Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac and Ari Rank Presidental Races from 1988 on

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

On today's episode, Isaac and Ari repetitive comments, a New York Times article about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and a ranking of presidential races in terms of historical significance, beginning with 1988. And as always, the Airing of Grievances.You can watch our coverage of the DNC Day 1 on our YouTube Channel!Check out Episode 6 of our podcast series, The Undecideds. Please give us a 5-star rating and leave a comment!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Help share Tangle.I'm a firm believer that our politics would be a little bit better if everyone were reading balanced news that allows room for debate, disagreement, and multiple perspectives. If you can take 15 seconds to share Tangle with a few friends I'd really appreciate it. Email Tangle to a friend here, share Tangle on X/Twitter here, or share Tangle on Facebook here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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interesting elections since 1988. This is going to be a good one. I hope you guys enjoy. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, joined by Tangle Managing Editor Ari Weitzman. Beautiful fall day setting in here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I know it's not the fall. I said the other day I woke up, it was 60 degrees outside. I was feeling good. I could smell the NFL season. It's like, it's right here. Just that awesome, crisp fall feeling morning. And I tweeted something about how, you know, is there anything

better than that first fall morning? And then just got ratioed on Twitter about how it wasn't September 22nd. Yeah. I'm like, you guys suck. You know, the internet just kind of sucks. I think we all kind of unofficially know that the first day after labor day is the unofficial first day of fall i think like culturally that's true and then like yeah in the northeast and mid-atlantic we had a really crisp first feeling of fall in the morning even though our friend and co-worker magdalena told us it was 100 in central oregon so maybe not the same everywhere but yeah yeah maybe not the same everywhere, but yeah. Yeah. Maybe not the same. But also the only region that matters is the Northeast and

we are the barometer of reality in our country. So people just unplugging their headphones as we speak. That's just how I feel personally. It's actually kind of a funny segue into one of the things that I really want to talk about today, which is just the feedback loop that we are living in. Because if people can find a way to get upset about me calling out a beautiful fall morning on September, you know, third instead of September 22nd, they can find lots of things to be upset about, which is part of something we've been talking about in Tangle this week. And I wanted to chop it up with you. I kind of hit, I think I hit a little bit of a breaking point that sort of happens to me every like 18 months or something. I think it's happened, right? Three or four times. Yeah.

Maybe a little more frequent. Maybe three to four months. I just, it's really hard. I think something I'm adjusting to is that we are at a size now, Tangles at a size now, the mailing list is where if one person writes in to say something, there's probably like 10 or 15 other people writing in with a really similar email. And it can get really frustrating to see the comments in the email sort of repetitive coming in, especially when they're critical. And this is not, you know, me saying don't do that. It's really helpful for us and informative. And we love hearing from people. And even though sometimes I get frustrated, it's one of the most interesting parts of the job is kind of managing the inbox and

seeing the way certain things are hitting people and how they're understanding our writing and my writing. But we did this piece on the Arlington Cemetery. And it was just one of those days where we had a lot of people unsubscribed from the newsletter. I think more people probably more Trump supporters probably than Biden Harris supporters, but people on both sides were upset. And the reactions I personally found really, really annoying and frustrating in a way that, you know, I was driven to kind of call some of them out in the newsletter today on Thursday as we're recording this. And I just like, I wanted to get a little bit of it off my chest, I guess, and just talk about it.

I requested some space and it's, you know, there's a certain, there's a certain like genre of response, I think that irks me in a particular way, which is like, why didn't you talk about X? It's the sort of whataboutism thing. And therefore, I can tell that you are liberal, conservative, whatever, and I'm unsubscribing. conservative whatever, and I'm unsubscribing. And I had some very productive interactions with people who wrote in who were upset that I basically spent a whole paragraph listing out all the things Trump has lied about in the last week or two. Some people wrote in upset about that. And, you know, I had back and forth and we kind of landed in a good spot. But some people just wrote in and said, I'm done. You're clear. You tipped

your hands, you know, mainstream media bias. You're like a classic corporate hack, whatever. I don't know what to do with this feed. I honestly genuinely don't know. And I want supporters of Donald Trump to explain to me how I should handle this? Because not one of them wrote in and said, he didn't lie about that thing you said he lied about. Nobody contested the stuff I was pointing out. They just said, you spent a whole paragraph doing this. Why? And the answer to that was, I was just establishing that he's not a reliable narrator of events. So if he's saying one thing and the army is saying another, I might not believe him. And then the other thing is like, why didn't you say this about Kamala Harris? Kamala Harris lies too. And I'm like, first of

all, we did say that. I said that right in the newsletter that all politicians, including Biden and Harris lie, but like Trump lies more than other politicians. And it's OK to say that I think like he has strengths and weaknesses. One of his weaknesses is that he has a very flexible relationship with the truth. And I think it's OK for me and other people to point that out. Yeah, I think that's totally fair. I also don't think that you'll find too many Trump supporters that will defend him on that other than to say he's exaggerating to make a point, which I think is my only pushback to you saying we didn't get anybody writing in to disagree with any of the lies that you listed in that now. But one reader wrote in to say, you included Trump saying that everybody wanted Roe v. Wade to be overturned. And one reader wrote in to say, yeah, but that was exaggeration. Everybody is obviously an exaggeration, but no one was really satisfied with the status quo,

to which the response is we included a link to, um, polls that showed popular support for Roe v. Wade, what, whether or not people are going to be happier with what follows after once the dust settles on this, which I don't think it still has. I think kind of obviously, um, is a different story, but that I think was the only pushback was to say, yeah, but he's an exaggerator. He's a known exaggerator. He, you can't really take these things seriously. It's this classic thing that I think the media has struggled with and fallen into as a trap

every once in a while is say what he means, not what he says, or talk about what he means, not what he says, which is impossible. Like it just ends up having us hypothetically talk about what he could have meant. And that's like like that sucks i i think i think it's actually kind of worth unpacking that criticism because i do think it's true that i mean i said you know that he's the babe ruth of exaggeration falsehood and lies i'm not i'm not saying that everything that he says or every inaccurate thing he says is inaccurate because it's a lie.

Sometimes it's inaccurate because it's a gross exaggeration. But like, it's still worth calling out was sort of my response. I'm like, OK, yeah, I mean, that's a great example is the Roe v. Wade thing. He's being interviewed and pressed, getting pressed about overturning Roe v. Wade, how he championed the fact that he did this. And now he's sort of running away from the abortion issue. He's moderating his position on abortion because he knows it's really bad for him politically right now and for Republicans. And his response to that is, I did the thing everyone wanted. I got Roe overturned, which everyone wanted.

Which, like, maybe that's an exaggeration and not an outright lie, but it's not what everyone wanted. Like plain and simple. The fact is it was a really, really divisive thing that by most polling metrics, a majority of Americans actually did not support. So, you know, or a plurality of Americans did not support. So I think it's or plurality of Americans did not support. So I think it's majority actually, honestly, I think it's a majority. So, so he's, he's either telling, saying something that he knows isn't true, or he's living in a fantasy land that's detached from reality. And he's a, he's the former president of the United States who's running for office, it's like it's necessary to call that out. The thing that I find really frustrating is like, if I don't talk about the

way Trump lies or exaggerates or, you know, spreads falsehoods, then I get called out as being in the tank for Trump, as being biased in favor of him. So I put that to one of the readers, one of the, you know, Trump supporting readers in favor of him. So I put that to one of the readers, one of the Trump supporting readers who I was having this back and forth with. I was like, what would you have me do? Put yourself in my shoes. I am someone who's reporting on the election. I'm reporting specifically on a story where it's the Trump campaign's word against the army's word. story where it's the Trump campaign's word against the army's word. And I have to talk about why I'm viewing it one way or the other, why I'm believing one side or the other. It's really relevant that Trump tells a bunch of lies all the time. So, you know, me saying that or believing that has

nothing to do with Kamala Harris, nothing to do with Joe Biden. I'm not commenting on them at all. I'm just saying that Donald Trump lies a lot. And that sentence is true. I mean, it's just like, and you know, the list that I that I put in the newsletter and read on the podcast was, you know, he said he won his classified documents case in Florida, which didn't happen. The case got dismissed that, I mean, basically the judge that he appointed threw it out in what is one of the most controversial decisions that happened, you know, on the federal bench this year. So sort of like lots of context there that Kamala Harris met with Vladimir Putin before Russia invaded Ukraine, which is literally a totally made up story.

That he passed the biggest tax cuts in history. Maybe you chalk that one up to exaggeration. That China is paying billions in tariffs. They're not, plain and simple. They're not. We pay for tariffs. He either doesn't know how tariffs work or he's lying about them. The Roe thing.

That Harris used artificial intelligence to fake crowd sizes, which is an internet rumor that he fell for, totally made up, that Latin American prisons are being emptied to send people to the US, which we can't fact check because it's a made up claim and he has not provided any evidence for it, but that's not happening. Migrants are coming here from Latin America. They're not people who were released from insane asylums and told to come to the U.S., which is basically what he's saying. And then the global warming thing. And then the Willie Brown story, which is like my favorite thing. What if like he told this whole story about how he was in an emergency landing helicopter

with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, and that during the helicopter ride, Brown was telling him all these horrible things about Kamala Harris. And then it turned out that he had actually just confused Willie Brown with another black politician from San Francisco. And that politician said it wasn't really an emergency landing. It was like we were told that we had to land early and we didn't make it to our destination because there was like something wrong, but it wasn't like a emergency. Uh, so just like, that's kind of crazy that he's just lied about all that stuff. And that's, again, that is like a list of things that happened in the last week or two. Uh, so doesn't mean anything about Harris or Biden, whatever.

