either my name is dan logan i work here at channel seventeen thanks for tuning in i'm joined today by one of my lifelong friends and someone who has stumbled their way into a pretty cool job paul macleod reporter for buzz feed thanks for joining me in finding out more about other people might be as well as you questions where ok i figure we're going to be catching up this weekend anyway we might as well share it with our viewership dan made this a condition of me being able to stay with him while i was visiting vermont so so here we are given back to the community so well despite all odds your job's pretty cool talk me through a day in washington reporting for us what's what's it like oh my god that's actually  really tough to answer because it's so different depending on what's happening like the cycle of news which would normally be you know all right there's an issue of the day and then we're going to spend a few days kind of unpacking that and kind of like exhausting it and then something else will develop that has been thrown out the window now with trump where essentially it's kind of at this fever pitch all the time you've got you've got things that sometimes two or three stories throughout a day that will come out that normally would be like the story of the month and you don't even have time to pay attention to them because there's just something around the corner immediately afterwards i mean he's always one tweet away from just people setting their hair on fire you know like hills like will be will be talking about health care one day and then something he'll start you know tweeting at the leader of north korea and everyone's like  you know figure out what's going on either in legislation or what's going to happen you know we're both canadian so we're used to a much more calm system where you who first of all they actually pass legislation in the parliament again  doesn't happen as much here and you know i'm used to you introduce a bill and then that bill goes before committee study and then it gets debated and then it either fails or it passes and in the states it's just not like that at all it's it comes out of nowhere you've got all of these competing issues that are battling and then it's basically all decided by closed doors and then agreement to reach and then bam within like forty eight hours from like nothing being written down to a being like signed by the president it can happen that quickly so you just can't like blink basically because shit's going to happen speaking of shit happening we have a call ok great which is kind of nuts so we're going to take that and see if i can no i don't think so i think that might be gone then call back please call back you actually kind of jumped into my second question there i'm hoping you can reflect for a minute on the differences that you've experienced and reporting in the capit my canada versus the capital in the states because i imagine it's quite a far cry it's so so so so different it ways that are better and worse i mean i will say the one thing that is way more fun about political reporting in america so  work on probably over five years americans are way more talkative than canadians and it is great for being a reporter because you will have you look at democrats or republicans and have them bash members of their own party in a way that you would never get in canada there's such a such a feeling of party unity there like just as i ran them example i remember going up to a republican congressman when i was pretty new on the hill and  about like who's on what side and who is fighting with who and and like he keep this guy who like the sec is like the second time we've ever talked and it's giving me all of this like you know very frank descriptions of how his own party is divided and that kind of stuff doesn't really happen put on a journalist to try to parse to be nature what the actual story is what the same time dedicated space to addressing either misconceptions or misinformation or putting have been put out there either  yeah well that's the first part of question it is i mean it it almost feels like you're trying to paddle back the tide when you talk about trying to fight seamounts of misinformation out there and well we will do as we'll do things like  will put out stories that will i should be dedicated to like breaking down all of the spin or lies or or misinformation out there and being like look here's what's really true about this issue and with you know try to cite things heavily so that we can give people a resource to work with to  ground themselves in a factual basis and you know we try to do that a lot in and i reporting where instead of just citing one side said as as and one side says that to actually be like no but here's what's actually factually factually accurate here is what this throwing rocks their windows around you and then disobeying future i think brave new world feels about right in terms of the soaping futures i would like is that get more of a mad max vibe if we could i think you know i'm on board with yeah i think we would do rob i have a couple other somewhat related questions here which ties into probably this dystopian future where we're talking about the political divide here the partisanship is so so deep and i don't know about you but that is one of the biggest reckonings for me in moving here is seeing that it's everything is a baseball game or a war or a football game like you're always moving the ball or hitting home runs and everything is a competition between two teams in almost every single topic of discourse how do you see that playing out in the next let's say five ten twenty years and