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Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we're devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

Today's Friday, October 30th.

Happy Halloween to one and all.

I'm Dan Multhrop, Chief Executive here, and I am thrilled, thrilled to be marking our 114th annual meeting and to introduce our forum which is the annual WCLV Forum endowed by Robert and Jean Conrad.

Please join me in thanking Robert Conrad and Jean Conrad.

You know, every year for our annual meeting, we try to identify a speaker whose work aligns with ours and gives us an opportunity to highlight the importance of free speech, civic engagement, or in today's case, the important work of building bridges across political divides.

Our speaker today, Isaac Saul, came to us a couple of different ways.

There was that time he and his newsletter, Tangle, were featured on This American Life.

And then a short while later, a very good friend of the City Club's, Marika Shorrock Clark, texted me to suggest Isaac as a speaker.

Brilliant, I thought.

And it was all we could do to not title the forum Better Call Saul.

Thank you.

Isaac Saul has a newsletter.

It's called Tangle, as I said, and if you don't know Tangle, you should.

It's a very City Club sort of newsletter, if you don't mind me saying.

They take one topic each day, they give you a brief summary of the facts of the story, they tell you what pundits on the right are saying, and then they tell you what pundits on the left are saying, and then, it's the crazy part, You get their take in a way that is totally transparent and every day comes with the same disclaimer.

It reads something like, and this is the part of the newsletter where we tell you our opinion.

It might be different from your opinion, and that's okay.

And we'd like to hear your opinion too, so email us.

Did I get it right?

That's pretty much it.

The whole thing is so simple and so beautiful and also so effective.

If what we refer to as the hot take has an opposite, it is Tangle.

It now has an audience of over 1 million with over 500,000 readers, 500,000 monthly podcast listeners, and 100,000 followers across its social platforms.

Isaac Saul founded Tangle News in 2019, and he'll tell you the whole origin story, I expect.

He's been working in journalism since his college days at the University of Pittsburgh.

Before Tangle, he helped build A+, a solutions journalism media outlet.

Moderating our conversation today is a good friend of the City Club's, NPR's media correspondent, David Folkenflik.

I probably don't need to say much more about David other than to thank him for all the driveway moments.

Thank you.

For the record, David, that was my mother who started the applause.

Today, David and Isaac will unpack today's politics, journalism, and why paying attention to those who disagree with you might just be the thing that saves democracy.

A quick reminder for our radio audience on WKSU: if you have a question for Isaac Saul, you can text it to 330-541-5794, and our team will work it into the second half of the program for you.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Isaac Saul and David Folkenflik.

Well, friends, thank you for coming.

Thank you, Isaac, for being here.

We are being broadcast live on WSKU and also livestreamed— KSU, excuse me— and being livestreamed as well.

But we are in front of people at a lot of tables here at the City Club.

So let's table set for a moment, Isaac.

Tell us a little bit about the founding of Tangle News.

What does it provide that we can't find a million other places on the internet?

Yeah, I like to say I have 2 genesis stories The first one is that I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which the political junkies in here will know is a bellwether county in a bellwether state that typically decides which way the presidential election's gonna go.

So when I was a kid, CNN would come to my town, come to the diner, come to our high school to talk to people and figure out what was happening on the ground.

And as a result, I just grew up around a lot of political diversity, friends and family members who came from very different places on the political spectrum, who could argue and talk about politics over dinner or a beer, and kinda let it be and let it lie where it was and move on with their lives when it was over.

And towards the end of President Barack Obama's term, second term, I started to just see that change.

The people who were sharing space previously could no longer really share space together anymore.

And it wasn't that they had fundamentally changed.

They didn't overnight become closed-minded, evil people who couldn't listen to somebody else's argument.

It was that the information ecosystem they were living in changed, and they were operating in just fundamentally different realities.

So, so when you say they can't share space, space as in?

As in, we're gonna talk about Trump's border wall proposal at the dinner table, and when this 5-minute conversation's over, everybody's gonna be okay.

It wasn't possible anymore, and it was palpable to me, and I recognized, in my view, a root problem, which was people were not getting their news from the same place, and people were really, really, really unwilling to step outside of the kind of algorithmic news bubbles we were living in and hear arguments that challenged their priors, and so I had this vision for a news organization that was a Big Ten media organization where we were kind of open arms to people from across the political spectrum.

They could read our content from top to bottom, and they would see themselves represented somewhere in the newsletter or in the podcast, and the theory was if you see yourself represented somewhere in the newsletter or in the podcast, it will disarm you a little bit so you can then read, engage with, and take in arguments that you might not agree with.

And I think that theory's been proven out by how successful the product is, and I think what surprised me most is there are so many people who want this.

They, Americans recognize fundamentally that the way that we're getting the news, the way we're getting the information, in a lot of ways is really broken, and they wanna get out of that brokenness, and even if they don't like the other side, they tend to wanna understand them to be able to engage at least a little bit.

So let's give folks a little sense of what that means.

I mean, you're not the Associated Press.

Right.

2,000 or 3,000 people that cover the news.

You have a newsroom, I think, of about 15 folks.

You have about 70,000 paying subscribers, but obviously a bigger audience for some of your work every month.

Let's take an issue that's in the news.