And, and I don't know what to do with the criticisms. And I tried to address this in the newsletter. And this was another interesting thing that I want to talk to you about was I tried to address this in the newsletter today by sharing the criticisms I got from Trump supporters who read Tangle and then the criticisms I got from Biden supporters who read Tangle, which a lot of those criticisms were because I was just hammering Biden about Abbey Gate and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And one of the things that a lot of people were saying was that, you know, Trump made a deal before he left office that kind of boxed the U.S. into an Afghan withdrawal, which is like partly true. He made a deal that I think made it more

likely that we would have to withdraw from Afghanistan. But Biden had agency still. And Biden was the commander in chief when the withdrawal happened. So like, you know, if you're constructing the blame pyramid, which I love to do, Biden is at the top. And he also Biden also said he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan. It was part of his policy proposal and part of what he campaigned on. So the idea that Trump boxed him into a decision he had made already that he wanted to do is a little farcical. And, you know, I shared this thing on Twitter. I shared a screenshot of the newsletter on Twitter. And a lot of people were responding, you know, supportively, overwhelmingly supportively, which I just

want to make clear, like, you know, a lot of people appreciate our approach. And I'm very grateful for that. But some people responded and said, you know, when you're being criticized by both sides, you're doing something right. And that's something I hear a lot. And it's kind of funny because it's like something people say to me, I think, in like, I'm on your side, I understand you. I actually don't believe in that as like a truism. I don't think being criticized by both sides means you're doing something right. I think sometimes you can be getting criticized by both sides because you screwed something up colossally, or you read the situation so badly that nobody is seeing any virtue in your opinion or perspective. And so like, I want to be clear, that is not some North

Star for me. And somebody responded to my Twitter saying that. And then interestingly enough, another person came in and said, you know, you're not, you're not on the right side of stuff, because you're, you know, because you're being criticized by both sides. And I was like, I know, I never have said that. And I never would say that. But it's interesting that people sort of think that that's a North Star when it's not. I mean, the real North Star is I am going to read all these various opinions, do tons of research on these topics and give the most honest, you know, realistic, not blinded by bias perspective that I can give. I am a human being. I have all sorts of, you know, my own life experiences that inform the way I see the world. And so I have opinions and I try not to be shy about them. But the deal that I'm making with readers and listeners, like my handshake deal with you all is I'm going to be honest about it. I'm not going to sugarcoat

what I think to appease a certain group of readers or to appease a political party or, you know, for any other reason. I'm just going to take in the information and say as honestly as I possibly can what I think, which is a really freeing thing to do. And sometimes I'm going to come out on one side or the other. And sometimes I'm going to come out on one side or the other. And sometimes I'm going to come out with some really kind of squishy, centrist, moderate position because I can't make my mind up. And I'm totally comfortable doing that. But it's interesting to me that there are all these different pressures. It's like you have the Trump people upset, you're calling him a liar, the Biden people upset, you're saying that

Biden's responsible for the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And then you have these people who are upset at you for saying that you've upset both sides because they don't think that should be a measure of success, which I'm like, yeah, duh, I agree. So I don't know. And all of that just led me to to my whatever, maybe my my quarterly breaking point. I guess we're down to three months on how often this happens. That has brought me here to this opening monologue. And then, of course, getting, you know, thrashed on Twitter for saying it was fall two weeks early. hopefully you've saved enough of this energy for the grievance section at the end but i know you've got something but still i think um something worth uh adding here and something that's apparent through what you're discussing is that we are also reactive just by nature of our model to feedback from readers like we read that stuff we talk to as many people as we can we put a lot of energy and effort into understanding what the feedback is. And I think anytime one of you writes in with a good point, and it's something that we're realizing, oh, they're actually right about that, we'll debate that we're missing in a topic that we're covering or a

topic that we should be covering, but we've been missing. If you write in with a good, respectful, honest argument and it's cogent and it lands, then we'll react. And I think part of us being reactive means that we are just consuming a lot of the feedback. Like we get a lot of it. And on a day where a lot of the feedback is knee jerk or reactive, and that happens sometimes I'm not trying to moralize towards our lovely readers. I think everybody gets the opportunity to react emotionally. Like we're doing it here. Um, just a day where it seems to happen to more people than general creates like a kind of emotional reaction because we try to respond honestly to this stuff. And I know that's something you try to do personally. informed by a lot of readers who are giving us good feedback saying you all have been giving criticism to Harris and Biden before her, which is legitimate, but honestly have been kind of

treating Trump with kid gloves for a little bit. And I think that was true. I think there are several things, everything in this list that you just read off that was in the newsletter of things that Trump had lied about. And just the the past couple weeks were things that we saw and decided not to cover in any in-depth way because it just was a little irrelevant, a little out of the main focal point for us. And those things kind of added up. And over time, it did feel like we were omitting it. So it just seemed like we had to react to our omission that a number of readers brought up as being something that we should be at least giving some amount of attention to. And the attention that we gave was, I think, appropriate. It was a paragraph in a piece about

something more specific. And that's ultimately kind of all it was. It was like, there's a month's worth of stuff we could be reacting to. We took some of it, put it in a paragraph and said like, hey, this is the guy that we see. I think most people see him. Let's call that out and move on. Yeah, I would say two things are worth noting as well. One is a lot of people on the right and a lot of conservatives are often criticizing the left for being overly sensitive and like incapable of criticizing their own, which I think the sensitive thing is really true. I think the incapable of criticizing their own thing is true in some left circles, but not in all of them. And it's a good criticism.

And then those same people are unsubscribing from a newsletter because we said that Trump lied a lot in the last week or two, which is like this basically objectively true thing. And they're not contesting the truth of the statement, but they're just upset that we did it and feel it's unfair to call it out. And it's like, that is being overly sensitive. Like if you're doing that, you're being overly sensitive. Number two, I would just say, I've been following politics for a very long time. I've been writing about Donald Trump since 2015, basically every week for nine years.

The last month of Donald Trump has been some of the most unhinged, crazy month of Donald Trump that I've ever seen. I just want to be like, again, I'm just calling it out like I see it. This stuff. Kind of like we did with Biden, honestly. I mean, it's not the exact same, but it's the reactions were kind of similar. Yeah. Like I wrote a piece about Biden in 2021 asking if he was okay because his decline seemed really obvious to me. And then over the course of three years up until 2024, my pieces got increasingly more and more critical about that until the debate when I was like, this guy has to go. I'm sorry. This is like,

what are we doing here? And I'm putting Trump under the same microscope. The stuff that Trump has said, like on social media, at least, I mean, some of the stuff he said in person, we have covered in the newsletter, the stuff he said in rallies, RNC, you know, whatever, we've given that some attention. I follow his true social account. He's sharing stuff that is like bonkers, dude. I mean, it's like pictures of Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton and stuff in jumpsuits talking about how they gave out blowjobs to get where they are, you know, like like sharing legitimate. And I use this word very carefully because I hate how overused it is, but like legitimate conspiracy theories, Pizzagate style stuff that like Democrats are satanic demons who

are, you know, molesting kids and in like organized sex. I mean, like he is posting stuff that is deranged, honestly. And I don't know if he's doing that because he believes it. I don't know if he's doing that because there's somebody who shares his Twitter or truth social account and just repost whatever they want. I don't know if he's doing it because he thinks it's good to activate the base, but like it's happening and it would be an act of bias on my part to ignore it or pretend it's not happening. So the real thing to do is to report it. It's to say plainly what he's doing. And I've not, you know, blown it out of proportion. I haven't lied about it. I haven't twisted his words. I'm

just sharing what he's saying. And when people read that, this stuff is self-evidently damning because it sounds like a little unhinged, but it's like, this is the stuff he's doing. That might not be a good reason not to vote for somebody or not to support somebody. Like if you're an American voter, maybe you see all that stuff and you're like, yeah, well, he's going to fight China on trade and he didn't start any wars when he was president. And, you know, I really think his immigration policies are way better than Biden and Harris's. That's fine. Like I said, he has strengths and weaknesses,

but this is his weakness. He's a little crazy sometimes. And we should be able to say that that's the reality, just like we were able to say that Biden is old and decaying in front of our eyes. I mean, these things are all fair things to say. And actually, the argument that's most analogous to me as we're talking about this is the Friday piece that you wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Israeli army and the war in Gaza, which is you can support this, but you have to acknowledge the biggest detriments or the biggest costs or the biggest marks against the IDF. And the way that you acknowledge it is not by saying it doesn't exist or trying to dismiss everything is coming from sources that aren't reliable. For sure,

some are, but you have to acknowledge the biggest costs and the biggest knocks against, and then make a clear-eyed, cogent determination that the thing that you're supporting is worth it with all of the costs and all of the benefits tallied. I think that's, that's kind of all it is. And that's all we're saying. Right. Yeah. That is a good analogy and got similar blowback for just like, you know, you're leaving out this, you're leaving like this context. You're doing the work of the anti-Semites. Yeah. Right. And I'm like, there's always stuff that we can't cover in a new, you know, like I could list 100 things the IDF has done that I think might qualify as a war crime or something. And the response will be, well, what about Hamas? And it's like, I've written about all the things Hamas has done. So that's not what this piece is for. This piece is just to say these things are happening. And if you want to support the war, you have to at least acknowledge and engage the fact that these things are happening. And it is, you're right. It's a really good analogy to Trump. It's like,

