Tangle - Inflation finally hits Tangle (kind of)

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

We have a few special announcements to make today so we are skipping our regular newsletter. We will be back tomorrow with our regular podcast. Thank you for your continued support!You can read today's podcast ⁠⁠here⁠⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story here. You can also check out our latest video, last Friday’s paywalled piece about how Israel has no good options here and the controversial debate we posted on YouTube here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the poll. What would you want to see in a Sunday edition of Tangle? Let us know! 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, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. Today is Tuesday, November 21st, and we have a little bit of a different podcast. This isn't actually a full news podcast. It's more of an announcement about some of the stuff that's going on before everybody

runs off for Thanksgiving. So I have some bad news. I have some good news. And then I have some better news. We're going to start with the bad news first. The price of Tangle's memberships to our newsletter are about to go up unless you are already a member, which I'm going to explain in a second. The reasons for this are pretty simple. When I started Tangle four years ago, it was just me working from home, putting out a single newsletter four or five days a week. I was one person and the price of Tangle was $50 per year or $5 per month. That price has not changed since then. Today, I have four employees, several part-time editors, a team of interns, an office space,

a YouTube channel, this podcast, social media channels, live events, a burgeoning campus ambassador program, and two teams of people who host and manage our website. All of these things, including this podcast, cost money. And while the number of subscribers here has grown, so too have our costs and output. Of course, this has all also happened over a four-year period, which as many of you know because you listen to this podcast, where pretty much everything has gotten more expensive for everyone. And while I hate to add to that trend, I also understand the realities of the situation we are in from a business perspective.

Finally, it's also true that as we look around this space, we have realized that our product, just the newsletter product alone, is very cheap, probably too cheap. The average cost of a newspaper subscription five years ago was about $120 per year, and most newsletters like ours are closer to $100 per year, even though oftentimes they give out way less content than we do, usually one newsletter, maybe two a week. So we're raising our prices just a little bit from $50 per year to $60 per year for the newsletter and from $5 per month to $6 per month. For most consumers, I'm hoping that this won't make a big difference. If you're willing to pay five bucks a month, you're probably willing to pay six bucks a month. But the cumulative effect for us, if thousands of people do that, will be huge. And obviously, for anyone who wants to subscribe at a

higher tier than that, we have that $199 a year tier. You can still do that to throw some extra support behind our work. So that's the bad news. Now, I know some of you guys who listen to this podcast are people who kind of oscillate between the podcast and the newsletter and go back and forth, which is why we're making this announcement here. However, we've also learned over the last few years of doing this podcast that there is oftentimes a totally different audience, a group of people who just listen to the podcast and not the newsletter. We've heard from those people a lot in the last year or two asking for things like the Friday editions in a podcast version, the Friday editions, which are paywalled in the newsletter, but we don't produce a podcast for.

We've heard from people asking for more interviews. We've heard people asking for a podcast that's just like what we do, except it's me and I have a co-host or another guest. Basically, people just want a little bit more podcast content. Some people have expressed the idea that they don't even read the newsletter anymore, so they are open to paying for that podcast content. So we have been putting that on the back burner over and over again. And now, finally, the next step of the podcast is right on the horizon. I would say early 2024, we are going to be introducing some premium podcast content that's behind a paywall. So if you are somebody who just listens to the podcast and you subscribe to the newsletter or

whatever, because you want to support our project, but you're not getting all the podcast content you want, you'll be able to subscribe to the podcast. We're also going to experiment a bit with bringing on some co-hosts with me, somebody I can hang out with and talk to. So it's not just my voice you're listening to all the time reading, which I think will make the podcast a lot more interesting. And we're going to keep ramping up our interviews. We've been landing, frankly, some people that I'm really happy about interviewing, including presidential candidates. And we've been having some debates and we've been doing a lot of stuff that I think we're going to double down on and continue doing. So that is where things are right now. I know a lot of people have written in and asked about the premium podcast stuff. It's coming. It's finally

like the next thing in the queue that we are going to do. And yeah, I hope that we'll have some of that for you early on in the year. So the next thing I want to make clear is if you are already a subscriber to Tangle, if you're already subscribed to the newsletter to support our work, if you're a Tangle member, quote unquote, the price you're subscribed at now will be your price forever. We're calling you our legacy subscribers. You're the folks who got in early, got us off the ground and helped make Tangle possible. So this is one of many ways we hope to say thank you by locking that price in. So if you're already subscribed, you're already a Tangle member, don't worry, your price won't change.

And I also have some better news than that. If you're not yet a subscriber, we are not making this price change right now as you're listening to this. We're actually going to do it over the next few weeks, probably before 2024 hits. So if you want to get in at the current Tangle membership prices, if you want to become a legacy member, we are going to wait a few weeks to raise our subscription prices. And we want to give everyone already listening to or reading Tangle a few weeks to raise our subscription prices. And we want to give everyone already listening to or reading to Angle a few weeks to jump to those paid memberships before the prices go up. So a reminder that members get Friday editions that are behind a paywall, access to the comment section on our articles, ad-free newsletters, updates on the business, our entire archive of past editions,

and also another newsletter that is coming out this year, which I'm going to talk about in one second. Before I do, though, one last little cherry on top of that. We've done the bad news, the good news. Now we're doing some better news. This week is a big week for sales. So we're going to shave 20% off the first year of a Tangle membership. It's our Black Friday quote-unquote offer. So if you want to become a subscriber, if you want to become a Tangle member and get locked in at the legacy price and get 20% off the first year, you can do that by subscribing with our Black Friday discount. There is a link and URL in today's episode description. That link for anyone who is curious is readtangle.com forward slash black dash Friday dash offer.

