Gen Z Is Rewriting the Political Compass

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And I think that being able to recognize that, Although you may be in this different tribe, a lot of the time, a lot of where you stand overlaps. And I think that's really important in modern politics right now. It's interesting to see how people taking my test, that's all it takes for them to realize how you're not completely separate from this other person just because they're voting different from you.

It is my pleasure It's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast a really phenomenal young man who has created a politics quiz that has now been taken by hundreds of thousands of Americans. I wanted to bring him in to spotlight really a young person who's doing something positive, senior in high school here in New York City, Liam Petrie. Welcome, Liam.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right, so check it out. You are here primarily because you created a very, very interesting, thoughtful politics quiz that people can find at— drumroll please— findmypolitics.com. Now, what the heck is the origin story behind this quiz, and did you expect it to take off like it has?

Yeah, I mean, it really took off out of nowhere. The origin of this was I studied for a semester in DC at a political program, and throughout that program, I was interacting a lot with different politicians. I got to meet a lot of cool people. But, you know, all of these people surrounding me knew about their politics so strongly, I felt a little strange knowing that me personally, I didn't know my politics as well. So I set out to find the available political compass tests. There's, of course, of course, the original one, which was created in 2001. There is the other ones, 12 Axes, You know, there, there's, there's a multitude of them, but every time I'd take one, I was very unhappy with the results I'd get. I'd shift everywhere and I was just perplexed because it felt like such a, I mean, obviously politics are very nuanced, but if you're making a test, I'd think that the test would be good enough for people to take it. And all these tests had so many missing parts. So I set out for a couple of months to just create my own test to test myself. I spoke to professors, spoke to as many people as I could to just get recursive feedback. I mean, I'm 17 years old. There's a limit to my political knowledge. As much as, you know, I, I'd like to make the test just on my own, it was important for me to get feedback from people who have degrees in political science and whatnot. So I started creating the test. I created the questions, figured out what was most important. And then eventually it got to the point where people were starting to really love it around me. I was giving it to my friends to take, giving it to family, friends, just people who I knew, and they'd be sending it to other people. And I realized that this could be a really useful tool for a lot of people. I think if it could be marginally as helpful for me, I mean, for other people as it was for me, this would be— phenomenal. And so, you know, I set out online to Reddit specifically for advice on how to improve my test before I shared it to the world, and it just blew up from there. I was sitting at maybe a couple hundred users for the first week after I released it, and Reddit just really, really liked it. It went from maybe 2,000 users after a week of it being launched to 80,000 overnight, and it was very much unexpected. It blew up just from a singular Twitter post, and it was really interesting to see. I realized that at the time that this was just kind of the start of the website. There was so much I still wanted to improve on. I think it was doing a lot of good at the start, but this has been a project that has been progressively moving forward as a result of the community surrounding it.

And, how many people have taken it now to date?

I have tracked about 300,000 people. I would say probably upwards of 500,000 people have taken it just because sometimes I'm not able to track the data properly. On the second day that it was blowing up, I lost— well, I can't actually tell how much I've lost, but probably between 50,000 to 150,000 responses. I track the data so I can look at it to see how I can improve. And so I just lost a bunch of that. And it makes me estimate that it's probably around 500,000 users.

Yeah, it is. It's fun. It's fast. And it's illuminating in its way, though I will confess to you. So I've taken a couple of these political quizzes. And I like to believe that, you know, that segmenting us into these buckets. Certainly, I'm someone who thinks that segmenting us into 2 buckets is very, very destructive. Yeah. That's not a good thing. And so, where did you source the, I want to say, the 21 different ideologies? Was there a taxonomy that came from political science textbooks? And again, I did find it interesting reading up on them. And I suppose You know, people, I want people to potentially have the experience for themselves. But you start the quiz by saying you think you're this, then you pick it, and then you take the quiz, and then it's like, hey, like, we think you're this, and you're like, interesting. So yeah, where did you source the categories?

