Tangle - Suspension of the rules: Isaac, Ari and Kmele talk Trump, Putin, Zelensky, a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a deep discussion about MAiD.

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

It's a new day and a new name for the Sunday podcast. Literally. We are moving our fan favorite podcast from Sundays to Fridays, and giving it a new name. SUSPENSION OF THE RULES.Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk the latest with Trump, Putin and Zelensky. They also get into it about a very interesting report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Lastly, they pivot to a deep discussion about medical assistance in dying, specifically referring to a very intense article from The Atlantic about Canadian's and medical assistance in dying. If you or someone you know is facing mental health struggles, emotional distress, alcohol or drug use concerns, or just need someone to talk to please call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or visit https://988lifeline.org/Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and Jon Lall. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things comes The Roses. Starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Samburg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney, a hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses only in theaters August 29. Get tickets now. Coming up, we talk the Trump, Russia, Zelensky, latest, a very interesting report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And a discussion about this very, very, very intense article from the Atlantic about Canadians and medical assistance in dying.

Yes, a quick warning that we are going to do a whole segment on something that is pretty related to medically induced suicide. So fair warning for anyone who has any kind of particular sensitivities to that issue. It's a really good, interesting episode. You guys are going to enjoy it. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to Suspension of the Rules. Our newest podcast here from Tangle Media, Tangle News, whatever we're going to decide to call ourselves. I'm your host, Isaac Saul.

I'm here with Camille Foster, our editor at large and Ari Weitzman, our managing editor. And I just got done reading about an Eric Adams advisor trying to give a journalist a bag of potato chips full of cash, which is maybe my favorite New York City corruption story of all time. How are you gentlemen doing today? I'm doing good, although I don't know if we can call $100 a bunch of cash. Depends the denomination. I know journalists aren't doing that well, but come on. Did you see, I think my favorite part of the whole story was that the woman was her, like, attorney reached out and said that it was, she apologized, it was part of her Chinese culture to just get here. Every time I hear it.

It's a bribe. Every time. That's the best that you guys could do is that it's part of a, it's just a cultural thing to pay off people, journalists who you just met with $100 bills stuffed into potato chips. I should actually get the... Have you ever been to a Nigerian wedding though?

I know. Throwing money on you. Don't you smile? I can't say. I have a bride. No, if you're the new bride, that's what they do. They're just hitting you with money. They're throwing it on your person.

I will tell you, Camille, that the thing that sounds different there between that and the Eric Adams thing is everything except for maybe the presence of physical dollars. So I don't know if it's the best analogy I've heard from reporters. I'm just commenting on the ancient Chinese

custom of bribing journalists to write good story about your political. Journalism with Chinese characteristics. Her attorney said, I can see how this looks strange, but I assure you that Wimmy's intent was purely innocent. In the Chinese culture, money is often given to others in a gesture of friendship and gratitude when he is apologetic and embarrassed by any negative impression or confusion this may have

caused. Yes, we're all very confused by exactly what happened. I wasn't aware that people gave cash as gifts. That is a huge cultural difference. Yeah, yes. I've never heard of such a, this foreign concept. Money is gifts. It's the potato chip bag. Well, you know, to be fair, I have a wallet that's made out of tieback, and it's designed to look like an envelope. And it's saved me before because I've lost it. So it looks like a piece of trash. And it's just sitting where I've lost it before. So the first thing I thought of was like, oh, so she just accidentally mixed up

an empty bag of potato chips with her potato chip bag wallet. And like, oh, no, I meant for you to throw that out for me, but I actually handed you my wallet. And it's like, yeah, I get that. It can accidentally mail my wallet. wallets someday, so I get it. If I were this journalist, I'd be so pissed. I dream of someone trying to bribe me. I mean, what an exhilarating moment.

That must be someone slips like a envelope full of crisp $100 bills across the table to you. And instead of having that incredible, like, cinematic movie moment, you just get like a few $100 bills stuffed up into this gross used potato chip bag, just covered in salt and crumbs. Yeah. What a disappointing way to be bribed. I would, that would really take some of the, the romantic scene. So your anger isn't over the bribe itself, but over the bribe not being commiserate enough

with how you think you should be compensated for your friendly judgment. Well, yeah, I guess. At this point, the Eric Adams is corrupt. The Eric Adams and all the people around him are corrupt story is so obviously true and just baked into my brain. that I am now officially, I've moved on to judging whether their means of corruption is classy enough for me or not, basically. That's where I'm at now.

Anyway, there's more important news, kind of. There's a lot more important news than that. But that was an incredible local, that's just like amazing, amazing local politics stuff. Maybe the biggest story this week that we touched on a little bit in the newsletter and the podcast earlier in the week was the Putin-Trump Alaska summit where people had pretty spared views about what exactly happened. And there was a lot of noise about the red carpet and the B-2 bomber flyover and, you know, whether Trump folded or is Putin's puppet still. But what happened since that newsletter got published is that Trump and Zelensky and a group of

European leaders actually met. And I think the headline coming out of that meeting is that Trump is trying to organize a face-to-face between Zelensky and Putin, which I commend him for. I think if the war is going to end, at some point these two guys are going to have to be in the same room together. You know, the big story that a lot of people kind of led with was the fact that it was the first time a broad delegation of European allies had all been in the White House at the same time, seven European leaders were there, you know, NATO partners meeting, discussing the future of the war, what was going to happen. I'm kind of curious to revisit this for a few reasons.

One, I guess I'm wondering if the tenor of the coverage should change at all based on anything that came out of the Zelensky-Trump meeting. I mean, I think Trump meets with Putin, we see this wave of coverage about it. We did a whole newsletter on it. Trump meets with Zelensky, there's kind of less tangible, maybe shifts in what we were expecting out of a resolution here. I didn't really hear anything, at least myself, out of that meeting that I think changed my view on how things down the road might look. Trump certainly didn't make any really hard and fast commitments, though there does seem to be increasingly more and more talk about some sort of, security guarantee from the Trump administration and from these European allies for Ukraine,

which I think is really, really significant and shouldn't be glossed over. Then, of course, days after the White House celebrated this kind of gathering, the Kremlin made it quite clear that its position hasn't really moved. It is not interested in any kind of peace deal that doesn't hand it the land that it already controls, and it doesn't seem like Vladimir Putin's particularly open to meeting face-to-face with Lodomor Zelensky. So that's kind of where things are. I'm curious if you guys had a different read about what came out of the post-Zolinsky. I mean, we've talked a lot about the Alaska Summit, but if anything came out of the Post-Zolensky meeting, that feels worth noting.

