang has said we need to primary everybody. And to be honest, I think that's more or less right. I think this whole party leadership knew about the Biden situation. They knew that he was way underwater. They knew because polling was available, that most Americans wanted a different candidate going back years and they allowed this crisis to unfold and now we are where we are. I think part of the solution is the democrats who are currently in power need to just own up to their mistakes and talk honestly to the public but I also think the task is going to be getting some of these folks who burned all of their credibility whether it was because they covered up the Biden age thing or whatever else. And they need to get out of office and we need to make room for new younger people because the democratic party is too old, too elite, and too out of touch.

Sarah [00:12:03] I totally agree. And I think the mirror image (I just wrote about this for our Substack) is they'll never admit when Trump is right about something. Even because he's correctly identified something that people really understand and they feel heard or he's, through a combination of luck and who knows what else, happened upon a solution that works and people are happy with, even when he later abandons it, we're allergic to saying, yeah, that criminal justice reform stuff he did was great, period. End of sentence. We won't admit our mistakes. We won't claim that he gets anything right. And so especially because he flip-flops so much, we twist ourselves into these positions where there's nothing we can claim except for, I don't know, maintaining the status quo. And if you are a party filled with people who have been doing this for decades... I used to read all those statistics about the house and Trump and the Republican party. I can't cite it right now, but there's something like 80 % of the Republicans have been there for less than like two years. It was like a huge turnover in the Republican party.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:13:05] Yeah, great point.

Sarah [00:13:06] And I used to see that and go that's so sad. They pushed out the moderates. He's taken over the party. And yes, of course, some of that is true. Of course, that's true. But also what they have is a party full of people highly adapted to this political moment. Highly, highly adapted to this political moment. We have people like that. AOC is the person we all cite. I think that there are people out there who read as authentic because they are, because they came up in a moment where they had no other choice but to be authentic in this type of media environment. But not enough of them. I don't hate Chuck Schumer, but it's time to go, man. I don't think you're bad at your job necessarily, but parts of your job you've been doing for a long time, but the job has changed. And I just think we have to acknowledge that.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:13:55] Yeah. I couldn't agree more with you. And particularly about the point about Donald Trump is occasionally right about something and he usually-- or rather I would say he's often puts his finger on the right problems and then his solutions to those problems are completely wrong.

Sarah [00:14:09] Well, they change too much, even when they're right. He's like, I changed my mind.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:14:13] Yeah. No, totally. Totally. And so I think one of the things that I find frustrating, too, is that we need to realize he won for a reason. Part of that reason was we didn't mount a campaign that was sufficiently popular to win the election. But part of it is because there are things he says that are actually popular and that people like.

Sarah [00:14:31] He did do that.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:14:32] Yes, exactly. And I think one of them is foreign policy, where I disagree often very profoundly with the way in which Donald Trump executes his foreign policies. But his basic point that we're spending too many tax dollars overseas for scary wars that a lot of America don't understand what they have to do with us, that resonates with a lot of people. And you might disagree with how he executes on that belief, and I tend to disagree, but that core ID is a popular one. And I think we need to spend more time reflecting on how is it that this man won election twice? It's not the Russians. It's that he's doing and saying things that are popular. Not all of it, but some of it. And we should be able to say, you know what, actually, this thing here he's executing it poorly because he has a bad attention span and his policies are unserious, but he is right, actually.

[00:15:25] That universities should pay in endowment tax. As somebody who comes from the world of academia, I find it immensely frustrating that it is a Republican rather than a Democratic president who was saying if you are sitting on an endowment of $40 billion or $50 billion, actually you need to pay more than 1 % tax a year. That's really frustrating to me. That should be a Democrat saying those things. So I really hear you about it's important to resist Trump where he needs to be resisted, which is most of his agenda, but also to not get negatively polarized into defending things that are unpopular simply because Trump happens to be right about something.

Beth [00:16:04] I think that there is a temptation to figure out how to carefully acknowledge what's right in Trump instead of taking some risk. You would hope that the gift of Trump would be permission for everybody to take some risk.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:16:17] Yeah.

Beth [00:16:18] On foreign policy, for example, what you said about the Rust Belt is really important. And that a politician who's willing to come out and say, you know what, we really appreciate our military, but also we've been horrible to our military. Look at how many lives have been ruined by service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it just feels almost too risky for anybody to go down that road. I wonder where else you would like to see people take some risks.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:16:44] Yeah, I would really like to see people take some risks on the economy. I think particularly in this last election cycle, there was all this invocation of Democrats need to do the popular thing. That's what the consultant class said. We're going to figure out, we're going to do surveys and focus groups and polls, and we're going to find out what is popular, then we're going to do the popular thing. Well, they didn't actually do that on the economy. If you look at polling, going back years, $20 minimum wage gets huge support from the American public. Healthcare, huge support from the American public. Free public college, huge support from the American public. Regulate the banks, huge support from the American public, support from a majority of Republicans. These are popular issues that are economically brave stances that they can take, that are actually in line with public sentiment. And so there are things like that that the Democratic party should be standing for.

[00:17:34] One of my many things that really bothers me in this moment is there's this invocation of the left or the far left. The far left set us out to sea through their unpopular policies. And depending on what you mean by far left, I agree. If by far left you mean to fund the police or prison abolition or open borders, yeah, I agree all of that was a strategic error. However, if by 'far left' you mean that the banks should be regulated and that people shouldn't go bankrupt when they get cancer, that is not a far left position. And I worry that there's this slipperiness where we're invoking we need to moderate. And I think it's an important question on what are we moderating? There are places, particularly cultural issues, where we absolutely need to moderate. We're way out of step with the public. But there are economic issues that are not moderate, but they are really popular and we should have the bravery to do it.

