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Larry Sabato, founder of UVA's Center for Politics and the mind behind the legendary Sabato's Crystal Ball, joins Adam Goodman for his third appearance on 13th and Park. With Election Day closing in, Sabato delivers his final midterm assessment: Democrats are poised to gain significant ground in the House, and the Senate, which he says he never would have imagined competitive a year ago given how Republican-friendly the map is, has shifted to a genuine toss-up with Democrats on the edge of 51 or 52 seats.

Sabato walks through the races that matter most, from Susan Collins in Maine, where he has stopped trusting the polls entirely after her 16-point swing in 2020, to Texas, where Ken Paxton's scandal-laden candidacy has handed Democrat Tallarico a real opening. He flags Iowa and Kansas as dead heats, praises Ashley Hinson's candidate skills, and notes that Adam Hamilton's unique profile as leader of a major evangelical-leaning denomination makes Kansas far more competitive than anyone expected. His race to watch on election night: Ohio, where Sherrod Brown is making a rare comeback bid against a well-positioned Republican in what was once JD Vance's Senate seat.

The conversation broadens into structural territory, revisiting Sabato's 2007 book "A More Perfect Constitution," in which he proposed 23 constitutional changes including a single six-year presidential term, mandatory Supreme Court retirement ages, and universal national service. He is candid that none of his proposals have been adopted, and equally candid that the current political environment makes reform impossible in the near term. His earliest realistic window: January 2029, with a new president and a new Congress. Until then, he argues, Americans are slowly being convinced that a fundamentally sound system is in urgent need of updating, and that compromise, once America's greatest governing strength, has to be rediscovered.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:12 Election Night with Larry Sabato
2:14 House and Senate Predictions
3:41 What's Driving Voter Anger
4:49 Democratic Party's Image Problem
5:50 Susan Collins and the Maine Race
8:34 Texas: Paxton vs. Tallarico
10:08 Iowa and Kansas Toss-Ups
12:24 Ohio: The Race to Watch
13:50 A More Perfect Constitution
16:17 Hope After the Election
17:43 Final Senate Forecast
18:49 Closing Thoughts

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John Zecca, NASDAQ's Executive Vice President and Global Legal Chief, joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park for a wide-ranging conversation on what makes American capital markets the envy of the world, and what is quietly threatening their future. A former counsel to an SEC commissioner who has spent 25 years at NASDAQ, Zecca offers a rare dual perspective: the regulator's eye for investor protection and the exchange's drive to keep capital formation accessible, dynamic, and growing.

Zecca breaks down why the US markets, now representing roughly $81 trillion of an approximately $160 trillion global market cap, remain unmatched. He points to three interlocking advantages: depth of capital, a willingness to take risk on both the company and investor side, and a rules framework that is transparent and manageable enough to inspire confidence without strangling ambition. He also traces NASDAQ's own evolution from its 1971 launch as the world's first major electronic exchange, built on over-the-counter markets the NYSE and Amex wouldn't touch, to a diversified business where roughly two-thirds of revenue now comes from data, indexes, and technology services rather than trading alone.

The conversation gets specific on two of the biggest challenges facing the market today. First, the declining number of public listings, down from roughly 7,000 to around 4,500, which Zecca ties to the rise of private equity, regulatory compliance costs, and litigation risk. He argues that when companies stay private too long, everyday retail investors miss the most explosive growth phase entirely. Second, the dual-edged impact of AI: a powerful tool for catching financial crime and reducing false positives through products like NASDAQ's Verifin platform, but also an accelerant for bad actors who face none of the regulatory constraints that legitimate institutions do.

The episode closes on a personal note, with both host and guest swapping stories of their very first stock purchases, Zecca's being a bet on PanAm that did not go as planned, and a shared conviction that the ability for any American to own a piece of a growing company is one of the country's most underappreciated strengths.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:11 First Stock Purchases
2:26 NASDAQ's Origins in 1971
3:52 Why US Markets Lead the World
5:53 Going Public: The Entrepreneur's Case
6:54 What Markets Mean for Main Street
8:02 NASDAQ as a Business
9:32 Verifin and Fighting Financial Crime
11:25 Why Fewer Companies Are Going Public
13:07 Balancing Regulation and Progress
14:25 NASDAQ's Pitch to Entrepreneurs
15:33 The Emotion of the Opening Bell
16:14 24/7 Trading and Tokenized Securities
17:19 AI's Impact on Markets
18:56 Closing Thoughts

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Matt Seaholm, President and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park for a wide-ranging conversation on what the plastics industry actually makes, how it powers American manufacturing, and what the future of recycling looks like in the United States.