Yeah, and I'll start by acknowledging that you're getting us to like talk about the post-Zolensky meaning particular and gesturing that, you know, we've talked about the Putin meaning in Alaska. And we've covered it in the newsletter. We haven't really discussed it together. But to put them in the same basket for a moment, I think we still really are getting a sense of what came out of both of them. I think the thing that we were able to glean in our coverage when we wrote about the meaning in Alaska with Putin and Trump was more optical. I think that's a big thing that we're discussing and seeing what the tenor of the conversation was following it was about peace deal, not ceasefire, and that being something that Putin wanted. But still, not a lot of commitments,

like nothing really that showed us the directionality of a possible deal. And it's just extension of a theme, I think, with the meaning between Trump and Sunlitki and European leaders. I think there's some optics. There's some discussion about the meaning went differently than last time when there's that big oval office blow up, so it felt different. Having everybody in the same room, seems like it shows conciliation on Trump's part towards Europe's point of view. And the thing that we discussed a little bit in the newsletter was, given that Trump does show this tendency towards being convinced by the last person he's spoken to, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It could be a good thing, actually, that he's talking to Zelensky's second.

Rather than being second fiddle, you want to be the second voice in Trump's here a lot of the time. So we are kind of looking at these broad things and making statements. But, yeah, I mean, you're right. We don't really have anything concrete to sink our teeth into. We have some ideas about where lines could be drawn, whether or not Putin is interested in taking those lines if it comes with a significant rider of security guarantees to Ukraine. Those are things that we're all sort of reading about,

but we're not seeing anything actually put into terms on paper yet. We're just all getting these sort of inclinations about how different leaders could be leaning, which is, you know, to be fair, how diplomacy often works. We're getting a sense of the relationships as they're evolving. It's really squishy. So we're seeing the same squishiness in both meetings. And it is sort of indicating that there could be some deal that involves going concessions and that Putin's probably not interested if those concessions involve security guarantees, which Zelensky would only be interested if they do. So it's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of things that seem like they cancel out for now and more wait and see, I guess, from us.

Yeah, I would concur with most of what's been said. I think that the principal thing to take away here is that it doesn't seem like much has changed. This is a years-long conflict. It's not going to be resolved overnight. And I think the biggest change might be the fact that Trump doesn't seem particularly interested in a ceasefire at this point and is much more interested in trying to get towards some ultimate conclusion, which strikes me is perhaps not particularly good for Ukraine. I think the longer this drags on, the kind of human toll for both countries is substantial. But Putin is somewhat insulated from the political cost associated with that. As I've heard in a number of instances, the official tabulation of Russian casualties is what exactly?

We don't really know. And it's not clear that anyone in Russia really knows. So that's a bit of a disappointment. But I do think that there are some things that if we're going to look at the entire situation and take an appraisal of it, we can actually say, well, this is an interesting and perhaps very good outcome. I mean, the fact that you have all of these European leaders arriving at the White House on one accord and kind of lockstep with one another is a tremendous expression of European solidarity.

And whether it was the intent of the Trump administration or not, whether or not it's a goal. of their approach to diplomacy, this is an outcome of Trump's approach to diplomacy, as is anything that looks like a commitment from Europeans to spend their own money, to put their own people at the forefront of this effort, as opposed to the United States having to lead the effort. And I think that in general, Europe having more agency in its own affairs is a very good thing for Europe in general and probably a very good thing for its allies, like the United States won't have to shoulder all of that burden. The questions about security guarantees are palpable. There are just myriad. What exactly is the United States willing to do here?

It sounds like it's not much in terms of putting actual troops on the ground and having something that essentially approximates a NATO security guarantee, but doesn't really, because it's the Europeans, if anyone, who are kind of putting lives on the line. It's the Europeans, if anyone, who are going to be spending capital. According to the White House, the Europeans are going to be paying for whatever support the United States is providing. There are going to be plenty of fiscal hawks who say that's a great thing, but there will be other people who say, hey, this is a major contest with a geopolitical rival and our allies, and we ought to be willing to confront them forcefully wherever they are, and it just still perhaps

doesn't seem like this administration is really committed to doing that in the same way. And again, I think the delays generally seem to benefit the Russian regime. Do you guys feel like if you were in Vlodomor Zelensky's shoes that you could take a territorial concession for the security guarantees? I keep going back and forth on this. It was really interesting. We have a new, by the way, there's now a Tangle new suburb. Reddit, which I've started peeking at every now and then, and we posted a question there. We posed this question there, which elicited a lot of really interesting responses from some of

our listeners. And maybe I should actually reframe the question, because I think it's almost impossible to be like, if you were Volodomor Zelensky in this foreign country, you have no attachment to. Let's put it this way. Live in a hypothetical. Go on a journey with me for a minute. You're the president of the United States. China invades America

and they make some inroads, let's say. They capture a fifth of American territory because none of our allies come to our immediate defense in the first six months or a year into the war. We hold them off and then Europe and some allies in South America and India and the Koreas,

North, South Korea and Taiwan, they look around and they say, we need to help the U.S. or they're going to fall to China. So we have this big meeting with our allies and they say, we'll come to the fight and we'll put our soldiers on the ground. We'll sacrifice the lives of our soldiers.

We will offer these security guarantees to back you guys up. But we think it's a futile effort to win back the fifth of the territory that you've already lost. And you just have to let go of that and we'll prevent it from becoming more than that. Like, is that a deal?

think you could take if you're the United States President? I honestly don't know. I mean, it seems like an impossible choice to make when I put it in those terms. And just to be clear,

I mean, we did this in the newsletter, but I think and the podcast, it is worth reiterating before you guys answer. This is the equivalent of you know, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Chusis, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia,

North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. That's a fifth of the landmass in the United States. Not a fifth of the population. It's probably more than that, but a fifth of the landmass. I don't know, man. Well, I think it's tough to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who's leading any country, but in this context, I think it's also tough to put yourself in the shoes of a different country's leader because as Americans, we're thinking about would we give up this country or any parts of it

when the context is different. We have a country that's geographically extremely difficult to attack. We have a military that's historically powerful. We have an economy that's extremely strong. It's tough to think of what this circumstance would be in which we would do that. and the dire straits we'd have to feel and the stresses we'd be under in order for that to happen. It requires a bit of sitting and really imagining the situation of your country that is in between other very powerful countries, especially one to your east.

That has historically been one that you were a part of a governing structure that contained your country in the Soviet Union decades prior. and that country has maintained a strong military presence. It's taken some of your country already. Let's not forget with Crimea. And what is, there's a, your pressure to both kind of be nice to them, but distance yourselves from them. And if you're too distant, then that's a problem. But you've got potential allies to your west and potential allies across the sea.

