Tangle - PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast: Ari and Magdalena talk Elon Musk, social media, and civil discourse.

Episode Date: January 26, 2025

Please enjoy this preview episode of our Sunday podcast. The full editions are available exclusively for premium podcast members. To become a member, please go to tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up. In this episode, Ari and Magdalena talk about the feedback from Ari's take on the Elon Musk controversy, navigating the politics of social media, and civil discourse in the second Trump term. They also play a trivia game at the intersection of politics and Bluey. And last but not least, the Airing of Grievances.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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a darkly comedic look at motherhood and society's expectations, Academy Award-nominated Amy Adams stars as a passionate artist who puts her career on hold to stay home with her young son. But her maternal instinct takes a wild and surreal turn as she discovers the best, yet fiercest, part of herself. Based on the acclaimed novel, Nightbitch is a thought-provoking and wickedly humorous film from Searchlight Pictures. Night Bitch is streaming now only on Disney+. Coming up, Magdalena joins me to talk about where Isaac is. Then we go over some feedback

we got from readers about Elon Musk. Talk about Musk too much, talk about how we're talking about Musk too much, talk about Metta, talk about how we're talking about Metta too much, play a little game, give some grievance and get out of here. It's a fun time. I think you'll enjoy it. From executive producer Isaac Saul welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take.

I'm Ari Weitzman, managing editor at Tangle, sitting in the host chair today for Isaac Saul, who is away on paternity leave, which is great, joined by fellow Tangle worker and parent, fellow parent of Isaacs. Wow, I said that pretty poorly, Mags, you want to introduce yourself? Parent of Isaacs. Okay, I'm not that old. It's been a long week, man. Yeah, yeah, it's been a long week. Yeah, Mags Magdalena.

I've been on the podcast before and back. Head of partnerships, growth and social is what I'm calling it right now. It's been a constant search for you to find your title. It's been the journey you've been on. Yeah, it's the nature of a startup. But I think, you know, I look at it as like, we are co-captains right now of the ship. So, hello, captain.

Hey, captain. How are we feeling the ship's going without the usual captain here? Oh, I mean, it's, I think overall it's going great. It's going, we've prepped a lot for this. Maybe the baby announcement on Wednesday, if you haven't checked it out, look in your inbox or listen to the pod. There's a special announcement of what happened, but Isaac and his wife,

Phoebe had their first child. Um, yeah, I'm not sure how much we're supposed to divulge on that. And so we're going to keep the details pretty, you know, vague. I will say that I, um, was pretty spot on on when they were born. I'm only using they because I also don't know, but yes, oh no, he did say son, so it's a son, yeah. Toiler alert. Yeah, he was just withholding name and pictures and stuff.

Yeah, so I was pretty spot on on, I call it for you all. On your second guess. On my second guess, yeah. To be fair, you were very bold for months saying it's gonna be the wolf moon in January is when this baby's gonna be born. Just missed it by a week. I was convinced.

I think depending on the listeners, half the audience probably doesn't know what I'm talking about. And then the other half, the women. Very, very intimately familiar with what you're talking about. Yeah. I mean, to put it in context, I had my second child last year and it happened on the full moon. And it's a thing. Babies do come around the full moon. I mean, it's anecdotal thing obviously,

but let's just say we got into the hospital the day before the full moon and every time a nurse came into our room, she looked like she was coming out of a war zone. She was like, you don't even know what's happening out there. We have so many babies coming that we have to move people into the triage emergencies. They were moving people into emergency,

just because so many babies were happening. So my initial guess with Isaac and Phoebe's child was that it was gonna come around then. But of course they were delayed. And then my second guess was pretty spot on by like three, two and a half hours, I think. So. Yeah. Second guess was impressive for sure.

I was way off, I think, both times. So that's sad. Just another big L for me. I mean, yeah. Well, you know, mother's intuition. When the story does come out, when he does share the birth story, I'm sure at some point he will. You'll know why I kind of pegged the day. Maybe there's like a little hint to that. I just think that this kid is a joker

already. And I think it was like perfect timing. So alluding to, you know, you guys can probably guess, but yeah. So we are without the official captain, we're captaining the ship. And I think it's going pretty well. We've, it's, it's what, how do you think it's going? Yeah, it's definitely a lot of work. I think we'll get into this a little bit more, but I definitely was graced with a good crash course into what Isaac's life is generally like. Yesterday, my experience was that we spent a lot of time talking about Joe Biden's part-ins. Again, we'll get into that a little bit more later. Answered a reader question that was pretty controversial about Elon Musk.

