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- [00:00]
A
Morning Zoe. Got donuts.
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B
Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage?
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A
Well I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T mobile commercial like you teach me.
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B
So Dana oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at T Mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
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A
Wow, impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
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B
Nice je free.
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A
You heard them. T Mobile is the best place to.
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C
Get the new iPhone 17 Pro on.
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A
Us with eligible traded in any condition. So what are we having for lunch?
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B
Dude, my work here is done.
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C
The 24 month bill credit on experience beyond for well qualified customers plus tax and 35 device connection charge credit send and balance due if you pay off earlier Cancel Finance Agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs 1099.99 A new line minimum 100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Oklahoma Speed Test Intelligence Data 182025 Visit T mobile.com.
- [01:01]
B
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- [02:50]
C
It's Wednesday, November 5, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca and the results were very good for the Democrats. I think all the Democrats, all the plausible Democrats and some surprising Democrats New Jersey to take the results of the 2024 presidential election. Kamala Harris won by 6. Yesterday Mikey Sherrill won a race that was supposed to be or touted as close one by 13. Virginia margin of victory also six, a little under six. In the 2024 presidential election. Harris be Trump. Abigail Spanberger won by 15 points. California's 50. The that one that proposal they'll be redistricting even though the Republicans have now filed suit to stop that. There was a main voter ID law. Republicans like bringing voter IDs to the poll. As much as I don't like voter ID as a proxy for oppression, the voters say no, we'll vote without the id. That's a Democrat or maybe a liberal win. Here is a surprising win also for the Democrats. The Georgia Public Service Commission where two Republicans, Tim Echols and Fritz Johnson were voted out. Not not no longer a boon era for politicians named Fritz. Fritz Mondale, Fritz Hollings. They once strode the earth. Not so much Fritz Johnson who said and now the very same Democrats who think it's right for taxpayers to fund gender affirming surgeries for prisoners want control of your power bill. You know what? That didn't play because these two particular Democrats want weren't talking about gender affirming surgeries. And that's a lesson, an obvious lesson. When Democrats talk about cultural issues that push away the public, they will not be popular. When Democrats talk about economic issues that at least say hey we're listening to you in a way that big tariffs Trump over there and his acolytes aren't they do well a couple of interesting mayor results that aren't results yet. In Minneapolis, Jacob Fry has a lead on Omar Fattah. It's about a 42 to 32% lead. They got to go to a runoff. Fry was the mayor there during the George Floyd murder and he brought some of the police stations back from the brink of literally being burnt down. He is being challenged by the more progressive. This is the word Fatah. And Fatah had for a time the endorsement of the Democratic and Farmer Party there. But then there were irregularities. They brought him back. I've watched some debates from this race. It is the classic Fry saying look of a lot of people are shooting up in one location. We're going to send the police in and stop them from shooting up. And Fatah saying no, that only moves the shooting gallery to a block down the road. That is actually not true. But it is the argument that is made in every municipality where there is widespread drug use and a question about how to stop it. Such a municipality. And there Little Saigon is the site of the rampant drug use in Seattle. And that was also site of a mayoral race that I talked about. But in this race, many Seattle veteran observers will point out that when the vote comes in, historically it does favor the left leaning candidate. And though I might say, ooh, it's better to be in the poll position as Harrell with a lead, I talked to a consultant who I very much trust, Sandeep Kaushik, and he says no, right now probably Katie Wilson with will win. But it is very, very close. Couple other national trends. Nothing really seems to have come from the election monitors that Donald Trump said he wasn't apparently did authorize to go to New Jersey and Virginia. Another sign that Trump can bluster, Trump can loom. But when the issues are economics and not social issues that repel the majority of Americans, Democrats right now have the upper hand. And in 2026, if history is any guide, that will be the case. And in 2028, well, we'll have to see if a guy named Trump, specifically even the Donald J. Trump is on the ballot on the show today. Well, I just talked about all these election results in a way that would make it seem, look, we have one nation that has the same trends and the same kind of electorate motivating it. Not so says my guest Colin Woodard. And he makes a good case. He talks about not the states, not the country, but regions, different regions. Sometimes one state is within a couple of regions and how the history and the people of these regions really determine the future and the past of America. He's the author of Nations Apart How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America. Colin Woodard, up next. Claude is an AI service