Take a question of AI and the need for data centers and power and energy and all this, important to the economy, important to people's communities.

How do you decide and what are you presenting to your audiences that will help them think this through issue maybe differently than they might see in certain kinds of other news sites?

Yeah, so we look for a few things.

One, we look for arguments that are representative of the political tribes that we all operate and swim in.

So I don't love reinforcing the left-right binary or the blue-red binary, but also it is the reality of the country that we have, and our audience wants to know, well, what are Democrats saying about this issue?

What's the Republican position on this issue?

So for something like AI, we will go out and look for arguments that we're seeing repeated by different pundits on the right or different pundits on the left, and we'll say, okay, these one or two arguments feel pretty representative of the angle that the right or the left are taking on this really divisive issue, so we might include that in our newsletter.

And then we'll look for the dissenters, the people who are maybe in a political tribe but don't agree with what the tribe is actually arguing on the national or public stage, and we'll feature their arguments in the newsletter just to show, hey, everybody on the right doesn't agree about this issue.

Everybody on the left doesn't agree about this issue.

Which for our audience is a really important thing to learn, that neither side is a monolith, and they all have their own internal politics and disagreements.

And then we'll just try and find novel takes, you know, expert opinions.

AI is a good example where we sometimes deviate from our format.

We'll do what the left's saying, what the right is saying, and then we might do what industry experts are saying.

Or if we're covering an international story, what writers in the Middle East are saying, and give people kind of a look into how this is being processed outside the kind of traditional national left versus right punditry.

And at the end of consuming all the content, you should have a pretty holistic look at all the different ways people are debating this topic and the different arguments that they're bringing forward to try and persuade people to their side.

To what extent do you expect people, or are people able to turn to your site and say, okay, I now understand the debate that's happening around this, How much do I understand the facts at the core of that debate?

Yeah, I mean, to me, I grew up as a traditional journalist, so like a beat reporter.

I started in sports, I moved into Congress, and it's very important for me that people are coming to an issue with some fundamental baseline agreed-upon facts.

So the introduction to the newsletter is typically the most neutral, emotionally detached piece of writing that we can possibly manage, with really balanced quotes from, you know, different politicians, with just the basic facts that it appears both sides agree on about what's happening, what the actual debate is.

So for something like AI, it might be how many data centers are actually being built in the country right now, what the cost of those data centers is, whether it's true or not that they're straining the water resources of particular towns or counties, And that kind of background information is provided to the audience up front, and then it's really explicitly labeled, okay, we're gonna move into this opinion section now where you're gonna see people framing those basic facts in the ways that they feel are advantageous to their argument.

You call it Tangle News, right?

Why isn't it Untangle?

It feels like this is resolving a lot of issues here.

I get this question all the time.

Believe it or not, it comes up a lot.

Like, right when people subscribe, they always say this.

I will shout out, I did not know what to name this media organization.

Turns out that's one of the hardest things to do.

In the beginning, the first name I had was The Shuffle, which is a horrific name, and yeah, I actually polled the initial audience and a bunch of friends and family of mine and said, here's the concept, I'm looking for name ideas, And I got literally hundreds of submissions, and my brother-in-law, my wife's brother, suggested Tangle, and the moment I saw it, I was like, it's perfect.

It just captures kind of the ethos of the mess, and— So it describes the moment we're in rather than the solution you're offering.

It describes the moment we're in rather than the solution we're offering, yeah, and he demanded 1% of the business, which— Seemed fair.

Tough for me, yeah.

So you're basically trying to make it easier for people to argue at the Thanksgiving Day table, except for your own, where I assume the fight over those royalties will last for years.

Exactly, yeah, and I would say too, I wanna be clear that we are not, this is not let's all stand in a circle and hold hands and agree on everything.

There is a fundamental baseline issue that we have as Americans in our country that we do not understand the best arguments that people we disagree with are making.

We don't even understand who they are.

I mean, the perception gap, which I'm sure some people in this room are familiar with, is a very well-studied phenomenon where if you ask Democrats something like, how many Republicans think immigration is bad for the country, they overestimate that number 2 or 3-fold.

If you ask Republicans, how many Democrats do you think don't like the police, they overestimate that number 3, 4, 5-fold.

Just the basic stuff, how many, how many black people are in this country, how many gay people are in this country, people have no idea.

They get those numbers really, really wrong, and so we're saying, at baseline, we're doing a really bad job of just understanding what different people in this country believe, and we're gonna show our audience not the worst, dumbest people on the other side who are making the silliest arguments that are easiest to dunk on, but the people who are actually gonna challenge the prior views that you have, and bring a perspective to the table that you might not have considered if you're operating in that kind of media bubble.

That actually brings me to 2 elements that I think are really interesting about what you're up to, one of which was a column that you wrote basically saying, are Americans somehow fundamentally dumb?

And you took this— this was his framing of the problem.

A lot of you guys say it privately.

Just saying.

But usually about people who disagree with you, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That's usually the context in which that happens.

You had a different take on that, so tell us how you approached that assignment and where you landed.

