YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Wagner

lines on the record
71
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2016-12-01
most recent
2016-12-01
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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Oh God, Dav In dog years, I'm like a thousand years old. I am actually, I pretend like I'm young, I'm not. I'm approaching middle age. Well,”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, and that's really problematic. That's not what news and information is supposed to be for. You know, facts are not supposed to be affirming. They are what they are. And when people want to sort of tailor make their world, that's when you get into real problems.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I don't know how you do either because I think people, and I was saying this yesterday, people are going to inform news for emotional catharsis and not actual information. I say to it.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Because there's some thinking that the office and the gravity of it is going to change his impulses. I mean, I don't know. There's”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, I think that, you know, I can't imagine what it's like to be Maggie Haberman at the New York Times right now. I mean, I think, you know, even this week there's been so much back and forth, so much vitriol directed to the press by the incoming Trump administration. You know, I'll say President Obama was not great in terms of transparency with the White House press corps. That is going to look like people will look back at those days fondly if the incoming president behaves in office the way he is as president-elect. I mean, the lack of...”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But yes, in terms of talking about issues, having an overwhelmingly progressive point of view, I think did it get us to where we are now? I'm not going to single-handedly blame Fox and MSNBC for the high partisanship. But I don't, I mean, you know, I think it's a really bad thing that the public trust in media and the Fourth Estate is deteriorated to the degree that it has. Frightening when you don't have common conversation and a common set of facts, it makes governing impossible.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, right. Well, I would take issue with the comparison between Fox and MSNBC just because I think, and I'll just talk about primetime, the rigor that people like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes bring to the job in terms of the research.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Because that's we need to be talking to each other right now. There is a desire, I think, to kind of close the doors and say, can you believe what happened? But really, like if we're moving the ball forward, you got to talk to everybody about things that matter to everybody.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That's called a family reunion. You know, the trick right now is to not talk amongst ourselves. Like everything that I just said, I'm really excited to be working for a network news program that reaches four million people.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Right, totally funny guy and other and plenty of other Republicans. You know, it is about dialogue. It's about, you know, it is fundamentally not a dialogue show. It's about the news. And it's about what's happening in the world. And I think there is a place for opinion and there's a place for a circling of the wagons and catharsis. But I think the work right now is circle.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Restrain yourself. Get me after a couple drinks, you know. No, I think one of the things that I used to do, and we had plenty of Republicans and conservatives on my show. I have a great relationship with Grover Norquist. Yeah.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, people are in foxholes, you know, and it's kind of, I mean, that's one of the things of this election. It's like, you just want to tell people, don't go back into the hole. Like, stay above ground. And breathe the air. Don't go back down into the darkness. Because I think a lot of people are scared. A lot of people feel rejected. A lot of people feel like they're not a part of, they're not at the table. And like the trick is to say, you know, like the table is it's ours, you know, and it is a collective effort. It really is. Even if it doesn't always feel like that, it is. And the only way, you know, it's just important for people to stay in the light. I know that sounds like probably a little heavy-handed, but I do believe it. You know, you have to, this is the work of being a part of a democracy”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Other advanced around the world. You look at what's happening in Europe, you look at what's happening in the UK is dangerous. And I think one of the lessons that I learned, probably the hardest from this book and doing all the research is that Even when you talk about DNA, we are humans before we were anything else. And you talk to a number of evolutionary genealogists, and they all say the same thing. You know, we are more alike than we are different. And that is, you know, it sounds like Pablam, but it's so important to remember, you know, the thing that brings us together is us. And I think the more we can remember that, and I personally believe the thing that unites us isn't blood or soil, but the times in which we live. This is our time on earth. And it is up to all of us to decide what we do with it.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, I think we tell ourselves these family stories that are necessarily kind of gauzy, warm ideas about what we left behind and what we got when we came here. And the truth is what we left behind, you know, the old world with all of its traditions and cultural practices that may have been lost was also filled with strife and problem. And half the time or all the time, the things that we the problems that were quote unquote left behind in the old world were, sorry, the problems, let me start that over again. Half the time, the problems we think are sort of endemic to this America right now were problems that were part of the old world.