Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac and Ari talk about Project 2025, the latest inflation report, and Ari shares a ghost story.

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

On today's episode, Ari shares a ghost story, Isaac and Ari talk about Project 2025, the latest inflation report and the partisan views around it, and as always, the Airing of Grievances. You can catch our latest YouTube video, an interview with Alyssa Cass and Pat Rosenstiel, and their efforts to make the popular vote the official decision in electing the US President, here.We were previously publishing these episodes on our Tangle podcast page, but we just re-launched the series — and released a brand new episode — on a unique podcast channel for The Undecideds. Please give us a 5-star rating and leave a comment!Check out Episode 4 of our podcast series, The Undecideds. May 30th, 2024, just after 5pm Eastern Standard Time, a landmark moment was branded into the 247 year history of the US. For the first time ever, a former American president was found guilty of felony crimes. So how does this affect our undecided voters? The answers may surprise you. We gauge the impact of the verdict on Diana, Zahid, Claire, Brian, and Phil and discover that on the road to the White House, even a felony conviction doesn’t block all paths.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police

procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. All right, coming up, a ghost story

with a kind of flat ending, if I'm totally honest about it. Not to ruin it beforehand, but you know. We're going to talk inflation and Project 2025, which everybody's asking about, and then some classic grievances. You guys are going to enjoy this one. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. independent thinking and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and I'm sitting here with Ari Weitzman, who has a ghost story that he wants to tell to start the Tangle podcast. I think that's a, like, should we just, just like lean right in? Let's just hop right into it. I don't know if you remember before I left for,

for my trip through Wisconsin, I said I was going to visit a place that I used to farm in Illinois. Do you remember that? I do. It was kind of a cliffhanger, I thought. Yeah, and you talked a little about the ghost thing, and then I asked you on the podcast if you genuinely believed in ghosts. I couldn't tell or not, and I felt like your answer taught me a lot about you that I didn't really know. Well, part of that was informed by this experience i had in illinois so do you know that i spent a summer farming we've talked about that a little bit i think before my

senior year in college yeah yeah so one of the places that i was farming was this small place right on the border between illinois and wisconsin it was the third place I was farming that summer. I spent three weeks at three different locations. I met the two people who ran this farm, this old couple. I think I can use their names, but I'll just change their names just in case. We'll call them Mary and Lou. So an older couple named Mary and Lou in Northern Illinois came to the lot, the second place that I was farming and told me about their setup, invited me over to tour the facility. They had one other person who was doing part-time work at that farm that season. And I would be staying,

unlike this other person, I'd be staying with them in their guest house on their property. other person, I'd be staying with them in their guest house on their property. So it was a Friday. They took me over. I had a short day at my second location where I was farming. They took me over to their farm, showed me around the grounds. Mary was giving me a little tour. She told me that Lou was in the field. She's always out there farming. He was like this old hippie guy, the stereotypical organic farmer, like blue jean overalls, gray hair, ponytail, beard, just like wanted to talk about the tomatoes, man, got this sick new brandy wine from PA, just like this really, really sincere organic hippie farmer. And Mary told me that sometimes he would have a dark moment and just need to go to the barn by himself

because Lou was imprisoned for 25 years for falsely being accused of murdering his parents, which was quite the bomb to drop. And the guest house where I'd be staying was where they died, And they were still there, she told me. That people who lived in this house would report hearing an old couple arguing at night, doors would open and close, windows would open and close, lights would turn on and off, and I just had to tell them to be quiet and it would be fine. But that was the Friday before I was going to stay with them the next week. I went to a family reunion, met a cousin I'd never seen or met before,

who was a medium living in Sedona, Arizona, which is a place where you'd go to do that. And she told me what I should do if I wanted to live in peace at a haunted house with spirits. She said, take a white candle, carry it through every corner of the house where you're going to stay, say your name, your relation to the property, and your desire for peace. Let them know how long you'll be there, and then blow the candle out. So I did that. I walked through the house. I told them, the ghosts, that I'd be there for three weeks. I was friends with Mary and Lou. I didn't want to be haunted. I didn't want to talk to ghosts, probably. Went through the kitchen, living room, the bedroom where I'd be staying, the master bedroom with the scary stain on the floor.

out of there fast, went into the bedroom, went into the basement, closed the basement very quickly to not go in the basement, and then went to sleep that night. And I had no idea how I was going to fall asleep because I was living in a haunted house by myself. There's no other house within a quarter of a mile anywhere on this road. I had a bike to work the next day to get there because we were so secluded in this house, me and the ghosts. So I didn't know how I'd fall asleep. I managed to, I fell asleep right away. And then I woke up like a bolt of lightning in the middle of the night with like flashing lights all over the room, going crazy, like hallucinating. And in that moment, I was certain, certain that there were aliens in the backyard. Like I just knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt. You know how that is sometimes when you're sleeping and you wake up and you're kind of

mid-dream and you're pretty sure the thing that's happening is real, but it's not. Yeah. That's where I was at. I'd been having a lot of nightmares about aliens and I was sure that this one was real. So I woke up, there's flashing lights all over the walls and I was staying in this haunted house by myself in Illinois. And I thought, you know what? I'm probably asleep. I'm just going to make myself close my eyes and then open my eyes and everything's going to be normal. And I did. And there are actually flashing lights on the walls coming in from the backyard. And I knew for sure that I was about to die, that the aliens were going to get me, that this was the end of the story for Ari. And in that moment, I thought,