Yeah, I just said, you know, we talk a lot about why our politics are broken, and there are reasons that everybody is comfortable talking about out loud, that, you know, there's too much money in politics, gerrymandering, social media algorithms, whatever, and then there's the thing that I hear people say privately to me all the time, which is Americans are idiots, and we don't know how to choose people who are good for the body politic.

And so, the way people prove this, often, is by pointing to polls where an American is asked, name the 5 freedoms that you're granted in the First Amendment, and 9% of Americans can name all 5 or something.

They ask somebody, you know, how does, who's, like, the highest authority on what's constitutional in the United States, and maybe only half the country can answer the Supreme Court, and other people pick the wrong answer.

And I get why that is an appealing story, But I actually don't think it proves definitively that because Americans can't tell you the intricacies of how a bill is passed, or the First Amendment, that they don't know how to listen to a politician to decide whether the person is full of BS or not.

And the analogy that I kind of drew was, if you asked me, tell me how digestion works, I would say, there's enzymes and acid in my stomach, and I have no idea But I know how to diet and lose weight and get in shape if I want to, and it doesn't matter that I can't explain the intricacies of how digestion works to you.

I know some of the baselines, and I know what's good for me intuitively and what's bad for me intuitively, and I think similarly, Americans can watch a politician and often are good at discerning what's legit and what's not, whether they're focused on the issues they care about or not, and the example I used in the piece was, Donald Trump's promise recently to give $5,000 to every American if Republicans won the House and Senate, and the media responded to this with a very clear assumption that Americans were so dumb they were all gonna fall for this.

The freakout was like, oh my, and there were like these fact checks and all these, this kind of knee-jerk reaction that we must prove to Americans there's no way they're gonna get this $5,000, But NBC actually did a poll where they called up a bunch of Americans and they asked them, do you think Donald Trump will follow through on this promise?

And something like 14% of Americans thought they probably or might get $5,000 if Republicans win the House and Senate, and everybody else was like, no, of course not.

They know, they're not idiots, they know.

And I think, like, we underestimate Americans consistently, and it's very easy to call somebody up on the phone and ask them this pop quiz question about the Constitution that they get wrong and then say we're all idiots, but it's not true.

And Americans aren't rubes, and that doesn't mean people don't fall for conspiracies, or there aren't dumb people out there, but it just means on net, I think a lot of people are good at listening to politicians and making choices about what they think is good for themselves or their communities.

Well, it reminds me, when we're trying to figure out how to tell stories, we want to keep them interesting and compelling and create driveway moments on public radio, in part because people live busy lives, and even when they have the radio on, they're raking the leaves, or they're taking a jog, or They're folding laundry, they're taking their kids to a soccer game.

They're not able to pay full attention and always scroll back and really remember everything.

But on the whole, I think people are fundamentally decent people and interested in the world around them.

And they may or may not have every shred of information, but they're trying to process it, which is a reminder for those of us who are not here in person.

We're listening to WKSU Radio.

I'm here with Isaac Saul, the founder of Tangle News, and we're happy to have him here.

This guy's a pro, man.

So one thing that Isaac and I talked about yesterday when we first met in person was the role that empathy plays in thinking about the news and thinking about how to write about it.

And I was reminded of a story that happened a few months ago where Kristi Noem's husband was revealed to have a certain interest and involvement with women online and certain interests in costumes and the like in doing so and became a figure of incredible ridicule.

And a fellow from the New York Times went out, Sean McCreech, and he went to Noem's hometown and interviewed people about the husband who was being ridiculed on every show in America and found a community that sort of lifted him up in his moment of clear sort of public torment.

How important is an empathetic approach to reporting the news at a time where a lot of terrible things are happening, sometimes at the hands of fellow citizens, sometimes at the hands of people in government?

Yeah, I think it's incredibly important, and it's literally a pillar and a value that we talk about internally as a news organization, 'cause we have a politically diverse newsroom, so you have to have empathy to interact with your colleagues, and also with our audience.

And, you know, I think generally speaking, empathy is often thought of in this political moment as this kind of left-wing value or liberal value, And it really isn't, and, you know, people tend to have empathy for the things that they understand, and the empathy kind of runs up right until they hit something that they don't like or don't understand, and then it kind of evaporates, similar to tolerance.

Like, everybody's tolerant until they find something they really don't like, and then they're intolerant of it, and in my view, I just think a lot about going into stories or debates with the idea that most people I know in my life are decent and good and care about really similar things.

The crazies are all online.

I never run into them in real life.

It never happens.

I can't explain it.

Just the people that, I come to Cleveland, it's like an incredible city.

Everybody's nice and warm and welcoming.

There's nobody like in my face screaming about how the moon landing was faked.

It doesn't happen.

So I go into these stories with that assumption.

Yeah.

And I try and bring that to the stories, and when I do that, I often see really similar patterns.

And the example that I come to all the time is gentrification and immigration, which to me is the exact same story.

A neighborhood changes, and people don't like it.

And the left has so much empathy for the gentrification story, where they hate hearing about minority groups experiencing white people coming in and changing a neighborhood, and they have no empathy for the immigration story of white people experiencing a neighborhood changing with a bunch of immigrants and not liking it.

And the reverse is true.

And it boggles my mind.

I'm like, everybody knows the feeling of going home to your town after not being there for a few years and seeing some diner you went to turn into, like, a hipster coffee shop and being like, ugh, this sucks.

