Tangle - FULL EPISODE - Question Everything: Can Journalism Save a Marriage? (Featured on This American Life)

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

A few months ago I made a decision that changed my life and the trajectory of Tangle for good.I was approached by a producer for a new podcast called “Question Everything,” hosted by Brian Reed (who you might know from the hit podcast S-Town). The producer, Zach St. Louis, told me they were doing a series about the state and future of journalism. They wanted to do an episode about Tangle, which I agreed to enthusiastically, and then Zach came down to the Tangle office and interviewed me for a few hours. During our interview, I mentioned to Zach that we’ve heard from many readers who said Tangle has helped them with their relationships with people in their family or friend groups with whom they share political disagreements. I even hear from married couples, I said, who are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Zach was intrigued by this and ended up tracking down a few of those Tangle readers, including one couple who ended up being at the heart of the episode. A few months after Question Everything published our show, it was picked up by This American Life on NPR, which nearly doubled our readership and helped me make a few big hires at Tangle. It all happened right around the election, and was an incredibly exciting and overwhelming time. Now that the dust has settled a bit, we’ve decided to republish the original Question Everything episode on our own podcast feed so you all can listen to it (in the event you haven’t). And, when you're done, I highly recommend going to listen to all of the Question Everything series — which is a genuinely fascinating exploration of journalism.Isaac & the Tangle teamBy the way: If you are not yet a podcast member, and you want to upgrade your newsletter subscription plan to include a podcast membership (which gets you ad-free podcasts, Friday editions, The Sunday podcast, bonus content), you can do that here. That page is a good resource for managing your Tangle subscription (just make sure you are logged in on the website!)Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up! You can also give the gift of a Tangle podcast subscription by clicking here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by Ari Weitzman and Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and Jon Lall. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hey everybody. Isaac here. So a few months ago, I did something that changed my life in a pretty meaningful way and also changed the trajectory of Tangle as a news organization. I went on a podcast called Question Everything hosted by Brian Reed, who you might know as the host of the very well-known podcast S-Town.

Question Everything is a podcast that Brian Reed put together where he was exploring the ethics of his show S-Town and then turned the whole show into an exploration of journalism and the state of journalism, where media is and where it's headed. And during the production of this show, one of the members of Brian's team reached out to me and said that they wanted to do an episode in Question Everything about Tangle. I agreed. And so a reporter came down to the Tangle HQ and interviewed me for a few hours one afternoon and we corresponded a bunch via email. And amidst that entire interaction,

this producer heard me say, or saw somewhere on the Tangle website, that we've heard from readers who have said that Tangle has improved their marriage. And so he reached out to me and asked if we could share contact information for any of the readers who had said that to me and asked if we could share contact information for any of the readers who had said that to me or left that on some Tangle forum because he wanted

to reach out to them and thought it could be a good compliment for the story he was working on. So I did. And this producer managed to find a couple that reads Tangle who had, simply put, an incredible story. I mean, a genuinely moving, amazing story about their relationship and how Tangle impacted it. And the whole episode ended up being mostly about this couple, and there's an interview with me in the middle of it.

And it went up on Question Everything's feed, and it caught traction and it got noticed. A lot of people started talking about it. And eventually, This American Life and NPR reached out about republishing the Question Everything episode and sharing it on their own feed and nationally across all the NPR stations, which they did. And as most of you know now, that show and that episode blew up and ended up driving hundreds of thousands of new readers and listeners to tangle,

which has fundamentally changed our business over the last few months and just completely overhauled the newsroom. We doubled in size. We have a much bigger audience now. It's been a really crazy few months and all of it happened because of Brian Reed and that producer, Zach St. Louis and Question Everything and the team that put it together. So both is a way to say thank you and to raise awareness about the episode and to share a cool piece of content. Today, we're going to republish the Question Everything episode,

the original episode that got picked up by This American Life on our own feed. You'll hear the episode in full as it was when it first came out. And I encourage you if you enjoy it to go check out the question everything podcast hosted by Brian Reed. It's an awesome series. It's a really, really interesting look at journalism at the state of media. I'm hoping to have Brian on the show sometime soon to talk a little bit about what he learned. And I want to support the work and the project that they're doing over there. So check out this episode.

Hopefully you enjoy it. And after you get done listening, be sure to go check out question everything anywhere you listen to your podcasts. Enjoy. From Placement Theory and KCRW, this is Question Everything. I'm Brian Reed, and this show is my real-time quest to try and find ways to make journalism better. So far on that quest, I've been talking to a lot of people who aren't so optimistic about journalism. These are reporters I admire, academics, politicians, and just regular consumers of news.