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, as it turns out, I am royalty. Which the sense of entitlement is warranted. Yeah, I mean, it was totally fascinating. I hope it's good. It's much more personal than I thought it was going to be.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “He has a new imprint coming out, so this is going to be one of the first books on his imprint next year. It's a book about. Know, I think we're grappling particularly right now with this idea of who are we as Americans. And so I explore that question personally by looking at the two poles of my family story, my mom's immigration story from Asia and my dad's kind of classic old world New World story from Europe and explore how sort of the ways in which we've passed down these stories are both misleading but also you know they inform a lot about our present sense of American identity So it required a lot of travel back to Luxembourg and England and Burma. I talked to a lot of genealogists. I went into the DNA based ancestry world.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It's a book for Random House. I have an amazing editor. His name is Chris Jackson. He just edited the Tanahasi Codes book. Me and the world. He did the Eddie Wong book”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “But nobody wants to, I mean, it's the saddest part of it is that, you know, the energy economy is what it is. The coal industry is not going to be coming back. I mean, that's just, it's a, there are things that can be done in certain sectors. There are certain regulations you can repeal. But that kind of American manufacturing, that kind of American energy production is fundamentally a thing of the past just based on technology and where we're at. And that the hollowness of parts of those promises, I think, is almost gut wrenching.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Each other. I mean, my dad has these stories of at Christmas time. There would be a ham in the mailbox or homemade cookies, and he would go on, he would follow his dad on the mail route, and at every stop there was a little homemade present for the mailman because you knew who your mailman was. You knew that he had six kids. And at Christmas time, that's just what you did. Now, some of this is shrouded in a decidedly Norman Rockwellian. Like there were downsides too, which I go into in the book that I'm writing. But, you know, that sense of kinship with the guy who delivered your mail and the butcher who made you cut your meat and the garbage man who picked up the garbage. I mean, we don't have, I mean, we don't have that. And to some degree, you know, we've gotten other things in benefit, right? That won't detail here. But we've definitely lost something. And I think we're coming to that.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And yet I'm not sure that the technological innovations of the last five years have made the mitigation of personal pain any easier. In fact, I think I might have made it harder.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Automation is going to take half the jobs that exist at the sort of white collar level by 2040, I think it is. That's going to dramatically change the US economy and the way people think of themselves in the workforce. And then there's just information. When you talk about a sense of community, you know, Facebook's amazing because you can be in touch with that guy that you went to high school with. If you want to. Right, exactly. But whether it really fosters a sense of connectivity is an entirely different question. And I think as human beings, not to get too heavy-handed about it, when people are in pain, they need other people.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, my dad's town was on on the Mississippi River, and there was a button factory which the buttons were made of shells from the river. And the button factory was like the gigantown. That's what people were employed by. And it just shuddered a couple of years ago. And it really is the closing chapter on a way of life for that part of the country, in that town, you know. These stories are unfolding across the country. And we focus on a campaign in the context of the candidates, but not the voters. And I think what 2016 showed us is we need to recalibrate that and focus on the voters.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, I just went to do a piece for Sunday morning in Mississippi, and it was actually really reassuring to be elsewhere in the country because everything is different when you're not inside the sort of Acela corridor and it's really important to get out of there.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I'm absolutely still interested in what happens inside the beltway, but I'm really also interested in stretching my legs and talking about what's happening elsewhere. I think this is really.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It's actually about Hollywood and race. And, you know, I think one of the things that we do too. I mean, you know, we think about politics as something that happens inside Washington, but of course politics is tied to culture. Politics is tied to society. And I think, you know, you look at this election. We looked at the race as a horse race. We looked at it as a series of poll numbers. And I think one of the reasons we miss a story is we didn't look at it in terms of the fabric of American society. And George Packer wrote a book called The Unwinding, which actually foreshadowed everything that happened in this race and told us more about our country than any of the poll numbers or any of the exit poll numbers. And I think what we need to start to begin to do is to try and look at politics in the context of culture and society and to not have economics reporting in one bucket and social and cultural reporting in another and political reporting in another. Because of course all these things cross-pollinate one another. And with my background,”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yes, where I am going to continue doing that? I'll still be a contributing editor. I have a big magazine piece coming out in a couple weeks. On what?”