Why Democrats keep losing the internet

Why is the right-wing media machine so massive and able to dominate digital media, while liberals and progressives struggle to keep up? Jon Favreau joins us to discuss the critical players and outlets in the early 2000s that led us to where US politics is today, along with looking back at what he’s learned from launching Pod Save America back in 2016. Our guest Jon Favreau is the host of Pod Save America, Offline, The Wilderness, and others as co-founder of Crooked Media. You can find him on all those shows and pretty much everywhere else online! Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  Um, I guess like just start, start things off. Really simple question, you know, like, how are you feeling about the state of the world right now? Optimistic, like pleasantly surprised? Like, how are things?

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Angry, frustrated.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  I would not say I'm optimistic. I would say the last year, even more so than the last 10 years of living with Donald Trump in our politics. The last year has really tested me and my belief about how we might be able to get out of this in a way that hasn't been, hasn't been tested for quite a while.

• 1:02Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, so you're not a Trump guy? Okay, good to know. Great to know.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Not a huge fan.

• 1:22Ryan Broderick?

  So my, not a huge fan. Okay, interesting. Okay, I'm Ryan Broderick. I'm not wearing my Yes We Can shirt today. It's in the wash. This is Panic World. A show about how the internet works our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And joining us today is a podcaster you all may be familiar with, Jon Favreau from Pod Save America. Welcome, Jon. Let's save America with this pod today. Welcome.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Uh, thanks for having me. Good talking to you guys.

• 1:55Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, the first question Grant wanted me to ask as a Pod Save superfan is, do you wish you guys had kept the title Keeping It 1600?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  No, I don't. I don't. I'm really glad we landed on Pod Save America. Though, it is funny that some people take Pod Save America as like, we were trying to be serious. Like, we thought that our podcast would save America, that it's like, it was a real, it wasn't tongue-in-cheek, which I find funny, but Keeping It 1600 was, it was fine for the time, but it was also when we thought that the podcast would be like, just a side hobby and not our jobs, and it would end after the 2016 election, so it seemed to, it seemed to fit for the moment, but...

• 2:38Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. Well, we're gonna be going back to that period of time a lot on today's episode.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:43Ryan Broderick?

  The major theory, the major sort of idea that we're gonna be picking apart here is a question that I've actually had for some time, which is this question of why the right-wing media machine is so massive? How have they been able to dominate digital media in particular so extensively? And why haven't leftists or liberals, progressives been able to keep up? And most importantly, how much is that actually costing us in this current information war that we're in with the Trump administration? And so, we're gonna be going through that timeline, but before we get to the story of how we got to here, I wanted to ask you just like generally, like, why do you think the right is so good at the internet, let's call it, right now?

• 3:25Ryan Broderick?

  Like, what to you is the biggest sort of thing that they have over everybody else?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I've thought a lot about this. I think in this moment, and obviously that stretches back for maybe the last decade,

• 3:41Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say they're funny, but they have become sort of...

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Nihilistic in a way that allows them to make all kinds of jokes about everything. And sort of the LOL, nothing matters, sort of attitude that you see online is very fitting, I think, for a movement that is primarily interested in tearing down institutions and convincing people that it's not worth really participating in politics in a serious way, or debating politics in a serious way, that everything is corrupt, and so we might as well try to get the people who are going to be corrupt for us in power, and nothing else really matters.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  And so I think the way that the internet and the way that social media evolved over time, I think prioritizes that kind of attitude, tone, etc. So I think that's one part of it. I also think that, of course, just what the algorithms prioritize is a big part of it. Fear, anger, works better for them than it works for the left. And then I think we can talk about all the issues the left has had over the last 10 years, and probably have gotten a little-

• 5:03Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know what you're talking about.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 5:06Ryan Broderick?

  You're very well organized-

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Been crushing it. Little humorless, little scoldy, self-serious. And I think, and part of that is, I will say, understandable reaction to genuine fear and outrage about what Donald Trump and his movement represents, so it's hard to be funny and light in responding to that. But I do think through that response, the left has sort of, at times, forgotten how to be light and funny in a way that might not be warranted, but is certainly necessary to reach a broader audience of people than just political junkies.

• 5:43Ryan Broderick?

  The thing you're describing with the nihilism, I think, I often refer to it as like the race to the bottom nature of the internet, which predated social media. We've gone through stories about it on this show plenty of times. It's this bucket of crabs feeling that a lot of online spaces have. And in fact, when we were putting together the research for today's episode, and I want to thank our researcher, Adam, who had a Herculean task ahead of him to put all this together for me. The right was not particularly good at the internet. And I wanted to start our story in 1995 because obviously there's right wing media. There's right wing radio, you know, Rush Limbaugh, all that.

• 6:21Ryan Broderick?

  But 1995 is when a little email newsletter launches from a man in a fedora named Matt Drudge. And Matt Drudge, I think, is sort of the first attempt at figuring out how to infuse right wing politics onto the internet in a big way. Meanwhile, the Democrats are embracing a new form of technology called blogs. Do you remember Howard Dean's Blog for America?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  I sure do. I sure do.

• 6:50Ryan Broderick?

  So I found an article from the University of Vermont here that describes it. Tell me if this sounds right to you. If Howard Dean were an internet company, would he be the smash success of eBay or the now-defunct Pets.com? I think it's probably Pets.com now. The momentum Dean established over the summer and fall bore a striking resemblance to the straight up curve of the dot com boom. On Tuesday morning, reeling after iOS, some of Dean's fans were asking similar questions. All those worries about whether you are preaching to the choir on the blog. Yeah, those were spot on, said one supporter identified as Nady, which I think is a fascinating insight for 2003 of this idea that the internet can create a filter bubble. What is your sort of like take on the very early Democrat and Republican blogosphere in the 2000s?

• 7:35Ryan Broderick?