And when I ask them about the state of things, I hear a lot of the same points. Trust in news is at an all-time low. People don't believe facts. And then people feel frustrated when they see bias in the media or when they feel lied to. And I expected to hear all of that. It's why I'm here. But recently, one of my producers came to me with a different type of story. This is the story of a couple, Dick and Emily. Dick doesn't trust anything, no matter what it is, that comes from the New York Times, the Washington Post.

The Atlantic. The Atlantic. MSNBC. CNN. CNN is another one. It doesn't matter what they're saying. He just automatically dismisses. Well, they developed their own reputation.

Okay. Today on Question Everything, a story about a couple of more than 20 years in turmoil and how they tried to get out of it. The story where I got to see these conflicts about journalism playing out under one roof and taking a toll on one couple's marriage. A story with some lessons not only for journalists, but for all of us, I think. Stick around. So, Zach, you're the one who's gotten to know Dick and Emily, this couple that was fighting over the news, right?

Yeah, so their names are Richard and Emily Newton. He obviously goes by Dick. They're in their 70s. They just celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary. It's a second marriage, both of them. They fell in love singing hymns together in the choir at church. She's an alto. He's a bass. That's sweet. Where do they live? They live in Orange County, California. Okay. And over the last several years, they've found that they've been growing more and more miserable over something that seems so basic,

which is what news they would each want to read in the morning. We get up and get a cup of coffee and we sit down and we start going through our emails. And we sit next to each other when we're doing that. I say, Emily, I have an article here. Would you be interested in me sending it to you? She would say, who's it from? If I said Brebert News or- BrightBart, is that what you mean?

BrightBart, that's it, yeah, BrightBart. Or Epic Times was another one. She knew those were really leaning and wasn't really interested. I was the same way with her. She found something on Atlantic or New York Times or Washington Post and she wanted me to read it. I kind of shied away from it. If I said to him, oh, I just read this article in the New York Times, it's really interesting,

do you want to read it? He would automatically shut down and say no, I don't trust the New York Times, they're whatever. I realized we are not reading from the same hymnal here. Did they have like a full sense of each other's political leanings when they met or is this something they discovered about each other after they were married? Oh no, they knew. I pretty much knew going in that she was definitely not a Republican.

She was. So they told me that they started arguing a lot more when Trump came on the political scene. Dick supported Trump. Emily furiously did not. But then it was after Election Day in 2020 when they had one of their biggest disagreements. From the beginning, I never believed that the election was fraudulently stolen. I have more faith in people and in our democracy. Dick was more open to doubt. They were saying that there was a lot of things that were going on that shouldn't have been going

on. There was packing drop boxes with ballots. One person would walk up to the ballot box and drop in all kinds of ballots into it. So this particular theory Dick's talking about, it's from a movie, one of the many sources that he was turning to at the time. It's called 2000 Mules. Have you heard of it?

I've heard of it, yes. I've had people talk to me about it as I've been reporting basically. Yeah, so this movie, 2000 Mules, I've heard of it, yes. I've had people talk to me about it as I've been reporting, basically. Yeah, so this movie, 2000 Mules. It looks like a documentary, but it's really a propaganda film. It's about a stolen election theory. It's not true, but for a while on the right, this movie seemed like it was everywhere. Everyone seemed to be talking about it.

Trump actually did a screening of it at Mar-a-Lago. It was in something like 400 movie theaters. I mean, lots and lots of people believed it. It's made by Dinesh D'Souza. He's a right-wing political commentator. All right, what's the gist? The gist is that it's about this theory that a bunch of Democratic groups were paying people, who they call mules, to illegally collect ballots and stuff them into ballot boxes in key swing states. Philadelphia alone, we've identified more than 1,100 mules. So there are these talking head interviews and they're intercut with this grainy surveillance

footage that shows like this person like putting ballots into a box and they're like see there's all the evidence you need. But that's not real surveillance footage? — It is real surveillance footage, but it's showing people just dropping off ballots legally. And when Dick watched it, like a lot of people, he thought it seemed really plausible. — It just added to the other stories that I was hearing. Things that were happening in Arizona and Georgia. I'm thinking, yeah, there's stuff going on here that shouldn't be going on. So Dick is watching this movie, he's reading his sources, and there are so many sources that cite so many stories about election fraud, which is part of what made it so believable.

