00:00:30.540You go back to the advent of the printing press and you can read old commentary about what that was going to do to the world and how it was going to change the world.
00:00:39.460And it's nearly identical to the same things a lot of people on the left are saying about social media today.
00:00:45.340It's going to produce, you know, unbridled amounts of misinformation.
00:00:48.920The information is spreading too fast. There's no way to contain it.
00:00:52.400It's going to lead to societal downfall, yada, yada, yada.
00:00:55.200And the solution, of course, is always to limit that information.
00:00:58.500It's to suppress it somehow in order to maintain whatever the narrative is that you think is the truth.
00:01:06.080That battle has been happening forever.
00:01:07.700I think COVID is a great example of how the prevailing acceptable wisdom has changed over time.
00:01:14.560I mean, what used to be totally off limits, like suggesting that it started in a lab and this was all the result of a lab leak,
00:01:21.460where that vaccines weren't totally effective and people were still spreading the virus and that sort of thing.
00:01:25.780And that's now acceptable speech on a lot of platforms when it wasn't a year ago or two years ago or three years ago.
00:02:19.720I am the founder of Tangle, which is a nonpartisan politics newsletter where we tackle one big,
00:02:26.980you know, controversial debate every day in the news and summarize the best arguments we can find
00:02:32.460from the right and the left across the political spectrum on that argument.
00:02:36.960So, you know, I kind of say there are two Genesis stories for me as to how I'm ended up in this seat talking to you guys.
00:02:43.800The first one is that I grew up in a really divided, politically divided county in Pennsylvania,
00:02:49.460just outside Philadelphia called Bucks County, where I had a lot of friends and family who were on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
00:02:57.360So I have a lot of loved ones who do not agree about politics.
00:03:02.300And that was kind of the environment that I grew up in with a lot of arguing and a lot of fights.
00:03:09.060And I think increasingly, you know, from my time in high school, when I started really paying attention to politics to where I am now,
00:03:17.280those fights have gotten more bitter and more divisive, which I think a lot of people recognize.
00:03:22.820And then my second Genesis story is that I'm a political journalist by trade.
00:03:27.700I went to a journalism school and got a job in the media world.
00:03:32.700My first job ever was at the Huffington Post, which, as you probably know, is a very left wing liberal media outlet.
00:03:39.740And as I like to say, I did not take my job there because I was a bleeding heart lib.
00:03:44.620I took the job there because I applied 40 other places and they were the only ones that gave me a job.
00:03:49.020And it's not hard to it's not easy to get a job with a journalism degree these days.
00:03:54.100So I kind of got a look at how the sausage was made really early on for, you know, a more partisan media outlet as my first job.
00:04:03.780And I also learned what it meant to get tagged in the media space.
00:04:08.560When I left the Huffington Post, I was immediately, you know, labeled as a liberal because I had bylines at Huffington Post.
00:04:16.900And anybody who could do a Google search pretty quickly dismissed anything I wrote as being kind of partisan hackery if they were a conservative because they could find out that my first job was at Huffington Post.
00:04:29.520And they assumed a bunch of things because of that.
00:04:31.980And so I learned pretty quickly that our information system was really divided.
00:04:36.360So I had an inkling of an idea to start Tangle really early on in my journalism career.
00:04:43.520I helped start and build a media company with Ashton Kutcher, the actor and venture capitalist, and was there for many years.
00:04:51.300For about seven years, I worked there and led a politics team there.
00:04:54.920And they went through an acquisition and sort of pivoted to video and did all that stuff that's happening in the media space.
00:05:00.480And so I kind of built an exit ramp for myself because I wanted to stay on the politics beat.
00:05:06.440And I built Tangle as a response to that and a response to many of the really, I think, insidious forces in the media space right now that are helping to contribute to our political divides and the spread of bad information.
00:05:21.060And, you know, the general celebration of people being partisan hacks, which is not something I'm a particular fan of.
