Tangle - Everything we got wrong (and right) in 2023

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Welcome to a new era in Tangle! Today will be the first episode with my Friday co-host, our Managing Editor, Ari Weitzman. We are working towards releasing Friday subscriber only content in the near future and this will be one of our new offerings. We'll be presenting the a few episodes for free. In an attempt at the virtue of accountability, I like to dedicate the first Friday edition of every new year to grading some of my previous writing. The way this process works is simple: About two months ago, I told my team to start looking through our archives with a retrospective lens, reading the things we published, and flagging instances where we made authoritative comments or outright predictions. I also sorted through reader criticisms and feedback, and suggestions about articles to revisit.Then, our team went back as a group to evaluate that writing, and settled on a grade for how we did.Of course, we published over 200 newsletters last year, so we can't grade every single one. Instead, we tried to focus on newsletters tied to the biggest stories of 2023 — the stories that garnered the most public attention and reader feedback. I'm going to share with you key excerpts from my writing and my overarching take, and then a brief "reflection" section along with a grade on the A-to-F scale.At the end, I'll do some rapid-fire grading and also revisit the 19 predictions we published in 2021.You can find our 2022 review here and our 2021 review here.You can also check out our latest YouTube video about misinformation and fake news that has spread like wildfire in the three months since Hamas’s attack on Israel and the subsequent fighting in Gaza here.Today’s clickables: Introducing new co-host Ari Weitzman! (0:40), Introduction of the 2023 recap (14:34), McCarthy elected as Speaker (17:16), Chinese spy balloon (21:55), Trump's New York indictment (26:15), Debt ceiling deal (29:46), Biden announces 2024 run (35:33), Should Feinstein retire (41:43), RFK runs (42:56), DeSantis runs (49:37), Inflation coverage (56:52), Biden's border plan (60:57), Israel piece (64:43), Rapid fire (76:20), GPA (82:18), 19 predictions (83:53), The Airing of Grievances (86:20)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and today's a new dawn, a new era in the Tangle media ecosystem. I am joined today for the first time ever by the new Tangle podcast co-host, Ari Weitzman. Ari, thanks for being here. Yeah, it's super weird to be on this side of it.

All that I've been doing with the podcast before is just editing the output, and now I'm on the input. It's a whole other world of things to be self-conscious about. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited. One of the things I'm looking forward to is what kind of emails we get from people about your voice. Um,

whether, whether they're pro expecting, I don't know, pro or anti Ari's. Well, I just like people have weird things about new voices and new, we got emails about John's voice being silky smooth, but maybe not,

not quite enthusiastic. And if you've kind of got, uh, our friend, Paul, our mutual friend, Paul, being silky smooth, but maybe not quite enthusiastic. And if you've kind of got, our friend Paul, our mutual friend Paul, I talked to him today and told him you were coming on the podcast and he said you sort of have like a late night jazz radio host voice. I thought that was a pretty nice compliment. That sounds like a win. I was going to say, I think following John isn't exactly setting me up for success, but I'll take that. That's a really good cue. If people are now hearing it that way, that sounds great.

Of course, no one hears their own voice that way. Yeah, I think that'd be a big win for you. Okay, so listen, I think, first of all, we need to talk a little bit about what's happening here. You have been involved in the Tangle newsletter for a long time. Heading into the new year, one of the big priorities for us as a media organization is improving our podcast. And so I personally have never really enjoyed our podcast. I mean, I love the content. I think the content is great because I'm very proud of the work we do in the newsletter. But it's basically most of the podcasts are basically me reading our newsletter, which because it's me and I know it's in the newsletter, I don't find particularly interesting.

And we're going to keep doing that in the sense that we're going to keep publishing our newsletters as podcasts. But I thought it'd be really fun to have somebody else on with me. And you obviously make the most sense to be the person to do that. And I guess in order to introduce you, we should talk a little bit about our background before we jump into today's episode. Which, you know, I think kind of the genesis story is that we were teammates in college as Ultimate Frisbee Players at the University of Pittsburgh. And we discovered that we both had a strong passion for writing. And we actually had a writing group for a while, along with a bridge club and some other sweet stuff we did in college. But I feel like it's been a dream for us for a while now

to be doing professional writing content output together. So this is kind of the culmination of many years of talking about this happening. And now I feel like it's actually nature, a couple edits to what you said. But I think the dream came true six months ago or so when I was finally able to come on full time. I don't think the dream was ever we should be talking to people and having them listen to our conversation. That's the dream. It is a dream, but I don't think it was the dream. We've been writing buddies for a while, and it is pretty rewarding to be able to do that professionally.

It is a dream come true. It does feel great. But I also think my first memory of our first conversation is about another shared interest of ours. Do you remember? A jersey number, maybe? Yeah. Yeah. That's my recollection.

Except one of those fall frisbee tournaments that's just really, really rainy and muddy and 35 degrees and freezing, but not freezing enough for it to be snowing. And we're doing our warm-up lap, and you wear number 19. I wear number 19. We talked about it. I had a way better reason. Pissed you off. I got the number. It's the only time I think you ever didn't wear 19 was your freshman season. Yeah. It's the only time in my life I've ever not worn that jersey number. I had to wear number 91, which is the year I was born. So it could have been worse. I still had some association with

that. But yeah, do you want to tell everybody what happened? So basically we had this debate over who's, who should get number 19. I was a freshman. I was like a hotshot freshman recruit. And I thought I was the man and Ari was a fifth year and nobody. Yeah. Fifth year transfer who nobody knew, but was better than me at ultimate. And so I was like, there's no way this guy is taking my Jersey number because I was the big hotshot freshman. And then we had to pitch why we should each get the jersey number. And my pitch was, I've always worn the number 19. And I really love Keyshawn Johnson. Who's this very obnoxious wide receiver, former wide receiver in the NFL. He's also super talented. Very good, very good wide receiver. But I liked him because of his swag and he talks a lot of smack and he's got an attitude. And so I said that and then Ari said this.

That when I was 15 years old, I was diagnosed with a tumor in my small intestine that required surgery in order to save my life. And when I was given degenerative anesthesia, as I was going under, the surgeon or the anesthesiologist told me to count backwards from 20. And knowing that the odds of survival for the surgery for me was about 80%, which isn't low, but anything with an eight's pretty bad, I feel like, there was a good chance that as I was counting, those were going to be my last words. So I was counting from 20, got to 19, and I was out. So for me, 19 represented both how close I was to death and the humility involved with that, but also how unbreakable I was and how confident I should be. And Isaac

offered Keyshawn Johnson, baby, know him. Just a solid argument normally, but I think it was pretty easy to see who earned it there. Yeah. Suffice it to say, I did not get the jersey number 19. So great. That's a good origin story. So that's the introduction to Ari Weitzman. That's the introduction to our relationship. It started from there, many bridge clubs, many other clubs. It's been a pleasure. It's been a ride. If you are a regular podcast listener, you're going to be hearing Ari's voice a bit more. I'm really excited about bringing him on. I think related to the work that we do, Ari's one of the smartest and most thoughtful people I've ever gotten to work with.

And I've been around a lot of people in the media space. I think in part because he doesn't come from the media world, which is really interesting and adds a nice wrinkle to the kind of the work I do in the insular world that I live in. He's also really good with numbers, which I'm not. So a lot of pressure. If you ever hear Ari say something wrong that has to do with numbers, make sure you write in because it will really crush his soul. That's the kind of thing. It annoys me a lot of pressure. If you ever hear Ari say something wrong that has to do with numbers, make sure you write in because it will really crush his soul. That's the kind of thing. It annoys me a lot. Yeah. He's going to be here co-hosting

here and there on the weekly pod doing some Friday edition stuff, helping me co-host when we have guests on and interview people together sort of as the right hand. I'm super excited for this new era and I hope you love the update. And if you don't, you're probably just going to have to deal with it, but you can write to us and let

us know honestly what you think. You know where to reach me, Isaac at readtangle.com, I-S-A-A-C. And if you want to say something to Ari, you can write to him too. His email's just Ari, A-R-I at readtangle.com. And going forward, as promised, one of the things that we're going to do in 2024, which a lot of you have been asking for for a long time, is reproducing our paywalled Friday editions as podcasts. And that is something that we're going to do today. We're going to go over the Friday edition that we published today. It's January 12th, Friday, as we record this. You probably won't get this episode for a couple of days, but we're going to talk about our 2023 year in review

where we graded all of our writing. We're offering this podcast for free today, and we're going to keep doing a lot of free podcasts that are like this in the next few weeks. But down the road, we're going to create a members-only podcast ecosystem where people who are just podcast listeners can get all this extra content for some kind of small price. So that's a big update. We're going to run through all this stuff that we covered in 2023 and talk about our grades and talk a little bit about our coverage.