  What were these spaces like? You know, the Drudge Report and I guess early Huffington Post and all this stuff.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Well, it's funny because I can situate myself in that time period where, so I graduated from college in 2003 and I get a job on John Kerry's campaign. And I am the press assistant on the campaign. And so because Howard Dean was taking off at that time in the summer of 2003, the Kerry campaign decided, we need a blog too, right? Howard Dean has a blog and now we need a blog. And we had a, I forget his name now, but some older guy was our blogger, nice man. And I was then, because I was an assistant and had some time on my hands, I was also part of the blogging crew.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  And the challenge then, which, you know, see if you can tell if we've continued to have this challenge as a party, was Howard Dean's blog was like... What people were feeling and sort of the organic energy behind the Dean campaign, which primarily was about Democrats voting for the authorization for the war in Iraq, but also a host of other issues.

• 8:43Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And John Kerry very famously had a couple of different positions on the war in Iraq, voted for authorization. And the message was very tightly controlled on the Kerry campaign. It was very top-down, though John Kerry himself didn't really know what his message was, or at least had some conflicting advice. And so, from my perspective, as the person who was trying to blog and post, it felt very forced. It felt like I was not able to have fun, say what I wanted to say. We just weren't doing it right. And it always seems like the Dean campaign was having fun, and that those people, we don't know if they knew what they were doing, because obviously it didn't work out for them, but at the time it was like, okay, there's an organic energy here that is authentic that we do not have.

• 9:28Ryan Broderick?

  That's interesting, because reading this back now, it's really funny. One of the commentators talking about this blog back then wrote, "The big irony from my perspective, from following online politics, is that a lot of politicians have been loath to get on the web because they don't like losing control. How were Dean learned the biggest one? Stop being an asshole. We learned about the insular nature of this medium. It can do miraculous, wonderful things, but it can't win an election. It can change the world, but it can't win an election." Which I think is such a fascinating shift to, we get to 2016, everyone's like, "The internet won an election, and this is exactly how it works." Was that the feeling then, that the internet was not going to determine the 2004 election? It was just icing on the cake to messaging?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah, there was no, the internet then was seen as an opportunity for fundraising and grassroots fundraising. And at the beginning of that, right? Because still grassroots fundraising hadn't really taken off yet for campaigns, but it was the first time that campaigns thought, okay, we don't just need to ask rich people for money, that maybe if we have grassroots supporters, they can contribute as well. There were also the Dean meetups, and we obviously, we can talk about this, but we built on that for the Obama campaign in '08. But it was this idea that you can use the internet to potentially organize strangers and bring them together offline to talk about the campaign and organize that way.

• 10:55Ryan Broderick?

  And it seems like everyone is slowly realizing at this moment that the, that there is something there to the internet. And you start to see the rise of like viral like gate suffix scandals. So in 2004, you get Rather Gate.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:07Ryan Broderick?

  When Dan Rather is discovered by right wing blogs to have faked anti-Bush documents. You get Wired, uh, reporting on the 2004 election, uh, reporting that it drives so much attention to the internet that it basically just like makes the internet this political force. And then by 2005, you see the launch of Huffington Post as a liberal response to Drudge. Also, the beginning of Mashable, BuzzFeed, Vice, Gawker. They're all sort of not inherently liberal or inherently political, but clearly like this new media has arrived. And then you get 2007 when Twitter launches, kind of solidifying, I would like the political media class. And we have a very good 2007 tweet to read for you today, which is from

• 11:47Ryan Broderick?

  the New York Times. And they tweeted in 2007, "Word up. It is I, the gray lady, with a shout out to all my hip young friends. Just wanted you to know I've added new specialized feeds."

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. That is wild.

• 12:06Ryan Broderick?

  So obviously, it's a dumb question, but I'm gonna ask you anyways. Twitter in 2007 changes American politics, right? In your opinion, does it change it immediately? Or, or, or like from 2005 into the 2008 election, like, how actually important was Twitter?

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Not, in, in my experience, not very important at all.

• 12:25Ryan Broderick?

  Fascinating.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  I'm old now, so it's hard to remember shit. But I don't have a memory of Twitter really taking off until we got to the White House, so 2009. And really even, it was like, I feel like 2009 into 2010 were, and maybe even 11, were sort of like the heyday of, okay, Twitter is a real thing. This is driving the news. It's driving cable coverage. It's something that we have to pay attention to. But just to give you some context, we had, of course, like an army of media monitors in the White House in Obama's first term. And, but even then, people were emailing tweets around, individual tweets.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Tweets, that's what the media monitors were doing. So it was not just like understood that everyone would scroll through Twitter. It's like, here is an important tweet and we are going to send it to people in the White House comms office.

• 13:15Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:17Ryan Broderick?

  The 2008 election is the first election that I can vote in. You know, you always have a like a nostalgic fascination with that, but I also think that is defined two threads of American politics online ever since. So you and it's not McCain Obama. It's Obama Ron Paul, in my opinion. The idea of Obama as sort of the slick MySpace presidential candidate, he's on Twitter, he's got a podcast and no one knows what those are yet. I went through his MySpace the other day and he's got like-

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Did we have a podcast?

• 13:47Ryan Broderick?

  Well, there's a wit. So I found screenshots and there's like a widget, like an iTunes widget to like, listen to something. I don't know what it is. But then meanwhile, you have Ron Paul, who is like, deep in Reddit, deep on 4chan, his like supporters are buying blimps to like fly around cities. They're all like these huge weirdos that are connected to like anonymous and all the rest of it. And you know, when you look back at that moment, to me, it's such an interesting snapshot of where everything is going and no one like- Ron Paul had a makeshift election inside of World of Warcraft, which is something Tim Walz did last summer.

• 14:23Ryan Broderick?

  Like, that's how ahead of the like, but then at the same time, the sort of slicker, more like TV friendly internet appearance, the, the, the hope poster, the yes, we can like, I, I think that stuff has also stuck around. And I guess like, as someone who was in the mix there, like, was Ron Paul, his internet presence on your guys radar?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:43Ryan Broderick?

  Like, how?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 14:44Ryan Broderick?

  Not at all.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  In fact, you just telling me that now is like, the first time I've ever thought about it.

• 14:48Ryan Broderick?