And also he's watching the president, President Trump, say over and over again that the election was fraudulent and had been stolen from him. Yes, exactly. And then Emily's consuming all of her own sources, and they say the exact opposite. And it all added to this feeling that it wasn't safe for them to talk about politics. Did that feel different from other arguments or disagreements you'd had about non-political things over your marriage? It did because there was no give and take. We can argue about what we're going to spend our money on.

We can argue about our kids. We can argue about the neighborhood. But we usually come to some sort of resolution. This whole thing about Trump, there's no resolution. How did that feel? Frustrating. Because I know my husband. I know what a smart, sensitive, thoughtful person he is. He's very generous. I know all that about him. And to have him suddenly be aligned to this person who I found absolutely despicable was very troubling.

She wouldn't talk to me. She basically just, I don't want to talk about it. I would try, but it just, it wasn't gonna happen. And if it did, we'd end up yelling at each other. And then I started thinking, wow, I'm letting politics get involved in our marriage because I was really angry at the time. And I just couldn't stand that.

I never thought that politics was important enough to jeopardize what she and I had together. Did you feel like that it could do that, that politics could jeopardize it? Yes, I really did, I think. What did I get myself into here? Maybe I did something I shouldn't have done. What's the mistake you're talking about? Having someone that was so far left that I couldn't live with. Oof. Yeah, this was a pretty low point in their marriage.

And they told me that they really wanted to find a way out of it. We were both looking for some sort of, I don't want to say neutral, but impartial news source. I was hungry for something that I could count on to peel the layers away and really show what's in the heart of it. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. 20 years of Jonas living the dream tour. Performing Nick Solo and the administration, Joe and DNCE and the Jonas Brothers, Kevin, Nick and Joe. Together with Marshmello and special guest Boys Like Girls playing Rogers Center August 21st. The greatest celebration of Jonas ever.

Get tickets now at LiveNation.com. With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. They started reading different online news sources that branded themselves as being unbiased, slant-free. That kind of thing. Interesting.

And then they finally landed on something. It was a newsletter. Dick seemed to like it okay. So did Emily. We both agreed. Oh yes, let's read Tangle. Tangle. Yes, that's the newsletter. And it not only helped fix this problem in their marriage, but it also did something

for Dick that no other news source up to this point was able to do. All right, so tell me about it. It's this daily newsletter, comes to your email, it's like a substack type thing. It's run by a guy named Isaac Saul. He started it, he writes it. They have about 135,000 subscribers. It comes to your inbox every weekday, and each issue is all about one topic from the news.

What they try to do is summarize two or three of the best articles and arguments from right-leaning sources about that topic, and then they do the same thing with left-leaning sources. And the whole premise of the newsletter is that there are people out there, like Dick and Emily, that are reading completely separate sources, and why not put all of those in one place, so you can actually read what those arguments are? I think probably the first thing that astounded me was the transparency that when they make

a mistake, they correct it as soon as they realize it and they put it right up front. How is that different than corrections in a newspaper? A little bit. It's the way that they do it. So corrections in a newspaper, you know, traditionally, they are at the end of the article. They'll be like a little footnote. Actually, we got this wrong. It's been changed above.

We regret the error, you know, in like little print italics at the bottom. Tangle's approach to corrections, it's a bit different. Can you show me? Yes. This is from August 21st. And at the very, very top, the very first thing that you see is correction, period, in big letters. In our coverage of the Medicare drug pricing negotiations yesterday, we said that four of the Medicare Part D drugs for which the government had negotiated lower prices were overprescribed in the United States. That was false.

We misread the abstract of a study and rushed our review process when we included it. A sincere thank you to the ten or so readers who caught the error. And then in italics right below that, this is our 114th correction in Tangle's 263-week history and our first correction since August 13th. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers. So this is different than a newspaper, I see. Yeah. What else did Dick and Emily notice about Tangle?

Yeah, so they noticed that it wasn't so sensational. It was more measured or even handed in their language. So for instance, Tangle noticed that readers on the right would sometimes unsubscribe from the newsletter after reading a phrase like, undocumented immigrant. But they also didn't think it was right to call someone illegal or an illegal alien. So they did this big internal review and they settled on the term unauthorized migrant. We really like that approach,

trying to filter out all the trigger words or the words that were very highly volatile emotionally, which helps both of us then consider the issue with less emotion about it. I'm not going to say with no emotion. We would still argue, but with less emotion about it. And then we loved Isaac's take. What's Isaac's take? So Isaac's take, Isaac refers to Isaac Saul. He's the founder and writer of the newsletter. And at the end of

every issue, he spends a long time writing his opinion. And these can be long. And he says exactly how he feels about the issue after having researched it and just describes his own feeling about it. Wait, do you have an example of this? Yeah, here I'll send one to you. We can look at it. All right. This was earlier this month. Hurricane Helene and the disaster relief efforts. Yes. The first part is just the topic. Then they summarize what the right is saying.

