Marshall and Saga here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

We have a very exciting announcement everybody. This is the very last time that you're going to hear about this. You have achieved our goal. We are now over 1000 ratings on Apple Podcast 2020 to be specific.

So thank you so much to all of you who helped us out and reaching that goal as promised. You're not going to hear us bug you anymore. However, just remember if you scroll down, rate us 5 stars in the Apple Podcast app and you write a review, you can leave us a question in that review and we will answer it right here on the air. Don't feel comfortable doing that. No problem at all.

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So from now on, all you are mostly going to hear us say is be sure to rate, subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and family. You guys sharing this to other people when you're live for Louis. Enjoy this. This is going to be a huge way. We continue to grow the show.

So on to our realignment question. This one is from Nick 9000 plus. Now I want to say the one thing will be huge for you guys is whether you're leaving a question in the rewriting section or by email.

Leave us a note about where you're sort of from. So we love to be with say they're from Phoenix, Portland or Houston. That's always sort of a cool thing for us to sort of know where people are coming from. But Nick 9000 plus is question. How worried should we be about the state of America?

Are things really that bad or have echo chambers fueled by the mainstream media and technology caused us to believe the end is not.

It's a great question Nick. In general, look, people have been against America several times since 1780 every single time they've been wrong and things have been a lot more dire in this country than they are right now.

So look, no, I don't think that things are really that bad. But I don't want to understate how bad things are either. I think this is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The good news is we got through the Great Depression and we have a lot more safety net than we did last time around. So in general, the way I think about it is this.

Things can be not as bad relative to our history, but that doesn't make them any less bad or worthy of our attention or of trying to achieve a better society in a country. What do you think, Marshall?

Yeah, the critical thing that you're pushing back against is sort of doom or ism right. So there's this and speaking of echo chambers. There's a lot of people who feel incentivized to tell everyone that everything's broken.

The only way to save this is to burn the system down. But we don't want to make it seem like we're not saying that there are really super, super, super bad cases here, especially individual level, which is that obviously if you are someone whose family's been racked by the opioid crisis, this right clearly from your narrative is for as bad as it's going to be the worst time ever for you.

But the broadeth and thy want to focus on here is this idea that it's the mainstream media that fuels echo chambers because this goes to an idea that we've talked about with Andrew Schultz earlier this week and also Nathan Bachez earlier this summer, which is that media actually is changing.

And in many ways, because media is becoming much more about the independent creator media is much more about Joe Rogan getting his audience or us as the realignment host having our audience or a newsletter writer like Andrew Sullivan having their audience or an Andrew's case him having his comedic audience away from the power of comedy central.

We're getting into a system where it's actually going to be much more like we could that we're going to see echo chambers come about because if you look at what the mainstream media really was at its height, so in the 60s and 70s when there were three channels that we get news from.

That was when you're having 40 50 60 million people actually tune in to watch the news every single day. So yes, in many ways, did that mainstream media tell you things that you probably wanted to hear, but it was a broader community that you're sort of speaking to.

But I'm curious what you think about that. So yeah, I'm not really understanding what you're saying here, Marshall, because honestly, I don't think having more echo chambers is a bad thing. I think it's actually a return to a general status quo that we saw before the rise of the so called mainstream media if anything, I think the problem with the mainstream media was the veneer of objectivity and breath with a pretty like uniform and with a pretty uniform ideology that was pressed upon this so called veneer.

And so a return to kind of the yellow paper. I mean, look, this is a controversial take in media, but the truth is we had a much higher literacy rate, much higher news consumption and much more trust in the media when the media was more partisan. So in a way, I actually think partisan media isn't necessarily a bad thing.

So that's really interesting because on one level, I think you've gotten to this cool idea about trust, which is that Joe Rogan's audience or even your rising audience trust either of you guys far more than they would trust even the same information coming from the sort of most neutral version of CNN or CBS news, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I definitely think they were talking about trust media getting more and more decentralized away from sort of like big institutions and a specific people will definitely improve trust.

But I definitely don't think that that's going to be good, especially when you're relating to sort of certain issues. So for example, there are actual cases where like a shared narrative is really super important. So for example, and we talk about this on the episode of Jane coast in the day, you could see parts of conservative media that literally don't believe that, you know, COVID-19 is a serious issue.

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