that I so love. I use it for writing all the time. It's also excellent for for coding and it's improved my professional workflow. I am not going to say that all of the correspondence I Get goes through Claude at some point. I mean, if you write in, you're going to hear from me. But just as an assist. Saved me hours, hours and hours and hours. CLAUDE is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborators that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. It gives me suggestions I wouldn't have thought of and takes what I did think of and polishes it so that it's what I meant. Or I can tell myself, yeah, that's what I meant. And the thing that it does, artificial intelligence, Right. What is intelligence but identifying connections where you didn't see them before? That's what I think. A key definition of intelligence is in my head. And when I think of intelligent humans now that we have intelligent machines. And that's what Claude does. Claude finds connections between all these sources that I wouldn't have found on my own, plus all the professional tools through MCP connectors, GitHub and Jira and HubSpot and Notion. If you work with those. You know what I mean. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Sign up for Claude today and get 50% off Claude Pro. When you use my link. Claude AI slash the gist. That's Claude AI slash the gist right now for 50% off your first three months of Claude Pro. That includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude AI slash the gist. Okay, the weather's getting colder unless you're in Phoenix, but it's still getting colder. And sometimes when you're in a warm city, you're like, look, I might get to wear a sweater. And sometimes when you're in a cold city, there is this phenomenon known as sweater weather. And Quince has got you covered. Literally $50. Mongolian cashmere sweaters. Oh, it's such a luxury. That's the Mongolian cashmere. $50. That's what you can afford. And that's the one I love. I have this green quince sweater that is a go to. And I am going to go to Quint for additional sweater type coverings. I also should mention that they've gone beyond clothing. They've. They have home, bath, kitchen and travel. Some luggage from Quince Give and get. Timeless holiday staples that last this season with quince. Go to quince.com/the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's quincy.com/the gist. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/the gist. You might know the United States from such regions as New England, the South, sometimes even the Deep South. Then you have the, oh, if you want to get really tricky, the interior Midwest. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Colin Woodard, who is a, an academic and a journalist and a sort of a demographer, certainly a demographer, but also something of a cartographer, has redrawn the map of the United States to tell us the regions of the country based on who founded them and their overriding ethic. So here I speak to you from New York, or as he calls it, New Netherland. And then south of us is Tidewater. And then of course we have Yankee Dom, which stretches all across the northern part of the country, including New England, but going as far west as Wisconsin and Minnesota. And Colin Woodard says that these distinctions, these areas understood, make us a nation apart. The name of his new book is Nations How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America. Colin, welcome to the gist.
- [12:22]
A
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
- [12:24]
C
So I was trying to orient myself as to your book and some make empirical sense or are regions that I've thought of before like the Deep south and others, I maybe hadn't exactly thought of them, but they appeal to me quite instinctively. Like there is a difference between the coast, dull west coast that you call the left coast, where the counties touch the ocean, and the interior, say of California or to the east of the Cascade Mountains, which are often much more conservative. But some of these regions, I don't know, the one that starts in, the one that starts in Pennsylvania and goes all the way to Iowa, is that the Midlands? What's going on there?
- [13:09]
A
That's right, yeah. And some of them were when I started working on this stuff, which was actually in sort of 2009, 2010, this was first in history form, discussed in a book called American Nations. And yeah, some of them were more intuitive than others. The idea is that, you know, where do cultures come from? They come from the first, you know, settlement colonizer group that comes to a new territory or, you know, expunges people from that territory and sets up a self perpetuating society. Even if that group is really small, they can have an incredible influence on the future characteristics of the resulting society. And so the Midlands, the one you describe is the legacy of William Penn's, you know, Quaker utopia that was set up on the shores of Delaware bay in the 1670s and 1680s, the Quakers may have, you know, faded from the scene and from control of that region fairly early on, but what they did is because of their faith, they believed, unlike say, the Puritans, that humans are basically good, humans have an inner light. And one of the effects of that is they had a pretty much open door immigration policy at a time when the other colonies were extremely strict about who could or couldn't come. And so all sorts of people, you know, imperiled or, you know, being tyrannized back in Europe of different dissenting religions and all different languages and, you know, ethnographics were all showing up in Pennsylvania and spreading out over the landscape in this sort of settlement ban that continued on 19th century.
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C
So the Midlands are listed as Pennsylvania, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri. That's what, that's what you list as the states dominated in the states controlled. I can't really think of Maryland as more similar to Iowa than Maryland is similar to Virginia.