Sarah [00:18:28] But here's the thing. I think the issue is they all become a part of a whole where moderation is seen as unethical, immoral, abandonment of our values. I had a dear friend who works in environmental policy. And I'll never forget him telling me, yeah, we just basically figured out that to achieve our goals, we had to link it to all these other issues. So you have to tie it together. You have to link trans rights to climate change. You have to link abolish police to feminism. Because if you leave any of these pieces behind, you're a bad person. You're on Twitter; you know what I'm talking about. You know what I mean? That's why there's no moderation allowed because everything is a moral position, not a political strategy.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:19:26] You're totally right. I think it's also important to recognize where this comes from. That move to everything is connected and actually it's not just the economy, it's also race, this and this; this was an attack that Hillary Clinton used to fend off Bernie Sanders during the 2016 election cycle where she started going on the campaign trail and said Bernie only talks about class, he doesn't talk about race. Breaking up the banks won't end racism, was her famous line. So a lot of this madness that we've had to endure, where everything is connected and it's, no, it's not just race, or not just class, it's also race and gender and this and this and this. And there's this ever connecting web of different groups and ideas and identities that we have to connect, even just to talk about something as simple as climate change. That stems from the Clinton campaign. And now it's associated with the progressive left, but that's where that comes from.

Sarah [00:20:14] Where's our oral history on where that strategy came from? That's what I want to know.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:20:17] I know!

Sarah [00:20:17] What consultant thought that up and was like, I know what we'll do.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:20:21] Yeah, exactly. But you're right. Without getting too specific, I was affiliated with a student group when I was an academic, not a student, who wanted to do a climate emergency declaration where they believed that other universities in Europe had declared a climate emergency on campus as a way to push their institutions to do more. I think that's a great idea. I was like yes they asked me to be involved I said sure I would be happy to. I have expertise in environmental issues. But it soon became clear that this document, the emergency declaration, got bigger and bigger and bigger. Because it was like well we need to have a policy about positive consent and we need to have a policy about this and this. And if you would ask, what does positive consent, while great, have to do with carbon emissions? It was like, well, environmental justice and racial justice and gender justice and blah, blah, blah are connected. And that is not wrong in some sense. It is true that the global poor and particularly poor women around the world bear the brunt of many climate impacts. That is just straightforwardly true. But at the same time, we can't just have an ever -expanding list of issues that you have in order to believe in one you're required to believe in all these other ones.

Sarah [00:21:37] Well, and it says the only thing we have in common is our exploitation.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:21:41] Yes. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

Sarah [00:21:43] That's it. That's what we share. Nobody wants to hear that. That's not a winning political message. And I'm interested that you brought up this experience on the university. Because when Beth asked you that question I thought for sure you were going to say, I'd like to see more risk in academia. It's a lot of carefulness in academia.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:21:57] No, I would love to see more risk in academia. There's things that Trump is doing like endowment taxes I think are good. Indirect cost cuts are reasonable. He's doing them too severely that is causing problems. But there are things where he has the right stance if he executes too harshly. But academics have not-- or universities, I should say, because I don't think the problem is actually professors for the most part. We can be kooky, but it's mostly the administration that is causing these issues and that is taking these stances. There's been a little soul-searching about why conservatives have attacked universities for 75 years, going back to the 1950s, as hotbeds of indoctrination. We should ask ourselves why, finally, after 75 years of making the same attacks on us over and over and over are they suddenly successful?

[00:22:48] And the reason they're suddenly successful is we have squandered all of our public credibility. And so the public is at this point. In the 60s and 70s, the public might say, yeah, some of those professors at UC Berkeley are weird, but you know what, we're winning the space race and we trust our public institutions. And now that's not the case. So we should reflect more in academia about why is this happening? Why are these attacks suddenly proving successful after being mostly unsuccessful for 75 years. And a part of the answer is that through actions we've made, we've squandered a lot of public trust. And again, by we, I mean the university as such. It's not the English department that is causing these problems. We have no power.

Beth [00:23:32] That makes sense to me, but it also feels to me like some of that trust has just evaporated as what it means to have a college degree has changed, and where higher education fits into having a good life and what's available to you on the other side of that. This is my biggest concern. I worry that we who care about politics are always going to be fighting the last war. It seems absurd to me that on the other side of this election, as you said, a lot of Democratic senators are now making little videos. That Gavin Newsom is making a podcast. Because that was the last election. The last election was the podcast election. That doesn't mean the next one is going to be. Who's thinking about what the next is going to be and what the next set of policies need to be? The nice thing about the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by Trump, I think, is that they did get to shed all that baggage. They don't have to tie everything together anymore. They could just say, we used to think that and we don't anymore. We kicked out everybody who thinks that. And so I wonder if that's what the party needs more than anything, just a hostile takeover that frees them to think about the future.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:24:40] I think that's totally right. One thing I really firmly believe is we need a Tea Party on the left liberal side of the aisle. In other words, a group of people who are going to primary incumbents and who are going to try to get them out of office and put new people in. Because there is no reason that Chuck Schumer needs to be in office still. Nothing against Chuck Schumer personally. He's led the Democratic Party through some good times and some bad times. But there is no reason that Gary Connolly, at the age of whatever he is, needs to be running committees instead of AOC. So a lot of these people need to get out of office. I think he got to primary everyone, but you at least have to primary everyone over the age of 60 because we really, really need new people in. And it's not just that we need new ideas. I think our credibility is so short that anybody connected to this recent defeat in particular, connected to the Clinton and Biden world, I think is just totally poison at this point. So both for new ideas, new people, but also just people who have credibility and who don't have a long history of taking on popular positions, I think that really matters for all the reasons you're pointing out.

