Escaping the Echo Machine (with David Pakman)

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Intro – 00:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: 

This is Relationscapes. We're mapping the stories and ideas that shape who we are and how we connect with each other to build a more just world. I'm Blair Hodges and our guide in this mini episode is David Pakman.

DAVID PAKMAN: Okay, given that I can't solve every problem, I can't work on everything—I may not be able to fix the situation in China with the Uyghurs and the Ukraine war and also poverty in favelas in Brazil, right? You can't fix everything. So here's a couple of things that I do want to get involved in.

BLAIR HODGES: Staying up to date with the news is a huge part of David Pakman's job. As one of the most popular progressive political pundits on the Internet today, he’s spent years navigating the media landscape. But even he isn't immune to the burnout that comes with nonstop news cycles, sometimes feeling overwhelmed by local and global crises.

Right now we're diving into his new book, The Echo Machine, to explore how digital media shapes our political discourse for better and worse. Pakman opens up about his own exasperation about modern politics, the importance of media literacy, and how we can stay engaged without losing ourselves in the chaos. Most important, Pakman shares his strategy to balance activism with realism, focusing on issues where we can make a difference.

In this mini episode of Relationscapes, we're talking about our relationship to the news.

 

Burnt Out by Politics in the Internet Age – 01:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: David Pakman, welcome to Relationscapes.

DAVID PAKMAN: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book surprised me right from the get-go, and here's why. You've been doing this for a long time. Back in 2005, you started hosting a little radio show, Midweek Politics, and you grew from there. Twenty years later, you're at three million subscribers on YouTube and your professional life has been all about talking about politics.

So it was so funny to see the title of the preface here, the introduction, “Why I Hate Politics.”

DAVID PAKMAN: Well, you know, it's sort of tongue in cheek. I mean, I think the point I make in the introduction is that I hate what politics has become. And rather than figuring out, “Hey, you know, we don't really need to have hunger anymore, we're more than wealthy enough as a country not to have hunger, but we still do, let's figure it out.”

Instead of being able to focus on the big important issues, we are in some cases relegated to or pushed towards dealing with people who can't even acknowledge just what basic facts are about the world, or spending a lot of time on these contrived social issues that are used oftentimes to deliberately take attention away from some of the real big economic issues that I would like to be trying to solve.

So I hate what it means to engage with the political system because it's been degraded so much, is really the kind of broader point I try to make.

BLAIR HODGES: The question is, how much does the Internet play into that? Because I think the Internet has a great democratizing effect. Like you've been able to grow your platform through this amazing thing. Anybody could start a show—whether they can grow an audience, that's another thing. But anyone can put their opinions on the Internet.

But we're on social media, where some guy from high school's popping in on my Facebook wall to sound off on something I said about Gaza or whatever. Do you think that on the whole conversations that are happening on social media that you're witnessing, do you find it to be a fruitful place to have conversations about politics, do you think the Internet has contributed to some of the frustrations you've had with how our political discourse works?

DAVID PAKMAN: No, I mean, at some general level, the caliber of many of the conversations on social media is of extremely low quality. At the same time, like you mentioned, it's because of the existence of a lot of these platforms that I’m even able to do what I do.

I'm reminded of the book Technopoly by Neil Postman where he says, any new technology, first of all, will be really difficult to resist. So, you know, you think back to, let's not allow cars because it'll put the horse buggy drivers out of a job. Seems so silly to think that could have been a technology that was really resisted. I think it's the same thing with social media. I think it's the same thing with large language models like ChatGPT and others. These things just sort of like are happening.

So then the question becomes, what can we do to harness the most good and limit the bad? And sometimes the answer is some amount of regulation, sometimes the answer is education. I think that's certainly part of what's going on with social media, which is that people who lack basic media literacy don't realize they're spreading fake news or they don't understand whether they're reading a primary source or a blog that rewrites articles and changes their scope and point such that they no longer resemble the original reporting.

So I think it's kind of like an “all of the above.” There's a lot of really worthless conversation happening in social media. And I really don't engage in any. I don't tweet back and forth with people or get involved there. I just do my show, right?

So the way I try to get the most good and limit the bad is I do my show and I disseminate it on these platforms and then I turn off the computer and go outside and try not to engage, you know, in the 140 or 280 character back-and-forths.

