TRIGGERnometry - Escaping the Biased Media Machine with Isaac Saul

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

SPONSORED BY: Express VPN. Get 3 months extra free when you sign up for a 12 month contract at: https://www.expressvpn.com/ Isaac Saul is a reporter and the founder of Tangle, an independent, ad-free, non-partisan politics newsletter that aims to summarise the best arguments from the left and right on the news of the day. Check it out here: https://www.readtangle.com/?ref=trigger Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​/ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  04:56 Isaac’s History with Huffington Post 10:13 The Motivations of Mainstream Media 20:55 Are People Interested in Balanced Arguments? 26:24 How Isaac Foresaw Today’s Echo Chamber Society 35:06 What is the Alternative if there is No Left or Right? 42:43 The Consequences of a Lack of Trust in Mainstream Media 51:23 Impacts of Deplatforming 57:38 What's the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. And it's nearly identical to the same things a lot of people on the left are saying about social media today. It's going to produce, you know, unbridled amounts of misinformation. The information is spreading too fast. There's no way to contain it. It's going to lead to societal downfall, yada, yada, yada. And the solution, of course, is always to limit that information. It's to suppress it somehow in order to maintain whatever the narrative is that you think is the truth.

That battle has been happening forever. I think COVID is a great example of how the prevailing acceptable wisdom has changed over time. I mean, what used to be totally off limits, like suggesting that it started in a lab and this was all the results of a lab leak, where that vaccines weren't totally effective and people were still spreading the virus and that sort of thing, 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. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissing.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a journalist and the founder and editor of Tangle. Isaac Sol, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you guys for having me on. I'm thrilled to be here. It's really good to have you on. Thank you so much for coming on. before we get into the interview itself and you've got lots of interesting things to share with our audience, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey that brings you to be sitting here talking to us? Oh, man.

Well, my name's Isaac Saul. I am the founder of Tangle, which is a nonpartisan politics newsletter where we tackle one big, you know, controversial debate every day in the news and summarize the best arguments we can find from the right and the left across the political spectrum. on that argument. 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. The first one is that I grew up in a really divided, politically divided county in Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia called Bucks County, where I had a lot of friends and family who were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. So I have a lot of loved ones who do not agree about politics. And that was kind of the environment that I grew up in with a lot of arguing and a lot of fights.

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, those fights have gotten more bitter and more divisive, which I think a lot of people recognize. And then my second Genesis story is that I'm a political journalist by trade. I went to a journalism school and got a job in the media world. my first job ever was at the Huffington Post, which, as you probably know, is a very left-wing liberal media outlet. And as I like to say, I did not take my job there because I was a bleeding heart lib. I took the job there because I applied 40 other places and they were the only ones that gave me a

job. And it's not hard to, it's not easy to get a job with a journalism degree these days. 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. And I also learned what it meant to get tagged in the media space. When I left the Huffington Post, I was immediately, you know, labeled as a liberal because I had bylines at Huffington Post. 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 at Huffington Post, and they assumed a bunch of things because of that. And so I learned pretty quickly that our information system was really divided. So I had an inkling of an idea to start

Tangle really early on in my journalism career. I helped start and build a media company with Ashton Coochor, the actor and venture capitalist, and was there for many years, for about seven years. I worked there and led a politics team there. And they went through an acquisition and sort of pivoted to video and did all that stuff that's happening in the media space. And so I kind of built an exit ramp for myself because I wanted to stay on the politics beat. I wanted to keep writing. 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 and, you know, the general celebration of people being partisan hacks, which is not something I'm a particular fan of. Yeah, totally. Well, listen, before we get into where we are today and all the crap that you rightly identify is a big cause of the many issues we have in the world, I was actually quite curious about the backstory. What years were you at the Huffington Post approximately? Yeah, so I graduated college in 2013. I'm 31 years old, so I was at the Huffington Post right after that. Actually, straight from college, I went into a yeshiva of a religious school in Jerusalem in Israel. Again, another interesting experience. I was not raised religious, but I didn't know what I wanted to do, what exactly I wanted to write about. And I had a campus

rabbi who I'd built a relationship with who was like, hey, there's this program in Israel. You can go for six months, live in a yeshiva. It's kind of all expenses paid. And you'll get a writing internship. And, you know, hopefully you'll see the light and become an Orthodox Jew, basically, was the idea. And I went and it was incredible. I mean, it was maybe to this day the most intellectually stimulating time of my life. I mean, I was talk about having your perceptions challenged at every corner and your belief system challenged at every corner as someone who was secular being dropped into one of the most religious spaces in the world. I got a lot of attention from very religious rabbis who were interested in compelling me to, you know, come to their side. And

