Tangle - PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast: Ari and Will talk about an NBA Trade, the Trump Administration and Defense Budgets

Episode Date: February 16, 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 Will talk about a significant NBA trade, a lot of Trump administration talk and propriety in government. After that Ari and Will go over some global defense budgets in a fun game. 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 Dewey Thomas. 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.

With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. If you say the truth and nothing else, you'll have an immense adventure as a consequence. You won't know what's going to happen to you, but the truth will reveal the world the way it's intended to be revealed.

And the consequence for you will be that you'll have the adventure of your life. Live at Scotiabank Arena, March 6th. Get tickets now at libnation.com. Coming up, Will talks about NBA trade. The two of us talk about the Trump admin. We go over some defense budgets in a game, and then we end with some grievances. It's a good one. Enjoy your Sunday. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place

where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of our take. I'm your host, Tango managing editor Ari Weitzman joined today as always or as routinely sort of normally now. As temporarily, routinely. As temporarily always, we'll come back. Will, how you doing? How's your week been?

I'm doing great. Thank you. It's been an eventful week, but doing well and happy to be here. So we're going to be talking about some heavier stuff as we get going. So a lot of Trump talk, a lot of impropriety in government, but to sort of warm us up to that, I want to get you talking about something I know you're interested in, which is something I don't know a lot about. So I just want to get you talking about something I know you're interested in, which is something I don't know a lot about. So I just want to ask you very simply to, as somebody in my situation, I'm a sports

guy from Pittsburgh. We don't have an NBA team. I've never been a huge basketball guy. My dad's a Penn State fan. Penn State's basketball team has always been bad, never really paid attention to college basketball. So as a sports guy who doesn't follow the NBA, tell me about the Luka Doncic trade. I'll give a quick overview of the trade and try to put it in terms that people can understand

even if you don't follow or care about basketball. But Luka Doncic is a very young NBA star who has achieved quite a bit in his, I believe, six-year career now. He's in his sixth season. He came into the league when he was 19. He's from Slovenia. He was kind of a wonder kid in Europe and was drafted by the Dallas Mavericks. He was actually drafted by the Atlanta Hawks and then immediately traded to the Dallas Mavericks.

He took the team to the NBA finals last year where they lost to the Boston Celtics, but it was kind of considered the next step for him as an impact player where he had won a lot of individual awards, but the team hadn't advanced that far in the postseason before. This is all to say he's young, he's extremely talented, he's considered one of the best players in the NBA already, and he was just traded to the Los Angeles Lakers in return for one of their star players, Anthony Davis, who is a power forward center, one of the big guys.

He's about seven feet tall. Yeah, I don't know a lot about the NBA, but eyebrows. You brought, oh, well, that one is good. I hope people get that one. I'm not going to explain it and I hope people get it. Anthony Davis of hailing from the University of Kentucky, an incredible basketball player as well. He's, I believe, seven years older than Luca, though.

He's in his 30s and has a bit of an extensive injury history when he plays, you know, he's a perennial top 10 guy, but injury questions for sure. Anyways, there has never been a trade like this in the history of the NBA and potentially professional sports, at least in the modern era, where one team voluntarily moves the face of the franchise for no discernible reason. In the days since the trade, there have been some allusions by the general manager of the Mavericks that they weren't satisfied with the conditioning that Luka was engaged in, that he wasn't fully bought in from a physical standpoint. He had been injured since Christmas,

so he hadn't played a lot in, or he hadn't played at all in 2025. But it's almost hard to come up with an analogy in the sports world for what the Mavericks did, because this wasn't the Lakers going to the Mavericks and saying we'd like to trade for Luka Dantric. It was the Mavericks proactively reaching out to other teams to shop this player and and I mean Luka is almost like Lebron who is now his teammate. He's like the best player right now isn't he? He's arguably the best player in the world. I think that's a hard discussion to have in the current NBA

because there's so many great players. But his basketball IQ is as good as anybody. I would say him and LeBron are 1A, 1B. And he's an incredible scorer. He won the scoring title last year. He was the highest scorer in the league. Again, they went to the finals. He was incredible on that run.

