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 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 result 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 constant in kissing and this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is a journalist and a founder and editor of Tango. Isaac, so 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 is Isaac Saul. I am the founder of Tango, which is a nonpartisan politics newsletter where we tackle one big 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 the 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 to 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 conservative because they could find out that my first job was 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 tango really early on in my journalism career.

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