Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac and Ari talk about Rafah, Kristi Noem, Lab grown meat and more.

Episode Date: May 12, 2024

On today's Sunday podcast, Isaac shares some arguments about why Israel might be wise to pursue this invasion in Rafah. Then Isaac and Ari talk about lab grown meat, Kristi Noem shooting her dog, ...a little bit of a wealth tax convo, and and how much Philadelphia sports fans suck.You can watch our latest video, Isaac's interview with former Congressman Ken Buck (CO-04) ⁠here⁠.Check the next episode of our new podcast series, The Undecideds. In episode 3, our focus shifts from Donald Trump toward President Joe Biden. Much has been made in the media about his age and memory and whether he’s cognitively capable of handling another term. But an unanticipated performance at the State of the Union reignited his base and left many questioning that narrative. And while Donald Trump faces a jury of his peers in court, the court of public opinion continues to weigh in on the effectiveness of Biden’s foreign policies, with an eye to the conflicts between Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and Russia, and our own protracted clash at our southern border.  Our undecided voters share their observations on the current commander in chief and how his decisions on the world stage affect their decision in the voting booth. You can listen to Episode 3 ⁠⁠here.⁠⁠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.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six 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.
Starting point is 00:00:57 Coming up, I share some of my arguments about why Israel might be wise to pursue this invasion in Arafa. And then we do a hard pivot into lab-grown meat, Kristi Noem shooting her dog, and how much Philadelphia sports fans suck with a little bit of wealth tax convo. And I think you guys are going to enjoy this one. 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. Ari, it's good to have you here. We're in a rhythm, man. We're crushing these Sunday podcasts now. It's pretty easy when you don't have to fly to Vancouver all the time or wherever
Starting point is 00:02:05 or Colombia or Ecuador or some other country all the time. It helps. I didn't go to Ecuador. I was Bali, I think maybe you were going for, but that's alright. I appreciate the shade. The country that I was really trying to remember was Bolivia.
Starting point is 00:02:23 Well, I'm here. I'm in Philadelphia. I'm local. I'm actually, right after we get off this podcast recording, I'm going to be heading over to University of Penn's campus to experience some of the encampment stuff firsthand. It kind of occurred to me, I've been writing about it and talking about it and writing about how I shouldn't be writing about it and talking about how I shouldn't be talking about it because there's more important things, which we're going to talk about actually today a little bit. And I've been to a lot of protests, pro-Palestine protests, counter protests, whatever. I've seen a lot of this stuff in person experience, but I actually have not been to an encampment in person.
Starting point is 00:03:05 I've just read a ton about them and watched lots of videos and stuff. So I'm excited to go over there and just poke my head around and we'll do it with an open mind. And I hope get to talk to some people, but excited about that because I think, you know, it'll be good for my reporting and writing and thinking about it. And also, hopefully we can make a cool little video out of it and produce some Tangle content that our readers and listeners will find valuable. Do we know what's different about the encampments at Penn compared to other schools, if anything? Primarily, it's actually how the university has responded. Different from the ones you've seen in the news, I suppose, it's how the schools have responded. I think I mentioned this or wrote about it in one of the Tangle editions, but I love this. Philadelphia Police Department on the student protesters, and the Philadelphia PD just said, you need to prove to us that this is a dangerous situation, and then we'll come clear it out.