He unfortunately dispatched my team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, in somewhat savage fashion in five games in the Western Conference finals. So this has been, this was a big enough story that I think the NBA dominated the week before the Super Bowl because this was all people were talking about in the lead up. So for those of you who are familiar, I don't need to say any more. For those of you who aren't, I would say, go watch some YouTube videos of Luka Doncic's passing highlights and some of the angles

that he sees on the court that just don't seem like it should be possible to see. And then ask yourself why an NBA team would trade that person as they enter their prime and having just led them to the championship series the year before and then get back to me or don't but that's what's going on in the sports world. Can you clarify something for me? The trade was one for one there was no picks or conditionals? There was one pick Maverick Scott second round pick

Not much and there was some I would describe them as peripheral players There was there was another the Utah Jazz were also involved in this technically a three-team trade There was no other in a significant impact player that was involved like you might expect I think The reason it's so shocking is because of those terms. There have been some major trades and acquisitions in the NBA in recent years, but those have usually come with like five years worth of first round picks or a star player and a series of complimentary players

that are also going to get minutes for that team. This felt like the Mavericks were trying to like pawn him off. It's the blunt way to describe it. And I mean, there have been some concerns. I mean, if you look at Luca, he's not a chiseled athlete, but he doesn't have to be. You know, I saw an article recently, I think from the Wall Street Journal, that said, Luka Doncic and Patrick Mahomes are examples of what the new peak male form looks like for athletes. It's like the dad bod. It's not cut, but it's able to perform. It's the healthy playing weight. Yes. And I think that both of those players use it to their advantage because they can

physically overpower other people in a way that they couldn't if they were maybe leaner and more muscular. So maybe this is kind of like if when the Chiefs lost to the Patriots, like before Patrick Mahomes won any Super Bowls, like that first time. 2018. Yeah, they made it to the AFC Championship game. If the Chiefs were like, this guy's kind of out of shape,

we're going to train him for Russell Wilson. I mean, you know, it's funny as Adam Schefter, the ESPN reporter, tried to present it as trading Lamar Jackson for Josh Allen, who are two like the great quarterbacks right now in the NFL, which was just roundly panned and rightfully. So just a completely bizarre comparison and not at all the context that this trade took place.

But yeah, I mean, I would say that Luca was even more established than Mahomes was in 2018, just because he's been first team all NBA, meaning he's been named one of the five best players in the NBA for five years in a row, which is like, he's on a LeBron trajectory in terms of individual awards. Like that's not something that has really ever happened

before since LeBron. So it's just like, he hasn't reached his ceiling yet. He's still ascending and he's already racked up so many accolades and he's also proven that he can be a winning player. And I think that is caused a lot of genuine confusion. But we'll see. I guess.

And the kicker to this, the kicker to this is Anthony Davis in his first game with the Mavericks got injured and is out for at least three weeks. So we'll see. I think it could go down as an all-time stinger, but that's all I'll say about that. My condolences to the Dallas listeners. Congratulations, I suppose, to the LA listeners.

And what a time to be alive. We'll be right back after this quick break. So awkwardly transitioning, Will. We've got a bit of a game now that you're going to spring on me about something that we've been talking about over the last week. How would you rank? With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan,

you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. An evening to transform your life. If you say the truth and nothing else, you'll have an immense adventure as a consequence. You won't know what's going to happen to you,

but the truth will reveal the world the way it's intended to be revealed. And the consequence for you will be that you'll have the adventure of your life. Live at Scotiabank Arena, March 6th. Get tickets now at libnation.com. One through five, the actions of the Trump administration

on a scale of least to most concerning. And maybe I can feed you these one at a time and you put them on the list and we'll kind of slowly fill in the top five, not necessarily in order. Yeah, yeah, let's do that. All right. So the first one I'm going to give you is a topic that you wrote about on Wednesday, which is the closing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the defunding of it, rather. So where would you put that and why?

I think that, okay, so one is most concerned, five is least concerned. Yes. Yep. I think that I would put that at four, I think think and I want to be really careful about why why that is so because that's pretty low the reason why that's low is that it's there's still a very ongoing thing and there's a lot of different ways to try to limit the power of a federal agency or department. And I'll start by saying, I'm a fan of the CFPB. I think the work that it does is useful and valuable,

and it does it better than any other existing agency out there. That said, there are other existing agencies out there that can do some of that work. One of the ones that I mentioned was FinCEN. So that's the government bureau, that's the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. So FinCEN, Fin Crimes Enforcement Network, C-E-N FinCEN.

But it's a much smaller agency. It's older in a way that is kind of obvious in the way that it communicates. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a really, really clean interface. It's really easy to report things to them. They're a really transparent agency, especially compared to its peers. They have semi-annual reports. It's really easy to read and learn about.