Well, I spent a lot of time just talking to people about what they like, well, specifically professors. But I started off, I knew what I generally wanted to cover. You know, there's a lot of different political ideologies, but obviously I'm born and raised in the United States. So my basis for any ideology is just, you know, where I begin is, you know, Republican and Democrat. And I kind of can branch off from there and determine what sections are separating one ideology from another, whether it's you know, a system trust, or maybe it's civil liberties. That's kind of how I'm determining the ideologies. You know, naming them is an interesting process. For coming up with the ideologies, the main thing that I focused on is just reading up on as many textbooks related to politics as I can, reaching out to professors. And I'll have people also just message me saying, like, you're missing this ideology. What do you think about this in Why haven't you added it? And I'll put a lot of thought into each one of those. That's how I've added a lot of ideologies. I only started off with 14 ideologies, and it's really obviously moved up from there. There's another 7 now, and most of those 7 have just— most of those 7 have just been a result of people reaching out to me and making me realize that maybe there is a little bit of a gap in a space where I'm missing an ideology. So that's mostly the process I've gone through. It's mostly just been speaking to people and then determining what makes sense and what doesn't and what parts are missing within my 5 axes where there's the biggest gaps.

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Yeah.

He also wrote Anxious Generation. I was wondering if those 13 were the basis of your original 14 and his work. And he has a number of organizations, but one of them is Heterodox Academy, I want to say. And he has a thesis too that the 2 tribes is a gross oversimplification. And he found that there are 13 tribes. And if I remember right, the folks that identify as far left progressive, it might be very low double digits. It might be like 11 or 12%. It might have gone up a little bit since Jonathan did his research. I found his 13 tribes fascinating. Was that the basis of the original 14?

Yeah, I think, I think 13 Tribes, the 13 Tribes was definitely a large inspiration. You know, I think this test was in large part due to the already existing tests and me taking what was good about a lot of the existing tests and seeing what needed to be changed. I really like the 13 Tribes that he has. I, I'm trying to remember the exact names.

Well, people, we can put a link to it in the— yeah, in the show notes so people can check out Jonathan Haidt's work. Jonathan, people probably know him best now as the author of The Anxious Generation, which was an incredible— maybe the most impactful book of my adult life, given that it changed legislation in 40 states. And I'm proud to say I'm friends with Jon. So I said to him, I was like, hey, Jon, how does it feel to have saved lives at that scale? Because I think there are a lot of lives that are saved by getting in my opinion, phones out of junior highs, as an example. I mean, across the population, they were making teenage girls particularly anxious and depressed, some of them very catastrophically so. But he wrote a book years before that that has influenced me to this day called The Righteous Mind. And now, unfortunately, because The Righteous Mind came out maybe 17 years ago or whatever it is, I'd have to look it up. People might not refer to it as frequently, but the subtitle of The Righteous Mind was Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. And so he tried to suss out, it's like, why is it that someone who I think is good and moral is on one side of the political divide and I'm on the other? And like, we're looking at each other and like, I still think, you know, at least I imagine that they're good and He came up with this universal set of moral values across populations. He spent a lot of time living in Asia and Latin America and other places, like a world-traveling social psychologist. So he identified some universal values, and some of them map to being liberal more than conservative, and some of them map to being conservative. So the ones that map to being liberal, are caring and fairness. And then the ones that map to being conservative are loyalty, authority, and sanctity. And then there's a 6th value, liberty, that people interpret differently and can be used either as, you know, as a liberal or a conservative. And there are biological underpinnings to some of these values where If you have a strong appetite for novelty, you like new stuff, you're more likely to be liberal than conservative. If you have a high disgust reflex, like you think things are gross, you have a higher propensity to be conservative than liberal. And appetite for novelty and disgust reflex are actually genetic. Like, you know, you're sort of born with either like, I love new stuff, I love trying foods, or like, I, you know, hate disorder or messiness or whatever. And when I read this stuff, I was like, oh my God, like, what John is saying is that a lot of our politics we're genetically predisposed towards. Because, you know, if you just are born— by the way, what's funny is like, I'm— I have a high appetite for novelty and a very low disgust reflex. Like, I just don't think things are gross. A lot of the stuff. I land kind of in between. But what John proposed is that the different political networks communicate along the different wavelengths where liberals, it's all about caring and fairness. And then for conservatives, it's all about loyalty, authority, and sanctity. More people respond to loyalty, authority, and sanctity than they do caring and fairness. And one of the things that John set out to answer is like, why do conservatives have a messaging advantage? Why are Fox's TV ratings 2 or 3 times higher than CNN's or MSNBC's? And you watch Fox and they're hitting certain notes. It is all around, you know, family, flag, soldiers. And then they categorize various things as like, you know, invasions, threats. So, The Righteous Mind very, very powerfully influenced me to this day. And one thing I find that your work, I think, is like the next level of is— so, Jonathan then later came out with the 13 Tribes analysis. Yeah. I feel like you're like a slightly updated version of that. And my question for you is, okay, you're a teenager, very, very enterprising. The fact that you did this, I think, is great. And then it ended up taking off in a way that you would never have predicted. So then people have probably been pushing you. It's like, oh, you should do this with it. You should do that with it. Now, and it is, by the way, not the case that you have to do anything with it. Like, it could just exist and be dope and people experience it. But have you gotten that kind of feedback? And like, have you felt a need to be like, oh, I need to try and Um, like build it towards, uh, this or that.