this is who he is. And it's okay to accept that this is part of who he is and decide that you're going to support him anyway. But don't pretend this isn't who he is. Because if he's president again, we're going to get this. He's going to say a bunch of wild stuff. We'll be hearing about his tweets all the time. You know, he'll be lying incessantly about dumb things, sometimes not even important stuff like dumb stuff like Kamala Harris has AI crowds or whatever. I mean, all that stuff is on the docket. And then there's the really more important stuff, which is like, he's already denying that, you know, the election results, basically. He's saying preemptively that if he loses, it'll be because they stole the election, which is what

he did in 2020. And then we saw what happened after. So we have to be ready for that too. I'm just trying to tell you what's going on and I'm being honest about it. And if people want to argue with me about, you know, the context of the things he's saying, or maybe I'm saying Trump's lying about X and you're saying, actually, I think Trump is right when he says X, then that's a really good conversation to have. I want to have that. I want to engage in that. But if like, you're just upset that I'm calling him out because you don't think I called out enough of another person's lies, then that's a dumb kind of silly, counterproductive argument to raise. All right. I think we spent enough time on this. I feel, you know, feeling better to come better now.

All right. Related to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and their policies, I really want to talk a little bit about immigration today, which is one of my favorite topics, mostly because I'm the most well read on and understand the most and enjoy reporting on the most because I think it's a really, really tricky topic. And there's a lot of dynamics. There are many dynamics to it that are, you know, make it fraught to discuss in a nuanced way. And it's also a really interesting topic because it's foundational to our country. I mean, immigration is a huge, huge part of our history. It's a huge part of our current politics. And it's a huge part of the 2024 election. It's going to be a deciding factor, I think, is where Americans are on immigration. And in that context, I read this really phenomenal New York Times article, and I trash the mainstream

media all the time. I started an entire news publication because I think, you know, CNN and the New York Times and Fox News and all these different places have major, major problems and need to be fixed and need to be, you know, I guess, recontextualized. But each of them still does really good work here and there. And sometimes, you know, some more often than others. And the New York Times still has great on the ground reporting. I think they do a very bad job covering Donald Trump. I think they do a really good job reporting kind of these small, little narrow stories. And they just published this fascinating piece about Springfield, Ohio, which attracted thousands of Haitians into this tiny little town.

And I sent it to Ari as a little bit of a homework assignment to discuss. I guess maybe I'll start by just giving a quick 30 second what the piece tells us, and then I'm interested to kind of hear your thoughts and what stuck out to you about it. So the story is basically that there is this town in southwestern Ohio, Springfield, that had about 58,000 people living in it. And in the last few years, around 20,000 Haitians have immigrated there. And some of the Haitians have come there under, you know, new programs. Some of the Haitians are people who have been in the U.S. for a decade or two. Some lived in Florida and came there. And, you know, the way immigration typically works is one person goes to a town somewhere in

the U.S. and they report to their friends and family about whether it's a good place to be or a bad place to be if there's work there or whatever. And so oftentimes we see what happened in this story, which is a specific immigrant community, in this case, it's Haitians, kind of come in large numbers together as a group because there are other Haitians there and they're hearing from those people the pros or cons of living in this place. And in this town of 58,000 people, roughly the estimate the article makes is that about 20,000 Haitians immigrated there, which is mind boggling. I mean, it's, you know, nearly a third of this town in southwestern Ohio, basically becoming, you know, a totally different cultural ethnic background in the span

of a couple of years. And I thought the piece did a really good job of talking, describing the impact of this in a way that kind of reflects the broader impacts and pluses and cons of immigration. But one of the things that happened in the story is that one of these Haitian migrants crashed his car into a school bus. He got into a head-on collision. He was in a Honda Pilot and he crossed a double yellow line on some highway or two-lane road. I can't remember exactly which. And the bus tried to avoid him. It was a school bus, went off the road, flipped, and killed students who were on board. A bunch of

injuries, huge, huge tragedy. And when it came out that the driver was a haitian immigrant one of these haitian immigrants that obviously if you live in a town of 60 000 people and 20 000 haitian immigrants show up you notice it set off it was like you know somebody in the story described it as like the the match on the tinder and set off this huge angry backlash to this wave of immigration into the town. The migrant was not drunk. He wasn't under the influence of drugs. He tested, you know, he was tested. His blood was tested, all that stuff. He said in court that he was blinded by the sun or something. I don't really know. I don't think we have a great idea of what exactly happened. And that story was very much in the news, the bus crash. But all the things that were happening in this town around that were not in the news,

which is what the story explored. I don't know, Ari, if you have some things that stuck out to you, but I'd be curious what struck you about the article because there's so much in there to unpack. Yeah, I think that's a really thorough summation so thank you for that and letting me get into some of the um context and behind the scenes stuff and starting by i think addressing so i have three things and i'll start by addressing the main story beat of the car crash or i guess guess the hook here, which is that that seems like the most irrelevant portion of the story to me. It's the thing that gets you into it. Like it's the event

that sort of catalyzes the interest in this town. But when you read about, you know, the, any sort of influx of migrant crime as it's written about, you might be reading about a real increase in raw numbers of crimes committed by migrants, but proportionally, the number of people who commit crimes who are migrants are smaller than the base population. So when there are more migrants, there will be more crime, but it's not that more migrants as a proportion of those who are coming in are criminals. You know, and I think that is at play here a little bit when we're talking about car accidents. Car accidents, cars in general, are the most dangerous implement in the country, more so than guns. implement in the country more so than guns and getting behind a wheel of a car every day for a year is one of the most dangerous things you can do just physically and that's not you know

to i love driving um i'm a big road trip guy i want cars to be safer but that's just kind of the facts of it so that that you have a Haitian who is driving with a foreign license that's not valid in the U.S. caused a car accident that very tragically resulted in the death of a young child is, you know, that's a hook. But that could have been anybody, honestly, that gets in a car accident. Like I've been in two not at fault car accidents just by being on the road. And thankfully I'm all right and everybody involved is all right, but cars are dangerous. It's kind of a thing that you accept. The second thing, and the things that I think are more interesting, and I'll kind of just be broad about them so I can let you respond, are first that the Haitians

that have come to this town, they are gainfully employed and their employers are really thankful that they're there and they're thriving. Like it's a thriving community and they are filling these manufacturing jobs that a lot of people, like the local population just straight was not large enough to fill. And I'm going to read a little bit of the article here, and then I'll move on to point three. And the part that I'm going to read is as follows, quote, by 2020, Springfield had lured food service firms, logistic companies, and a microchip maker, among others, creating an estimated 8,000 new jobs and optimism for the future.

End quote. Goes on to say, but soon there were not enough workers. Many young working-age people had descended into addiction. Others shunned entry-level work altogether, employers said. Haitians who heard that the Springfield area boasted well-paying blue-collar jobs and a low cost of living poured in, and employers were eager to hire and train the new workforce, end quote. The third thing that I thought was interesting was the impact on housing, which sounded a lot like what you would hear from a gentrification story, which was a new population has moved in. They have a higher standard of living and they're

buying up apartments that it's making the area better. Maybe it's a little nicer here than it was before, but rents are going up. People who have lived here feel like they're displaced. They can't quite keep up. Tax dollars are nice. It's driving the school district, like making the school district better, but it's driving some locals out that can't compete. And it is just sort of interesting that those story beats are part of this story about a Haitian immigrant community coming to town. It's just not what you would expect. And so that was an interesting reflection for me. That is a fascinating observation. I honestly didn't connect that, but it totally tracks with how I read the story in retrospect. I mean, it's literally identical to the gentrification stuff where the culture's changing's changing, you know, there's like this local community that doesn't want these people who like speak differently, look differently, are taking,

you know, their presence is creating these jobs that they're taking, but the jobs aren't available to the local population either. I mean, that's like another thing the story sort of touches on, doesn't get into a lot, but that like all this interest came in and these Haitians get hired for the jobs and it's revitalizing the town in a lot of ways, but the Haitians are willing to do the job and work for less. And so a lot of those jobs aren't going to the people who were there before the Haitian migrants got there, which is sort of something that happens in gentrification to like, you know, in Philadelphia, there'll be a new bar or restaurant opening in a neighborhood that is being gentrified.