You just read one of those reports, you know exactly how many employees they have, you know how much their budget is. It's not a massive bloated agency, but it is an agency that is unique amongst federal agencies. It's funded through, unlike other federal agencies, it's funded through an act that Congress passed about 15 years ago, the Dodd-Frank Act, and it takes a proportion of draws from the Fed that the Fed can give up to that amount and the CFPB can request up to that amount and Congress can't do anything about that. They already approved a law. They don't appropriate the money every year. What they can do is they can pass a law, changing the law that they had just passed or that they passed during Dodd-Frank.

That's a bit of a higher threshold because one, you have to be able to propose in a way that beats the filibuster and two, Congress has to do something. That's one of their biggest biases is they don't want to do things, which is unfair. Like that that's an unfair thing to say. But also, like, there's not going to be consensus in the Senate for them to want to address this, to be to put it like bluntly, every Democrat is going to vote against it. So it's not going to pass the filibuster. So it's not going to happen outside appropriations, which means it's somewhat untouchable in terms of its funding. So I also mentioned that there's ways that the federal government can, or that

the president can limit a federal agency. They can install a different head. That's something you can do at the CFPB. They can ask for less funding. They can direct Congress to fund it less. They can fire non-essential employees to a limit. We're not sure still how legal it is to just fire everybody in a summary manner or direct them not to work and tell them to stay home. A lot of these things are being worked out in court right now. There's a hearing tomorrow about the CFPB, I believe, as we're recording February 14th. And that... 13th February.

Yeah, sorry. We're recording on the 13th. Tomorrow the 14th, there'll be a hearing. So that's the only thing that really concerns me about what the Trump administration is doing. And what they've done is order to stop work from the CFPB. Musk's kind of got involved with it, with Doge, and like bricked the homepage, but that's all.

Like just the homepage has a error screen on it, but the rest of the site's still humming and working beautifully, which is kind of interesting. It's like a good symbol of how well-insulated it was when it was designed. But Russ Vote requested, the OMB had, he requested zero dollars from the Fed for it. And it's going to try to starve it out, which is what Mick Mulvaney did in 2018. So that's why it's low, because you can do that. You can't change

its appropriations in Congress. The president can ask for less money. Maybe the Fed can defy them, but that's probably not a fight that they want to get into. They can appoint political appointees to head it. They can probably limit the number of at-will employees that are there. And to be fair, it's about 1,700 people. It maybe doesn't have to be that big. Maybe. I'm not sure. It maybe can coordinate with other agencies in a way that's less duplicative. Probably. I think that's true. And it can probably be funded in a way that is more like every other agency.

And if that's the case, then it's easier for Congress to have oversight of it. And it's, it's still going to be hard for the president to defund it in a way that it's, I would actually, actually argue it's harder for the president to defund it if it's appropriated through Congress, because then it's rescission, which is unconstitutional. And they're going to be trying that anyway. I think they'll fail on courts, but it's easier for Trump and vote to ask for zero dollars than it is for them to just stop paying out appropriations Congress had made. That's what they're doing. As somebody who likes the agency, I don't think it's as concerning as other things they're doing. I think it's politics.

So to be clear, it's relatively lower on the concern level, just because there isn't a concern about them taking any illegal action, right? Like this is something that the president can do or the executive can do. Not so much about your personal feelings about the CFPB. Right, exactly. Thank you for that. Yeah. I don't think that and it is not least concern because there is an element of this that is concerning for me on the constitutional argument, which is telling employees that they need to stop working when they have, they still have operational budget that they can use. They just requested zero for the next quarter.

So telling them don't do the work when there's work to be done that's already been scoped, I think may be illegal. And I'm not a constitutional law expert, so I can't weigh in on something like that authoritatively, but it's certainly less apparently illegal than other things on this list. Sure. Well, I think that's a thorough explanation of somebody who spent a lot of time thinking about this

and writing about it on Wednesday. So I think we can leave it there and keep moving. Okay, great. All right. Now let's talk about something that well, we both we both talked a lot about this, but this was a take that I wrote, which was the executive order from President Trump on transports and trans women's participation in them. Where would you put this on the concern scale? So using the same kind of rubric about how concerned am I about the legality of this

action, I'd put it at a five. The president is passing or he's issuing an executive order saying I have this other executive order defining what I mean when I say woman and man and thereby what the government means when they use these terms. And I'm also in that executive order I express a theory of gender. It is the one that most the majority of the country adheres to, that there are two genders, they match sexes, you can have gender dysphoria. I think within that rubric it's still possible within that framework, but it still says there's two genders, there's two sexes. That's the president's viewpoint and

that, as I explained it, it's maybe less permissive than the president's viewpoint about gender dysphoria, but I think there's still room for it within that viewpoint and saying, okay, I issued that executive order, so I have those definitions. Now pursuant to those definitions, here's another executive order saying, enforce sports participation if you are a school that receives Title IX funding by these definitions or else you will not receive Title IX funding.