I had a lot of really interesting conversations, and I did some traveling in the Middle East, and I wrote a lot. And I was there, you know, in 2013, spring of 2013, summer and fall of 2013. And I was writing essays and cover letters home from Israel, applying for jobs in the United States. And so I came home, I think, in the winter of 2013, right around the turn of the year to start working the Huffington Post. And I was there for about a year before I got, I got poached. out of the job. So it was the Facebook boom, the clickbait boom. It was the time when articles were getting millions

of views with clickbait headlines and that kind of stuff. 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 of the time. Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, you know,

I... So tell me what that was like. Like, I'm curious what that's like going into a... But, you know, from my observation, the Huffington Post is, as you said, very left-leaning and kind of ideologically pretty homogenous in my experience. So going in there with someone who had slightly different opinions, what was your experience like? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I think, like, I want to be careful not to broad brush everybody who work there or works there now because that's what happened to me. And, you know, that was really frustrating for me.

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. So you might write a story about a, you know, I don't know, a law around abortion or something. 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. 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. They want people to read it. They want people to share it. 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. 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. 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. Now, at the same time, 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. So that was the kind of stuff you, you know, I would see. 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. 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. 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 missed the rise of Trump and missed the rise of the Trump right.

and we're extremely out of touch with what was happening in a lot of places across the country. 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. But what you were talking to me about the Huffington Post and the way they did things and the ways they sensationalized headlines, we've got the tabloid press in this country. I'm thinking, hang on, but that's no different to what the sun or the mirror, all of those, or the Daily Star, all of that ilk do in our country. country. Francis, I would add, by the way, sorry to interrupt your first question, but I've written

pieces for non-tabloid art publications in this country, and it's the same thing. You write what you think is a sensible new one's piece, and then someone attaches the most incendiary possible title. That's why I no longer write for mainstream newspapers. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I don't think it's at all exclusive to the Huffington Post, obviously. I mean, I think it's something that happens across the media space. I mean, I'm pretty familiar with the ecosystem you guys are operating in. I read a lot of British papers. 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. 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 balance, informative information to people, 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. 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, and then readers come in to check out what you're doing and they get that, then they're going to give you money. And that's a really good incentive, you know, on the publishing side to stay true to your mission, stay true to your

goal. 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, then you're going to have to do things to hit those goals, which is a really big challenge. And I don't envy the position that a lot of those media outlets are in. 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. And the headline's crazy and it makes you want to click in. 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. To put a devil's advocate position to you, Is it? But isn't that the trap you're in and that where? all in in a way because we have subscribers. We let's be we know what our audience likes. We know what our audience dislikes. Isn't that the kind of path that we all have to tread in a way? Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, I think one of the things that I think is actually really worrisome about the independent media space. So, you know, I know you guys have a substack. I started out on substack. 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. And the challenge is that that is sort of a bubble and an ideology of its own. 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 in the same way a lefty or righty reporter might be motivated to look for something that affirms their beliefs. So, you know, I think a really good example of that was actually the war in Ukraine. You could go back and read a lot of the top political and international writers who are

on platforms like Substack or Independent Writers. And a month before Putin invaded Ukraine, they were all saying that it wasn't going to happen, that it was just saber-rattling and the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and the CIA and all these deep state entities were sort of just fear-mongering, basically. And it turned out that the mainstream narrative was actually right that 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. And in retrospect, it was pretty obvious. I mean, he put hundreds of thousands of troops on the border and said he was going to invade. I mean, it wasn't a big secret. But we at the time, you know, even I bought into a lot of that kind of heterodox thinking,

and I think a lot of people missed it there. So, yeah, you have to be careful. I mean, from my perspective, I think there's less pressure in the space that we're in. But absolutely, I mean, there are the fire breathers who are independent writers who I think are motivated. 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. And so they're they're motivated to do that kind of writing. And I do think that's, that's a dangerous trap. And, you know, there are people who talk about that. 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. Isaac, do you think part of the problem is, is because of social media, we amplify the most divisive voices, the most outrageous takes. So then we see people, journalists on the left, like who work for, we all know the type of publications producing just ridiculous nonsense. And we go, this is a leftist journalist. When the actual truth is there's lots of journalists who lean left who are left, who are actually very good, very principled. And the same with the right. So what we have in many ways are these two straw men who we see as left journalists