Yeah, well, I think, I, I think what this really reminds me of is, you know, and I, I've written about this before, but I got a lot of pushback on that, not adding fascism to, uh, my website as an ideology. And that was really tough for me because I had 2 directions I could go in. One where I kind of stepped forward in my position as the curator of the, this website And choose not to add it because I don't align with fascism and I don't agree with fascism, or keep my role as a nonpartisan figure and recognize that, yes, my role is to add ideologies that exist, and fascism is definitely an ideology that exists. And so I think that's what this kind of reminds me of. I did manage to come up with a compromise, which I think is where, like, I try to settle for all of these. I decided that you could only get fascism in my 80-question test because, you know, I think again, and I was saying this earlier, politics has such a level of nuance that my test, no test will be able to capture unless it's maybe a couple hours long. What my test does do is capture it very accurately with the amount of questions it has. And I just felt like that if someone was labeled a fascist from my 30 or 50 question test, that would not— that would not be a just, a just response by, by my test because there was not enough data or nuance within the questions to capture their ideology accurately then. And I think that's what this really reminds me of.

That's really funny. Has anyone responded to being called a fascist if they took the 80 question test and were like, fascist? And they'd be like, yep, that's me. You nailed it. Like, because it could be that someone, like, when they get called a fascist, they could be like, that's completely wrong. Or they could be like, yep. I don't know if you got that reaction. I mean, out of 500,000 people, you know, I would guess hundreds or even thousands of people might have, uh, gotten the, the fascist, uh, categorization.

It's luckily the, the lowest ranked ideology, but

that's— Oh wait, so for fun, what's the highest ranked? And then, uh, I mean, I guess we can say

it. Progressive realist is currently the highest ranked. It makes sense. I think that's what I would have predicted. I think liberal conservative is second right now. Centrist is not at all. I think when people talk to me about what they think is the most popular, they often go to centrist, which feels like a default answer. It's like not even close to 5th. I think it's 7th, maybe. Progressive realist is by far the most popular right now.

Well, it could be. Do you have a sense of the demos of the people that are taking your test? Is it skewing young?

Yeah. So I have an option where you can choose to fill out some demographic information. I would assume that the people taking my test are mostly between 18 and 40. That's what I've gotten from the demographic data. But also, this test is spread mostly through Reddit and Twitter, and like, that's the large majority of the people on it. Obviously, it's spread farther than that, where people will send it to people and then get sent to more people. But I still think that generally the demographic is between 18 and 40.