It's not better or worse, it's just different, and it changed, and, like, I look at a story like what happened in Springfield, Ohio, and there is something very gross and insidious about what the president and the vice president did, about the rumors they spread, and we should call that out, and big, bright red lines on things like that.

We live in a pluralistic society in America, It's part of what makes our country great, and I'm there for that.

But also, people who live in a town that hasn't changed in 50 years, experiencing an influx of 50,000 Haitian migrants in 1 or 2 years, and experiencing that in a way that's not uniformly positive, does not make them evil people.

It doesn't make them racist, it doesn't make them bad.

I'm not saying some of those people aren't racist, I'm sure some are, But there are plenty of people who have that experience and feel a particular way that's not fundamentally about them disliking people of color or disliking immigrants, but about the experience of feeling the world they're used to changing, and the left can see that in certain instances and can't in others, and the right can see it in certain instances and can't in others, and I think when you come into these stories with a mind towards that empathy, the similarities become a lot clearer, and the divisions become a lot more frustrating, and I've had that experience doing the work of Tangle for a really long time, and I just try and flesh that out in our writing and coverage for our audience, 'cause I think it helps people better understand folks who they might typically really disagree with.

You know, I wanna ask a question that may have some valence here in Ohio.

Different news organizations think differently about the question of character and of personal background in evaluating political figures, candidates for public office.

You think in the governor's race, Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, questions raised about immigration status, his parents, a question about Amy Acton, visibly raised by her opponent's campaign, of course, about what happened to her as a child.

How important are these questions of personal background and how the candidates respond to it in terms of your thinking about the kinds of coverage you want to provide your audiences?

Me personally, Isaac, very important.

I mean, I have political checkmarks when candidates come into office where things like integrity and honesty and being above the fray matter.

In this political moment in particular, I am subscribing to the idea that decency is going to make a comeback.

I think we're starting to see the first kind of flashes of it.

And yeah.

It is both welcome to hear you say that and a bit of a shock that people in this room might somehow embrace that.

And so I am trying to portray to my audience that I think a return to that decency would be good for our country and healthy for our politics, but there are members of my team who don't care at all about the personal character of politicians, because they view politics as a blood sport, and they think that people who come in and get things done and are effective at advancing a particular agenda that they agree with is more important than whether that person's been accused of sexual assault or something like that, and I don't think that is a horrible position to hold.

I mean, I think, There are instances and contexts where we make those choices all the time.

I mean, I'm a diehard football fan.

We're sitting here in Cleveland.

I root for guys every weekend who have done some horrible things, and I wear their jerseys, and I love them, and, like, I'm not pretending I'm above the fray in certain contexts, and I get why people might bring that to something like politics that they view as sport.

I disagree.

I mean, I think that politics is fundamentally about putting people in office to run government who are representing the values and beliefs of their constituents, and so I want my values and beliefs to be held by the person in office, and if they're not, then I'm gonna flay them for that.

But I can acknowledge that I might just be playing in the big theater, and I'm sort of the dumb one for believing that any of that stuff matters when all voters really care about is what gets done and what doesn't.

Personally, that's how I answer that question, but if you read Tangle, you will see other views there represented than my own, for sure.

One of the things that I think you're, I would call an experiment, but I mean, you are up and running and you're succeeding at this, that your news organization is trying to address in some ways is the erosion of trust that much of the public has in the news media.

Seems to be slightly rebounding, but it's from a very low level.

Let's just acknowledge that.

Today, I think it was today, last night, the Washington Post came out with some polls.

Let's go to the— think about the state of Kansas.

They showed that both in the race for governor and the race for Senate, that the Democratic candidates in this largely Republican state have significant leads over their Republican opponents, both over the 50% mark.

The Washington Post publishes that poll, the results of that poll, and also concomitantly an article saying, we're not sure we trust our own poll.

Talk about that and what that represents.

Yeah, I think it's really good.

I think it's great, and I thought the Washington Post article was fascinating.

I mean, there are Washington Post reporters basically saying, we're calling and texting Republican voters, and they're basically telling us to get bent, and that's the reality of where we're at now, and it's, the worst it's ever been.

It's happening here, it's happening in Maine, it's happening in Iowa.

So, in the interest of transparency, we're gonna share these polls with our audience, but we want you guys to know that even after weighting these polls and trying to change them in the scientific way pollsters change polls, we don't think we're actually close to getting a really representative group of who's gonna turn out on Election Day, and I think that kind of introspection which is like a little bit navel-gazy, but is also very transparent, is a product of news organizations like the Washington Post recognizing that they've gotten out over their skis in the past with stories or polls or whatever, and they've gotten burned, and their audience has made them pay for that, and so they wanna get ahead of it, and I think it's a great way to do journalism.

I mean, it is very in the Tangle ethos of how we might have pursued the story, in the same way if we were running a sample poll or a group or something.

What's the difference between that and just hedging?

I don't know that there's a huge difference.

I think dedicating a couple, I think it was like a 2 or 3 byline piece, to fleshing out what happened as they tried to go out and conduct this poll is a level of transparency that you might not have seen in the past.