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A
Yeah. The reason I say so, none of these settlement bands and none of these regional cultures respected state or even international boundaries. Oftentimes those boundaries didn't exist at the time of settlement. So it's portions of those places, and those are the states that today, based on the 2020 census, where those regional cultures dominate the population of those states. But the part of Maryland that does have a lot in common with Philadelphia is the part that was settled essentially via, you know, Philadelphia area. There's a settlement stream. You'll see it in the landscape because they often name the towns, you know, Fredericksburg and, you know, German names. That was industrial, you know, essentially setting up towns with, you know, free labor and industry that goes through Baltimore and hooks up through Frederick, Maryland, in that interior, which is totally different than the older part of Maryland that was settled along the Chesapeake as part of the same general model as Tidewater, Virginia. So this was people coming in the 1650s, 60s, 70s, led by the second and third and fourth and fifth sons of the great English, you know, noble manor families. In other words, the sons who weren't going to inherit Downton Abbey back at home, you know, you're out of luck. You know, go be a priest or join the army. But the discovery of the New World meant that these left, you know, second, third, fourth sons could imagine going to the New World and setting up their own manor estate and replicating that system of the English countryside. And they came and they did that, but nobody wanted to play the role of the serfs, so they had to turn to indentured Servants, and then by the end of the 1600s, to adopt a slave system. And that's the culture that extended into Southern Maryland, Eastern Shore, you know, Anne Arundel County, St. Mary's County. It's why Maryland is a fractured place where people recognize that there are, you know, three Marylands. The argument among Marylanders is where is the border between them? And this is why that's true. Some states are deeply divided.
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C
So some states are so fractious or fractured that to try to interpret them as part of a whole, and maybe they're part of this greater midlands hole. Is that more useful than just actually looking at the internal difference of the state?
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A
Yeah, I mean, both are important if you want to have the grand picture of why our politics are the way they are, why some states are divided and some aren't, why there are red and blue states. You need the whole big picture of our history. But if you're looking at a state level, there are some states that have a lot of internal cohesion, you know, in identity. Vermont, you know, Colorado. It's easier to have a sense of Colorado ness or Vermont ness than it is in California or Texas or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Maryland. States that are cleaved by these different original settlement zones where people really don't agree with one another. And to understand that is really, really helpful. There's, you know, people in Texas know that Austin's the state capital, but that San Antonio and Dallas and Houston are the hubs of three very different Texas that consider themselves rivals. So there's. There's a reason behind that. And once you see the. The whole settlement branches and the way the different rival colonization streams settled much of the continent, you start realizing, oh, that's why the geography is the way it is in this state or that state.
- [18:37]
C
Yeah, I often. It's. It's definitely true that our historical antecedents have a big impact on life just by setting things in motion and having. I mean, you could think of the huge laws like slave state versus non slave state, although Kansas and Nebraska are in the same region. For your purposes, you. But even some subtle laws and property ownership and even laws more subtle than that water rights have throughout history, they have a way to influence life today. Absolutely and stipulated. However, given that America is such a land of immigrants and the populations are so in flux.
- [19:22]
A
Yeah.
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C
Wouldn't you say the characteristics of the states that have a lot of turnover are less solid than the characteristics of some of the states or some of the regions that have much less turnover? Like you have maps in your Book about how there was almost no immigration to the Deep south through the early part of the 20th century.
- [19:44]
A
Yeah. Deep South, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, Miss. That great immigration wave. Yeah. I mean, you would think so. You would think just generally across the continent, that mass immigration, the fact that we migrate, many of us are born in one place and move to another and then move to a third place. The fact that we have mass retailing and mass communications and mass culture would be diluting and, and, and changing and marginalizing all these different regional cultures and their effects. But we work, you know, with data, nations apart, is. Is taking this paradigm and looking at current phenomenon at the county level and able to trace these obvious and massive differences in almost everything between the regions. And those differences appear to be growing, not shrinking. And that's true in both places that have a lot of flux and places that don' lot of flux over time. So, you know, why would that be? Well, one reason is that some of the places with a lot of flux have always been defined by that. You know, there's a. An area with a Dutch settlement legacy around New York City. New York City, northern New Jersey, some of the southern counties are, you know, the lower Hudson Valley part of Long island is part of one Dutch cultural zone that has always, like the Midlands, that the Dutch weren't in charge. The whole idea is we are a global, you know, commercial city, state, trading state. From the beginning, from the time it was a village of 700 people, that's what it was. Change.