And then Ari and I discussed, we decided that we needed some kind of shtick to close out every episode that we did together. And there are a lot of different podcasters who do this kind of thing. I love it. Bill Simmons, for instance, has a parent corner on his podcast where him and one of his guests,

they just talk about a parenting story at the end of every podcast, something going on with their kids. Which we could just make up. Yeah, we could make up something like that as two childless bros. But instead, we're going to do an airing of grievances at the end of every podcast, which I'm really excited about because I need a safe space to talk about the weekly things that annoy me and speak freely outside of the...

I think it's a good outlet considering that Entangle every day, we end with something nice. A good story is sort of a chaser to the often bitter shot of the news, but it represses a lot of our natural cynicism. I think it's good to have an outlet for that too. Yeah. I'm very excited for it. This is not my grievance, but speaking of cynicism, I'm literally going insane right now, watching people talk about the Houthi rebel stuff on Instagram and Twitter. I feel like- Let's get that out of the way for sure. Yeah. Let's get out of the way before you get, I feel like I'm losing my goddamn mind. We're going to talk about this. I mean, we're going to do a newsletter and probably a podcast about this

next week, but I hope this podcast gets out there this weekend or later today or whatever. So hopefully those of you who are going to post about this or talk about this, hear this before it comes out. I just, just like, just so people know the Houthi rebels, A, are not Yemen. Those things are not synonymous. In fact, they overthrew the Yemeni government about 10 years ago. So please don't post about them like they're Yemen and B, they're not your Yemeni government about 10 years ago. So please don't post about them like they're Yemen. And B, they're not your friends. They are not your friends. I'm seeing so

many people, so many friends of mine. I have to say this too, to be fair, a lot of them lefty, like leftist friends of mine, posting about this stuff on Twitter and Instagram and about how brave the Houthi rebels are about, you know, this incredible thing they're doing to protest the atrocities that Israel is inflicting in Gaza right now, which are atrocities. I totally agree. They don't care about Palestine. They're literally like, if you think of them, you should imagine like pirates, Islamic extremists, their slogan is literally about death to America and Jews and Israel and how they want to be an eternal curse on Jews. They're an Islamist extremist movement. They are not people you want to be lining up behind and

throwing your support behind. And it is just totally bonkers to me that people, A, think that they are like representative of the Yemeni government and B, are posting all this insane stuff across social media about how great what they're doing is, which is they're shooting missiles. They're firing missiles at merchant ships, at civilian, at like people who are like carrying our groceries on their ships, just like civilian ships. They're firing missiles at, and we're supposed to think that that's awesome. They're not fighting Israel. This isn't like a war against their... All right, whatever. We'll talk about it more later. It's one of those examples of both side brain, I think, where you have to think one side versus the other. And if there's anything that's

purported to be opposing the thing that I am against, then that thing ergo must be good. So saying, well, Israel's sort of being very aggressive in Gaza right now. It's not a thing that you can really argue against, that Israel's being very militant in Gaza, but saying, therefore, since the Houthi rebels are claiming that they're opposing Israel, they're the good guys. You got to hand it to them. of really bad information out there. So I'm really excited to write about this and cover it next week.

But I'm sitting around on Friday afternoon trying to get out of work and reading this stuff and it's driving me completely bonkers. And just tone check real quick. Hopefully it does not further develop into a regional war. It's not something that we're excited about by any means, but just to try to counter the misinformation is where the excitement is.

Yeah. And I don't want to spoil my take, but I'm not supportive of the president launching attacks on a foreign country without congressional approval. I'm not excited about us bombing areas in Yemen. That's not at all what I'm saying. I'm just, yeah, it's just totally nuts. So this one has gotten me a little fired up. I'm hoping by Tuesday I'll be more level-headed and cooled off. But right now I'm just like, I cannot believe some of this stuff we're seeing. All right, with that out of the way, we got to get into today's edition. We're going to be doing our 2023 year-end review, everything we got right and wrong in 2023 with some grades. And we're going to jump in right now.

Okay, so every day in Tangle, we are doing our best to present a wide range of views on what is happening in U.S. politics. And at the end of these editions, we do my take. And those of you who've been listening to the Tango podcast for a long time have probably heard me say a million times before, but my take is just a chance for me to share my own perspectives on those views, the views we're sharing from the right and the left, the story that we're covering. I'm never trying to be the authoritative final voice on any issue, but I feel strongly about some issues like what's happening right now in Yemen and some of the commentary about it. And I think it's sort of an act of transparency for me as the author of Tangle to share my own views. And it's an opportunity

for me to give some fresh views on what's happening. So we spend five days a week all throughout the year writing and talking about the things happening in the political world, which means we're bound to say a lot of stuff that's accurate and bound to get a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. And there is just simply not a lot of accountability in the world right now. It's one of the things that kind of grinds my gears, whether it's the halls of Congress or professional sports referees, people can just suck at their jobs and nothing happens. So in an attempt at the virtue of accountability,

I like to dedicate the first Friday edition of every new year to grading some of the things that we publish in Tangle. The process is pretty simple. About two months ago, I told Ari and the rest of my team, start looking through our archives with a retrospective lens, reading things we publish, flagging instances where we made authoritative comments or outright predictions. And then we're going to sort through all the criticisms, the comments, and we're going to go back, evaluate the writing, settle on a grade for how we did. Obviously, we published over 200 podcasts last year, so we can't grade every single one. But we did try to focus on podcasts or newsletters that

were tied to the biggest stories of 2023, the stories that garnered the most public attention and reader feedback. And I'm going to share some key excerpts from my writing. Ari and I are going to talk about these grades. We did them in the standard A to F American scale for those of our international readers out there where I guess this is different in a lot of places. A is very good and F is very bad. And at the end, we're going to talk about my 19 predictions I published in 2021, where they stand. And if you're interested, you can find some of our reviews from 2022 and 2021 in today's episode description. Does that cover it? You think that's a pretty good intro for what we're about to do? Sounds good to me. All right. We're going to jump in with our coverage of Kevin

McCarthy and his election as speaker. Why don't you break this down, Ari? Yeah, sure. So in January, we covered Kevin McCarthy being elected as the new House Speaker. And during the fight for the speakership, we in Tangle thought that McCarthy would eventually win the gavel and that he would make a lot of concessions in order to do so. And that did happen. We also wrote that the game of chicken McCarthy was playing on the debt ceiling would lead to a default or some stock market hit or serious cuts to social programs like social security. And that did not happen. Here's one relevant excerpt. The roughly 20 members who forced these concessions are being called ultra-conservatives and terrorists and hostage takers and far-right, but few people are calling them prudent or impactful or smart or effective, with the

exception of Jacobin, of all places. They were outnumbered nearly 20 to 1 on the Speaker vote and managed to change the shape of Congress and extract what they wanted despite not putting up a single legitimate alternative for Speaker. It also speaks to a missed opportunity from Democrats, who could have taken any of the first 14 failed votes as an opportunity to vote in McCarthy or a consensus pick without ceding all this ground to the right flank. In the end, those 20 members got what they wanted. They probably got more than they expected, and there are lessons there for minority factions across Congress. So how'd we do there? So this is a good example of a piece of writing that I

look back on where I started reading and I was like, oh yeah, I was kind of nailing this. And then these little lines popped up where I felt like I would kill to go back and change some of this. On the dynamics of the whole speaker election and the influence of the House Freedom Caucus, I think I pretty much got it right. McCarthy got elected. He made concessions to

get there. And directly related to this excerpt, I was also right to point out that this was a huge win for the House Freedom Caucus and the representatives should take a note on not being afraid to throw their weight around, which I thought the House Freedom Caucus did pretty well. And they got the message too. All throughout 2023, the House Freedom Caucus kind of punched above their weight, including when they eventually removed McCarthy in October. However, we gave this a B-, which I think was the right grade, because I got a bit wrong on the asides about the debt ceiling standoff and the risk that the showdown would be hugely disruptive for the United States, which it decidedly was not. So a decent start to the year. I think it was hard to really imagine all the things that would come out of this fight, which we're going to talk about a little bit more when we get later into 2023 here, but a B minus, an opening B minus, which is kind of like, you know, my entire academic career summed up. Yeah. Spoiler alert for that. But I think if there's anything, so I know for you,

the big thing that you really wanted to change was the way that this would affect the US economy more broadly. I think for me, the thing that I wish we would have done a little differently was talk about the way, the shape of the board, as it were, for the House Republicans based on what the demands were and the sort of sword of Damocles that was over McCarthy's head for the whole year, which was they're demanding fiscal responsibility, they're demanding budget cuts. But the only two places really where you're going to make cuts to the budget that are significant are in defense or social programs like social security that are