They summarize what the left is saying. But then at the end, you see my take. And so I'm obviously not going to read this whole thing. Yeah, this is long. Wow. 2,200 words I looked. It's like a whole essay. But what's his take on Hurricane Helene? Yeah, so before we get to his take I think you need to understand what he's responding to here

There's been a lot of attacks on the Biden administration from the right saying that they're doing nothing to help people who've been affected by this hurricane Like actually nothing well that they failed to rise to the occasion basically So Isaac he really puts a stake in the ground and says there's a big problem with this narrative. It's all nonsense. It's all a lie. And then he writes, I hate writing pieces like this. It's not my job to defend the federal government from lies. And it's hard to write a piece like this without reading it like I'm openly shilling for Harris or Biden. I am not. I'm not here to do their PR or protect their reputations.

However, I do care about our information ecosystem. I care about reliable, accurate information being shared widely. I also care about the North Carolinians in danger right now. Not just because they're Americans and it's a state I love, but also because my mom, my aunt, my brother and his family, my sister-in-law, and my niece, they all live in North Carolina. So the horrors we're all witnessing on the news hit close to home. Here's the truth, though. Biden and Harris have actually pulled every lever federal executives can in a situation like this.

None of the critics that I posted above can say exactly what they want them to do that they aren't already doing. And if you're planning on writing in to tell me that I am shilling for Harris or being a left-wing hack by calling out lies online, you better be prepared to tell me exactly what I've gotten wrong here. And then he goes on for several more paragraphs. Oh, wow. Interesting. I can feel his resentment at having to defend the Democratic administration.

Yeah, he's like, I don't want to do this just to defend them, but in this case, they're doing everything they can. And that's what the facts show. And so I'm gonna say that. And this part of the newsletter was something that Dick and Emily really came to appreciate. He was very clear about what his biases were. That made him extremely trustworthy. More often than not, when we get to the end and we read my take, we look at each other and say,

yeah, that's how I feel. They started realizing that they actually agreed with each other on a lot of things and they were able to talk about it. And eventually, something pretty remarkable happened. So remember how Dick was totally convinced the election had been stolen? He watched 2000 Mules, he read all of those conspiracies about it. So as Dick and Emily were starting to have this shared understanding of the news again, Tangle did the thing for Dick that no other source seemed to be able to do,

that Emily wasn't able to do. And that was prove to him that the 2020 election had not been stolen. The only thing that changed my mind completely was the fact that I started reading Tangle. And it's only because I trust Isaac and his team so much. It's incredibly fulfilling, to be honest. This is Isaac Saul. He's the guy with rights to tangle. Yes. It's actually so rewarding because the election fraud stuff in particular was one of the most

difficult times of my life as a reporter. The month after that election was dark, stressful, really, really hard work. And hearing that somebody had that reaction, that their mind was actually changed, even one person, it's like, yeah, it makes me want to cry. So am I getting this right? It seems like Isaac and this newsletter tangle, they seem to have done something that I feel like so many journalists, myself included, have been banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out what to do, which is how do

you get people to believe the evidence that the 2020 election was not stolen from Donald Trump? Something like a third of Americans believe it was. It's really threatening our ability to function. How do you present those facts and get people to believe them? And you're saying Tangle did it. In this case, Tangle did it. Yeah, for Dick, Tangle did it.

["Tangle Did It"] We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. Nick Solo and the administration, Joe and DNCE, and the Jonas Brothers, Kevin, Nick and Joe. Together with Marshmello and special guests, boys like girls, Plane Rogers Center, August 21st. The greatest celebration of Jonas ever. Get tickets now at LiveNation.com. With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff.

And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at Fizz.ca. All right, so how did Tangle do this? How did Isaac, the guy who runs this, do this? Yeah, so Isaac did a ton of work around this whole election denialism issue.

It wasn't just one newsletter. Every time a new claim about how the election may have been stolen surfaced, he would spend all this time running it down, explaining in detail why it was false. He did that in the days and weeks immediately following the election. He continued doing it as new claims surfaced in the years since. But a lot of news sources have done this, you know, looked at these different claims about how the election was stolen and showed why they aren't true and looked at the court cases where no evidence surfaced and all this stuff, right?

