Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a big grab bag for rogues of every stripe.

I'm your host Andrew Heaton.

And we're, what, a month out? A month a half something like that before the next presidential

election so we'll begin today's episode by posing a question.

How will people in the future look back on our current political era?

Think about that for a moment, what your answer is.

I'll give you mine. There is a natural human tendency, I think. that for a moment,

there is a natural human tendency, I think,

for all reasons of cognitive bias

to assume we're living at a particularly fascinating dynamic time.

Probably everybody in American history thought that they were living in a particularly

fascinating dynamic time, even people who live between Grover Cleveland and Grover Cleveland again, but I actually do think that. I think we're living in a

fascinating and dynamic time and I don't think it's just cognitive bias. I think

there's so much massive technological inflection points that we're living through that it would be impossible

to think that this is some kind of humdrum period of history.

My suspicion is that people will look back at our period today as kind of akin to the turbulent

times which immediately followed the invention of the printing press.

That the printing press just kind of changed everything for a long time and it took society a long time to

adapt to it and we're still figuring out the internet and everything else all

while it evolves. Politically, I suspect that people will look back

at our current era like the period just before World War I.

And I don't mean that in an ominous another really big war is coming.

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