some right journalists, but actually they're not credible, these publications that we're talking about. 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, 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. So, you know, a good example is somebody like Marjorie Taylor Green. 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. 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. And she's a household name now. I mean, 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. 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. And maybe there are certain issues where she is representative of the Republican Party today. But on the whole, I think she's, you know, she's pretty fringe. She's pretty far out there. she's pretty far right. 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 Green. And I think that's because of the effectiveness of that kind of political warfare. And the same goes for, you know, conservatives on the right and what they do at the left. I mean, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez widely considered one of the most far-left progressive Democrats in the House. she's also the most famous. 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. And if you're scared of this, if you don't like this, then you should vote for Republicans. So, you know, one of the things I try and do in my work is offer up people who aren't that fringe, you aren't that

far right. I mean, you know, or far left. In our newsletters, we do include those fringe opinions, but there may be one of, you know, seven or eight opinions that you're going to see. That way you understand, you know, here's the spectrum of what the thought is on this side of the aisle. So you don't leave feeling like everybody on the left is AOC and everybody on the right's Marjorie Taylor Green. Hey, Francis, do you want to protect kids? I was a teacher for 12 years. So no. I will never forget what those little quits put me through. Francis, what did your therapist say about moving on with your life? me. I was filled with joy and goodness until those little

f***ing sheds, took my dreams and shredded them. Francis, remember what the lawyer said about not discussing the allegations in public? I was found not guilty on all charges. Not guilty is not the same as innocent. Anyway, going online without using ExpressVPN. Not guilty is not the same as innocent. Anyway, going online without using ExpressVPN. I can't do it. Anyway, going online without using ExpressVPN is like leaving your kids in a public toilet.

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but ExpressVPN has made it easier than ever to keep your information safe. Just fire up the app, hit one button, and you're instantly protected. Secure your online data today at ExpressVPN.com slash trigger. and get three extra months for free. That's expressvpn.com slash trigger for three extra months for free. I'm going to use it right now to find Francis and new therapist. I fucking hate them. Well, that makes a lot of sense,

but I suppose I was thinking when we were talking about the Daily Mail and the sun and tabloids and other publications on 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, but quite a lot of people are quite happy to eat McDonald's. You know, I enjoy McDonald's once a year, but I generally don't go to that sort of place. But every time I drive past the McDonald's, it's full of people, right?

So is this, is it really true that a lot of people want to have this nonpartisan, long form, you know, sensible, multifaceted, nuanced conversation? I mean, it's what we tried to do on trigonometry. And we have an audience, but every time I turn on YouTube, I'm confronted with the fact that, you know, a hot right wing girl calling someone on the left a moron or a shill or whatever is going to get a million views. When we do a sensible interview with someone like you, you might get, you know, 50,000 views or 10,000 views. Might get 100,000 views. But it's not going to get a million views because most people want a McDonald's. Isn't that true?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, there are a few kind of uphill battles, I think, that people in aerospace are climbing because I do sort of think you guys are doing work that is, you know, similar to mine, which is, first of all, everybody's going to click on the headline about, you know, the dozen kids dying in a bus crash 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. I mean, that that is the reality of the challenge. that we're at. I've worked at news organizations that produce quote unquote good news, feel good content or solutions journalism, journalism about people who are solving things rather than people who are creating problems. And it is hard. It is hard to get people to engage with that stuff. I do think there are ways to do it, though. And I think there are ways to raise the interest level. I mean, when I'm pitching Tangle to people and trying to get them to sign up and give our newsletter a shot, 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.

And both pitches are really honest, but I also know that one's going to be more effective than the other. 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. There's not enough trust. There's too much bias. There's not enough transparency. There's no balance. So I built something to try and solve that. I got tired of talking about what the problem is.