Sarah [00:25:47] Well, it's so interesting because I've been thinking this. The first thing I said to my husband was, we can't run anybody in 2028 that was in leadership during COVID. I don't want anybody that had to make a COVID decision about a school or a mask or anything. I don't want a candidate that had that experience. I think that would be a bad idea. And there's a part of me that because we define everything by these eras-- now I did see some really fascinating, to me as a former Clinton staffer, this like, "Where's Bill Clinton? He understands middle America. Go ask him what's going on." I was like, wow, we've really closed the circle completely here, guys. But you think about how you define it. Clinton, Obama, Biden, Trump. The idea that the Democratic Party is going to capture lightning in a bottle before we have a leader is probably unrealistic.

[00:26:41] I don't think the reason that the post -mortem after Mitt Romney died is because of anything except for it wasn't Mitt Romney anymore. You know what I mean? It was Trump, so he got to decide what was relevant and not from the post -mortem. And so I think there's a part of me that's like, we're just going to have to chill. We're going to have to see who shows up because so much has been defined, like you said, not even just from the past presidencies and the past candidates, but the COVID and the leadership and what they did during that time and what they're going to get saddled with. And I think democratic governance and Republican governance made a lot of mistakes, and it's just really hard for politicians to own that. And I think you're right, it has to come from outside pressure to go, "That's not working anymore."

Tyler Austin Harper [00:27:29] I agree with that wholeheartedly. And it is one of the few things that is giving me a lot of optimism right now because I think, one, I do not bet. I'm not a betting man, but if I were a betting man, I would bet [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:27:42] You're the real minority right now. Everybody's betting all the time.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:27:44] I know. Yeah. If I were a betting man, I would bet an astronomical amount of money that none of the front runners, the candidates that are currently being floated, none of them are going to get anywhere near the nomination. And I think the party will try to push Gavin Newsom and maybe Harris or Tim Walz or Buttigieg or whoever forward. But I think there's zero chance. I feel really strongly that we are going to get some kind of outside candidate. And I hope it is not a billionaire to be honest with you, but I think we're going to get some kind of outside candidate who's going to take that debate stage. And like Trump, they're going to be polling at 1 % when they take that first debate stage and they're going to grab that party metaphorically by the throat and throttle them for Covid and school closures and disastrous foreign policy and all of the like, and saddling us importantly with the Trump administration that is gutting the federal government stealing from the public. So I think we're going to get an outside candidate who's really going to just burn through the entire field.

Sarah [00:28:42] I think so, too.

Beth [00:28:53] The one instinct that I have been trying to press myself on about Trump that I think is right and I've fought with since Trump came onto the scene is his tendency to make everything simpler. I've been nasty about. Just in being a commentator about Trump, I've been really ugly about how he tries to make everything so simple. But as I think about just that question, like what makes a good life? What opportunities are available to people? If I think about what I'm frustrated by every day, it's that everything feels too complicated. And I wonder if a Democrat, if a person who believes in government solutions to big problems is capable of sharing a message that sounds simpler to people?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:29:39] I think that's something that our current crop of democratic leadership and our political class really struggles with, I think, because the democratic party is so intimately culturally tied up with the university system. And not to blame everything on academia, but we are the party for better or worse-- and I think it's a little bit worse, but of the college-educated professional class. And I think there is just this tendency to wonkify everything and to over-complexify everything because politics and policy are complicated and messy. But you're right, Trump is really good at explaining things to people in simple terms. There are other people that are good at this. Bernie Sanders is somebody who has a simple message, which is that they are stealing from you. You are struggling to afford your health care. You are struggling to stay out of debt for getting cancer. You are struggling to feed your family. And these people are getting rich by starting a strategic crypto reserve. That is a really simple message people understand. And so we have some folks who can do that. And to me this is not about I am from the leftward side of that.

Sarah [00:30:38] Bernie is a million years old, to our previous [inaudible].

Tyler Austin Harper [00:30:40] That's what I was going to say, but this isn't even just about that Bernie represents my preferred set of policy options. It's just the simplicity that he has a message and he has credibility because he said the same thing for a very long time. And Bernie is old. He can't run again, very obviously. So we need new people who are younger, who have credibility, who don't have the whiff of COVID or the Biden age issue or whatever else on them. But I don't know where that person is going to come from, but I'm confident that starting in 2026, we'll start seeing some of them show up in the midterms. And I think when it comes to the primary, I hope at least that we'll have them. But we do need new voices.

Sarah [00:31:20] Let me pull that back to clearly our cross avenues that we keep going back and forth as democratic party in academia. I think the Hopefulness you and I feel about the primary is because there's a testing. Someone will come out on board and they'll have to prove, they'll have to argue, they'll have to persuade that their position is right. And I think another big change I totally agree with the administration's the, by and large, academic administrations have been concerned with justifying the high cost of tuition. I read some crazy statistic about Harvard that has like one staff per student. I'm like, what? Why?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:32:06] I think Yale has even more than that.