A lot of flurry of editing were bringing on a new editor who's been doing great. We are saying goodbye to one of our other interns who then stayed on to be a contracted editor with us because we had a hard time letting her go and she's headed out and we wish her the best. And in the same sort of flurry of people going in and out, we have a new customer service rep coming on that we are off boarding. So immediately after the take went out, I just went to help onboard him, recorded the podcast in the morning, then did some payroll dispute management with somebody who may or may not be on the call. And after that, I was starting to prep for the next day's newsletter, at which point I thought, I've got some time, I'll go check some of the feedback and criticisms, respond to stuff, and that sort of dynamited

the rest of my day. So I got to get that full taste of, you know, you're working your heads down on every task in front of you, and then you just check in to make sure you're listening to readers, and you get told that you're a bad Jew whose ancestors should be ashamed of themselves. And that's kind of what happens. So already respected Isaac for doing this job, respected a little bit more now. But what about... But that said, to answer your question... Yeah, let's just gloss over that. Let's just gloss over that. I think Tangle is going in the right direction still. It's the direction that we're already on.

directions though. It's the direction that we're already on. I just have an appreciation for the work Isaac does a little bit more and I have more of an appreciation for the readers who can do civil discussion. It's something that I've been pretty consistent about when I talk about it, but I do think that we are getting healthy debate and the fact that we aren't having too many people unsubscribed. We're just getting people complaining means they want to engage. So I think that's a good thing. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. In a darkly comedic look at motherhood and society's expectations, Academy Award-nominated Amy Adams stars as a passionate artist who puts her career on hold to stay home with her young son. But her maternal instinct takes a wild and surreal turn as she discovers the

best, yet fiercest, part of herself. Based on the acclaimed novel, Night Bitch is a thought-provoking and wickedly humorous film from Searchlight Pictures. Nightbitch is streaming now only on Disney+. Yeah, yeah, just to follow up on that, I think, you know, both you and I have worked with Isaac for a while now and we've seen him, I think, yeah, this week has given me a newfound appreciation, even working with him for so long, of how thick his skin must be at this point because, yeah, I mean, people are at times pretty awful when they read something that they do not agree with, especially if it's something that is sensitive or there's

a lot of emotion behind it. So it was interesting because we waded into the, what Ari alluded to was the Elon Musk Nazi salute and we already took a take on it. Some folks did not agree with the take as usual, right? That's like par for the course. But some of the commentary that we got on it just on our website, but mostly in like our inbox was just really, you know, awful. And I think part of it is people think that they, when they unsubscribe, because they read something that they don't want to read and feel like, enough's enough. I don't want to,

I don't want to engage with this. This is too uncomfortable, annoying, or whatever." And they unsubscribe and we get a prompt of, why are you unsubscribing? They write this tirade and they send it into the ether and they think no one's going to read it, right? Because that's usually the part for the course, right? With a lot of mainstream media outlets or for anything, right? And with Tangle, what makes us unique is we really try and engage with all the comments and all the emails. We don't reply to everyone, but pretty high rate of replying. And so I think people were expecting to send their responses and then not get something back.

And then I think you have been trying your best to kind of give a response to the people that were quite honestly angry with you, right? Yeah. And I think that's true. And I agree, most places aren't quite as accessible as we try to be. And I also understand that I'm a newer voice. So people maybe don't have the same level of trust or familiarity as they would with Isaac.

So as soon as they hear somebody come out and in addition, I'm sensitive to the context about this too, especially in retrospect. In addition, where we're criticizing Biden for his pardons on his last day, while Trump is issuing a lot of executive orders, which weren't the topic of discussion that day, something that we got into the next day. But in that same addition, I come out and say something that reads like a defense of Elon Musk, even though in the past couple of weeks, we've been pretty critical of him. And my answer is not exactly a full-throated defense of him.

