Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and today we're talking about

political polarization where it comes from and why it seems to be more

Now than it was in the past

You know, I'm always someone who is a little bit skeptical when people point to the present day and some feature of it

Whether it's economic or political or whatever and say it's very different now than it ever used to be

That's very difficult to say objectively right because we all experience the world differently when we're

20 years old 50 years old 80 years old and we change no doubt

So it seems to us that the world is changing in different ways, but it's hard to be objective about it

Nevertheless, I do kind of buy the idea that

Political polarization has increased in the sense that there's sort of been a sorting of people

It's very least in the US, but I think it's a broader phenomenon than that

Into a set of alignments on different issues that you might not think are necessarily connected and nevertheless

People are sorting themselves into tribes and this is not a correct or incorrect thing

Maybe this is a good thing. I don't know, but it seems to be there and we want to ask well

Why did that happen in a way that there seemed to be more of a continuum in the past?

So today I'm talking to Ezra Klein who's the name that most of you

I'm sure no Ezra has a famous podcast of his own

Ezra and I sort of heard of each other got to know each other a very tiny bit way back in the early days of

blogging, you know, I started my blog in 2004 preposterous universe

Ezra was writing at Wunk blog and pandagon back in the day

now of course he's the co-founder and and I don't know what exactly what his title is head editor of Vox.com

Which has become a little bit

...