Seaholm explains why plastics are far more than bags and bottles, touching everything from automotive components and semiconductors to Legos and garden sheds. He makes the case that plastics are the pillar of American manufacturing because the country controls its own feedstock, giving it a unique advantage in a global supply chain. He also walks through what actually happens inside a plastics facility, breaking down the molding and extrusion processes that turn raw pellets into everyday products.

The conversation shifts to Washington, where Seaholm outlines four key pieces of legislation his association is pushing: the RMAA, the PACK Act, the RIAA, and the Stewart Act. He focuses on the PACK Act and RMAA as the most urgent priorities, arguing that a patchwork of conflicting state-level definitions for terms like recyclable and compostable is creating confusion for manufacturers and consumers alike. Federal standards, he argues, are the only path to a functioning national recycling system.

Seaholm also reflects on what drew him to the industry, sharing a story from a plant tour in rural Pennsylvania that shifted his understanding of who the plastics workforce really is. He closes with a forward-looking view on chemical recycling, circularity, and the shared responsibility between industry, policymakers, and consumers to keep plastic in the system and out of the environment.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:03 Welcome and The Graduate Clip
2:14 What the Plastics Industry Makes
3:56 Inside a Plastics Factory
5:19 Plastics as the Pillar of Manufacturing
7:26 Washington Fly-In and Legislation
9:05 The RMAA and PACK Act Explained
10:34 What Happens When You Recycle
11:46 Breakthroughs in Recycling Technology
13:05 The Economics of Recycling
13:46 Matt's Path to the Plastics Industry
15:40 History and Origins of Plastics
16:09 The Industry Five Years From Now
17:41 Consumer Role in Recycling
18:39 Resources and Closing
20:26 Outro

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Bryan Gray, CEO and co-founder of HereNOW Help, joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park to discuss one of the most urgent and underreported crises in America: veteran mental health. With an average of 17 veterans dying by suicide every single day, and 61 percent of those who died by suicide in 2023 having had no VA healthcare contact in their final years, Gray explains why the traditional system is falling short and how HereNOW Health was built to fill that gap with a single, AI-driven platform offering 24/7 clinician access, peer support, daily check-ins, risk scoring, and personalized treatment tools.

Gray traces his path to mental health technology through two formative experiences: reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People in high school, and watching a brilliant Carnegie Mellon classmate unravel emotionally during a high-stakes NVIDIA job interview. Those moments crystallized for him the difference between IQ and emotional intelligence, and set the direction of his career. He shares the deeply personal story of co-founder Billy Gerlach, whose brother died of a drug overdose weeks after the company was incorporated in 2019, and who himself passed away in 2023 after a fentanyl-laced Xanax. Billy's family remains central to the company's leadership and mission.

Gray walks through how HereNOW Health works in practice: a modular, dynamic platform that adapts to each user's individual needs, whether they need self-care tools, peer support, or clinical intervention. He explains the two structural barriers that have historically kept veterans from seeking help, fear of losing flight status in the military and fear of losing disability benefits as a veteran, and how HereNOW Health's anonymized access and benefit-neutral model are designed to remove both. The company launched its first deployment at Tinker Air Force Base and has since expanded through NASDVA partnerships to Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, and a growing list of states and territories.

The conversation closes with a story Gray calls his most defining: a chance encounter in a hospital waiting room with a Holocaust survivor who walked from Auschwitz to England and married the man beside her four days after arriving in America. She had not spoken German in decades. Gray listened. She found peace. It is that moment, he says, that taught him the true power of active listening and why 95 percent of counseling is simply being present for someone who needs to be heard.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:11 Ravens vs. Steelers
1:57 From Tech to Mental Health
5:20 Co-founding HereNOW Help
7:50 Destigmatizing Mental Health
8:52 Inside the App
11:28 Veterans and the VA Gap
12:39 Anonymity and Benefits
14:00 Peer Now Academy
15:46 State Partnerships and Expansion
17:10 The Holocaust Survivor Story
20:34 The Power of Listening

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World Bank Group President and former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga joins Adam Goodman on a special edition of 13th and Park to confront one of the defining challenges of our time: over the next 10 to 15 years, 1.2 billion young people in emerging economies will reach working age, but only about 420 million new jobs are projected to exist for them. Banga lays out what that gap means for global stability, and why getting it right could make Africa for the next generation what Asia has been for the last 40 years. Getting it wrong, he warns, means social unrest and mass migration on a scale that will touch every corner of the world.