I basically said that I don't think this gesture that he made was a Nazi salute. I think he's really awkward and awkward to the point that it's really hard to imagine, which makes him make a mistake like that because you can't really even imagine doing that sort of gesture, unless you're that awkward. It's almost unimaginable. That's not exactly the kindest thing to say about somebody, but that was something that in that context reads like Musk is fine. It's not a problem. Biden's worse than Trump.

And then dismissing the rest. I can understand how that reads. And to be fair, to the quote that I said earlier, like your ancestor should be ashamed, the person who emailed him to say that when I responded was very apologetic and said he was out of line, issued a really nice email, and I appreciate that. So I know it takes a little bit of time to understand that there are other people to talk to that are on the other end of it, and that there's going to be a chance for dialogue when that's not a thing you're used to. So yeah, I think you're right with that.

And I do think some of the feedback has had some fair points. And I do think I would really love to have a chance to get into some of that and explain a little bit more about this Musk stuff. I know we had that a little bit down on the show notes, but are you all right if I take like five minutes and do a little mini rant here? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I wasn't looking at the script to be fair.

Sorry, John, sorry, John. I just thought opportunity, you know, like when you're interviewing someone, just go for it. Yeah, I know. That's a good instinct. So let me get into that a little bit. Like I said, I understand the context of the way that this felt when I wrote that I don't think what Musk did was a Nazi salute. Something that I didn't say, which I regret omitting because I do think it's helpful context, is that Elon Musk has done plenty of things

that are somewhat problematic in recent history. One of those things was saying that the only future for Germany is the AFD, this ultra right party for the future of Germany. A lot of people in Germany are very sensitive for obvious reasons about their turn of white supremacy and Nazism. So that is a tough line you don't want to cross. But somebody who's not from Germany, who is an immigrant in the US himself, he probably doesn't quite know the sensitivities. He also has been upfront about having Asperger's, which does not excuse what he does. And I'm not saying that everybody who has Asperger's is necessarily tone deaf like this. I'm just saying it's an

added dimension to consider. And I didn't get into that in the take because I felt it muddied things a little bit, but that is an added dimension. So I'm aware of that. Another thing I'm aware of is what I consider to be the worst thing that Musk has done to date, which is I'm going to break down the saga really briefly, but I'm going to do it in full because I think it's important. In November, just a couple of weeks after the election, somebody, I'm sorry, his name is Charles Weber. I'm not super familiar with him. His

bio says he's a Florida Jew, not a whole lot else. I'm sure he's got more information. He tweeted this video about this PSA ad about a father confronting his son who had posted Hitler was right online. It was just a video, just a PSA about like, confront your family members about stuff when they say things that are problematic online. A person responded to that. His name is Eric. He said, okay, Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about Western

Jewish populations coming into the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face? There it is. Elon Musk replied to this tweet, quote, you have said the actual truth. So, yeah. Wow. This was in November? Sorry. Yeah. Oh, 2024.

Yeah. This was a couple weeks after the election. We referenced this a bit in the newsletter. It's a tripwire for me personally. It's a thing that I'm pretty sensitive to. I think this is promoting in very, almost not subtly, almost out in the open this theory called great replacement theory, which in my mind is like the granddaddy of them all when it comes to anti-Semitism and white nationalist conspiracy theories, which in a nutshell is that Jews, quote Jews, you know, all of us go to the meetings that you don't get to go to. They coordinate behind the scenes to import and it's always this word import or bring in, which I think is dehumanizing on its own, but that's a whole other thing. Import quote minorities or people from some other country into the country to replace

white culture with the aim of eradicating the white race and culture. It fails the first step of just trying to see if it's feasible. There's this old adage, I don't know if it's an adage, but the saying that if you have two Jews, you get three opinions. The idea that Jews could control things, in general, this trope is pretty nonsensical. This idea of importing people is kind of gross. On one hand, not excusing it, I'm very, very much against it. I can understand where the perception comes from. Democrats have an agenda that is generally pro-immigrant. It's very tolerant of immigration. They try to reach out to immigrants to try to get them to become future Democratic voters, which kind of makes sense if they're gonna be the pro-immigrant party.