  No way.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:50Ryan Broderick?

  That's so wild. Okay.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  And, and at the time I was, you know, I was 24, 25 at the time. Um, so it's not like I was too old for, to get it, but like, there was no, I mean, those of us in comms, those of us in press, just absolutely not.

• 15:06Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I imagine you had friends in real life, and that means you weren't aware of Ron Paul.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:12Ryan Broderick?

  In my experience, there was not an overlap, you know?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Like, I was aware of Ron Paul, but certainly not his online presence, yeah.

• 15:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I learned about him via a friend in high school who was really into Bitcoin.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:25Ryan Broderick?

  So that's, I think that's the world that those people swam in. So 2007 is, I think, where all of this gets solidified. You see the rise of Politico, sort of creating the Twitter media cycle. I've talked to like young, I've talked to like older Politico reporters who built custom RSS feeds to get tweets slightly faster than everyone else so they could flip them into stories. Like, that's how important kind of this world was for them. But I guess, like, when you look back at the Politico, Huffington Post drudge era, when they are sort of defining things, did you feel like they were shifting the conversation politically?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:00Ryan Broderick?

  In terms of, so how did that shift happen? What did it look like?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that for sure, because I remember, I mean, even before the 2008 campaign, I remember, so I was in Obama's Senate office in 2005 and 2006. And I remember when, I think it was probably 2006, when Fox started saying like, "Oh, you know, he went to a madrassa for school because he was in Indonesia." And it was, I remember my now co-host, Tommy Vitor, who was the press secretary at the time, dealing with this. And it was like, wow, this is really bubbling up because of the internet, right?

• 16:45Speaker 02

  And like, it ended up on Fox, but at the time, he could call Fox producers and yell at them and try to correct them. And it was, you know, it would work to an extent, maybe it wouldn't. But the birther stuff, right, this is pre-Trump birther stuff, but like the madrassa, the Obama's not from here, and of course, like, I think whether it was the Clinton campaign or someone else had like leaked a picture of Obama wearing like, you know, it looked like African garb or something, like it was, you know. And that kind of stuff, that was the first time in politics, I was like, oh, it's not just like a John Kerry attack that's going to be a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, that's going to be an ad, it's going to be shit on the internet that we're going to have

• 17:30Speaker 02

  to respond to. And we can't necessarily just call up someone at a media outlet and be like, hey, this is unfair, can you issue a correction? Because it doesn't really matter if they do, because it's going to be everywhere on the internet, anyway.

• 17:45Ryan Broderick?

  And that is exactly what starts to happen after Obama wins, in a huge way. And it's kind of crazy to look at our timeline I have in front of me, and see how fast things start to change here. Because Obama wins, and you immediately get the start, the first uses of the hashtag #TCOT, #TopConservatives on Twitter.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Oh wow, I forgot about that.

• 18:05Ryan Broderick?

  Which becomes sort of like the digital arm of the Tea Party. And then you get the launch of Breitbart, basically like a year later. Steve Bannon said the original goal was to create the Huffington Post of the right, which, yeah, I'd say that works. And then you get, all in 2011, you get the start of the Arab Spring, largely on Twitter. You get, a few months later, the start of Occupy Wall Street on Twitter and Tumblr. And you get this sort of general feeling that the internet is like this inherently liberal revolutionary tool. And I guess, do you know why people, like, why did we think

• 18:46Ryan Broderick?

  that? Especially because if you look at it really closely, if you think of the Tea Party, which I don't think we, at the time, thought of the Tea Party as an internet community, even though it obviously was. They were obviously mobilizing online. So it's like, the Arab Spring was not inherently liberal. Occupy Wall Street, I even argue, wasn't even inherently liberal towards the end, especially once the 4chan guys showed up. So it's like, I feel like it's such an interesting snapshot of how little we understood of what it was actually, like, what the internet was actually doing, and what digital media was actually doing at the time.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  It's a great question. There are, I think there's a David and Goliath dynamic to the early internet, social media, sort of feel and connect, you know, at least with regards to politics. And just from my experience, that sort of manifests in two ways. One, for our campaign, right, it was like... I mean, it's interesting, you know, us versus Ron Paul, the slick internet versus whatever Ron Paul was. But I think about us versus the Clinton campaign in the primary, and we were, you know, Hillary Clinton fixture in Democratic politics, had all the donors,

• 19:58Speaker 02

  had all the connections, had all the establishment help, and we were the underdogs. And so for us, organizing, using Facebook and using other social media and the internet to organize people, both much like Howard Dean did, in real life, and to raise money that way, felt like, oh, this is a way to connect like-minded people, to sort of take on the establishment in sort of a scrappy way by reaching out to people who we may not know. And it's just, it's just a better way of organizing, of grassroots organizing. And Obama was an organizer at heart, was a community organizer, and so it fit with that. Once we get to the White House, I think, you mentioned the Arab Spring. I actually think that was a

• 20:41Speaker 02

  huge factor in leading us to believe that the internet and then Twitter, especially because it was Arab Spring, it was Iran, it was just a lot of places where we were seeing people organize themselves against autocratic, repressive regimes with social media, with some success. And so it was seen then as this liberalizing force. And I think where it changes is repressive regimes, autocratic regimes were, became wise to that and suddenly realized that they could also use social media to their ends, to confuse people, to divide people, to misinform people, and to sort of keep power.

• 21:23Ryan Broderick?

  It's so funny you say that, because that is almost exactly what Cornel West said to Democracy Now! at the time. I'm gonna read this to you.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 21:32Ryan Broderick?

  "It is a revolution. U.S. Autumn responding to the Arab Spring. I knew there would be some more outrage as the two-party system begins to decay, and the mean-speardness of the Republicans moving more toward reactionary and quasi-fascist politics, and the relative spinelessness of a Democratic Party tied to oligarchs as well, but centrist in trying to hold off the vicious right-wing politics of the Republican Party, but refusing to in any way be progressive." And obviously, he's got a lot more heat on it.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:00Ryan Broderick?

