TRIGGERnometry - December 15, 2022


Escaping the Biased Media Machine with Isaac Saul

Topics
locals
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Isaac Saul Alex Jones Beautiful Noise Donald Trump Marjorie Taylor Greene Kanye Sweet Caroline Douglas Murray Nick Fuentes Sam Harris Tim Pool Jacob George W. Bush Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Milo Yiannopoulos Mitch McConnell Jordan Peterson Brett Weinstein Ashton Kutcher Lionel Shriver and 10 more
Ariel Pink： ＂I Lost My Career for Attending Peaceful Trump Rally＂ Stoicism： Get Better at Life with Massimo Pigliucci

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour

Words per minute

183.13

Word count

11,165

Sentence count

580

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

25

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Trigonometry, Francis Foster and Constantine Kishin sit down with Tangle founder and editor Isaac Saul to talk about how he got started in journalism, how he started Tangle, and what it means to be a bleeding-heart liberal.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
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00:00:30.540 You 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.
00:00:39.460 And it's nearly identical to the same things a lot of people on the left are saying about social media today.
00:00:45.340 It's going to produce, you know, unbridled amounts of misinformation.
00:00:48.920 The information is spreading too fast. There's no way to contain it.
00:00:52.400 It's going to lead to societal downfall, yada, yada, yada.
00:00:55.200 And the solution, of course, is always to limit that information.
00:00:58.500 It's to suppress it somehow in order to maintain whatever the narrative is that you think is the truth.
00:01:06.080 That battle has been happening forever.
00:01:07.700 I think COVID is a great example of how the prevailing acceptable wisdom has changed over time.
00:01:14.560 I 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,
00:01:21.460 where that vaccines weren't totally effective and people were still spreading the virus and that sort of thing.
00:01:25.780 And 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.
00:01:42.640 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:45.940 I'm Francis Foster.
00:01:47.380 I'm Constantine Kishin.
00:01:48.420 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:54.460 Our brilliant guest today is a journalist and the founder and editor of Tangle, Isaac Saul.
00:01:58.780 Welcome to Trigonometry.
00:02:00.080 Thank you guys for having me on. I'm thrilled to be here.
00:02:02.560 It's really good to have you on. Thank you so much for coming on.
00:02:05.780 Before we get into the interview itself, and you've got lots of interesting things to share with our audience,
00:02:11.140 tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are,
00:02:13.500 what has been the journey that brings you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:02:16.280 Oh, man. Well, my name's Isaac Saul.
00:02:19.720 I am the founder of Tangle, which is a nonpartisan politics newsletter where we tackle one big,
00:02:26.980 you know, controversial debate every day in the news and summarize the best arguments we can find
00:02:32.460 from the right and the left across the political spectrum on that argument.
00:02:36.960 So, 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.
00:02:43.800 The first one is that I grew up in a really divided, politically divided county in Pennsylvania,
00:02:49.460 just outside Philadelphia called Bucks County, where I had a lot of friends and family who were on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
00:02:57.360 So I have a lot of loved ones who do not agree about politics.
00:03:02.300 And that was kind of the environment that I grew up in with a lot of arguing and a lot of fights.
00:03:09.060 And I think increasingly, you know, from my time in high school, when I started really paying attention to politics to where I am now,
00:03:17.280 those fights have gotten more bitter and more divisive, which I think a lot of people recognize.
00:03:22.820 And then my second Genesis story is that I'm a political journalist by trade.
00:03:27.700 I went to a journalism school and got a job in the media world.
00:03:32.700 My first job ever was at the Huffington Post, which, as you probably know, is a very left wing liberal media outlet.
00:03:39.740 And as I like to say, I did not take my job there because I was a bleeding heart lib.
00:03:44.620 I took the job there because I applied 40 other places and they were the only ones that gave me a job.
00:03:49.020 And it's not hard to it's not easy to get a job with a journalism degree these days.
00:03:54.100 So 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.
00:04:03.780 And I also learned what it meant to get tagged in the media space.
00:04:08.560 When I left the Huffington Post, I was immediately, you know, labeled as a liberal because I had bylines at Huffington Post.
00:04:16.900 And 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.
00:04:29.520 And they assumed a bunch of things because of that.
00:04:31.980 And so I learned pretty quickly that our information system was really divided.
00:04:36.360 So I had an inkling of an idea to start Tangle really early on in my journalism career.
00:04:43.520 I helped start and build a media company with Ashton Kutcher, the actor and venture capitalist, and was there for many years.
00:04:51.300 For about seven years, I worked there and led a politics team there.
00:04:54.920 And they went through an acquisition and sort of pivoted to video and did all that stuff that's happening in the media space.
00:05:00.480 And so I kind of built an exit ramp for myself because I wanted to stay on the politics beat.
00:05:04.760 I wanted to keep writing.
00:05:06.440 And 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.
00:05:21.060 And, you know, the general celebration of people being partisan hacks, which is not something I'm a particular fan of.
00:05:27.660 Yeah, 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.
00:05:40.340 When were you, what years were you at the Huffington Post approximately?
00:05:44.220 Yeah, so I graduated college in 2013. I'm 31 years old.
00:05:48.660 So I was at the Huffington Post right after that.
00:05:50.520 Actually, straight from college, I went into a yeshiva, a religious school in Jerusalem in Israel.
00:05:57.740 Again, another interesting experience.
00:06:00.020 I was not raised religious, but I didn't know what I wanted to do, what exactly I wanted to write about.
00:06:06.080 And I had a campus rabbi who I'd built a relationship with who was like, hey, there's this program in Israel.
00:06:11.960 You can go for six months, live in a yeshiva.
00:06:14.800 It's kind of all expenses paid and you'll get a writing internship.
00:06:18.820 And, you know, hopefully you'll see the light and become an Orthodox Jew, basically, was the idea. 0.80
00:06:24.560 And I went and it was incredible.
00:06:27.960 I mean, it was maybe to this day the most intellectually stimulating time of my life.
00:06:32.320 I 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.
00:06:45.500 I got a lot of attention from very religious rabbis who were interested in compelling me to, you know, come to their side.
00:06:53.260 I had a lot of really interesting conversations and I did some traveling in the Middle East and I wrote a lot.