Because in my interpretation, again, as the president, I see allowing people who do not meet my definition of female or a woman or a girl to compete in women's or girls' sports, because I think that's a violation of Title IX. I think that's a defensive argument. And I think that is a use of executive authority that is within the powers of the president.

That's obviously controversial. It's obviously something that should be debated. But as you noted when you wrote the take on it, it is something that a majority of people agree with. I think fewer people are concerned about that. Quite a significant majority. Right. And even the majority.

As of a January 2025 poll, which is somewhat stunning. And I think with we have a little bit more, if not like a considerably more right now based on our audience demographics, more culturally liberal, culturally progressive. I think like socially liberal is kind of the classic Obama era way of saying it, like social liberal, fiscal conservative. I think there's a lot of socially liberal readers. Classic. And even within that group, when we polled our readers, our second most responded to survey ever, 48% said that they think it is appropriate for an outright ban like Trump proposed. And another, I don't have the poll in front of me, I'll pull it up, but another 30, 28%

I think said that it's appropriate to ban in most cases. And I think that's indicative of a lot of people's opinions. Now as you were saying in your piece, it's kind of passing laws that, this is a paraphrase, I don't think this is exactly how you said it, but passing laws that this is a paraphrase. I don't think this isn't exactly how you said it, but passing laws that concern us with like the will of the majority or most cases kind of leave out a lot of edge cases, which are still people who still deserve the right to like participate in the way that other people do, which I think you could argue is a First Amendment to, like the right to gather or the right to... Assemble? Right to assemble. There you are. Thanks for walking me back. So 45%. So 44.8%. 45% said should never be allowed. 29.5% should be allowed in some cases. So it's still a majority of our readership would say that in most cases, they don't support trans women or girls or sports, but there are definitely cases where it makes sense and it is the

more fair thing to do. The opinion that I think is unanimous amongst Tangle staff is that the body that is best suited to make that determination is the governing body of each individual sport. It doesn't feel like something that the federal government should be doing. But at the same time, you can disagree and you can say, I'm at the head of the executive branch of the federal government and I'm going to make this verdict. You can do that. If the enforcement mechanism you have is Title IX, you can do that. It does seem to me to be a defensible reading of Title IX.

You could also argue, and I think you should, that maybe Title IX should be revised so it's clearer. If there's an interpretation that you can use to advance exactly opposing arguments, then maybe it's not a good enough piece of legislation. We can update it. But you can still do that. It's still a defensible interpretation using a tool that's in the president's toolkit.

Yeah. I know one of the things that we talked about in the take was how the past four administrations, including Trump's second administration now, has all radically assessed Title IX in different ways and issued orders on it that are extremely contradictory where we've kind of been jerked back and forth four years at a time on this law which has a lot of impact on our country. You know, millions and millions and millions of students at schools who are receiving public funding. So I agree with you. I think in an ideal world, again, Congress could act on this and clarify, update, and make this law from the 70s a little more applicable to the issues that we're dealing with in our modern day, but

I'm not going to hold my breath on that. Yeah. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, on to the next one. Let's talk about the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, and our favorite, the budget cuts, the Doge budget cut store. You're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. An evening to transform your life. If you say the truth and nothing else, you'll have an immense adventure as a consequence. You won't know what's going to happen to you, but the truth will reveal the world the way it's intended to be revealed. And the consequence for you will be that you'll have the adventure of your life. Live at Scotiabank Arena, March 6th.

Get tickets now at LiveNation.com. Do you want to give us a quick overview and then where you think it ranks? Yeah, let's set the table a little bit. This is something that we talked about last week as well. And this is, DOGE has been doing a lot. So we have to specify which of their actions we're referring to here. So this is about when a federal judge blocked DOGE

and their contractors from accessing the Treasury Department's payment system. Now they have access or a couple of contractors have access in a read-only, non-shareable sense. So I think maybe we should talk about kind of the sweep of it, like the fact that they access them in a way that we're not really sure what powers of access they had and then also knowing what they have now.

So that ruling is going to be in place until at least this Friday again. So many legal things happening at the end of the week when they'll hear arguments that 19 state attorneys general brought that challenge to just access to that system. So what Musk was doing was trying to evidently be able to access the way every payment was being made and to every employee so you can make a determination who's getting paid fraudulently and what budgets feel like they're too bloated. This is sort of following in my estimation.