And if you go to that link, if you go to that URL, that's 34% off the first year from the $60 what it will be in a couple of weeks to the $40 now. 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. 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 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 six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur All right, so bad news, good news, better news. The best news is this. We don't want to just ask for more money without offering more as part of our membership. So given that we have a team and we're capable of doing more, along with unlocking Friday editions and getting ad-free newsletters, Tangle members are also going to get our Sunday newsletter. This is a new newsletter that we are launching in the next few weeks.

These are brief breakdowns of each of the week's editions. So if you miss a few during the week or you don't want to read a newsletter every day, you can read a summary of our coverage in one email to catch all up in just a few minutes. We're also releasing a word game, a totally custom new word game created by our managing editor, Ari. It's super fun. I've gotten to play it a few times. I really like it. We are going to have little selections of kind of compelling non-political content from the internet that we come across during the week. Things like recipes or comics or other interesting news.

One of the things that happens with our team is we have like this Slack channel, just awesome stuff that we all find during the week on the internet while we're doing research for the Tangle newsletter. And a lot of it just has nothing to do with politics. So we wanted a fun place to sort of catalog that stuff, give people something that's just like,

a little bit not the difficult news we have to cover every single day, because I know from writing about politics, it can be hard. I know for you listening, it can be hard too. And finally, we're gonna do some fun stuff, Q&As with our staff or other Q&As with me outside of the reader question stuff,

maybe things that can make this all a little bit more personal. So we're really excited about this new offering and a new way for people to connect with Tangle. Our plan right now is to debut that Sunday newsletter in early December. And if you have ideas about what you want to see in that Sunday newsletter, you can go to today's newsletter that came out and take a poll where you'll be able to leave some suggestions. So to recap, prices are going up in a few weeks from $50 a year to $60 a year. If you are already a Tangle member, your price will not change. You're baked in. You are a legacy member. We are saying thank you. If you want to become a Tangle member before those prices go up and bake in that legacy membership, you can do that right now and you can get 20% off for our little Black Friday

offer. If you are somebody who only listens to the podcast, yes, we've heard your request. We are going to be hitting you with some premium podcast content soon. We're going to launch some stuff that is just exclusive to podcast people because we know a lot of them want to support us only on the podcast and don't want to pay for a newsletter you don't read. So that's going to be another way to support us is to either donate or subscribe to unlock certain stuff that's just podcast only premium content. And finally, we are launching a new Sunday newsletter.

We're calling it the Sunday Tangle. And it's going to have a lot of new fun stuff that you don't see in the normal newsletter. And I think it's really good. I am in a position where I actually get to read it like you do because Ari is going to be doing the first draft of it. And it's been really fun to just get a chance to experience something created by Tangle that I didn't start. I didn't put my own fingerprints on and that's really fun. All right. So finally, just want to say thank you. Obviously, the only reason we have a team and an office and this podcast, it's all because those first Tangle members took a leap of faith with us and helped us get this thing off the ground. It feels like we are beginning this new chapter now with me and

this full team. We're stepping into 2024 with a totally different operation than what I had just two or three years ago. And I'm so excited about that and what we can offer in 2024 and beyond. We are going to be back tomorrow with a regular podcast edition. We're going to be covering the George Santos ethics probe, and then we'll have a couple of days off for Thanksgiving. And then we'll be back in early December with our normal newsletter starting next Monday. All right. So before we get out of here, I want to give you some news so you don't miss what's going on. So we're going to do a little quick hits and then, as always, finish it off with our have a nice day story. First up is that the United Auto Workers have ratified their new labor contracts

with 64% of members casting ballots in favor. Number two, former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain joined Airbnb as their chief legal officer. Number three, the United Nations released a climate report warning that the world is on track to surpass a critical warming threshold within the next decade. Number four, 12 Palestinians were killed, including patients, at a hospital encircled by Israeli forces. Israel says it is looking for Hamas command centers. Ceasefire negotiations continue. And number five, a federal appeals court said that only the federal government, not private citizens or civil rights groups, can sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The ruling, which would weaken the act, is expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court.

All right, and last but not least, our have a nice day story. Runner ducks are a slender, upright-standing species of duck that, unlike more commonly known breeds, run gracefully rather than waddle. They are known for their flocking instinct and running with synchronized precision in groups. All that was a distant dream for Hope, a pet runner duck who was born with a twisted left leg and could only limp around his enclosure while his able-bodied companions raced past him. He had an operation to straighten it, but still could not walk properly, let alone run. But his owner, Jennifer Lisensky, refused to give in. She made contact with artificial limb designer Nicole Gottschalk, who measured Hope and printed a plastic limb that can

be strapped onto the crippled leg with Velcro. As soon as it was fitted, Hope waddled off, apparently happy to be more mobile at last. It brought tears to my eyes, Lisensky said. He was quacking so excitedly. The Times of London has this uplifting animal story, and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. Like I said, we'll be back tomorrow with a normal podcast before Thanksgiving break. But if you want to jump on the Tangle membership with a 20% off discount, you can go to www.readtangle.com forward slash black dash Friday dash offer. There is a link to that in our episode description. And please take note that our prices

are going to be going up before the end of the year. So this is kind of your last chance to get in at this lower price. Thank you again for all the support and getting us here. And we'll be right back here tomorrow. We'll see you then. Have a good one. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed 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, 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 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 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 Flucelvax.ca.