maybe the ghosts will protect me from the aliens. And then I realized that was the dumbest thing I'd ever thought in my life. Because not only would aliens have to be real, but ghosts would. And they'd both have to be there and also interacting with each other and care about me in some way. So I was pretty sure that wasn't going to happen. And I thought, you know, I just need more information. I have to know what the aliens want. So I did the bravest thing I've ever done in my life, which was get out of bed and slowly army crawl across the floor, like belly on the wood, just slithering to the window and peeked my eyes up over the windowsill

to discover that I had gotten my bearings mixed up and the backyard was actually the other direction and the lights were coming from the front of the house where a cop car had pulled somebody over right in front of the bedroom window. So I had a sense of relief and a sense of frustration and anger and went to sleep and then never had any issues with ghosts the whole time I was there. It was just one brief run-in with the cops and otherwise no ghosts. But flash forward to, sorry, fast forward to a couple weeks ago, I decided I wanted to visit the old place as I was driving through Northern Illinois, sent an email to some people who had a business listed at that address now. And the person who responded to me was the woman who was

also doing part-time work that summer. She'd bought part of the land and was farming there. And I thought that was a huge coincidence. Thought I'd go and see her, ask her what's going on with the ghosts, how the house is doing, how the farm is. And the story has kind of a flat ending, which is I got ghosted. So I did not get a chance to see her. What? Yeah. You didn't go to the farm? I did go to the farm. I got to the farm. I saw Mary. She told me again, Lou's in the field somewhere. Couldn't find him. Went to the farm. I got to the farm. I saw Mary. She told me, again, Lou's in the field somewhere. Couldn't find him. Went to the guest house, walked all the way over. And she had just left.

I'd missed her. So no haunting, but a ghosting. And I was considering trying to get into the house, but I was just too spooked. I just couldn't do it. I didn't want to bring negative energy in, so I just walked away. Wow, that is kind of a flat ending. I'm sorry to hear that that's where the story went. I was hoping that you were going to, well, I don't know exactly what I was hoping, but yeah, that's tough.

You got ghosted, though. That's nice. That's a good, you finish it with a pun at least, so that counts for something. Yeah, right. So it's a little bit of a punch line but i'm still thinking about it i want to go back there sometime i don't know when the next time i'll be going through northern illinois is but you know my my friend harper uh i have a very good friend harper who one of the really interesting quirks of his personality, he's like one of the most likable, affable, likable. Affable. Like just loves everybody, is loved by everybody. Yeah, I like Harper.

Incredible dude. Yeah. And he has this one really weird quirk where like people who believe in ghosts infuriate him. Really? And it's really like I came out a few years ago like i've never seen him like angry or upset before but somebody was just like talking about whether they believed in ghosts or not and he was just like really perturbed that this person did and was like i can't believe you believe in ghosts like you're you're an idiot like saying stuff that i've just never heard him say or posture

in a way i've never heard him posture. And, uh, it's really funny. He's like, he's very fair skin so much so that, and he's got long blonde hair and really light eyes and his eyes are so light that he has to wear sunglasses. Like anytime he's out on a bright day, his eyes are like so sensitive. He like can't function without wearing sunglasses, which is something he's kind of known for. Um, and, uh, yeah, so the new thing I say is actually that Harper is a ghost and that's why he gets upset that everybody else, whenever somebody believes in a ghost. It just makes so much sense when you think about it.

It makes perfect sense. It's just all a big cover up. Anyway, all right. Well, speaking of spooky things that people are really scared about and all the terrible ghosts that i'm getting so good at transitions but i just have to fix the part where i talk about how good the transition is yeah that's you had it and then you just it was like you're doing a triple axel then you stopped doing it and said man i'm doing a really good triple axel right now yeah yeah but i am getting good this is the last time i'm going to bring it up but everybody can just pay attention to it now if we're going forward. Is Project 2025 maybe the most requested topic

that we've ever gotten in Tangle? We're going to do a big subscribers-only Friday edition newsletter about it coming up. Not next week, I think the week following. It's really fascinating because I have all these sort of instinctual responses to it. And a lot of our readers are very emotional about it, I think. For, I guess, the uninitiated, Project 2025 is basically a playbook that a group of conservative activists have come up with, which I think in their own words is to pretty much deconstruct

and break down the administrative state that they believe is filled with a lot of progressives and liberals and Democrats to ensure that whoever is the next president, hopefully a Republican in their eyes, that the agenda isn't being stymied from the inside. And there has been endless writing and alarm bells and all this stuff about Project 2025 in the press. And we've gotten dozens and dozens of emails from people asking us to cover it to report on it which like i said we're going to do we're in the process of working on a story right now and i actually just had a call our first interview for that story one of the first interviews for that story with a guy named paul dans who directs um heritage's 2025 presidential transition project

presidential transition project. And I think it's a first pass, but I think my instinct from chatting with him is that a lot of my feelings and initial gut reactions to this are going to bear fruit, which is basically that I think everybody's overreacting in a huge way. And yeah, I thought maybe it'd be useful to use a few minutes of the podcast to talk about it because I'm fresh. I mean, I literally just had this interview. It ended 15 minutes ago. So a lot of it is kind of right top of mind for me. Yeah. So I think I'll present to you what I think is the common way that Project 2025 is talked about in alarmist language. And you can tell me what percent of this you think is right and what percent you think is overblown. So the alarmist take is Project 2025 is the Republican Party in plain view saying how they're going to dismantle the professional governmental state, the bureaucratic state

of nonpartisans, and replace it with ideologues who support their mission and install a more pro-authoritarian government of loyalists to the president who would then be President Trump, and start a culling process of liberals or even career professionals in government, and instill a more conservative ideology from the top down, and do untold damage to the institutional state that has been set up over decades of nonpartisan professionals and will go to untold new territories for a federal government that could bring about new levels of authoritarianism and unquestionable decay at our top levels of government. So I think that is the scariest pitch that I hear about it. What percent of that do you think is right?