Maybe 5 or 10 years ago, the poll comes out with a brief editor's note, or there's something in the kind of like media reporting section of the Washington Post saying, hey, we conducted this poll, but here's why we have some skepticism about it.

This is like, if you go to the Washington Post homepage, it is a featured article with a headline like, we went to Kansas, Democrats wanted to talk, Republicans not so much, and they are putting that out there, I think effectively as a way to say, this could be an issue that's more widespread than just what's happening here.

It could be happening in all the polls we're seeing all across the country.

The country about this race, which looks very good for Democrats right now.

One of the things that you mentioned that sort of went by the wayside there at the start of our conversation is that you bring together all the, you know, you try to provide a fact base that's, you know, not disputed.

It's almost like a legal brief, right?

Yeah.

And then you surround it with all these arguments from different points of view.

It may not just be red-blue, right-left.

It may involve a variety of different approaches, bring in some experts.

But also, at the end, you often say, look, this is this writer's view.

Look, I've done the time, I've really drilled down on it, this is what I think.

Why was it important for a trusted site, a nonpartisan site, essentially a nonideological site, to also have a point of view on various specific things?

Well, what happened is actually just a product of beta testing the newsletter.

When I first sent it to this group of 15 or 20 friends and family members, the My Take section, which is now the most popular part of the newsletter, was not in it.

So it was just, here's the intro to the story, here's what the left is saying, here's what the right is saying, and then we maybe moved on to a reader question.

And the response I got from everybody I sent it to was like, well, what do you think?

There was no conclusion, there was no announcement.

It's not satisfying.

The left made this argument, I hate it, I wanna see you tear it up, tell me what What you think?

And I was like, oh yeah, well, I have tons of thoughts.

And so I started pecking out these little mini columns every day, and quickly I realized that our audience was responding mostly to what I was writing as the My Take writer.

And I actually think it's why we've had success in a space that other nonpartisan or nonideological or neutral news organizations have struggled, is because we're leaning into the personality, and we're saying, This is a view someone on our team holds.

We've decided to give them the microphone, and they're gonna share their perspective today, and you can take it or leave it.

And when you look at the comments or the inbox and the email responses, you know, 80% of the views, or 80% of the responses and comments are about the My Take section.

It's about whatever me or someone on my staff wrote that day, and I think that's just, people like having someone to yell at or agree with, or they wanna respond to somebody's own formulation of the argument, and it's the original thing that we're putting out.

So I view it as a value add, but also as an act of transparency.

I want our audience to know where I'm coming from on a story when I cover it, and it's kind of this safe space for me to say, this is what I'm thinking, and I'm the one who helped produce and edit this newsletter, and you can take my background and perspective here in context when you read everything else that's in this email.

But there's, there's something interesting about it, because it's not starting off as the column.

So my sense is, and I'm a big believer in this, we've talked about this with Mike Pesca among others, is that it's an earned conclusion.

It's not your starting point, it's your landing place.

Yeah, and I often say things like, I don't know.

Oh my God, I swear to God, when we do that in the newsletter— I've not heard that on CNN recently.

Yeah, the response is so different.

So overwhelmingly pop— people write in and say, I've never seen a public pundit just say they didn't know or they weren't sure about something.

This is so refreshing, thanks for saying that.

And the first time I did it, I was like, oh wow, people really like that.

I should be honest about that more often when I, like, feel a little torn up or mixed about something.

There's a wonderful Israeli politics columnist who some people might be familiar with named Aviv Reti Ger, who I've interviewed before about the conflict, and he says, I am a deeply confused person, and I love that, and I stole it, and I say it all the time now, just like, I'm a deeply confused person, and that's okay.

The world is super complicated, so sometimes I don't have a black and white strong landing point, and I tell my audience, I'm really conflicted about this issue for these reasons, and they like hearing the thought process and showing the work.

Do you ever find at home your wife says to you, you're a deeply confused person?

Yeah, yeah, a lot.

Speaking of questions, we're about to begin the audience Q&A.

For our radio and livestream audience, I'm David Folkenflik.

I'm the Media Correspondent for NPR News, and I'm moderating today's conversation at the City Club of Cleveland.

Joining me here on stage, Isaac Saul.

He's founder of Tangle News, an independent and nonpartisan news outlet.

We welcome questions from anyone, from City Club members, guests, students, as well as those joining us via our livestream at cityclub.org or live on our radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU, IdeaStream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question, please text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

City Club staff will try to work it into our program.

Let's go to our first question, please, if you don't mind giving us at least your first name.

As you do so, William, I'm a native and a lifer in Cleveland, and I graduated from a suburban high school in 1968.

I remember how torn and divided this country was from '65 to basically '75, and it took 10, maybe 20 years to get over it.

Looking at the present situation, I think it's exactly like it was.

When I was in high school.

How do you see this country healing?

Yeah, great question.

You know, it's funny, I always like to remind our audience that we love to believe that we are living through the worst time and the most historic time, and I don't think it takes looking that far back to realize that that's not totally true, and by a lot of different measures, we could say We're not.

Look, I think there is a signal that's been sent for the last few years that dunking on the other side, making your opponent look like an idiot, putting up the most brutal, cutthroat ads you can possibly put up, is an effective strategy, and it gets you to the White House, and it gets you to the Senate, and Americans love it, and we're all eating it up, 'cause we hate the other team.