That's very easy to look at in a malevolent way, especially when if you look by the numbers, more Jews, not all Jews, but more Jews tend to be Democratic. So there are some larger swaths that, you know, it's easy to paint that picture, but it's also total bunk. When Musk said you have said the actual truth, I still don't think that meant he was a Nazi. I think the biggest issue that I have with Musk is that he is pretty weak or pretty thin skinned himself and wants to promote people who agree with him. My whole unifying theory of Elon Musk to try to explain him in my own mind, add the piece that he's awkward, add the piece that he wants support, but the thing that kind of starts

it is I think he was generally a political person when he was taking over CEO of Tesla. He was the electric car guy and he saw himself as on the left because the left was the party of electric cars. Then his child came out as trans, so the person he thought was his son was his daughter and he had a hard time dealing with that, still does. Kind of sparked something in him, looked around at cultural progressivism, said, I don't believe in this, I don't fit in. And he got infected by hyper-partisanship, this bug that we're familiar with. And he said, I'm going to the other team. And that's when you see the world in left-right dichotomies like that and only

in those terms. When you switch teams, when you say, I'm going to the other side, it's almost like denouncing your religion or taking up a new one and you just have to bring a wholesale new set of beliefs with you. And I think you went really, really far into it. And when you do that, when you go really, really far and make this partisan identity core to your conception of yourself, you kind of have to insulate it. So when there are people that are close to that ideology that are saying things that sort of dog whistle at great replacement theory, you don't really feel inclined to do self-reflection and say, maybe I'm going a little too far by saying Jews are importing like brown people. Maybe I'm going too far.

You say, you know, there's something here. It's real. There's a demographic thing to be concerned about. I don't have to even open the door about great replacement theory and anti-Semitism. I don't think Trump – Trump, sorry. It's a little bit of a Freudian slip, but it's kind of the same thing with Trump though. Like this is the biggest criticism I have with him too, is you maybe are aware of what's behind the door, but you don't want to open it and confront that because those are people that are sort of, they're way far on your side, but they're on your side. And when it comes to the left,

when you make those same comparisons, it's kind of tough to come up with a one-on-one analog. There are issues with the left that the right does not share. I don't know. I don't think we have to get into that right now. But it is an issue. It's one of the bigger issues with the right movement right now, if not the largest one. And Musk failing to confront that is a huge problem. After he made this gesture, in the context, now going back to the criticism that we received,

that I received, he had an awful response. It was just a total non-response. He's like, yeah, so this is just BS. People are trying to paint me out to be something. Is this just a joke? Just liberalism trying to spew their nonsense. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. In a darkly comedic look at motherhood and society's expectations, Academy Award nominated Amy Adams stars as a passionate artist who puts her career on hold to stay home with her young

son. But her maternal instinct takes a wild and surreal turn as she discovers the best, yet fiercest, part of herself. Based on the acclaimed novel, Nightbitch is a thought-provoking and wickedly humorous film from Searchlight Pictures. Night Bitch is streaming now only on Disney+. I mean, I think he tried to like make, you know, shared that like Harris and other people in the political spectrum had also made these kind of gestures in the past, right?

Right. And I've seen that. That was what he was leaning on, yeah. Like, I've seen those stills and the stills look, like it looks like there's a point to be made there. But at the same time, there's still images. When you look at the videos, it's very different. Yeah.

And I mean, on the other side of this, I'm going to say that that gesture of having your hand near your heart and then going out to form a 45-degree angle with sharp fingers extended, honestly, it's not a super unnatural movement. Seriously. I've remembered, I have a very clear memory of being in New York years and years and years ago, more than a decade ago, because I'm going to use the word taxi cab and trying to hail a taxi cab and realizing that I'm doing this thing where I'm bringing my hand down and then I'm hailing

it and then I'm doing it again and I'm like, oh shit. I felt really self-conscious and embarrassed because I don't know. Is it hailing a taxi? Okay, I don't know because I didn't live in New York, but isn't it down below? I mean, I shared a meme of the different. You did. I know that's what made me remember it. And yeah, I'm pretty sure the hailing the taxi is a little lower.