Starting point is 00:04:11 And they just couldn't do it and didn't have what they needed to tell them that this was something that required the force of the Philadelphia Police Department, which I say I love because I think that's the right response is like, we're not going to come in riot gear and clear out a bunch of students who pay to be on campus at the, because of the illusion of a threat, you know, especially in this city with all the issues that Philadelphia is facing right now with crime and homelessness and drug addiction. And I mean, there's so much stuff the police have on their plate. I do not want, you know, 80 officers spending a couple of days clearing out pen protesters unless they really need to be there. So I was super glad they responded that way. And I think as a result, the encampments and the protests have kind of gone on pretty peacefully since then. I
Starting point is 00:05:01 mean, I have seen a couple of things online that are a little bit like icky, some just like intimidation stuff from the protesters. But for the most part, it seems like it's just pretty uneventful, which might end up being what we find in our video when we go over there is that it's boring. We won't know what we're going to find until you go over there to find out, I guess. So that's the whole point. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we have a couple of really good topics to touch on today. And honestly, I think kind of a lot of, I don't want to say lighthearted, but maybe a little more fun stuff that we're going to get to in the second part of this podcast that I think is just a little less weighty than what we're going to start with. But I wanted to
Starting point is 00:05:47 talk a little bit about this piece that I'm writing right now that's going to be published in the newsletter on Friday. I don't think we're going to do a podcast about it. And since we're not going to do a podcast about it, it feels like I should talk a little bit about it on this Sunday podcast, just so, you know, I know a lot of folks are just podcast listeners, but the sort of thought experiment that I've been going through is just what if I'm wrong about Israel? What if I'm wrong about the calls for a ceasefire? And, you know, what would an argument against myself look like? How could I steel man that? And so I've been playing with that idea for the last week or so. And then we got this flurry of news about what was happening in Israel. And it became very clear that this Rafa invasion was happening. And so the piece became a lot more timely, even more timely than I think it was going to be regardless. more timely, even more timely than I think it was going to be regardless. And as I've been, you know, kind of absorbed and immersed in these arguments that Israel should go into Rafah and Israel should do whatever it can to finish this war, I've realized that there are
Starting point is 00:06:58 a lot of really good arguments on that side that kind of, I don't want to say changed my position because I still feel pretty strongly that some kind of ceasefire with the release of hostages and a long break in the fighting, not an armistice necessarily, but a ceasefire would be a good thing. But there are some arguments that definitely keep me up at night or make me doubt my position or make me doubt myself and I think that they're they're worth talking about so my hope was we could spend you know five or ten minutes doing that here and give some folks a little bit of a taste of the piece that's coming out on Friday and if you are listening to this on Sunday and you're not a newsletter subscriber you know you can go it on our website. It'll be up by then
Starting point is 00:07:45 on readtangle.com and you can check out the full piece. But that's kind of the idea I had, I guess, just to touch on that a bit because it feels unfair not to talk about it in the podcast. And we can be honest about the way that you've been exposed to these arguments. It's not as if you have been immersed only in pro-ceasefire talks. It's part of what we do at Tangles, write to and with people all the time who have different opinions. Readers will send in emails with their takes. We'll read arguments from across the spectrum every time we cover a piece. So I'm sure you've had an argument in mind before you even started this piece that made you think, you know, this is the one thing that is bothering me about this position that I've been taking in the newsletter. So that's kind of my first question for you. I haven't gotten to edit the piece yet
Starting point is 00:08:40 or see it. As you came into writing this what was that one argument that for you seemed strongest before you even started writing or reading about it in earnest yeah thanks it's a good question i think i think the one argument and and this is a good place to start is that uh any kind of ceasefire or long-term stop to the war or an armistice or whatever it is, an end to the war now, is in basically every conceivable way a win for Hamas. And the reason it's a win for Hamas in basically every conceivable way is because what's basically happened over the last seven months is that Israel's relationship with the United States has been weakened. Israel's position on the global stage has been weakened. Israel has lost, you know, 1,200 citizens and soldiers and whatever in this initial fight or in this initial October
Starting point is 00:09:43 7th attack. And now they've gone into Israel, and they've gone into Gaza, and they've lost hundreds of soldiers. The domestic political situation in Israel has become basically untenable. I mean, it's all infighting. Netanyahu's career is almost certainly over whenever the war ends. There are protests in the street. The country is traumatized. The country is divided. The people are angry and upset. The hostages are still there. Many of them appear to be dead now. I mean, Hamas can't even say they'll bring forward 30 plus living hostages. So everything about this has been bad for Israel. And the one thing that they could take away from this war is that they've toppled Hamas. And if they don't do that, if they leave Gaza and they leave it in a state where Hamas can come back
Starting point is 00:10:37 in power in a matter of hours or days, which is what would happen right now if they stop the fighting, then they've effectively lost on every front. And Hamas will take that and they'll take it to the people and they'll frame what's happened as a victory. They will basically make the case that they outsmarted and outwitted Israel and America by taking these hostages and using them as leverage. you know, Israel and America by taking these hostages and using them as leverage.