00:06:58.560 And I was there, you know, in 2013, spring of 2013, summer and fall of 2013.
00:07:05.440 And I was writing essays and cover letters home from Israel applying for jobs in the United States.
00:07:12.320 And 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.
00:07:19.780 And I was there for about a year before I got poached out of the job.
00:07:23.640 So it was the Facebook boom, the clickbait boom.
00:07:27.080 It was the time when articles were getting millions of views with clickbait headlines and that kind of stuff.
00:07:32.000 Yeah. 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.
00:07:44.080 Is that fair?
00:07:45.240 Yeah, I think that's fair.
00:07:46.340 I 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.
00:08:02.400 So going in there with someone who had slightly different opinions, what was your experience like?
00:08:07.460 Yeah. 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.
00:08:16.480 And, you know, that was really frustrating for me.
00:08:18.780 But 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.
00:08:38.760 So you might write a story about a, you know, I don't know, a law around abortion or something.
00:08:45.640 And 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.
00:08:58.720 And 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.
00:09:09.900 They want people to read it. They want people to share it.
00:09:12.560 Another 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.
00:09:25.560 And 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.
00:09:34.120 And 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.
00:09:44.280 Now, 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.
00:09:59.080 So that was the kind of stuff, you know, I would see.
00:10:03.040 And 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.
00:10:13.360 And 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.
00:10:24.980 And 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.
00:10:39.020 And we're extremely out of touch with what was happening in a lot of places across the country.
00:10:45.060 Isaac, 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.
00:10:52.040 But 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.
00:11:01.220 I'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.
00:11:09.320 Francis, 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.
00:11:18.460 You write what you think is a sensible, nuanced piece, and then someone attaches the most incendiary possible title.
00:11:24.920 That's why I no longer write for mainstream newspapers.
00:11:27.280 Yeah, I mean, first of all, I don't think it's at all exclusive to The Huffington Post, obviously.
00:11:35.640 I mean, I think it's something that happens across the media space.
00:11:39.440 I mean, I'm pretty familiar with the ecosystem you guys are operating in.
00:11:44.060 I read a lot of British papers.
00:11:46.100 I 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.
00:11:56.660 I 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.
00:12:07.640 But oftentimes, that's less entertaining and less engaging and less enticing than the really sort of crazy, more incendiary things that are out there.
00:12:17.720 One 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,
00:12:35.540 and then readers come in to check out what you're doing and they get that, then they're going to give you money.
00:12:41.100 And that's a really good incentive, you know, on the publishing side to stay true to your mission, stay true to your goal.
00:12:47.800 If 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,
00:12:58.280 then you're going to have to do things to hit those goals, which is a really big challenge.
00:13:03.260 And I don't envy the position that a lot of those media outlets are in.
00:13:07.100 I 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.
00:13:16.640 And the headline's crazy and it makes you want to click in.
00:13:19.940 And, 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.
00:13:27.560 To 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?
00:13:34.280 Because we have subscribers, we know what our audience likes, we know what our audience dislikes.
00:13:42.760 Isn't that the kind of path that we all have to tread, in a way?
00:13:46.540 Yeah, 100%.
00:13:48.660 I mean, look, I think one of the things that I think is actually really worrisome about the independent media space.
00:13:56.940 So, you know, I know you guys have a Substack. 0.77
00:13:59.040 I started out on Substack.
00:14:01.760 You 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.
00:14:14.780 And the challenge is that that is sort of a bubble and an ideology of its own.
00:14:20.760 If 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.
00:14:37.600 In the same way, a lefty or righty reporter might be motivated to look for something that affirms their beliefs.
00:14:42.740 So, you know, I think a really good example of that was actually the war in Ukraine.
00:14:47.320 You could go back and read a lot of the top political and international writers who are on platforms like Substack or independent writers.
00:14:55.020 And a month before Putin invaded Ukraine, they were all saying that it wasn't going to happen, that it was just saber rattling.
00:15:01.860 And 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.
00:15:12.220 And 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.
00:15:22.520 And in retrospect, it was pretty obvious.
00:15:24.900 I mean, he put hundreds of thousands of troops on the border and said he was going to invade.
00:15:28.720 I mean, it wasn't a big secret.
00:15:30.380 But we at the time, you know, even I bought into a lot of that kind of heterodox thinking.
00:15:35.220 And I think a lot of people missed it there.
00:15:37.300 So, yeah, you have to be careful.
00:15:39.340 I mean, from my perspective, I think there's less pressure in the space that we're in.
00:15:45.640 But absolutely, I mean, there are the fire breathers who are independent writers who I think are motivated.
00:15:52.420 You 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.
00:16:00.840 And so they're they're motivated to do that kind of writing.
00:16:04.040 And I do think that's that's a dangerous trap.
00:16:06.840 And, you know, there are people who talk about that.
00:16:09.880 But 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.
00:16:22.360 Isaac, do you think part of the problem is, is because of social media, we amplify the most divisive voices, the most outrageous takes.
00:16:30.520 So then we see people, journalists on the left, like who work for, we all know the type of publications producing just ridiculous nonsense.
00:16:39.140 And 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.
00:16:47.340 And the same with the right.
00:16:49.020 So what we have in many ways are these two straw men who we see as left journalists and right journalists.
00:16:55.240 But actually, they're not credible, these publications that we're talking about. 1.00
00:16:59.580 Yeah, 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. 0.98
00:17:09.920 You 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. 0.98
00:17:27.460 So, you know, a good example is somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene. 0.87
00:17:31.940 I mean, she whatever had all these crazy beliefs that she posted out on Facebook about, you know, Jewish space lasers and all this stuff.
00:17:39.900 And 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.
00:17:53.000 And she's a household name now. 0.99
00:17:55.640 I 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.
00:18:04.380 Why 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. 1.00
00:18:13.900 And maybe there are certain issues where she is representative of the Republican Party today.
00:18:18.640 But on the whole, I think she's, you know, she's pretty fringe.
00:18:21.600 She's pretty far out there.
00:18:22.620 She's pretty far right.
00:18:23.660 Yet 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.
00:18:35.600 And I think that's because of the effectiveness of that kind of political warfare.