Sarah [00:32:08] Oh, my gosh! I was like, what are we doing? But I do think to the professors of it all, my friend was like, of course, colleges should be progressive places. They're full of students. They're full of young people. But like maybe 60-40, 70-30, not 99-1. Because we're college educated, there's just a real symbiotic relationship between like the attitudes come out, like abolish ICE, and then they're manifest in the Democratic Party because it's so many college-educated people and there's no one in academia or any other places that say, I have a college education, I'm a college professor, that's a bad idea. And let me tell you why. Do you think that some of this gets down to these ideas aren't being pressure tested inside academia before they trickle out into the party?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:33:03] I think academia and the Democratic Party are mere images of one another. And by that I mean that people often say, and there's obviously a real kernel of truth to it, that universities are very 'far left'. But I say there's only a kernel of truth to it because the faculty is left leaning, right? But even when we're talking about the faculty, we're really talking about the and some of the social sciences are left-leaning. the sciences are less ideologically polarized. And then if you start talking about the law school or the business school, it's a whole different can of worms, actually. There is a lot of ideological diversity and some law schools, some business schools are in fact really conservative and especially overwhelmingly conservative on the economy. So the issue with universities is that you have on the one hand this left -leaning faculty, and then institutionally, very financially and economically conservative institutions that only care about making their endowment number go up, and that run their institutions like a libertarian fever dream.

[00:34:01] And so my point is that is actually somewhat-- to give Biden his credit, he was great on unions in a number of those issues. But the Democratic Party is a mirror of the university, not just because, yes, there are some people who are left -leaning, who have kooky cultural ideas, but also because they really do embody the same sort of neoliberal technocratic ethos that universities operate in terms of their basic financial model. So when people start to say the university is a hotbed of leftism, it's not wrong but it's an incomplete picture because it is cultural progressivism that is married to a very moderate to right -leaning libertarian economic perspective.

Sarah [00:34:44] It's a rocky marriage from what I'm watching.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:34:46] It is. And, in fact, those two pieces, those two halves have this symbiotic relationship not unlike the Democratic Party where universities, particularly after Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders, when there was all this attention to their tuition rates, the debt issue, etc., that's when they start onboarding all of the 'anti -racism and progressive issues'. Because they can say, no, look, we have the moral high ground. We're good people. We're not racist. Don't look over here at our endowment. Don't look over here at our student debt. Don't look over here at the fact that we source the majority of our students from these top income brackets. And we're actually sending 50 % of our students to work at Wall Street or to staff Google. And so I think, again, totally agree with the idea that universities are left -leaning, but they're also in other ways that are important, really conservative too. And those two pieces work symbiotically in a way that's really corrosive, in a way that's similar, I think, to the Democratic Party too.

Beth [00:35:45] I don't think this is unique to the Democratic Party, but I think another point of intersection between academia and politics in general is just the hotbed of money that exists with the constant appeals to fundraising.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:35:59] Yes.

Sarah [00:36:00] I know so many people in academia who feel that if you want to be a dean, now that's a fundraiser. If you want to coach the basketball team, that's a NIL fundraiser now. If you want to be a professor, it's all about recruiting people to your department to justify its existence and get more money involved. I think that's politics, too. It's very disillusioning to have the one call to citizens who care about their government need to donate to candidates. It's also very frustrating that every problem we identify that the solutions offered are about more money. So I wonder how you think we walk our way out of that.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:36:37] I think we need to realize that we just raised the Democratic Party $1.5 billion in a summer that we lit on fire and lost an election. So the utility of money in politics as opposed to something Ezra Klein has been talking a lot about, which I agree with, is attention. The Trump administration was really good at getting and holding attention. And I think you're right. The last election was the podcast election. This next election might be a different kind of election. So I don't think we need to just say, oh, okay, our solution is podcasting or whatever.

Sarah [00:37:09] It is a great solution. I just want to say that right now.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:37:11] It is. Yeah. But it is to say, though, that I think Democrats are putting too much stock in the idea that money wins elections. We just had a great test case for that where we raised and spent a ton of money, and that was not enough to win. So, yeah, money matters. It's great to say we need to get money out of politics. Everyone agrees. But the reality is it has some role to play in our system as it's currently set up. But I really think we are overestimating the utility of it at this present moment. And then also it's become a good unto itself, not unlike a university endowment. Universities around the country right now are cutting their graduate programs and they are cutting the number of PhD students they're taking. Like can't afford it because there are budget cuts. So you were sitting on billions and billions of dollars that you don't want to touch for a host of reasons, some of which are legitimate, others of which are totally spurious. But at a certain point, you have to ask yourself what is the point of sitting on these $40 or 50 billion dollars if we're not going to use it to defend the interest of the university, which is to educate people? And that's sort of how I feel about the party, is that the Democrats need to think about, well, what are we doing with this money? What is it for? I don't think we can just assume that the party that raises the most money wins elections anymore. We're in a different world. And I think we've been slow to come to grips with that.