I think like 20 to 30% of it is right. And I think the rest of it is kind of undercut by just the premise, which from the conservative perspective and from Paul Dan's perspective, I mean, I'll speak directly to just my conversation with him. It's that right now, we actually have the thing that a lot of Democrats say that they're worried about, which is we have a president who has an agenda and he has a bunch of underlings in the executive branch at all these agencies, the administrative state, who are very aligned with his agenda. And this is the dictatorship that people say they're so worried about. We're actually experiencing right now what it's like when there's really strong loyalty

to the president's agenda, and that's how they get it done. And what happened under President Trump is that he came into office and the career administrative state, the people who are career workers at all these different agencies, whether it's like the EPA or HUD or name your major federal agency that's in the executive branch, that those people ideologically were very strongly opposed to the agenda that President Trump got elected on, and they actively worked to undermine it rather than implement it. And I think that's actually a really good argument. And I think it's really clear, and I actually think it's pretty true. And I'm not saying that what they want to do will be good or bad for the country.

I think it could totally be bad if Trump comes into office and there's no backstops for the things he wants to do, because some of the stuff he wants to do, I genuinely think is outlandish and ridiculous, whether it's deporting 20 million people or 10% tariffs on all goods being imported from China or whatever it is. I mean, he's proposed out loud some projects and proposals that I think are bad and stupid. And I'm glad that there are people who are going to stop that. He's also proposed some stuff that I think is good and would work and he should have the support of these agencies behind him. So it was really interesting just hearing him, hearing Paul talk about it and just say, from our perspective, this is the dictate. We are living through the

dictatorship right now. And what we're not, what we're saying is that actually the job of the people who work in these agencies is to be loyal to the agenda that the president got elected on. That's the point. The checks and balances that exist come from different branches of government. They come from Congress. They come from the courts. These are people who work in the executive branch, and the president has the right to make sure that the people who are operating in this administrative state support his agenda and want to push it forward because we get to elect the executive and we're going to elect somebody to be president. And if Donald Trump gets elected, then Donald Trump should have a support system around him to enact his agenda. And there's nothing insane or authoritative about that. He's not going to be

able to do whatever he wants because there will be other checks and balances, but those checks and balances shouldn't come from inside the administrative state. And I think that's pretty fair, actually. I'm comfortable with that framing. I don't think that that's a totally ridiculous way to think about it. Washington, D.C. area, which is something I want to come back to later. But in that area in Southern Maryland and Northern Virginia, the voting shares about 75% to 80% liberal voting Democratic. And if that's the professional class you're drawing from, then that obviously skews. I'll also read a little bit from this interview done by Sharon McMahon in the preamble, which I think we've also seen, but I think is important context for our listeners. Sharon McMahon says, quote, when a president takes office, there are about 4,000 positions they must fill with what are called political appointees. These are people usually at the top

levels of the federal bureaucracy who serve at the pleasure of the president. It is generally assumed that if you're a political appointee and a new administration is elected, you'll lose your job. That's the nature of the work. She goes on to say, quote, when a Democrat has been elected president, they generally have no trouble filling the 4,000 political appointee jobs with people who either live near D.C. or are willing to relocate. But when Donald Trump was in office, he could not find 4,000 political appointees to fill the roles. His administration was only able to fill about 2,600. So that sounds like the problem statement, as it is, that this is the biased political state currently. They just want to fulfill it.

But I think the way that they can often seem pernicious is this idea of trying to find a list of people that are going to fill these jobs and scouring the nation to create a list of people we want to put in government, which then kind of implies a list of people we want to put in government, which then kind of implies a list of people we want out. And the act of list making feels a little scary to some people. So I wonder if the correction may be an overcorrection. Do you think that's possible? I think that it's definitely possible that whatever they end up doing could do so much

to gut longstanding professionals and experts who work in these agencies that they're going to run into a different problem, which isn't so much that the people inside the agencies oppose their agenda. It's that they're going to have people who are perfectly loyal to their agenda, but are totally incompetent and don't know how to do the work and don't really have a great- Because they're losing institutional knowledge. Right. They're losing institutional knowledge. And rather than compel the people who are there to help them, they basically fire a bunch of people who are probably good at their jobs. And then they have all these rookies who come in

and they just have their own learning curve, which is something in retrospect, I wish I asked Paul about. I didn't. I'll say this too, though. And he said this explicitly in the call, which I think is true. And right now I'm taking his word on it, but I think it's probably true, is that the Trump campaign has not influenced this agenda. They're pitching it to the Trump. They want Trump to do what they're doing, but this is not like... It gets framed in the press as like, this is Trump's terrifying agenda for 2025. And he's like, dude, I released a book on this in 2022 when nobody thought that Trump was going to be the nominee. This is for whoever the next president is. If Biden wants to take it, great.