  But I think he is... Very sharp to understand that in a revolution, especially with a brand-new technology, you don't know which way it's gonna go. Only that it's gonna go. Yes. And we're gonna talk about the world that is created once that revolution in media starts, right after a word from our sponsor, Pokemon Go to the Pole. Um, alright. Uh, so, okay.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+.

• 22:57Speaker 03

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• 23:28Ryan Broderick?

  So, the 2010s, it's the biggest upheaval politically in my lifetime. I feel like we are still dealing with like, we're still trying to understand exactly what happened, but if we go through the dates here, we get the launch of BuzzFeed News in 2011. We get Gawker and Vice also sort of adopting a digital newsroom. And we get the rise of sort of like Twitter as news. And this is when you get in 2012, Newark Mayor Cory Booker as a Twitter celebrity. Kind of one of the first internet's boyfriend kind of ideas. And this is a New York Mag piece on the phenomenon from the time, "His social media presence is a singular glimpse at the future of political life on the social web that offers a mix of responses to constituents complaining about broken traffic lights,

• 24:13Ryan Broderick?

  self-help aphorisms, and the occasional song lyric or words of encouragement for the New Jersey Devils." Do you have any sort of memories about like?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 24:24Ryan Broderick?

  Any of this?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Look, now that I'm thinking about it, I feel like my memory is just Cory Booker had a big social media presence.

• 24:35Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  But I don't remember the presence that well.

• 24:37Ryan Broderick?

  People found it very annoying, and I think that was a sign of what's to come as we enter this transitional period of culture and politics, starting on the internet first and then moving out into the rest of the media second. I mean, the 20, the lead up to the 2012 election, to me, so it was the first time I'm in a newsroom and I'm sort of covering this live. And it's, it feels like the last moment of the good times in a lot of ways, because you get, you get sort of the presence of like Tumblr as this cultural force. So there's a lot of animated gifs flying around. Romney is like, obviously a wet fart. I think for me, the moment he strapped his dog to the roof of his car, I was like, this, this, the game's over.

• 25:21Ryan Broderick?

  And like the social metrics prove that you can go back and look and like Obama is just like searching. So Obama wins in 2012. This is where I sort of want to spend a lot of time today because it, to me, I don't totally understand what happened. And I don't understand why we didn't clock what was happening. So very simply, like, what is your sort of sense of the beginnings of Gamergate? Is that, is that a world that you've gone into a lot? Is it something you've thought about a lot? Was it something that like you were thinking about at the time at all?

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Definitely not at the time. I don't even think I knew it was happening at the time. I think since I've, you know, launched offline, I've gone back now and, you know, have had a few conversations. Not specifically just about Gamergate, but that Gamergate has come up. So I like know the broad strokes of what it was. But I, in 2013, 2014, of course, I like had just left the White House. I was out, it was before Positive America, before I knew that. So it was this period where I was sort of just watching politics from the outside for the first time in eight years. And I remember thinking that like, things weren't going quite as well and, and things were deteriorating a bit, particularly online.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Though I still didn't have this view, I don't have the view of the internet and social media as I, as I do today, or even as I would in 2016. But I thought it was like a, you know, things, things are a little bumpy, but then I'm like, well, you know, we had a couple of good years. And so maybe that's just sort of the way the pendulum swings.

• 26:47Ryan Broderick?

  That's interesting. I mean, just, I'm not the first person to make this observation. Like, there's plenty of people who have said this, but like Gamergate, I think in a lot of ways, creates the playbook that we're still seeing today. And like, it launches in August 2014, based off a 4chan thread, full of like, sort of misinformation about like, reporting on the games industry, and we don't need to rehash it. But it is interesting that Steve Bannon, in particular, was so sharp about co-opting it. And he said multiple times that he hires Milo Yiannopoulos specifically to write about it and launder it into like, larger mainstream media. And at the same time as that's happening, basically like, a year later, you get the pivot to video from Facebook, the first big pivot to video, which sort of changes the nature of digital media. You start to see the layoffs starting. But you also, I didn't realize it

• 27:32Ryan Broderick?

  was this early, I didn't realize that 2015 was the beginning of the Bernie bro.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Hmm, yeah.

• 27:40Ryan Broderick?

  But it is interesting to look at both sides of the spectrum and see that the right is like, becoming very organized around what are effectively just like conspiracy theories. And at the same time, I'm, please do not email me about this, I'm not comparing Bernie bros to Gamergate, please do not do that. I want to live my life comfortably. But it is interesting that like, as you said, that like, the negative rumblings online were being felt across the political spectrum. There was an uglier kind of, more aggressive kind of politics happening. And, and I don't know what to make of that. I mean, what were your first impressions of the Bernie bro movement, quote unquote, which I wish I got a better name for it, Dirtbag Left, let's call it, maybe?

• 28:15Speaker 02

  So, my view of this was, it started with sort of Occupy Wall Street, right? That, that we dealt with in the Obama White House, right? So I, we understood, in the Obama White House, and I think this was reflected in the 2012 campaign, that there was a, an economic, economically populist anger brewing as a result of the 2008, 2007 financial crisis. And of course, we grapple with that the first couple of years of the White House. And

• 28:49Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  I always tell this story, like, I remember sitting down with Larry Summers, who was the head of the National Economic Council at the time. I, of course, have not ever taken a class in economics and here I am writing about the financial crisis and so I like ended up learning a lot from Larry, who treated me like one of his students, and Tim Geithner and that crew. Yeah. I was the young kid there, but I was also like the political hack and so I would be like, "Okay, well, we have made the decision not to claw back the bonuses from the AIG executives and there are like pitchforks and torches headed towards the White House and how am I supposed to explain this to people?" And Larry, very calmly, would be

• 29:32Speaker 02

  like, "Well, it's just contract law. Like, we cannot, we have made a contract, the government has engaged, entered into a contract and we cannot just pull these bonuses back because it's just not legal and it's simply not part of contract law." And I was like, "Okay, that's a great explanation in your classroom at Harvard, but it's like, I don't think this is, this is not going to land on the internet." But it was like that moment, I was like, "Oh, there are certain things that we are trying to grapple with in the White House where lawyers, bureaucrats, tradition, it's like, it's preventing us from, from sort of responding to the populist anger that's out there in a way that would be satisfactory