And what does it feel like when part of your territory in that context? when you're a country that's in between other powers when part of your territory is threatened. You have to really consider what that would mean, what that would mean for you and the reality of concessions because it's land and you don't want to give that up as a leader. But the thing you really don't want to give up is tens of thousands of more people to affront consistently that's showing that it's not budging against an enemy that's showing that he's not budging. And in those terms, when you think about what your options are, I don't know if there are better ones than taking a strong backed with allies and friendship and guarantees some sort of strong concession. I think that's like maybe one of the things that you swallow.

Yeah, yeah. No, enormously difficult. I have to imagine that at the end of the day, the United States and the Europeans will be. in firm agreement that some concessions have to be made here, and they will certainly be applying pressure on Zelensky from the opposite direction, encouraging him to make some settlement here. And I have to imagine as well that dissatisfaction amongst Ukrainians in general with any sort of concessions

will necessarily be tempered by the fact that the conflict will at least have been abated. I mean, I think the only practical objective for Europeans here is to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again. And the degree to which the kind of settlement and matters is fair or unfair to Ukraine is really a secondary consideration from the standpoint of people who are just thinking about, well, how do we ensure that the Russians behave themselves going forward? That's the principal concern. And secondary to that is, you know, what do we do for Ukraine? Yeah, and it is unfair, right?

Like, they were the ones doing all the fighting. And at every point the U.S. and Europe gave them just enough to sustain. but not enough to win. Could I interject with just a tiny bit of lightheartedness, just something about this whole meeting before you move on, that made me chuckle a little bit. Give it a check. Why not?

I don't know if you guys saw this, but NBC News described it as Zolinsky. For Zolinski, Monday also offered a reset. After a tense Oval Office meeting earlier this year, he struck a more diplomatic tone on Monday, offering Trump and others his thanks more than a dozen times, including for the invitation for Trump's efforts to stop killings and stop the war and for Melania Trump's letter to Putin asking him to protect children

for a program to purchase American weapons and to the European partners for their support. On his ex-account, he offered profuse, continued thanks as well into Tuesday. And he showed up wearing a suit, by the way, instead of his usual military fatigues. And he told Trump, as he greeted him, quote, this is the best I had. Trump said, I love it, ultimately sharing a video of the warm exchange on his social media platform, Truth Social. And when Trump was asked what his message to the people of Ukraine was, he told the reporter, we love them.

Trump might be the simplest guy in the world to figure out. I just, like, if... I think it's true. Yeah. If I were a foreign leader, I think I could make Trump my best friend in a single meeting. I really don't think it's that hard. Like, and I don't mean that in like a, I mean, I guess there's something about it that's like a little bit denigrating to say it that way, like, but it's just so clear how he operates. Just be grateful, be very nice, offer profuse praise, be like visually, aesthetically appealing in every possible way you can.

He clearly cares about that so much. Like his sort of like appreciation for the vanity of things is so overt and obvious. Yeah, I don't know. It just made me laugh like there. The number of times he said thank you. Oh, by the way, in response to an Oval Office situation, let's not forget, where they freaked out on Zelensky for literally saying the thing that they have now come to realize themselves six months later, which is that Putin's full of shit

and his quote-unquote diplomacy is not actually really diplomacy because he never sticks to his word. I mean, what... So the last thing Zelensky said before J.D. Vance freaked out on him and then Trump piled on was asking them what they meant by diplomacy

because they've tried diplomacy with Putin before and he breaks every agreement they make and then they went off on him about how he's ungrateful and is litigating it before the press and yada, yada, yada. And then six months later, Trump's like, I can't believe this guy Putin. I mean, we have a phone call. He seems so nice.

And then I hang up and then he's bombing people. And, yeah. But Zelensky learned his lesson, I guess, showed up in a suit and said thank you more times than he probably said anything else in the whole meeting. So I guess it seems to have worked, too, which is good for Ukraine. No, I think that's a great observation and very well put. It is one of those things where it can be both a meaningful, genuine, strength and positive attribute, and in another respect, like, kind of gross. It's almost as though the only game to play is the sycophancy game, even if you're only

pretending and everyone knows you're pretending in its theater. And that's a bit despicable. I think given the gravity of the circumstance, the idea that there is this preposterous game where someone has to say thank you over and over and over again, emphatically, and someone has to worry about whether or not they're wearing the right apparel. Where did your suit come from? Again, just feels rather crude. I think it's, I saw many people trumpeting it on the Maga side as a victory of some sort. And I think it's mostly just embarrassing. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with what Zelensky wore the last time. And the entire unseemly

encounter in that first meeting, whoever you put the blame on, could have been avoided. Um, so it's, it's, it's preposterous that it's still casting, casting such a long shadow in a circumstance that everyone would, everyone would actually like to see resolve. We'll be right back after this quick break. Searchlight Pictures presents the Roses, only in theaters, August 29. Director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things comes The Roses. Starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch,

Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Alison Janney, a hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses only in theaters August 29. Get tickets now. All right, I could stay on this topic forever because I find so many elements of it fascinating. But we have two other big ones that I want to navigate. The first of which is kind of a complicated, at least to me, complicated economic story. And maybe Ari, I'll let you drive a little bit on this one if your game for it.

And then the last thing that we're going to jump into on today's show is maybe one of the heavier and more uncomfortable topics I think we've ever talked about. So I'm kind of curious to see where that conversation goes. But we'll start with the complicated, nerdy economic stuff first. I guess the easiest thing to do before I pass it to Ari is just to say there is a story that's been percolating or a narrative, I think, that the Trump administration's economic policies have drastically increased the number or proportion of working native-born Americans, I believe. and maybe now we're not so sure about that data, which is a story popping up at a time when we have this new potential leader of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,

which has drawn a lot of attention and skepticism about the data. All right, can you tell us what's going on here a little bit? Yeah, it's a simple thing. There's a simple headline and then a bit more of a complicated backstory behind it, and there's a sort of cloud of uncertainty that it's all within.