 

Stressed Out By the News – 05:45

 

BLAIR HODGES: You say our fractured political system can also exact a really heavy personal toll on people who try to engage with it. And you were kind of hinting at this in your response. I'd like to hear a little bit more about how you manage dealing with political stress, especially as we're dealing with a lot of it right now.

How is it spilling over into your personal life and how do you try to be real about what's happening without letting it take over your life.

DAVID PAKMAN: I think it's really important—to start with, it's not great practice to kind of live in the news. And I know people who get so consumed with what's in the news that it becomes almost disabling. And as soon as I see them in person, they're exasperated to immediately talk about, did you see this, or did you see that?

And I see it’s really taking a big personal toll and occupying a huge amount of mental space. And so at a top level, we want to balance being informed people about what's going on in the world with also living in our communities. It is true that a lot of the tragedies that are taking place globally we are not going to be able to do anything about.

I wish it were different. And it's not sort of that we don't care. It's just we can't solve every problem, every.

BLAIR HODGES: A big problem is that we can also be maximally aware of the problems. So that's the tension, to me, is I feel even more helpless and more aware thanks to being so connected.

DAVID PAKMAN: That's right. And to a degree, excessive news consumption can generate that sense of impotence, for lack of a better term, where, wow, all of the stuff is happening, and I can't do anything. So what I suggest to others—kind of almost at my own detriment, right?—is like, the content I produce is really to do a couple of things.

It's to tell you about the sorts of conversations happening in the political world, in the political system, to provide hopefully some combination of a place to hang out with like-minded people, a little bit of lighthearted relief, not taking ourselves too seriously, and hopefully a catalyst to go and say, all right, of all the different things that are going on, here's the two or three I really care about. Here's how I'm going to get involved.

But it's also true that we can have an outsized impact in our immediate communities. It's not part of my show because I do a national show for, for a generalist audience. So if it's just about what's happening in Milwaukee only the show kind of loses its point.

But I see what I do as, “open the door, enter this space, but don't live in the news.” Really try to live in your immediate community, is my suggestion. And personally, when I'm done producing my last show of the week, I really, I don't pay attention to anything in news and politics until I'm planning my show. And I think that's critical for mental health.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you have conversations at home? I think your kids are pretty young, right?

DAVID PAKMAN: My daughter’s two.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Okay, so not a lot of political talk around the table. I know you've made some kids books though, right? Like you wanted to put some stuff out there that maybe parents could engage their kids with.

DAVID PAKMAN: Yeah, we did sort of, like with my team, just a test run of three children's books on critical thinking, on voting, on the scientific method. My “real” book that we're talking about here is my first non-fiction book. But the idea was, I talk so often about the dearth of critical thinking and media literacy, is there anything I can do to start some of these conversations in homes?

And so those were a really interesting kind of testcase, and they did very well.

 

Overview of The Echo Machine – 09:14

 

BLAIR HODGES: The Echo Machine is the book we're talking about right now. I'll give people a little bit of an overview. You're giving us a look at how we got to where we are in the United States, especially from the civil rights era to the present. You take us up from the Civil Rights movement in the sixties, up through Reagan and Clinton and Bush and Obama, and now Trump, and how the political landscape has shifted.

Your book identifies some of the main issues we're facing right now, like about how truth works, how people think about truth, how we assess “fact,” and how the media landscape impacts that. I think it offers a pretty hopeful framework for how we can make things better, which is an interesting approach.

I think a lot of people are feeling a little—well, a lot worried and cynical and beaten down right now. What's it like putting this book out with this hopeful edge to it? Because, you know, you were working on it before we knew the outcome of the election.

DAVID PAKMAN: That's right. The book was finished, in fact, before I think it was finished, even before Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the nominee.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, wow.

DAVID PAKMAN: So there were a lot of things we didn't know. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple things that I really want to accomplish with the book. One is, there is an audience of people that just don't consume this sort of material audio-visually.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAVID PAKMAN: They prefer to read. And so I want something for those people to also have, like, an entryway into the work I do and the kind of ideas that I support and hopefully defend in the book.

The second thing is to give a little bit of an overview of the—one main point is Trump is the, kind of, conclusion or outcome of seventy years of things that happened in the United States. And understanding that, I think, is useful both ideologically and emotionally for people who are struggling with what's going on. I want to make the point or kind of expose that there are countries that in their own ways, have solved, to a degree, some of the problems we're dealing with today.

