Luke Thomas

And what it means is that it's not just that, hey, maybe you have one kind of political view and I have a different one, but we both like

some of these other kinds of activities, and we live similar kinds of lives outside of it, now our lives are beginning to segregate along not just you voted X, I voted Y, but because I voted Y, I'm going to live in certain places, I'm going to visit certain places, I'm going to shop at certain places, I'm going to wear certain things, I'm going to listen to certain kinds of music, I'm going to eat certain kinds of food, and vice versa.

Now those layers are being stacked onto our voting patterns,

And I have to tell you, I find that to be very bad for the political experiment that is this country.

Exactly.

And that's another component to everything else is surveillance data and to what extent this is being used or manipulated.

But

to the point you raise we're living more siloed and siloed and siloed and siloed existences along lines that did not used to be the case we could both go to the same concert because we both like the same band now there is some research to suggest of course there's still going to be you know a mixing of crowds but now there's evidence to suggest that those kinds of things can be better predictors of one political party or voting pattern versus the other that is nuts

Let me tell you one thing conspiracy theorists have right.

The one thing I'll give them, I am not, you're right, I am not a big conspiracy theory guy.

But I think one thing, especially in our present moment, that the conspiracy theory people get very correct, and I mean this genuinely, absolutely genuinely, they are skeptical of power.

That is, I will tell you, I think a very good instinct.

they need to be skeptical of power.

Joe Rogan, in my judgment, one of his problems is that he used to be very skeptical of power, but then he has on people like Peter Thiel, like J.D.

Vance, like Donald Trump, but more than that, Elon Musk, these guys who pull powerful levers in society.

And it's like, dude, it's one thing if, let's say you're Joe Rogan, and who do you want to get on?

You want to get on me, because I'm an archeology professor at the University of Wichita, or whatever.

You know, you can reasonably trust that I'm going to come on here and just geek out about archaeology.

I don't have an agenda to push other than, for the most part, probably just archaeology, right?

Or a physics professor, something like that.