Banga explains how the World Bank is rethinking its role as a bridge between public institutions and private capital. Drawing on his private sector career at Citibank, Nestlé, Pepsi, and Mastercard, he makes the case that governments enable but the private sector creates jobs, and that the only way to close the gap is to get private capital off the sidelines. He walks through the five barriers holding back investment in emerging markets, from regulatory uncertainty and currency risk to the absence of a proper asset class for pension funds, and describes how the Bank's Private Sector Lab, led by figures like Larry Fink of BlackRock, is working to clear each one. A concrete example: the World Bank's work with Rio Tinto in Argentina to unlock lithium mining, processing jobs, and the infrastructure needed to make it viable.

The conversation turns personal as Banga reflects on growing up in India, where poverty was visible on every street corner, and what drew him to a role measured not by quarterly earnings but by how many people gain access to electricity, clean water, skilled work, and a fair shot. He shares the audacious targets he has set across electrification, agriculture, healthcare, and women's access to capital, and explains why he would still declare victory at 250 million people reached if the original goal was 300 and the baseline was 100. At the heart of his message is a simple conviction: a job is not just income. It is dignity. And dignity, he argues, is what made this country great and what the rest of the world deserves a chance at too.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:11 Welcome and Ajay's Global Travel
1:46 The 1.2 Billion Jobs Gap
2:30 Africa's Demographic Opportunity
3:16 World Bank's History and Legacy
3:39 Rio Tinto and Lithium in Argentina
5:13 Five Barriers Blocking Private Capital
6:55 Making the Investment Pitch
8:34 Infrastructure and Governance as Pillars
9:57 Governments Enable, Private Sector Creates Jobs
12:06 Small Business and the Middle Class
13:28 Human Dimensions of the Work
14:06 Growing Up in India, Finding Purpose
16:11 Ukraine, Gaza, and Conflict Zones
18:03 Assessing and Mitigating Risk
20:01 How to Get Involved and Invest
22:41 Electrifying Africa
24:19 Jobs, Dignity, and the World's Bottom Line
25:32 Closing Thoughts

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Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park for a wide-ranging conversation about the mission to make humanity a multi-planetary species and what it actually takes to build the infrastructure for that future. Limp traces the arc from his childhood fascination with the Apollo program and backyard model rockets to leading one of the most ambitious aerospace companies in the world, describing his move from a 30-year career scaling consumer technology at Amazon as a deliberate choice to spend his final professional chapter on something truly missionary.

Limp breaks down the three pillars Blue Origin is pursuing to drive down the cost of reaching space by orders of magnitude: reusability, high-volume manufacturing, and radical vertical integration of the supply chain. He explains how building factories capable of producing hundreds of rockets per year requires a fundamentally different design philosophy, and why owning everything from material science to the foundry is not just an operational decision but a way to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

The conversation covers Blue Origin's vision of lunar permanence, the company's self-funded lunar lander program, and what Limp calls the "amazing gift" of the Moon as a launching pad to the rest of the solar system. He also walks through Project Sunrise, Blue Origin's orbital data center initiative, as an early and concrete example of the broader mission to move polluting heavy industry off Earth entirely. Limp is candid about the Launch Complex 36 anomaly, the emotional all-hands that followed, and how Jeff Bezos's words that day galvanized 1,000 workers running 24/7 to get back on a path to flight by the end of this year.

Throughout the conversation, Limp reflects on what drew him to a role whose biggest payoffs he may never personally see, the urgency of getting to the Moon before China and staying there, and the refreshing speed with which NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has pushed bureaucracy aside in favor of genuine public-private partnership.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:11 gradatim ferociter and the Anomaly
2:30 Jeff Bezos's Rallying Cry
4:11 Dave Limp's Origin Story
5:22 Building Infrastructure in Space
7:26 Reducing the Cost of Launch
11:01 New Glenn and Factory Scale
12:06 Protecting Earth by Leaving It
14:53 Project Sunrise: Orbital Data Centers
15:19 NASA and Public-Private Partnership
18:09 Lunar Permanence and Beating China
21:42 A Mission Bigger Than One Lifetime
24:02 Closing Thoughts

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Tampa Bay Rays CEO Ken Babby joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park for a wide-ranging conversation on what it takes to build a winning organization on a limited budget, why culture and chemistry are the Rays' real secret sauce, and what it felt like to celebrate a postseason series win over the New York Yankees in a champagne-soaked clubhouse just one year after acquiring the team. Babby traces his unconventional path from intern at the Washington Post to minor league owner of the Akron Rubber Ducks and Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, and explains how 15 years of testing ideas in the minor leagues became the blueprint he brought to Tampa Bay.