hugely popular. And knowing that those are hugely popular and hard to cut means there's not a lot of room to maneuver. We could have seen that this was only going to show up as eventual downfall for one side or the other. And I think the failure for us to read the tea leaves there is something that I think, in retrospect, we could have gotten into a little more. Yeah, that comes up a couple times in today's review where I look back and I'm like, I can't believe we didn't see that coming. And I really do try not to make a bunch of predictions. They sort of come out organically in our writing because political prognostication is, I think, sort of a cheap trick. But at the very least, I agree. Something like that should have been included in our analysis. All right, so that's McCarthy. That was one of our first articles we published of the year. It

came out in January. I want to jump next to the Chinese spy balloons. Do you remember those? It feels to me like literally years ago, but it was actually February of 2023. I couldn't believe when I saw that this happened in 2023, people were freaking out about this story. It was like the, I mean, the, I think we did two newsletters about it maybe because it, it was in the news for like two weeks straight. Dominated the cycle. It dominated the cycle. Like, what are we going to do? Are they going to shoot it down? All this stuff. It was moving so slowly across all of the Northern US. It was the slow motion. It was one of those media dream stories where all the narratives were there, but the stakes

weren't really high. But you could drum up the stakes to seem higher if you wanted to. And it just felt like one of those drum beats of insanity that we really did want to cover, And it just felt like one of those drum beats of insanity that we really didn't want to cover, but eventually we had to. Yeah. And so we went back, we read this piece that we published about it. The thrust of my piece was pretty straightforward. I'm not going to read straight from the excerpt. Just to summarize, I think I said affirmatively, this is definitely a Chinese spy balloon.

I thought their explanation was pretty laughable. I did not support shooting the spy balloon down over land. I thought that was a bad idea, which I think panned out well, because when they did shoot it down, there was like a 10-mile debris field or something. It was insane, a seven-mile debris field. So yeah, no bueno to do that over Oregon or wherever it was seen. And in the grand scheme of things, I said, this is all being blown wildly out of proportion. We all spy on each other constantly in the great world power games, all the chess games. The United

States has spies all over China and sends all sorts of different aerial stuff all across Asia spying on people. I was not surprised to hear that China had spy balloons in our orbit. I mean, I understand why it was jarring, but I think more than anything, people just like got a real dose of reality about what's actually happening in these war games and these espionage games happening all over the globe. So we gave ourselves a great grade for this one, which I think was well deserved. We got a solid A, which, you know, I was super happy to read this piece. I think I was right to tell everybody to chill. Given the regularity of this kind of spying, this felt totally, like, wildly blown out of proportion to me in terms of how much oxygen it took up um and i was right that you know it was a spy balloon there was if you remember there was actually quite a bit of

debate about that uh we now see the same weather the same errant weather balloons as china calls them flying all over taiwan which you know just drifting away yeah just happened to be drifting across taiwan it's so bizarre how that happens uh so you know there just drifting away. Yeah. It just happened to be drifting across Taiwan. It's so bizarre how that happens. Uh, so, you know, there's a great article in the wall street journal actually from last month, like mid or late December about these Chinese spy balloons that are being seen in areas like Taiwan now that are identical to the errant weather balloons that just floated across the United States. So, yeah, I feel pretty good about this one. I mean, I don't really have any regrets.

Is there anything you would change from our... You know, I don't think there's anything that I would necessarily change in how we covered it. No, I think the only thing that I would really say I could possibly disagree on at all is the optimistic note of it's like a wake-up call for us or for most American civilians about the state of play for espionage. Because I kind of thought after COVID, this is going to be a wake-up call for everybody about risks and normalizing risk around us and having a better ability to think about things that are very dangerous. And I don't think that happened. So I really don't think that we're going to have this lasting impression of, okay, yeah, espionage is happening. It's a pretty uncomfortable state of affairs, but I know that China's going to have some spies. We're going to have some spies. Some of it's going to leak into public knowledge every once and again, and it's not going to disrupt my day too much.

I think next time we hear something like this, it's going to be the same thing all over again. All right. Next up, we've got Trump's New York indictment. This was the indictment over the alleged hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. I'll let you take this one, Ari. payments to Stormy Daniels. I'll let you take this one, Ari. Yeah, this was something where when we look back at it now, it's hard to remember that the indictments were not a foregone conclusion. This was in March. Trump had tweeted that he was going to be indicted over his alleged hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. This was the first of the big indictments in 2023. We had rumors about it. We didn't necessarily know if it was going to happen. So this is what

we wrote. I'm not at all convinced this indictment is actually imminent if it's coming at all and certainly don't think liberals should start dreaming about Trump getting perp walked in handcuffs or ending up in an orange jumpsuit. That just isn't going to happen. Unsurprisingly, the New York Times appears to have very well-placed sources in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, and their reporting certainly seems to suggest an imminent indictment. But after years of such rumors, we agree with one of the commentators that we should all wait for the actual thing to happen before talking about it as if it has happened already. So, indictment, not imminent. Perp walk, not coming. Yeah, we kind of flubbed this one.

Oops. Yeah. I mean, okay, in my defense— There was no perp walk, I guess. Yeah, there was no perp walk. And I still think—I mean, I think the legal threats to Trump, obviously, outside of this indictment are much graver. And if I were going to rewrite this now, I maybe wouldn't classify this as the liberal fantasy or whatever. Because I still don't... If you put a gun to my head and made me bet on whether Trump's ever going to serve a day in prison, I would definitely bet no. But his odds have for sure gone up in the last two years with all the legal trouble, or the last year with all the legal trouble he's been facing. And I would say in my defense, we had been hearing

that this indictment was coming for a really long time. And maybe this was some wishful thinking on my part. I mean, I didn't think he should be indicted for this. We wrote about this at the time. The statute of limitations on this was effectively had passed. They pretty much avoided the statute of limitations because Trump had left the state and come back. finance violation here, but it had sort of turned into this rash charging decision where they were throwing the book at him in a way that I did not find very convincing. It seemed very political to me. And I think I didn't want it to happen. And so therefore, I was sort of like, despite the fact Trump was saying it was happening and the New York Times was saying it was happening, I was just like, everybody just chill. We've been hearing over and over and over again for seven years that Trump was about to go to jail. So whatever, we screwed it up. That happens. I gave us a D plus for this and nobody on the editorial team fought me on that. So, um, and I mean, to be fair, I think none of us really have a better

compass for what we expect of Trump stories than you do. So I think for me, I was probably even way further off than you were. Our saving grace is that there was no big perp walk, orange jumpsuit, handcuff moment in this. It wasn't a total F. a total F, but the next one we're doing was. So that's a nice transition. We covered the debt ceiling deal in May. This was another really big story. And we got an F for this coverage, rightfully so. We covered this deal. It was between Speaker McCarthy and Democrats. I know there've been like a lot of funding deals. So, you know, you guys have heard different stories about all the things Congress have done the last year. This happened in May. The deal was between Speaker McCarthy and Democrats. And after it happened, I wrote that this was basically a big win, specifically for Speaker McCarthy, because he kept the government opening. He pulled together this raucously divided caucus, and he's doing pretty well so far as Speaker. Those were pretty

much my words verbatim. I also said he managed to keep Republicans together on a tough vote to spark these negotiations. He had squeezed enough out of Biden that he can hammer home some talking points to the public and sort of win this fight in the public opinion realm as well. And I said, more than anything, this is a direct quote, more than anything though, he's won by projecting the image of a leader who can govern, directly take on the president, and keep House Republicans in line. Yeah, I basically got every single thing wrong here. Um, I don't think anything I wrote last year aged as poorly as that paragraph. I really, it was just totally backwards. Um, you know, it led to a revolt among house Republicans.

They came together and removed him as Speaker, and he has now resigned from Congress. I mean, his political career is literally over. So yeah, it went about as badly as possible. What do you think was the thing that you were miscalculating on the most here? on the most here? I think I was underestimating the degree to which the House Freedom Caucus and Matt Gaetz and that crew were committed to the stuff they were saying. I mean, I definitely have a lot of problems with how they govern. I think like, you know, Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and the people the liberal media covers a lot as being the totally insane, off-the-rocker Republican right. I do think they are Twitter legislators. They are interested not in public policy and data and

research and doing things that might actually really benefit their constituents so much as they're interested in fighting the culture wars and, you know, defining who's bad and who's good and tweeting a lot and getting praise from their supporters. I really do feel that way. And I know some people might disagree with me and that that's nothing about their ideology there. You know, There's a lot of Twitter members of Congress on the left too. But I just didn't think they were going to stick this out when the whole kind of Washington DC infrastructure came bearing down on them to get this deal done, to lift the debt ceiling, all this stuff. I just thought they would take the L and move on to the

next thing. And instead, to their credit, they basically said what they were going to do, which is that if McCarthy broke this promise, they were going to end him politically. And they did. I mean, that was the other thing is, uh, once the, once they decided, okay, we're going to actually try and remove him. I wouldn't have been confident that that was going to succeed because I didn't think there was a viable alternative. And it turns out there kind of wasn't. I mean, the path we took to get to Mike Johnson was incredibly rocky. And Jim Jordan threw his hat in the ring, Steve Scalise threw his hat in the ring, all these people stepped up and they flubbed. And then they finally landed on this congressman who's like a, you know, relative no name.