Starting point is 00:11:10 Though in the hostage release, they'll get prisoners released from Israel, more prisoners released from Israel, Palestinian prisoners. They still have Hezbollah fighting, you know, from Lebanon in the north. And this will embolden them. It'll embolden Iran, who got basically everything they wanted, I imagine, out of some sort of provocation. I mean, again, United States and Israel's position on the global stage have both been weakened. Both are facing domestic turmoil now. We have all the protests here in the U.S. Biden is underwater with a lot of voters, and we have protest votes against him. He very well might lose to Donald Trump in the upcoming election. Netanyahu is basically on his last leg in Israel. All of these things are great for anybody who wants to see a little bit of chaos and
Starting point is 00:12:01 a little bit of interfighting among Israel and the United States and Israel and United States citizens. So they're basically facing a situation where they have one thing that they can say, we did that made all the horror and all the Palestinian death and all the Israeli death and everything that's happened over the last seven months worth it, which is a legitimate eradication of Hamas. gathering power in Rafah and what's left of their battalions and their military, they will effectively take over the strip again in a matter of days. And we just go back to where we were. And then it's 10 more years or whatever it takes for Hamas to rule and rebuild. And we just wait until the next war starts, which is basically inevitable, that if Hamas is in power, they'll do this again, because they're saying, we will do this again. We will do October 7th
Starting point is 00:13:12 over and over again, as long as it takes for a Palestinian state to exist from the river to the sea, which in Israel's minds and the minds of a lot of people in the global elite and global world order and all the nations across the globe who are invested in this is a total non-starter. There will not be a singular Palestinian state from the river to the sea. So if they won't stop killing Israelis until that happens, then that's going to keep happening for a really long time. And I think that's a really good argument. And it's the one that I fear the most, I think, about what happens if there's a
Starting point is 00:13:52 negotiation and a ceasefire right now. So that's a really thorough way of saying, basically, yeah, not accepting a ceasefire is what's worst for Hamas, even if it's not what's best for Israel. I'm sure you're holding back some cards still, and there's going to be more to read on Friday, but that was pretty thorough. mentioned off the top and is something that I've been sort of annoyed about too throughout this whole discussion is the conflation of the term ceasefire with armistice or truce. And the idea for promoting a ceasefire for months had been, it's not calling on Israel to even pull out of Gaza. We can cross that bridge when we get to it or even call for an end of all fighting. But it's to stop the current military occupation or stop the current military invasion of cities or bombardments and allow for some access to humanitarian aid and then some release of hostages, and then a ceasefire will
Starting point is 00:15:06 eventually expire. And that's part of what makes a ceasefire a ceasefire. And I think as these protests have gone on, the argument, especially from Hamas' side, has been consistently a demand for a permanent withdrawal of troops from Gaza as part of a ceasefire resolution, which is a different term. And it's something that I think protesters are accepting as terms. Hamas is sending those terms amongst U.S. protesters. And I wonder if you engage that counter-argument at all to say, well, you can even say we will reject those terms for a ceasefire. We'll even say, we'll talk about armistice when we get to it, but what about accepting a temporary ceasefire that would just be an exchange of hostages and a pause in fighting to allow for some humanitarian
Starting point is 00:16:00 aid? Knowing, of course, that Hamas hasn't been promoting that or accepting that. But what would you say to that counter-argument? Yeah, it's a good question. And I sort of am going to touch on this in the piece in the sense that one of the signals we're getting is that a couple weeks ago, Hamas seemed very uninterested in the idea of a ceasefire, even a temporary one or even a permanent one. They got what was sort of described as a quote-unquote generous offer from the Israeli-American camp for a stop to the fighting. And they turned it down because I think they did not expect everything that we've seen the last few weeks, which is all the signals that the Rafah invasion was going to happen. And the moment that it became clear that the Rafah invasion was going to happen, suddenly they were announcing that they were accepting terms of the ceasefire deal, which is the clearest signal that they don't want this to happen. And that is another thing I talk about in the piece, which makes me think if this is something Hamas doesn't want, then Israel should do it. But to your point,
Starting point is 00:17:11 to speak more directly to it, I personally think that even a temporary ceasefire, though Hamas I don't think would accept terms for it would open the door for an actual armistice or truce or end to the fighting and that if we could get six weeks where Israeli hostages were coming home and diplomacy was happening and some sort of plan was being discussed for what a post-war Gaza looked like, that alone, the opportunity to maybe extend that, you know, six months or a year or permanently would be worth it because I think there'd just be a chance that that would happen. But at the same time, you know, it creates a lot of the same problems I was just talking about, which is just if you leave Hamas in power, you give them time to sort of regroup, then you basically are signing up for years and years more of their rule. And that's not just bad for Israel because of what Hamas is saying it'll do and promising it'll do, but it's also bad for the Palestinian people, the Gazans who have to
Starting point is 00:18:31 live under their rule, who have not benefited very much from Hamas being in power. I mean, most of what has happened in Gaza that's been positive in terms of development and economic growth and peace and stability has happened in spite of Hamas and not because of it over the last 20 years. So it's a really difficult question, but I think it sort of gets caught on the same thing, which is just you cannot let Hamas stand because if you do, then basically everything that happened up to now was worthless because you just are going to go back to the same status quo and where we were. So that's kind of how I've been thinking about it.