Yeah. So progressive realist is number one. Centrist, by the way, this is something I might as well— this is something you might not know, but listeners probably do know. So check it out. I'm the co-chair of the Forward Party, and the Forward Party sometimes gets called centrist, which irritates people who are associated with Forward to no end because it's like, oh, that's not what we are. uh, reform movement that wants to include people of every ideology and think that, um, getting segmented into 2 buckets again is very, very bad. It's very destructive, and, and it's manipulating us to thinking, okay, the source of my problems are the extreme of the other party over there. And each party just tries to elevate the, uh, bad— the worst actors of the other side and be like, oh, this is what all Republicans are like. And it's like the Jan 6 protesters and like, oh, You know, like, this is what everyone on the left is like. And because that there— it's supposed to be binary, um, then everyone just gets mad. Uh, meanwhile, uh, none of our problems are getting solved. And so everyone's getting, uh, like frustrated, and it's like, oh, what's the source of my frustration? Meanwhile, the elections were a part of— 90% of them are predetermined who's going to win in terms of party, uh, that all of the action is in the primaries, um, which ends up leaving The vast majority of people on the outside looking in, Congress has a 12% approval rating right now. That's not a lot. You're like, oh, he screwed that number up. No, it's actually 12%. And the reelection rate is 94% for incumbent members. So the average American has figured out that, oh, my vote doesn't matter in the vast majority of these circumstances. And the only times it does matter, you know, in terms of the presidential, which boost turnout. But even then, you're talking about 6, 7, 8 states that are genuinely swing states, and then the rest, you kind of know which party is going to win. So it's like a really not very genuinely lowercase d democratic system or representative system. And we're getting like more and more Americans are waking up to it. By the way, there was one poll I was shown that cracked me up. Um, which was that 75% of Americans right now would vote to replace every member of Congress, including their own, if they could. So, uh, one thing I do wanna note is that Congress has a 12% approval rating, but the approval rating of our specific member of Congress is significantly higher than that. It might be 50%, um, Mm-hmm. 54%, something along those lines. Because like, it makes sense. It's like, oh, my congressperson, like, they seem pretty reasonable and There's a significant chance they're the same quote unquote party as I am. So I kind of like them and maybe they show up to stuff and I'm like, oh, I saw them speak, so I like them. I mean, it's the way humanity works, but 75% of us would ditch that person that we kind of like if it meant we could get rid of everybody because we think the entire body is so dysfunctional. So, so, so that's a little bit of the backdrop. One thing I really like about your test, which is again at findmypolitics.com, is it does try and add complexity, nuance, like a degree of thinking and sophistication. Because if you have 21 tribes, then it's really harder to be like, oh, I hate half the population. It's one thing I also enjoyed about Jonathan Haidt's 13-tribe taxonomy.

Yeah, I mean, I think one thing about having 21 ideologies is you realize that someone voting across, you know, a Republican and a Democrat are only sometimes one step away from each other. And I think when I get a lot of emails talking about how people take it with their friends, like when it was first starting off, I have this specific email that I have starred And saying, I took it at the pub with my friends and we all got different ideologies, but we realized that we had a lot of the same axes where they're the same. We both had the same, you know, civil liberties and the same governance. And I think that being able to recognize that although you may be in this different tribe, a lot of the time, a lot of where you stand overlaps. And I think that's really important in modern politics right now. I think it's interesting to see how people taking my test, that's all it takes for them to realize how you're not completely separate from this other person just because they're voting different from you.

Yeah, that's beautiful. That really is the lesson that I hope people do take, because if you had the 5 axes or the 21 tribes or the 13 tribes or whatever it is, then again, it's much more difficult to just blame all your problems on that sliver or half the population. I mean, there are a lot of people in blue areas that literally think that everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a terrible person. And you're like, well, that is— you do realize it's tens of millions of people, that there are a lot of people there who voted for him for a whole host of reasons that might not be what you think. And so that's one thing I enjoy. If people saw that look, We are different, you know, we care about different things, but we might overlap much more than is presented to us, certainly in the media every day.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that's the beauty of a lot of these tests. I think it's also interesting how a lot of people— I think this goes not only for my test, but a lot of these personality-related tests where it is a test where you answer a bunch of questions and it gives you information about yourself. A lot of people wear it like a name tag. It'll be like, I'm Liam, I'm 17 years old, and I'm whatever ideology. And I think that that's interesting to see. I'm— I don't know how I feel about it. I think it's— I think it's good in a lot of senses, but I think that's also like, for example, when I think of fascism, I don't— I don't want someone putting that on the label. I think that's something we definitely see in larger-scale politics, like just with Republicans and Democrats, whether it's maybe it's free Palestine or not, or just any major question that just groups you into one or the other. I think, I guess having 21 ideologies, the benefit of that is you're probably not going to land in the same spot as someone. And so it's okay that you're not one or the other because you're going to be one of 21. And Maybe no one in the same room as you has the same answer as you, and that's okay because you're not getting grouped up against or because people can actually think about that and really compare differences and not have it just be a binary thing.