And the staff at the bar and the restaurant are not people who live within five blocks of the restaurant. That's just like not how it happens. And it's fascinating to me that that stuck out to you. I didn't really think of that, but it's a really clear parallel. I think what struck me about the story was it was this kind of microcosm of the immigration debate more broadly. It hit basically every segment of it in one way or the other. The crime thing, which is, you know, the bus crash element, like, I mean, this guy, it's not like traditional crime, I think, in the way we think about it. But this Haitian driver is,

he's being charged with involuntary manslaughter. So he could go to jail for 10 years or something. So he could go to jail for 10 years or something. But it illustrated the pros of immigration, which is that you get these workers, you kind of, you know, they interviewed these school teachers who talk about how they're enriching the Haitian kids are enriching the learning environment. You know, they're adding like this new flavor, this something new in town, you know, like the same way a new restaurant or something might change a town or bring in new people. It's just like, you're getting an interesting new twist, something that's fresh, that is being received in a positive way. And then that, that from the perspective,

that that from the perspective a lot of people who live there these immigrants are not basically causing a ruckus they're like minding their own business that's like what a lot of the people interviewed in the story said so i wanted to sort of read like some of the reactions there is this company mcgregor metal that's this family-owned business in Springfield. They make parts for cars, trucks, tractors, that sort of thing. And they were short of workers. And so they interviewed the guy who's the CEO of this company. And he said, you know, we needed machine operators, forklift drivers, quality inspectors. And this is his quote in the story. The Haitians were there to fill those positions. The immigrants now comprise about 10% of the workforce. They come to work every day. They don't cause drama and they're on time, he said, which is just like a, it's so simple. It's,

but it's like this, I think just like a perfect encapsulation of what a common immigration story is in our country, which is just like, these people come to work. They don't give me any shit. They're on time. They work hard. They cash their check. They leave. I love it. They love it. I'm happy. And that is like a thread that's in this story that I think is really illustrative of how the pros kind of play out oftentimes. And then there's this flip side of it, which is the cons. And the cons are sort of very tied to the cons we see in a lot of different immigration stories, which is there's stories like the car accident, whatever. Then there's the way the local facilities and services have been overwhelmed, basically, by the fact that the population of this town has grown by like 20, 30% in the course of a

few years. So at a health clinic where the average wait time used to be 15 minutes, it's now 45 minutes. At the schools, the enrollment is way more competitive and there's lines out the door and there's people who aren't getting into public schools that they used to be able to get into no problem. And then something you referenced, there's all these workers coming, they're getting paid 1920, 25, 30 bucks an hour. They're working their ass off. So they're making a lot of money so they can afford housing. And a lot of them, a lot of these Haitian migrants are splitting homes. So they're, you know, three of them are living in a $2,400 apartment somewhere, and that's

driving up the cost of housing. And so one of the people they interviewed said, the new homeless here in Springfield are people that can't afford $2,000 or $3,000 a month in rent, which is a lot. I mean, that's really expensive that, you know, I live in an apartment that costs $3,000 a month in rent. And it's a huge apartment. It's way more space than I need. It's like a row home in Philadelphia with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. And I live here because, I mean, candidly, my wife fell in love with this place when we toured it and it's in a good location. And I really liked it too. And, you know, we're expecting kids and we want, wanted the space

for down the road. Wow. But, but like, despite that, despite that fact, it's, uh, it's expensive and I make a good living. I mean, Tangle has been doing well. I have a good business. I'm a business owner. And like 3000 bucks a month is a lot and rent. So that wasn't how it used to be priced. And in this small town in Springfield, Ohio, I live in a big city too, one of America's biggest cities. So you'd expect the rent to be more expensive, but this is a town of 60,000 people in Southwestern Ohio or whatever, that that's their reality is pretty interesting and is indicative of the way immigration can change things in towns like this and in the country more broadly. And so I thought the story just did a phenomenal job of kind of exploring the different dynamics

these influxes can have. And it's like there's some people who are upset about all this change. And there's some people who are really grateful for it. There are some people who are, you know, glad that these people are getting jobs and happy that their kids are in school, but are like, this is meaningfully made my life a little more difficult in X, Y, Z ways, whether it's more expensive. You know, the other really interesting thing that the story talked about was that the schools

and the healthcare facilities had to adjust to the fact that their patients changed or their students changed. So they had to hire Haitian Creole speakers at these healthcare facilities. They had to hire teachers who are ESL teachers, English as second language teachers, who can teach students that don't speak English as a first language. So all of that stuff impacts the budget, which means if you're a taxpayer in town, it just got more expensive for you to, or your school just got more expensive. They're going to need more money in five or six

years in their budget to afford all these new things to accommodate the new students, citizens, all that stuff. So it's a really interesting trade-off. And it's like the town's being revitalized. Jobs are coming back. Industry's coming back. These good things are happening. But in some ways it makes life harder for the people that were there before this influx. And I just thought it captured the, I guess, the essence of this debate in a really powerful way. The story is headlined how an Ohio town landed in the middle of the immigration debate. It's in the New York Times. Yeah, I really recommend it. I don't know if there's anything else there you want to pick at. Just very briefly that I think it is hitting on some

aspects of the immigration debate, but I think more than anything, the theme of this story to me is the suite of problems that come with growth in your town and sort of economic uplift, which was not cost-free. It comes at the expense of something, and that's similar as what you see in gentrification. And there's a suite of problems that are real that are related to that, and that there are a suite of problems that are related to economic downturn. And I think in the decades that preceded this story, And I think in the decades that preceded the story, this town in Ohio, Springfield, as well as other towns similar to it, have experienced an economic downturn. And we mentioned a little bit when I was quoting from the story that addiction is one of those things. Lack of opportunities is one of those things. And creating a lack of an engaged workforce is one of those things and creating a lack of an engaged workforce is one of those things. And

you, if you are a resident or a mayor of a town would every day of the week, choose to have the suite of problems that are associated with economic upturn. And that doesn't mean that it fixes everything that preceded it with economic downturn. It just means it kind of accentuates what was there. So I think that's kind of an interesting thing to remember too, is that there's no such thing as a story where everything works out and there's a solution that lifts all boats. It's going to be a lot of boats get risen, some don't. There's going to be some gaps and governments and communities will have to find a way to solve them. That to me is like my big takeaway. Yeah. And one last thing I just want

to say, because I hate when people don't do this. And so I don't want to be part of the problem is that the piece was written by Miriam Jordan, who is a national immigration correspondent at the New York Times. And we talk about these stories all the time, or I guess reference media pieces all the time where we refer to the publication and not the writer who actually did a lot of the work. And yeah, Miriam is a great reporter. I've seen some of her stuff before. I don't know her personally, but I think she has a history of writing about this topic in this way. And so, you know, I totally encourage you to check out some of her work and kudos to her for a really awesome piece.

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that I think you're going to enjoy. So I want to, I don't know what's coming by the way. So if this sucks, it's on our age. Just to put that on the record is the thing. And if it does suck, it's on Isaac actually. And here's why, because what I'm going to do for you, Isaac, is I'm going to read to you some facts in a bullet point or just summary way about some of the elections that we've had since 1988. And I'm going to ask you to try to rank them in terms of interestingness. This was an idea that I think came up for me was that we're in the midst of maybe a 10 out of 10 interesting election right now in 2024. But it might just feel that way because of recency bias. idea of what elections are like, inspired a little bit by Bill Clinton at the DNC, giving us some very particularly framed fact about what happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall economically, is to take that framing and think that's a general, that's a good marker in time. Let's look at 88 after the Reagan year, or the Reagan years ended, and see what have our elections been like in our common era

that we can sort of have a little bit of recollection of. 88 is a little too young for both of us, 92 as well, to have any real memory of. But it's something that we experienced the ramifications of growing up. And it's something that impacted our lifetimes. And I think many of our readers will remember them. So I think it'd be fun to, and maybe educational to go through and rank these elections. I totally agree. And I'll just say before you get started, this is so interesting because I ran into a friend of mine from high

school today. Actually, I was on the way home from the gym this morning. His name's Ken. Shout out Ken, if you're listening. He actually told me he was like, I was just like falling asleep to one of your videos last night. And then he was like, Oh, he's like, I, I, that sounds offensive. He's like, I, to go to bed, I watched YouTube and I started watching your New York city event last night or a couple of nights ago. So it was like, so funny that we ran into each other. Uh, but he, we were were talking about he's just like, how has your life been the last month? And I said, you know, I think this is the craziest, like 30 to 60 days of politics in US history. So I do think I would rank it number one almost. But I also am conscious of the fact that that's recency bias. But it's interesting that you're doing this because I literally in a very organic fashion just told somebody, you know, basically something to the effect of I think this has been the most interesting 60 days of U.S. politics ever.

And and so my life has been totally upside down and crazy and the work doesn't stop. And we had a good laugh about that. And now here I am a few hours later and you've presented this prompt. So let's do it. That's a pretty bizarre coincidence. I guess that's two in one actually getting, running into somebody and having that come up. And then that recurring here, it's like an extraterrestrial synchronicity kind of coincidence, but let's get into it. So let's go to 88. So I'm not going to pop quiz you. That feels mean. I'm just going to tell you what happened broadly and then get your reaction. So 1988, that's following the Reagan years. We had on the Republican side, George H.W. Bush,

the Republican nominee, was the vice president under Reagan, and he was running against Michael Dukakis. In this election, here are a couple of Dukakis from Massachusetts, by the way. Here are a couple of the headline facts about this. This was following two terms from Reagan, so that meant both parties were having primaries. George H.W. Bush had a famous line during the Republican National Convention when he accepted the nomination, which was, read my lips, no new taxes. That's something that we can probably remember as being a marker in our shared American political history. He came in third during the Republican primary at the Iowa caucuses at the beginning of the primary election behind Bob Dole and

afterwards started to get a little bit of momentum and then cruise the party nomination. He referred to his momentum as, quote, Big Mo, which is sort of a classic George H.W. Bush way of talking, just like gotta win the elections, gotta get the big Mo. He's just a weird guy. Dukakis, a weird guy himself. He was sort of a gentle, mild-mannered Massachusetts liberal. He won the nomination over Jesse Jackson, who was the runner up. He also in that election, jackson who was the runner-up he also in that election uh senator who received one vote by the name of joe biden who was accused during that race of plagiarizing parts of a campaign speech which is like interesting little footnote i think maybe more than accused i think he did he did that he did that he did that shit yeah but um this was also the campaign that produced the famous Dukakis tank picture where Michael Dukakis was convinced during a campaign stop to get into a tank and don a helmet.