I wouldn't have said I knew who Mike Johnson was, certainly by this time we published. Yeah. So there were, all those things made me think, okay, even if they wanted to, which I didn't expect them to solidify around a movement to remove him, they're not actually going to be able to vote him out. And then they did. So, you know, I underestimated them, I guess, is the story. And you said that you thought they'd be able to take the yell. I mean, from my perspective,

I thought they'd be able to try to walk away with something they could spin as them successfully fighting. But I'm consistently surprised by how hard the line is for hardliners just across the board. And if the House Freedom Caucus is saying we want absolutely no continuing resolutions ever under any circumstances, pass a budget, it has to be a budget we want, no compromises, that's what they mean. And I thought it would be, we're able to get some compromise. We threw our weight around. We're going to keep pushing, but no, it was not enough, not enough. Blow it up. Yeah. And now we're, I mean, again, we're sitting here recording this on Friday, January 12th, and all the kind of insidery DC stuff is about the fact that Mike Johnson,

the new house speaker who replaced Kevin McCarthy, basically just agreed to the exact same deal that McCarthy orchestrated here. This is the deal that McCarthy got forced out on. And the rumblings are starting that this same group of legislators is going to force Johnson out. So that'll be super... I'm sure we'll be talking about that in our 2024 review a year from now is kind of how that plays out, which should be really interesting. All right, let's jump into another 2024 story. I'm sure we're going to be revisiting a year from now. We wrote a story about that, and I'll let you take a little bit of this excerpt here. Right. So the big question mark for a lot of 2024 was whether or not Biden was going to be running again for 2023 coming into 2024. And in our piece, when he announced his candidacy, one of the first

things we wrote was about his age, saying it's a vulnerability, how support for him might coalesce the closer we got to election day, but it's still a concern. Here's what we wrote. Biden would be 86 if he were to leave office in 2028, appears less and less vigorous every time I see him, and implied repeatedly before the 2020 election that if he were to win, he would not run in 2024. Somewhere during his presidency, which has been marked by historic inflation, many more COVID-19 deaths and a border crisis, he went from a bridge to the next generation to how many times do I have to tell you I'm going to run. Polling this far out is notoriously malleable. Politics is weird, but hypotheticals always perform differently than hard

and fast realities. More than 70% of Americans might want someone different now. Lord knows I do, but if Trump wins the Republican nomination and Biden sticks to running, Democrats will turn out in droves and Biden will probably win again. That is what Tangle wrote. That's the stance that you decided felt right to us coming into 2024. How'd it fare? What do you think? First of all, obviously the election hasn't happened yet. So the thrust of my piece was basically Biden was going to end up the nominee. That's very clearly going to happen unless, you know, I think the only thing stopping him at this point will be some kind of health issue and that his age was going to seriously weaken his campaign. So those two things I think were both obvious then, but also a little bit prescient. So yeah, like seven, eight months ago,

if you had asked me, is Biden going to have the same very poor approval ratings that he has right now against Trump at this time in January of 2024, I would have expected that his numbers were actually getting better by now because the Trump v. Biden race has sort of crystallized. And I think people, you know, I think the independent and moderate voters in America are still going to vote for Biden if that's the matchup in 2024. But those numbers have not gotten better. So that's sort of the one thing that I missed when I wrote this and why we didn't give ourselves an A. There just hasn't been the increase in support for him. And we might have to revisit this again next year. I mean, if Biden somehow loses the nomination or if he loses the election, this is not going to age very well. Again, like I said before, you do the gun to the head, bet your life theoretical. I'm still putting everything I own on a Biden victory in 2024 because I think Trump does that poorly with moderates and independents right now. But I certainly don't think it's a lock. I would bet that if I had to, i certainly don't think it's a lock i would bet that if i had to

but i don't think it's a lock so this is one that's probably going to change a little bit over time depending on how the next seven or eight months go and i'd actually say that this may end up aging really well to our benefit just because if the election does end up being Biden versus Trump and we're saying we expect the poll numbers to get better, poll numbers for Biden really didn't start to distance themselves until well after the caucuses were underway. I have 538's poll tracker from 2020 up, just playing a quick little game here. Can you guess what the difference in polling for Biden and Trump were in February of 2020? How many points Biden was up or down? In February of 2020, so a month after January 6th, basically?

A little more, yeah. Yeah. I would say Biden had like an eight-point lead on Trump. 3.8. No way. 3.8%. And when election time came around, that's when it got up to 8.4, but he didn't breach eight until October. Wow. Well, he did over the summer for a bit, bit came back down but when reality starts to set in

good got it you were saying uh february of 2020 i was thinking february of 2021 post january 6 um so right that makes sense yeah eight points so i was kind of right on what i thought. But wow, 3.8 points in February of 2020. So going into the November 2020 election this same time period, that's about where he was at. Right. And if past is prologue here, we can probably expect once the electorate starts really getting a clear picture of what they have and have to choose from, I think we see those numbers start to change a bit. Wow. Yeah. That's a good reference point for sure. I'll keep that in mind for some of our coverage. Okay. Let's keep moving. The next one I want to do really quickly. In fact, I'm just going to breeze through this really quick. This was about whether Senator Dianne Feinstein should retire. She was under pressure to retire

from Congress. I did not make any bones about my position. I basically said it is an absurdity that she's still in Congress given her health and her state. This is obviously a little bit sensitive to revisit because Feinstein died in office four months later and we covered her death and wrote about it. And I am not going to belabor the point or spend any more time on this than we need to. I believe that Dianne Feinstein is a Titan. I think she's the kind of person there will be buildings and streets named after, rightfully so. And I'm not going to sit here and spend any time dancing on the grave or disparaging somebody's career because I disagreed with that decision. So I wouldn't change anything

we wrote. We gave it an A+. I don't feel like there's any need to say anything more than that. And we can jump into the next one, which is way more interesting and fun to talk about. which is way more interesting and fun to talk about. For some people. For other people, I think. I think it still rubs a lot of people the wrong way. All right. Well, for me, it's fun to talk about.

I enjoy this stuff. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He entered the race in April, I believe. And in June, we covered his campaign because he was getting some momentum. I spent a little bit of time talking about the anti-vaxxer stuff and that label, but I spent a lot of the time in my piece talking about the fact that he had a message that would land for a lot of Americans. I wrote about how many Americans were in low-wage jobs, about how middle-class Americans can't support their cost of living, and their rust belt is rusting and cities are too expensive. And there's gun violence and anxiety and depression. And there's also this overwhelming sense that neither of our major political parties are doing

anything about this. I think a lot of people in the country feel that way. And I think a lot of the anger is sort of centered on corporate elites, big tech, intelligence agencies, whatever, along with the halls of Congress and the Washington DC cabal, however the people who exist in that world really want to put it. And this was the environment that RFK Jr. launched his presidential campaign. And this is what I said in my piece is like, do I think he has a chance? No, definitely not. He's not going to win the race. vaccines and loathing the intelligence community and anti-corporations and big tech and whatever that resonate with a lot of Republican voters and are now in vogue with, you know, some kind of Democratic voters as well. So my prediction was that his candidacy was going to burn out. And, you know, I said this as he was getting traction. So reading this again, I mean, on

the question of why he was getting traction and what his candidacy was about, I was pretty proud of what we published. I thought we pretty much did it. But I did have a couple big misses. The first of which was that today in December of 20 that, you know, today in December of 20, or I guess last month in December of 2023, one in five voters were still considering voting for him. That's 20% of the American public. So that's a lot. That's a lot. I mean, that has the potential to have a huge impact on the election. Now, considering, of course, he's a lot different than he's my top choice, but the candidacy burnout stuff that I predicted that I definitely thought would have happened by now has not happened yet. I was expecting him to have like the Vivek Ramaswamy sort of rise and fall that we saw. The flavor of the month kind of thing.