00:18:40.120 And the same goes for, you know, conservatives on the right and what they do at the left.
00:18:45.080 I mean, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, widely considered one of the most far left progressive Democrats in the House.
00:18:51.640 She's also the most famous. 0.99
00:18:53.540 And 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. 1.00
00:19:02.020 And if you're scared of this, if you don't like this, then you should vote for Republicans.
00:19:05.760 So, 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.
00:19:15.400 I mean, you know, or far left in our newsletters.
00:19:19.160 We do include those fringe opinions, but there may be one of, you know, seven or eight opinions that you're going to see.
00:19:25.780 That way you understand, you know, here's the spectrum of what the thought is on this side of the aisle.
00:19:32.120 So you don't leave feeling like everybody on the left is AOC and everybody on the right is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:19:37.660 Hey, Francis, do you want to protect kids? 0.97
00:19:41.480 I was a teacher for 12 years, so no, I will never forget what those little c***s put me through. 1.00
00:19:47.520 Francis, what did your therapist say about moving on with your life? 0.99
00:19:51.280 They ruined me. 0.99
00:19:52.240 I was filled with joy and goodness until those little c***s took my dreams and shredded them. 1.00
00:19:57.300 Francis, remember what the lawyer said about not discussing the allegations in public? 0.98
00:20:01.740 I was found not guilty on all charges.
00:20:03.980 Not guilty is not the same as innocent.
00:20:06.400 Anyway, going online without using ExpressVPN...
00:20:09.740 Not guilty is not the same as innocent.
00:20:19.360 Anyway, going online without using ExpressVPN...
00:20:22.740 I can't do it.
00:20:24.100 Anyway, going online without using ExpressVPN is like leaving your kids in a public toilet.
00:20:30.820 It'll probably be fine, but do you want to take that risk?
00:20:33.900 Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels, airports...
00:20:40.100 Basically, any network that's not your own, your online data is not secured.
00:20:45.180 Any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data, passwords, financial details, you name it.
00:20:55.400 ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so that hackers can't steal your data.
00:21:02.700 Hackers can make some serious cash selling personal information on the dark web.
00:21:08.120 But ExpressVPN has made it easier than ever to keep your information safe.
00:21:13.220 Just fire up the app, hit one button, and you're instantly protected.
00:21:17.200 Secure your online data today at expressvpn.com slash trigger and get three extra months for free.
00:21:24.340 That's expressvpn.com slash trigger for three extra months for free.
00:21:29.040 I'm going to use it right now to find Francis a new therapist. 0.98
00:21:32.480 I f***ing hate them! 0.98
00:21:34.480 Well, that makes a lot of sense. 0.99
00:21:36.040 But I suppose I was thinking when we were talking about the Daily Mail and The Sun and tabloids and other publications
00:21:42.640 and 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,
00:21:51.820 but quite a lot of people are quite happy to eat at McDonald's.
00:21:54.620 You know, I enjoy a McDonald's once a year, but I generally don't go to that sort of place.
00:21:59.960 But every time I drive past a McDonald's, it's full of people, right?
00:22:04.300 So is it really true that a lot of people want to have this nonpartisan, long-form, you know, sensible, multifaceted, nuanced conversation?
00:22:19.160 I mean, it's what we try to do on Trigonometry.
00:22:21.020 And we have an audience, but every time I turn on YouTube, I'm confronted with the fact that, you know, 0.97
00:22:27.680 a hot right-wing girl calling someone on the left a moron or a shill or whatever is going to get a million views. 1.00
00:22:34.500 When we do a sensible interview with someone like you, you might get, you know, 50,000 views or 10,000 views. 0.93
00:22:41.140 You might get 100,000 views, but it's not going to get a million views because most people want a McDonald's.
00:22:46.600 Isn't that true?
00:22:47.180 Yeah, for sure.
00:22:48.640 I mean, look, there are a few kind of uphill battles, I think, that people in our space are climbing
00:22:56.380 because I do sort of think you guys are doing work that is, you know, similar to mine, which is, first of all,
00:23:02.780 everybody's going to click on the headline about, you know, the dozen kids dying in a bus crash
00:23:07.840 before they click on a headline about, you know, a political party solving a water crisis in, you know, some city in Houston or whatever.
00:23:15.840 I mean, that is the reality of the challenge that we're at.
00:23:19.700 I've worked at news organizations that produce, quote-unquote, good news, feel-good content,
00:23:24.940 or solutions journalism, journalism about people who are solving things rather than people who are creating problems.
00:23:31.280 And it is hard.
00:23:32.340 It is hard to get people to engage with that stuff.
00:23:35.720 I do think there are ways to do it, though, and I think there are ways to raise the interest level.
00:23:40.900 I mean, when I'm pitching Tangle to people and trying to get them to sign up and give our newsletter a shot,
00:23:47.300 I change the way I talk about it, honestly, depending on the kind of person I'm talking to and what their political worldview is.
00:23:53.980 And both pitches are really honest, but I also know that one's going to be more effective than the other.
00:24:00.400 So, 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.
00:24:09.360 There's not enough trust.
00:24:10.500 There's too much bias.
00:24:11.620 There's not enough transparency.
00:24:13.160 There's no balance.
00:24:14.860 So I built something to try and solve that.
00:24:17.720 I got tired of talking about what the problem is.
00:24:20.040 Give it a shot.
00:24:20.800 If you don't see your views represented, if you don't think it's fair, you don't have to read it.
00:24:24.800 But I think if you try it, you'll like it.
00:24:26.940 And 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.
00:24:34.980 And there are a lot of journalists out there who aren't being fair.
00:24:37.160 If 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,
00:24:49.600 you should get out of your news bubble.
00:24:52.160 You're in an information bubble if you don't understand that yet.
00:24:55.520 And the answer isn't racism.
00:24:57.780 OK, it's it's something much more.
00:25:00.060 It's something much broader and more important and more, I guess I would say, complex than that.
00:25:06.340 And that is a good way to get people like, OK, maybe I do have more to learn about other people in the United States.
00:25:13.080 Maybe I am misunderstanding what a lot of people in America think or feel.
00:25:16.980 And 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.
00:25:22.740 Because 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.
00:25:33.040 I actually think the true is same for a lot of the politics in your country.