And he looked sort of goofy and like he was role playing being in the army and people hated it. Ron Paul ran for libertarians. David Duke ran for the Populist Party. Whoa, I forgot about that. And the running mate for George H.W. Bush was Dan Quayle. For the Democrats, it was a guy named Loyne Bettson, who I don't remember at all. And that's going to be a common theme, I think, is some names that I'm like, I don't even remember who that was.'s going to be a common theme, I think, is some names that I'm like, I don't even remember who that was. But Dan Quayle, at the time, this was in 88,

his reputation would change a little bit, but he was known for just being good looking. And he was getting comparisons to John F. Kennedy. And in the debate against Benson, Benson said to Quayle, Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. Which is another one of those moments that lives on in american politics but the end of the day was the u.s was not buying decaucus they wanted more of the bush reagan years and bush proves to 426 to 111 win so gut reactions to that so funny So the, I love this game already. The thing that I know, or the thing that I think of immediately when we talk about that election is what you just said at

the very end there, which is that it was a blowout. It was, it is, you know, modern politics, what people in my profession often say is like, this was the last time we had a landslide presidential race, which I mean, first of all, is kind of wild to think about. Secondly, I don't know if you've in your research, you pulled up the map, but it's so interesting. I mean, this is maybe the most interesting part of that is that yeah this this is 1988 right so it's not that long ago um whatever 100 million people a little shy of 100 million people voted in the election the entire map's red i mean there's pretty much you know yeah pretty much there's just the parts that are touching water in the north right there's like seven or eight states that um that michael ten plus dc but yeah right okay ten plus dc so one of the states that he won is iowa which has just like been totally taken off the map by Republicans. And the other one is West Virginia, which is bonkers. And

looking at this map today and imagining a world where Republicans are, you know, easily winning your Arizona, your California, and Democrats are winning West Virginia and Iowa. I mean, it's really sort of like a remarkable marker in time of how much the political orientations change. It happens so slow for us in real time, because these elections, you know, just like they're spaced out for years, whatever. And every year there's kind of a, maybe half a new battlegrounds. It's like, Oh, maybe Democrats are going to make it run a Texas or maybe North Carolina is on the map this year. You know, now Republicans are finally have a stranglehold on Florida. It's no longer a swing state, but we're just looking back 30 years.

And it's like, there was a time not that long ago when there was an election where Republicans were winning California and losing West Virginia. I mean, that is like a really bizarre thing to wrap your head around. And try not to get too distracted by the map, too, because it's something that's going to come up as these things are going to look so different. And over time, it's going to we're also going to have many differences. Remember, this is following the Reagan years. He was governor of California. He was immensely popular. So there's a reason why California would go to the Republicans. And if you go back to the previous election, if you want to

talk about landslides, check out Reagan's map from 84. It is literally red across the board, except for Minnesota and DC. That's it. No. Like, no exaggeration. That's all. That Monday I won in 84. That was not only an electoral college landslide, but that was the last time that there was an election that was decided by more than 10 percentage points in the popular vote. So as much as Bush blew out the caucus in the electoral college, the percentage in the popular vote was 53.4 to 45.6. And that started our streak of every election since has been decided by at least or at most 10 popular vote points. Interesting. I didn't know that. I'll say the other thing that I knew that is just like one of the things that comes up about this election and, you know, even,

even today is that Benson who you were like, you know, you didn't know much about, he was picked because Dukakis thought he would help him win Texas, which is super relevant to like this whole debate we just had about what Kamala Harris is doing, where, you know, and that's how that's the context that, you know, I have read about this election. And because it's an example of one of these times in U.S. history when a president picked a running mate in order to try and win a state and it just didn't work and like was like less than meaningful. And this is this is an example of that. And it's sort of ties into this whole debate we just had about, you know, is Harris going to regret not picking Josh Shapiro, which is so when the position we're in now with the election in front of us, you know,

it hasn't come yet. It's so interesting to imagine all these scenarios where she doesn't pick him and they lose Pennsylvania by half a percentage point and throws the election to Trump. And it's this huge mistake. But there are all these examples like this, where candidates pick a running mate to win a state and they just get obliterated in the state anyway, which is kind of just like a funny reminder. But I think that's also a good transition to bring us to 92 when the Democrats picked a couple nominees on their ticket to win the Ozarks and lower Appalachians, and it totally worked. So that was then governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, running with a then representative from Tennessee, Al Gore, in 92 against George H.W. Bush and Dan

Quayle, as well as a third party in the election, which was Ross Perot. So we're coming in here in 92 with Reagan as the incumbent, coming off of mixed reviews as Reagan's successor. Sorry, not Reagan as the incumbent. Bush as the incumbent coming off of Reagan. He inherited an economic dip of the Cold War ending. He also was getting some criticism for NAFTA, mixed reviews there, and the Gulf War. And this was an economy that was in recovery from a temporary recession. Clinton ran as a centrist dem. He won the nomination on those bona fides. He beat Jerry Brown from California in the Democratic primary, as well as somebody named Paul Tsongas, who again, I'm sure a lot of readers will go, yeah, of course, Paul Tsongas, but

I don't know this person at all. And he chose as his running, Al Gore. He would go on to win Arkansas and Tennessee in the general election, spoiler alert, along with Kentucky and West Virginia and Missouri and Louisiana. It was the last time that we would see, well, actually the next year would be the, but Clinton in general was one of the, was the last president to win that string of states for the Democrats. But this was another, a couple cultural moments from this election included Dan Quayle, his reputation moving from pretty boy to just dummy. Unfairly or not, he had a moment where he corrected, when he was judging in elementary school spelling bee,

a child who spelled potato correctly and corrected him to add an e at the end of it which was a pretty yeah just a historic moment in u.s politics yeah it's real tough but i think the thing that this election is most known for is ross perot he ran as the candidate for the Reform Party, which was formed out of concerns for the national debt primarily, just said, we have to change what we're doing. Bush had been winning in the polls when Perot accepted this push to get into the national election for president. He entered the race to a lot of acclaim. He was doing policy discussions with just like poster board or whiteboard on national television and would tune in to watch this nerdy guy with glasses talk about tax policy. And he popularly is thought to have won the first debate. I think it's fair to say that he did

win the first debate. After that, he was getting into some controversies, controversies with some of the comments that he made on the campaign trail that were indicative of like maybe him being a little racist in some ways. He said those were smears. He dropped out. And then after pressure, joined the race again. By that point, he'd sort of fallen off of where he had been, which was leading the polls as a third party candidate in the middle of summer in a presidential campaign, which is somewhat unheard of, especially in our modern era. And when he came back in, he just didn't have the momentum. He didn't have that big mo that he needed to win the election. People generally credit Clinton winning the election with the disruption that Perot brought

to the race. And ultimately, Ross Perot would get 19% of the vote. clinton would get 43 percent of the popular vote george hw bush would get 37 and clinton would bruise to an electoral college victory of 370 to 168 that is 1992 yeah i mean i don't know if you're asking me to explicitly rank these but this one would definitely be yeah let's do that as we go i think so 92 ahead of 88 so far yeah you made 88 sound really interesting but in the end it was kind of like a blowout i mean i think it's fascinating because it was the last landslide and because of how much the map has changed since then i think it's interesting in retrospect. But this was like a race that I think had the kind of surprise twist and turn element that the current election we're in also has, where there are all these elements that you don't really know how to wrap your head around. And in this race, you know,

it was a that an incumbent president was losing George H.W. Bush, which didn't happen again until Donald Trump lost, for what it's worth. And then also the Ross Perot story, which is just something that had never happened and has not been repeated since, which I think makes this sort of singular uh in terms of you know i guess the the dynamism of it it was something that he he created such a huge variable in the election it's hard to really know what would have happened if he hadn't run we here at tangle will um kind of dove all in headfirst on maybe RFK Jr. being that guy this year, which didn't happen. Hasn't happened so far. Hasn't happened so far.