do you see any way of repairing damages that are very clearly  existant in american politics well we we were talking about this yesterday i think about how that there's not really any kind of fear or space for nonpartisanship in the american system because we're used to having things like a deep politicized judicial system a governor general who is a for those who don't know it's our head of state it's sort of a representative for the queen but it's it's having someone who is is not a political actor  is sort of like a referee or even our speaker actually even a better example our speaker of the house is that even though it is an elected position as opposed to be a nonpartisan referee is probably a good way to put it i mean they're supposed to rule fairly they're supposed to act in non partisan way and then you look at it in the american system where the speaker who has all of this power becomes the ultimate political position because then you can as good ones because here you can block any legislation from coming floor that the opposing party wants to present in fact you can block you not only can but do ryan has done this has been basically the norm since the ninety's this thing called the hastert rule which is basically years you're only supposed to well it's supposed to it's completely bullshit m but the idea is that you only bring in legislation that is supported by the majority of the majority but that means that if there is a bipartisan piece of legislation that will say right now even though the house about to change now let's say a large amount of democrats in a minority of republicans would work together it would easily pass with more than fifty percent of the house paul ryan would and does block this from ever going to a vote because it is not supported by a majority of the majority party and it is it is i mean that is  just a open stated level of insane partisanship that is what i get there today it seems insane to us but it's completely commonplace here it's it's and it's basically the norm yeah i don't know how it gets any better because all of the entrenched interests are in continuing that fight and i mean there are many there are so many there are so many there's so much money being made in reinforcing that to write like if you have a radio station do you want to and you want to make money do you want to cater to one side and get people riled up and angry so that they're tuning in to learn about who they should how they should get and get the other side there's a lot of money in that or you can go down the middle and try to be an informative resource and th decades and decades and decades and it works i mean if there's this body that serves to keep you in check and call you on your bullshit you want to you want people to tune them out and this is i mean i  behavior i don't think back like some of the stuff he does is helpful and i think it's sort of self aggrandizing but that's neither here nor there like my personal views on it like the guy is not going around karate chopping interns getting a doctor videos sort of trying to exaggerate like the movement of a hand to make it look like it was worse than it was i mean this is the mind with the rhetoric it's just it's really disheartening and you you just kind of have to push through it because you know it's there's no there's no smoke and mirrors here it's all very apparent like anyone who wants to see what's happening and see what's happening so are you saying that there are people that just don't want to see what's happening is that kind of your take on the other side oh my god yeah i mean we've the money people that like  in a non confrontational way just sort of like so like how do you get your stories do politicians like call you up and like feed them to you and you know what i do like no no no no no and i'm going to explain sort of how it worked they would be genuinely interested and surprised people just really do because they're told so often that you know the politicians of the enemy of trump or whoever it is that saying and they just they just accept it as fact  speaking of politicians you have some pretty regular daily interactions with many legislators senators yes he's your favorite who is my favorite who do you have a great interaction with who brings your day when you see them in the halls that's really tough when i will i'll just tell my story of the last time i talked to john mccain who was always like super salty but like reporters loved him because he  and so like we almost walked into each other we were just couple feet away and i just saw him he's saying he's got the cast and he's walking with his cane and everything and i just said to him like oh so i guess i guess we're not going to playing soccer at lunch and he does like it and he does like i looked up at me and he just got this i was like oh no i'll maligned by the press corps is there someone who is the opposite of that someone who is or maybe even to people you know so there is there are people who make it pretty tough to do your job you get the information you know them i think i think people sometimes  was surprised when i when i got went there that some of the perceptions i had were total backward so especially when you look at like trump for example who is you know very hostile towards the media i kind of thought that that would filter down and i thought there'd be a general republicans a kind of hostile media and  bernie sanders look at that they don't they don't talk to reporters too much when they're walking around in congress they just they just move on action i think they just have kind of decided there's nothing in it for them and they don't want