 I learned pretty early on that people would take my reporting or my writing seriously, but based solely on where I was publishing it and not what I was writing. So if I put up a column in the Huffington Post, that column was not going to be read or taken seriously by anyone with center or right of center political views. If I wrote something for the independent journal or got interviewed on Fox News, there was nobody in the liberal world, nobody left the center who was going to take what I wrote seriously or care enough to examine it with an open mind. I found that out the hard way. My first job in news, my first journalism job was at Huffington Post. I did not go work for the Huffington Post as a 22-year-old because I was a die-hard bleeding heart liberal. It was because I got a job there and getting a job at a media organization is really hard. I applied to 70 media organizations and I got one job and so I took it. When I left Huffington Post and started writing for other places, I quickly saw that in the comments section of the articles and the responses to my tweets, people would just say, oh, this guy worked at HuffPost, that liberal rag, he's just another lib. That tag stuck with me. It stuck with me to this day. I got really tired of and frustrated with being pegged to the institutions or the brands that I was writing for because I didn't want to be represented by them. I wanted my writing and my arguments to stand on their own. That was first and foremost. The reason that I chose Substack and Newsletters and how it happened was more about another symptom of the media ecosystem, which is that I was working at a company called A-plus, a solutions-oriented media outlet where we wrote some feel-good positive stories about things that were working. I was on the politics beat there and we were bought by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment who basically turned the news website into a video shop. We did the pivot to video with Facebook and a lot of the other players in the media. I had the cord cut on my writing and my political reporting and I didn't have an outlet. I was writing video scripts instead of writing articles and columns and doing political reporting that I wanted to do and so I was looking for a place to do my writing. So I started Tangle and started on Substack while I had a full-time job as an editor and it was in the beginning it was sort of like a side project that I was experimenting with but I chose Substack instead of freelancing or anything else because I wanted that independence. I wanted it to just be to be mine.