They did. But Isaac was doing a lot of research. Like, for example, in the weeks following the election, right after he did this 400 tweet long thread that was going in detail into each claim. He was really, really deep on this. But I don't think it was only the research that helped convince Dick. There's something else that Isaac did, and it was in his tone and how he approached this whole issue, especially around the claims that seemed more persuasive. He didn't just write them off. He assessed them seriously.

He presented them seriously, and that didn't make Dick feel stupid. Here's Isaac. Some of the stuff was really convincing and proving that they were wrong was not as simple as saying like, oh, this is just like conspiracy nonsense. Like the ballot stuffing thing, that was a plausible way to steal an election.

In 2022, he actually dedicated an entire newsletter, a deep dive into 2000 Mules, that movie we were talking about. So when that movie came out and everybody just like laughs at Dinesh D'Souza, I was kind of like, I'm going to watch it and like take some of these allegations seriously and see what's up. It turned out they're all bullsh**, but like you only know that if you actually do some of the work.

Can I actually just read you what he wrote at the top of that newsletter? Yeah, please. So the title of the newsletter is An Honest Look at 2000 Mules, The New Stolen Election Theory. And this is how he opens it. I consider myself to be both a skeptic and an open-minded person. I am deeply cynical about our government, believe intelligence agencies are covering up the truth about UFOs, and don't feel any particular loyalty to any major political parties. I generally distrust authority, government agencies, and politicians. But I do believe it's wise to consult expert opinions and advice.

I love a good conspiracy, a good cover-up, and a great story. A stolen presidential election would be an all-timer in every regard. A story so gigantic, a conspiracy of corruption and power so unthinkable that the idea alone is tantalizing enough, I almost want to believe it." And then he goes on to dissect every point made in the film and show why it's inaccurate. But that's how he starts. Interesting. Okay, so that's the presentation difference you're talking about?

Yeah. And I'll just say that that framing, it's really different from how other outlets covered this film. Like, for example, there's a New York Times headline about the movie. It was, quote, a big lie in a new package. There was a Washington Post headline that was, quote, 2000 Mules offers the least convincing election fraud theory yet.

And look, I mean, that's all true. It is a lie. But Isaac realized he's probably not going to convince someone who already believes the lie by leading with that. So instead, he levels with people, explains where he's coming from and all the research he did, not going to convince someone who already believes the lie by leading with that. So instead, he levels with people, explains where he's coming from and all the research he did, and then explains what he found about the claims. And so this was what Dick was reading. After reading his article, what I realized was, and he even admitted,

there were some things that were happening that shouldn't have been happening in some of the polls. But it wouldn't have changed the dynamics of who won and who lost at all. That was actually the first time I really realized it for sure. And that really opened my eyes to how corrupt that was. That really sold me on the fact that the election wasn't stolen. fact that the election wasn't stolen. What I was thinking in my head was like, I want to bring all these people in my life under one roof. And I want them to be able to read a news source that like the, you know, Trump, MAGA,

bro will trust and like the left wing Bernie bro will trust. What was the like origin story for Tangle for Isaac? Like he was a reporter before this? Yeah, he was a reporter. He worked for Huffington Post, a couple of other places. And he told me that he's always been the type of person that's brought together people from different backgrounds in his personal life. Maybe they don't agree.

And he's often mediating between those people. But really the inspiration for Tangle came out of his own news consumption. The idea for Tangle basically came from the Trump era of like Trump proposes a border wall, and I'm like, he's like proposing a 2000 mile border wall. This sounds totally insane. I can't imagine the best argument for this,

but I really want to understand. Is this something that would actually work? And in order to grasp what was actually happening, my day would be like, I'm gonna go read the New York Times editorial board. I'm gonna read their immigration reporting about it. Then I'm gonna go to Fox News and scroll through their opinion page and

search for Trump's border wall. And then maybe I'll listen to like a Ben Shapiro podcast and then I'll go listen to Pod Save America and then, you know, I'll watch The Daily Show, do a bit about her, watch John Oliver, and then I'll spend like an hour on, you know, some Tucker Carlson special about it. And then I'll do like 10 hours of all this consuming the news, and I'll sit down and I'll be like, okay, I think I now have a really good understanding of everybody's perspective, positive and negative about this policy proposal.