Right. Four or five months ago, everybody was talking about Ramaswamy. We were covering his candidacy, some of the stuff he was doing. Today, he's not even qualifying for the debates. He's basically an afterthought in Iowa. I think after the Iowa caucuses, he'll probably drop out pretty soon. But RFK Jr. is still throwing his weight around. So that was the one big miss I had. And then the other one was that he left the Democratic primary and ran as an independent. And we sort of talked about this at the top, but this is one of those things that was like, oh, wait, that actually was kind of on the tea leaves and we should have seen that coming. And that was something we

probably could have prognosticated on that he didn't fit into the Democratic primary. And he had sort of this attitude and vision of the country where it was like the least surprising thing ever that he decided to run as an independent. So we missed that one. I think I know why too. This one is the first one that I remember very well because this is one of the first ones that we did after it came on full time. And I remember that as we had decided we're going to cover RFK, we really went in and researched it. We listened to this entire Joe Brogan podcast appearance. A lot of what he's written on vaccines, a lot of people pushed back to when he talked about vaccines and the pushback to the pushback. We talked to vaccine experts. We didn't write a whole lot

about the anti-vax stuff, just a couple paragraphs, but we kept that really tight, and that was a big focus of ours. A thing that we didn't focus on was, does he fit in the Democratic Party or not? We just weren't seeing around that big object in the foreground, which was vaccines. And I think looking back, we can say the anti-vax movement has been pretty popular on the left before COVID. It's a thing that's really hard to remember, but a lot of the people that you would associate with being anti-vax were very much into body purity. And I think that's still a good number of the people that are anti-vax, but that perception of who is anti-vaccine has changed a bit. And in that changing landscape, there was just no place for RFK Jr. in today's Democratic Party. And it's

something that we didn't think about at all. And like you said, retrospectively, it seems clear as day, but I think that's why we missed it. Yeah, that's an interesting reflection. I don't think I really have any edits to it. I would add to that. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown.

When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. cell from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. Another wrinkle was, for me at least, was he really did and does still actually speak with a great deal of respect

and reverence for President Biden. He refers to him as a friend. He honestly mostly says positive things about him as a person and negative things about his policies or just the idea that we need somebody else. And I think running as an independent is such an affront to him that I sort of didn't expect him to do that. That's a good point. And maybe from RFK Jr.'s perspective, not being in the Democratic primary

is a more respectful way to go about his business. But to me, it's a bigger threat to Biden's presidency or his reelection campaign. So I was a little surprised by that. But ultimately, he's doing his own thing. So we gave ourselves a C for this. I think it was a well-earned C. Well-deserved C. Yeah. Is the expression Cs that get degrees or Ds get degrees? I think it's Ds get degrees. People love alliteration. Even if you're not able to know what it is, you still love it. Bummer. All right, well, we can drop that because

I think we have a couple of D's coming up still before we get out of here. All right, next up was Ron DeSantis running for office. So we're clearly in the campaign season here in our 2023 review. In May, Ron DeSantis entered the Republican primary. I think I did a good job making it clear he had some conservative bona fides and some policy wins. I also said, and this one I was proud of reading again, that this whole obsession and focus on wokeness was maybe not going to play great nationally. And I also didn't really know how conservatives would respond to his penchant for leaning into government authority. So what I wrote about was basically, there's small government conservatives and Republicans that have traditionally run on that. I think anti-government or small government messaging

does really well with the public, with conservatives and with independents, and even with some Democrats, because nobody likes the idea of the government being up in your business. We'll talk about that in our grievances section. I've got a big government complaint coming in our grievances section today. But Ron DeSantis is not a small government Republican. And this was one of the things I did not know how it was going to play on the national stage. He is somebody who uses the levers of government to advance a conservative agenda, which is a totally legitimate thing to do, but it's just different. It's just different than some other Republicans that I think we're used to seeing in a presidential race.

So I was kind of skeptical of that. And then there's the whole thing with the likability. I mean, I love these videos of him being a retail politician in bars in Iowa and stuff where he's wearing a motorcycle jacket and trying to not look stiff or scripted. And the behind the scenes of him at the debate, just walking around like a robot that's waiting for its software update. It's tough to watch, man. And that's not always a death knell for politicians, but there are people who are good at it. I mean, Donald Trump is an incredible retail politician. Trump is an incredible retail politician. You watch him work a room and it is so organic. It's so natural. I know people who loathe him. I mean, really, truly despise him as a person,

hate his politics, whatever. And they've met him. I mean, I was a reporter in New York, so I've met a lot of people who have met Donald Trump because he's such a New York person. Trump because he's such a New York person. And they can't deny it. They like him. He does something. He has something, some special sauce. He's likable in person. Barack Obama had this too. He was great on the campaign trail. He could walk into a room and talk to anybody and shake hands with people and give answers that felt and seemed organic. Ron DeSantis does not have that. So it's hard to say exactly what's hampering his campaign, but I think that's definitely one of the things. Other than his campaign itself, but that's for another day, maybe. Right. The organizational side of stuff has been a mess. There's been a lot of drama,

staff turnover, things like that. The woke obsession, the anti-woke, everything's woke, woke, woke, woke, woke. It's just not played very well nationally with conservatives, with Republicans. I mean, I think this is a little bit of like, the left lives on Twitter and lives in Twitter world on a lot of stuff, especially kind of the progressive left where they think Twitter's real life when it's not. And I think this is a great example of the conservative side of that coin of just like believing that the number one priority for Americans is, you know, what kind of gender culture wars. Yeah. It's like what, what gender is the animal character in this children's book in a Florida library. And let's make that the

big story. And if it's like a, you know, a transgender bear, we're going to, we're going to tell the world about that and make them care about it. And it's like, that definitely works with some very online conservatives, but it's not the thing your average voter in New Hampshire is worried about. So I think he flopped on that. And, you know, I was a little bit wrong. I think that he would face some serious scrutiny for his record as governor. There hasn't been a ton of talk about what he's done in Florida, which I think would have been really advantageous to him if there was. Instead, it's been sort of the focus on his likability stuff, how bad he is in a room with voters, his kind of canned talking points in the debates. And then, of course, the fact that

until a couple weeks ago, he was kind of seemed afraid to trash Trump. So we had a mixed bag here. And I think similarly for politicos, the debates aren't real life either. I think we look at the performance in the debates where he is talking about Florida a lot. He is talking about what he'd do on the border a lot. He's extremely aggressive with how he postures there. And that audibly plays well with audiences at the debate. You could tell that the Republican audience likes his message. But as soon as he's off the stage,

or he could stay on the stage and the lights and the cameras are off, he's just a different guy, it seems like. Or not a different guy, but that the organic nature of his ability to reach people just isn't there. And I think that's why we brought this up from, I think it was originally a C, but we rounded up to a C+, I think, because the likability is just such a key term here. Yeah, it's hurting him. I don't see any way around it. So our coverage was all right. Yeah, I think a C-plus is a very reasonable grade. I think we all pretty much agreed on this grade. I don't remember this one getting edited or fought over at all. Some of these grades we did fight over a bit. But he is basically what I thought he was. I kind of misread some of the biggest threat to Trump, which that was probably

the biggest story of his campaign launch was this is the guy who could beat Trump. And I don't think that's panned out at all. He's still a little bit ahead and just barely holding on to second place. But if you asked me today, I would say Trump's biggest threat is Nikki Haley. She's got the biggest money behind her and the most support and the best chance of maybe getting a win in New Hampshire or South Carolina, which is kind of how people get momentum in these races. And even if it's not Nikki Haley, the fact that we have to have the conversation about it anymore means that he's not the de facto other choice. And that was his chance, was just being the non-Trump in the race. Yeah, 100%. All right, so let's take a quick break before we get into our last few.

I think we've got three more and then our rapid fire and we'll be right back. and the next thing we had was our coverage of inflation which was the economic story of 2023 but in march we gave it particular attention after the fed had another interest rate hike and that hike came after the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank at a time when it was unclear what the Fed was going to do. Here's what we wrote. As others have written, the Fed's central job is price control, so it should prioritize crushing inflation, given how much the government is already doing to stabilize the banks. I think pausing interest rate hikes would have been

both redundant and much riskier in the long term. Powell seems to have made the right choice, though the 0.25% compromise hike seems like a little bit of a wobble. It's hard to blame him for wanting to appease everyone and keeping things calm during such an uncertain time, but a lot of the commentators are right to emphasize that this can't be about sentiment or appeasement. It has to be about the data which shows inflation and which Powell is singularly tasked with addressing. Not bad, right? No, not bad. I think, I mean, look, one of the things that I fundamentally kind of screwed up on this one, to just start start there is that I sort of spoke in this sort of condescending tone about Powell. And even though I was positive about the hike, I got that

part right. I was sort of like, you know, there was some smugness in there about what was good and what was bad. And I think retrospectively, the takeaway here is Jerome Powell was and is the smartest guy in the room. I mean, they have done, the Fed has done a masterful job. If you told anybody two years ago that what we have today is how the Fed was going to handle inflation, which is that inflation is cooling. It's coming down rapidly. The economy, by traditional metrics, GDP, unemployment, all that stuff is cooking. The stock market's doing great. I mean, this is not just the soft landing. I mean, it's almost something better than the soft landing. Noah Smith had a great piece about this at the end of December. He said,

in fact, this is actually a much better outcome than what I personally would have called a soft landing. This is closer to what I'd have called immaculate disinflation, which I think that's actually right. I think it's not over yet. We just got numbers this month where we saw this slight little tick up, which after everything we've all been through has just sent a shiver through everybody. But generally speaking, this was a really... They've done a really excellent job and we kind of missed that. So we gave ourselves a B minus. We got a lot right. We were pro-inflation hike. We had some trust. The B minus is a product of me being a smug... I'm not going to curse yet, but me being smug about Trump-Bowell.

