Well, I am delighted to welcome as my guest today, Renee DeResta.

She is the author of Invisible Rulers, which will be our topic today, and also associate research professor at the McCourt School of

Public Policy at Georgetown. Rene, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me.

I enjoyed your book and learned a lot from it. Thank you for putting the effort in. I have to tell you,

the thing, on page, I think it is,

18, you wrote something that had me saying, yeah, I'll read it. It is possible that if you're

reading this book, you have at some point in recent years asked yourself, is it just me, or has

everyone else lost their mind? And I felt like saying,

because not only do I wonder about that, but everybody that I know says that too. They say,

you know, it's like there is some sort of contagion out there. And so you are an expert on the Internet and on social media and its effects on all of us.

So I think it would be helpful to begin with a story that you tell.

And I want to go back to how you got involved in all this.

But first, let's set the stage with that story you tell, and I want to go back to how you got involved in all this, but first, let's,

let's set the stage with that story you tell about the difference between the Iowa caucuses

in 2012 and the Iowa caucuses in 2020, because I think it sort of illustrates how in that short

interval, the way we process information, everything

had changed. So tell that story, if you would. Yeah. So in 2012, you had a Republican caucus in Iowa,

and I am trying to remember, it went through like three different wins, right? I think there was

Santorum was declared the winner. Romney was declared the winner. There was a third person.

Your, you're, my recollection is that, that Romney was declared the winner, and then later

it turned out that Santorum was actually the winner. But by then, Romney had already gotten the boost and all

that. And so. And I think that there had actually been a third person who had been. There might be,

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