Like we want Trump to get elected. We're working to get Trump elected, but it's a transition playbook for whoever the next Republican president is. And it's about making sure that these agencies that we believe are staffed mostly by liberals and progressives don't undermine our agenda. And I asked him explicitly too, I said, you know, to me, the criticism of what you guys are doing that I think is most resonant is this idea that you're going to basically flatten and eliminate all the people who have, you know have disagreements with what your agenda is? And aren't those objections

and a little bit of the disagreement and the dissent within government healthy for the work that you're doing? And he said, yes, of course. I actually do. Like I said, I said, philosophically, do you believe that dissent inside a single government is a healthy, good thing? And he said, yes, I do believe so. But I think that dissent should be by and among the three core branches of government, not within just the executive branch, which I don't think is a great answer. Like I would prefer that there was dissent inside the executive branch too. But I think the framing that he's putting forward makes sense, which he's just like, we want people working on our agenda who are committed to our agenda. And American voters deserve that because if we're getting elected, it's because people want us to enact our agenda. their agenda. And yeah, I don't think that's like an authoritarian framework. I don't think what they're doing is going to be the end of democracy. I think there's a decent chance if Trump gets elected and they do execute this process that a lot of government workers are going to lose their jobs. And that will be, I think, really disruptive and cause different problems. But I understand the intent behind it, and I don't think it's a totally corrupt intent. I think it's actually pretty reasonable.

A couple other things that came to mind as you're describing the response and this idea of ideological disagreement in the federal government and the executive branch is something that I want to offer as the Ron Swanson principle, which is that if you have one political party in a two-party system who has a major plank in their party ideology, that they are anti-big government and want there to be a smaller federal government, that's not a very good recipe for making people who are going to be representative of that ideology in government. So when you think of the character of Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec, he was a strict libertarian who ironically worked for the, he was the head of a department in government. And those people with those small government principles probably aren't going to be lining up to join the federal government. So I'm wondering if this is just not really even a solvable problem. I don't know how he gets around that. I don't know if that's something that you asked, Paul, but is there just an innate bias in people who want to work for the government

being people who are less right-leaning? Yeah, I didn't ask him that. And I think that's a really fair point. I do think that there is that innate bias and that a lot of people who have a desire to work for government are people who tend to have more liberal or democratic politics because they just believe in government. I don't know how they navigate that or what their plan is. I got the sense from talking to him that he's very, very confident that they'll be able to staff all these agencies with people who have requisite experience and commitment and loyalty to the ideological goals. So, you know, I think I'm not going to speak for him, but I think from what I gathered from his perspective is that they certainly believe there are enough Republicans and conservatives out there who want to work

in government that they can staff this pretty easily. And. Uh, and, and I don't doubt that. I mean, I think that's probably true. Uh, you know, and I, I'd say to one last thing, and then I know we want to, we want to touch on another topic on this pod, but he said something too that I thought was interesting, which was basically like that his goal and their goal with project 2025, they don't believe that they're going to get all this stuff implemented. He's like, these are policy suggestions. These are transition ideas.

This was like a volunteer effort. We put this book together. And he's not saying like, this is some innocent thing. He believes they're going to have an impact. In fact, he said, I, Democrats should be scared. Like we're going to shed light on all the waste and corruption that exists in government by showing what we can do when we put our people in place. So like, I understand why they're scared and I'd be scared if I were them too.

But at the same time, like his expectations are not that everything they want to do is going to happen. They're not working hand in glove with the next administration, the Trump administration, to be clear, that, you know, they are hoping Trump wins. And then they're hoping that Trump adopts their recommendations. But he was like, you know, we don't have a direct line to the campaign. I don't know for sure what they're going to do. What we know is that we have this ebook explaining what we should do. And it's been downloaded over a million times and we get nonstop press coverage. So we're having an impact. And we hope that that impact is lasting. So that's kind of where he was coming from from there's a lot more to say about it and we're gonna give it a lot more coverage going forward but uh yeah i thought it was i the conversation basically and this is always dangerous but affirm my priors in a lot of ways because i have not been terribly juiced about this i think I think the first time I read about it and read their website and looked at their stuff, the reaction I left was like, yeah, if all this

stuff happened, it would be pretty radical. But this just seems like a competent conservative movement plan. They do need to change the way government works if they want their agenda to get accomplished. And Democrats are just much more organized when it comes to government efforts like this. And they do this when they go through presidential transitions. Obama did this after Bush, you know, Bill Clinton did it like they this is what they do. And so I think it's just Donald Trump learning about how the government works, you know, in his first term and realizing how much he got stymied conservative seeing that and thinking they needed to build a plan for him. And this is their plan they're going for. And it, yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. And I don't feel like it's quite as big a deal as people

think. And I could totally be wrong about that, but that's kind of my first blush impression of it. Then I think that's kind of the first impression that I had of it too. I think that I'm going to be wondering moving forward is how interrelated this agenda will be with the principle of wanting to move the federal agency headquarters out of DC or out of the DC area. Because I know that used to be a thing that people talked about kind of neutrally. At least it was introduced to me from people who were apolitical. And now I see it really more associated with the right in a bill introduced by Josh Hawley, I think several years ago to do so. But I don't think that's an explicit plank in the Project 2025 platform. But it does seem compatible. And I wonder if regardless of this gets through or not, if it is a hand in glove thing, or if we have a Democratic president or Republican president, if that's something we're going to be hearing about too. It just seems like something that is adjacent to the problem as described. And I wanted to mention it before moving on. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot.

Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. All right. The second thing that I think we wanted to talk about today, which to me is going to be and will maintain as the story of the 2024 election, which is inflation. We did a piece on it today, and you got pretty riled up about some of the partisan coverage of this story that you've seen, and you demanded some time to discuss this issue. I demanded some time. I, like that painting, stood up with a bill in my pocket and my hand on the rail and said, I think that this is too partisan the way we're discussing this. And I thank you for yielding the floor. So, I want to describe a little bit about what I saw,

which is today's edition as the best example of partisan media sphere bias I've seen in a while, because I think the month's economic news kind of broke the partisan brain. As a quick recap, we had a strong inflation report. So 3.3% year-over-year increase, according to the CPI, slightly lower than expected. Month-to-month inflation, pretty stable. Core inflation only rose 0.2%, which was the slowest pace since October of last year. Then the Fed announced that it would not be cutting interest rates. And it's still targeting maintaining a 2% inflation rate over time that hasn't changed. And then lastly, but something that happened before either of these things was that we got the Department of Labor's employment

report for May, which showed a healthy jobs market, the US economy added 272,000 jobs in May, market, the US economy added 272,000 jobs in May, significantly more than expected. Average earnings rose 0.4%. And the unemployment rate was pretty stable. It rose up to 4%, which was the first time it reached that threshold in 27 months. But it's been pretty stable and healthy. And that threshold is kind of a red herring. It's been pretty low when you look at it historically. So that means our economy is doing pretty well post-pandemic. It's faring pretty well on the whole compared to international markets. We have a pretty good labor market, but there's a tension with a major mitigating issue of inflation where if inflation is going in the right direction, but we're not there yet, if we get a hot labor market, then it's going to make it hard for the Fed to lower rates and fight inflation. So in short, inflation is a priority. It's doing okay. Not where we want it

to be. Job's doing well, but those things are kind of in tension. But apparently it was impossible for the partisan brain to just say that. So I had a couple quotes from the right, a couple quotes from the left, from pieces that we pulled today that I thought were indicative of almost like activist language that was seeping into economics coverage in a way that was more clear than I think I can ever remember seeing it. in a way that was more clear than I think I can ever remember seeing it. So the first comes from, and I'm going to pick on some people, it's not meant to be adversarial. I know everybody has their biases and their place in the media sphere,

they're clearing yada yada, but we cite in an article from the National Review that contained the line, inflation is cumulative. Have you heard that before or seen that? Because that's something I see on the right kind of regularly now. Yeah, definitely. And I think this is kind of a new concept, which is the way of describing inflation as being a cumulative problem, which on one hand, technically it is when prices go up, when the rate compounds, compounds on what the price increased as. But on the other hand, we assume inflation generally. So we just have a rate that is aberrantly higher than a rate that had been normal and it's going to return. It's not like there being a compounding rate of increase is a new thing. That's just the way rates work. So we would structure for inflation. That kind of strikes

me as an activist thing, saying inflation is cumulative. Because if you want to play that game, then nothing has more of an effect on inflation today than inflation 40, 50, 60 years ago that raised the rates that we're now living with forever. So I think once it's in the past, you kind of can't dig up those bones anymore. Otherwise, we'd be sitting here saying, it's Ronald Reagan's fault that we have all this price increase. So that kind of bothered me. Yeah, that's an interesting, I like how you landed that. That's an interesting way to sort of reframe their argument. It's just a never-ending blame game all the way back to whoever first started inflation almost.

It's not productive. And I think it just serves the side that you want it to serve. And I think that's something we're seeing from the right right now. The same article said that some, quote, some have argued he, meaning Biden, should raise the inflation target to 3%, end quote. I don't really see that seriously argued. I think that's a straw man. And I was kind of surprised to see that mentioned so soberly and flatly. We had a brief discussion about this, how over time, if you look at inflation, you could say that 3% is the average rate of inflation over time, but that includes periods of high inflation. so it doesn't make sense for that to be a target we shouldn't have a target include unhealthy levels we should have the target be what the healthy baseline is which is two percent the fed has never said anything different so i don't think that's a sober argument being made by people

i want to offer one other quote from the right which is uh this is coming from a writer working at cnn which we know is a left-leaning outlet, but this is Patrick T. Brown, who's a bona fide conservative writer saying, quote, this month's rosy economic data is nearly everything the president could ask for. And it just isn't. It's just not. We have to be able to say that inflation being somewhat under control isn't the same as rates being cut. That's what the president wants. Full stop. That's the priority. Inflation, like you said, is the thing that is stickiest as the issue against Biden in this election. So the thing

he wants to see is inflation getting markedly lowered, which is measured popularly by interest rates coming down. When they don't come down, it's not good news. Bottom line. You could say, oh, we had a strong jobs market, as indicated by this report from the Department of Labor in May. You can say inflation's cooling. Those things are in tension. And if we don't have a clear, decisive inflation's going down coming from the White House, we don't have a signal worth talking about. So I think that's just a way of casting this that it seems impossible to say in a partisan way. Like if you're going to try to make a point about the economy right now, even these sober economic points are being made in these partisan ways. And it's, yeah, it's gotten me a little riled up. Yeah, I can tell. It is a weird moment though. I mean, to give the partisans some credit, I guess I would say it's a hard moment to describe, which means that it's an easy moment to kind of construe into what your worldview desires. If you think that Biden sucks, it's really easy to frame the economy as being terrible right now, and his presidency is going really poorly. And if you're a Biden

stan, it's pretty easy to frame this as a successful... In this call with Paul, the guy from Project 2025, towards the end of the call, he said something like, their Democrats are focused on Project 2025 because they don't have anything to run on. The economy is in shambles. There's war across the globe and Biden can't walk off a stage. He doesn't know how to get out of a room by himself. And it's like, I get the rhetoric and it is kind of easy to sell that. But also, the economy is doing really well compared to pretty much everybody else. And a lot of the metrics are really strong from a traditional GDP, unemployment, wage growth. There are things that are going really well. So yeah, it's like, I get it. And personally,