Why can't I just find that one place? That should exist somewhere. Do you know who's reading the newsletter? I kind of do based on a reader survey of Tangle subscribers. So a little bit over half of the subscribers are men, around 57%. It's queues very wide, just below 90% of readers. It's US-based, but Isaac says it does reach something like 55 other countries. And about a third of the readers say that they're on the left, a third on the right,

and the last third are either center or independent. Wow, so pretty evenly politically split. Yeah, pretty even split politically. And I did talk to some other readers of the newsletter who said that it had an impact on them, similar to Dick and Emily. Like who? I met this one guy at a political event in New York,

and he told me it's basically the only news that he reads. I talked to a new reader of Tangle, a journalist, actually, and he said that there were some arguments from the right that he reads. I talked to a new reader of Tangle, a journalist actually, and he said that there were some arguments from the right that he'd just written off, but reading Tangle actually helped him see that they had a point. And I even spoke to another guy who, like Dick, had his mind changed about the 2020 election. I assumed that Donald Trump was telling me the truth that they had firm evidence that it was definitely manipulation of the ballots.

This is a guy named Rick. Wait, Rick and Dick? Rick and Dick. OK. Both Richard, if you want to be technical about it. Got it. Go on. It's a really similar story to Dick and Emily's.

Rick was a big Trump supporter, voted for him twice. Rick's son is on the left politically. They were arguing about the news a lot. And the son started forwarding Rick the newsletter, including issues that were about the stolen election claims. They weren't just laughing it off. I have a trust in their news gathering and presentation abilities, head and shoulders above any other news gathering source.

I have a trust level there that's unequaled. And again, like Dick and Emily, Rick and his son have mended their relationship. They can talk to each other about the news again. And now he doesn't think the election was stolen. And that feeling of being lied to, it's actually convinced him not to vote for Trump this year. Really?

Yeah, the only reason I wouldn't vote for him because he made me look foolish in front of my son. You know, Zach, you mentioned the importance of striking the right tone when we're presenting evidence, especially evidence that's like contrary to what someone believes. And that does seem important, but also, you know, just hearing the story of Rick and his son alongside the story of Dick and Emily, his wife, like I do just wonder, does a person have to be motivated to get along with someone they love,

to repair a relationship essentially, in order to change their mind? Yeah, it's a good question. Wanting to see something from someone else's perspective, the perspective of someone you love, it seems like that doesn't hurt. You know, it's, um, it's interesting thinking about it. It's not exactly that Tangle moved both of them towards the center and they met in the middle, but it moved Dick more towards Emily basically.

Yeah. I mean, obviously it would make for a better story if they each move toward the center. I think that's sort of what we want from a story like this exactly met in the middle But it's really more like dick believed something that wasn't true. And then he was the one that moved toward facts How does Emily say it changed her like does she say it changed her? So she told me that she didn't have as dramatic a change as dick It wasn't like she believed something that wasn't true and had her mind changed.

But she says she does read the news differently now. For instance, she told me that hearing some of Kamala Harris' policy proposals and how before she would have taken some of them at face value was good ideas. Now she says she's thinking more critically about them. How are they doing these days? Yeah, the last time I spoke to them, they really did seem to be in a better place. I think on the surface, it seemed like their problem was that they've been talking across this political divide.

But their real problem was that they weren't agreeing on facts. They weren't agreeing on what was true. That's what made it so bitter. It's a huge relief Dick and I can now agree on more or disagree based on the same information at least. I don't feel like I'm walking on age shells if I want to mention something to her. I mean she's her own person I'm not going to tell her who to vote for and she wouldn't listen to me anyway. Now we're on the same hymn book more or less. Although he might be reading a different page than me at the time, but it's generally the same hymn book.

But I mean, agreeing on the same set of facts, being in the same book, that's only going to get you so far. Who's Dick voting for? You know, as far as I'm concerned, I don't like Trump as a person. The way he handles himself, the things he says, it bothers me a lot. But the one thing that I did like about him was his policies. And so I'm definitely leaning towards Trump still. Okay, that's Dick's take.

That's my take. That's the first time that he's verbalized to me that he's thinking about voting for Trump. My heart just stopped. Emily and Dick Newton in Orange County, California. Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Today's episode was produced by Zach St. Louis and edited by Jonathan Goldstein. Our show is made by me, by executive producer Robin Simeon, and production intern Emily Malterre.

Neil Drumming is a contributing editor. Sophie Cassis is a contributing producer. Fact-checking by Kaylin Lynch. Sound design by Brendan Baker. Music by Matt McGinley. Special thanks to Lisa Pollack. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seipel Gina Delvac Teja Lajimera and Jennifer Farrow I'm the emperor, I'm the king, I'm the queen, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king, I'm the king You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply.

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