00:05:27.660Yeah, totally. Well, listen, before we get into where we are today and all the crap that you rightly identify as a big cause of the many issues we have in the world, I was actually quite curious about the back story.
00:05:40.340When were you, what years were you at the Huffington Post approximately?
00:05:44.220Yeah, so I graduated college in 2013. I'm 31 years old.
00:05:48.660So I was at the Huffington Post right after that.
00:05:50.520Actually, straight from college, I went into a yeshiva, a religious school in Jerusalem in Israel.
00:05:57.740Again, another interesting experience.
00:06:00.020I was not raised religious, but I didn't know what I wanted to do, what exactly I wanted to write about.
00:06:06.080And I had a campus rabbi who I'd built a relationship with who was like, hey, there's this program in Israel.
00:06:11.960You can go for six months, live in a yeshiva.
00:06:14.800It's kind of all expenses paid and you'll get a writing internship.
00:06:18.820And, you know, hopefully you'll see the light and become an Orthodox Jew, basically, was the idea.
00:06:27.960I mean, it was maybe to this day the most intellectually stimulating time of my life.
00:06:32.320I mean, I always talk about having your perceptions challenged at every corner and your belief system challenged at every corner as someone who is secular being dropped into one of the most religious spaces in the world.
00:06:45.500I got a lot of attention from very religious rabbis who were interested in compelling me to, you know, come to their side.
00:06:53.260I had a lot of really interesting conversations and I did some traveling in the Middle East and I wrote a lot.
00:06:58.560And I was there, you know, in 2013, spring of 2013, summer and fall of 2013.
00:07:05.440And I was writing essays and cover letters home from Israel applying for jobs in the United States.
00:07:12.320And so I came home, I think, in the winter of 2013, right around the turn of the year to start working at the Huffington Post.
00:07:19.780And I was there for about a year before I got poached out of the job.
00:07:23.640So it was the Facebook boom, the clickbait boom.
00:07:27.080It was the time when articles were getting millions of views with clickbait headlines and that kind of stuff.
00:07:32.000Yeah. And so I gather from the way you talk about it that you were not necessarily fully aligned with the prevailing ideology at the Huffington Post at the time.
00:07:46.340I mean, you know, I so tell me what that was like, like, I'm curious what that's like going into, you know, from my observation, the Huffington Post is, as you said, very left leaning and kind of ideologically pretty homogenous in my experience.
00:08:02.400So going in there with someone who had slightly different opinions, what was your experience like?
00:08:07.460Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I think like I want to be careful not to broad brush everybody who worked there or works there now because that's what happened to me.
00:08:16.480And, you know, that was really frustrating for me.
00:08:18.780But I think generally the dynamics that you see in that kind of environment are, you know, a headline gets turned into something a little bit more sensational or misleading or intentionally combative than what your actual story is and what, you know, what the essence of a piece you've written is.
00:08:38.760So you might write a story about a, you know, I don't know, a law around abortion or something.
00:08:45.640And there are lots of caveats in the story about how, you know, this law is unlikely to be passed and there are all these guardrails in place that would prevent it from being, you know, ruled as a legal in front of the Supreme Court or whatever.
00:08:58.720And that story goes through the kind of machine and it comes out on the Huffington Post front page, which is like, you know, abortion rights threatened for 150 million women across the country because they want people to click on it.
00:09:09.900They want people to read it. They want people to share it.
00:09:12.560Another thing I experienced, frankly, was that, you know, a lot of the people who were working in that newsroom, I think, grew up in more urban and wealthy areas.
00:09:25.560And I was kind of coming from a background that had a lot of class and political diversity, even though it was a predominantly white part of the country.
00:09:34.120And so, you know, I just the kind of conversations I overheard and the assumptions I think a lot of people made about the politics of that moment were not totally aligned with my view on them.
00:09:44.280Now, at the same time, there are a lot of reporters there, not a lot, but a handful I can remember for sure, who were from more rural areas or even more conservative areas who are working at the Huffington Post, who maybe have liberal beliefs, but I thought had like a much more well-rounded understanding of the country.