Sarah [00:38:30] But that's another manifestation of the age of many of the candidates, of their experience. And I just want to say this. It's not just the Democratic Party candidates in leadership; it's the whole apparatus. Listen, I like Pinsies [sp] too, okay? But they sent me a thing and it was all about corporate money in elections. And I was like, what gear is it? We raised more money and we lost. But then we bring Elon Musk into it, people just lose their minds. It's the billionaires, which I don't disagree with. I do think we should regulate and tax billionaires. And I do think there's an overabundance of influence among the uber wealthy. Of course, I do. But we're just stuck in the same talking points and we cannot unshackle ourselves from Donald Trump is evil. Money and politics is the-- people are still talking about Citizens United. I'm like, guys, what are we doing? What are we doing?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:39:25] I think there's a real tendency too where-- and I am a Democrat. I'm one of these hyper-educated elite people. So I am fully guilty of hypocrisy here. But to care more about being right than wielding power where they're like, but Trump is bad. It's like, yes, everyone knows. He's lying. Don't you see him lying? We need to fact check him. Everyone knows he lies. We all know, you know? And at a certain point there's just this obsession with I would rather be right. And I don't think people think in these terms explicitly, but I think at some deep emotional level, a lot of Democrats would rather be right and are fixated on being right. Folks refer to it as democrats are front of class kids. They are the tryhards in schools who wanted the straight A's.

Sarah [00:40:12] The gunner. That was my nickname in law school. That's how I know.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:40:14] Exactly. Yeah. And I sympathize with that. But at the same time, politics isn't always about being right or having the most sophisticated answer. Sometimes it's just about resonating with people and seeming to be honest and telling the truth and seeming to believe what you say. And I think that's something that is underrated about Trump's appeal. Trump is a liar. This is completely true. And he's disorganized and he's all the things people say about him. But at a basic level, people believe he cares about immigration, and people believe he cares about America's not getting a fair deal in trade, et cetera, because he talks about them all the time. He's said the same thing about them for a decade plus. And people might not like how he handles them--

Sarah [00:40:56] He believes his lies often.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:40:58] Yes, and he believes stuff. And I think that's another issue here. Is that we need people who believe things that aren't weather vanes. And that's such a problem with the democrats. If you look at someone like AOC, I have republican family members and friends who are like, you know what, she's fine. And the reason they think she's fine is that they're like she doesn't seem like she's selling you something. And Donald Trump in the same way I think has that appeal where people are like, you know what, I don't like the things he sang and I don't like how he comports himself. But I more or less believe-- which is separate from truth -telling or facts, right? But I believe he believes the things he says he believes. And looking at many Democrats, I don't believe. I'm a gun owner, but when Harris is talking about I own a Glock, blah, blah, blah, maybe you do, but I don't believe this is important to you. You're just lying. And so I think we need candidates who voters believe what they say, and that's part of the issue we've been having. Because we're eager to what is the right thing at this moment. And that we never established a track record of having convictions. We just established a track record of blowing where the wind tells us is the thing that's going to get us straight A's.

Beth [00:42:14] I think what voters believe that Democrats care about is everything that they would put under the umbrella of DEI, because that's where Democrats have been most consistent. And I don't think that's necessarily wrong. I just think there needs to be a new way. I was thinking about this. I have a 14 -year -old daughter who is learning about the Holocaust at school right now. And she was talking to me about what they've been doing in class right now and learning the difference between a stereotype and prejudice and discrimination. As she was talking, I thought, I wonder how many people would say, "Well, that's DEI. She shouldn't be learning that in a public school." I wonder just where you are on this debate and how you think we can be kind to each other and care about history and fairness and dignity of all people without getting tagged with this idea that everything's woke and we've lost our minds.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:43:05] It is simultaneously true that there is a thing called systemic racism. It is true that black people have a harder time getting mortgages, even if they have the same credit score as a white family. There are these things that are true. It is true that there's a legacy of racism and gender discrimination in American society and life that still has these tail effects into the present, even as we made a lot of progress. But there's a difference between saying that is true and trying to come to grips with it and engaging in ideological self -flagellation campaign where everyone is supposed to interrogate their internal biases and white supremacy and so on. And also there's just been a lack of sophistication with these ideas. This idea of whiteness got invoked a lot over the past half decade, decade, right? I grew up in a part of Pennsylvania that was hit in the teeth by the opioid crisis. I knew a lot of white working -class families that they did not have a lot of privilege. The men did not have male privilege. They did not have white privilege. They were getting kicked in the teeth.

[00:44:07] I think that there's a way to talk about these issues that says, yes, people of color and minorities and folks of different gender identities have these particular kinds of challenges. But there's a way to do that that isn't so flattening and that acknowledges the tapestry of identity in America that is not just oppressors and oppressed. And to the piece of the influence this has within the democratic party, I think there's been a lot of misreading that is going on right now of one issue in particular, which is the trans issue, which many Democrats are focused on. This is why we lost the election. And they point to that Donald Trump they/them ad which was very popular. And I think they totally misread that ad. When it says the Democratic Party is for they them, a lot of Democrats are interpreting that ad success as being about a trans backlash. That's why it was successful- because people are sick of it. And the reality is that that issue is a proxy for a broader sense that the Democratic Party cares about these tiny groups and not about you. I think one is making a mistake when they say, we lost because of trans issues and now we need to do a 180 on this.

[00:45:16] There's some issues like sports that are legitimately unpopular that we're on the wrong side on and that, yes, we should have some adjustments. But to be so fixated on this small group of people who are vulnerable is to totally misrecognize why that ad was successful. That ad was successful not because it was about trans people, but because it was saying, these Democrats, all they care about is all these different groups. They don't care about you. They just care about these people with different kinds of identities and that's all that matters to them. But we care about all Americans. And I think it's important to recognize that those universalist appeals, rather than sort of identitarian particularity, resonates with voters. Including working class minority voters who the Democrats have been bleeding for the better part of the decade, even longer now. So I think there's a way to talk about these issues that doesn't do a full 180. We don't need to just become diet Republicans, but there's a way to talk about them with more sophistication and that also appeals to these universalist ideals rather than we are all in our racially segregated in gender segregated bunkers with our idiosyncratic needs and so on and so forth.