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Counter programming And I think they think, you know, there's like we do, there's a desire for real information about, you know, the world in which I'm a fan.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Exactly, keep it in the family, made a real investment in news. I mean, they've decided that that's what they really want to do. The hashtag is news is back. And I couldn't agree more. You know, I think especially in these times when there's a proliferation of fake news, for example, and there's so much misinformation for a major network to say, look, we're going to go hard on news, not just that in the nighttime, but in the morning, which is like, you know, there's a lot of fluff in the morning.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, and I think conversation was always a thing that I was most interested in in terms of my show at MSNBC. The cruel reality is that there have to be commercial breaks, you know, and a show is beholden to a certain number of them. And I would always try and say, well, can't we just cancel one? And it was like, no, Alex, we have to get the money from our sponsors because that's how this place stays afloat. But, you know, I think being naive about exactly what could and couldn't be done was actually a strength in terms of launching that show because we sort of did what we wanted to do and it worked, you know. And I was lucky enough to have incredible people like yourself join the program. And I think that, you know, the level of discussion that we had was, I'm very proud of it. You know, it's hard to sustain that for over a long period of time, but we had a really good run of almost five years. And, you know, now I'm at CBS, which is also home to.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “The success of podcasts in this one in particular, David, is evidence of the fact that people do like in-depth. I agree with this. I mean, the hunger for it is like, it's so obvious.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you do. You sent me all these pictures. Yeah. You send everybody all those pictures. So Chris was like, do you want to come on TV and play TV with me? And I said, sure. So I was once and they, MSNBC kept calling. And then in short order, they offered me a show, which was totally absurd. But I said yes and moved back. At that point, I'd been the Huffington Post and AOL merged. So I was at the Huffington Post and I'd come back to New York and then I started working at MSNBC full time in 2011.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “How'd that happen? So I had gone to college with a wonderful man named Chris Hayes. And he and I had been friends forever and he was guest hosting a show on MSNBC. And he knew that I was covering the White House. He was living in DC at the time. He said, do you want to?”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “So, but for the press, that was great. In what can be a fairly humdrum daily existence, Robert definitely made it more interesting. And, you know, I mean, a lot of stuff, look, that was an incredible time to be covering what was happening in the White House, whether it was the BP oil spill or the Arab Spring. I remember my friend, I”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Yeah. And Robert, you knew when Robert was pissed off. I'm sure to the chagrin of the administration, sometimes Robert would make news.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “It was Robert Gibbs. And I mean, Gibbs, as far as press secretaries go, was a great press secretary because he would say things, you know, like, and you put this into Gibbs really knew what was going on. He wasn't just kind of a random mouthpiece. He sort of understood what was going on. Here's unusual in that regard.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “And I mean, look, I wasn't the White House reporter for an extended period of time. It was like a year and change. And I think it is kind of stifling. I mean, you are going to those briefings every day. It becomes kind of this insane cat and mouse game with whoever the press secretary. Does Robert Gibbs?”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “The kind of journalism you had. Sure. Yeah. And I think, you know, in part, Melinda Hennenberger, who hired me is a great wild person, liked the fact that I had international experience and cultural experience, but not really inside the Bellway experience. She thought that that would bring, I think, a fresh perspective. And I also think, you know, you have to be tenacious and sort of jump in with both feet if you're going to be a journalist. And she knew that I could do that.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Well, I'd been writing for magazines for years. And then off of the Clooney stuff, I thought, you know, it was the... I don't know if you remember this. It was called the Saffron Revolution Burma, these monks took to the streets in 2008. And they, and I just felt like the stakes were just getting higher and higher. And I'd been traveling around the world with these guys. And I thought, you know, I just want to go back to writing about the world. So I had been writing. I'd contributed a couple pieces to various publications. And then I was offered a job covering the White House for Politics Daily. And I never covered the White House before. But I thought, okay, and it was an incoming new administration. And I was really curious about what was going to happen. So I moved to DC.