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C
The constant change is the definition, and.
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A
Change is the definition. So it is. There was never a majority. It was always many people with different religions from all over the place involved in this. So some places are like that just by their definition. Now, anywhere in the world, if you want to see, like, you know, the culture kind of set in amber and completely. Und every culture, whether we're in Europe or North America or Asia, you know, every culture changes over time. And you get influences from other places. If you're in rural areas that that change in flux is slower. So, yeah, if you want to kind of see New England culture distilled in amber, go out to a rural New England town where they still have town meetings, where the entire, you know, community shows up once a year to act as a mini legislature and vote on each item in the town budget, you know, and then direct their selectmen, who are their executors, to execute those things. That's a direct democracy. Why? Because the early Puritans were deathly afraid an aristocracy would form. So like every single town had to be a republic unto itself. We don't. In New England, counties have no powers. Maybe a sheriff's office. Massachusetts, Connecticut, have officially eliminated counties altogether, all powers down to the municipal level, even if it's a town of 6 or 700. And that was seen as a way to ensure that you never had, you know, wicked original.
- [22:32]
C
Wait, did you say Massachusetts eliminated counties?
- [22:34]
A
Massachusetts has no counties. They don't exist anymore. Or Connecticut has changed to planning areas. I mean, they're on the map, but they have. They do not exist as units of government anymore. Oh, I see.
- [22:46]
C
There's no. Okay, so there's no Suffolk county legislature or administrator or anything.
- [22:53]
A
Barnstable county, because Cape Codders are, you know, really hardcore, have. Has their own sort of council, but nobody else does. So they don't really exist as units of government anymore. And even in other places, they're very weak. Whereas in most regions of the country, it's the county that has all the power. Towns were created later out of the county, if the county let them. But you'd have a. In Tidewater, Virginia, you would have a crossroads somewhere where you'd have a courthouse, Arlington Courthouse, and it was literally a courthouse in the fields. And the gentlemen would ride together, get off their horses with their servants, and make the decisions about the community, not have a town government decide everything. So, yeah, these things. You will find that rural areas anywhere in the world kind of have less change. So sometimes you can see certain historic things a little bit easier than a city. But it's not as though, if you really start probing the data, people's underlying attitudes, that there's a big difference between the places that are constantly in flux and those aren't.
- [23:51]
C
So there are areas of the country and areas that you might describe as Deep south or Midlands that for decades and decades have had a certain character and were set in motion by all the historical precedents that you talk about. But now change has come quickly. So I was talking to Art Cullen, who lives in northwestern Iowa. Yeah. And the schools there are 90% children of color, and more than half of them are Latino. And so that's a big difference. And that has caused some sturm and drawing. But also, can we now say that that is. That is a town, that is an area that is now best understood as part of this historical context of being in the Midlands, or I'm thinking about a lot of the towns in North Carolina, where there's been so much immigration and so much turnover. It's a lot less like what we would Think of as North Carolina or always have up until about 15 years ago.
- [24:50]
A
Yeah, the, I mean, change is a constant in human societies, but cultures have a hold. Certain characteristics last for hundreds or even thousands of years despite the movement of people, the shifting of empires. That's true of Homo sapiens and their cultural creations everywhere. The only thing I'm saying that's new is that, you know, the same laws that apply everywhere else in the world apply in the United States and North America. And those laws, you know, as a model, you know, huge numbers of people can come to Paris or move into the UK or move to North Carolina. And yeah, if a Martian comes and moves somewhere, they're going to kind of seem like a Martian. But then they marry a local person and you know, their kids are like bilingual and yeah, I'm Martian, my parents moved from Mars, but you know, I went to kindergarten, no one was speaking Martian, so I learned English. And then you get to generation three where those people have been there and the grandkids may not speak Martian at all. They may, as a totem or an identity thing, think of themselves as Martian American, but they've really by then assimilated into the culture around them. That's just kind of how humans work. You know, this is a model, this is absent laws that say you and your people will not be assimilated. We reject you like a sort of blood and soil laws like the Germans had right up into the 21st century before the EU made them change it. You know, like you could be a Turk, a Turkish fourth generation German born person of Turkish descent and you couldn't become a German citizen. So you're sort of stateless back in the old model. So you can have things like that or redlining and, you know, intentionally trying to stop people say the great migration of African Americans from the deep south into Midland and Yankee cities. And there's these intentional efforts to not let you live among us. Right. Those are efforts to refuse to let people sort of assimilate. But absent those things over time and about generation three, people kind of assimilate right down to the dialect of American English they'll speak. Will they change things? You know, does England have better food now than it did a century ago because people from all over its empire came Low bar. But yeah, but yeah, but still there are recognizable things about British culture that make it different than French or German culture that over time that, that metronome plays out everywhere in the world.