00:09:59.080So that was the kind of stuff, you know, I would see.
00:10:03.040And it was clear to me that, like, you know, on the whole, 80 to 90 percent of the people that work there had center left to far left political views.
00:10:13.360And when, you know, there are teams of people like that, there's very little dissent in the newsroom about what stories to cover, how to frame the stories, who your sources are, how you pick headlines, all those things.
00:10:24.980And it kind of snowballs. And I think, you know, going into the 2016 election, we saw the ramifications of that in the sense that a lot of people and a lot of news organizations miss the rise of Trump and miss the rise of the Trump right.
00:10:39.020And we're extremely out of touch with what was happening in a lot of places across the country.
00:10:45.060Isaac, as you were talking to me, and bear in mind, we're from the UK, so our media is very different from yours in many ways.
00:10:52.040But what you were talking to me about the Huffington Post and the way they did things and the way they sensationalized headlines, we've got the tabloid press in this country.
00:11:01.220I'm thinking, hang on, but that's no different to what The Sun or The Mirror or all of those or The Daily Star or all of that ilk do in our country.
00:11:09.320Francis, I would add, by the way, sorry to interrupt your first question, but I've written pieces for non-tabloid publications in this country, and it's the same thing.
00:11:18.460You write what you think is a sensible, nuanced piece, and then someone attaches the most incendiary possible title.
00:11:24.920That's why I no longer write for mainstream newspapers.
00:11:27.280Yeah, I mean, first of all, I don't think it's at all exclusive to The Huffington Post, obviously.
00:11:35.640I mean, I think it's something that happens across the media space.
00:11:39.440I mean, I'm pretty familiar with the ecosystem you guys are operating in.
00:11:46.100I mean, obviously, The Sun is motivated by the same things that The Huffington Post is, which is they need traffic because if they get traffic, they get revenue on their ads.
00:11:56.660I mean, it's one of the sort of fundamental tensions that news organizations have is that they're trying to tell stories and give balanced, informative information to people.
00:12:07.640But oftentimes, that's less entertaining and less engaging and less enticing than the really sort of crazy, more incendiary things that are out there.
00:12:17.720One of the things that I did when I started Tangle as a means of combating that was that I set out to build our entire revenue stream based on subscription revenue, which I think, you know, if you are advertising yourself as a media organization that's presenting balance and nuance and all these things,
00:12:35.540and then readers come in to check out what you're doing and they get that, then they're going to give you money.
00:12:41.100And that's a really good incentive, you know, on the publishing side to stay true to your mission, stay true to your goal.
00:12:47.800If you're The Huffington Post and, you know, your goal is to inform the public, but the incentives are that in order to keep everybody on staff, you have to get a million page views a week,
00:12:58.280then you're going to have to do things to hit those goals, which is a really big challenge.
00:13:03.260And I don't envy the position that a lot of those media outlets are in.
00:13:07.100I mean, you click on a Daily Mail article these days and, you know, you get absolutely hammered with 20 different pop-up ads and videos and all this stuff.
00:13:16.640And the headline's crazy and it makes you want to click in.
00:13:19.940And, you know, I'm sure there are a lot of writers and reporters there that wish it wasn't like that, but that's just kind of how you survive in the industry right now.
00:13:27.560To put a devil's advocate position to you, Isaac, but isn't that the trap you're in and that we're all in, in a way?
00:13:34.280Because we have subscribers, we know what our audience likes, we know what our audience dislikes.
00:13:42.760Isn't that the kind of path that we all have to tread, in a way?
00:14:01.760You know, a lot of the writers who I read and follow on Substack are what I would call kind of heterodox writers who are offering sort of alternative, non-mainstream views on really important issues.
00:14:14.780And the challenge is that that is sort of a bubble and an ideology of its own.