• 30:12Speaker 02

  to the people who are angry because we're sort of trying to do it by the book, right? And then, at the same time, you know, like Obama would do an interview where he was like, "Yeah, I don't think we need to give more bailouts to fat cats on Wall Street." And then we'd go through like a week's cycle of stories about how he was too populist and too angry and too mean to the rich because he called people on Wall Street "fat cats." Right. And so, it's, so we knew that was brewing and then by the time we get to 2012 and the reelection, even before we knew we were running against Romney, we were like, "Okay, this reelection campaign has to at least respond to some of that populist anger that's still out there and the fact that wealth inequality and the growing gap between rich

• 30:53Speaker 02

  and poor, that the financial crisis only accelerated, like, we have to, we have to respond to that and we have to speak to that and we have to have an agenda that speaks to that." And so, we knew that existed and so when Bernie comes along in 2015... I was not surprised that his movement sort of took off, right? Because we knew that was brewing since like at least 2010. I think what happened in the Democratic primary there, though, is because Hillary couldn't outflank Bernie on the left on the economy.

• 31:24Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  She decided to outflank him on identity issues and social and cultural issues. And so the version of the Democratic Party that becomes like, you know, more focused on identity-inflected issues, cultural issues, eventually what the Republicans would call woke, all that kind of stuff, that begins with Bernie versus Hillary in 2015 and 2016. Because the Bernie bros are seen as like, yes, they're economically populist, but they are, there's misogyny there, at least with some of the online folks, right? There is maybe accusations of xenophobia, right? Bernie is like not very liberal on immigration in 2015, right? And in the next iteration, he is in his next campaign.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  And so that cleavage in the Democratic Party starts to emerge, I think, in that, because of that primary in 2015 between Bernie and Hillary.

• 32:15Ryan Broderick?

  So this is an excerpt from Hillary's book after the 2016 election. And she writes, "Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn't make an argument against me on policy. So he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character. Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist." And then she concludes with, "I am proud to be a Democrat, and I wish Bernie were too." And to see this infighting against the backdrop of what's happening on the right is especially frustrating 10 years later, because as this is happening, in 2015, Trump retweets Pepe the Frog for the first time.

• 32:57Ryan Broderick?

  And then he goes on a rant a few months later about the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  They're remaking Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford. You can't do that. And now they're making Ghostbusters with only women. What's going on?

• 33:13Ryan Broderick?

  Effectively, sort of connecting the dots between this, like, very pop culture-focused gamergate movement with grievances about woke and all this stuff, and a larger, sort of, MAGA movement. And the Democrats are completely in freefall here. They're all fighting with each other about what the Democrats mean. And it's interesting you brought up the Occupy thing as this thing that wasn't squashed. And I hadn't thought of it that way, and I think that is an interesting way to think about it. Hillary's campaign, though, is not really focusing on that. They are doing the mannequin challenge with Bon Jovi on a plane. They are doing a remix of the Hamilton musical.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  There are ten things you need to do. Number one. You register to vote and it's on. You post that Hillary sign up on your lawn. Number two. Call some undecideds with your crew. Your cousins in Ohio, maybe try and flip 'em blue. Number three. Watch Hillary examine the terrain. Watch her campaign with the man Tim Kaine. Ah, Tim Kaine and the membrane. Tim Kaine and the brain. Number four. Hillary makes each decision, looking at the world from a rarefied position. A public servant with tenacity, agility. Mi gente. Experience is not a liability.

• 34:29Ryan Broderick?

  And then, of course, the Pokemon Go to the polls moment. One of my favorite moments ever.

• 34:36Speaker 06

  Because we're gonna have a lot of jobs. Jobs from building infrastructure to coding. Creating new apps.

• 34:46Speaker 06

  I don't know who created Pokemon Go.

• 34:52Speaker 06

  But I'm trying to figure out how we get them to have Pokemon go to the polls.

• 34:58Ryan Broderick?

  At the same time as all this is happening, so you have the right consolidating power, sort of understanding how to speak the same meme language with each other. You have the Democrats running what is essentially the cringiest version of a 2008 election in 2016.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Without that, without the candidate.

• 35:13Ryan Broderick?

  Without the candidate, yeah. Uh, and then you have the complete implosion of digital media. So Mashable starts layoffs in 2016, Mike.com starts layoffs in, in 2018. The Guardian publishes a piece called "The Future of Digital Journalism Is In Question As BuzzFeed And HuffPost Lay Off A Thousand." So people are noticing, like even in 2018, that journalism is in a lot of trouble. You start to see buyouts, Vice.com starts to implode, and Breitbart is doing tens of millions of views. They are dominating Facebook. And what we'll see from this moment on is a new right-wing media company dominating the conversation as the one before it, you know, recedes into, you know, more and more obscurity.

• 35:56Ryan Broderick?

  For instance, after the Breitbart boom, you have a bunch of imitators. You have the Daily Wire, they get huge on Facebook. Then you also have the Free Press, Turning Point USA. They're all right there engaging in this non-stop culture war. To sum it up, lefty-leaning, progressive-leaning, digital media outlets, this like new wave of MTVs and Rolling Stones that we are all thinking we're going to change the world, they're out.

• 36:23Ryan Broderick?

  And replacing them is right-wing propaganda pretending to be those kinds of sites, making those kinds of YouTube videos, making those sorts of podcasts.

• 36:33Ryan Broderick?

  And then comes a little media company right in the middle of this called Crooked Media.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Yes, I remember, so I moved to LA in 2014. And John Lovett is already here. He's writing a television show, creating a television show called 1600 Penn with NBC and Josh Gad.

• 36:59Ryan Broderick?