I get it. And personally, my emotional feel is that the economy is not great. I feel that because things are expensive. I feel like I'm doing well, but there's still caps on what I can and can't do that I wouldn't expect that are lower than I want them to be. My friends who are trying to buy houses or having kids or whatever, like they're so strapped that I hear all that and then I feel it myself. And then even though I'm doing really well and Tangle's taken off

and I've created something that's like started jobs and I'm making a lot of money and whatever, it's like all these things that are good. But I also feel like, oh yeah, the economy is kind of shit. And I know that there's some dissociation there, but I'm also like, my feeling is tied to a reality of like, if somebody had told me I was making X amount of dollars five years ago today, I would have thought that I'd be able to do so much more than I'm able to do. Or like my friends who I know have good paying jobs and are smart with their money and whatever,

who I'm watching struggle because they have one kid. It's like that, you know, it's just crazy. It feels like it feels kind of bad. So yeah, it's a really weird, interesting economic moment. And I feel really unsure oftentimes about how to describe it. Well, it's really tough to make relative comparisons. I think that's something we're seeing right now. 2% inflation relative to 3% inflation. What does that mean? 3% relative to 7%.

How am I doing now versus how I thought that I would have been doing six years ago? how am I doing now versus how I thought that I would have been doing six years ago? It's really hard to be able to judge because we're comparing hypotheticals. And I think it's fair to say I don't feel the way that I expect it to based on how I'm doing. I think that's all right. But at the same time, yeah, we are doing well compared to other nations responding to a global pandemic, which is a once in a-a-lifetime kind of disrupting event. And it's tough to also say, you should feel okay because Germany's doing worse. It doesn't really mean much to a person who's saying, I want to refinance my home. I can't get a mortgage under 7%. I'm trying to buy a car with a car loan because that's the way most people buy cars,

and interest rates are too high for me to be able to afford monthly payments. Credit card interest rates are drivers of personal debt for the most part for a lot of households that carry debt. And a lot of the common consumers interaction with the economy comes through interest rates, period, end of story. And that's something that an economist that we had on not too long ago, Kyla Scanlon, something that she talked about. And she's a little bit to the left on things ideologically, but she's pretty neutral or tries to be with how she talks about the economy. And she mentions that one of the things that's really hard for new people entering the workforce that are like Gen Z or younger millennials is that we have this barrier to entry for

creating wealth, which is tied to buying a home. And that is tied to an interest rate. So it's one thing to say, well, jobs are really strong. Earnings are going up. Opportunities are high. You have the ability to find housing, but that housing is tied to an interest rate, which is now really, really high. And these housing values are really, really high. So other than that one thing, you should feel

fine. And I want to briefly just mention for fairness that the left, like you said, is interested in selling this economy is really, really strong when we should be making these relative comparisons still. So I have a quote from New York Mag, and I can say this really quickly, which is, quote, they, meaning interest rates and the recent job reports, show an equilibrium returning to the US economy after years of bad vibes. And bad vibes is that catch-all that Kyla Scanlon popularized as this way of not really being able to agree these strong economic indicators that we're having with the feeling of the economy that we're experiencing and trying to wrap our head

around what that means. And that verbiage is kind of stuck with the time when she introduced it. But I read Kyla's stuff whenever she puts out new information or new blog posts, and she's a good writer. And she said since then that, you know, I think just interest rates are dominating the way people interact with the economy. And I think that does have a big effect on why, quote, the vibes are off. I don't think we're seeing equilibrium. I think we're experiencing a period where what we should be doing is reimagining the way that people feel or people experience the economy. It's not about GDP. It's not about job growth. It's not about necessarily even unemployment. Unemployment being strong or low is a

prerequisite to feeling good about the economy. But those things don't interact with most people's day-to-day lives. Interest rates do. And that should be something that we talk about more. And just real briefly before I give you a chance to respond, because I've spoken a lot here, MSNBC published a really, really slanted article when they were trying to lobby for the Fed to cut interest rates already, saying, quote, the unemployment rate hit 4% for the first time in more than two years. And other metrics also show a softening labor market, end quote, as evidence for this argument of we should be lowering rates now, which we should not. We just should not. If we're concerned about inflation, if that's something that's going to be impacting people, we should be most concerned about making sure we're not worsening it. This is just a partisan way of trying to say, we want to do the thing that's better for the president to sell. And if the economic

fundamentals don't support it, then you shouldn't be inventing an argument to say that they do. And I'm not saying that this argument is invented out of whole cloth. It's just a really skewed way of reading the same tea leaves everybody else is reading. And it's motivated reasoning to try to get to this point where you're saying, the guy on my team should get this win right now. And I'm not even saying the economy is bad. I'm saying that we have to be making relative comparisons at different aspects of the economy. And if we're looking at the jobs rate, sure, we're doing pretty well. People are employed. But if we're looking at interest rates, it's complicated.