- [27:11]
C
There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the book before we even get to thinking about it as a whole. For instance, I found out that white people in New York, or as you call it, what is it, New Netherlands, are as likely to be the victim of gun crime as your average Canadian. So we could talk about gun victims in New York and we could talk about even gun victims in America. But if you drill down into the specific demographic level, you find facts like that. And so the experience of an American in a different place, of a different demographic, we're not really Americans. You know, the white guy in New York and the white guy in Louisiana and the white guy where you're from, in Maine. They have all different risks of this very. There's a whole chapter on guns. They have all different risks of this very American phenomenon. And to go even deeper, some of their risks are at the. The hands of another. Whereas for many people, the gun risk is suicide. And unless. I think your point is, unless you understand the different nations and the different differences, there's not one America can experience.
- [28:21]
A
Yeah, you can't understand any of our policy differences or those differences you're describing. Yeah, we did one on gun violence, both per gun deaths and breaking it out into per capita gun suicides and homicides, then breaking it out by who the victim was, you know, comparing just white homicide victims versus black homicide victims. And no matter how you sliced and diced it, there were these enormous differences between regions, you know, two and a half times, you know, the per capita gun death risk is two and a half times higher in the Deep south than it is in the greater New England space. And, you know, I can't remember five or eight times higher than in that Dutch settled area around New York City, even though that is the densest and most diverse part of the continent. And that applied, you know, if you looked at just white victims, you see the same things. If you just compared rural counties in each of these regions with each other, or you just compared urban ones or just rich ones or just poor ones, you still saw these enormous gaps over and over again and again. This doesn't follow state boundaries. This is with. You could look at the county map and see the county level affinities to settlement patterns from two or 300 years ago. Along the curves of these issues, life expectancy, enormous differences between the regions, diabetes, obesity, FICO credit scores, per capita debt, uninsured by county, you know, all kinds of phenomenon where you just see it over and over again, including county level, you know, election results. So it's, it's. You cannot understand the geography of almost anything without recognizing that were really this federation of separate rival cultures and nations with different values. And those values result in different policy choices, different social environment, and therefore different outcomes for people.
- [30:07]
C
Tell me about the gun suicide differences, rural counties and specific rural counties. How, how Maine might differ from Oregon.
- [30:15]
A
Yeah, in all of those cases, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but enormous gaps, whether it was rural or urban, between like, essentially the greater New England space, which, as you described as New England, you know, upstate New York, the western reserve of Ohio and the Upper Great Lake states. That's a region, you know, where the, the rural rate is a tiny fraction of that in the deep south. And, and gun homicides and suicides there. The same pattern in most regions, you know, followed each other, like deep south bad and both Yankeedom good in both. The fascinating thing is the interior west, you know, from about the hundredth, you know, where you start kneading in the Great Plains, where you kind of need irrigation in order to make crops grow all the way through to reach the interior side of the coastal mountain range, that vast area of the interior West. In that region, per capita gun homicides are remarkably low. It's an incredibly safe. People don't shoot each other. But the gun suicide rate was staggeringly high. And that's the only region where that was the case. Which, you know, if you're a researcher, who cares about that stuff. Well, that's an observation that matters. And I talked to a bunch of people who are experts. They had some good ideas as to why the suicide rate might be higher. You know, having to do with, you know, relative isolation. The fact that these communities are often boom and bust, people are transient and therefore have less social ties. And an idea that, you know, you have to be a man and, you know, solve your own problems and therefore not reach out for help all increases the risks. But, you know, why is it that the gun homicide rate is so low? I mean, part of it may be that I grew up in rural Maine in the middle of nowhere. Everyone hunted for, you know, deer and, you know, know how to use their firearms, but you would never ever there, like, take your gun to Walmart or want to go shopping at the grocery store with it. If you did that, you would be considered a sign, like, shameful, like, here's a sign that you're not grown up enough to have a firearm, Whereas in other regions, you absolutely pack heat everywhere to show, you know, that, you know, I'm a real dude and if you mess with me, I'll mess with you. It's A completely different cultural assumptions. And it, it seems that in the far west, you know, firearms are seen as a tool, not a status symbol of one and a signal. Don't mess with me. The way it is in some of the regional cultures where trust in institutions and that you let you know, you let the, the teacher take care of the bully, not solve it yourself is the is the norm. Whereas in other regions it's the other way around.