00:25:37.520 And I think, you know, something like what I'm doing would be really effective and draw a big audience there.
00:25:44.560 And, you know, to your point, it's it's not easy to win people over on the nuance of things.
00:25:51.520 But I do think there is a groundswell and a kind of grassroots uprising against the way things are right now that's happening.
00:26:01.360 And, you know, you guys having 300,000 YouTube subscribers is part of that.
00:26:06.600 We have 365, mate.
00:26:08.220 We've worked hard.
00:26:10.040 365,000 YouTube subscribers.
00:26:12.580 I mean, that that is proof of it.
00:26:15.320 I've seen your channel.
00:26:17.000 I've watched your videos.
00:26:17.980 You guys have really long form, oftentimes controversial conversations that I think, regardless of where people were from, they would feel uncomfortable in certain moments.
00:26:28.060 Yet they're coming back and they're watching.
00:26:30.460 I think that's proof of it.
00:26:32.500 Tangle has over 50,000 people on our mailing list.
00:26:35.180 I think that's proof of it.
00:26:36.880 I 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.
00:26:45.940 So, yeah, it's not easy.
00:26:48.180 We're definitely competing with one hand tied behind our backs.
00:26:51.640 But because, you know, human nature wants the kind of sensationalist stuff that reaffirms our worldviews.
00:26:57.980 But I do think there are more and more people who are increasingly interested in this kind of content.
00:27:03.620 Isaac, I was listening to an interview you did as part of my research, and you said something really fascinating.
00:27:11.660 You 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.
00:27:22.040 Why was that?
00:27:23.080 A 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.
00:27:36.040 But that was where so much political discourse was happening.
00:27:39.760 You know, the hundreds of comments on, you know, some high school teacher's Facebook status or whatever.
00:27:46.100 I 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.
00:27:55.280 And 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.
00:28:08.580 It wasn't like two articles that were varying opinions on the same news event.
00:28:14.360 It 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.
00:28:29.880 And 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.
00:28:41.660 And you could see it plain as day. I mean, it was just like people were getting their information from two different sources.
00:28:48.220 It wasn't like these guys were both reading a New York Times article and had a disagreement about the language that was being used.
00:28:55.320 It was like one side was pulling something from a really obscure conservative blog with, you know, some truths and some fictions.
00:29:03.560 And the other side was pulling something from a really obscure liberal blog with some truths and some fictions.
00:29:08.680 And they were going to battle with that kind of information.
00:29:11.680 And 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.
00:29:31.920 And, 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.
00:29:49.620 So 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.
00:29:59.760 But 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.
00:30:07.320 It makes them dig their heels in more because they're fighting off enemies left and right online.
00:30:11.980 So there's a lot of really, really troubling stuff that I think we've seen in that space.
00:30:17.020 But, 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.
00:30:27.480 And it turned out that it wasn't.
00:30:29.580 That's really interesting.
00:30:30.660 Sorry, no, no, you go.
00:30:31.680 I 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.
00:30:41.920 And you mentioned the war in Ukraine.
00:30:43.600 We 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.
00:30:53.840 But, 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.
00:31:19.160 I'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.
00:31:29.220 It's the idea.
00:31:30.340 It's this meme online that people will support anything as long as the mainstream is telling them to support it.
00:31:36.680 And 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.
00:31:47.660 And thanks to the echo chambers and the availability of all sorts of media.
00:31:52.660 Now, 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.
00:32:08.300 There'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?
00:32:21.100 Yeah, yeah, no, for sure.
00:32:23.560 And so I think there's a couple of things at play there.
00:32:26.620 First 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.
00:32:34.840 There'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.
00:32:45.380 You 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.
00:32:54.120 So, you know, enough Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo searches and you're going to come across the thing that you want.
00:33:00.840 So that's one.
00:33:01.940 Two, 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.
00:33:09.860 And 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.
00:33:19.640 It'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.
00:33:34.500 And, you know, his argument is basically like we live in political tribes increasingly in today's society.
00:33:42.680 People's community are tied closely to their political worldview.
00:33:46.700 And 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.
00:34:03.460 And you'll change your worldview to kind of fit in is basically his argument.
00:34:08.160 And he and he makes a really good case for it.
00:34:10.140 I 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.
00:34:20.680 The commentary back then was that he was moving the Republican Party to the right.
00:34:24.440 And 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.
00:34:33.860 And it's like, OK, well, what does it mean to go to the right then?
00:34:36.480 It doesn't make any sense.
00:34:37.440 I mean, a lot of people define conservatives and progressives as conservatives want to conserve.
00:34:42.460 They want to keep things as they are.
00:34:43.900 They're progressives are trying to change.
00:34:45.660 They're trying to change what it means to be a woman and they're trying to change same sex marriage and all these things.
00:34:51.300 And 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.
00:34:59.680 So doing that was considered, you know, launching the country to the right.
00:35:03.780 It was considered this very conservative moment in American history, yet they weren't really conserving anything.
00:35:09.040 They 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.
00:35:18.520 So, you know, I don't really buy that the left and the right are actual pulls of political ideologies that we're subscribed to.
00:35:27.420 I 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.
00:35:34.400 Big government, little government, you know, big government, small government, conserving, progressing.
00:35:40.040 But they're always dynamic and moving and changing.
00:35:44.520 And so...
00:35:45.240 Sorry to interrupt.
00:35:45.740 So what are the tribes then?
00:35:46.960 Because I agree with you completely and I hate using terms like right and left because they're inaccurate generalizations.
00:35:53.440 However, there are tribes that clearly are at loggerheads with each other right now, as they always have been, frankly.
00:36:03.280 What is the...
00:36:04.180 You know, some people talk it's pro-establishment, anti-establishment.
00:36:08.700 But I don't imagine a lot of progressives think of themselves as being pro-the establishment.
00:36:13.460 They think they're radical people who are changing the nature of society.
00:36:17.700 They don't think of themselves as having control of every institution, as the right, quote-unquote, would see them, right?
00:36:24.540 So what are the tribes?
00:36:26.220 How are we to break ourselves down?
00:36:28.940 Yeah, it's a great question.
00:36:30.660 I mean, I think I can answer that in terms of what's happening in the United States.
