James Telfer
speaker
259 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 6 Aug
James Telfer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The government did great things.
The people did amazing work.
We were super unified.
And so just kind of off of that and reflecting back on that, I also spent a lot of times with the agency overseas watching from afar.
And I was overseas during COVID, during the summer of George Floyd, during January 6th.
And what I'm seeing and a lot of my colleagues and people who just, we don't understand what could have brought us to the points that we were in.
It seemed like,
about 10 years ago we went into this accelerated partisanship uh and it's starting to really think the unthinkable maybe maybe we aren't as united maybe we aren't geared in our current culture to reunite you know i think uh you know i think a lot of people have this idea that there will be a reset at some point you know i watched maher the other night the uh
had Brett Stevens on from the New York Times.
Even he talked about, well, to get back to the way things should be.
I listened to Sky Galloway and Kara Swisher.
They were talking about a reckoning last week and we have to have a reckoning to get back to where things should be.
I don't know if it's a certain generation.
It's our Gen X plus generation that thinks maybe we watched a lot of 80s movies and people did the right thing at the end and people came around and had this revelation.
I don't want to seem too pessimistic.
I just don't see it happening.
I think our culture is geared now to drag us to the extremes.
If you look in the social media and the information sphere, it's almost like let's get into our echo chambers and pull us to both sides of the divide.
And so it's hard for me to picture a situation where, you know, somehow this wave passes over us and without some type of external black swan event that we somehow figure out a way to even things out and kind of get back to the norm.
I think, you know, and obviously I wasn't around in the 1960s, but, you know, there was polarization.
Showing 81–100 of 259 · page 5 of 13
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