Maybe he does change the race in a really meaningful way. But just to say, like, we've sort of chased that as a, you know, a standard, like who's going to be the next Ross Perot ever since, which I think sort of cements the race in U S history in a way that's really interesting. Um, fun thing that I have, you know, in my brain somewhere knocking around that I just looked up while you were talking to confirm that I was remembering all the details, right? Nobody ever talks about Ross Perot's running mate ever James Stockdale. He was like a super interesting guy who he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for seven years for seven years, which is like, I don't even know how to fathom that. And then he, he came back to the U S and he met Ross Perot. I could be saying this wrong, but I'm fairly sure he met Ross Perot through Ross Perot's wife, who was doing some kind of like legal work for

former prisoners of war, maybe for Vietnam vets or something. They met some, his wife was involved. They met, it was kind of like this happenstance thing. And then he was kind of a significant VP. I mean, I think like, A, he had this serve the country, man in uniform thing. He made the sacrifice uh and just like was famous for what he went through and what he survived there was this thing about him that got coined uh by james collins who is an author who i'm familiar with which is the quote unquote Stockdale paradox, which I just I just pulled up. And the way Collins or the way Stockdale explained it, or his view of the world, I guess that Collins dubbed the Stockdale paradox is why he survived when other prisoners in Vietnam

did not. And he basically said, it's the optimists who make it. They're the ones who say, we're going to be out by Christmas, Christmas would come, Christmas would go, then they say, we're going to be out by Easter and Easter comes, and then it would go and then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. And this is a very important lesson, you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be. And Collins called this the Stockdale paradox. Um, so he was basically,

yeah, basically just saying like the optimists were the ones who didn't make it, uh, which I thought was kind of an insane thing to say. Uh, but like, who am I to tell this guy, you know, I, my intuition is like, Oh, the optimist would be the ones who make it. Um, anyway, he also had, you know, we talk a lot about debates and whether they matter or not. And I sort of took a little bit of a, I guess, a victory lap about how, you know, I'm someone who believes debates matter. And then Biden debate happened, totally reshaped the entire election. Stockdale also had a very famous debate moment where he's like hearing aid wasn't on or something. And he misunderstood a question or couldn't, he had to ask for, to, to hear a question again,

a clarification about a question. And it started this whole thing. SNL did a bit about him. And then he kind of became a little bit of a meme and sort of went the way of Dukakis, like the, the, or, uh, yeah, Dukakis, like the dim-witted, you know, whatever. And it changed the race a little bit. I'm sure. I mean, it's hard to know now, but, uh, the race a little bit i'm sure i mean it's hard to know now but uh he lost a little bit of that allure so yeah fascinating race would rank it above 88 for sure okay and i think that's um a good segue is the to 94 is the cultural ramifications of it all. You mentioned SNL and Dana Carvey was the first, I think, SNL person to get some acclaim for doing a parody of a politician who played George H.W. Bush. But 96, I think, is when you start to really see some pop culture elements influence the race. And I'll get into that eventually. pop culture elements influenced the race. And I'll get into that eventually. This was another Bush versus, or sorry, this was another Perot election where Perot was involved, included Bob Dole from

the Republicans and then Bill Clinton, the incumbent from the Democrats. Perot's running mate this time would be a man named Pat Choate, who was an economist. End of sentence. The next interesting things about this race, or maybe the first interesting things, were that Clinton entered this race seeming like he was going to lose. In the midterms of 94, Democrats lost the House and the Senate. Clinton was having a hard time selling his vision for the country. He wasn't generating a ton of optimism amongst the base. Again, this is a centrist Democrat. There are some Democrats that you'll hear today refer to Bill Clinton as their favorite Republican president. But again, so somebody entering the race, not polling super well. And another interesting thing here in retrospect, I think, is that Bob Dole, his opponent in this election, referred to Clinton as a, quote, spoiled baby boomer. Dole was the last non-baby boomer candidate, I think, until now even. Maybe you could say Harris isn't a baby boomer, but I think you would be wrong. Clinton, as I think I alluded to in the previous election, was the last Democrat to win the, quote, rural whites in the South, including Louisiana,

West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee. Democrats would not win those states again in a presidential election. This was also the year of that uh famous clinton election um or clinton dole simpsons episode which i think lives in infamy um would love it john if you dropped some of those quotes here but i remember some of these just are burned into my brain of what, like, it turned out that both Clinton and Dole were aliens, and then... We are aliens, but what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system. You have to vote for one of us. He's right. This is a two-party system.

Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate. Go ahead. Throw your vote away. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I don't understand why we have to build a ray gun Go ahead. Throw your vote away. I don't understand why we have to build a ray gun to aim at a planet I never even heard of. Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos. Go! All of this stuff just lives on in infamy from the 96 election. uh, in getting the Republican nomination beat Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes as the second and third runners up or the first and second runners up in the nomination process. He also named as his

running mate, Jack Kemp, which is another one of those names that I had to look up, but maybe something that you'll be able to remember and tell us about, but I had no idea who that was. able to remember and tell us about, but I had no idea who that was. Perot, again, did run again, but the Reform Party was sort of in tatters. Maybe tatters is too harsh of a term, but disarray. They had a national convention. It was kind of chaotic. He ended up only getting 8% of the vote compared to 19%, which is what he'd gotten in 92. So the reform party started to fall off. Ralph Nader ran as a Green Party candidate, which is a little bit of the come up for the Greens. And the impact on the election ended up being ultimately not huge. So Nader ended up mustering about 1%, and he'd get that in the next election too. Clinton ends up beating Dole in the popular vote 49% to 41%, and wins in a runaway in the Electoral College 379 to 159.

And that was 1996. Yeah, least interesting of all the ones we've talked about so far. So I'll rank it third. Uh, as a sports fan, you should know who Jack Kemp is. He was, uh, he was a professional football player. He played quarterback in the NFL and the AFL. And he was a San Diego charger. He won an MVP award with the AFL. Probably. I mean, I'm trying to think off the top of my head, but I would bet maybe the most well-known athlete, like, like at the intersection of success in sports and success in politics, at that axis, at the peak of both of those, I think maybe Jack Kemp. I don't know who has had as successful of a career in both.

He served in the House for a really long time. You know, he almost made it to the White House and was fairly close. He was on a major party ticket. And I mean, the election wasn't that close, but he was there. He was right at the doorstep. Uh, so I'd be curious. I don't know. That's a good trivia question. Like who is, who's the intersection of most successful politician and athlete ever. But I, I actually think it might be him. Um, that's all I really define professional wrestling. Cause jesse ventura but then

we're getting off track yeah that's a good point i would define professional wrestling as a real profession but not a real i mean i guess it's a real sport yeah that's tough i don't know um let's just let our readers tell us the answer i don't know those guys destroy their bodies i would just say. I think there's a good argument for it being like a real, I mean, it's staged. So there's the outcome is predetermined, which takes away the competitive part of it.

I have counterpoints, but I don't want to get too far in the weeds here. I think we should move on. I would have spent 30 minutes on that personally. Okay. Yeah. The least interesting, I would say, and the most interesting part about it is something you actually didn't mention, which I interesting, I would say, and the most interesting part about it

is something you actually didn't mention, which I'm happy I can say, because I can add something to this, which is that like, this is the, I mean, this election really is the birth of our modern politics. Not in the map sense, but I mean, this is like, this is the time period when Newt Gingrich basically invented the style of like uncompromising culture war. I'm going to block, like, we are not going to work with Democrats in order to improve our electoral odds, which is now something both sides, like a kind of politics both sides participate in, that as hard as it is to imagine, was not something that was very common before this era. But this is like the birth of Newt Gingrich and, you know, the dysfunction of the House,

Congress, but especially the House that we have today. And, you know, that that was like his methodology to get gains for Republicans. And, you know, it turned into the investigations into Bill Clinton and all that stuff. But like this was the beginning of it, which I think is, you know, if you're doing these kind of errors, I think it's the error we're still living in right now, which is really interesting to me. That's true. That's something I left off of the list we're still living in right now, which is really interesting to me. That's true. That's something I left off of the list when I was considering how to give bullets for this, but I'm glad that you brought that up. One of the reasons why Clinton ran a successful reelection campaign is that he tied Dole to Gingrich, who was popular as a cultural warrior and popular among the Republican base, but not popular nationally or amongst moderates. And you're right that that's kind of the first time that we could use those terms in a way that was meaningful. And we continue to today. Let's move on to 2000,

which was Bush versus Gore, the only race so far that is also the name of a Supreme Court case. So that's fun. And we'll get to that. This was the fourth of five U.S. elections where the winner of the election in the Electoral College lost the popular vote. Both parties had primaries in 2000, since we're coming off of back-to-back Clinton election wins. So that's a little bit of flavor to the 2000 election. In the Republican primary, just very briefly, Bush won, George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush, won his campaign somewhat off of name recognition, but also somewhat off of just approachability. He ran this general campaign as the guy you could have a beer

with that was something that was successful against the man that the Democrats would go on to nominate, which was Al Gore, who was seen as pretty wooden and stiff. Gore did. He named this very centrist Joe Lieberman as his running mate, whereas George W. Bush named Dick Cheney as his VP, a person who is thought of as being maybe the most impactful vice president once in office that we've ever seen. After these two were named as their party nominees, I'm sure that there are some things that you maybe would want to pull from the primaries here, but the primaries, in my opinion, weren't extremely interesting in 2000, despite the fact that both parties had them. But to bring us straight to the

general election, this was where I think SNL really entered the prey. This is where you had Daryl Hammond playing Al Gore and Will Ferrell making the name for himself playing George W. Bush. Gore was pilloried for his stiff persona. Bush was pilloried for his proneness to, I guess, I'm prone to gaffes as well. It's hard to talk forever. But Bush misspoke a lot during his campaign. And that's something that people kind of latched on to. It's something that we remember from the 2000 election. Nader also ran. He got about 1% of the vote. This was following Clinton's impeachment for that sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky that you alluded to earlier. That's

something that Gore was tied to a bit as well, something that he had a hard time really distancing himself on. And one of the reasons why Bush ultimately ended up winning an exceptionally close race, ended up being 271 to 266, and was decided not necessarily by the voters in the state of Florida, but by the Supreme Court. And that's a whole other podcast that maybe we could get into. You could argue that, no, actually Bush did win Florida. Certainly the Supreme Court thinks that. Certainly most people would think that. A lot of people would argue the other way around, that on recount, actually Gore should have won. A number of ballots were spoiled. The ballots that Bush ended up winning were unclear because of

the way that they were formatted with the famous now butterfly ballot, which was confusing to read. People thought they were voting for Al Gore actually cast their vote, I think for Pat Buchanan, but I'm going to have to double check that. And then a number of the votes for Gore that weren't counted had hanging chads in them, which meant that a hole was punched through them, but there was still a little piece of paper there, so it wasn't punched all the way through. So that was a lot of controversy in Florida. Since then, Florida has completely retooled their election process. They run incredible elections now. We don't have that without 2000, where the legacy of that election was eight years of George