00:36:34.620 I would have a harder time talking more broadly about, you know, global politics or specific...
00:36:38.760 Don't worry, we inherit all your stuff.
00:36:40.660 No, let's use technical language here, mate. 1.00
00:36:44.340 You're shit. 1.00
00:36:45.340 We download your shit and we inject it straight into our... 1.00
00:36:49.120 Yeah, you guys are maybe the only ones who have crazier politics than we do right now. 1.00
00:36:54.840 And you're welcome for that, I guess.
00:36:56.760 Yeah, but we don't have guns, so we're okay.
00:36:58.440 Yeah, right, exactly.
00:37:00.060 Yeah, so, look, I mean, I think fundamentally the tribes of the Republican and Democratic Party,
00:37:05.680 I mean, when you talk about voters, I still think it's the duopoly of the two parties.
00:37:09.900 You know, one of the reasons that we see fewer and fewer landslide elections is because party
00:37:15.020 allegiance is really strong among voters, and it doesn't matter how bad a candidate is or
00:37:20.620 how much they're violating, you know, that person's political worldview.
00:37:24.680 If they have an R or a D against their name, voters are just really likely to vote for them.
00:37:29.860 That being said, in America, I do think that we basically have what I would call...
00:37:35.280 I mean, I view it as like four main tribes, two on each side.
00:37:40.120 I think, you know, on the right, we have the sort of old guard, you know,
00:37:43.960 you call it the establishment Republicans, some people call it traditional Republicans.
00:37:48.600 I'm talking Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, that sort of era of Republicans that
00:37:53.640 really talk about being, you know, aligned with small government and, you know,
00:37:59.080 some semblance of bipartisanship, tons of respect for the traditions of the country,
00:38:04.520 constitutionality, that kind of thing.
00:38:06.980 Then I think there's sort of this new era of right-wing conservatism that, you know,
00:38:12.160 existed 20 years ago, but I think has really been elevated and escalated by Donald Trump,
00:38:16.800 which is, you know, battling the culture wars.
00:38:19.680 It's stopping the progressive left from making changes that they view as being really
00:38:24.580 dangerous to the country.
00:38:26.160 It's really focused on immigration.
00:38:29.620 It doesn't necessarily matter whether something is a big government or small government type
00:38:36.000 policy or whether it's constitutional or unconstitutional in like the very traditional
00:38:41.000 sense of the word.
00:38:42.160 It's about winning.
00:38:43.440 It's about making sure that Republicans, you know, get off their knees and start fighting
00:38:47.740 for the country that they really believe in.
00:38:49.640 And that's kind of like the attitude of that new right.
00:38:52.240 And then I think on the left, there's the, you know, the, the maybe traditional or establishment
00:38:57.200 Democrats, I would call them the corporate Democrats, which, you know, I know is a derisive
00:39:01.480 term, but I think, um, a is accurate and B isn't always necessary, doesn't always necessarily
00:39:06.680 mean that they have, you know, bad policies or the wrong policies, but this is sort of like
00:39:10.960 the more elite donor class democratic party that has a lot of power, a lot of influence at major
00:39:17.980 institutions, corporations, colleges, those kinds of things.
00:39:22.040 And they're interested in some regard in keeping the status quo, which I think is very different
00:39:28.460 from the kind of establishment or the kind of Trump, right.
00:39:32.440 And the progressive left, they, they want things to be stable.
00:39:36.160 Um, they're fighting for progress, but they're doing it in a very sort of incremental way.
00:39:40.600 And they're really interested in, in doing it, you know, via bipartisanship, things like
00:39:44.460 that.
00:39:45.120 Joe Biden, I think for the most part is a member of this sort of party, Nancy Pelosi, I would
00:39:50.100 definitely put in that kind of, you know, democratic establishment.
00:39:53.880 And then you have the progressive left.
00:39:55.480 And I think those are sort of like, you know, maybe closer to the, the Trump right in terms
00:40:01.180 of attitude and respect for norms and that kind of thing, uh, obviously to your point,
00:40:07.700 they get put against each other.
00:40:08.960 All of a sudden you have progressive lefts, like, you know, trumpeting FBI talking points
00:40:13.140 and stuff, which makes my head want to explode.
00:40:15.040 But, um, generally speaking, I think these are people who are like, we've had incremental
00:40:19.900 change forever.
00:40:21.040 We want real broad changes to the country.
00:40:23.940 Now we want to upend the systems that have produced a lot of inequality in the country, a lot
00:40:28.740 of the problems in the country.
00:40:30.400 And, uh, you know, I think similar to the kind of Trump, right, the progressive left
00:40:34.940 is, is interested in winning.
00:40:36.720 They feel like, you know, they've had many years of being dismissed or ignored and they
00:40:42.460 are sort of the activist type who are like, we, we're going to do whatever it takes to win.
00:40:46.480 We're going to play dirty, fight hard, all these things and, um, try, try and make the
00:40:52.240 real broad overhaul to the country systems that they want to see.
00:40:56.760 So to me, those are like the four tribes that we have in, in our politics today.
00:41:01.400 And they're all kind of at war with each other.
00:41:04.740 Hey Francis, if you were a member of the public, would you like the opportunity to ask incredible
00:41:10.380 guests like Bill Burr, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Adam Carolla, Brett Weinstein, John
00:41:16.620 Barnes, Douglas Murray, Nigel Farage, and Lionel Shriver, your own questions.
00:41:21.800 You bet I would.
00:41:23.160 And what do you think the best way to do that would be?
00:41:25.920 Uh, probably stalking, mate.
00:41:27.840 You'd have to corner them in the supermarket, probably run near like the sort of frozen
00:41:32.760 food aisles, and then just bark questions at them before they can escape.
00:41:37.420 Uh, not the American ones, as they have guns. 0.84
00:41:40.140 And you'd have to be extra careful with the females, as that's how I got in trouble last 1.00
00:41:44.620 time.
00:41:45.600 Can you really imagine you're going to get Douglas Murray near the frozen food aisle?
00:41:48.760 If you want to ask our incredible guest questions and have access to phenomenal behind the scenes
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00:42:50.620 Exactly.
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00:43:20.580 See you there, guys.