Give it a shot. If you don't see your views represented, if you don't think it's fair, you don't have to read it. But I think if you try it, you'll like it. 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. And there are a lot of journalists out there who aren't being fair. 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 than Republican Party, you should get out of your news bubble. You're in an information bubble if you don't understand that yet. And the answer isn't racism. Okay. It's something much more, it's something much broader and more important and more, I guess I would say, complex than that. And that is a good way to get people like, okay, maybe I do have more to learn about other people in the United States. maybe I am misunderstanding what a lot of people in America think or feel. 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 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. I actually think the true is same for a lot of the politics in your country. And I think, you know, something like what I'm doing would be really effective and draw a big audience there. And, you know, to your point, it's, it's not easy to win people over on the, the nuance of things. But I do think there is a ground swell and a kind of grassroots uprising against the way things are right now that's happening. And, you know, you guys having 300,000 YouTube subscribers is part of that. We have a... 365, mate. We've worked up.

365,000 YouTube subscribers. I mean, that that is proof of it. I've seen your channel. I've watched your videos. 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, yet they're coming back and they're watching. I think that's proof of it. Tangle as over 50,000 people on our mailing list. I think that's proof of it. I think 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. So, yeah, it's not easy.

We're definitely competing with one hand tied behind our backs because human nature wants the kind of sensationalist stuff that reaffirms our worldviews. But I do think there are more and more people who are increasingly interested in this kind of content. Isaac, I was listening to an interview you did as part of my research, and you said something really fascinating. 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. Why was that? 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. But that was where so much political discourse was happening. You know, the hundreds of comments on, you know, some high school

teachers' Facebook status or whatever. 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. 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, it wasn't like two articles that were varying opinions on the same news event. 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.

And it was like the old days where we would be throwing links at each other and bombing Facebook statuses with, you know, long forum posts about why somebody was wrong and having all the sources cited at the bottom. And you could see it plain as day. I mean, it was just like people were getting their information from two different sources. 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. It was like one side was pulling something from a really obscure, conservative blog with, you know, some truths and some fictions. And the other side was pulling something from a really obscure liberal blog with some truths and some fictions. And they were going to battle

with that kind of information. 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 these like really politically affirming information ecosystems. 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. So people who post more politically on Facebook are also now more likely to run into, you know, the dissenter, the person dropping their comments. 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. It makes them dig their heels in more because they're fighting off enemies left and right online. So there's a lot of really, really troubling stuff that I think we've seen in that space. 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 imagined was, you know, not unique to me. And it turned out that it wasn't. That's really interesting. Sorry, no, no, you go.

I was going to ask on that front because 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. And you mentioned the war in Ukraine. 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. people who hadn't been following. But, 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 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. I'm convinced of that because we've got to be. to a point where it's like the right used to mock the left for supporting the current thing. It's the idea, it's this meme online that people will support anything as long as the mainstream is telling them to support it. 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. And thanks to the eco-chambers and the availability of all sorts

media. Now, if you want to build the 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, there's plenty of, you know, substacks and YouTube videos and rumble, whatever that you can find to make what is on the surface a legitimate case for whatever it is that you believe, right? Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. And so I think there's a couple of things that play there. 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. 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. 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. So enough Google or Bing or duck, duck, go searches,

and you're going to come across the thing that you want. So that's one. 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. And he makes it, 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.

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. And, you know, his argument is basically like we live in political tribes increasingly in today's society. People's community are tied closely to their political worldview. 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 you're preconceived, you know, purported, I guess allegiances are and you'll change your worldview to kind of fit in.

It's basically his argument. And he makes a really good case for it. 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, the commentary back then was that he was moving the Republican Party to the right. 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. And it's like, okay, well, what does it mean to go to the right then? It doesn't make any

sense. I mean, a lot of people define conservatives and progressives as conservatives want to conserve. They want to keep things as they are. Progressives are trying to change. 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. 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. So doing that was considered, you know, launching the country to their right. It was considered this very conservative moment in American history. Yet they weren't really conserving anything. 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 clap back, basically. So, you know, I don't really buy that the left and the right are actual polls of political ideologies that were subscribed to. I think there are moments in history where we have vague understandings of what it means to be left or what it means to be right. Big government, little government, you know, big government, small government, conserving, progressing. But they're always dynamic and moving and changing.