Starting point is 00:19:21 I'm going to explore this a bit more in this piece. I don't want to spend too much time on it today. We talked about maybe just chatting for five or 10 minutes, which we've well exceeded. But I think there's a lot of really good arguments for it from some of the Israeli writers and thinkers who I've been following. And I think it's really important to consider the kind of Israeli psyche and understand why such a strong majority of Israelis want this war to continue until Hamas is gone. So I'm going to talk a bit about that and just kind of, I guess, peel back the layers of my own contradictions. So that's coming. Yeah. By the time folks hear it here, it'll be out on our website. And now that we've gotten this very heavy, weighty topic. We can get on to the light day that was promised.
Starting point is 00:20:20 Yeah, we can get on a little bit to that. Instead of starting with 15 minutes of, hey, let's talk about whether or not there should be a ceasefire in Gaza. Yeah, before we make this incredibly abrupt pivot, let's just take a quick commercial break as a little bit of a palate cleanser. And when we come back, we're going to be talking about lab-grown meat. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.
Starting point is 00:20:57 All right, we are back and moving on a little bit from the Israel-Gaza protester stuff. a little bit from the Israel-Gaza protester stuff. To talk about lab-grown meat, this came up in the newsletter and Ari and I decided we wanted to do a few minutes of it on the podcast. I've shared with you all that we have this little shared document that we put ideas in for things we want to talk about. And this was one Ari dropped in there that just said lab-grown meat disagreement, which I didn't know we had. So I am on the edge of my seat and waiting as anxiously as you guys are to know what about my incredible lab-grown meat take Ari disagreed with. Well, four words, one question. Would you eat it? Because he said you wouldn't. I did say I wouldn't in the newsletter. I will try anything once. So maybe I should say I don't
Starting point is 00:22:01 think I would ever be a habitual eater of it, though I would try it if I went to a restaurant or I went over to somebody's house and they were like, dude, I just got the newest lab-grown meat. It's first edition, however we're going to talk about it in freaky dystopian computer tech ways. I would try it because I want to know what it tastes like but I'll be honest and this is like lizard brain and I understand this is irrational and like silly and maybe small-minded of me but I wouldn't I wouldn't trust it I don't think I would trust it to make it like the primary thing in my diet or the primary replacement of meat in my diet. I am just of the mind that my species has been eating animal meat for hundreds of thousands of years, and we know a ton
Starting point is 00:22:57 about it. We know a ton about the repercussions of that. We know a lot about how our body processes it, what kinds of meat we should eat, what we shouldn't, how much we should eat, how often we should eat. And I understand that what we're talking about growing in a lab is supposed to be some identical genetic DNA match to that. But I'm just not interested in being the first guy to eat lab-grown meat a few times a week for five years without knowing what's going to happen. I'm just sorry. That's how I feel. I get it. I think a lot of... So I'm not the kind of person that uses the word irrational as a slam. I think there are lots of things that you might say that aren't technically rational,
Starting point is 00:23:43 but are beliefs that come from somewhere. I think our minds process information unconsciously. It'll rate faster than we can consciously. And we can come to a feeling about something without really being able to articulate why. So I think it can be irrational, but it can still be valid. So I don't have an issue with that. I think my perspective just comes from a different place, which is rather than try to argue against your position, I'd rather just try to explain my stance. Can I do that? Does that sound fair or interesting? Yeah, you can do that. That sounds fair. I accept your very thoughtful framing. Yeah, you're very thoughtful framing. So for me, I consider it pretty similarly to how I think about any other crop domestication.