And how's that looking here in Ohio right now?

And this is what I would say is, I think that that strategy is becoming tired, and I think that's the first step, is that people are just gonna get exhausted by that approach to the game.

And we saw it in the Democratic primary in Texas.

James Talarico ran a really above-board, decent campaign that was designed to be big tent, and it worked.

It was effective.

And I think we saw it here in Ohio.

Vivek's ad blew up in preposterously bad fashion for him, and it's showing up in the polls, it's showing up in the straw polls, it's showing up in the focus groups, and I think that's a good signal for what Americans want out of these campaigns, and what they're looking for in the end of Trump's term, and the post-Trump era.

The last thing I'll just say is, however you feel about the president, I believe that he is singular in a kind of charisma that he brings to his craft, you could say, and the expertise with which he understands the media and the attention economy, and we've seen a lot of people try and do the Trump impersonation, and it never goes well.

I mean, like, what's Matt Gaetz doing right now, you know?

So, I don't suspect that we're gonna see President Trump leave and somebody fill the void with the kind of tenor that he's brought to our politics and succeed.

I think he is, again, whatever you think of him, historically good at what he does, and he's not gonna be easily replaced, and I think that vacuum leaves a lot of opportunity for the decency politics.

I've always wondered if that was because Trump arrived on the presidential campaign scene with the highest name recognition of anyone since probably Dwight David Eisenhower.

He had pretty much 160% name rec, and people kind of baked in the idea of who he was.

He could do it because it's what people had already expected him to do.

He was a TV personality and a showman, and he had the business background belief that everybody had in him.

Again, I really think singular.

Somebody like Ron DeSantis.

Or somebody like J.D.

Vance, or what Mr.

Ramaswamy is experiencing at the moment, you think that's all like, hey, you can try to echo that, but you don't have that baked-in sense that it's okay for you to do that?

Yeah, I don't think any Republican strategist I know is watching Vivek Ramaswamy or J.D.

Vance or Ron DeSantis and thinking, this guy is a layup for president in 2028.

Well, we'll see about Vance.

It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Yeah, consider me skeptical.

For our next question, please tell us your name, sir.

My name is Fareed.

My question is for both of you.

With the deep polarization do we have, is it caused by the two-party system?

If we had multi-party system, would we have less polarization?

Let's go to Isaac Saul of Tangle News first.

I am an advocate for you know complicating the party duopoly that we have.

You know there I just interviewed.

Andrew Yang and Governor Whitman, who are running some Forward Party candidates across the country this year, actually quietly, with a lot of success and potential to maybe even get a senator or 2 into this race.

People have pledged allegiance to their Forward Party and not caucusing with anybody.

So, generally speaking, I think it could help, but I would be cautious about viewing it as a sort of catch-all solution.

Israel has coalition politics.

I would not describe them as a particularly unified country right now, even in the face of multi-front war, which is typically the kind of thing that brings a nation together.

Yeah, look at British politics and French politics.

I mean, I think the divisions are constant across the world right now, and countries individually have to solve them in ways that are appropriate for their populace and the people that live there.

I mean, we are a really different place than Israel.

We're a really different place than England or France.

We have a different kind of mindset, different aspirations, different population, so we're gonna have to find our own way.

Again, I would love if there were more parties competing for attention and votes, but it's not the kind of thing that will solve the problem to me wholesale.

If I could just plus one on that, I covered Congress before I started covering media in 2000, and we don't have a system whereby you have the chief executive be somebody who cobbles together a working majority in Congress, so it would have ramifications there, but I think there's an argument to be made, and was in fact an argument to be made before our current configuration, that there are actually individual parties within the parties kind of informally that coalesce, not firmly, but, you know, if you thought about, you know, in the height of the civil rights movement, you had Southern Democrats who were very much against integration, and you had, you know, coastal Democrats and Northeastern Democrats and, you know, some upper Midwestern Democrats very much desperately in favor of it, right?

You had these— and you had Republicans who were also split in certain ways.

And so essentially, these 2 parties are these uncomfortable designations over a lot of of people coalescing.

I think it could be interesting.

You could see certain kinds of issues come to the fore, like the environment, or like certain kinds of, you know, for argument's sake, pro-religious instruction in the schools or something, that are around single issues that could be elevated by having small parties that could then work with the larger parties.

But if you look at the experience of industrialized democracies across the country, there's been a lot of instability in a lot of countries that have that.

And so it's hard to look at that as a panacea, is what I would say.

Yeah, for sure.

This gentleman's been waiting patiently.

Thank you, sir.

So have the people behind me.

I'm Bill Levese, and I have a question about why.

I hear lots of people with very straightforward and simple explanations for why things seem to be so divided, so toxic, so whatever.

And I wonder if your position with Tangle gives you a perception of how we got this way?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's a single-pronged answer, but the things for me that I would weight the most heavily are exposure in real life to people whose politics you don't agree with, literally having meals with them, knowing them, understanding them, And there's tons of social science about this.

I mean, if you map Islamophobia with whether somebody knows a Muslim or not, the people who don't know any Muslims are the most Islamophobic people in the country, and it is consistent across every kind of bigotry you can imagine.