The simple headline is the BLS Bureau of Labor Statistics released some numbers recently that showed that there's a decline of 1.9 million in foreign-born working-age population in the U.S. And a subsequent increase of 3.3 million in the native-born working-age population since December. And can I just interrupt you really quick, just briefly, just to say,

this is a really important headline for the Trump administration because there is a there is an outcome that they have made very clear they are driving towards with many of their policies which is to increase the amount of working native-born Americans and decrease the amount of like illegal and native or foreign-born labor here

which are not the same but to decrease both of those things in favor of, you know, quote-unquote, real Americans getting these jobs because that's something they accuse the Biden administration of of having all this job growth driven by immigration. Sorry, go ahead. Right. Like that is very much the outcome that they're looking for. So in terms of that, in terms of the policy goals, good numbers. The interesting thing is they're also kind of impossible for that to happen in the context of the other

numbers that we're getting from the BLS, like we're seeing jobs generally going down, so it's not impossible. It's not really possible that since December there'd be an increase of 3.3 million native-born jobs while there's a decrease in foreign, like foreign-born jobs. The explanations like,

there's obviously this big pall around it of, okay, well, now the BLS is getting politicized, so are we then dismissing these numbers is completely fraudulent. There's kind of a banal. explanation for this. There's room to ask how much this would have been different under a different head of BLS, but not a huge amount. This is not a thing where it's just been a spike this month. It wasn't like in July, we saw a three million increase. That's not what happened.

It's since January, there's been this monotonic increase in the number of native-born jobs that BLS is reporting. And at the same time, a monotonic decrease, mostly there's like a little bit of a flat line around March, but monotonic decrease in foreign-born jobs. And that's based off of a difference from the numbers that they're getting from the census to estimate the proportion of people in the country. The Census Bureau estimated more foreign-born workers because there's a big boom in immigration from 2003 to 2004. As we all know, it's one of the reasons Trump got elected. And at the same time, since the election and since Trump has been doing well on the campaign trail, going back to October, there have been decreases in

the number of foreign-born workers who are responding to requests for survey data. So we've talked about how requests for survey responses have been tough for the Bureau generally over the last couple years. That's just been magnified with foreign-born workers. And why would you? Like, it's a risk that you can understand if you're somebody who's not authorized to work in the U.S. and you have a job, what's the incentive to report it? So, Since Trump's been elected, they've been responding less. We know that at the same time, the census has been estimated that there's more. They're looking at the jobs numbers they're getting from employers, and they're making

proportional assumptions on who holds which jobs based off of the responses to surveys. So it's not reliable data, and we have been criticizing the BLS for potentially putting a new head in who would give us data that we have reason to be suspicious of. But at the same time, it's not something that only happened since McIntarfer was fired. It's something that's been in the works. It's actually one of the reasons why you might say we're getting unreliable data at BLS. We should shake it up. But it is now with this new head, something that E.J. Antony, who Trump is nominating, he's not the head yet.

But there's an acting director. There's a reason for us to look at data coming out of the BLS and asking, is this political. So in that whole cloud, there's the story, this headlong. line of increased native-born, decrease foreign-born. That's not new, per se. There's a reason for it. But now we're asking, okay, moving forward, how is this process going to change? Because we do want the person who's in charge to make this data more accurate. But we have good reason to doubt that it's going to be improved in a way that makes it more accurate in this case, given that it's something that reinforces what the Trump administration wants to be true. So that all kind of track.

It is a little mushy. That tracks to me. So I guess like maybe a straightforward way to kind of sum it up is that we can look at the proportion of the native-born and foreign-born population of the working Americans, the employed working Americans. And those proportions have basically stayed the same, right? I mean, that's one of the ways they kind of disprove this idea or that this Bloomberg article that came out about it sort of disprove this idea is that the proportion is not actually changing the way it would have to to necessitate these numbers being so different. Right. And if you assume that those proportions are relatively similar from last January, which like you don't need to assume, like you can actually see that in different data, then these numbers don't track. more or less. But it's not like they just stopped tracking.

It's that this is the continuation of a trend that we've been seeing since Trump was not only in office but elected. Yeah, that makes sense. It does sort of, I mean, it doesn't justify the changes at BLS, but I think maybe it justifies the scrutiny of our economic date. I mean, it was kind of a wild realization to me to be like the timely data that we are working off of on a monthly basis is based pretty much entirely on survey response rates. I mean, that's kind of it. Like, you know,

we get, we figure it out. It's why we get these revisions. It's not like it's the, it's not like that's it and then it's done. But it's a little bit jarring to realize that we're at the whim of whether people are going to answer these calls or, you know, I actually don't know how they conduct the LS surveys, whether it's phone calls or online or in person, but I presume it's probably a mix. And there are, I mean, fortunately, there are a lot of private, and not a lot, but there are some important private benchmarks that we can look at. I think ADP and Moody's both have these competing models for helping to understand what's happening with employees. in the country. And my suspicion is that the net effect of all of this, the questions raised by

the administration, the appointment by someone new, essentially the explicit politicization of this project, even if they do their best to kind of deliver the numbers in an honest way, it looks political. There was an allegation of malfeasance on the part of the prior administration's appointee. There have already been suggestions that the new guy is someone who isn't trustworthy. and the president has a very explicit perspective on what the numbers ought to be. It is impossible to avoid the appearance of this seeming like the numbers are being screwed around with. And the net effect is going to be greater doubt and suspicion of these agencies and the data

that they're providing no matter what going forward. And that is going to be true for Democrats and Republicans. You may see perhaps an initial bump. But my suspicion is that especially if we're in a kind of somewhat tumultuous, economic circumstance and the years to come that people are going to have lots of questions about whether or not these numbers can be trusted, which perhaps will lead to the development and deployment of more private models to help people understand what's happening with employment, because that is really valuable information to have. It's not just a matter of

whether or not voters believe that the person who's in office is doing a good job, planning for the production of your particular in your industry depends a hell of a lot on what's happening in that industry with jobs and being able to find new ways to actually make predictions about where the trend lines are and where they're going to be is going to be a hugely valuable thing. So while I have my concerns about this, I'm at least optimistic that we'll have some alternatives

that help us make sense out of things going forward. But it is a little frustrating that the kind of pessimism and institutional skepticism that we've seen grow and grow and grow in recent years that has impacted government broadly and the media and universities and the academy and expert opinion in general, it's happening here and it's going to continue to happen. And I think that there's reason to be frustrated about that, even if you are the kind of person like me who believes that in general, people ought to be cultivating as many kind of skills and abilities as they can

to make up their own mind and do their own research. and as broad a universe of context as possible. Right. And there's only so much of your own research you can do when you're one person instead of a bureau with your hands on 631,000 workspaces that you survey. They have the ability to do this better than we do. And it is sort of jarring to think that in this day and age,

we're still relying on sampling this composite sample and then doing a statistical extrapolation from it in order to get these jobs numbers. when we do have other private metrics that, you know, maybe somebody could make a composite reading out of that can give us something that's a little bit more reliable. If only we had somebody who was instituted as the head of the BLS, who had any background that showed they were capable of making such sophisticated statistical economic data analyses, that, yes, is a veiled criticism. Maybe not too veiled, but I think there is good reason. that the president did not give, but there would have been good reason to install somebody who was capable of giving us a little bit more reliability, and instead we got the opposite,

and it is very frustrating. I'm definitely going to look into this. My suspicion is that someone at Anthropic and Open AI at least is already looking at this and had been, and that they're probably redoubling their efforts to try and concoct some sort of LLM-based model for making more accurate predictions around this stuff. I'm sure there's like a university lab too doing that. Like, you're sure of opportunity. Yeah.