I don't think this is a very far of a limb to crawl out on either. The playbook that Musk has demonstrated as a CEO, which is, I'm going to come in with the assumption adversarially. I'm going to come in with the assumption that there are people here that are sort of fat we can trim, that are not pulling their weight, that are resting on their laurels. And I'm going to light fires and I'm going to say, I'm going to try to smoke these people out. And I'm going to say to them, look, we're going to, we're setting a higher standards, either get with these standards or get going.

And I'll keep the people around who are here will be lean, trim and motivated. And then we'll focus on the things that will matter and the people who we don't need will be gone. So anything I left out of that summary? I think the one little detail to note is that there was an initial ruling last Thursday now that granted those two Doge staffers access. And then there was a subsequent ruling that overruled that ruling that said, oh no, actually nobody can have access to the system from Doge and potentially anyone else outside of the Treasury. And that's what the Friday hearing is going

to be about. And then there'll be a subsequent one, I think, to suss out the overarching issue at hand here. So just wanted to make that caveat. Cool. Yeah, appreciated. I think all the same with all that said, I think this is two. I think this is number two for me. Yeah, I think there is a way that you can say no action's really been taken yet. Like with with this access. So that that's a mitigating thing. It's like it's laying a foundation or groundwork.

So I'm not going to say that building is fascist until I see the building, which, by the way, I do think some buildings are fascist, but that's a conversation for me. We'll do a rank of architectural features or design with you in a future episode. Sure, we'll go from the brutalist to brutalism. Right, right. I see I was going to ask,

well, we won't go back to the movies, but anyways, I think if people like this format, the next one we should do is have you talk about architecture. Architecture? I don't know. Okay, I'll study up. Or design. Or design.

Okay. Because I've walked around New York City with you and I've seen you point out things that I would never notice on buildings. Right. So. Yeah, I don't know where that comes from. Well, okay, so this is a bit of a spur.

So we'll get back onto the main road here. But if you like this topic and you want to hear Ari talk about this stuff, if you like this format and you want to hear Ari rank architecture design, whatever it is we land on, reach out to us. That email is isaac at retangle.com.

And if you get a paternity leave email, just keep sending it. There's an issue with this Gmail right now. You got to just keep sending it. There's an issue with this Gmail right now. You gotta just keep sending it. And it'll be passed. Just spam it. So speaking of spamming, yeah, Doge, I think the big concern is anything that Musk touches is improper.

It just like, bottom line, it is. Like you can love the fact that we're looking for cuts in the government. You can even say the places that he's looking are appropriate. I disagree. We've said this pretty much from the very beginning, whether it's me or you or Isaac or Aidan, like I don't think our shorts producer, I don't think he's gotten into Doge too much,

but we've talked about in Slack. A unanimous point of view amongst this Tangle editorial team is if you want to cut the budget and we should want to do that, we should want to trim the deficit, we should want to address the debt, the way you do that is by cutting where the biggest cuts are to be found and that is health care, military, and social security. That's where you're gonna find it. If you're not looking there and like maybe a little bit in Department of Education, Veterans Affairs is also large but that covers like two of those areas. If you're not looking in those areas you're just playing a side game and it's kind of for show. But with the added caveat that what I said earlier if

Musk is touching it it's improper because his just his existence in those offices in the federal government is a conflict of interest. Something we mentioned last week. You think it inherently is? For sure. Okay. I do. Something that I mentioned, I don't know if it was last week or the week before, was the

teapot dome scandal involving President Warren Harding and how that was like the the governmental definition of corruption into a Watergate. And when you look at it now it just sounds like business as usual. And I think like the Overton window shifted so much for what we think of as acceptable comportment for government that we don't even see what Musk is doing is like even that bad. This is a headline that happened today was, X settled with the federal government. 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 wanna receive all that and give your support to help grow Tangle Media, please go to readtangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, a podcast membership, or a discounted bundle membership, which gets you both access to the premium newsletter and the premium podcast. 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. 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. Bye, y'all. 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.

And if you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with FIZ. Switch today. Conditions apply.

Details at fiz.ca. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. An evening to transform your life. If you say the truth and nothing else, you'll have an immense adventure as a consequence. You won't know what's going to happen to you, but the truth will reveal the world the way it's intended to be revealed, and the consequence for you will be that you'll have the adventure of your life. Live at Scotiabank Arena, March 6th. Get tickets now at libnation.com