00:43:23.040 Do you think that this fragmentation of society has been exacerbated by the fact that no one
00:43:28.380 really trusts the mainstream media anymore?
00:43:30.500 Not left, not right, because we've been let down and been betrayed so many times by them,
00:43:35.640 whatever institution it is.
00:43:37.680 So as a result of that, a distrust creeps in, which means also people are likely to think
00:43:43.160 in a more conspiratorial manner.
00:43:44.960 Whenever I think about progressivism, to me, it's quite a conspiratorial way of thinking.
00:43:49.900 There's this systemic thing in place that is keeping certain people down, and that means
00:43:54.940 certain people can't progress.
00:43:56.700 And if you think about the right, especially the Trump right, they believe that as well,
00:44:01.500 just in a different form.
00:44:03.840 Yeah, no.
00:44:04.340 I mean, look, obviously, from my position, the trust in media is one of the core issues.
00:44:10.440 I mean, foundational to my goal with Tangle, the very essence of it is that I'm trying to
00:44:16.020 create a media outlet where we see equal levels of trust from our conservative readers
00:44:20.980 and our liberal readers.
00:44:22.120 I think that is one of the only real true signs that you're producing content that is
00:44:27.960 representing a really diverse and holistic set of views.
00:44:31.680 So, I mean, there's no doubt.
00:44:33.440 I think it's the combination of, A, the mistrust and the fact that there have been so many big
00:44:39.060 media blunders in the last 20, 30 years.
00:44:42.220 I think it's also, B, that there's now so many alternatives to some of the stuff we've
00:44:48.520 been talking about.
00:44:49.380 It's that you don't have to just get the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall
00:44:54.340 Street Journal or the New York Post or whatever to your front doorstep every day.
00:44:57.920 You can go out and find stuff in a few clicks by typing a few words in on an internet search
00:45:03.700 browser, and you're going to get presented with a lot of different alternative media, a lot
00:45:08.460 of different options for news to consume.
00:45:11.340 But, yeah, I mean, you look at the numbers, the pure polling of it in terms of, you know,
00:45:16.380 trust in the media and the only things that Americans trust less, and I think this is
00:45:23.180 probably true of a lot of people in Europe, is their current government.
00:45:27.020 I mean, that's pretty much it.
00:45:29.280 It's Congress gets lower approval ratings and right next to them is a lot of the media that's
00:45:34.920 out there.
00:45:35.420 And so, you know, I think there's two parts to that.
00:45:37.400 One is a lot of media is going to challenge your worldview, and when your worldview is
00:45:42.820 challenged, that might make you upset.
00:45:44.380 It might make you, you know, sometimes the New York Times publishes an article that is
00:45:48.920 a really great piece of reporting that sheds some light on some truth, but conservatives
00:45:53.320 don't like the truth that it sheds light on.
00:45:55.500 So they hate the New York Times more and they trust the New York Times less.
00:45:58.920 So it's a tough conundrum to sort of navigate, but it's a big problem because if we all can't
00:46:06.060 agree on the basic set of facts in a story, then we're not really going to get anywhere
00:46:10.500 in terms of, you know, moderating our views or even understanding what the other side thinks.
00:46:15.300 And this brings us on to an issue that you, I think you're, I've read a few things that
00:46:19.720 you've written about this.
00:46:21.020 This brings us on to the issue of misinformation.
00:46:24.700 And just very briefly, do you think, you know, in percentage terms, there is more misinformation
00:46:32.080 now than there has ever been?
00:46:34.340 Or is it more a case of, you know, 10 years ago, the New York Times could publish a piece
00:46:40.300 that wasn't true and nobody would know, or most people wouldn't know.
00:46:45.360 And now if they do that, well, there are going to be people on Substack on YouTube and whatever
00:46:50.920 challenging it.
00:46:51.920 So we're more aware of the fact that what we're being told isn't quite true.
00:46:57.240 Yeah, I think it is that there's just more awareness of it.
00:47:01.700 I mean, I think misinformation is a problem, but I do not think it's a, it's, it's the kind
00:47:07.960 of problem, especially a lot of people on the left believe that it is.
00:47:11.780 Uh, Jacob, well, because first of all, it's something we've been battling forever.
00:47:18.980 Um, you know, I mean, you go back to the advent of the printing press and you can read old
00:47:24.860 commentary about what that was going to do to the world and how it was going to change
00:47:28.480 the world.
00:47:29.060 And it's nearly identical to the same things.
00:47:31.780 A lot of people on the left are saying about social media today.
00:47:34.960 It's going to produce, uh, you know, unbridled amounts of misinformation.
00:47:38.440 The information is spreading too fast.
00:47:40.700 There's no way to contain it.
00:47:42.200 It's going to lead to societal downfall, yada, yada, yada.
00:47:45.220 And the solution of course, is always to limit that information.
00:47:48.300 It's, it's to suppress it somehow in order to maintain whatever the narrative is that
00:47:54.400 you think is the truth, uh, et cetera.
00:47:57.400 That battle has been happening forever.
00:47:59.460 I mean, it's happened over and over and over throughout history.
00:48:02.420 Um, Jacob and Changa wrote a great book about the history of free speech that touches on a
00:48:06.680 lot of this stuff and, uh, that, that has informed a lot of my writing about it is just this idea
00:48:12.780 that, you know, our, the, the misinformation threat today seems so important and so scary.
00:48:20.100 And it's so big that the only solution is, you know, we need the government to regulate
00:48:25.340 what gets posted on Facebook or Twitter, which to me is totally insane.
00:48:28.880 Um, so, you know, that, that's, that's kind of the tension that I see in terms of the historical
00:48:35.400 precedent being there and us feeling like we're really important in living everything that's
00:48:40.780 happening to us in modern times has to be this major historical unprecedented event that, uh,
00:48:45.900 I just don't think it is right now.
00:48:48.040 Well, I will say one thing.
00:48:49.720 I mean, the printing press did cause about two centuries of religious.
00:48:53.160 So, so it wasn't an uneventful period of time in human history.
00:48:58.060 And, and I, and I don't think that there will be, um, I don't think there will be a periods
00:49:03.540 of, you know, total stability as the advent of social media continues to grow.