How could we reasonably measure in the next year or two the success of E.J. Antoni's tenure? I mean, I think it's pretty easy to sit here and be like, this guy's not qualified and this is, you know, Trump. It's obvious Trump did what he did because he's upset about the revisions. He said it. He explained it. There's no need to invent things. He thinks the BLS is rigged against Republicans, or at least that's his stated view. So I'm not going to like pretend that he has some higher minded goal here. But I do think there's a question of whether some massive shakeup like this. Like what if E.J. Anthony does actually improve the way this data is collected and increases response rates? I mean, would that be a world where, a year or two, we're kind of eating crow on this. I think it's an important gut chag. It's a great question. I think that the challenge here, though, is just that the way this

is unfolded and that the rhetoric that's been used both before and hence is actually contributing to the skepticism. And that skepticism is going to be durable. And that it just casts a long shadow. And I think it's actually interesting that in a number of places, and we've talked about a few of them already and some we haven't. But this week, the president is also making some noises about the Smithsonian and changes that need to be made there and alluding to what's happened with universities with respect to the push to combat anti-Semitism and the withholding of funding in order to achieve that end. And then forcing universities to agree to the things that many organizations like Fire, I'm a board member, have raised concerns about academic freedom and free expression

in connection with the way that the Trump administration is approaching things. If they were to pursue pluralism and push back on kind of what they see as an intellectual monoculture or political perhaps or partisan monoculture in certain institutions, if they were doing that in a deliberate manner and they were trying to be as kind of transparent as possible and not necessarily bull in China shoplike, then it's possible they might actually be able to bring some people over to their side and that we would be in a position where it's easier to adjudicate whether or not people feel a greater sense of trust and whether or not they're actually being successful here. But because they actually seem to prefer being confrontational

here in contexts like this, because in many instances it seems that they prioritize the kind of theatrical impression that we're getting things done and we're going to own the libs, that I think it may be the case that it's certainly important for us not to get out over our skis as people who survey this stuff. But it also just contributes to the fact that most people or many people are going to be very skeptical. And if they want a different outcome, they should probably have a different approach to trying to get things done. I know that it's harder to be pragmatic. to try to be inclusive in context like this. I know that it can be bruising to bring Democrats into the fold

who have perhaps been sharply critical of you, but I think it's the right thing to do if you actually want to make durable progress that's going to stand beyond the period of, beyond the term of your administration. So much of what this administration has done is via executive fiat and not with respect to actual legislative change. And the only way you can get those,

legislative changes is if you're willing to do the hard work of building a bipartisan coalition. And they just seem not just disinterested in it, but almost allergic to it. Plenty of good reason to be skeptical of Antony then Camille, but I think also to try to tie that into an answer of how we know if we're wrong, though. Because like, yeah, there's great criticism of the chosen methodology for change at the BLS and elsewhere, but how could this work? Like, it's possible, right? And I have a couple things that inform my perspective here. As you know, Isaac, as you might not know, Camille, my dad worked for the Department of Labor for a number of decades. He worked for OSHA, not the

BLS, but adjacent. And I sort of picked up over time, and from talking to him after he retired, that the worst appointed secretary of labor that you could work under isn't a person or would be a person who like has their way of doing things that is like not helpful and unconstructive and then enforces it. Somebody that's not the worst person to work under is somebody who doesn't know what they're doing and doesn't pretend to because then the people who do know what they're doing can self-govern. So if you have somebody like Antony who comes in who makes it his job to continue to shitpost online and doesn't like like he gives some directives but he's not hands on and saying this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong when he's

wrong, you know, and obviously I'm baking this in like some assumptions about what he's going to be capable of doing to this question. But it's just to say that if he is hands off, then it's possible that people who know what they're doing can step up and do the job well. At the same time, it's possible that he has like an idea or two that people want to collaborate with. Maybe he should post and then in the room, he's a different person. And he wants to collaborate and learn and has good feedback. And it's possible. There's routes where the BLS is doing well. How can we make that determination? I think the answer to that, Isaac, is sort of based on what I would learn or what I had learned from talking to climate modelers, which is just you come up

with some omnibus way of trying to make measures of what the thing is that you're hoping to predict. And then you retrospect it backwards. And you say, if I look as like a university lab. I'm taking economic data. I'm taking ADP job role or like workplace role reports and putting all of these private sector and publicly available data sets together, partial data sets maybe from the BLS too. And I try to create a metric. Does that metric generally track with what then of available data that I had at the time does it track with what we're able to get from the eventual more reliable data we got from BLS at the end of the month? And then I would take that projection and move it forward and say, okay, I came up with something

that roughly approximates what we're able to see historically. And now I can project reasonably that over time that's going to be a good stand-in for what the real, quote, real numbers reported from the BLS are. If those numbers tend to align over time, if the thing that we designed to approximate the BLS measure does track to what the BLS actually outputs, then we can say he's doing a good job. We could even say that, you know, if it gets closer, then he's doing better. If there's fewer revisions and those revisions tend to match with what we expect reality to be, then yeah, we could say he's doing better. And if they don't, then we say that they don't.

And I think that's, I can't think of any other way to do it that would be better than that. Yeah, thank you for answering the question directly, Ari. You're exactly right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that actually, that is consistent with some of what I was suggesting earlier about there being these other private sources of data. If it doesn't seem to conform to the stuff that you're getting from ADP and paychecks, then you're going to know there's a problem.

If LinkedIn is showing you trend lines that don't seem to support what the BLS data is suggesting, that's going to be a problem. You're going to have, and the revisions are particularly valuable. The fact that you're going to have these opportunities to, and it's already kind of built in there to take a look at the

quarterly numbers and see if they match up with what has been reported. then that's all going to be an indication of whether or not he's doing a very, very good job. But again, I do think that the specter of impropriety is going to be very, very, very hard to evade here, almost irrespective of what happens. But we will certainly try to adjudicate things in a fair manner here. Very much. We'll be right back after this quick break.