00:14:20.760If what you're providing to your readership is a counter-narrative, if the only goal that you're trying to do is to sort of offer something that's kind of heterodox or different and feed them what they want and give them what they want, then you're motivated to look for that all the time.
00:14:37.600In the same way, a lefty or righty reporter might be motivated to look for something that affirms their beliefs.
00:14:42.740So, you know, I think a really good example of that was actually the war in Ukraine.
00:14:47.320You could go back and read a lot of the top political and international writers who are on platforms like Substack or independent writers.
00:14:55.020And a month before Putin invaded Ukraine, they were all saying that it wasn't going to happen, that it was just saber rattling.
00:15:01.860And the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and the CIA and all these all these, you know, deep state entities were sort of just fear mongering, basically.
00:15:12.220And it turned out that the mainstream narrative was actually right, that, you know, a lot of the reporting and the sourcing that was coming from those outlets, which, trust me, have gotten tons of stuff wrong, was correct.
00:15:22.520And in retrospect, it was pretty obvious.
00:15:24.900I mean, he put hundreds of thousands of troops on the border and said he was going to invade.
00:15:39.340I mean, from my perspective, I think there's less pressure in the space that we're in.
00:15:45.640But absolutely, I mean, there are the fire breathers who are independent writers who I think are motivated.
00:15:52.420You know, they know their audience loves it when they just absolutely torch the New York Times or the left or whatever, like the crazy progressives out there.
00:16:00.840And so they're they're motivated to do that kind of writing.
00:16:04.040And I do think that's that's a dangerous trap.
00:16:06.840And, you know, there are people who talk about that.
00:16:09.880But the forces of that on an individual, to me, are less pernicious than the institutional pressure that you get and the threat of losing your job that you get when you work at one of these major media outlets.
00:16:22.360Isaac, do you think part of the problem is, is because of social media, we amplify the most divisive voices, the most outrageous takes.
00:16:30.520So then we see people, journalists on the left, like who work for, we all know the type of publications producing just ridiculous nonsense.
00:16:39.140And we go, this is a leftist journalist, when the actual truth is there's lots of journalists who lean left or are left, who are actually very good, very principled.
00:16:49.020So what we have in many ways are these two straw men who we see as left journalists and right journalists.
00:16:55.240But actually, they're not credible, these publications that we're talking about.
00:16:59.580Yeah, I mean, so I think one of the most common tactics that I see in our kind of modern political warfare that happens is the mainstreaming of idiots.
00:17:09.920You know, I mean, it's the idea is pick out the person on the other side who is saying the most asinine, crazy, you know, derisive, combative things about a certain political group and then elevate them and make it seem as if this person is the mainstream.
00:17:27.460So, you know, a good example is somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:17:31.940I mean, she whatever had all these crazy beliefs that she posted out on Facebook about, you know, Jewish space lasers and all this stuff.
00:17:39.900And she's one Republican, you know, conservative in the House of Representatives in the United States, which is probably going to have about 222 Republicans in it in this upcoming Congress.
00:17:55.640I mean, she every liberal who's politically engaged knows who she is and they can probably name less than 10 other Republicans in the House of Representatives.
00:18:04.380Why is that? It's because a lot of people on the left elevate her and try to make her symbolic of what the modern day Republican Party is.
00:18:13.900And maybe there are certain issues where she is representative of the Republican Party today.
00:18:18.640But on the whole, I think she's, you know, she's pretty fringe.
00:18:23.660Yet if you ask your standard Democrat in the U.S. to imagine a Republican today and ask you ask them to describe to you what their beliefs are, they're going to describe somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:18:35.600And I think that's because of the effectiveness of that kind of political warfare.
00:18:40.120And the same goes for, you know, conservatives on the right and what they do at the left.
00:18:45.080I mean, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, widely considered one of the most far left progressive Democrats in the House.
00:18:53.540And that's because the right and conservative media have intentionally made her the most famous to sort of say, this is the modern day Democratic Party.