Starting point is 00:24:36 You think about something like apples, for instance. Apples are not wild growing fruits. have been subjected to centuries of very intentional breeding to try to make this what would have normally been a really bitter, plump ovary that surrounds a fruit into something larger and sweeter and more nutrient-dense. And please double-check this in case this is wrong. This is information that I remember reading 15 years ago. But I remember reading that every apple breed that you eat is less of a breed and actually a genetic plume of every apple that's that breed. And they splice these apples onto trees by taking the branches from the tree and just spiking it, hammering it onto that tree. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Can you say that again? Every apple, say that one more time. Every apple that you, every Granny Smith apple that you eat
Starting point is 00:25:37 isn't a member of a subspecies of apple or isn't a fruit from a subspecies of apple tree it's a genetic clone of it contains the same genetic information as every other granny smith apple very cool okay sorry to interrupt i just want to make sure i have that right no that's fine um that's based off of my um my recollection of a michael pollan book um Botany of Desire, which is really, really good. But it's all to say, and that's just one example, you can consider cows or chickens in general and think about how we breed these animals to be what we want them to be. I think plant domestication, animal husbandry is something that required centuries, if not millennia of human input to change something that occurred
Starting point is 00:26:30 outside of human intervention into something that fits needs or preferences we have as a species. So you think about things like monocropped food that is meant to be resistant to herbicide and pesticide, like the Monsanto genetically modified foods, GMOs. We eat them. I don't have a problem eating them. I have a problem with monoculture, but in terms of domestication, it's just another step. of domestication, it's just another step. And as far as lab-grown meat goes, to me, it's just another step. It's the same process. We're trying to intervene in something that is quote-unquote natural. I try not to use the word natural because it's so vague and large, but it is our nature to do that as humans. So I don't feel like it is anything unique compared to the centuries of human history and millennia of human history that we have preceding it.
Starting point is 00:27:31 And I try it. Interesting. Interesting. I, yeah, that is a fair contrast. And I just feel compelled to say this. You know, I consider myself like a pretty red-blooded American. I don't even know what that means anymore.
Starting point is 00:27:51 I guess I always interpret that as like- It means you like eating steaks. I get it. Yeah, I interpret it as, when I say that, I think what I mean to say is I think of myself as like one of the common folk. I enjoy a good burger and love meat, and I'm definitely carnivorous. At the same time, I've seen the videos of these mass farming spots and stuff and how meat is mass produced in our country. And I think I have a pretty low sensitivity for that kind of thing. And I just want to, I guess, articulate and be clear that I'm in favor
Starting point is 00:28:48 and supportive of ways that we might reduce the use of that kind of food production. So the lab-grown meat thing is interesting to me. And I think what you're saying is totally fair and a good counterpoint to my, you know, quote unquote, irrational feelings. I just like the difference between a cow and an apple seems notable enough to me. But like another way to put it is just that for a long time, there's been a lot of research that like eating tons of meat, eating tons of red meat might give you certain cancers, colon cancer, whatever. That research, as far as I understand it, is actually becoming more and more debated. And
Starting point is 00:29:34 that like sort of 15 years ago, that was kind of common knowledge. And now there's a lot of people saying maybe that's not true, but whatever, assume for a moment it is true. Like my concern would be that something happens in the process of growing this lab-grown meat that maybe makes it more you know full of carcinogens or whatever more cancerous and maybe we just won't know that for another 20 years and i'm nervous about the prospect of being on the wrong side of that so that is kind of what freaks me out about it. Totally fair. I get that. My counterpoint to that is that, no, cows are not apples, but we, I would say we could define what we do with animal husbandry for cows as bioengineering as it is. We select species to breed. We feed them specific diets. We try to get them to grow
Starting point is 00:30:27 larger in the areas where we eat them specifically. And there are risks in this process that we underweight, like the risk of giving a cow a grain-fed diet instead of a grass-fed diet, something that I don't think we appreciated until after that became commonplace, especially at large scale. And I think a lot of that, what we see in studies that show poor health outcomes from eating red meat come from the health of the animal and the less nutrient-dense meat that comes out of an animal that is fed a diet that it hasn't been evolved to take. And I think that is a risk. So just normal animal husbandry or even animal husbandry at scale has its own risks that we don't think of because we don't see it. And I think my last challenge on this is that I think we are comparing the idea of lab-grown meat as something that we're thinking about.
Starting point is 00:31:24 We are comparing the idea of lab-grown meat as something that we're thinking about. 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?