- [32:42]
C
And we'll be back with more of Colin Woodard right after this. As fall becomes winter and the weather gets cold, you might need to find yourself outside just doing work, wanting to wear effective clothing that looks good and wicks away all of the elements. And that's what True Work does. It's performance workwear built like it matters because you know what it matters and True Work knows that it matters. And there is a lot of time and attention and expertise where real workers on real job sites decided what would work best.
- [33:25]
A
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- [33:26]
C
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- [34:39]
A
Got donuts.
- [34:40]
B
Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?
- [34:43]
A
Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T mobile commercial like you teach me. So. Dana.
- [34:50]
B
Oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at T Mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera. System.
- [35:01]
A
Wow, impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
- [35:09]
B
Nice. Jeffrey, you heard them.
- [35:11]
A
T Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition. So what are we having for launch?
- [35:19]
B
Dude, my work here is done.
- [35:22]
C
24 monthly bill credit is on experience beyond for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 device connection charge credit same and balance due if you pay off earlier Cancel Finance agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs $1,099.99 and new line minimum 100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Oakload Speed Test Intelligence data 1H2025 visit t mobile.com Colin we're back with Colin Woodard, author of Nations Apart. And Colin, during this interview I've been asking you exactly about how what you've been writing about how the sections of the country not as defined by state boundaries, go back historically and how that they are distinct from each other and they yield distinct results. But this isn't the main thesis of Nations Apart. You've been writing that book and chronicling the phenomenon since 2011. What's new in 2025? And I guess you have been looking at America and seeing that we're at each other's throats more than ever. But what's new here is not just that we have these regional cultures, but specifically it is these regional cultures, this thing that you put your finger on all those years ago, that is the cause of our polarization slash destruction. Why has it come to this? Why do you say, and it's not just because this is the thing you know most about, and you're paring that to a phenomenon that's going on. But what is the case that it is specifically the regional cultures that you've written about for so long, that is causing the fracture?
- [36:51]
A
Yeah, well, in a very long time, I mean, the regional cultures have been at each other's throats and in competition the whole time. Why did we have a civil war? Right? There was a battle over the future of the country and how you would define it. Back then in the antebellum period in the 1830s and 1840s, there was a. There was a fight over what is this United States thing going to be? Because you had these separate regional cultures, these different colonial projects. They all got together in 1776 to fight off a common threat. The change in British imperial policy was going to say, no, you're not going to have your own ways of governing yourselves. You're going to do what we say. We're going to be a proper, you know, despotic kingdom. And they were like, no way. We're not going to lose the way we're doing things. So they gather together in a ragtag alliance and lo and behold, they won. But when they won, they found themselves in something called the United States of America. And nobody knew what that was or what it was supposed to be. And they kind of kicked the can down the road a little bit. They created a constitution that tried to hold the southern slaveholders together with the Yankees. It's a really weird document with all kinds of checks and balances to ensure that no region can dominate the others and has elements of aristocracy in it along with direct democracy. It only makes sense if you realize that these cultures had to broker with each other to create a constitutional arrangement they could all live with. But even that wasn't enough. By the 1830s and 1840s, it was a battle over what does Americanness mean? And on one side there were a group out of largely Yankeedom who were saying, oh, those words Thomas Jefferson wrote make sense. You know, we're a people on a mission. And the mission originally said to be tasked to us by God, like the early Puritans believed they had tasks, was to take the ideals and declaration. The proposition that all humans have a God given right to live free, to survive, you know, not be tyrannized, to pursue happiness as they understand it and to access the representative government that makes that possible. Our task as Americans is to create a society where that's possible. And that was one ideals based civic vision for what America was for and who got to belong. And then there was an instantly there was a deep Southern and Tidewater counter attack that said no way. They explicitly said Jefferson is wrong. The declaration is wrong. Humans are not equal. Only the Anglo Saxon race in the original conception has the genius and ability to realize those promises in the Declaration. We're really the ethnostates of the Anglo Saxon race and everyone else is here provisionally were a classical republic like ancient Greece and Rome were, where there's a tiny minority who have the liberty or privilege to practice democracy and subjugation and slavery are the natural lot of the many. And that group had 2,000 years of political thinking and history behind them. And the other one was the radical idea that was the fight between those two visions was the fight that tore the country apart during the antebellum period and in the Civil War and during Reconstruction and Southern Redemption and the Jim Crow period and the civil Rights era. And it's affecting us now. So absolutely, those things have been there the whole time, a struggle. And at different times in our history, it's been quieter or stormier. And we're now in probably the greatest crisis since the 1860s.