  He loved the 1600 thing. He really liked it.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, that was before. So he has this, he's doing television writing. Tommy and I start a consulting firm where we're just writing speeches for people. Tommy's in San Francisco, I'm here in LA. And we're sort of watching politics from afar. Dan is also in San Francisco. He's like running comms for GoFundMe. And we, we've had conversations, this group of people about, at this time, about like how there's not, there's not a lot of progressive media out there. There's not a lot of like left of center media that like in, in an opinion sense, right? Not just like journalism, but like, you know, punditry. And that, and I think we all had sort of our beliefs about like how the Clinton campaign

• 37:46Speaker 02

  was going and how the Democratic Party was going and how like things were, you know, the Obama era is ending and why isn't there media where Democrats or liberals or leftists can be not so self-serious, not take themselves seriously, but also like take politics seriously, joke around a little bit, and then especially reach out to people who might not be interested in politics or who might be cynical about politics or just sort of turned away from politics and sort of bring them into the process. And then when Hillary loses.

• 38:16Ryan Broderick?

  And now you're trapped being a podcaster forever. Until Hillary wins, this is your life forever.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Real, real monkey's paw situation there. That I'm still, I'm still living in.

• 38:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, the worst curse of all, yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  When Trump wins, we're like, look, maybe this is our chance to take the podcast that has become very popular and start a progressive media company that's not just podcasts, but you know, everything else that we now do. And that's sort of how we started the whole thing.

• 38:45Ryan Broderick?

  It's fascinating to think of like you guys launching in the middle of this because like, as you said, you weren't like a super online guy.

• 38:54Ryan Broderick?

  But to look back, like, the whole era is ending. Like, the whole thing, like, in a lot of ways, like, I mean, obviously hindsight 2020. But I guess, like, when you, when you look back at that, were you aware of just, like, how dire things were? You said that you thought Hillary would win. Like, why did you think Hillary would win? Like, I'm curious. Also, for the record, I was not living in the US at this point. So I was, I was covering sort of the rise of far-right populism outside of the US, and I had just lived through Brexit. So I had a very different attitude to my American friends, where I was like, this shit's cooked, bro. Like, this is over. It's like, what was it? Like, how, what, what was the optimism? You know, what was driving it?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  So, a few things. First of all, it was certainly not a lot of faith in Hillary Clinton as a candidate, just to be very honest. I remember before Obama even jumped in the race, and I, it was like 2005, 2006, and I made a bet with Robert Gibbs, because I was like, because he was, who was Obama's press secretary at the time, would go on to be his press secretary in the White House, and my boss in the Senate office. And Gibbs was like, oh, you know, Hillary's gonna end up being the nominee in '08. And I'm like, no, she's not. He's like, what do you mean, no, she's not? Who's, who's gonna do it? He's like, your, our, our boy John Kerry, after losing in '04? Like, there's no one else is gonna beat her. And I'm like, I don't know who's gonna beat her. Like, what about Obama? He's like, he's not gonna run. He's just, he just got to the Senate.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  And I'm like, okay, I don't know who's gonna beat Hillary Clinton, but someone is gonna beat Hillary Clinton, because there is just, I do not think she has it to be this party's nominee. Like, I, so I've never had, I've come, you know, whatever. I don't wanna speak too badly at this point, but I never had a lot of faith in Hillary the candidate. What I did believe was that the country would just not vote for Donald Trump. I thought she would win by default. And I was also someone who, early on, did believe that Trump would win the Republican primary, because I kinda had seen at that point that the Republican Party was not in the, we're gonna nominate another Mitt Romney mood, after what happened in 2012. So I was not surprised that the Republican Party, which was sort of a mess after Romney...

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Romney lost in 2012, ended up with Donald Trump. So I saw that coming, but I was like, there's just, you know, I bought into the demographics or destiny argument and thought, okay, I know the voters that Donald Trump will get. I know that we are going to continue losing non-college white voters from even from Obama levels, even though he was the first black president and that was a big deal, but like he did really, really well with non-college white voters compared to everyone since then. And so I knew we lose that, but when I did the math, I was like, look, it's the country's becoming more diverse, the electorate's becoming younger, and it's even though she's not the greatest candidate, Donald Trump is just too much for the country. Like he's not, he can't do it.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  So that's, that's why I thought he would.

• 41:50Ryan Broderick?

  No, I think that makes sense. And it's, it's interesting. You just, you described the Republican Party as a mess post Romney, where it like politically, that's probably absolutely true. We only look back at the things like the Tea Party and birtherism and Gamergate as successes because they did succeed in 2016. And it's like, if they hadn't, like this would just be more of an identity crisis for this party. 2016 is the culmination of all of this energy and it works. If it hadn't worked, we would look at, you know, meme warfare as being really embarrassing. And it was really embarrassing, but for the Republicans, it's crucial. And I think if it hadn't have worked, there would have been a major identity crisis.

• 42:30Ryan Broderick?

  If these young, fashi, far-right millennials working their way up the party had failed, had lost the election in 2016, it's possible the Republicans would have splintered into a million different coalitions and actually be going through what the Democrats seem to be going through right now. It's also possible that the Republicans would have just kept losing. They, they would have just put more Romneys, you know, more Ted Cruzes out into the field. And that is the world that I like to think about when I go to sleep at night. And after the break, we're going to be talking about sort of the world that we are now forced to live in and what, you know, what we, where we go from here. But, but first a word from our sponsors, Charlie XCX's Brat.

• 43:15Speaker 00

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• 44:11Ryan Broderick?

  So, Pod Save America appears. America is saved. We're all good. The internet landscape that we kind of took for granted in the 2010s is also gone. So Twitter is now X. Joe Rogan is the biggest personality on earth. The GOP is basically being led around by podcasters who either work for it or are working with them. You know, Hawk Tua happened. We all forgot about that, but like that was like a real lightning rod for a while. And the rise of TikTok during COVID and after COVID, we have TikTok. And we, I think we have the, the final kind of fracturing

• 44:52Ryan Broderick?

  of any kind of liberal coalition, at least online, specifically around Israel. And I think going into the 2024 election, the Democrats really just didn't understand how fraught this coalition was, or if you could even call it a coalition. Cause I, I think now it's very clear that there are things that we might put under the umbrella of liberal politics, leftist politics, progressive politics, that do not get along, are not compatible. At least that's what I think.