to get caught up in some sort of like stumble of speech that will come back to haunt them and an attack ad a year from now and so and so they just don't talk about so it's weird it's like there's no real rhyme or reason to it it just it really is a person by person basis not like he was clearly losing control and we were i was going to sit in the back room and one point he was he was leaving it was like it's the first break in here and he was walking out and you can see i'm just i don't know it kind of like he was kicking himself like he was clearly not happy with how things were going and he was very frustrated i think about himself i think i should psychoanalyzed but from my read was he looked like he was just like mad that he kind of lost its cool and and i just remember thinking like this is going things got really weird when jeff senator jeff flake of arizona he was it was something was up and we were like what is what is going on why are they not just passing this nomination through really quickly and and went for like an hour where like they were clearly negotiating some sort of deal in the back room and no one knew what was going on but that kind of chaotic environment i had only seen once before that was during the obamacare repeal where we thought that was going to happen and then john mccain clearly like it took it out a little bit time to be like oh my god like they don't have the votes what is happening here and then and so then you know there was another week of an f b i investigation and over that time you could you could just tell i guess the polling just turned against democrat that turned against i want to turn against ford but it turned in favor of  cavanagh among republicans and you could see trump get more emboldened and then by the end you know i mean i was just in florida for the midterms and you know i was talking to some republican operatives there and they were saying that like that have nothing helped them hugely that that they saw during that it turned men of a certain age but also women who have young sons turn them back towards republican party because it is i guess in some way they thought well because after complicated you know for example like the the way the the the first letter all came out like that huge amount of misinformation back your first point this is this is a story this is an issue where we actually put out a play by play of how it all became public because people  thinking when dianne feinstein leaked it to the press or tried to create this whole scandal and timed it perfectly like that is could not even farther than the truth dianne feinstein's office was not the ones who were behind that so what does anyone know or a complete shuffle one direction or the other where would you put buzz feed on the spectrum i'm guessing it's on the left side somewhere but more the thing i'm more interested in know from you is where would you get your news if you if you wanted to find your opinion the most impartial the least partisan outlets in the states what would you recommend well so i was actually asked the first question is for days ago when i was down in florida and i would say th the weird thing the buzzword is that while we have some issues where we've been openly political on gay marriage for example like the the stated position of the company at the time during the debate was like we are in favor of gay marriage we're not going to be we're not we're treating this as a human rights issue we're not treating this as a gay two sides like everyone's opinion it's equally valid kind of issue and there's been some other things like that but for the most part we actually play a very straight like we take a so sometimes think they will come out on the news in the new side which might be likes i don't know some jokey thing about like obama or whatever which we have nothing to do with but it will all get sort of wrapped up in that but in terms of i mean i try to read a lot of sources  in terms of in terms of federal politics for like where i go outside of as we the washington post in the new york times are really good i mean the amount of resources that those papers have and the deep investigations that they do it's it's like they're they're really incredible i'm really happy that we have like robust newspapers still but you know there's a lot out there i mean pro publica there's great stuff for investigative reporting  i mean yeah they've i think i think in a lot of places like the daily paper is still a good place to go to if there's a newspaper person myself in the paper background you know but yeah yeah yeah no i like i  it's a lot of research that goes into fantasy sports and i'm just wondering if if you might consider using some of your buzz feed weed chasers of all to be better at first of all in our fantasy baseball league i once finished first in the regular season three years in a row and got robbed a lot of integrity i think is needed in terms of the men in the read it a lot of integrity required in the in the political field political reporting but i'm still fairly convinced that as children you cheated when you played risk so i want to go to form you can address the viewers there's probably like seven or eight of them i think my parents are tuning in and they'll be very interested know if you're ready to really come to terms with what you did as a child i was so appalled no they they've look i've had enough run ins with your parents  up we look at the rules and i was vindicated i was vindicated you'd never beat me at risk and look you can you can win all the fantasy leagues you want when it gets when you take it outside of the internet bring it down to the