Sarah [00:46:24] Well, I think the paradox is that-- I've been thinking about this a lot. That the same things that make an issue important to a mass amount of people politically, like the same things you need to do with political communication to connect an issue to a majority of Americans, is almost the exact opposite of what works in organizing.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:46:48] Sure. Yeah.

Sarah [00:46:49] It's a lot easier to organize people if you say this is who you are and they're attacking that. That's easy to organize around. It's a lot harder to organize around a constitutional change. I want to uncap the house. How do I get people out to march for that? That's a lot harder. It's harder to do around policy. That's why you look back at some of the most successful political campaigns, civil rights, feminism, the LGBTQ movement. It's because the ask is inherent in your identity. So the strategic ask and who you are is linked together in a way that makes organizing easy. But once you've got everybody at the table, then what are we articulating? And is it around an identity or is it about an argument we need to have? That's harder. That's a lot harder. It's like you have to lose the identity to sweep in a lot of voters. But the identity makes it easier to organize, but then sometimes you lose the ads. Do you see what I'm saying? Like it's all tied up together.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:47:45] Yeah, absolutely. I think that's totally right. I think we need a way to pull people together and to recognize that there are different groups with different interests. Just to give you an example, one of my immense frustrations was (I have many of them, as you can tell) the Harris campaign, it had been clear that the Democratic Party was struggling with Black and Latino men for over a year of polling. Going back to when Biden was a candidate, this had been crystal clear, poll after poll, we are bleeding working-class minority men. And it took until, respectively, September and October for Harris to have any policy rollout that addressed Black or Hispanic men at all. The Hispanic one was extremely condescending. It was literally hombres for Harris. And then the one for Black men was literally like crypto and legal weed, which is also weird and offensive in a whole different host of ways.

Sarah [00:48:38] You're forgetting about the third one, which was Bad Bunny.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:48:43] You're right, that was an important pillar. But my point is we need to have some balance and recognize that there are voters who have particular sets of interests and yet at the same time if we just treat the American voting public as just this like pie of different slices of identity that we all need to figure out how to cobble together into one block, that's a losing proposition, too. And that's a really hard balance to strike, recognizing that there are different groups in our coalition who have different interests while also appealing to some common core that makes us who we are as a party. But I think we've done it in the past and there are ways to do it in the future. So I worry about overcorrections. I've been very critical of DEI and what gets called wokeness and so on and so forth. But I think we should be wary of overcorrections, too. And I especially think we should be wary of just trying to become a zero calorie Republican Party, which is I think partly what some folks in Democratic leadership seem to have in mind.

Beth [00:49:42] So you've thought a lot about that erosion of support with black men, Hispanic men in particular. What is the path forward there? What do you think would really resonate with those groups that wouldn't be condescending or identitarian, but that would genuinely start to repair that relationship?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:49:59] I think we need more people in the Democratic Party and Democratic Party leadership who are, one, come from these communities, and two, not to put too fine a point on it, who are straightforwardly and traditionally masculine. I think that is one of the problems, is that a lot of working-class men don't feel like the Democratic Party is a party for them. They feel like it's a party that has had a lot of messaging around toxic masculinity and so on and so forth. And that seems deeply invested in redefining masculinity in a way that is totally unappealing to them. This summer there were all these articles about how Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz were redefining masculinity and they were going to bring in working class men. I like Tim Walz and thought he was a good pick because he was great on TV. But I can't say that a lot of my working -class, moderate friends from Pennsylvania would look at Tim Walz and say that guy who's fumbling with unloading a shotgun is some paragon of masculinity. And to be clear, that is not to say that I think we need to run male candidates. One thing that I find really dispiriting is the idea that Harris lost because she was a woman rather than because she did a bad campaign.

[00:51:02] I think a woman can be president. I think men will vote for a woman to be president. You can look at Mexico's president right now, who's a woman who has 85 % popular support, including great support among Hispanic men. So the idea that black men or Latino men won't vote for a woman, I think is ridiculous. So what I'm saying is that we need more people who are straightforwardly masculine and working class in the Democratic Party. I don't mean that that has to be our presidential candidate, but I do mean to say that we need to have the sense that those people are welcome in the party, too. And whether it's fair or not, I do think there are just a lot of working class men who look at Democratic Party leaders and they don't see anyone who looks like them or talks like them or has the interests they have. And then they look over at the other side of the aisle and they say, yeah, I see people who talk like I talk and who come from the kind of places I come from and who have the kind of hobbies and interests I have and who don't want me to constantly redefine myself in order to fit some image of the Ideal male that is emanating from the other side of the aisle. So I think that's a huge part of it. I think the Democrats just need to find a way to talk to working class men that is not condescending, that is not asking them to be somebody different, and that just accepts them as part of the coalition in the same way that other groups of people who are very different. We also are important parts of our coalition.

Beth [00:52:26] I have kind of a hard time, though, with Republicans being the pillars of masculinity, too, because it also feels very disingenuous to me. I live in Thomas Massey's district. I get his Christmas card with the guns that everyone's holding.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:52:39] I'm sorry.