And so- Sorry to interrupt. So what are the tribes then? because I agree with you completely, and I hate using terms like right and left because they're inaccurate generalizations. However, there are tribes that clearly are at loggerheads with each other right now, as they always have been, frankly. What is the, is that, you know, some people talk it's pro-establishment, anti-establishment. But I don't imagine a lot of progressives think of themselves as being pro-the-establishment. They think they're radical people who are changing the nation.

of society, they don't think of themselves as having control of every institution as the right, quote, unquote, would see them, right? So what are the tribes? How are we to break ourselves down? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think I can answer that in terms of what's happening in the United States. I would have a harder time talking more broadly about, you know, global politics or specific countries.

Don't worry. We inherit all your stuff. No, let's use technical language here, mate. Your shit. Yeah. Download your shit. and we inject it straight into our. Yeah, you guys are maybe the only ones who have crazier politics than we do right now.

And you're welcome for that, I guess. Yeah, but we don't have guns, so we're okay. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, so, look, I mean, I think fundamentally the tribes of the Republican and Democratic Party, I mean, when you talk about voters, I still think it's the duopoly of the two parties. You know, one of the reasons that we see fewer and fewer landslide elections is because party allegiance is really strong among voters, and it doesn't matter how bad a candidate is or how much they're violating that person's political worldview. If they have an R or a D against their name,

voters are just really likely to vote for them. That being said, in America, I do think that we basically have what I would call, I mean, I view it as like four main tribes, two on each side. I think, you know, on the right, we have the sort of old guard, you know, you call it the establishment Republicans. Some people call it traditional Republicans. I'm talking Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, that sort of era of Republicans that really talk about being, you know, aligned with small government and, you know, some semblance of bipartisanship, tons of respect for the traditions of the country, constitutionality, that kind of thing. Then I think there's sort of this new era of, right-wing conservatism that, you know, existed 20 years ago, but I think has really been

elevated and escalated by Donald Trump, which is, you know, battling the culture wars. It's stopping the progressive left from making changes that they view as being really dangerous to the country. It's really focused on immigration. It doesn't necessarily matter whether something is a big government or small government type policy or whether it's constitutional or unconstitutional. the very traditional sense of the word. It's about winning. It's about making sure that Republicans, you know, get off their knees and start fighting for the country that they really believe in. And that's kind of like the attitude of that new right. And then I think on the left, there's the, you know, the maybe traditional or establishment Democrats. I would call them the corporate Democrats,

which, you know, I know is a derisive term, but I think A is accurate and B isn't always necessarily, doesn't always necessarily mean that they have, you know, bad policies or the wrong policies. But this is sort of like the more elite donor class Democratic Party that has a lot of power, a lot of influence at major institutions, corporations, colleges, those kinds of things. And they're interested in some regard in keeping the status quo, which I think is very different from the kind of establishment or the kind of Trump right and the progressive left. They want things to be stable. They're fighting for progress, but they're doing it in a very sort of incremental way,

and they're really interested in doing it via bipartisanship, things like that. Joe Biden, I think, for the most part, is a member of this sort of party. Nancy Pelosi, I would definitely put in that kind of, you know, democratic establishment. And then you have the progressive left. And I think those are sort of like, you know, maybe closer to the Trump right in terms of attitude and respect for norms and that kind of thing. Obviously, to your point, they get put against each other. All of a sudden you have progressive lefts like, you know,

trumpeting FBI talking points and stuff, which makes my head want to explode. But generally speaking, I think these are people who are like, we've had incremental change forever. We want real broad changes to the country now. We want to upend the systems that have produced a lot of inequality in the country, a lot of the problems in the country. And, you know, I think,

similar to the kind of Trump right, the progressive left is interested in winning. They feel like you know, they've had many years of being dismissed or ignored and they are sort of the activist type who are like, we're going to do whatever it takes to win. We're going to play dirty, fight hard, all these things and try and make the real broad overhaul to the country's systems that they want to see. So to me, those are like the four tribes that we have in our politics today and they're all kind of at war with each other. Hey Francis, if you were a member of the public, would you like the opportunity to ask incredible guests like Bill Burr, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Adam Carolla, Brett Weinstein, John Barnes,

Douglas Murray, Nigel Farage and Lionel Shriver, your own questions? You bet I would. And what do you think the best way to do that would be? Uh, probably stalking, mate. You'd have to corner them in the supermarket. probably run near like the sort of frozen food aisles, and then just bark questions at them before they can escape. Not the American ones, as they have guns. And you'd have to be extra careful with the females,

as that's how I got in trouble last time. Do you really imagine you're going to get Douglas Murray near the frozen food aisle? If you want to ask our incredible guest questions and have access to phenomenal behind-the-scenes content, then you have to be on our locals. That's right, for only $7 a month. get incredible extra content, behind the scenes footage, giveaways and also the chance to be part of an incredible community where you can meet and hang out with like-minded people.