BLAIR HODGES: This is one of my favorite parts of your book is you're talking about, like, Scandinavian countries.

DAVID PAKMAN: That's right.

BLAIR HODGES: Americans are so America-centric. And you're like, let's check out what's going on over here.

DAVID PAKMAN: Yeah. And we look at South America, we look at India, Germany, and other places.

And then finally, finally, I really want to push the idea that it's really hard to solve this stuff when our uncles and aunts are already reposting conspiracy articles to Facebook. Like, yes, we can talk to them about distinguishing fact from fiction and fake news sites and this sort of thing, but the ship has kind of sailed.

And so really, we need to be going back to educating kids, starting pretty early, about media literacy and critical thinking as a way to stop the problem, informationally, that we're having.

 

Our New Algorithm Gatekeepers – 11:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, let's talk about media. When newspapers and network TV news kind of ruled the media world, we had actual human editors who could make judgment calls about what would appear on the front page, what the top story was.

They could choose stories that sold newspapers. Of course, they wanted to sell papers. But they could also make some choices to educate the public. Stories for the public good. So to me, it was sort of like they could offer us a bag of candy, but also a plate of vegetables, and that's what we had in front of us.

Now it seems like with so many different media options, we can eat a diet of candy all day long. We don't have to go to any vegetables, and we're letting the algorithms do the work. And you've pointed out how this can become a problem when algorithms are geared to keep our eyes on the screen. Social media overseers find that being angry, being outraged, seeing simplified narratives, being presented with conspiracies, has been more likely to keep eyeballs attached.

And so there are these perverse incentives now that we don't have these more human gatekeeping media figures. There were problems with gatekeepers too. I'm not saying it was like a perfect paradise. But I think that shift, it's really caused a lot of problems.

DAVID PAKMAN: Yeah, I mean, it sort of goes back to the idea of the good and the bad about any technology that Neil Postman wrote about. It also kind of gets back to Plato's concerns with democracy, which is that democracy is great, and also it leads to potentially the least competent people directing society, directing politics, et cetera.

And one of the things that's unfortunately true is that the most, kind of, emotionally compelling content tends to be shared the most, regardless of its accuracy or its saliency in terms of what we are able to do. So the algorithm-driven process, I'm both a beneficiary of it and a victim of it as a news consumer like everybody else. It's really a double-edged sword.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you ever feel like—I mean, sometimes you have to play into it, right? Like on YouTube, for example, you have the thumbnails where you’ve got the goofy frozen reaction faces. And you have use titles, clickbait titles, give a title that's going to grab people. And you and your team put those together.

Does it ever feel like you have to play into the algorithm more than you like to? Or maybe you just see it kind of as the game you have to play. How do you feel about it when you see the thumbnails and the clickbait headlines?

DAVID PAKMAN: Yeah, I mean, listen, I've had moments where different people have called me out on my show for participating in clickbait. And it's sort of like, yes, that's true. I admit readily that we select video titles, episode titles, and thumbnails to garner the largest possible audience. That's true. If I'm producing an hour a day, I want as many people as possible to watch that.

And so could I title an interview with a member of Congress, you know, “Massachusetts Congressman explains pros and cons of salt cap limits”? I could title it that way. It would get no views. And my view is, if I've gone through all of the work of preparing for recording and having my team publish an interview, do I want to pick a title that is more in line with what attracts attention? That's maybe, you know, “Congressman issues brutal warning on tax cuts.” That will get more views.

I don't think it's inaccurate, right? I'm not going to lie and say “congressman taken out on stretcher during interview” if that didn't happen, right? I'm not going to do that. But yeah, you know, I'm working within a system to try to figure out, let's get the maximum attention possible to content that, fundamentally, I feel good about. I'm getting my opinion out and I think we're better off for having this content.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking with David Pakman about his new book The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America.

 

The Informational Nutrition Pyramid – 15:44

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. I’d like to talk about your food pyramid analogy from the book. I really liked this. You trying to get people thinking about media literacy and you use the analogy of the food pyramid.

DAVID PAKMAN: Yeah. And I put myself at the top with junk food to just be total, totally upfront here. [laughter]

It's sort of like the idea of an informational pyramid. And there are lots of people who right now just consume opinion content, like what I produce. It might be content that's on my side of the political aisle or the other, or a combination of the two, doesn't really matter.