- [40:11]
C
So that's my question. I mean, I appreciate bringing us up to the present or explaining what caused the Civil War, but why is it knowing what you know about the nations and being the nations apart and they've always been different? Why is it that in 2011 those nations being apart didn't present themselves as the crisis that you're identifying now or even in during the. The New Deal era where, or we can name all the other eras where there was great challenges to America. There were always, you say always consistently these different nations within the country. It seems like there is plenty of opportunity to have been worse than now, but now is when it comes to a head.
- [40:59]
A
Yeah, I mean, you know, it did come to a head before, but why is it coming to a head now and not in other periods? Several things have happened. One of them is when we won the Cold War against the Soviets, we stopped talking about, you know, what is the purpose of the country? You know, oh, we don't need to worry about that. You know, capitalism just defeated communism. Go capitalism.
- [41:19]
C
You know, okay, so we'll worry about.
- [41:21]
A
So end of history, which wasn't helpful because we stopped thinking about what holds us together. And that happened in the Western world elsewhere, and that has a bad impact. Secondly, in this country, we, in that same time period, we shift. There's a. There's a balance right between that. Individual liberty I talked about, individual liberty is really important. But if you just maximize individual liberty and like eliminate government and taxes and everything else, you don't end up in freedom. You end up in an oligarchy because the strongest families will grab and maximize their freedom by enslaving everyone else. There'll be a battle between them. And you end up in Guatemala and El Salvador in the late 20th century where the 10 families capitalized own everything, or the eight families, they own the police and the land and the army, and they kill anyone who gets in their way. We don't want that. Right. And if you go in the communitarian common good stretch too far and to the point where individuals don't have liberty and you're supposed to just defer to the supposed keepers of the common good, you end up with orwell you end up with, you know, the Nazis and Stalin. So both of those are bad. But somewhere in there, logically, there's a point where those two essential aspects of freedom are in equilibrium. And, you know, a liberal democracy, a Western democracy, a society devoted to trying to have a maximally free but sustainable society for individuals over time relies on having those in balance. So the, that the long winded answer to that second question is we have gone since the end of the Cold War, we kept going further and further into the individual liberty side, you know, dissolving changes to tax code to the idea of what we invest in and not invest in to privatize, you know, efforts to privatize education and health care and things that don't. Maybe the market doesn't work so well on to stop funding basic science, to stop doing those things as a group. And the balance got further and further off to the point where it frayed the social contract where, you know, the chances of, if you're born in crappy circumstances to, you know, poor parents without connections, your chance of making it is the latter is much more rickety than it was before. And the, you know, sense of most people that the system is somehow rigged in that way, that even the law, if you're wealthy, you can get away with anything. If you're poor and you, you know, steal, you know, a matchbox, then you'll be, you know, thrown in jail forever. Those, those notions eroded the social contract and got us into a much more vulnerable and, you know, dangerous circumstance where you start questioning, you know, liberal democracy at all. A circumstance where anywhere in the world, when those things start fraying, that's when demagogues can step in with more radical solutions and get you into crisis. And when you have underlying a latent structure of an unstable federation of different regions or stateless nations, if you will, that disagree on many fundamentals and who in the past fought entire wars with each other, you'll start seeing the cracks form at that regional, geographic level. And indeed, as this crisis has played out, it's played out regionally. You know, nobody talked about red states and blue states, you know, until, you know, the 1990s, it wasn't a thing, but it crystallized more and more rapidly.
- [44:37]
C
Yeah, so what I'm hearing there is.
- [44:40]
A
And finally social media, right? The social media and the Internet has meant that you, you accentuate the differences. Everyone's aware of all the crises in every possible place and the algorithms in order to drive our using the platforms, our outrage and our engagement are all driven to amplify the conflict. So that's another element. You know, I'd say the arrival of the Internet and social media and mobile devices connected to the Internet have also help explain the timing along with those other things.