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, Burma has always been for so long, and you know this, David, the president's done a lot of work along with Ben Rhodes to bring that country back into the world. But for so long, it was shuttered off to everyone else. And, you know, that's where my mom is from. And it's really weird to grow up with a, you know, my mom is from Burma. She's Burmese. There's a Burmese community in D.C. And it existed as this kind of like far away planet in another universe that I could never really wrap my head around. And it was so shrouded in sorrow. You know, I mean, the human rights violations, the story of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize laureate, who is locked under house arrest. I mean, it was just so ripe with deep sadness. So it was super meaningful to be able to go over there and try and change things and support groups on the ground who were doing important work.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Yeah, I went to Chad, the Chad Darfur border with George. I went to the Zimbabwe border with Matt. I did some work on the Burma Thai border. We had a lot of...”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Political policy making class. So I wrote a long brief about what I'd want to do and had an incredibly nerve-wracking meeting with George Clooney. And I had a broken high heel. I remember that very clearly. And I got the job somehow and did that for a couple years.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yes. George Clooney had been doing a lot of work in Darfur, and he wanted to formalize his work there, both in terms of the advocacy, but also he was raising money and granting it and wanted to grant it out to groups on the ground. So he, along with some of his pals, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Don Cheetle, and the late producer Jerry Yeah, sorry, humble brag. The late producer Jerry Weintraub, they formalized it and decided to create a nonprofit called Not on Our Watch. And they wanted someone who sort of understood the handshake between, again, the entertainment creative class and the sort of”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Well, I don't know that the Center for American Progress. One of the ideas was that policymaking too often takes place in a vacuum with not enough engagement from the world of culture. And so I was actually headquartered in New York. And part of the idea was to think of ways in which to talk about the issues that mattered and bring other people into the dialogue who weren't usually a part of it, whether they were writers or artists or whatever. And I did that for a fairly short stint. I went back to more magazine writing and then I started working for not on our watch, which was a”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Well, culture generally, music is a really great entry point, I think, to talk about all kinds of other issues, whether they're socio-political, whether just straight ahead art. I mean, music is a window into so much about a society. So that was really interesting to me.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Absolutely, and to see the world and talk to people in it. I mean, I always think, you know, I don't, I have respect for people who go to J school, but really you learn how to be a journalist by writing about. Right. People and talking to them. And, you know, I had always, I was the editor of my elementary school newspaper and my high school newspaper. And I edited the college weekly. And, you know, I always knew that writing was going to be a part of what I wanted to do. The Egyptology thing, I think, was just a brief psychotic flirtation with, you know, a parallel universe.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Why Egyptology? It was only a year that it lasted, as it turns out. I was not cut out for the study of hieratic and Coptic hieroglyphics. I was really interested in the ancient world. I thought I wanted to be an archaeologist. And having never gone on a dig and just having spent a lot of time at the Natural History Museum, I thought it would be really great to study it and to be surrounded by ancient civilization or the relics of it. And Brown happened to have like an incredibly great department. So that's what my declared concentration was, much to my parents' chagrin. I was also studying neuroscience, acting in French that first semester, which is the only argument you need for a core curriculum.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “They did me well, right I mean, what was the point of going to some? Well, I mean, Brown was a great college to go to. I'm really happy that I got in and that I attended and I graduated.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Well, you know, that's me, David. I just remember he was so thrilled to see a Democrat win the White House. He'd been on so many losing campaigns.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “You know, he was, I think, tangent sort of invested as less than involved in the 92 campaign. We were in Little Rock that night, I remember. You know, he was like doing his part, but he wasn't any kind of big mocker in the campaign by any stretch of the imagination. He was just really excited to see a demo.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “A great guy. I mean, a great guy. My dad actually set up a trust for his daughters to go to school. So yeah, he was, you know, he was consulting. You know, I think, you know, there's a sort of wash, he was working on various projects, dipping in and out of this and that, you know, the Gary Hart campaign, et cetera. And then at one point, Clinton was going to run. I think it's talked to my dad about this potential bid. And Chelsea was still really young. And I remember my mom and dad talked to him and said, you know, you should wait till she's older. And I'm sure this is his advice he got from other people as well, but he decided to take it and decided to delay his initial run until 1992, which proved to be, I think, a good decision. Well, plainly.”

    2016-12-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 101 - Alex Wagner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source