So, exposure, just sharing space with those people, as corny as that sounds, Definitely the, for my generation, the algorithm and the way people are getting news in digital spaces.

I have a son who's almost 2 years old.

You know, when my wife was pregnant with him, I started liking posts on Instagram about pregnancy and whatever, and now I go on Insta, it's like everything on my Instagram is pregnant women and 2-year-old kids.

And they've followed me now.

Now I'm being fed stuff that's, oh, is your son 2 years old, joining the terrible twos?

It's like, they're so good at it.

They're serving me up that content, and if that thing that I was liking was a conspiracy about the 2020 election being stolen, I'm in the rabbit hole, and it's happening.

So I think that is for sure a big issue.

I do think political leaders have to do something about it, and they play a part, too.

I mean, I think we, again, have turned to and elected a lot of people who believe that it's really effective to demonize the other side and use fear to motivate voters and to negatively polarize people, and I personally am very open arms and welcoming of any politician who can humanize the other side while standing their ground morally and ethically, and vouching for the views that they believe in without framing their opponent as evil.

I think when we have political leaders start to do that more often, it's going to help downstream for sure.

Look, this country obviously has an ethos that believes in free markets and light touch of regulation and all that, but there can be a lot of involvement of the government in the success or failure or regulation of corporations as we've seen in all kinds of stories.

If you think of subsidies given, of contracts given, of the reason why all these tech giants were sitting behind the president at his reinauguration January of '25.

What would your, not specific, but general level of comfort be with some degree of government involvement with saying, with figuring out the best balance of tech's control over what we see, given how much of our life is lived digitally now?

Oh man, you're gonna poke at my libertarian buttons here now.

Not much.

I wouldn't be very comfortable with it, because then you're sort of just creating a different problem, in my view, which is the government's influence on public discourse.

And it's easy to make that case to anybody.

I mean, a lot of conservatives are really upset about President Biden pressuring Facebook during COVID to not allow COVID misinformation to spread, and now a lot of liberals are experiencing what it's like when Elon Musk is thumbing the scale of Twitter and, you know, changing how Starlink works in particular countries across the globe, and we're not crazy about the sort of, that relationship whenever it's happening.

It's just, we pay attention when it's sort of impacting the issues that we care about, so, Similar to the political space, I think we need tech leaders who care about the future of the country and care about the outcomes that their decisions are making downstream, and as normal citizens, we can pressure them and hit pressure points in certain ways.

I mean, Meta, I have a really good friend who was one of the top safety developers at Meta and spent years trying to tell them that they needed to change the way that their algorithm was working because of the impact it was having on teenage users, and Meta came around to that position once the lawsuits got real, and they realized they were actually liable, and there was money on the line, but those lawsuits were brought by normal American moms and dads who had a child tragically take their own life or something, and then went after Meta 'cause they could draw an association there, and so I think we're starting to see that pushback now, Pretty blunt instrument.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's good for it to happen in the capitalist system that we operate in, and for it to happen organically.

I don't think, I personally don't want the government thumbing those scales, but we have a lot more power than we give ourselves credit for, I think, and the tech backlash is here, and it's super real, not just on data centers, but even just screen time, and again, my generation— Devices in schools.

Yeah, I'm 35.

Grew up in an era, my friends and family, or my friends my age, they remember what it was like to go to high school without a smartphone, and we're like the last generation who has that.

I remember getting an iPhone my sophomore, junior year of college, and what a big deal it was, and I still have that attachment to the pre-internet era, and I wanna give that to my kids, and I think that backlash is happening all over the country right now for people sort of in that millennial generation.

I'm NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik.

We're listening to our conversation with Isaac Saul.

He's the founder of Tangle News here on WKSU Radio, Ideastream Public Media, and with the Cleveland City Club.

Sir, your question.

My name is Rich.

I have a business rather than a political question.

Have you ever considered running ads on Fox and CNN to— No, but that's a great idea.

No, yeah, TV ads are expensive, but I love that thought.

You've gone on Fox.

I'm going to fire my advertising person.

Are you available?

A job creator right here in Ohio.

But you'd go on CNN, you'd go on Fox, you'd go on MSNBC.

Yeah, I mean, I go on those.

I'm a big fan of walking into the lion's den, so, you know, I just did an interview with Fox News last week about Hasan Piker.

I'm like, I take any and all invitation to preach the gospel for all the media people in the room.

I'm available.

So a lot of that happens through earned media, but because we're a newsletter business primarily, we do advertise in a lot of conservative and liberal newsletters, Readers are the primary thing that fund our work, so it's kind of the number one priority to grow that audience, but the TV audience is just a little different.

But yeah, if you're reading overtly partisan news outlets who send out newsletters, you might run into an ad for Tangle at some point, 'cause we definitely try and target people who are in those bubbles or echo chambers and offer them something that we think might break them out of that a little bit.

So let's, you mentioned Hasan Piker, so a very left of center, podcaster who's become sort of a figure of criticism denounced as various people are speaking about the Michigan Senate race, right?