I really consider that for experienced consumers of media, because otherwise you can fall into a lot of traps and believe a lot of things that aren't necessarily true. If you're not able to distinguish between news and opinion programming, understand some history, some economics, et cetera.

So in the book I talk about, really, the base of this pyramid is epistemology, critical thinking, how do we know what we know? Understanding what a proposition is. Do conclusions follow from premises? These kind of basic thinking concepts are at the bottom of the pyramid.

We then want to have some subject matter knowledge in what we're talking about. So some understanding of history, some understanding of philosophy, some understanding in general about economics, so that when we hear elected officials talk about this type of tax cut or that type of tariff, we have an understanding both historically and economically, as to sort of what that means.

Then media literacy is another aspect to this, which is, just because something says “LIVE” in the corner and there's a logo spinning it doesn't tell us whether we're watching an opinion editorial or a piece of news reporting. The media literacy skills are important.

Then I suggest for most of our informational gathering about what's going on in the world, you really want to be hearing from reporting sources. Associated Press, Reuters, primary sources that are kind of on the ground doing the reporting.

And then once you have all that, watch some opinion shows like mine. But that really shouldn't be the bulk of forming our understanding about the world.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, and that's my fear. I feel like that's where so many of the viewers are, right? I love the pyramid you set up, and I think the kind of content you make needs to be made. I also wonder how to get more people going further down to the bottom of that pyramid.

You're writing a book as part of your effort to help that happen. But what else do you suggest people do? Sometimes it’s easy to just throw on the video and listen to it or throw on the podcast and listen to it. And maybe people feel like they're doing enough if they're doing that.

DAVID PAKMAN: I mean, there's the micro and there's the macro. The micro would be when you're folding laundry and maybe drawn to have TikTok going. Maybe it's an audiobook with some subject matter expert that explains to you either history or philosophy or economics, right? So that's like a micro tactic.

But it's really more about the macro, which is creating a culture of reading. And the way I was taught, most of the material in like English class, and really most classes growing up, I didn't like it. The texts that were chosen were either the inappropriate ones, or they were taught in a way that wasn't engaging. And students start to kind of reject this. “Oh, when I'm handed a book and told to read it, it's a bad experience.”

Obviously, since then that's completely changed for me. And you know, this is just like a fraction of my books here. This is letters “A” through “C” right here behind that you can see. So I think there needs to be a kind of cultural change.

And with really little kids, we do a pretty good job. You know, most parents know that with a baby, a one-year-old, two-year-old, a three year old, you read every day.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAVID PAKMAN: And then it gets kind of lost and a lot of times, the kind of “default path” of school does it in a way that turns students off. But I think we have to restructure that culture so that being informed about a lot of the things I talk about at the bottom of the pyramid become revered, rather than sort of seen as what you do if you don't really want to have fun.

 

The Crisis of Expertise – 19:50

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is where I think about the “commentariat,” and I think you're sort of part of this. I don't use that label as an insult. I mean, like, the kind of punditry, the kind of talking-head-type dissemination of news. I think so many people can't distinguish between that and an expert in a particular subject area.

And, you know, I think you do a good job of this especially when you bring on experts and you interview them. So you're platforming people who have greater expertise, and you're kind of standing in for the audience, asking them questions and letting that talk. But I think a lot of people aren't distinguishing enough between punditry and expert witness.

And this is where style can just beat the crap out of substance.

DAVID PAKMAN: That's true. But we also can't ignore that now, for years, we have had a political class that loves to say they know better than the experts, right? I mean, think back to Trump's first term, where he knew better than the doctors and the epidemiologists and the generals and the engineers and the economists and the teachers and the Democrats—

BLAIR HODGES: Injecting bleach was successful, though. I don't know if you tried it, but I found it to be very good.

DAVID PAKMAN: It worked for you, yeah. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAVID PAKMAN: So there's talk about “the crisis of expertise” we sometimes hear about, which is that just because you call yourself an expert doesn't mean that you are. Which is true. But that's been taken too far, to where there are people who believe my opinion about anything is just as valid as someone who is truly an expert. And that's a real problem.

BLAIR HODGES: You trace in the book how the GOP has really leaned on this kind of, personal opinion is equal to, like, anybody. “Everybody has a right to have their opinion,” which somehow gets transmogrified into “Everybody's opinion is just as good as anybody else's opinion.”

DAVID PAKMAN: And what's fascinating about that is that there is a framework of postmodernism in that idea.