00:19:02.020And if you're scared of this, if you don't like this, then you should vote for Republicans.
00:19:05.760So, you know, one of the things I try and do in my work is offer up people who aren't that fringe, who aren't that far right.
00:19:15.400I mean, you know, or far left in our newsletters.
00:19:19.160We do include those fringe opinions, but there may be one of, you know, seven or eight opinions that you're going to see.
00:19:25.780That way you understand, you know, here's the spectrum of what the thought is on this side of the aisle.
00:19:32.120So you don't leave feeling like everybody on the left is AOC and everybody on the right is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:19:37.660Hey, Francis, do you want to protect kids?
00:19:41.480I was a teacher for 12 years, so no, I will never forget what those little c***s put me through.
00:19:47.520Francis, what did your therapist say about moving on with your life?
00:21:36.040But I suppose I was thinking when we were talking about the Daily Mail and The Sun and tabloids and other publications
00:21:42.640and the Huffington Post and whatever, isn't this one of those things where it's like maybe you like to go to an expensive restaurant,
00:21:51.820but quite a lot of people are quite happy to eat at McDonald's.
00:21:54.620You know, I enjoy a McDonald's once a year, but I generally don't go to that sort of place.
00:21:59.960But every time I drive past a McDonald's, it's full of people, right?
00:22:04.300So is it really true that a lot of people want to have this nonpartisan, long-form, you know, sensible, multifaceted, nuanced conversation?
00:22:19.160I mean, it's what we try to do on Trigonometry.
00:22:21.020And we have an audience, but every time I turn on YouTube, I'm confronted with the fact that, you know,
00:22:27.680a hot right-wing girl calling someone on the left a moron or a shill or whatever is going to get a million views.
00:22:34.500When we do a sensible interview with someone like you, you might get, you know, 50,000 views or 10,000 views.
00:22:41.140You might get 100,000 views, but it's not going to get a million views because most people want a McDonald's.
00:23:32.340It is hard to get people to engage with that stuff.
00:23:35.720I do think there are ways to do it, though, and I think there are ways to raise the interest level.
00:23:40.900I mean, when I'm pitching Tangle to people and trying to get them to sign up and give our newsletter a shot,
00:23:47.300I change the way I talk about it, honestly, depending on the kind of person I'm talking to and what their political worldview is.
00:23:53.980And both pitches are really honest, but I also know that one's going to be more effective than the other.
00:24:00.400So, you know, if I'm talking to a conservative right-wing Trumper type, I'm going to say, look, I started a media outlet because I agree the media is broken.
00:24:20.800If you don't see your views represented, if you don't think it's fair, you don't have to read it.
00:24:24.800But I think if you try it, you'll like it.
00:24:26.940And that's a really appealing pitch to them because we meet on the fact that, yeah, the media ecosystem is broken and these incentives are wrong.
00:24:34.980And there are a lot of journalists out there who aren't being fair.
00:24:37.160If I'm talking to a liberal, you know, it's more like if you still don't understand why Trump was elected in 2016 and almost got reelected in 2020 or why he's still the most popular politician in the Republican Party,
00:24:49.600you should get out of your news bubble.
00:24:52.160You're in an information bubble if you don't understand that yet.
00:25:00.060It's something much broader and more important and more, I guess I would say, complex than that.
00:25:06.340And that is a good way to get people like, OK, maybe I do have more to learn about other people in the United States.
00:25:13.080Maybe I am misunderstanding what a lot of people in America think or feel.
00:25:16.980And so they'll come check out Tango to sort of get a better understanding of the other side of what's happening in the conservative space.
00:25:22.740Because a lot of conservatives feel like they're surrounded by liberal media and a lot of liberals feel like they have no idea how a conservative could believe what they believe in the United States.
00:25:33.040I actually think the true is same for a lot of the politics in your country.
00:25:37.520And I think, you know, something like what I'm doing would be really effective and draw a big audience there.