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You can share memes, talk about the latest episode, or even make a new friend. But just one. Exactly, more than both of us have, really. People are now doing meetups in their city because they love locals. In fact, some people in fact, Some people enjoy it so much, they prefer it over the show.

They prefer Locals to Trigonometry. If I have to get them executed, I'm the one that goes to jail. Right, go to trigonometry.com. Only $7 a month for all that incredible content. Trigonometry.com. See you there, guys. Do you think that this fragmentation of society has been exacerbated by the fact that no one really trusts the mainstream media anymore,

not left, not right, because we've been let down and been betrayed so many times by them, whatever institution it is. So as a result of that, a distrust creeps in, which means also people are likely to think in a more conspiratorial manner. Like whenever I think about progressivism, to me it's quite a conspiratorial way of thinking. There's this systemic thing in place

that is keeping certain people down, and that means certain people can't progress. And if you think about the right, especially the Trump right, they believe that as well, just in a different form. Yeah, no, I mean, look, obviously from my position, the trust in media is one of the core issues. I mean, foundational to my goal with Tangle, like the very essence of it is that I'm trying to create a media outlet that where we see equal levels of trust from our conservative readers and our liberal readers. I think that is one of like the only real true signs that you're producing content that is representing a really diverse and holistic set of views. So I mean, there's no doubt.

I think it's the combination of A, the mistrust and the fact that there have been so many big media blunders, you know, in the last 20, 30 years. I think it's also B that there's now so many alternatives to, you know, some of the stuff we've been talking about. It's that like you don't have to just get the new. New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post or whatever, to your front doorstep every day. You can go out and find stuff in, you know, a few clicks by typing a few words in on an internet search browser and you're going to get presented with a lot

of different alternative media, a lot of different options for news to consume. But yeah, I mean, you look at the numbers, the pure polling of it in terms of, you know, trust in the media. Again, the only things that Americans trust less, and I think this is probably true of a lot of people in Europe, is their current government. I mean, that's pretty much it. It's Congress gets lower approval ratings, and right next to them is a lot of the media that's out there. And so, you know, I think there's two parts of that. One is a lot of media is going to challenge your worldview. And when your worldviews challenge, that might make you upset.

It might make you, you know, sometimes the New York Times publishes an article that is, is a really great piece of reporting that shed some light on some truth, but conservatives don't like the truth that it sheds light on. So they hate the New York Times more and they trust the New York Times less. So it's a tough conundrum to sort of navigate. But it's a big problem because if we all can't agree on the basic set of facts and a story, then we're not really going to get anywhere in terms of moderating our views or even understanding what the other side thinks. And this brings us on to an issue that you, I think you're, I've read. a few things that you've written about this.

This brings us on to the issue of misinformation. And just very briefly, do you think, you know, in percentage terms, there is more misinformation now than there has ever been? Or is it more a case of, you know, 10 years ago, the New York Times could publish a piece that wasn't true and nobody would know or most people wouldn't know? And now, if they do that, well, there are going to be people. on Substack on YouTube and whatever, challenging it. So we're more aware of the fact that what we're being told isn't quite true.

Yeah, I think it is that there's just more awareness of it. I mean, I think misinformation is a problem, but I do not think it's the kind of problem, especially a lot of people on the left believe that it is. Why not? Well, because, first of all, it's something we've been battling forever. you know, I mean, 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. And it's nearly identical to the same things. A lot of people on the left are saying about social media today. It's going to produce, you know, unbridled amounts of misinformation. The information is spreading too fast. There's no way to contain it. It's going to lead to societal downfall, yada, yada, yada. And the solution, of course, is always to limit that information.