Beth [00:52:42] And it's so silly. I often feel like I'm watching commercials of Republicans cosplaying traditional masculinity. When you know that they are [crosstalk].

Sarah [00:52:51] That's very impressive. He got the stone and built his own house or something, right?

Beth [00:52:57] Yes. Whatever. You know what I mean. It's kind of the Josh Hawley thing, right? This is an Ivy League educated person. I can hear our listeners just being like, why do they get away with it all the time and Democrats have to do it in such an authentic way?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:53:11] So I think the answer to that-- I totally agree with you, first of all. There is just as much inauthenticity on the right side of the aisle as there is, and they are just as elite as we are, by the way, in terms of their leadership.

Sarah [00:53:21] I'm going to push us though, guys. What about Lauren Boebert? What about Marjorie Taylor Greene? These are not highly educated people. And they've also had a lot of diversity in the Republican party that we just ignore and decide it doesn't exist.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:53:34] Yes, we do. You're totally right about that. I think there are a lot of very elite Republicans, but I do think there are more actually working class Republicans in power than there are on the Democratic side of the aisle. But I think the sense that there is some kind of hypocrisy or cosplay with the Republican masculinity, that is totally right. But if the question is, why do they get away with it? Because they don't seem to hate those people. There's a cliche but I think it's true, that voters don't vote for the person they like best, they vote for the person who they think likes them best. And if the question is which party likes me more if I'm a working class man in a semi-rural place who likes hunting and fishing, I think who likes me more as a person, I think it's pretty easy for a lot of folks to say, actually, I think the Republicans seem to like me a little bit more. And, yeah, maybe those Republicans are just cosplaying with their trucks, and they're just as much of elite beltway vampire as the next Democrat. But I think that's part of what it comes down to. It's, yeah, maybe they're inauthentic, but they don't seem to actively dislike me or the things I like and stand for.

Sarah [00:54:46] Well, and nobody wants to hear you go, well, actually, their policies harm you. I hate the book What's the Matter with Kansas? I feel like it's ruined politics my entire life. Stop with that.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:54:57] Yeah. I also think the question of why do people vote against their interests, I think part of it is there's no faith that either party is going to make their economic life better. And so they're like I'm going to go with the people I agree culturally. And I think that's a part of it. I think it can look irrational that poor rural republicans are voting for people who don't have their Economic interest to heart, but I think a lot of those people think, you know what, neither party is going to make my life better economically, but I agree with these X, Y, and Z cultural issues. And so I think the way for Democrats to actually win back some of those people who might not fit into our cultural tent well, is just to really convince them that you know what, and they had a great layup. There's going to be four years of right-wing gutting of the federal government, gutting the veteran affairs administration, social security, and tech barons in charge. Really, it's going to be super easy for the Democratic party to say, all that stuff you hate that's been ruining your life for four years, we are against all of that, you know?

[00:55:58] And you can get people on board who might not be the most progressive person culturally, but they can get behind that economic agenda. If I could recommend one book that people read, the book I always recommend is The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America by a guy named George H. Nash who was a historian. And it's about the formation of the modern post -war Republican Party. And the thing he points out is that that party was a coalition of evangelical Christians, Cold War hawks and foreign policy, and then economic Wall Street libertarians who sip martinis. And the evangelicals and the hawks and the martini -sipping New Yorkers don't have very much in common, but they knitted together a coalition of them regardless. And we can do that as well. And I think if we have a common economic agenda, we can tolerate a lot of cultural plurality. And I think we need to be willing to do it and remove some of those litmus tests.

Sarah [00:57:01] At the end of our show we always have a little segment called Outside of Politics where we talk about what's on our minds outside of politics. So is there anything on your mind outside of politics? Anything you're obsessed with? A show? A movie? A product? You got to tell us.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:57:17] That's a really great question. Oh, boy. I am currently watching 1923 and White Lotus, both of which I am obsessed with.

Sarah [00:57:26] We're doing a watch along with White Lotus right now, recaps and everything.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:57:30] Nice. That's amazing. It's quite entertaining. Honestly, the thing that's on my mind right now to be totally transparent is I fish very seriously and fishing season starts in about six weeks. I fish for striped bass, they're migratory. So I'm waiting for them to come back their way up the East Coast and arrive in the main ocean. So really most of my spare thoughts are about the incoming fish.

Sarah [00:57:55] Bass fishermen. Okay.

Beth [00:57:58] I don't know enough about bass fishing to ask you questions about it. Is this an equipment heavy hobby? Like, is there a lot of stuff associated with bass fishing?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:58:07] Yes. I do a form of saltwater fishing for striped bass that's called wet suiting, where you wear a wetsuit. It takes place at night. It's saltwater. You swim out into the ocean to these offshore rocks to fish from. It's really, really fun. But yes, it's very equipment heavy because there's swimming involved and you need special gear and belts to hold everything on. And, yes, so it is if you are like a tinker and... Yeah.

Sarah [00:58:28] My mind is blown. I live on the Mississippi River. I had a very different image in my head when you said bass fishing.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:58:37] Yes.

Sarah [00:58:38] So you put the gear on and then how far out into the ocean do you swim?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:58:44] It depends. Anywhere from 50 to 100 yards. There are these boulder fields and offshore rocks you can swim out to. So you can access deeper water to fish from it. Yeah.

Sarah [00:58:53] How big are these bass?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:58:55] They can get up to 40 pounds, over 40 pounds. So a big one would be like 45 to 50 inches.