But I just, you know, I'm not a New Yorker. I'm just trying to be visible. I'm waving my hand out. So yeah, maybe I did that super wrong, too. But that's why it's an embarrassing story. So the point of that is that I think it's possible to do this without realizing it. Like I really do think that, especially when you are, as I said, an unfathomably awkward

person. John Stewart had this great bit about this too. He said like, okay, Musk is trying to make this my heart goes out to you gesture. And John Stewart said, okay, a normal person, if they do that, might go, hmm, like that, like hands to your breast and then sort of push your hands forward. But Musk like gripped at his heart and then threw it to the ground. And then it was like, did it twice. And that's really weird. It's a strange thing to do. But it still fits within my understanding of who this person is. And I think the biggest criticism that I could have of him following this whole thing, because I still don't think it was an intentional thing, my biggest criticism is he continues to be craven in his unwillingness to confront what's behind that door, to look at the tropes that he's sort of being, I think he might be being played

by honestly. And I think he's, in the very, very least he could have done is said, you know what, that gesture did look bad. That was fucked up. I'm sorry. I'm not going to do that again. That's not something that I support. But I think he's too nervous about confronting the people that are on the far end of his team to do that. That's my screen on it. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm going to play Devil's advocate for a second. I mean, this is taking up a lot of time, but I think it's really important because it was, I think, the single biggest piece of feedback we got this week apart from all of the congratulations

on Isaac's baby. That definitely took the crown. But yeah, I mean, I think my opinion watching it, I agree. I think he's a very awkward, weird person. I mean, let's think back to that Butler, Pennsylvania rally where he was jumping up and down in a weird, very awkward, very cringe-worthy moments. So he does have that history that you were talking about of just being like socially awkward and weird. The one piece that I want to kind of push back on, I mean, Musk is like an incredibly incredibly intelligent person. And he comes from South Africa, right, originally, which has its own very, you know, tumultuous history in general. I feel like he would be very acutely aware of

that gesture. And one piece that I'm wondering about is if we lean into the fact that he wants to be loved, right? Like he just pines for that recognition. That's why he's doing all these. I mean, honestly, I mean, we can criticize Musk all we want, but he has done some really amazing things, you know, in different realms, like from Starlink, for example, to, you know, all the space exploration and electric cars and whatnot. So I'm just wondering if because he's pining for that love and attention and he he's finding it in the alt right, if it could have been him potentially being like, throwing them a, hey, I see that you love me,

hey, just throwing it out there, we got this. I think people kind of interpret it as that. Yeah, I'll say, I think that's a reasonable interpretation. I think that makes sense to me. I don't find it to be the most convincing interpretation, but I think it makes sense. I'll push back a little on, I don't think Musk really wants to be loved. I think that's a Trump thing more so. I think Musk wants attention and he likes making people laugh.

He's a bit more of a troll, which I think actually supports your point more of like, okay, so he's trolling because the alt-right have a lot of trolls with them, so he's trolling like them. I don't know if he sees them as like, racist though. I think he kind of sees them as trolls. This is a thing that I learned after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, going into how people get extremified and slip down into this rabbit hole where they end up surrounded in this ideology that leads a person to one day go to their computer, say, screw your optics, I'm going in and grab a gun, shoot a bunch of people who are just at a Saturday service. And it's that, it starts with this sort of thing. It starts with like, we're just jumping around. We're just jumping around. Hey everybody, this is John,

executive producer of YouTube and podcast content, and co-host of The Daily Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. We are now offering this podcast exclusively to our premium podcast members, along with our ad-free Daily Podcast, Friday editions, in-depth interviews, upcoming new podcast series, bonus content, and much more. If you want to receive all that and give your support to help us grow Tangle Media, please head over to tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up for a membership.

If it's not the right time for you to sign up, please don't worry, our ad-supported daily podcast isn't going anywhere. But if it is in your ability to support by signing up for a membership, we would greatly appreciate it. And we're really excited to share all of our premium offerings with you. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew. This is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Take care.

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 K. Back, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bacopa, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. In a darkly comedic look at motherhood and society's expectations, Academy Award-nominated

Amy Adams stars as a passionate artist who puts her career on hold to stay home with her young son. But her maternal instinct takes a wild and surreal turn as she discovers the best, yet fiercest, part of herself. Based on the acclaimed novel, Night Bitch is a thought-provoking and wickedly humorous film from Searchlight Pictures. Night Bitch is streaming now, only on Disney+.