Babby offers a candid look inside the Rays' baseball operations culture, crediting president Eric Neander and manager Kevin Cash, the longest-tenured manager-front-office duo in the game, with building a clubhouse where players choose to have dinner together on the road and play dominoes on the plane. He makes the case that Kevin Cash's unflappable calm is as important to the team's success as any analytics model, and reflects on what watching trade deadline decisions from the back of the room taught him about how elite organizations actually work.

The conversation turns to the Rays' long-awaited Forever Home, a new ballpark in Tampa that will be built adjacent to Steinbrenner Field. Babby describes a facility designed to feel like an open-air ballpark while delivering the climate-controlled comfort Florida demands, and calls it unlike anything currently in North America. He also walks through the remarkable off-field partnership with the Yankees, including the moment New York publicly backed the Tampa ballpark project and gave the Rays the home clubhouse at Steinbrenner Field for an entire season rather than displace their division rival.

The episode closes with a close look at the technology reshaping baseball, from the ABS challenge system to the replay review that overturned a would-be Anthony Volpe home run in Game 3 of the ALDS, a call Babby says exemplifies commissioner Rob Manfred's commitment to always getting the outcome right. Babby draws a through line from his early days checking box scores in the Washington Post to running one of the most creative franchises in the sport, and makes clear that for the Rays, the best is still ahead.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:33 Beating the Yankees
3:56 The Washington Post Years
6:21 Minor League Lessons
8:54 Players and the Clubhouse
11:08 The Rays' Secret Sauce
13:45 Small Ball and Team Chemistry
16:09 The New Tampa Ballpark
19:51 Technology and the ABS System
22:27 The Game 3 Replay Call
24:27 The Yankees Partnership
27:42 Rooting for the Rays

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Gladden Pappin, co-founder of American Affairs and newly joined Ballard Partners, sits down with Adam Goodman on 13th and Park to trace the intellectual and personal journey that brought him from Little Rock, Arkansas, to the center of Washington's policy debates. A sixth-generation descendant of the Osage Nation and Harvard graduate, Pappin draws a straight line from his grandfather Bob Gladden's restless work ethic and globe-trotting ambition, to early exposure to high-level politics through the Clinton White House, to the conviction that American political thought needed a serious reset.

Pappin and his co-founder Julius Krein launched American Affairs in 2017 at the Harvard Club of New York, deliberately placing it beside Foreign Affairs on the shelf and inviting contributors who actually understood industrial policy, supply chains, energy dominance, and the competitive threat from China. Long before those topics reached the mainstream, the journal was making the case that deindustrialization had hollowed out American towns and that the political consensus of the 1990s had cost the country real power. Pappin describes how Senator Marco Rubio's office became an early home for those ideas, and how proposals that once filled the journal's pages now sit in the offices of the current administration.

The conversation turns to J.D. Vance, whom Pappin first engaged in a critical review of Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, and who reached back out in January 2019 to begin a serious policy dialogue. Pappin offers a rare inside look at how Vance approaches ideas, describing a leader who actively seeks out dissenting voices, drills down on each subject area, and refuses to surround himself only with people who already agree with him. That portrait of intellectual curiosity, Pappin argues, is what distinguishes Vance as a strategic thinker.

Pappin closes with a sweeping assessment of Europe, NATO, and the Trump doctrine's emphasis on economics as a parallel pillar to security and sovereignty. Having led a research center in Hungary and now heading Ballard Partners' Central and Western European practice, he argues that the foundation of European security rests on individual nations and the willingness of their people to invest in their own countries, and that the new American approach of anchoring alliances in clear economic value propositions is both a correction to overreach and a more honest path to lasting partnership.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:12 Welcome to Ballard Partners
1:34 Arkansas Roots and Grandfather Bob Gladden
2:41 The Clinton White House and Early Politics
3:30 Launching American Affairs at the Harvard Club
5:14 The Ideas Behind the Trump Doctrine
7:59 Marco Rubio and the China Competition
9:39 Reviewing J.D. Vance's Book in 2016
11:28 Vance Reaches Out in 2019
12:31 How Vance Approaches Ideas and Leadership
14:33 Europe, NATO, and the New Transatlantic Relationship
16:09 Individual Nations as Europe's Foundation
17:51 Economics as the Core of the Trump Foreign Policy Doctrine
20:18 What Living Abroad Taught Him About America
21:05 Notre Dame, South Bend, and American Life
21:48 Closing Thoughts on American Affairs and Big Ideas

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Mykhailo Bno-Airian, Vice President of Global Affairs at MHP, joins Adam Goodman at Ballard Studios in Washington DC for a conversation about one of the most overlooked dimensions of the war in Ukraine: its economy. A former diplomat, energy executive, and governor of the Kyiv region, Bno-Airian brings a uniquely layered perspective to the question of how a country keeps itself working, and working at a world-class level, while under sustained military assault. MHP, founded by Yuriy Kosyuk, operates across roughly 350,000 hectares, employs more than 30,000 people, and has grown into the number one poultry producer in Europe, exporting to more than 70 countries.