- [45:08]
C
Yeah. So I'm hearing a general critique of neoliberal policies overlaid onto this typography that you've spent years and years developing. I still don't think it gets there in terms of why now, not during the robber baron period. If you want to talk about income inequality, why now and not during Jim Crow south pre civil rights era. Why are we more fractured now than we were when states rights was a phrase on everyone's mind? It could be social media, but I don't see. I understand everything you're saying. I just think it's inevitably an inadequate explanation to say that you have this deep bed of knowledge about the nations which we have to be oriented about, about what the real nations within the nations are, and then you have this coming apart. I don't think the fact that we have these different nations explain the coming apart because we. Because that has been the constant. These different nations. I'll take some. I have some quibbles with what you're saying. It's an interesting idea. I don't see how all the different nations explain our current situation.
- [46:25]
A
It explains the vulnerabilities that would lead.
- [46:28]
C
But they've already been vulnerable. I mean, because they've always been these nations.
- [46:32]
A
Yeah, but conditions change over time where underlying vulnerabilities suddenly become relevant. You know, the same in terms of like the. That the neoliberal argument, the end of history argument and the timing of the arrival of social media. Those are all true elsewhere in the world and throughout the Western world, you're seeing the same challenges happen because everyone is experiencing those things. Which countries?
- [47:00]
C
Well, does every other country have their own nations within?
- [47:03]
A
Not all of them. And note that the countries where. So Hungary, I lived for five years in Hungary, was based there during and after the collapse of communism. As a journalist. And there's a country where they've fallen into an illiberal regime with elements of authoritarianism, a collapse of democratic norms. But there's no danger of the Hungarian state fracturing. Not at all. Because there is no internal fracture lines like I'm describing. Whereas the United Kingdom, which is also experiencing all of these same pressures. There is a danger. Right. There's a danger that Scotland's going to break away. There's a whole argument going on right now about English ethnicity that has. Hasn't been openly discussed in 75, 80 years, like, are you, if you are not ethnically, genetically English, whatever that means, do you belong to the English ethnicity? The distinction between Britishness and Englishness is. Now there's protests and Elon Musk is, you know, telling protesters flying, you know, the English St. George flag that they should overthrow their government kind of stuff. I mean, this is a very relevant issue that affects the future survival of the United Kingdom because it is a federation, if you will, between Scotland and Wales and English a contest over English identity. Is there a British civic identity that if your grandparents were from South Asia and you're the second third generation born in the British Isles, are you English, are you British, are you somehow less English or British if England breaks off or Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland all leave and there's an English state, do you belong? The same sense that battle's going on right now and it's no accident that this is happening in the Netherlands, in Sweden, in France, all over our peer Western liberal democracies at the same time, precisely because those elements I described are in play. And it's because we're a federation that we're vulnerable. And the federated states are going to be vulnerable to a possible collapse of their federation, not just a retrenchment or collapse of, you know, democracy, if you will. Hungary is safe from state collapse from this, but not from the collapse of their republic. We're vulnerable to both. And that matters a lot in understanding why could the, you know, richest, most powerful country in the world at a time that's not exactly. It's not like it's the Great Depression, right? This hasn't weren't invaded in World War I. This is not a crisis like that. And yet our whole country appears to be self destructing. How can that be? It could not be if we were not a federation like this. And the way that the events have played out and some of the chapters trace the past 15 years of decline in democracy on a regional level. You can trace with empirical evidence how the regions have started dividing and cracking. And you see that cracking now, right? There are compacts that more or less follow my regional lines over states grouping together to create their own vaccine regimens. You know, which states are sending their National Guard to occupy which other states. If you start tracing which state dominates each of these regional cultures, you'll start seeing the lines play out. So it matters a lot in both the details and the, and the timing.
- [50:25]
C
Colin Woodard is the director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell center for International Relations and Public Policy. His latest is Nations Apart How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America. Thank you so much.
- [50:42]
A
Thanks so much for having me.
- [50:49]
C
And that's it for today's show. Cory Warra produces the Gist. Jeff Craig is our social media director. Kathleen Sykes and I collaborate on the Gist list. Have you Texted Mike at 33777? Big things are going on with the Gist list. Michelle Pesca oversees it all benevolently. She would never commission any predestined or pre cooked intelligence. She also makes a delicious yellow cake.
- [51:18]
A
Boom Peru.
- [51:19]
C
G Peru Duper. And thanks for listening. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.