W. Bush and a lot of controversy about the way that he got into office. And people see this as sort of also the beginning of a new era of the Supreme Court, where the ability for us to say that they're above the fray in politics was kind of an illusion that was dispelled in 2000, something that we kind of have been a little bit back and forth on ever since. But certainly the year that we see these people not as nine robed demigods, but as nine humans with their own biases. So again, 2000, Bush beats Gore, 271 to 266. Yeah, I mean, it has to be at the top of the list. Number two, still to I mean,

I don't I don't think it's more interesting than the election we're living in right now, to be honest, in part because this election is already so interesting. We haven't even gotten the results yet. But yeah, the contested elements of it, the fact that that Bill Clinton was impeached right before or not, you know, right before, but in the lead up to the election. Yeah. The fact that the race was as close as it was. I mean, that's the thing. Looking back on it, that's so wild. I, you know, I've read a lot about the 2000 election i mean i was i lived through it but

the i i'm like almost of the opinion that al more people meant to vote for al gore than george bush but maybe more people didn't vote for al go than George. I mean, like it's this really bizarre line to walk, but I'm certainly not convinced that, like, I wouldn't say George Bush a hundred percent won the election. Um, just, you know, as crazy as that is to say, I think with 25 years of hindsight, it's kind of fair to say that that's still in doubt. But one thing that I do think is really interesting, and I'll just throw this out there is the map from this race looks pretty similar to what a map could look like in 2024. The exception is that Gore won Iowa. But like, aside from that, I mean, it's basically Republicans having

Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada, but losing New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And that is a, that is a totally reasonable outcome of this upcoming race that, you know, in that case, Republicans would win, but it would be extremely close. You know, it requires them sweeping the Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada. But it's really interesting to look at this map and think about how it relates to our current politics. So yeah, throwing that out there. And then the last thing I'll just say is Dick Cheney, man. I mean, like, I don't even know where to begin.

But thinking about impactful vice presidents who actually mattered and made a difference in the course of US history, I would say he's an exception. You know, maybe you put someone like Mike Pence up there, if you put a lot of weight into Pence's role in constraining Trump and around January 6, and all that stuff. But like, you know, again, this is something we know, we suspected at the time, but know now with the benefit of all the history and memoirs and everything that's been written about the Bush presidencies. But Dick Cheney was driving the ship on a lot of stuff, especially foreign intervention. Especially foreign policy. And impacted us and our country and the globe in a way that I'm not sure any vice president in the modern era has. So, you know, that part of this race became a lot more fascinating.

So yeah, there's, we could dedicate an entire podcast to like 12 different elements of it, which is why I think it probably has to be number one of the ones we discussed. Yeah, I like that rating. I agree. I think since probably has to be number one of the ones we discussed. Yeah, I like that rating. I agree. I think since you mentioned Mike Pence, a thing that I'll add is another element that is really interesting to this that we didn't even mention is the vice president at the time of the election, whose job it is to certify the election results, was Al Gore, who was running for office. And he banged that gavel and he certified himself as the loser in the election, which is something that I think requires an immense amount of character. So even though he ran a campaign that ultimately didn't end up being successful and

certainly didn't connect with as many people in the country as he could have, I think you have to admire that, especially considering since you drew the comparison to Pence, that he did a similar thing. And I would also add... Cut me out. No, no, no, please, please. Okay, the last thing that I would say is that, since you mentioned the map,

I don't want to spend too much time on it. This election was decided by four electoral college points, and one of the states that is very different now than what we saw in 2000 is New Hampshire. New Hampshire went for Bush. It had four electoral college points. You could also say that was the tipping point. Yeah, good point. But that's 2000. That's an era where the map starts to look similar, except that Florida and Ohio were considered swing states at the time. And that's a little different now, but still a very similar map. And that brings us to 2004. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. Thank you. one of the most moving and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved

grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Thank you. is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. 2004, we had an incumbent in George W. Bush, who was running post 9-11, post the internet really becoming a popular thing. Again, hat tip to Al Gore for that. Thanks, buddy. And he inherited the, or not inherited, he got the US into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would become sort of

an albatross around the neck of Republicans in 2008 and again in 2012. But at the time, what we had was a wartime president writing some pretty high popularity numbers. So W was looking pretty good coming in 04. On the Democratic side, John Kerry won the Democratic nomination over Howard Dean. Howard Dean was the person who coming into the primary season, people saw as the front runner. And this was another one of those moments in American politics where we had the Howard Dean scream, which maybe you want to drop in, John, but maybe you don't. And then we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House.

And after that, it was sort of like an awkward thing, what kids would call these days as the ick, similar to Michael dukakis wearing the helmet just didn't look right didn't seem presidential carrie also similarly wooden but had something that al gore didn't which was a military record to run on and this is where we also got another term that's been part of american politics since 04, which is swift boating. This is when we had Super PAC start to get involved. And one of them was Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, I believe was the name of it, who launched what we would call, if we're being like just objective, a smear campaign against Kerry for his role as a swift boat captain during the Vietnam War. role as a swift boat captain during the Vietnam War, just impugning his service in the military and was one of the reasons that he lost the election. Bush was able to run as a guy who was pro-military. He was the head of the armed forces as the commander in chief during a war.

And they were able to, the Republicans, run a clever campaign painting Kerry as somebody who you could question in that regard. This was the first time, like I said, we had major, major money in super PACs be part of the narrative. Something we would see later with Obama and McCain in the next election as Citizens United would be one of the Supreme Court cases that is a legacy that we're dealing with. I think the roots of that go back to 2004. Also, the first time we heard people talk about gay marriage as a legitimate plank in a party platform, though the Dems weren't on board with it fully yet. convention, the keynote speech was given by the junior senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. It was very successful, and it launched him to stardom, and we should keep an eye on this guy.

Bush was riding this popularity, as we said. He rode that popularity to what we would call a moderate but convincing electoral college victory, which was 286 to 251 over Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards from Massachusetts. And that is 2004. Yeah, pretty uninteresting election to me personally, you know, incumbent wins, Democratic challenger, both running on really traditional politics of their party without anything, you know, any kind of like really fascinating variables, I would say maybe down near the bottom, second to last, maybe. I mean, interesting in the sense that Bush is now widely regarded as like a, you know, failed president, I think, by both Republicans and Democrats, certainly by Democrats. But I would say when he left office, his approval ratings were

terrible. And we were sort of still living in the shadow of 9-11 at this time. And the war on terror was just beginning. You know, I think the Iraq war started in 2003. So this happened, this election happened, you know, right after that war started. And yeah, looking back on it, it's kind of shocking. He won, um, you know, he didn't, it wasn't like a blowout landslide, whatever, but he won fairly handily. Uh, so yeah, I mean, it's just like a blowout landslide, whatever, but he won fairly handily. Uh, so yeah, I mean, it's just like a totally different era and what, like kind of such a milk toast, you know, like I should mention since you talked about the election results that Bush won the popular vote by two and a half points. So yeah, it was, it was a narrow win, but it was definitely a significant win. And yeah, maybe milquetoast, but I think there's a lot of things from the modern era that we get from this. Like I mentioned, funding and Citizens United. And that's a case that wouldn't come up till 2009, I think. But it's still something that has its roots to here as well as like a national that like was resting on primarily attack ads for both

sides and i think that sort of vitriol something that was upped in 2004 or sorry in yeah in 2004 but got it yeah we can so we're rating that right now between 96 and 88 and we're going to move on to 2008. So 2008, again, this is one of those years where both parties have primaries. It's also a historical footnote, the first election I voted in. We had on the Democratic side, Barack Obama defeat Hillary Clinton as his primary challenger, and then go on to name Joe Biden as his running mate. On the Republican side, Rudy Giuliani was the early front runner in this election, which is something that I forget. And he was pulling ahead of John McCain, the senator from Arizona, as well as a man who I also just forget named Fred Thompson, a senator from Tennessee. Maybe you can tell me more about him too and say you should be ashamed for not remembering Fred Thompson, but I think he's maybe the most forgettable one.