Starting point is 00:32:01 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. at fluselvax.ca. Not to what's happening,
Starting point is 00:32:28 but what do we imagine raising an animal would look like? And it doesn't look like that. Generally, it doesn't look like a farmer with three or four cows raising them and being sustainable or like being, like training those animals in a way that we'd feel comfortable with.
Starting point is 00:32:43 If you actually go and look at large beef farms, not even like ranchers who raise cows in a more humane way at scale, but where we get most of our meat from, I don't think most people would be comfortable with it. And I think they'd have questions and they would consider a lot of things that are happening normally to be risks too. So I just think the comparison should be, sorry, apples to apples. Yeah, I really hate you for that. All right. Are you ready for the most fire? I do too. I couldn't stop myself. Are you ready for the most fire transition we've ever had on the Tangle podcast? I think I have it.
Starting point is 00:33:20 Better than apples to apples. Let's hear it. I kind of improv these things. All right. We're going to stay on the farm for a moment. Chrissy Noem shot her dog in the face. Is that good? You think that's a nice... Should we use that? Did I do good? Is it good?
Starting point is 00:33:36 Yeah, it's pretty good. It just came from the sky into my lap. Yeah. It happened, and we wanted to talk about it and we're in the farming world and i just couldn't jesus i we don't actually want to talk about the fact that that chrissy noem shot her dog though she did do that and then she wrote a chapter in her book bragging about i'll say really quick i okay i'm not trying to be a contrarian heterodox here. I think in the very beginning, the reaction to this passage was totally appropriate.
Starting point is 00:34:14 We're like two weeks into this news cycle now. And now I'm starting to feel like maybe we're overreacting. Like maybe she's being unjustly maligned. The punishment has exceeded the act, I think, at this point. I saw her go on Fox News or something. And it's been two weeks since this story happened. And she's just getting obliterated and going on News Nation and getting by conservative pundit hosts who are just like holding her feet to the fire. And look, she killed a dog. She wrote a book about it. And the fact that she killed the dog, she didn't write a book about that. That was just, she didn't write a book, but she could get clarification. She did not write a book about killing her dog,
Starting point is 00:35:02 but she wrote a book about how she makes tough decisions. And it's like it was basically a book that someone ghost wrote for her. That was like her audition to be vice president. And she bragged about it, which like it's it's one thing if like this story came out that Chrissy Noem shot a dog that was apparently quite violent and dangerous. And, you know, maybe it was going to attack her kid who was like a dangerous and, you know, maybe was going to attack her kid who was like a toddler and, you know, whatever. I think we could have had that debate. And I think she's responding to the controversy being like, this is something that happens in the country is like, you have a dog that's really dangerous and sometimes you have
Starting point is 00:35:42 to put the dog down. And like, what's so much more humane about just taking that dog to the vet and euthanizing it, you know, versus shooting it. It's kind of honestly not that different. And I get, I, so like, I understand the response. I think the thing she's missing is like, people aren't necessarily so upset by the fact she killed the dog which is upsetting they're upset that she wrote about it in the most like deranged way possible where she was like i make tough decisions and i know how to do the hard thing and like here's a great example of me doing the hard thing is i like blasted this dog in the head and everybody's just like, what? Like, no, we don't want like a political leader who shoots their dog because
Starting point is 00:36:32 it's misbehaving. You know, we want somebody who like makes tough decisions to problem solve. Like there maybe was a different way to problem solve that situation that didn't involve killing the dog. Um, so that's my quick take on the Kristi Noem thing. Or maybe there's a way to discuss the problem with more nuance, such that the book could find it a little bit more understandable. But something about that Newsmax interview that you mentioned for her getting just completely dunked on by conservative pundits for what she wrote, and they're mostly focusing on her other anecdote about Kim Jong-un and whether or not she made that up, which she did. Her response to that was, yeah, when I became aware of that content, I had it removed.
Starting point is 00:37:15 So you clearly didn't write this then. You told somebody about a series of things, they put it in your book, you didn't put any attention into it. So if you wanted to say, yeah, I consider these things attentively and I make hard decisions and I'm very thoughtful, then show any amount of attention to the thing you signed your name to. Also, she lied to the ghostwriter. She told the ghostwriter a story that wasn't true, which she just basically admitted, which I think is kind of just a hilarious element. Anyway- But I feel like it's her Michael Dukakis moment. You know what I mean? Oh my God. A Michael Dukakis drop? We didn't bring this up just to dunk on Chrissy Noem.