Yeah. And I'll own that a little bit too, honestly. I think I remember pulling you in that direction also. I was pretty convinced by the argument of Ben Miller, who we had on the podcast as an economist who's been pretty consistent in saying, don't believe what you're hearing about the soft landing getting approaching and being more imminent. an economist who's been pretty consistent in saying, don't believe what you're hearing about the soft landing getting approaching and being more imminent. We are still going to have a recession based off of historical trends. Every time there are rate hikes, a depression or a

recession will follow and it's just going to lag. And I thought it was a pretty decent argument. And I thought, you know, it's just going to happen. People are all just watching the last month instead of expecting the lag. And I was, I think, kind of a counsel that was saying, be pessimistic. And caveat, caveat, it's still too early to say, things could always change. But I think I would give myself a worse grade than you. If I had written this take, it would have turned out even worse. I appreciate you saying that in public. Don't get used to it, though. All right, let's move on to the next one.

After inflation, we had Biden's border plan. Which we covered a couple times. Yeah, we covered a couple times. I'll let you break this one down because you were definitely, I think, also had a strong hand in some of our coverage here. But probably, maybe in less of a bad way, hopefully. This was early in 2023 when Biden proposed a border plan to help reduce the number of unauthorized migrants coming to the U.S., his idea was to accept about 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, and to push the new CBP One app to try to increase legal immigration, reduce illegal immigration, and bring some order. This is what we wrote at the time. I think it's only fair to start by giving Biden kudos for taking some action. Are there huge problems with the plan? Yes. Is it the plan I would have used? No. This plan isn't brand new. It isn't concocted out of thin air. It's basically identical to the

plan the Biden administration used for Venezuelan migrants. And that plan has been pretty effective. The bad news is basically everything else. I have a hard time seeing it last legally. It's well short of anything that will improve our immigration system, promote humane treatment of migrants, or resolve our domestic disputes over immigration. And there's a lot good there, but there's also some that we were a little off on. Yeah, there were some things we were off on. I mean, first of all, I think the biggest thing is that I expected the plan to face a lot of legal trouble and it did. So points to us for that. I was pretty pessimistic about Congress and Biden doing something that was holistic and helpful. So points for that.

But the big hit for us here was that any optimism I had was probably misplaced, though. And I had some optimism about this plan. I had some optimism about a similar plan for Venezuelan migrants. about a similar plan for Venezuelan migrants. We covered that policy in March. We basically said, oh, this might actually work. Look, things are working. The immediate impact of it looked positive. Now we're, you know, whatever, a year out from this and the border's basically as bad as it's ever been. This has not worked as a policy. And so, you know, got it right in terms of legal trouble, got it right in terms of this is a band-aid and we probably won't see a real holistic solution, got it wrong anytime we sort of gave a nod to, oh, this might actually work out well. So we gave ourselves a B, which I think was a fair grade. In reading all

this again, I maybe would even downgrade that to a C plus, maybe? Yeah. I think the reason why we're a little softer on ourselves is we did the equivalent of sneaking our answer off the teacher's desk and scribbling something different and then turning back in, in that we graded ourselves in a reader question in November because we had expressed some optimism about the, I guess what we can call it, the plan for the Venezuelan cohort. And then we reviewed that and graded it in a reader question and gave ourselves a poor grade. So we're giving ourselves maybe a little bit of credit for being harder on ourselves at a different point. But yeah, that maybe is cheating. Yeah, I think it's a little cheating.

But all right, so we call it a B in the newsletter. We'll call it a C plus here, which I think is maybe a better grade. Okay, last but not least, certainly not least, we have the Israel piece, the October 10th piece published after Hamas' attack on October 7th in Israel. Anybody who's been around for a little while probably has heard before that this, my take, went viral on Twitter.

It was the most read thing we did last year. We had the craziness of Elon Musk tweeting at us and all these people retweeting it and whatever. I think it's been seen by millions of people at this point. And the my take of this was the longest my take that I wrote all last year. So it's going to be really hard to summarize here on the podcast. I encourage anybody who's interested and wasn't around in October to go find this podcast from October 10th or go find the newsletter from October 10th and listen to it. I'll just say that my take was a lot of elevating points from both the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel side. And I expressed a lot of personal discomfort with the entire situation,

which I think is pretty much still how I feel in a lot of ways. I also expressed a lot of concern about what Israel was going to do in retaliation. And I said a lot in this piece. I wrote about the history of this conflict. I wrote about what just happened on October 7 piece. I wrote about the history of this conflict. I wrote about what just happened on October 7th. I wrote about what I thought was coming. And we got a lot of feedback. I seem to piss off pretty much everybody, which is sometimes how this work goes. So I think if I were going to write this again, the biggest changes I would make would mostly be rhetorical.

It'd be the kind of language I use and how it triggered people from the pro-Palestine position and people from the pro-Israel position into getting really angry and not being able to read the rest of the stuff that I said. I was a little bit surprised and thought it was interesting that most of the criticism I got was from my Jewish brethren and my Israeli readers, despite the fact that, you know, I don't know if I would call myself a Zionist given some of the associations with that word today, but I believe in and support the project of Israel, which I traditionally think makes me a Zionist. I believe Israel has a right to exist and should exist. And, you know, I'm supportive of the project, despite how much I loathe the current iteration of the Israeli government.

And then I got the feedback and so much of the critical stuff was from pro-Israel readers. So they did make some good points. I think I could have been clearer that I was not making moral equivalences between Hamas and Israel. I had a couple lines in there that I don't think express that clearly enough. I described Gaza as an open-air prison, which I think is activist language and not totally reflective of the situation on the ground in Gaza. I think the blockade and what Israel was doing before October 7th was not productive. And I think the way people in Gaza were living is not something anybody would choose. But it also, in a weird way, kind of diminished some of the way Palestinians and Gazans have been

thriving there despite all that. And I don't think I gave that enough credence, which actually isn't a really pro-Israel position. It's actually a way to frame and talk about the Palestinian perseverance and how beautiful parts of Gaza are and how well parts of Gaza were thriving before this war, despite the blockade from Egypt and despite the blockade from Israel. So that was something I wish I wrote about a little bit more. We talked about the Al-Aqsa Mosque and desecration and could have added some more context there. And I initially should have written a bit more about some of the ideological fanaticism that drives Hamas, because they are an Islamic

extremist group, and that is core to some of the issues at hand. And I didn't mention any of that. Conversely, there was tons of criticism from the pro-Palestine side as well. And I think one of the really good criticisms that came in was that I spent zero time writing about the Nakba, which is the defining historical event for Palestinians around the creation of Israel, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were living there when Israel was created and in the wars that came after Israel's creation. And this is like in the wars that came after Israel's creation. And, you know, this is like not talking about the Holocaust when you're writing about Israel. It's kind of nuts that I didn't spare any sentences there. And I think that's probably the biggest hit on the whole piece and something I regret

deeply. And, you know, I tried to account for in our writing that came after that. And, you know, I tried to account for in our writing that came after that. Also, I wrote a little bit too dismissively about sort of the scars of colonialism in this region. I mean, I basically said, you know, is Israel and the British colonists and is this colonialism? Yes, but this is how the world was created, that we live in the modern world before post-World War II, New World Order, all that stuff. And I don't necessarily think any of that's wrong by the letter, but I think it is dismissive of the emotional baggage of what Israel is to many Palestinians in a way that is not appropriate for the subject. So I regretted that. Paradoxically, and this is something that was really interesting for me to reread and look back on, I was criticizing Israel's actions before the incursion into Gaza actually happened, which I thought was pretty interesting. And at the same time, I underestimated how bad

things would get. So in retrospect, it was almost like you shouldn't be criticizing what they're doing before they've done it. And then reading what I was really worried about was, you know, I said things like Israel will do a bunch of things they don't have a right to do. They might flatten apartment buildings or kill civilians and children. And yet I was not expecting over 20,000 Palestinians to be killed or 70% of all homes in Gaza to be destroyed and nearly every single one of the 2 million Gazans inside Gaza to be displaced. So I basically underestimated how awful the last three months were going to be while at the same time speaking kind of prematurely about how bad they were going to be. So some regret on one end. And then, like I said, paradoxically, almost didn't go far enough

in the way I spoke about it. And all this aside, we gave ourselves a B+. I gave us a B. Ari gave us an A. Our other editor, Will, gave us a B+. And then I split the difference and took Will's grade and went right down the middle on the B+. Split the difference and went with Will. And the reason I did that was because we, in my opinion, got a ton right too. I mean, we were right about the horror of what Hamas did. If anything, we understated it. We were right that Israel was going to respond in a way that we had never seen before in this conflict. That was true. We were right that more Palestinian innocents were going to die than Israeli innocents died in the October 7th attacks. That was true. I was right that we were watching the beginning of a lengthy spate of violence. We're now three months in. That was true. I was right that American partisans were going to bungle this issue with terrible commentary and a narrow view of history. That's been true. There's been