00:25:44.560And, you know, to your point, it's it's not easy to win people over on the nuance of things.
00:25:51.520But I do think there is a groundswell and a kind of grassroots uprising against the way things are right now that's happening.
00:26:01.360And, you know, you guys having 300,000 YouTube subscribers is part of that.
00:26:17.980You guys have really long form, oftentimes controversial conversations that I think, regardless of where people were from, they would feel uncomfortable in certain moments.
00:26:28.060Yet they're coming back and they're watching.
00:26:36.880I think the the kind of the swell of independent media that we're seeing right now that's challenging a lot of the traditional media outlets is proof of it.
00:26:48.180We're definitely competing with one hand tied behind our backs.
00:26:51.640But because, you know, human nature wants the kind of sensationalist stuff that reaffirms our worldviews.
00:26:57.980But I do think there are more and more people who are increasingly interested in this kind of content.
00:27:03.620Isaac, I was listening to an interview you did as part of my research, and you said something really fascinating.
00:27:11.660You said that in 2014, you could see the creation and the rise of echo chambers way before Trump, way before Brexit, way before any of that.
00:27:23.080A big reason why was because of the community I grew up in, you know, like I was back then, you know, it's crazy to think about now because Facebook's kind of a ghost town, at least for me.
00:27:36.040But that was where so much political discourse was happening.
00:27:39.760You know, the hundreds of comments on, you know, some high school teacher's Facebook status or whatever.
00:27:46.100I mean, it was like people were debating, fighting tooth and nail about politics on platforms like Facebook and a little bit of Twitter, but mostly Facebook.
00:27:55.280And I saw, I mean, the post, the kind of news and information that people were posting on Facebook back then from my friends who were on the left and my friends who were on the right.
00:28:08.580It wasn't like two articles that were varying opinions on the same news event.
00:28:14.360It was they were talking about totally different news events or they were talking about the same news event, but had a totally different underlying set of facts that they were believing in, that they were, you know, talking about in the comments and fighting over.
00:28:29.880And it was like the old days where we would be throwing links at each other and bombing Facebook statuses with, you know, long form posts about why somebody was wrong and having all the sources cited at the bottom.
00:28:41.660And you could see it plain as day. I mean, it was just like people were getting their information from two different sources.
00:28:48.220It wasn't like these guys were both reading a New York Times article and had a disagreement about the language that was being used.
00:28:55.320It was like one side was pulling something from a really obscure conservative blog with, you know, some truths and some fictions.
00:29:03.560And the other side was pulling something from a really obscure liberal blog with some truths and some fictions.
00:29:08.680And they were going to battle with that kind of information.
00:29:11.680And so I was I was worried back then that so many people who I knew personally were sort of projecting this really combative personality online and were clearly immersed in in these like really politically affirming information ecosystems.
00:29:31.920And, you know, between 2014 and now there have been tons of studies about this, about, you know, how that echo chamber increases partisanship, how oftentimes even trying to break the echo chamber actually also increases partisanship, which is a really interesting phenomenon.
00:29:49.620So people who post more politically on Facebook are also now more likely to run into, you know, the the dissenter, the person dropping their comments.
00:29:59.760But because of the way people interact on Facebook, because it's so combative, it actually doesn't bring you know, it doesn't moderate their views.
00:30:07.320It makes them dig their heels in more because they're fighting off enemies left and right online.
00:30:11.980So there's a lot of really, really troubling stuff that I think we've seen in that space.
00:30:17.020But, yeah, I mean, it was it was just my friends and family members and that kind of anecdotal thing that I was seeing that I imagine was, you know, not unique to me.
00:30:31.680I was I was I was going to ask on that front, because the I suppose the way that the echo chambers would have been in 2014, it just seems to me that it's on a whole different level now.
00:30:43.600We were actually one of the few people in the old media space who did say it was going to happen and kind of broke down why it happened immediately afterwards for people who hadn't been following.