It's to suppress it somehow in order to maintain whatever the narrative is that you think is the truth, et cetera. That battle has been happening forever. I mean, it's happened over and over and over throughout history. Jacob and Changa wrote a great book about the history of free speech that touches on a lot of this stuff. And that has informed a lot of my writing about it is just this idea that, you know, the misinformation threat today seems so, important and so scary and it's so big that the only solution is, you know, we need the government to regulate what gets posted on Facebook or Twitter, which to me is totally insane. So, you know, that's kind of the tension that I see in terms of the historical precedent being

there and us feeling like we're really important in living. Everything that's happening to us in modern times has to be this major historical unprecedented event that I just don't think it is right now. Well, I will say one thing. I mean, the printing press did cause about two centuries of religious events, right? So it wasn't an uneventful period of time in human history. And I don't think that there will be, I don't think there will be periods of, you know, total stability as the advent of social media continues to grow. I mean, obviously, we've seen it in the United States just in the last few years that I think there's, you know, more political violence and unrest than we've seen in a few decades. But I also don't think anybody would look back on the advent of the printing

press and say that, you know, what came of that and the information, the way that we were able to share information and educate people wasn't worth it in terms of the upside. So it's a really difficult thing, you know, it's not a black and white issue. But yeah, you raise a good point that it's not a guarantee that things are going to. going to go smoothly, that's for sure. You know, and we talk about the age of misinformation, but if you look at a figure, for instance, like Alex Jones, I know it's a classic figure to say,

you look at the Sandy Hook case. The fact that he had this huge platform could spread the most horrendous misinformation, which then had dire consequences in the real world. Surely that is quite unprecedented, isn't it? The fact that it's this one guy who's then able to cause all this amount of destruction and disruption, I should say?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I haven't really considered how that scale would translate historically. I mean, I'm sure that there are some figures we could find, you know, who handed out pamphlets or spread, you know, certain religious texts or some of the first people who were dominant in the radio era that maybe spread more misinformation or spread similarly dangerous. disinformation. I think one of the critical things about Alex Jones is that, you know, he did things, him specifically, he did things in a way that were violating, you know, certain terms of service that some of the platforms he was on had, which led to the repercussions that he's faced now. So, you know, we're making an agreement, I think, a societal agreement that we're going to have some Alex Joneses and we're going to have to figure out how to navigate them. But the tradeoff for that is that, you know, when there's protests in China like we're seeing right now, there's a way

for somebody to upload a video that's, you know, shedding a light on the repression of political dissent in 10 seconds on TikTok, which would have been impossible 30 years ago. And we wouldn't have any idea what was happening on the ground there right now. And that's really good to me. So, you know, it's not an eye for an eye in terms of that trade-off. And I think there's going to be upsides and downsides. But on the whole, I think, you know, what we've seen throughout history is that when free speech thrives, society is better off, even if it gets a little rocky at times. I mean, so what do we do with figures like this? What do we do with figures who have a huge platform put out conspiracy theories misinformation because the other flip side of the coin is and

we all remember during COVID when we were all affected by this when people were challenging certain narratives they lost their channel they had strikes put against them they were demonetized they were shadow banned he's just talking about us yeah yeah being silenced is it you're joking but we do actually have there was a video that we did with the journalists here in the UK called peter Hitchens about his criticism of lockdowns and we caught YouTube shadow banning it. We literally have a video on our channel which shows that it was shadow banned. So this isn't conspiracy. This was happening 100%.

Yeah. So I mean, that is my argument. You know, and I know this is like maybe offers up a little bit of my political worldview and where I come from. But my personal opinion is A, that de-platforming the vast majority of the time. is, has the opposite effect of what's intended and be that the net sum of, you know, allowing the sort of shadow banning, the removal of like these dissenting opinions is actually bad for society. I mean, you know, to your point, I think COVID is a great example

of how the prevailing acceptable wisdom has changed over time. 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 or that vaccines weren't totally effective and people were still spreading the virus and that sort of thing. 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. And I understand the rationale for that. I understand the, I think, you know, maybe my nuanced perspective is the reason that those platforms felt that pressure to remove that kind of content, I think actually came from a good place. They, They were being told by certain medical institutions that this was disinformation.