00:49:09.000 I mean, obviously we've seen it in the United States just in the last few years that I think
00:49:14.580 there's, you know, more political violence and unrest than we've seen in, in a few decades.
00:49:19.440 But, um, I also don't think anybody would look back on the advent of the printing press and
00:49:24.920 say that, you know, what, what came of that and the information, the way that we were able
00:49:29.160 to share information and educate people wasn't worth it in terms of, of the upside.
00:49:34.000 So it's a, it's a really difficult thing.
00:49:36.920 You know, it's not, it's not a black and white issue, but, uh, yeah, you raise a good point
00:49:41.180 that it's, it's not a guarantee that things are going to go smoothly.
00:49:44.120 That's for sure.
00:49:45.560 You know, and we talk about the age of misinformation, but if you look at a figure
00:49:49.360 of, for instance, like Alex Jones, I know it's a classic figure to say, you look at
00:49:52.680 the Sandy Hook case, the fact that he had this huge platform could spread the most horrendous
00:49:58.300 misinformation, which then had dire consequences in the, in, in the real world.
00:50:04.000 Surely that is quite unprecedented, isn't it?
00:50:06.460 The fact that it's this one guy who's then able to cause all this amount of destruction
00:50:11.640 and disruption, I should say.
00:50:13.180 Uh, yeah, I mean, I, I, I guess I haven't really considered how that scale would translate
00:50:23.040 historically.
00:50:24.040 I mean, I'm sure that there are some figures we could find, you know, who handed out pamphlets
00:50:32.180 or spread, you know, certain religious texts or some of the first people who were dominant
00:50:37.420 in the radio era that may be spread more misinformation or spread similarly dangerous
00:50:43.460 disinformation.
00:50:45.180 Um, I think one of the critical things about Alex Jones is that, you know, he, he did things
00:50:53.680 he, him specifically, uh, he did things in a way that were violating, you know, certain
00:50:58.660 terms of service that some of the platforms he was on had, which led to the repercussions
00:51:03.700 that he's faced now.
00:51:06.280 So, you know, I, we're, we're making an agreement, I think a societal agreement that we're going
00:51:13.240 to have some Alex Joneses and we're going to have to figure out how to navigate them.
00:51:16.860 But the trade-off for that is that, you know, when there's protests in China, like we're seeing
00:51:22.520 right now, there's a way for somebody to upload a video that's, you know, shedding a light
00:51:27.880 on the repression of political dissent in 10 seconds on Tik TOK, which would have been
00:51:33.580 impossible 30 years ago.
00:51:35.120 And we wouldn't have any idea what was happening on the ground there right now.
00:51:38.480 And, and that's really good to me.
00:51:40.760 So, um, you know, it's, it's not, it's, it's not a, it's not an eye for an eye in terms of
00:51:46.940 that trade-off.
00:51:47.900 And I think there's going to be upsides and downsides, but on the whole, I think, you
00:51:53.880 know, what we've seen throughout history is that when, when free speech thrives, society
00:51:58.580 is better off, even if it gets a little rocky at times.
00:52:01.720 I mean, so, so what do we do with figures like this?
00:52:05.520 What do we do with figures who have a huge platform, put out conspiracy theories, misinformation,
00:52:11.380 because the other flip side of the coin is, and we all remember during COVID, when we were
00:52:15.760 all affected by this, when people were challenging certain narratives, they lost their channel.
00:52:20.380 They had strikes put against them.
00:52:21.980 They were demonetized.
00:52:23.080 They were shadow banned.
00:52:23.960 He's just talking about our stuff, right?
00:52:27.440 Yeah.
00:52:27.760 We're being silenced, Isaac.
00:52:30.100 You're joking, but we do actually have, there was a video that we did with a journalist here
00:52:35.080 in the UK called Peter Hitchens about his criticism of lockdowns.
00:52:39.680 And we caught YouTube shadow banning it.
00:52:42.560 We literally have a video on our channel, which shows that it was shadow banned.
00:52:46.400 So this was, this isn't conspiracy.
00:52:48.300 This was happening a hundred percent.
00:52:49.820 Yeah, so I, the, I mean, that is my argument, you know, I, and I know this is like, maybe
00:52:56.740 offers up a little bit of my political worldview and where I come from, but, um, my personal
00:53:02.600 opinion is a, that de-platforming the vast majority of the times is, uh, has the opposite
00:53:08.340 effect of, of what's intended and be that the, the net sum of, you know, allowing the sort
00:53:18.140 of shadow banning the removal of like these dissenting opinions is actually bad for society.
00:53:23.920 I mean, you know, to your point, I think COVID is a great example of how the prevailing
00:53:29.280 acceptable wisdom has changed over time.
00:53:31.700 I mean, what used to be totally off limits, like suggesting that it started in a lab and
00:53:36.880 this was all the result of a lab leak or that vaccines weren't totally effective and people
00:53:41.020 were still spreading the virus and that sort of thing.
00:53:43.020 That's now acceptable speech on a lot of platforms when it wasn't a year ago or two years ago
00:53:48.080 or three years ago.
00:53:49.300 And I understand the rationale for that.
00:53:51.340 I understand the, the, I think, you know, maybe my nuance perspective is the, the reason
00:53:57.920 that those platforms felt that pressure to remove that kind of content, I think actually
00:54:01.900 came from a good place.
00:54:02.900 They, they were being told by certain, you know, medical institutions that this was disinformation,
00:54:07.760 the vaccines worked, it didn't come from a lab.
00:54:10.260 And if you allowed this information to spread on your platform, a bunch of people were going
00:54:13.480 to die.
00:54:14.100 And if you're somebody making, you know, content moderation decisions, being told that what
00:54:18.680 you're allowing is going to lead to thousands or millions of people dying is probably a really
00:54:22.300 scary thing.
00:54:23.020 So I don't envy the position they were in.
00:54:25.540 I think they made the wrong choice in a lot of cases.
00:54:27.700 I think that's been proven out by what's happened, you know, up to today.
00:54:32.180 In terms of what to do with people like this, look, I mean, in a lot of ways, I think it
00:54:36.900 often works itself out, I, you know, you click onto something Alex Jones tweets or used to
00:54:43.640 tweet when he was allowed on the platform and the first hundred responses are people
00:54:47.820 mocking him for being crazy, you know, they're, or they're fact checking him or they're quote
00:54:52.200 cheating him and dunking on him and getting a ton of traction doing that yada, yada, yada.