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a little bit. There is a story that came out in the Atlantic recently, and the very captivating headline of it is that Canada is killing itself, and the subhead says the country has given its citizens the right to die, and doctors are struggling to keep up with demand. I'm going to read a couple excerpts from this story to just frame it for some of our listeners who I'm sure have not read it yet. I imagine some have, and many haven't. When Canada's parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia,

medical assistance in dying or made, as it's formally called, it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law. The next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a weight. Maid now accounts for about one,

in 20 deaths in Canada, more than Alzheimer's and diabetes combined surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer. There are a few other quotes here I'm just going to pull out. It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset, it has proved a case study in momentum. Maid began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions, but not facing imminent death. In two years, Maid will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors. As of 2023, the last year for which data are available,

some 60,300 Canadians had been legally helped to their death by clinicians. In Quebec, more than 7% of all deaths are now by euthanasia, the highest rate of any jurisdiction in the world. One doctor, Claude Ravard, a family doctor in the suburban Montreal, said, I have two or three provisions every week now and it's continuing to go up every year. This story, I mean, to me is fairly shocking. I want to talk a bit or try and explore that why it sort of maybe offends my sensibilities or draws such a strong reaction for me. but I'll start broad before getting into some more specific questions for you to

knowing that the three of us all read this piece. And Ari, I'll start with you. I'm curious what your reaction was to it in kind of broad strokes or like what you felt reading it. Even, yeah, thank you for asking and for choosing this story. I think it's something that, first of all, incredibly well written and something I'm really interested in learning more about and speaking to other people to learn more about because in Vermont there's a similar provision that's different in some meaningful ways that allows for medically assist in dying. And it's very different. But I can't speak authoritatively on how.

What I can't speak authoritatively about is what you asked me, which was my reaction to this piece, which is like really just hot anger. It was really tough to explain. how much of a, like, gut level, like, back wet with sweat reaction that I had to this. And when I've had conversations with people trying to suss out why, and some of those stats are just, like, shocking. This idea that medically assisted dying accounts for one and 20 deaths. Like, that's extremely large. Even compared to other countries where it's been illegal and legal for longer, like in Belgium,

it's two, three percent, and that's already seems large to me, but one in 20 is pretty astounding. And there's cherry-picked anecdotes here, and I wouldn't claim to say that they represent the majority, but the fact that they represent something that can be legal is upsetting. And I'm going to just like take some, just like a little bit from one of them, which is the one that's the most startling to me, which is a person came into a practice in Canada asking, he was a person in his 30s who was suffering from a lung cancer diagnosis. He was given treatment options, and he, not lung cancer, I'm sorry, it was colon cancer, but he was from the beginning insisting that he wanted made instead of treatment options,

saying that he wanted to avoid the pain of the treatments. And the only way to do that was to go to medical assistant dying, death, like to be killed. And I think one of the things that bothers me a lot is that these acronyms, I think, like we say made and what we mean is a doctor killing you. And I think when we choose language that's meant to be sensitive, a thing that we do is we make it more easy for us as language users to be shielded from the meaning of our words. And it really upsets me. think you were asking a doctor to kill you. I think that that's something that it sounds harsh and it's brutal, but that's the truth. And there's a difference between saying, like, you have a right to death and saying you should give a right to refuse treatment that's going to unnaturally prolong

your life when you're ready to die and you have a treatment that's terminal. But to say, I'm suffering from a cancer that's treatable and I could survive and potentially even recover and live a happy life and I'm going to deny those treatment options. The treatment option that I want is to be killed is something that I think based on some experiences that I've had probably bothers me. Like I think is the reason why it bothers me so much. Like I've had a couple near-death experiences that required me being hospitalized when I was 15. I had a tumor in my small intestine that made me like need to have a pretty immediate surgery

in order to survive. and I had, I think, like, an 85% chance of survival from that, which, you know, as a kid, I thought pretty good, I'm fine. But when I look back on it, realize how close to death that I was and how tough that was for my entire family and thinking, like, there is no way through that process that wasn't going to be traumatic or painful. But that's the option. That's the option that I had. And I think having gone to the hospital with, like, other issues before, the only attitude that I can sort of, and I've seen family members, we all have family members that have suffered and the way that I've seen family members recover and respond to treatments that were, like I have an aunt who has tumors, brain tumors,

and the way that she's dealt with her treatment has been so inspiring to me. And to think that there's another way to respond to option to like these diagnoses that are tough and challenging but aren't immediately going to kill you is to just say no and to just like jump straight to the end. As a matter of a personal choice, it's something that I struggle with. And I think to legalize treatment for that as medical killing and to refer to it as treatment is something that really upsets me and really like I just get worked up thinking about it. And I'm interested in learning more and trying to, you know, become a little bit more tempered in this. Because, again, I'm learning about anecdotes that don't represent the majority,

and there's majority cases here that I'm sure are very different. But the way the law is drafted encompasses some cases that I think reasonably we should say it shouldn't. And that's what bothers me so much. Camille? Yeah, I mean, I thought it was a really extraordinary piece of reporting. I certainly had some things I didn't love about it. but I feel like I learned a great deal. And the first things that I thought about when I started reading it,

and I sent you guys a message almost as soon as I started reading it, was Camus in the beginning of the myth of Sisyphus. It says, like, the first question that we have to ask in philosophy, the most fundamental one is, like, should I go on living? And the second thing that came to mind is this ancient Egyptian wisdom text. And I believe the title of it is something called something like, the dispute between a man and his bah and his soul is what ba ba is in that context and it is an extraordinary piece of literature that was discovered and the translation essentially is this this man

in a context thousands of years removed from ours having this internal struggle with respect to what he should do living in a time that feels utterly alien to him and in a circumstance where he feels lonely. He doesn't suggest, you know, I'm not being well taken care of or something like that. It's just my friends are gone and the people who I'm surrounded by feel like strangers. And my soul tells me my subconscious that I should perhaps just end it. And he's wrestling with this in this text. And it doesn't arrive at a place that says, you know, that is a horrible impossibility.