Sarah [00:59:01] What's the biggest one you've caught?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:59:03] Biggest one I've caught is 48 inches.

Sarah [00:59:05] Wow! What do you do? Do you throw them back?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:59:07] Yeah, I throw them all back. I'm an environmental studies professor. Despite as much as I like to complain about the elite liberals, I am nonetheless a soft, crunchy environmentalist. So, I put them right back in the water.

Beth [00:59:22] And you do it at night.

Sarah [00:59:24] At night.

Tyler Austin Harper [00:59:25] Yeah. The really big fish are nocturnal. So if you're trying to catch larger trophy-size striped bass, it takes place at night. They're nocturnal, that's when they feed the most. There are sharks and currents and all sorts of stuff to worry about, but that is when the big fish are around. So that's when you do it.

Sarah [00:59:43] That means you're swimming at night?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:59:45] Yes!

Sarah [00:59:46] How did you discover this hobby?

Tyler Austin Harper [00:59:48] Very particular way.

Sarah [00:59:50] I would imagine!

Tyler Austin Harper [00:59:51] So I've been a lifelong fisherman. But I run a lot and I was training for a race and got rhabdomyolysis, which is something people can get from overusing a muscle and it can be dangerous.

Sarah [01:00:04] The CrossFitters get that.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:00:05] They do. So I ended up stuck in the hospital for 10 days with rhabdomyolysis in the emergency room and I was reading a fishing book. And in the paragraph of that book there was this line about these people who do this extreme sport version of fishing where they swim out at night. I was like if I get out of this damn hospital, I'm going to do that. And so I got out of the hospital and I bought the stuff and now here we are.

Sarah [01:00:28] How long have you been doing it for?

Tyler Austin Harper [01:00:31] five years.

Sarah [01:00:31] Oh, my gosh!

Beth [01:00:33] How long is this season?

Tyler Austin Harper [01:00:35] It runs from early May to about early November. It's a hobby that rewards obsession in so far as striped bass return to the same places at the same time of year. So in order to actually be good, you have to be going all the time. If you're only going once a week you're never-- we call it patterns. You're never going to figure out what pattern they are on that year, what kind of locations they're at, what kind of bait fish they're feeding on. So you have to go a lot. It's sort of a zero sum game. You either need to go not at all or a whole lot. So it's May through November. I fish about five nights a week, usually sometimes four or three. It's a lot of fishing. It's a lot of late night.

Beth [01:01:14] Who's going with you? How many people are going out together to do this?

Sarah [01:01:18] I was going to say this is just fueling so many questions from us.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:01:23] I have a fishing partner I fish with a lot. I fish alone about half the time.

Beth [01:01:28] I don't know if you should do this alone, Tyler, that makes me nervous.

Sarah [01:01:30] What if the shark gets you.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:01:29] Well, I have an emergency locator beacon. You push a button and pull up a thing and the coast guard can come find my corpse, I guess.

Sarah [01:01:38] I don't like this at all! I mean I like it.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:01:41] I wrote an article about it last year in the Atlantic called ‘Boat Fish Don't Count’, which is just saying people who do this, fishing from a boat doesn't count. If it can't kill you, the fish don't count.

Sarah [01:01:50] So, wait, where do you live that you do this?

Tyler Austin Harper [01:01:53] Maine.

Sarah [01:01:54] Okay, that makes sense. Are there other locations around the world that once you get into it you got to go there?

Tyler Austin Harper [01:02:00] So this is a pretty actually geographically specific hobby, mostly for striped bass. So striped bass are native to the East Coast and then there's some transplanted ones in the West Coast. But really this is a hobby from about New Jersey up to Maine.

Sarah [01:02:14] Okay. Fascinating.

Beth [01:02:16] I love everything about this except you going alone.

Sarah [01:02:18] I do, too.

Beth [01:02:18] I'm really behind it. I just want you to always have your fishing partner with you.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:02:24] I have friends that I fish with and have for a number of years, but last year was the first year that I have a fishing partner who wants to fish as much as I do and who's interested in the same sorts of things and fishes in the same way. Because there are a bunch of different ways to do this, not all of which are compatible. So I've been fishing with people a lot more this last year. But you spend a lot of time very sleep deprived out alone at night. It is better to have people with you, I will say that.

Sarah [01:02:55] I'm so glad we asked you this question.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:02:57] Thank you

Beth [01:02:58] We usually don't leave it so open -ended, but this is a lesson to us, we should leave it more open -ended.

Sarah [01:03:03] That's right. Yeah. Fascinating. Tyler, thank you so much.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:03:09] No, thank you. This was really fun.

Beth [01:03:11] I genuinely only go to X to check on Kentucky basketball and what you're saying.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:03:16] It's very sweet.

Beth [01:03:16] And so it's great to be able to talk with you in person.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:03:19] Well, I wish Kentucky the best of luck in March Madness.

Beth [01:03:22] We're going to need it.

Sarah [01:03:24] Did you see my face? I just went...

Beth [01:03:27] It's been an injury heavy year.

Tyler Austin Harper [01:03:29] Oh, no. Well, good luck regardless. Thank you guys both. I appreciate it. It's been fun.

Beth [01:03:34] Thank you so much, Tyler, for sharing his time and thoughts so generously with us. We'll be back with you on Friday, and we don't know on what schedule on Friday because we are watching government funding talks with bated breath. So hold the schedule loosely with us, if you will, and we will be in touch with you and your feeds as quickly as possible. Until then, have the best week available to you.