so, so, so much bad black and white writing about this. I was right that this would help Hamas, that Israel's impending attacks would harden support for extremist groups like Hamas. New polling has confirmed that that's been true. Hamas support is skyrocketing in the West Bank and in Gaza. And I was right that Hamas would continue to promise violence against Israel, which they've done. And finally, I said at the end, you know, in this rhetorical flourish that none of this was getting us closer to a solution, and I didn't know what the solution was. So B plus overall, this was the biggest piece of the year, obviously. Feel good about the grade, feel horrible about the topic and all the updates and the state of affairs. Any other thoughts on that? I think this is, as we've said, every time this topic

comes up in the newsletter, it is the most complex geopolitical conflict in the world currently, maybe ever. And as such, everything we write, it's going to be wrong in some way. We're going to find out it's wrong in a month or a year. It's so complicated. Everything that we just said, even differences in our language and summary, we're going to get comments on, feedback on. We would have just gotten some stuff wrong newly just now. And it's really, really hard to understand everything about this conflict. And with that, I think the reason, just to defend myself a bit here, why I was pushing for us to give ourselves a bit of a higher grade is that I think we got the most important stuff right here, which is just that it's been very hard for people to

criticize bad actors on, quote, both sides when people are acting poorly on both sides. If you are the most pro-Israel person in the world, you should still be able to say the deaths of civilians are unconscionable. You should be able to do that. And you should be able to, if you're the most pro-Palestinian person in the world, say that what Hamas did was unconscionable. And that's not to equate the two. I don't want to try to say things are the exact same. But I'm saying the fact that we're able to talk about these things as criticizable is something that's really hard for people to do. is something that's really hard for people to do.

And that's the reason why this piece got popular in the first place, was that everyone felt the word we kept getting was relieved or clarifying just to be able to have a news outlet that was saying, you should be able to criticize both sides, not calling balls and strikes and saying who's the right side, who's the right side, who's the wrong side, but just that both sides have points and both sides have reasons to be criticized. And that's why I thought it was something that deserved an A from us. I appreciate that perspective. And I am proud of our coverage on Israel and Palestine in this conflict. I think it's been pretty multi-faceted and there

are always going to be things I change and want to change in retrospect. But yeah, I'll take that from you as my loyal editor. So thanks for saying that. And thanks to all our readers for pushing back too. It really is helpful. We know we miss stuff and it kills us every time we do. We know we miss stuff, and it kills us every time we do. It's a horrible, complicated mess, and having now 90,000 eyes helping us stay honest is helpful. So thanks to you all. All right. We are coming up on an hour and a half here, so I'm going to run through this last part real rapid fire.

We covered Tommy Tuberville's abortion protest. We gave ourself a C plus for, you know, basically being right that it was an effective way to get a bunch of attention, but also being wrong about whether it would impact military readiness in the long term and weirdly did not expect or predict that he would just fold and the protests changed nothing about Pentagon policy and military readiness didn't at all seem to be impacted. So we gave ourselves a C plus for that. We did great coverage, in my opinion, of the George Santos stuff in January when some of the first details came out. A plus for our coverage said Congress should investigate him. And if they find what it seems like he did, they should remove him. Congress investigated him.

They found a bunch of shady financial dealings. They booted him on a bipartisan basis. Well-deserved expulsion from Congress, in my opinion. Bob Menendez, senator from New Jersey, indicted. I said it looked very bad. Evidence looked very bad. We've gotten a few more months of retrospective on that. Still looks very bad. Evidence still looks very bad. His defense for himself, very bad. There are some bad grades in this rapid fire too. We got a C plus for the mutiny in Russia led by Yevgeny Pergozhin. I said it was an overreaction, the coverage of it. At the time it was like, oh my God, is this going to be the end of the war, this mutiny? And I think I was right that it was

an overreaction in retrospect. I did though drink some of that Kool-Aid that it was, you know, there were breaks in the Russian forces. I thought it could materialize into something. I struck an optimistic tone about the impact it'd have on Putin. And politically at home, the pressure was ramping up and maybe the war was coming to an end. Unfortunately, none of that happened. And then Prigozhin got killed in an airplane explosion. Presumably. Presumably, yeah. Allegedly. Allegedly killed or he just happened to be in, you know, a one in a million airplane explosion where the entire thing blew up and there were no survivors. One or the other, I don't know. Maybe it was Putin, maybe not. Something... Foreseeable, we

missed it. Yeah, definitely foreseeable. Should have been more steadfast in, you unbelievably, unapologetically authoritarian Vladimir Putin is that he would just kill this guy after publicly saying that he was going to honor this deal they made together to let him go live in Belarus happily ever after. So we gave ourselves a C plus for that coverage. And then there was some debate about this internally. I don't want to get too deep into it, but there was the prisoner swap with Iran. I was sort of like, don't, don't submit to your instinct of this is going to be a terrible deal. The money's going to go to Iran. They're going to turn around and use it to fund proxy wars, all that stuff. There's a debate about whether this money actually ends up helping Iran fund their proxy wars. I

think it's pretty obvious it does. Even if the money they're getting is not being directly used to fund the proxy wars, they have more money coming in. One end, they can take the money that they were not spending on proxy wars and subsidize it with that new money and then use the money that they now have left over on the proxy wars. Iran has been very, very, very, very, very active since we published this piece. We wrote about this prisoner swap in September. The Hamas attacks happened October 7th. I don't think there's some direct correlation there, obviously, but we know that Hamas gets funding and support from Iran, and it's been total chaos since. Hezbollah, Houthis, it's not bueno. So we gave ourselves an F for this coverage because I told people to not think something

that they were probably right to think, which was not good of me. And then extra rapidly, Supreme Court, pretty good year from us. We accurately predicted the student loan debt program being struck down, accurately predicted the abortion pill ruling, accurate on the rejection of the independent state legislature theory, and accurate that the Supreme Court would adopt an ethics code. All of those things we can get more detail on. We've already gotten into detail a lot. You can go to readtangle.com to read more. A for us for the Supreme Court coverage this year. Pat's on the back all around. I'll take that A big time. I want to acknowledge we did not grade some important stories here.

The impeachment inquiry in Joe Biden, the Hunter Biden plea deal, Ukraine's counteroffensive, Biden's classified document stuff. We talked about John Fetterman and Mitch McConnell's health issues, Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, Jordan Neely's death, Daniel Penny's charges. That was a huge story in America for a month. And we also did not talk about the more recent government funding negotiations. That was a huge story in America for a month. And we also did not talk about the more recent government funding negotiations. That was not an accident. We sort of determined that they needed to be left ungraded because there was way too much uncertainty about

how our coverage has aged in order to address them. Jordan Neely, we have not had a trial. John Fetter and Mitch McConnell, still in office. And I think TBD on whether they should have stayed in office or not, we're kind of watching that unfold in real time. Obviously, the Biden plea deal, the Hunter Biden plea deal, we don't know anything new about because none of that stuff has gone to trial yet. Ukraine's counteroffensive ongoing, the impeachment inquiry ongoing, Biden's classified document stuff kind of still ongoing because we mostly focused on whether it would impact him in the election or not. So we're leaving all that stuff on the table.

Let's get to the numbers. Yeah. Lastly, we have our GPA for 2023. So this was courtesy of Will who cranked this out really quick. And it was basically what I expected. You want to talk about these numbers really quick? Sure.

So for those of you who aren't familiar with the GPA scale, zero through four, essentially four is an A plus, three as a B, et cetera. And in 2021, we got a 2.1. So that's a C, pretty solid C, based off of 12 creative predictions. 2022, a slightly higher 2.1 on eight predictions, but not statistically significantly higher. So basically the same.

2023 this year, best year yet, probably due to all of the good hires that Tangle made in the past year. 16 predictions, 2.8 GPA. So that's a B minus C plus. Or yeah, it's a B minus C plus area. Not too bad. I think you'd graduate again from Pitt with those grades for sure. Yeah. Big time walking at graduation at Pitt with those grades. So

I'll take it. Obviously pretty subjective because we're picking the stories to grade, but we do really genuinely try to reread and then grade the ones that generated the most interest and seem to dominate the news cycle. All right, to put a cap on this whole predictions grading, we have to revisit our 2021 piece where I published 19 predictions. Last year, we talked about nine of those predictions I made in 2021 and the fact that seven out of nine of them were correct. And we wrote about how we knew that. In 2023, only one of those predictions got a new ruling on it. So there's still 10 or there's still nine that have not had rulings on them. But in 2023, we decided that we were going to rule on my prediction about COVID.