It suggests that, you know, the West will deliver a. kind of peace to me. And I think there is something to be said for taking count of the fact that are prevailing perspectives on death and life, on suicide, on someone's, and it's interesting to even describe it as a right to die. It's my life. If it has become too difficult for me to live, for whatever reason, the notion that I don't really have a meaningful choice and what I'm going to do is one that is, first, like, formally just untrue and ridiculous. Like, even if the state prohibits me from doing it, I could pursue this in other ways. And the United States being among the world leaders in overdose deaths suggests that

perhaps lots of people are pursuing this in other ways. And interestingly, and I resonate with so much of what you said, Ari, but I thought that I kept having was, is it not the case that in countries and in places where we are, we imagine, You know, this, we can't permit this sort of thing. We've simply become accustomed to stepping over people who are, you know, heroin addicts who are using on the streets who are clearly killing themselves in front of our eyes. And we're comfortable with the way that they're going about it slowly, publicly in some cases and privately, and in an agonizing manner, as opposed to some of what's depicted in these stories, people who are surrounded by family and who have had time to think. about this and who even at the last minute kind of pull back and say, wait a minute, I don't want to do this. I actually want to stay. I have lots of concerns about this. Some of them grave. I have to say,

though, I would have far more concern if there was not a great deal of consternation about this publicly. And if there were not a profound and obvious interest in understanding who should be able to do this under what circumstances and how can we ensure that there's sufficient supervision and scrutiny to ensure that practitioners are going about this in a very kind of moral, above board and transparent way. But I do think that there is some kind of legitimacy and credibility to the kind of death with dignity movement and that while we've become accustomed to living, very sanitized lives with respect to the fact of our own mortality. We don't even, we're not, most of us anyways,

aren't accustomed to knowing anything about or even thinking about the death of the food that we eat, to the extent we eat meat, let alone the deaths of the people that we love by the time we see them. They've been cleaned up. It is a real thing. It is common, to quote Hamlet, but that doesn't mean that it it is trivial. So I think provided we're attributing the right gravity to all of this, I feel not merely open to exploring this universe, but I think even a world where one in 20,

you know, for almost 5% of deaths are attributable to something like this, well, the question becomes, you know, are these people better off? And it's not impossible to imagine someone that is enduring such grave suffering, such intense loneliness that can't be ameliorated by monetary compensation from the state, that this did turn out to be the best choice for them. And this was, in fact, a gift. And some people, including myself, may have moral challenges to that sort of circumstance. But I think we do have to, in a free, open society, accept that this might be a way that some people on

the side to live their lives and end them. I think what's interesting to me is I don't actually feel myself having any objection

to the legal questions here. Like, I think there's a really strong argument that if a willing, I mean,

There needs to be some sort of standard, I suppose, like qualification for what cases, you know, somebody can't just walk in. The mental illness thing worries me. But the physical pain and the, you know, people who qualify for the medical assisted death on the grounds of a diagnosis that's terminal, I think it's totally legitimate for the law to allow the... patient to find a doctor who is specifically accredited in a way that they know how to navigate that situation, whether it's like being sure that this person is sure and then also being able to administer, you know, whatever this cocktail is that's killing these people. I think my objection to that on the legal question of like, should this be legal, is pretty. pretty muted, and I feel like people should be free to explore that option.

To me, it's like the cultural kind of momentum around this stuff that I find so unsettling. It's that, like, there is a bigger and bigger acceptance, and it's sort of a chicken and the egg situation. Like, did the culture come first and usher in the legal elements, or does, like, putting the weight of the law behind this and making something like this legal sort of open the door to the cultural revolution that's going to drive more and more people to this decision. But I don't feel, what makes me feel really icky is like the, the just momentum it seems to have from a standpoint of like, this is more and more an option that's in the cultural

ether that people are going to decide to choose. versus like, I can think of a lot of narrower grounds than maybe this article covers or that Canada is currently operating in where, you know, if somebody is in extreme pain and they have a terminal diagnosis and they want to be relieved from like that suffering that there should be a way for them to do that, that isn't, you know, committing suicide at home or whatever it is or dying a slow, horrific death that's unnecessary

and expensive for their family and all these things. I mean, yeah, I'm unsure about my objection to that as much as I am about the broader, really uncomfortable feeling I get thinking about this becoming common and accepted in culture. The thing that was really

maybe starkest for me was that I just finished reading a book that was given to me by a friend about the president of Uruguay who was often called the poorest president in the world that was a little bit of a retrospective about his presidency and a period of imprisonment he spent

which was nearly a decade. He was a former guerrilla fighter. He was captured by the government. He was imprisoned by himself, like in a hole, essentially, for about 10 years of his life. And the way that he described his his struggle and his thoughts was to put the idea of succumbing to madness

or succumbing to the desire to die as a bridge that was not to be crossed and never crossable. And like tantam out to defeat to him and he said it was the mind of a gorilla that maybe led him to that. But hearing about the way that he persevered made it really, provided a very stark contrast to this 30-something-year-old with a 65% chance

of having his cancer be treated, saying that he doesn't want to undergo the possibility of pain in order to make that happen. And I think, yes, we can share a concern about the cultural momentum, but if the law is crafted in such a way to make that an option, then I think it is. a problem with the law, like straightforwardly. And there's something, like Camille said, everyone has the right to die. Like in suggesting otherwise is a little absurd because saying, you know, if like I won't unpack that more, I think we're going to have a very healthy at the end caveat about not doing,

not taking extreme actions. I'll foresage that here a little bit and say that, I think. like pushing living life and trying to saturate it with an appreciation enjoyment and staving off the end of it is like one of the largest most principal foundations of life like in as somebody I don't believe I'm not a religious person so I don't know how much I can say the word but I do think life is sacred and I think the um the idea that we'll allow it thanks thank you appreciate that I think to be extent that we craft a law that says that you have the right to ask for this as a treatment.

If you have, in the way that it's written, is if you have a diagnosis that is terminal, because that has a lot of gray area. For one, terminal when? Like, what is your timeline like? What is the pain that you're under? What is the suffering that you're undergoing? Are you even undergoing it yet at this time because this is hypothetical and it's still being covered by this law and that's subjective so it's tough to answer those questions but and and so they're being kicked towards the patient the patient has the right to define that and then on the other hand what is the medical practitioner required by the law to do so if somebody's insisting that this is an option they want to exercise as a medical practitioner based on this article it sounds like

professionals are afraid to say, I'm not going to do that because it does seem to be illegal to say, I'm not going to allow you to pursue that option medically. Like, I'm not going to connect you with a specialist who does that. Talk to somebody else and it's not going to be me because that opens you up to a lawsuit. And that's pretty chilling, I think. If you have a patient who you think there's options to explore and they don't want to explore them, then you're liable for not then giving them. a treatment that is going to sentence them to death.