BLAIR HODGES: Let me quickly define that for you. Postmodernism is a school of thought that is skeptical of grand unified stories about everything, the idea that we can discover unbiased or objective truth. Postmodernism would encourage us to recognize that everybody is situated within their own perspective on things. So there’s a “relativity” to truth. Truth is relative to who we are and where we’re at when we’re learning truth, or describing it.

DAVID PAKMAN: Certainly. And I think this is also kind of inextricably linked to the concept of identity politics, which on the one hand, I've been critical of. When the political left uses identity to silence. I very much disagree with using identity sort of as a cudgel to say, “You don't get to voice an opinion based on your identity,” which I'm very much against.

At the same time, when the right says that identity kind of doesn't matter at all, it is actually true that identity gives us perspective that others may not have. For example, as a Jewish person myself, there are opinions I have which are informed by my dealing with anti-Semitism that a non-Jewish person could understand but would not have the same perspective as I do.

So that's valuable. I don't want to use that to shut anybody up. It doesn't mean only I get to speak. But we do want to recognize when identity does provide a useful perspective and listen to those voices. So with a lot of these concepts, it's not just, yes, no, good, bad, black, white. We're talking really mostly in shades of gray.

 

To Platform Extremists or Not – 23:25

 

BLAIR HODGES: I want to ask you about platforming extremists. You take time in the book to explore whether it's okay to invite someone on a show, on a prominent platform, who has some really extreme ideas. The downsides and the upsides. You kind of try to make a case for why sometimes you think it's a good idea to engage.

DAVID PAKMAN: Yeah, I don't think there's any hard and fast rules of like, okay, “homophobes allowed, Nazis not allowed,” or I don't think that it's this simple, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Homophobic Nazis.

DAVID PAKMAN: Maybe the way I talk about it in the book is, if there are ideas growing in prominence such that if we don't fight them, they may actually start to convince people in the general public, and if I feel as though I'm equipped to rebut those ideas, then I think it's a worthwhile endeavor.

In the book I gave the example of the Westboro Baptist Church. It’s a church—technically, of sorts, that was quite prominent fifteen years ago. And what they were most known for was showing up and holding homophobic signs at the funerals of military service members, at the funerals of people they believed to be LGBT. Whether they were or weren't, that was kind of their big thing at the time.

They were prominent enough and causing enough disruption that I thought it was a reasonable thing to bring people from the family on, it was mostly like a family church with some ancillary hangers-on. I thought it was worth bringing some of these folks on, exposing them as hateful, and hopefully doing my part to push back against these ideas.

Today, they've essentially disappeared from the sort of public sphere. Gay marriage is now legal, which it wasn't at the time. Doesn't mean LGBT discrimination has ended, but there have been some advancements. At this point, it seems like it would just be kind of an exercise in titillation and nothing else. So I wouldn't have them on today. Fifteen years ago, I thought it was a worthwhile endeavor.

BLAIR HODGES: So don't do it for the clicks. How do you try to carry yourself in that interview? Like, what are your concerns? “If I'm going to do this, here's what I need to do on my own side of things.”

DAVID PAKMAN: I want to make sure I'm anticipating their arguments such that either I give them enough rope to hang themselves with, or I can provide substantive pushback to make it clear, not only do I not agree with these ideas, they're bad ideas, and people should come away, hopefully, on the side of “these are bad ideas,” rather than convinced by those ideas.

And then from a sort of emotional standpoint, I don't want to get reactive and start yelling or become overly emotional, because I think that that really doesn't translate well.

BLAIR HODGES: Right, you say maintaining emotional composure is a core goal for you. In your Westboro Baptist Church interview, I know you stayed really calm while your guest got increasingly worked up. So that, plus being well-prepared and not letting people push problematic talking points unchallenged, is important because platforming can convey legitimacy.

I thought of the recent Gavin Newsom interview—kicking off his podcast with right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk. And instead of challenging Kirk, he found common ground and spread harmful misinformation about trans folks in particular. Or like how Joe Rogan lets anti-vaccine crackpots share bizarre ideas with millions of people, often without any basic fact checking at all.

All that said, you did bring me around a little bit. I used to think, don’t even bother—just bring on experts to analyze these people and their ideas. That’s my approach on Relationscapes. But I do think direct engagement can be worthwhile depending on the setting.