Bno-Airian describes the daily rhythm of life in Ukraine with striking plainness: bombings through the night, families emerging from shelters in the morning and walking their children to school. He argues that the true front line of the war is not only military but entrepreneurial, with Ukrainian business owners rebuilding destroyed facilities the very next day and refusing to stop. MHP's continued operations in rural communities, he explains, are critical not just to food exports but to preserving the tax base, social infrastructure, and human presence in areas that would otherwise empty out.

The conversation turns to global strategy, with Bno-Airian pressing the case that Ukraine is being discussed without Ukrainians at the table. He recounts MHP becoming the first Ukrainian agricultural company to join the World Economic Forum at Davos, his meeting with the WTO Director General on eliminating non-tariff barriers to agricultural trade, and his argument to decision makers in both Washington and Brussels that Ukraine should be seen as an opportunity, not a competitor. He draws a direct parallel to U.S. support for Israel and South Korea, suggesting a similar industrial partnership model could define the postwar relationship between the United States and Ukraine.

Adam Goodman closes by framing the episode's core theme: that beneath every geopolitical calculation is a human story, and that a Ukrainian family's hopes for safety, prosperity, and freedom look a great deal like those of any American family.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:05 How Ukraine Keeps Going
2:33 Fighting on Every Front
3:16 What MHP Does and Who Built It
4:43 Why Continued Operations Matter
6:01 The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Wartime
7:02 Ukraine's Voice at Davos and the WEF
8:52 The Strategy Washington Is Missing
10:36 WTO and Non-Tariff Trade Barriers
12:17 The Case for U.S.-Ukraine Economic Partnership
14:12 A Documentary About Ukrainian Resilience
15:25 Closing Thoughts

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Craig Wagoner, President and CEO of Community Health System, joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park for an in-depth conversation about one of California's most consequential but least-known health systems. Serving more than 4 million residents across 15,000 square miles of the Central Valley, Community Health System operates five hospitals, nearly 12,000 employees, and the only Level 1 trauma center and burn center between Los Angeles and Sacramento. Wagoner explains what it truly means to be a safety net provider, accepting every patient regardless of ability to pay, and why that mission comes at a steep financial cost: the system loses roughly $600 on every government-insured patient, a burden that has pushed the organization into the red despite running one of the leanest cost structures of any hospital system in California.

Wagoner details the specific pressures facing the system, from chronic physician shortages in a community where there are roughly 2,000 residents per primary care doctor, to the structural mismatch between Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates and the real cost of delivering care. He shares the system's goal of being back in the black by 2029, and outlines the strategies driving that turnaround, including a nurse navigator diabetes pilot program that has already produced a 33% reduction in emergency visits and measurable improvements in patient blood sugar levels. He makes the case that Community Health System, with its overwhelming concentration of Medicaid and Medicare patients, is a natural proving ground for population health models that could be scaled nationally.

The conversation turns to Wagoner's personal journey through 35 years in healthcare across 22 hospitals and six states, and what drew him to the Central Valley's mission-driven culture. He describes a workforce where some employees have been with the organization for over 50 years, a staff he says has hearts bigger than any place he has ever worked. He closes with a call for a fundamental realignment of incentives across the entire healthcare system, bringing pharmaceutical companies, payers, providers, and labor to the same table to design something better, arguing that at 18% of GDP, the current path simply is not sustainable.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:22 Welcome to 13th and Park
1:40 What Is Community Health System?
2:32 Financial Pressures of Safety Net Care
3:14 Serving 4 Million Across 15,000 Square Miles
4:27 Lowest Cost Provider in California
6:14 Physician Training and Shortages
7:36 Top Medicaid Rankings: Pride and Warning
8:51 Operating in the Red
9:38 Diabetes Pilot Program Success
10:46 What Flexibility Is Needed from Government
11:55 CMS, Cost Savings, and Access
13:09 Expanding to COPD, Cardiac, and GLP-1s
13:48 The Ultimate Test Model for Medicaid
14:43 35 Years in Healthcare
15:47 From Montana to the Central Valley
17:38 The 12,000-Person Mission
19:23 Right Care, Right Time, Right Place
20:45 Optimism for a Better System
21:32 Closing Thoughts

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-a-wagoner-3943a830
Website: https://thecommunitycause.org

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