My prediction was that COVID variants of the future will not get less infectious, but will get less deadly. And that early signs from Omicron are what many epidemiologists seem to have expected, that pathogens evolve to be able to replicate more effectively. And I said that the trend of more contagious and less lethal variants will continue. And fun fact, I remember this prediction because it was Ari's prediction, actually. This was something that you suggested we put in the 19 predictions list. So we ruled this correct.

That's been true. COVID has gotten more contagious, but has also been less infectious. Do you want to say anything else about that? get the point by knowing a little bit about viruses. They want to survive. In order to do that, they don't want to kill the host. They want to be transmissible. So knowing that, pretty easy to make the projection, but we did it. So good job us for doing it. And that now takes us over the halfway mark on the predictions. And also the readers know why 19 was chosen. predictions. And also the readers know why 19 was chosen. Yeah, yeah, that too. You'll see that if you pay close attention, the number 19 will pop up a lot because of our paired associations with it, I guess you could say. All right, so that is a wrap on our 2023 review. There's a lot there. I think this is a great way to start our co-hosting duties together with an

hour and a half marathon talking about how good and bad we did in 2023. So I'm glad we chose this one as the jump off podcast episode. That being said, as promised, we're going to wrap this up with our airing of The Grievances, which I am... Insert George Costanza audio hit here. Yeah, yeah. I'm excited to hear what John, our podcast editor, comes up with for the music transition into this segment. So I hope it's good and maybe it'll be some George Costanza audio, but who knows? John, you can drop that right here. be some george costanza audio but who knows john you can you can drop that right here the airing of grievances i got a lot of problems with you people

all right uh you want to go first with your your airing of the grievances? Yeah, let's get it all out there. So pop quiz for you. What was advertised in the 80s and 90s as, quote, the baby boomer way to vacation? Oh, well, I know the answer because I know what your grievance is going to be. Then it took you too long to get there. Time shares, baby. Yeah. And I have the advertisements to prove it in a manila folder for my parents that I got from over winter break. Actually, Thanksgiving break. Over winter break, my fun home project was canceling all of my parents' time shares. I don't want to denigrate the choices of my parents who are lovely, wise people. Everyone makes mistakes. But they had four timeshares all over the country, mostly in the East. And the rumors are true.

They are not easy to get out of. And something that I learned about timeshares is that you actually buy a lease when you get the timeshare. I thought it was, there's just some hotel operation. They give you dibs to a certain time that you have a certain unit, and you just have that in their records. unit and you just have that in their records. No. You go to the county of the state where the timeshare is located. You buy a lease. Your name is on the lease, but it is subdivided as a time unit. So it would say something like, so-and-so owns this property unit 42 for week number 36. And your lease says that you own it just for that week, which means when you try to get out of it, you then have to get somebody to go down to the county office, pull the lease, sell the lease back to the timeshare that you bought it from to that company, or they charge you, normally they charge you a fee and they just take it back. You don't sell it back. You pay them a cancellation fee so they can take the lease from you. And that whole process,

after a couple hours on hold per each place, gets wrapped up in three to six months. So it's not some easy thing. And if you or anyone you know is in a timeshare, And if you or anyone you know is in a timeshare, give them a call, prepare for a long wait, and get out while you still can. They might try to tell you, you can always gift this to a family member. Not a good gift. I don't think your family members want it. Just bite the bullet. Get rid of the toxic asset.

Say thank you very much for all the time we shared, but it's over. Yeah, that is wild. I don't know anything about timeshares. I'm not totally surprised. I can't imagine a reason to have one in the era of like Vrbo and Airbnb, but I guess there are people out there who are still holding on to them. So respect to your parents

for staying in the timeshare game until 2024. I mean, it makes sense. I guess there are people out there who are still holding on to them. So respect to your parents for staying in the timeshare game until 2024. I mean, it makes sense when you think about it. Like in 1990, you buy a place and then you can sell it on a secondary market if you don't use it. You can trade the time with other people. You actually own it, which feels secure. Like I get that. It does make some sense, but it just ends up being like a really expensive gym membership at like planet Hollywood or planet fitness rather, where like you just pay to not go. That's kind of the business model. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. All right. Well, that's a good, that's actually,

I think the same genre of grievance I have, which is about the sort of mundane life asset all in that world. My grievance is Phoebe and I, my wife, Phoebe, who many of you know from our Valentine's Day podcast. She's coming back this year, by the way. So get ready for that. Part two is coming. Phoebe and I bought a new car recently, my first ever new car. Incredible feeling, great life milestone unlocked. I have always owned and love dearly various beaters. My first car, some people who really know me well know this, that my first vehicle I ever owned was a 1987 Winnebago Lechharrow, literally a giant RV that I drove to high school every day and all over the country for many years. And it was a total

junker. It was always breaking down, always needed fixing. And every car I've ever owned since then was a beater. It was a crappy old car that was sturdy and would start, but always had problems, including the 2006 Honda CR-V I had until a few months ago. So I buy a new car. We're living the dream. We have this new vehicle. It's incredible. We're like, this is the best.

You buy a new car. The dealership registers the car for you. They give you temporary tags. They tell you your license plate's going to come in the mail. You drive the car home from the dealership, drive around with the temporary tags for a month. Our new license plates show up in the mail. Great. Everything's going smooth. Put the license plate- Sounds like the process is really smooth. Sounds like they've got it all worked out. Everything's great. Got it all worked out. I have a Philadelphia parking permit. I moved the parking permit over to my new car. I put the license plates on the car. I put the license plate on the car. And the next

day I come out in the morning, I have a ticket on the car. After I've done this whole process, I've called the Philadelphia parking authority. I went down in person to the parking authority, told them I had a new car. What do I have to do? We transfer the permit over to the new car. Here's my license plate. Put the new plates on. I have a ticket. I opened do I have to do? We transfer the permit over to the new car. Here's my license plate. Put the new plates on. I have a ticket. I open the ticket and it's a ticket for the new vehicle not being inspected. And I think, oh, surely this is a mistake.

Because they wouldn't sell you a car out of the factory that they hadn't inspected in some way. This is, this, this, something's messed up here. So I take the ticket, bring it inside, put it on my desk. I'm like, this is a later problem. I'll call the parking authority, whatever. Go to sleep, wake up, come out the next day. I have another ticket on the car, a second ticket for the exact same violation, not having an inspection on the car. for the exact same violation, not having an inspection on the car. And so I Google it, I look this up and it turns out that you can buy a brand new 2024 car with a hundred miles on it. Dealership registers, it does all those things. And you still have to take that car to a mechanic, your local mechanic, and then pay him for the inspection of the car and then have that inspection vehicle, have that inspection done and registered with the car and all that stuff in

conjunction with you getting this new parking permit in order to not get slammed by the Philadelphia Parking Authority. This is insane. This is why people vote for Republicans right there. Well, you know, or it's an example of us having a weak federation and states that have to have things done their own way. You know, just it's watercolors basically. Like who, who do you want to blame based on your political tribe? You can blame somebody. I blame, I blame big government. It feels wrong. It is totally insane to me that I can spend, first of all, an absurd amount of money. I mean, I'm still sick. I'm still nauseous about what it costs to buy a new car, but committed. We're in it. We love it. New car. Great. We're going to

have it for years. And then that I still have to take that brand new car to a mechanic and pay him a hundred bucks to whatever he, I mean, I'm sure I left and he smoked a cigarette and then just signed it. Like why he doesn't have to inspect the cars. It's still, it's, it's brand new. I mean, it's a joke. So, uh, big time anti that I think you should get at least like a year of inspection and registration when you buy a new car that you don't have to worry about it. And I might just not pay these parking tickets as an act of protest against the city of Philadelphia. So that's my big grievance for the week. Hey kids, pay your parking tickets. But still, this feels like an example of the

quote new money problems. Kids like us from some towns in Pennsylvania outside the big cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, thinking that we've made it in the world. We've got a media company. We've got podcasts. We're doing it. But the old money has us figured out. They're like, nah, kid, you forgot to check this box. Pay this fine. You're not one of us. Get back to the boonies where you belong. Yeah. I did not feel a warm welcome from the city of Philadelphia on this. That is for sure. So, all right. That's a wrap. Ari Weitzman, good to have you here. I think a great kickoff podcast. We're going to be doing it pretty regularly, so I guess I'll be here. Yeah. And we'll hopefully make it a little bit more digestible in terms of length. But thanks to everybody who stuck through. I think a lot of people want long

podcasts now, so we'll see. I hope so. We're at like an hour and 40 minutes. This is one of the longest ever. I would say I'll see you guys next week on the podcast, but that's not exactly true. And I'll leave that little cliffhanger there for an announcement that you're going to hear on Tuesday when we're back from Martin Luther King day. And until then be safe, be well, take care of yourselves, pay your parking tickets. Peace. by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, We'll be right back. Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province.

Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.