Like your recent appearance on Digital Social Hour—Sean Kelly’s a right-wing young guy, and you introduced some ideas to listeners who might not take them seriously otherwise, might not even hear them otherwise

There’s that saying, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” like it can sort of clear out the bad stuff. But I love your book’s take on that. You said, “Sometimes sunlight causes weeds to grow.” So you’re giving us a nuanced balance. And you did, like I say, sway me a little. It's less about avoiding platforms or avoiding people entirely. It’s more about being selective, being well-prepared, and thinking through the type of show you want to make.

DAVID PAKMAN: Yeah. And I think my views on this, where I would draw the line, has also changed over time. I think that that's just naturally a part of growing as a person who does public commentary. And I wouldn't necessarily draw the line—I mean, listen, there are probably some interviews I did twelve years ago that I just wouldn't do now, even if everything was exactly the same, because I would kind of characterize the balance a little differently.

But I also would say that as a person who is now twelve years older, and you're never exactly in the position of making the same decision again. But certainly there are probably a handful of interviews where it was like, I could have kind of taken it or left it.

 

Political Hobbyists and Political Activists – 28:14

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, well, let's close by talking a little bit about the contrast you make between “political hobbyism” and “political activism.” I want to close here, because a lot of people are feeling kind of frozen right now. There's so much going on every day, so much in the news, and it can be easy to just either completely disconnect or just freak out so bad.

You talk about hobbyism and political activism in the book, and I think this is a healthy way for us, in this particular moment, to think about how we're politically engaging.

DAVID PAKMAN: Yeah, I mean, I think if you watch or listen to a show like mine or read my book, and you vote, and maybe you sign a petition here or there, you're doing the minimum. And that's great. But really, the point of voting so you have a stake, and following the opinions of people that maybe are sort of politically in your wheelhouse, this is really, hopefully, to get you to figure out, “Okay, given that I can't solve every problem, I can't work on everything, I may not be able to fix the situation in China with the Uyghurs and the Ukraine war and also poverty in favelas in Brazil,” right? You can't fix everything. So, "Here's a couple of things I do want to get involved in. I'm going to learn more about those things and then I'm going to participate either in organizing rallies in my community or lobbying for an ordinance to be changed in my state" or "in my city."

I think the idea here is, it's good to have something beyond just kind of being a passive observer over if you really want to feel you are involved in a substantive way.

Now, in the book, I talk about big ideas for activism, mass rallies in urban centers, strategic debt defaults, coordinated absences from work. I mean, like big, big things that have worked over history. Doesn't mean everybody's going to do those things. But the idea is just to be thinking of the gap between, “I listen to some shows” and “I'm going to get involved and try to achieve change.”

This doesn't mean everybody is able to do it, doesn't mean you need to feel bad if you can't. But the idea is creating two concepts of activism and political hobbyism, so that people can really understand and say, “Where do I want to be on this spectrum,” if that makes sense.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. People can learn more about that from the book. It's called The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America. David Pakman is host of the David Pakman show, which you can check out on YouTube.

David, thanks for talking with me about the book. I really enjoyed it.

DAVID PAKMAN: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

 

Outro – 30:46

 

BLAIR HODGES: So many more questions to ask, so little time! Thanks to my friends at Beacon Press for helping to set up this discussion. And thank you for listening to this episode of Relationscapes, where we're mapping out the stories and ideas that shape who we are and how we connect with each other to build a more just world.

If this is your first time joining us, I invite you to stick around. We've had some truly incredible guests, including national bestselling authors and award-winning researchers tackling everything from the evolution of the human body to the invention of the family to the future of love in the digital age, and more. So if you're curious about how relationships shape you, and how you shape relationships, you'll find plenty to explore here.

Also, I was checking out new reviews of the show and Apple Podcasts. I saw this one from Niua2003 and I'm probably—I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but they say, “The questions on Relationscapes are, well, they're different from what you usually hear. They're thoughtful and unique.” [laughs] 

Thanks! I hope people will follow in Niua’s footsteps and leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts. You can also rate the show in Spotify. Those are starting to stack up, which I love to see. If you listen via Spotify, please rate the show.

You can follow me on Instagram and I actually just launched on Tik Tok. I'm on there now, so we'll see, [laughs] I haven't spent a lot of time on Tik Tok. We'll see how it goes, but you can follow me there. I’m at underscore relationscapes.

Mates of State provided our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges and I'll see you again soon.