And that's, like, culture, yes, momentum, yes, lots of issues. But that's got to be something that can be fixed legally. Like, that seems way too permissive. I do think, you know, that there's a kind of understanding amongst libertarian weirdos like myself that there is often a kind of false dichotomy that is either asserted or assumed where we're looking at a circumstance that has to be either a kind of prohibition versus sanction. And I think you're correct, Ari, to point out that to the extent there are legal requirements on medical practitioners to inform people of this option and not to dissuade them

from this option, I think I would take issue with that because those are kind of speech restrictions of a sort, even an obligation to speak a particular thing or to refrain from saying Both of those are kind of speech restrictions. So that is an issue for me, and I think it's something that is worth raising concerns about. But interestingly, as you were talking, I think a lot about, and I think we all do. I suspect most of us listening think a lot about our kind of modern circumstance and prevailing norms in the Western world with respect to religiosity, with respect to the crisis epidemic of loneliness that's been alluded to in a bunch of different contexts, where it's worth interrogating what our values are

and what the kind of prevailing dominant philosophical ethic is, the prevalence of ideas that we live in a cosmos that is mechanical and that has evolved in a particular way and is ultimately meaningless. It is a prevailing notion amongst the smart set. And I don't know that it actually stands to reason that if the universe is mechanical and that things have evolved to this point, that things are ultimately meaningless.

And I don't know that the state has any role in trying to forge a kind of better moral valence for us as societies and as individuals. But I do think that we all have some agency there. And it's worth kind of confronting and thinking about these things. And there is a sense in which even having this option available and having the opportunity to discuss these things and to put it into broader context. And I think to the extent we're talking about the trend and the 4.7, 5 odd percent in Canada nationally, like there are other places like the Netherlands where this has been going on for like two decades now and where

the numbers rather than kind of continuing on some skyrocketing trajectory have actually leveled off at a little higher than 5%, which suggests that there perhaps is a kind of normal baseline. Does that mean it's acceptable and ideal? No, but it perhaps does suggest that, you know, Canada isn't inevitably killing itself. That Canada is permitting some people to die, and the aspiration is to permit them to die with dignity, whether or not they're fulfilling that aspiration, I think is a real question. And there are perhaps a number, a universe of ancillary related questions. I guess I'm curious, I mean, could... Draw the line for me between someone who is saying I don't want to be a vegetable or I don't want to be intubated or, you know, like I don't want an intervention versus somebody who's making a decision after getting some kind of diagnosis like this or.

experiencing some kind of pain that like I can see the road ahead and I don't want that fight and I would rather like take this option that's offered to me. I mean, like, you know, I guess there's the distinction. I mean, Ari, you said like, you know, there's a difference between the right to die and the right to be killed, but, like, is there a huge difference between, you know, somebody who says, I'm going to, like, I am refusing to put up this fight

and somebody who says, like, I want help giving up, basically? I mean, I just, I find that a little bit harder to parse than maybe the right to die versus right to be killed language portrays. It seems like those things are closer together. I think it matters

what the mandate is and who the actor is. And if you're saying there's so many ways to phrase it that feel agreeable to say if I know what I'm, I know what I want and I know the suffering that I'm in for and that I've already started to experience

and I don't want that. I want to go before I start to feel it. I just want, I want help with that. I want to be eased out. It sort of sanitizes what the actual implication of that is, which is to say there's going to be a person in Canada. They have, you know, socialized medicine. So maybe it's different in the U.S.

or it would be because of this reason. But this is a person who's a worker of the state, and he's into the state who now is obligated to act. And you're telling this person who's a medical worker who signed up to generally do the opposite and try to sustain life and ease suffering in a way that allows life to continue to exist, to now say your obligation here is to inform this person of people who will do this or you do it yourself. And that's a big difference to me.

It's a huge difference to me. So if you are drafting a law that says you have one's contingent to say like in the, in the, I can sign some of the system. If I'm incapacitated, if I'm going to be put on permanent life support, I want somebody, I want to be able to say I have, I'm turning that down in advance of it. And then the medical team wouldn't be administering those treatments that would extend your life. And it's a different thing to say, I see what I'm in for. I don't want it and I'm requiring you or an agent of the state to do this

and I think that's the difference is saying that the action is going to be final in the actions mandated by the law and again just because it feels so weird to continue to talk about this and it's such a sensitive topic and I know we're going to say it anyway

but I feel the need to just say if this is a thing you're struggling with and you're thinking about it please do not And there are people who are better at having those conversations and more qualified than I am, but talk to somebody about it and make sure, like, if you're suffering in something medical like this and you're at the end of your life, like, I'm not in that situation. I can't know it, but I really, really hope that you consider all your options. Yeah, we, I mean, we're certainly obligated to note that for, I mean,

Because we're talking about medically assisted suicide. So, you know, if you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline, or you can go to speakingofsuicide.com for a list of additional resources. I have a flight to catch, which is going to save me from what would maybe be the most awkward transition in Tangle history to try and segue into grievances section right now. after that discussion. So I'm not going to do that. I think maybe we can table a list of our petty complaints for the day at the back end of a discussion about medically assisted suicide.

I'm really curious to hear from our audience on this, though. So if you have thoughts about this topic, and especially if you're somebody who is close to it in a particular way, either having experienced it yourself or perhaps an expert, in the field or a medical professional, I'd be really curious what kind of opinions exist out there. I don't have a great read on the room on where people land. I think, like, my instinct is that if this were a left-right issue, there's probably a lot more acceptance of it among people on the left side of the political spectrum than people on the right. But I don't know for sure,

and I don't know if there are really political-divided lines, political dividing lines here. I'm interested. So you can always reach us by writing to staff at readtangle.com or myself, Isaac, or Ari, or Camille, all at readtangle.com. We've each got her own personal emails up. And yeah, I'm interested to hear from folks on this one. So I wish I had a really good, nice landing spot here, but I do actually very much have to go. And Ari and Camille, I appreciate you guys, as always. The article, again, for those of you who are interested in reading it, is headline Canada is killing itself.

It's in the Atlantic. It's worth the read. It's clearly a touchy and thought-provoking subject. It's a really fantastic piece of writing. And gentlemen, we'll be back here next week, hopefully, with a little bit of lighter fare to finish things up on. But I'm really grateful to have two people to bounce some of this stuff off of whose thoughts I actually appreciate. and I'm interested to hear. So thanks for being here today.

Yeah. Yeah, you got it. No palate cleanser. It feels a little strange. But, yeah, I know a lot of people are upset or have their own grievances about our grievances. So maybe it's a thing we can talk about it. We'll talk about that later.

Yeah. All right. I'll see you guys soon. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wohl. Today's episode was edited in Nendium. engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman

with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Canuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reetangle.com. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode Hulu Original Limited series

that blends gripping pacing with emotional complexity, offering a dramatized look as it revisits the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox for the tragic murder of Meredith Kircher and the relentless media storm that followed. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is now streaming only on Disney Plus. Thank you.