Yeah, I love that. You know, what you're saying does remind me a little bit of someone who takes the Myers-Briggs Briggs personality test. I don't know if you've heard of this or taken it, but they'd say something like, I am an INTJ because of their qualities and be like, you know, I'm— I think I am actually an INTJ.

I took it. I think I took it a couple of days ago. It was the first time I've shifted. I was like an ENFJ for all of my life. I think I'm maybe an ENTJ now. Wow.

We're only one letter off, man. Yeah. By the way, I think now I might be somewhere between an I and an E because I was historically very, very introverted. I was a bookworm. I was a nerd, loved to read. And then now people are shocked that I'm not an extrovert given that I

speak

so often, show up to events. I just gave a speech yesterday for thousands of people, honestly. Though there are folks I see, for example, I know some high famous comedians who are introverts for sure. Mm-hmm. It's kind of wild. So now that you have this, uh, phenomenon, uh, findmypolitics.com, new people take it every day, people sending you feedback, uh, do you have any designs, uh, on, on it? And one of the reasons I wanted to have this discussion with you is, um, to congratulate you and provide like a role model for young people saying like, look, uh, Liam had a problem, which was he didn't really understand his own politics. I thought that the tools out there were not filling the need. And so he said, shrug, like, let me build my own. And then it ended up becoming something. And then you iterated over and over again, I'm sure at this point, you know, like dozens of times. And I think that this— Hundreds.

Yeah.

Hundreds. Yeah.

Yeah.

So, and, and people have benefited from it. I mean, obviously they've told their friends. It's like circulated to the extent it has. I've taken the quiz. I suppose I should not Um, you know, like, let me just say that, uh, it gave me a different answer at the end than at the beginning. Whereas at the beginning I was like, I think I'm this. And then they said, we actually think you're this. And it did make me scratch my chin for a bit and say, interesting. Like, it was, it was a good experience.

Mm-hmm.

It was, uh, food for thought. It's great that you have, um, built this thing that has brought so much value to the world. Do you have a— and again, you don't have to have a vision, but like, what do you think is next for either you or the quiz?

Yeah, well, I think the main thing on my mind right now is I just spent a lot of time adding a new feature that basically allows for a group of people to take it and you get the aggregated results. So for example, well, this didn't happen. My classroom was supposed to take it, but for example, a classroom Of people could take it and you get to see where everyone lands relative. It can be anonymous, it cannot be anonymous, but I think it gives a lot of perspective for a larger group. It's like interesting to imagine. I think that's one thing I really haven't seen with any of these tests so far. And so I thought to add it. And I think what I'm focusing on right now is improving it. I have the first version out right now. People have really liked it so far.

I love the classroom take-it feature, and then you could put up the results. I think that'd be really fun for just about any classroom, especially if obviously the results were anonymized so no one felt like they were going to be singled out for being the fascist of the class. Now, I'll just keep doing that. That'd be really fun, but it'd be really fun just to be able to put it on, just put yourself up there. And I did see that feature, didn't use it, but the fact that it's new is cool. So Liam, congratulations again. It's findmypolitics.com. If someone wants to reach out to you to make a suggestion or be helpful in some way, how can they best do so?

Yeah, well, my email is liamytyt@gmail.com. That's where I've gotten the majority of questions and comments. I also have a LinkedIn where people reach out to me and On top of that, just on my website, there should be a form to just press a button and reach out to me.

Liam, thank you again for building something so awesome that has already made at least hundreds of thousands of people think. And I do think if we all saw each other as a diverse set of people that might have different brain wiring or particular leanings, but that let's say that there are 21 types of us and that there's no one to hate except for, again, those lousy fascists over on the edge, that the country would be a much better place and the world would be a better place. People can reach out to you. You gave them the means to do so, but findmypolitics.com. My big ask is that what I want findmypolitics.com at the end to say is to be like, hey, you should join the Forward Party. Click here to do so. We should actually sponsor the quiz and then give you a slice of merch sales or something like that.

I'd be happy.

Commercialize. Commercialize. It's time to corrupt you young. Get you while you're still in high school. Let's turn Find My Politics into a moneymaker. I'm kidding, but that's just what we do, what we do here at YAG HQ. Congrats again, Liam Petrie, findmypolitics.com.

Thank you so much, Mr. Yang.

Oh, Andrew, please. All to the good.

Thank you, Andrew.