The vaccines worked. It didn't come from a lab. And if you allowed this information to spreading your platform, a bunch of people were going to die. And if you're somebody making, you know, content moderation decisions, being told that what you're allowing is going to lead to thousands or millions of people dying is probably a really scary thing. So I don't envy the position they were in. I think they made the wrong choice in a lot of cases. I think that's been proven out by what's happened, you know, up to today.

in terms of what to do with people like this, look, I mean, in a lot of ways, I think it often works itself out. You know, you click onto something Alex Jones tweets or used to tweet when he was allowed on the platform. And the first hundred responses are people mocking him for being crazy, you know, or they're fact-checking him or they're quote-teeing him and dunking on him and getting a ton of traction doing that, yada, yada, yada. I mean, all that stuff, I think, is effective in a lot of ways at sort of limiting. the, I guess the acceptability of a character like him. And I think a lot of that stuff happens organically on these platforms. At the same time, platforms are allowed to make rules. They're private companies. If people violate those rules, they're allowed to kick them off the platforms. My issue with a lot of the stuff Twitter and YouTube is done is that they don't apply those

standards evenly. So if you're going to have a standard, apply it and use it. In the case of Alex Jones, you know, I don't think de-platforming him actually worked. I think there's, you know, a tremendous amount of evidence for this. His, you know, his audience has grown faster than ever over the last few years. You know, you look at all these really, I guess, you know, scary political events that people point to as the result of characters like Alex Jones, like January 6th. Alex Jones was at January 6th with a megaphone telling a crowd what to do, you know, two years after he'd been banned from some of these platforms. So, Did it really work? Was he really made this ineffective character? No, he just went to this dark corner of

the internet where people were consuming his content without seeing any dissent, without being engaged by any people who thought that Alex Jones was a whack job. And so this community, you know, around him becomes even more insular and probably more extreme in the long term. I think one of the only real successful de-platformings that I've witnessed or remembered was Milo Lianoplas, who, you know, basically I think disappeared after he was de-platformed. And even him, we're now seeing him pop his head back up. I mean, he's like on Tim Poole's podcast with Nick Fuentes and Kanye, and all of a sudden he's kind of back in the mix.

So who knows, maybe he becomes some murdered. That podcast didn't go pretty bad. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was, you know, I mean, it was a, in some ways it was great. I mean, that podcast is a perfect example of why we should allow these people to come out into the daylight. I agree completely. I just wrote a whole substack piece saying that.

very same thing, even though a big part of me kind of winced when I saw the guest lineup. Totally. It's a strong flavor, you're right, Max. Yeah, I mean, I'm, look, I'm a Jew who is semi-observant and deeply connected to the Jewish community. So obviously, the stuff with Kanye, whose music I love, and Nick Fuentes, who is, you know, just a total asshole. I mean, it's scary to see people like that go on a big YouTube show.

But what Tim Poole did is exactly why we should allow it because he made it so obvious that Kanye is incapable of hearing an opinion that he doesn't agree with and can't even make the case for himself. And they just look like a bunch of weasels, you know? And I watch it and was like, this is great. This is why if you allow these people on these platforms and you handle it in the right way, it actually exposes a real deep truth about them, which is often that they're deeply insubes. secure and don't really have any clue what they're talking about, which I think is good for society as a whole to show that to people in mass. Couldn't agree more. Well, on that happy note, Isaac, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. We're going to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters that only they will get to see the answers to on locals. But for now, we've got

one final question for you, which is the same as it always is. Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? God, that is such a difficult question. You know, it's funny, I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is I was at a conference last couple weeks ago and I saw this really fascinating presentation on sustainable housing and not in like the super woo-woo green, you know, kind of very progressive liberal sense, but in this very like innovative sense of building homes that were totally self-sustainable with, you know, grass growing on the roofs. vertical farms inside and all these really cool mechanisms for capturing heat or keeping the house cool. And yeah, I think there's like a ton of really interesting solutions out there to some of the big problems we have in terms of energy, which I'm sure you guys are feeling right now. And even climate change that all kind of work together that, you know, there's a lot of doomsday stuff and a lot of attachment to solutions we've had for years like, you know,

wind and solar and then there's all these really innovative people, I think, who are like 50 years into the future already, who I don't think we give enough attention to. So go look up some of that stuff. That's what I would say. It's pretty cool. It gives me faith in the capacity for innovation and not government to solve a lot of our really big problems. Perfect. And of course, do check out Tangle as well for that nonpartisan take on all things political and news. Isaac, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure. And thank you guys for watching and listening.

We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or also. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. See you soon on locals. What are some news stories you'd want to look into but can't or don't have the time to and that might be too problematic or too dangerous to explore in the current partisan era.