• 45:23Ryan Broderick?

  From where we sit now, a year later, like I'm genuinely concerned that there isn't a way to create an anti-Trump umbrella because of how segmented and fractured these different groups are. I don't know. How do you see that landscape now?

• 45:39Speaker 02

  It's a good question. I think I noticed this. So I, you know, I have a podcast called Wilderness and since like 2018, been doing like I've just conducted some focus groups myself with voters. And at the beginning of that series, you would ask people where they got their news from and you'd get local TV, some would, the more politically engaged would say cable. And then you get some people saying like, on Facebook or on Twitter, right? And you get like specific platforms. Then by the time I get to 2022, I did one before the midterms there and I asked people where they got their news and suddenly like, people would just start saying more, my phone. And they would stop.

• 46:24Ryan Broderick?

  That's weird.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  And they would stop saying outlets, naming outlets. And they say, oh, I just looked on TikTok. And I'm like, what is on Tik? And they're like, uh, Daily Mail? The Daily Mail is like a bit, it's, it's, it's on my TikTok all day. And it'd be like progressive people, but they're getting it from the Daily Mail because that showed up in their TikTok feed. And the brand and the company, or the outlet that was like delivering them the news was less important than either the platform or just a general, it's coming, it's on my phone.

• 46:52Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. That's fascinating. And I think it definitely like gels with what we have here. Kind of like you see the post-COVID rise of, you know, already popular people like Hassan Piker or the leftist pocket of YouTube that's sometimes called BreadTube. The Chapo guys, they're not called Come Town anymore, but they were Come Town and now they're just like normal celebrities, which is weird. And, and, but I think it, it starts to show like a weird thing with the Democrats that the Republicans don't seem to have an issue with. And it's something that I would like love your take on because the Republicans over the last 15 years have basically found a way to either use the internet.

• 47:32Ryan Broderick?

  Internet like monkeys with typewriters to surface like policies or big lie conspiracies that they can get behind or also just personalities like Charlie Kirk was effectively my take on it is that the reason they're so upset about him in an existential way right now dying is that he was their attempt at homegrown Trump the idea of a young influencer being bred to be a presidential candidate to replace the cult of personality that's my take on it and so they were very very fluid and very flexible with the internet to the to the chagrin of everyone on earth

• 48:07Ryan Broderick?

  why haven't the Democrats done the same like what is it like is someone who's been inside the mechanics of the party like I don't understand is it as simple as it's the Israel question or is it as simple as the wealth inequality question or is it more is there something that average people just don't like I have to imagine if you're a 22 year old person with liberal progressive views or leftist views you are going why isn't Hassan Piker the Joe Rogan of the left just by default

• 48:34Speaker 02

  why isn't he or why is or

• 48:36Ryan Broderick?

  why isn't he in the terms of like why isn't like why aren't political candidates from the left or the center-left working with influencers and and upstart digital media and creators the same way the right are

• 48:50Speaker 02

  so I think I think you probably have to back up before Gaza because I think some of this begins in in 2017 and 2018 in the response to Trump right and so the response the response to Trump you get a quote unquote resistance movement and the resistance movement is the most mainstream democratic movement of the various sort of factions that splinter after Trump and it is the wine moms and it is the center-left people and it's the people and you know who are and democratic I think from this group of people you get a lot of democratic staffers and you get a

• 49:34Speaker 02

  lot of people who work in democratic politics and I do think that this faction of the party has the politics generally of the 2016 Hillary campaign

• 49:46Ryan Broderick?

  uh oh

• 49:47Speaker 02

  and partly by that I mean an emphasis on these identity inflected issues

• 49:53Ryan Broderick?

  yeah

• 49:53Speaker 02

  and at the time you also start you get Me Too

• 49:59Speaker 02

  And then after Me Too, you get, of course, then 2020 happens, COVID. COVID becomes another identity-inflected issue against the right, right? 100%. Around, you know, masking becomes a symbol of that you're, you know, you're wearing a mask. You're a fan of Fauci. You got the bobble head. And so that sort of kind of liberalism exists. And it is, I think it is a powerful force within the party. Online at times, it can go, and this happens on a lot of media outlets. This is when you get like the freak out over cancel culture, right? And so does the Me Too movement go from a focus on sexual assault and sexual harassment

• 50:41Speaker 02

  to, okay, now we're going to, you know, start yelling at this person or that person online? Then you get COVID. Then you get George Floyd and the protests of summer of 2020. You get the defund the police movement, right? And so you start getting, I think the left and the center-left, or basically from the far-left through the center at this point, which is the coalition you end up needing to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, begins to splinter. And it has held together basically up through 2020, barely, because there was a feeling that like, we gotta beat this guy. But the cracks were all there and it was economic, right? There was like a Bernie-left and more of a center-left.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  There was people more focused on issues of race and policing and civil rights. There are people more on gender equality and sexual harassment and the legacy of the Me Too movement. There's people focused on like, you know, this is where you get the yard signs, right? Like in this house, we believe in science kind of stuff. And that is just a, because it is, when I say identity issues, it then also becomes more individualistic in a way. And so there is a focus on rights, identity, and less of a focus on sort of like solidarity across various issues and political beliefs that you would need to keep a movement cohesive

• 52:03Speaker 02

  in order to defeat what ends up becoming an authoritarian threat. And I think the diffuse sort of views and beliefs of everyone, everyone who's not MAGA becomes a problem and becomes harder to keep together, especially with the fractured media and information environment and like algorithmic bubbles.

• 52:24Ryan Broderick?

  That's interesting, the idea, because in a lot of ways, it's sort of a holdover from the way social media used to work, which is like, like the Facebook quiz boom was because your identity was the way you would communicate on Facebook. You would say like, I'm a Scorpio, or I'm a Hufflepuff, or whatever. And like, the Democrats, using that term very loosely at this point, still feel, like, Blue Sky to me feels like extremely 2014.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:54Ryan Broderick?