And we shouldn't be saying, let's cut them now when we don't have the backing in the rest of the economy to do it. And it's just tough to not see people grapple with that tension. We're just focusing on the one part that we care about. And I think it's fair to say the economy is good. Interest rates are high. That mitigates things. There's a tension there. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a great example of why we try and do the work we try and do. Because I really don't think you can read MSNBC or Fox News and leave feeling like you got a

balanced view about something as basic as the economy, which should be objective. And it's also just like, it's proof that even this stuff that's so tied to numbers is often subjective, you know, like there, there's so many layers to how to analyze this stuff. I mean, even, even the inflation report itself, and this is just one last thing, we have to wrap up a little bit early today, but even the inflation numbers themselves, there's a difference between inflation being driven by auto insurance and inflation being driven by housing, or inflation being driven by gas and inflation being driven by food. Like those things impact different people differently and to different degrees that it's like the CPI and the core CPI and even this like super core thing,

which now people are talking about all of a sudden, like they, they don't tell the whole picture because I could have nothing but housing inflation and everything else could be going great. And I'm still fucked. If my rent goes up $500 a month, that's worse for me than if my auto insurance goes up 50 bucks a month and my health insurance goes up 50 bucks a month and eggs get twice as expensive. The housing inflation is way worse for me. It has a bigger impact. Yeah, it has a bigger impact. I don't think that the real dollars part of it isn't discussed as much. And that just complicates things even further in a lot of ways.

All right, we're going to be a little shorter today than usual because I am quadruple booked with meetings all afternoon and have to run here. So we're going to jump into our grievances section before you do. Go ahead. Do you have one last thing you want to say about that? I don't think so. I mean, I could briefly say that we're trying to build a house right now. We're getting a construction loan and economics is somewhat personal to each of us, like you said. And I feel like I'm doing pretty well economically, but we're so just tied to the torso with this interest rate moving up and down that every flinch of the Fed is something that we're overreacting to because it's going to make a difference for

our mortgage. And that's hundreds of dollars every month, thousands over a period of years. And you just feel that more. Like you said, real dollars are more impactful because interest rates are tied to these large purchases. The price of eggs, price of auto insurance, it's not as big. It kind of feels blunt and simple to say that, but it does feel like that's getting undervalued. These abilities to make decisions about whether or not I'm going to build a new house or if I'm going to move and refinance, it's constraining. Maybe it's not making me suffer. I'm not out on the street, and I'm thankful for that. I think a lot of us should be.

But those constraints are also real. Yeah, that I think rings really true for me. It makes a lot of sense. All right, let's get into our credences for the week. Where's the great transition, Isaac? That was a tough one. Yeah. The airing of grievances like that's some kind of a phobia are you want to go first or second you know we were just

complete you were just complaining for 30 minutes so maybe i should go first how's that for a transition yeah take a that's good. You found it. Yeah. It took me a second. Okay, cool. All right. I think I've taught, I've spoken about my neighbors on this podcast before. Have I? The raccoons.

The guys. No, not the raccoons. Those guys are, they, I just, yesterday. No, that wasn't yesterday. Maybe two nights ago. Woke up in the middle of the night to absurd banging stuff getting thrown around, whatever. And I just go upstairs and there's just this one baby raccoon on my roof, just like picking tomatoes off my tomato plant and throwing these like hard, unripened tomatoes on the roof. And it was just like, sounded like somebody was dumping a bag

of marbles on the roof, woke me out of a dead sleep at like three in the morning. And I was just like, God damn it. And they're so cute. It's hard to be mad, but, uh, yeah, I turned on the light and thought about how I wish I had a gun in the house, but just kidding. I wouldn't have shot the raccoon. Um, but I was really upset because it was super late. And that's not even your grievance. Yeah. My neighbors are, they're the guys. So how much do I want to say here? They live next door to me. When Phoebe and I first moved in here, the first weekend we stayed here, we heard this unbelievable racket over there at like from like two to seven in the morning, just like music, partying, people laughing,

carrying on. It sounded like they're having an awesome time, basically just raging. And, uh, and so I was like, Whoa, like those guys are like getting after it. I love going out, having a few drinks, hitting the bar until closing time, whatever. But these guys were getting after it. So a couple weekends later, I'm sitting on my front stoop, my front steps. It's like 8am on a Saturday. And this dude like stumbles up to my front step and he's like, yo, is this the after hours spot? And I was like, no, I think it's right next door. Now that you said that, uh, and he like bangs on the door and the neighbor opens the door and lets the guy in. And he's like the dude who lives there. And he's like, what's up, man? Like, you know, I'm new neighbor. We say hi,

we chat for a minute. And, uh, I was like, you guys are like, yeah, you're getting after it over there. He's like, yeah, it's kind of like a long pause. He's like, do you guys have kids? And I was like, no, he was like, good, good, good. Uh was like, oh, god damn it, dude. And he was just like, yeah, so we run an after-hours adult social club, 2 a.m. to 10 a.m. And I was like, that is insane. And then I looked inside. Instead of a living room in the front of the have the house, there's just like a pool table and chairs. And yeah, basically these guys are just at running a weekend's after hour club next door. They party. It's all good. I'm like, I sleep through anything.