00:54:56.660 I mean that all that stuff I think is effective in a lot of ways at sort of limiting the, I guess,
00:55:03.340 the, the acceptability of a character like him.
00:55:07.080 And I think a lot of that stuff happens organically on these platforms at the same
00:55:11.180 time, platforms are allowed to make rules.
00:55:13.240 They're private companies.
00:55:14.160 If people violate those rules, they're allowed to kick them off the platforms.
00:55:17.840 My issue with a lot of the stuff Twitter and YouTube has done is that they don't apply
00:55:21.140 those standards evenly.
00:55:22.940 So if you're going to have a standard, apply it and, and use it, uh, in the case of Alex
00:55:28.760 Jones, you know, I don't think de-platforming him actually worked.
00:55:33.020 I think there's, you know, a tremendous amount of evidence for this.
00:55:36.480 His, you know, his audience has grown faster than ever over the last few years.
00:55:41.460 You know, you look at all these really, I guess, you know, scary political events that
00:55:46.420 people point to as the result of characters like Alex Jones, like January 6th, Alex Jones
00:55:51.040 was at January 6th with a megaphone telling a crowd what to do, you know, two years after
00:55:55.960 he'd been banned from some of these platforms.
00:55:57.840 So did it really work?
00:55:59.400 Was he, was he really made this ineffective character?
00:56:01.820 No, he just went to this dark corner of the internet where people were consuming his
00:56:06.200 content without seeing any dissent, without being engaged by any people who thought that
00:56:10.660 Alex Jones was a whack job.
00:56:12.500 And so this community, you know, around him becomes even more insular and probably more
00:56:17.780 extreme in the longterm.
00:56:19.320 I think one of the only real successful de-platformings that I've witnessed or remembered was Milo Yiannopoulos,
00:56:25.860 who, you know, basically I think disappeared after he was de-platformed.
00:56:30.360 And even him, we're now seeing him pop his head back up.
00:56:32.980 I mean, he's like on Tim Pool's podcast with Nick Fuentes and Kanye and all of a sudden he's
00:56:37.880 kind of back in the mix.
00:56:39.000 So who knows?
00:56:39.960 Maybe he becomes some martyred.
00:56:41.080 That podcast didn't go pretty bad.
00:56:42.920 Yeah, it was, you know, I mean, it was, in some ways it was great.
00:56:48.800 I mean, that podcast is a perfect example of why we should allow these people to come out
00:56:54.240 into the daylight.
00:56:55.320 I agree completely.
00:56:56.320 I just wrote a whole Substack piece saying that very same thing, even though a big part
00:57:00.900 of me kind of winced when I saw the guest lineup.
00:57:04.240 Totally.
00:57:05.200 But I agree.
00:57:05.920 It's a strong flavor.
00:57:06.960 You're right, man.
00:57:07.220 Yeah, I mean, look, I'm a Jew who is semi-observant and deeply connected to the Jewish community.
00:57:16.980 So obviously the stuff with Kanye, whose music I love, and Nick Fuentes, who is, you know, 1.00
00:57:23.860 just a total asshole. 0.99
00:57:25.100 I mean, it's scary to see people like that go on a big YouTube show. 1.00
00:57:29.080 But what Tim Pool did is exactly why we should allow it, because he made it so obvious that
00:57:35.760 Kanye is incapable of hearing an opinion that he doesn't agree with and can't even make
00:57:39.760 the case for himself.
00:57:40.840 And they just look like a bunch of weasels, you know, and I watched it and was like, this
00:57:45.340 is great.
00:57:45.760 This is why if you allow these people on these platforms and you handle it in the right way,
00:57:50.280 it actually exposes a real deep truth about them, which is often that they're deeply insecure
00:57:55.080 and don't really have any clue what they're talking about, which I think is good for society
00:57:59.620 as a whole to show that to people en masse.
00:58:02.800 Couldn't agree more.
00:58:03.660 Oh, well, on that happy note, Isaac, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you.
00:58:06.900 We're going to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters that only they will get
00:58:11.480 to see the answers to on Locals.
00:58:13.500 But for now, we've got one final question for you, which is the same as it always is.
00:58:17.500 Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?
00:58:21.420 God, that is such a difficult question.
00:58:25.380 You know, it's funny, I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is I was at a conference
00:58:31.440 last couple of weeks ago and I saw this really fascinating presentation on sustainable housing
00:58:39.520 and not in like the super woo-woo green, you know, kind of very progressive liberal sense,
00:58:45.300 but in this very like innovative sense of building homes that were totally self-sustainable with,
00:58:52.400 you know, grass growing on the roofs and vertical farms inside and all these really cool mechanisms
00:58:58.840 for capturing heat or keeping the house cool.
00:59:02.920 And yeah, I think there's like a ton of really interesting solutions out there to some of the
00:59:08.540 big problems we have in terms of energy, which I'm sure you guys are feeling right now,
00:59:12.800 and even climate change that all kind of work together that, you know, it's there's a lot
00:59:18.900 of doomsday stuff and a lot of attachment to solutions we've had for years, like, you know,
00:59:24.720 wind and solar. And then there's all these really innovative people, I think,
00:59:29.820 who are like 50 years into the future already, who I don't think we give enough attention to.
00:59:34.080 So go look up some of that stuff. That's what I would say. It's pretty cool. It gives me faith in
00:59:38.520 the capacity for innovation and not government to solve a lot of our really big problems.
00:59:45.240 Perfect. And of course, do check out Tangle as well for that nonpartisan
00:59:49.360 take on all things political and news. Isaac, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a
00:59:55.140 pleasure. And thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another
00:59:59.020 brilliant episode like this one, or also, all of them go out at 7pm UK time.
01:00:03.940 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
01:00:09.140 Take care and see you soon, guys.
01:00:11.000 See you soon on Locals.
01:00:11.820 What are some news stories you'd want to look into, but can't or don't have the time to,
01:00:18.740 and that might be too problematic or too dangerous to explore in the current partisan era?
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