Another interesting note about the Republican primary is that Mike Huckabee won Iowa, one of the first state in the primary slate for the Republicans, before McCain captured that big mo and ran away with it. before McCain captured that big mo and ran away with it. McCain was looking like he was going to be mounting a pretty significant challenge to Obama. Obama would, as the person who we know, you know, retrospectively is the winner. It was tough to be able to make a call early. But then McCain had one of the all-time fuck-ups in naming S's running mate Sarah Palin. Palin was the governor of Alaska, was added, was really, really tough to just give interviews that seemed cogent. She had a lot of gaffes. She obviously did not have a good grasp of policy, especially in an election that centered on

foreign policy. She flubbed answer after answer. One of the famous things from her was a journalist lobbing a softball at her, asking her what sources she likes to read, and she called that a gotcha question. And this was, again, like another SNL thing where Tina Fey pilloried Palin. And that was something that I think kind of stuck. Warren Iraq was also getting stuck on McCain as somebody who voted for it. He was a veteran. I think that's something, again, another person who was a prisoner of war, a person who was really well respected, had bona fides from both parties, who was thought of as the Republican, quote, maverick who would cross party lines, a person with a lot of moderate appeal. But the Palin nomination, as well as the Iraq support and a war that was becoming increasingly

unpopular were things that kind of dragged him down to a decisive defeat in the end to Barack Obama, who won 365 to 173, winning the popular vote 53% to 46%. And that was 2008. Really quick before I respond, can you tell me read the rankings to me right now as we are? I think this is for the audience. This is going to be the last one that we do. We're going to do 2012, 2016, and 2020 next week to keep this podcast at a reasonable length. But I want to hear where we're at right now. All right. So in order from your rankings of least interesting to most interesting, we had 96, which was Clinton over Dole. Then we had 2004, which was Bush over Kerry. 1998, sorry, 1988 next,

which was Bush over Dukakis. Then 1992, which was Clinton over Bush. Then we had 2000, which was Bush over Gore. Got it. Okay. I think this is second behind 2000. Interesting. I'll tell you why. Tell me why. First of all, I think a few months before the election, even though people couldn't really believe the polls, I think at this point, like, for whatever reason, whether it was the idea that we were going to elect a black guy president, or that we were going to elect this young junior senator, or, you know, that Democrats were gonna pull back all this power after, you know, eight years of George W. Bush, whatever it is, I think there was a lot of doubt. I mean, I remember the reaction to Obama winning as being kind of this shock in some ways. And the way he won too, I mean, it was so dominant. And he won so many different sectors of the

electorate, that I think it kind of just like, it sort of blew people's minds at the time. And it happened in a way I don't think a lot of people expected or thought was possible, which like now we look back on and I think remember it maybe a little bit differently, but it was like pretty nutty at the time. Um, so that part of the race was really interesting. I think there was an element of, for me personally, that maybe makes it number two. And again, this is something that you didn't talk about, which I think you were right not to talk about. Cause this is kind of navel gazey, but like, this is the beginning of the distrust of mass media. The 24 hour news cycle was happening already, you know, in the early 2000s.

But like it went into overdrive like this is, you know, shortly after this, we got like Sean Hannity doing 10 minutes in primetime about Obama wearing a tan suit or like putting mustard on his sandwich or whatever, you know, like. And Jon Stewart going on crossfire. Right. Like that, it was like, it became sort of infotainment news junkie at a mass media scale. And we had Facebook and MySpace at the time and like the advent of the internet, internet fundraising. at the time and like the advent of the internet, internet fundraising. I mean, I remember there was a time, God, I would say 2008 or 2007, where I pretty sure it was Rand Paul, or maybe it was

Ron Paul. It was one of, it was either Rand Paul or Ron Paul, like broke the record for most money raised online, which is like, yeah. And it was like $6 million or something, which is insane. I mean, like, yeah, it's just like, you know, all these things that have such a huge impact on where we are now happened in this race. this race. And candidly, I mean, I think the the way the media covered Obama, so many reporters, so many TV correspondents, they loved him. You know, they I mean, they really they did like they actually did. And it exposed the bias that existed at all these news outlets at mainstream, you know, corporate ABC, NBC, CBS. It was like, he was cool. He was young. He was hip. He, he like, you know, was against the man against the machine. He ended up being like a pretty run of the mill

democratic president, but like at the time it was hope change i mean they were those are a couple notes that i had that i didn't get into but yeah there was definitely big optics big energy for sure all optics all energy and it was defined by the mass press like and you know and this is what in my opinion this is a really big part of the story of how we got the rise of Fox News and all these alternative media outlets and Y Talk Radio. You know, it had already been huge, but like accelerated in a different direction. Is Obama won over the press and they were not shy or at least were not discreet about how positively they viewed him up to and through this election, especially as a contrast to John McCain. And it, you know, a lot of people think like, oh, Donald Trump is what ruined, you know, the America's trust in the media, which isn't really true. I mean, Donald Trump put it into overdrive and I think he maybe made, he helped turn a lot of conservatives into people who like loathe the

media, but the way Obama got covered made a lot of conservatives distrust the media. And that bias is like a huge part of this election. It's a huge part of this story. And it's something that like, you know, given my work and everything is, is like a really interesting part of it for me. I just, I just pulled this up, but this is from back then Republicans and independents is from the Wikipedia page about this election, which I just Googled the media bias from 2008 to find some stats. So it's Republicans and independents leveled significant criticism at media outlets coverage of the presidential election season, an October 2022 Pew Research Center poll estimated that 70% of registered voters believe journalists wanted Barack Obama to win the election, as opposed to 9% for John McCain.

I mean, that's like a crazy, you know, 70% of registered voters in an election that Obama won handily thought that journalists wanted Barack Obama to win. Just, yeah, it's like, this is really the defining moment for the distrust in media. And I think we kind of rewrite it to be about Trump, but it was really this. I think it's part of the long tail that gets us to 2016 for sure. I think you're right to call that out. We don't get there without Obama in 08. And then certainly the correspondence dinner thing that happens at the end of Obama's second term. And that maybe is a little bit of a teaser for next time. The last thing that I'll leave you with maybe is that consider what it was like to

live through these elections. I what it was like to live through these elections. I think it's right to say it's interesting in retrospect. But when we get to the final rankings, I think I'd probably push for 92 with Ross Perot being a more interesting election than 2008. But we'll get there when we get there. All right. Before we get out of here, we got to do our grievances. I'm going to put a minute on the clock for both of us to articulate some, uh, some grievances in a, yeah, we'll see how we'll see how efficient we can be. The airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people. Mine's going to be hard because I have to cover two really quick. Okay.

First of all, I got to talk fast. First of all, last week I talked about my grievance being the Philadelphia, like that in every major city, the parking enforcement is the best run part of the city. And a very lovely friend and Tangle fan of mine, Lindsay, texted me today and was like, hey, listen to your Sunday podcast. FYI, parking in Philadelphia not run by the city. Fascinating story. Interesting. Looked it up.

Started reading all these articles about it. There's this huge controversy. The Philadelphia Parking Authority was taken over by the state. It's a really big deal. The city of Philadelphia does not enforce it. They want some of that enforcement back. The state is really good at it. Uh, whatever. Super interesting. I got that wrong. So I blame Pennsylvania, the state, not Philadelphia, the city for all the parking tickets I get for being five minutes overdue in a spot. Um, my other grievance, the real one for

this week is just that we're trying to launch ad-free podcasts in Tangle, and it's impossible. I don't know, like, we moved to a platform that was supposed to support subscription podcasts, and then they stopped supporting them like a week before we migrated our whole podcast there. I know all of you guys don't want ads. I know you're willing to pay to not get ads. I've heard you. I've gotten your emails.

I'm trying so hard to make this happen. And it's so annoying. And we're trying to avoid just like going to Patreon and having half our podcast published in one place and half the other. We're working on it. We're very close. We have a meeting with another podcast platform soon. And it's really bothering me because I really want to figure it out.

And I've been talking about this for like six months. So that's coming. And that's my grievance this week is that we can't give the people what they want. Cool. Not too much over one minute. I'll go. I sort of have two to get through as well. So my preamble grievance is about how in Vermont right now and in New England in general, there's concerns over Eastern equine encephalitis, which is a mosquito borne illness, which is kind of scary. But because of that fear, it's driving a lot of people to stay inside at mosquito time, so morning and evening during some of the last good weather of the year.

Vermont canceled its Oktoberfest, which is annoying. My wife goes to a gardening class, which happens around mosquito times, and they canceled that too, or at least put it online, which why around like mosquito times. And they canceled that too. Um, or at least put it online, which like why it kind of defeats the point. But because of that, um, like my wife came back, like after the gardening class announced, they're going to like make the next one remote. Um, she came back with some cilantro. This is my real grievance here. And it was something that we needed for a recipe that I was going to make. Um, and that's when I learned for the first time at 37 years old that the recipe that I was looking at, which called for, um, coriander, coriander and cilantro are the same thing. I didn't know that 37 years, nobody ever told me that. I started texting my, yeah, I started

texting like my friends, like, did you guys know about this? Coriander and cilantro, this shouldn't be allowed. Like if you're a herb, be one thing. I know apparently now coriander comes from the crushed seeds, cilantro is the leaves and they have different tastes, but I feel like this should be, I don't know, illegal, but a lot of my friends didn't know about this. So I think a lot of people are off the hook. Those who did learn about it recently. Um, it's not my fault. If you're just learning about this now, it's not your fault either. It's okay. Coriander and cilantro are the same thing. And I'm mad about that. I love it. You just taught me something new

in your grievance, which is a nice little thing. Um, all right, man, we got to get out of here. We're, we're coming up on two hours. We'll pick this up next week. I'm looking forward to it. And yeah, we'll see all you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Take care. Peace.

Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.