I don't really mind. But the one thing, the one thing that really sucks is that they smoke cigarettes inside and the smoke comes through the walls. And so like, Oh, Phoebe and I will just wait. We're in Philly. We're in row homes and they're like the row home attachment. So I'll wake up in the middle of the night and my entire room will just smell like a bar in the nineties. And I'm like, Holy shit. Um, so I've just been on this crusade. Uh, I've bought like five different air filters, like highest quality HEPA air filters that I'm like putting in different parts of the house, trying to fight the smoke. And, um, yeah, just nothing works. Just, I'm losing the battle. I am getting obliterated by this smoke. Like I've tried like several different strategies.

obliterated by this smoke. I've tried several different strategies. And so today, I saw the guy who owns the house. He doesn't live there full time. His brother does. I don't know, some weird stuff. And I was outside and I just said like, hey, what's up? We always say hi and how you doing? What's good? What's going on in the neighborhood? Yada, yada. And I was just like, dude, any chance you could do something about the neighborhood, yada, yada. And I was just like, dude, any chance you could do something about the smoke, whatever. And this actually is my group inspired. This was like, he was just like, yeah, I'll talk to my brother and like smoke's coming through the walls. I'm like, yeah. Like I was like, I don't know if we share like a vent. He's like, no, you guys got central AC, but, um, I'll talk to my brother about it. We'll see what we can do. And I was like,

I'm not trying to be that neighbor. Like you guys have lived here for like 50 years, but it would be awesome if that wasn't a thing. Um, and he was like, it's no problem. It's no problem. Like we'll figure it out. And I'm like, all right. So I have basically thrown in the towel on defeating the smoke with my own like mechanical genius, which was basically just buying air filters and trying to figure out what vents the smoke was coming from and then putting the air filter right next to that vent. Yeah, pretty rudimentary genius, I guess. But I went the direct human route and appealed to this guy's good graces. And now I'm waiting to see. So I guess we could check in next week. I'll let you

know. He did say he was like, I'll talk to him, whatever, you know, happy to, it's not a problem. And then there's kind of this like extended policy. He's like, but I will say it is my sister's birthday this weekend. So like not this weekend. I was just like, yeah, all right, that's fine, I guess. But I'm actually not going to be home this weekend anyway. So I was like, all right, whatever. I can deal with that. Okay. Yeah. So that's my grievance with maybe a happy ending, a potential solution we can check in on later. Yeah, I hope so. I mean, smoke is a different thing to me. I'm not against smoking cigarettes on principle, but smoking inside is kind of a bridge too far for me. I mean, I don't care what other people do in their own homes, but

I would be really uncomfortable in your situation. I just have this extreme sensitivity to smoke. I can tell if somebody smoked in a room within like a couple days if I walk into it immediately. I was in a hotel room a couple years ago and I walked in and I said, someone smoked in here, we can't stay. And I went to the front desk and they're like, no, that's a non-smoking room, so it should be fine. I'm like, I'm telling you, it's not fine. So I'm not even a guy, I hate complaining. I will not send food back. If I get the wrong order, I'll just say fate has decided for me and I'll eat the different food that was given to me. I'm not a person who complains, but I could not deal with that. Like in this situation,

they said, oh no, it was a smoking room two years ago, but we converted it and fully cleaned it. I'm like, okay, sure. You did, you missed something. But like smoke can stay in wallpaper. okay sure you did you missed something but like smoke can stay in wallpaper hotels have wallpaper you probably don't but it can pervade and it just lingers and it takes a long long long time to get out and once it's there if you're sensitive to it in your home i don't know man that's um yeah to me that's your strongest grievance that i've heard so far. Appreciate you saying that. Safe space here. For once. Yeah. I mean, mine's pretty low stakes.

I'm on the wrong side of 30 now. And wrong side of 35 even. Just driving back, long car ride from Illinois. And when I was about four to five hours outside of home on this 18-hour car trip, my back seized up fully when I was in the driver's seat. And it was not a small one. I had back spasms in my 20s. I just had bad posture. I went to a PT who helped me out with it, fixed the way that I walk and stand, which I didn't know was a problem, changed the way I sleep at night, started to adjust my stride,

did a lot of stuff to address the root issue. I hadn't had back problems at all since. And this had me out of commission for like a week. Just could not sit when I had to get up to, after like sitting down or lying down, I had to, up to after like sitting down or lying down I had to it took me like a minute I had to roll over and keep my back perfectly straight in order to stand when I got up in the middle of the night I had to kind of like Colin McGregor walk to the bathroom because I couldn't walk with straight knees it took me like a week to recover from from just a problem where I kind of hurt my back sitting in a car, which is tough to admit. Wrong side of 30 is right, dude. That is tough.

Well, young Buck, you'll be like me one day. I'm there. Yeah, back spasms are not a thing I've dealt with before, thank God. But I've seen people have them and they look horrific. It's really weird. It's just your muscle decides to contract and it won't change its mind for several days. You have to treat it super nice. All the other little muscles around it join in unison and also contract. And you have to work kind of out to in and get everything else nice and right. So it took me like five to six days before i remember there's like a moment where that one muscle just to the left side of my lumbar spine when i felt it sort of like sputter and release a little bit i was like ah that was it that was the root cause

now it's just a little bit of lingering soreness i have to work with but it took a full week it's annoying we need to fix this design flaw with humans yeah put a good word in for me we're not meant to maybe stand upright i'm not totally sure something's definitely totally messed up about our entire framework at this point i see like one in a million people looks like they're standing well with good posture and they're built the way they should be built. And the rest of us and myself included, my whole, my like back is just like inverted. My shoulders are slumped forward and I'm in like pretty good shape and try and work on myself. And I'm completely like, I just look ridiculous. I don't think it should be this way. So my back spasm is probably coming.

Well, I hope it doesn't. Maybe you're dealing with it by just inventing a new way to walk. Maybe the weird looking Isaac posture is actually a new form of human evolution. I hope that that's true. I hope it's not. All right, we got to get out of here. Yeah. You'll never hear the end of it. All right. We'll be back next week, everybody. 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 Sean Brady.

The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime,

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