00:30:53.840But, you know, you know, the war in Ukraine is a good example, because I am absolutely convinced that if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election and the Vladimir Putin had still invaded the entire of the almost the entire of the right would now be massively in favor of funding Ukraine and the entire left would be massively against funding Ukraine.
00:31:19.160I'm convinced of that because we've got to a point where it's like the right used to mock the left for supporting the current thing.
00:31:30.340It's this meme online that people will support anything as long as the mainstream is telling them to support it.
00:31:36.680And of course, the right, a lot of it, not all of it, but portions of it have now got to a position where they oppose the current thing without thinking, without analyzing, without critical thought.
00:31:47.660And thanks to the echo chambers and the availability of all sorts of media.
00:31:52.660Now, if you want to build a case for or against or supporting Ukraine or against supporting Ukraine or for neutrality or for not caring about it or for the fact that it's actually fake news or that it was, you know, Jewish conspiracy, whatever.
00:32:08.300There's plenty of, you know, sub stacks and YouTube videos and rumble and whatever that you can find to make what is on the surface a legitimate case for whatever it is that you believe, right?
00:32:23.560And so I think there's a couple of things at play there.
00:32:26.620First of all, I think it's what you just said, which is that the media space is so fractured now and there's so much out there.
00:32:34.840There's so much information out there on the Internet that it doesn't really matter, you know, how obscure or maybe detached from reality your viewpoint is.
00:32:45.380You can probably find somebody who has published a well-articulated video or article or podcast that's sort of making the case for you to affirm that.
00:32:54.120So, you know, enough Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo searches and you're going to come across the thing that you want.
00:33:01.940Two, you know, I did a really interesting interview with a guy named Hiram Lewis who's writing a book called The Myth of the Left and the Right.
00:33:09.860And he makes what I think is maybe the most compelling case or explanation, I think, for our current political moment, which is that there just is no left and right.
00:33:19.640It's just a total it's an abstraction where what defines being left or right has just completely been upended and changed and moved repeatedly throughout the course of American and global history.
00:33:34.500And, you know, his argument is basically like we live in political tribes increasingly in today's society.
00:33:42.680People's community are tied closely to their political worldview.
00:33:46.700And so if your community is your political tribe, then you're going to kind of follow what the tribe does because you want to stay a part of that community, regardless of if it violates whatever your preconceived, you know, purported, I guess, allegiances are.
00:34:03.460And you'll change your worldview to kind of fit in is basically his argument.
00:34:08.160And he and he makes a really good case for it.
00:34:10.140I mean, the examples that he uses are like, you know, when George W. Bush invaded Iraq and, you know, launched us into this war against terror in the Middle East.
00:34:20.680The commentary back then was that he was moving the Republican Party to the right.
00:34:24.440And when Donald Trump took office and took this isolationist stance that he was going to, you know, pull troops home from the Middle East, the commentary was he was lurching the party to the right.
00:34:33.860And it's like, OK, well, what does it mean to go to the right then?
00:34:43.900They're progressives are trying to change.
00:34:45.660They're trying to change what it means to be a woman and they're trying to change same sex marriage and all these things.
00:34:51.300And then we just have this Roe v. Wade case where, you know, 80 years of precedent is upended in a day because conservatives wanted to change what the current law is.
00:34:59.680So doing that was considered, you know, launching the country to the right.
00:35:03.780It was considered this very conservative moment in American history, yet they weren't really conserving anything.
00:35:09.040They were making a really big change to the country, of which, you know, the repercussions I think we just saw in this election was that voters sort of clapped back, basically.
00:35:18.520So, you know, I don't really buy that the left and the right are actual pulls of political ideologies that we're subscribed to.
00:35:27.420I think there are, you know, moments in history where we have vague understandings of what it means to be left or what it means to be right.
00:35:34.400Big government, little government, you know, big government, small government, conserving, progressing.
00:35:40.040But they're always dynamic and moving and changing.