What do you make of the role of people like Hasan Piker on the left, a Theo Vaughn, a Joe Rogan, people who are podcasting, talking often deeply at length about politics, not always adhering to the facts in the way that you might, certainly not going middle of the road on them, not in necessarily looking for consensus, often going after their— the targets of their derision, and at the same time, certainly bringing a lot of people into long-form political discussions and talking about news items.

Where are you on folks like that?

I think fundamentally, it's good if young Americans are interested in politics, and they're consuming political content, and they feel like somebody is offering something that makes them want to engage, so on net, I think it's probably better than it is worse.

I mean, obviously, I watch those shows, and there are things about them that make me wanna rip my hair out, just factual inaccuracies, or bad logic, or arguments that I could easily refute, but I also think a lot of those people are representative of Americans who just wanna get involved, but maybe don't have that much time.

Theo Von is a good example.

He kinda does this dumb hick routine where he just pretends like he's an idiot, but he's not.

He's a stand-up comic.

He's very clever, he's super smart, and he leans into that persona to wade into issues, I think, as a defense mechanism, but I don't think it's bad that he's sort of offering up sort of the normie opinion on a podcast that's being broadcast to millions of people, and I think it's good for us in the media to read and consume that content with the framework that a lot of people, he's not convincing a lot of people of his views, he's speaking for views that a lot of people hold.

And the same is true of Hasan.

Like, I think that Hasan has some views that I find reprehensible.

He also believes a lot of really normal lefty stuff about Medicare for All, and defunding the police, and abolishing ICE, progressive lefty stuff for sure, Millions of Americans share those views, and they weren't convinced by him.

So you have to engage people like that and talk to them.

I once interviewed Paul Begala, who had been an aide to President Clinton in the '90s, became a frequent figure on cable news, particularly CNN, subsequently, and he says, I look at my role the way a drunken person tends to look at a lamppost, more for support than illumination.

That was a new one for me.

So there is something to that.

You know, I once asked Bill Maher about this, where he was essentially saying— I was asking him about the implications of something he said.

He said, well, you don't have to— you can't really take me seriously.

I'm a comedian.

And I said, but you're a comedian— you know, it's a little bit like Jon Stewart.

You're a comedian who operates in a space about civic discourse.

Trying to affect how people think about things, you are making an argument here.

Should that not be something you're held responsible for?

And he kind of declined it.

And Stewart used to kind of say, I'm just a funny guy in silly suits who makes funny faces on TV, but he's now kind of, while still doing that, not making that argument anymore.

What is their role, the role of sort of comic figures in all this?

I mean, I watch Bill Maher's show.

I used to watch Jon Stewart's show, and I think that they add a degree of levity and obviousness you know, to our politics sometimes.

For me, I find them as being the kinds of people who sort of, like, smack you upside the back of the head and make you realize what's happening is totally ridiculous.

I mean, I remember the Jon Stewart going on Colbert and talking about the origins of COVID and, like, there was just the Wuhan Institute of Virology is right next door.

It's like comparing it to, like, being in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and wondering where all the chocolate's coming from or whatever, you know?

And it's like, and there was something really, just like, only a comic like him could deliver that thing where it's like, yeah, maybe we should take this possibility seriously.

So I think they serve a purpose in that realm, and I think for, again, for a lot of Americans who want to engage or feel informed or be informed, but aren't gonna wake up and read the Wall Street Journal every morning, it's a really accessible way to understand what the debates are and what people are talking about.

Yeah, so they're all part of the great big messiness that I think makes it work, in my view.

Please.

Good afternoon.

My name is Delores McCollum.

I'm a retired social studies teacher with the Cleveland Public Schools.

My question for you is, what do you think the view is of your colleagues, your foreign colleagues?

How do they view the United States in general?

But in particular in the last, say, 10 years, what sense do you get about how they see the United States?Quite negative I mean, honestly, I think, yeah, I mean, I think there's a sense globally, and certainly among the people that I talk to, that we are abandoning a lot of the sort of values and ethos that have made the whole project work for a long time, and I actually think it's, for me, I make a point of reading journalism and opinion columns and things like that from other countries across the world who are looking at us from the outside in, because it's always, it's eye-opening for sure, and we talk about, the way things happen in a place like Russia, or China, or Iran, and then a sort of similar, maybe parallel story might happen here, and we process it, and talk about it, and frame it in totally different ways, and when you see a German columnist or something write about that, and kind of come after, or attack the American hypocrisy of it all, I think it's humbling.

From my perspective, and the way that I view the American project, is we are still, in many ways, a North Star for how a lot of countries wanna operate, from just a baseline legal rights perspective, and when they feel or see that we're not living up to that, it's upsetting, and we should lean into that responsibility, and the privilege of being that example, and act accordingly, and I don't think we are often in recent years, and I blame some of that on the current president, of course, but it's not just him.

I mean, I think, not to both sides it, but I do think it is, we are ushering more and more power into the executive branch in our government, which makes us much, much more reliant on what one person or a few people around that one person want or think or believe, and we've given them a great deal of power, and they're exercising it, and we should be really careful about that, in my opinion.

Huge thanks to Isaac Saul of Tangle, David Folkenflik of NPR, for this conversation today.

Thank you so much, both of you.

Isaac Saul, David Folkenflik, thank you so much.

Happy Halloween, everybody.

This forum is adjourned.

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