  It is a place where like-

• 52:56Speaker 02

  For me, it feels like very 20, like 2018. 2018, Blue Sky is like forever in 2018.

• 53:02Ryan Broderick?

  So, does that explain kind of like, why when Biden is trying to reach out to influencers, like, it doesn't work because there's not, in a lot of ways, I guess what you're saying is like, because there are so many groups within a coalition that you would need, you can't have a Joe Rogan of the left, quote unquote. You can't have one personality to suck up all of that energy and speak to everyone without pissing everybody off.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  I mean, Biden reaching out to influencers, he's reaching out to influencers, it's like a top-down structure, and so the influencers he's talking to are like, sort of, house organs here, right? It's like, it's not, and look, I say this is, a lot of people think that that's what Pod Save America is, right? And that we're like-

• 53:45Ryan Broderick?

  I was gonna say-

• 53:46Speaker 02

  We represent the establishment of the party, but we, a lot of Democratic politicians don't always, we're not like the first stop, because we will, you know, ask uncomfortable questions sometimes. And we're not even, I mean, you're probably like, not really, but like, not, compared to some of the influencers that they do reach out to, we're a little more confrontational. And I think Joe Rogan becomes Joe Rogan, not because, like, someone thought, like, Donald Trump thought, oh, he's on the team, and now I'm gonna reach out to him. It's that like, oh, he's had conversations and had people on that I think could overlap with what I'm doing, and I'll go on there, and we'll put Republicans on there, and if, you know, they get some shit from Rogan on certain issues, that's fine, but at least

• 54:29Speaker 02

  they can try to like, find some kind of commonality with him on some issues that would have, that would be mutually beneficial to both of them.

• 54:37Ryan Broderick?

  So, I mean, do you think, though, like, that Pod Save America speaks to, I mean-

• 54:46Speaker 02

  Like, I'll give you an example.

• 54:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, sure.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Sunday, I did not look, check my phone, did not, I was like, I'm gonna take a break from Twitter. And I'm going to listen to the interview between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

• 54:59Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  Two people who I respect a lot and think are great writers, all that kind of stuff. And, and I, and I've been involved in the argument that they're having, right, myself, in different ways. And I sit down for breakfast and I listen to the whole thing and I'm like, wow. That was a great conversation. It was frustrating at times, but it really was like illuminating for me. And I thought Ta-Nehisi Coates did great, and I thought Ezra did great, and what a, you know, good conversation. And then, I go online, and everyone is so mad.

• 55:28Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, they're still talking about it.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Still talking about it today.

• 55:31Ryan Broderick?

  Watching clips today.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  And I'm like, that's great, but it, watching people sort of like split up into teams just based on that conversation. And I was like, wow, I thought that was a conversation that potentially could bring some people together, or like, because it certainly did the two of them that were having the conversation. But the way that it, the way that it sort of lands within the Democratic coalition, or with the broads, left of center coalition that we're now dealing with, is it immediately sort of funnels people into sides. And it's just, it's very, it's very tough to keep it together in that environment.

• 56:05Ryan Broderick?

  So, I know you don't have a ton of time left, but basically, just like, really, last question, if you can fit it in, is just like, how, how does Pod Save America, or you personally, I guess, like, how do you start to build that coalition? Like, how does anyone, because like, I, you've almost blackbilled me on my own show here, thinking about like the systemic problems within the Democrats to come together, assuming we have a fair and free election again. But like, what is the, what is the first step here, if, if, if things are this splintered?

• 56:38Speaker 02

  The only thing I can think of, and what we're trying to do here, is to like be a home for voices from Hassan and folks on the left to come on and chat, all the way to, you know, the, the corporate Dems that make people crazy, or, you know, the, or the, or never Trumpers, right? Or people like that because and to like have conversations where we can disagree and debate and whatever else without doing what people do online with each other. And then hopefully that, you know, makes the people that we bring on the shows feel comfortable chatting more. And maybe we can have some conversations and maybe people can see that if they didn't like Hasan Piker, he's not the villain they thought he was from online, or maybe.

• 57:22Ryan Broderick?

  He's very handsome.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  He's very handsome. I don't know how you can not think he's handsome.

• 57:26Ryan Broderick?

  People would like him.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  And same thing with, you know, our friends at the Bulwark. And I think that having those conversations offline or on a podcast where you're not quite mediated by the algorithms is somewhat helpful. It's only a first step. Like, I don't think it's going to solve anything, but it's what at least we're trying to do is try to convene and be a place where like you don't have to be totally scared that we're going to scream at you. But yeah, we might disagree and we might have someone that you disagree with. And we can debate in sort of a, you know, hopefully constructive way. You know, we're trying to do that with like Crooked Con in person this fall in DC. And where we have, you know, everyone from Hasan to Andy Beshear showing up. And, you know, we'll see if we can make that work.

• 58:14Ryan Broderick?

  You should do a thing where like Ezra Klein has to sit surrounded by blue sky leftists and they all just scream at him, like one of those Jubilee videos. I'd pay good money for that.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Me too. We might have to do that, so.

• 58:25Ryan Broderick?

  It might not fix democracy, but it would make me feel better.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  It'd be fun to watch.

• 58:28Ryan Broderick?

  That really counts. Yeah. I want to thank you for coming on the show. I typically ask our guests, you know, say where people can find you online, but I assume people know where to find you online. But do you have anything you want to plug before we send you on your way?

• 58:39Speaker 02

  Just, you know, we're trying to build our YouTube channel over Pod Save America. So go check it out and subscribe to YouTube or YouTube. It's free. All you have to do is just hit subscribe. So and big fan, big fan of you and this pod and garbage day. So it was.

• 58:55Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you so much.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  It was great to chat with you guys.

• 58:59Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fialsted is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Couga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer Samantha Hallows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the

• 59:39Ryan Broderick?

  one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/panicworldpod. And please, give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

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