Starting point is 00:37:59 I want to be clear about that. We brought it up because I think it's an interesting reminder about the impracticality of making predictions about politics. And I thought this was a really good note. This was your note was, you know, whatever we it's, it's very easy to make fun of Kristi Noem for this stuff. But I think a more useful takeaway is like, this is why six months before an election, you don't know who's going to get elected. You don't know who the vice presidential pick's going to be. Because oftentimes stories that are much bigger with much more substance than this catch fire. Or sometimes a really dumb story like this catches fire and fundamentally changes the shape of an election. I mean, I don't want to like, you know, get out of my skis here,
Starting point is 00:38:50 but just like butterfly effect with me for a moment. There's a world in which Chrissy Noem was actually the best vice president candidate for Donald Trump and would have helped get him across the finish line in a really close election. And she is basically off the board now. And maybe Trump goes on from this and picks somebody for VP who's a bad pick for VP because this woman who was considered a favorite by a lot of people is now off the board. And we have a different election in 2024 because Kristi Noem wrote a sentence or two in an autobiography about killing her dog. I mean, that is like, welcome to American politics and how tenuous every storyline and every prediction is, is like something like that can derail an entire, you know, election narrative, basically. And I'm glad you're the one reading that line because you are essentially saying,
Starting point is 00:39:45 hey, if you're a person who picked Kristi Noem as your frontrunner five months ago, you get a get out of jail free card. So I will take that get out of jail free card as the person who was predicting Kristi Noem to be the frontrunner five months ago. You were on Tim Scott. You've always been on Tim Scott. So do you want to maybe put a pin in this and say you want to get out of jail free card down the line in case something comes out about him? Or do you want to double down? I feel better about Tim Scott because he ran for president and he's been a senator for a few terms. And I think the oppo research on him is out. And I think it exists. And Kristi Noem, obviously, it's not like she's some nobody. She's the governor of North Dakota. I mean, she's an important person. In fact, for what it's worth,
Starting point is 00:40:39 I saw her say in an interview that the whole reason she wrote about this in her book was because it was a story that a lot of people in North Dakota knew, and she was expecting that this story was going to come out. Sorry, South Dakota. That a lot of people in South Dakota knew, and that it was going to come out, and she was basically insulating herself from that criticism by including it in the book. So, you know, yes, I am willing to double down on my Tim Scott prediction because I feel pretty good about it. And I haven't really seen... I think as the race has changed, the things that are important to Trump and the openings for him to win have all pointed toward a higher likelihood that he's going to pick Tim Scott, namely that he needs a good
Starting point is 00:41:27 fundraiser and Tim Scott is good at raising money and he's good at campaigning. And also that Biden has weaknesses with voters of color. And if Donald Trump brings on a vice president who's Black, I genuinely think that it won't hurt him with Black voters or Hispanic voters or other voters of color who maybe are like not trustful of this guy. And, you know, I say that carefully and with like an attempt to tact because I really hate the political punditry that's like, oh, like Black people will just vote for other Black people. like that. It's so dumb. But it is also simultaneously true that all people of all colors and race and backgrounds are more open minded to or more interested in candidates that share a similar background as them. So like, I'm a white American Jew. And if there was some guy running for an
Starting point is 00:42:27 office in, you know, Philadelphia, who is a white American Jew and grew up in the same town I did, or, you know, had some cultural overlap with me, and he was running for office, I would probably be more compelled to like, look into his campaign and be a little bit interested in what he was doing, because we have some shared connection, There's connective tissue there. So all I mean to say is Joe Biden's strength with some Black voters and voters of color is looking like it's wavering a bit. And Donald Trump is going to have an opening to pull some of them over to his side. And having somebody like Tim Scott campaigning for him, being a surrogate, saying he's going to be the vice president. I think at the very least,
Starting point is 00:43:11 it doesn't change anything. And best case scenario, it actually brings over one, two, three, four, 5% of the vote, which could swing the whole election. So the headline there is Isaac Saul says that it is difficult to make political predictions in advance, but I'm special, baby. I'm ripping it. I got it. I'm seeing the ball. Double down. Yeah, I do feel like I'm seeing the ball and I might be wrong. I, and I would say, I would say if I am, if I am wrong, my suspicion is that it'll be JD Vance or at least the phonic. If I had to, if I had to throw some other names in the ring, those would be the ones that I would say, you know, and I think fourth place would be like somebody who I don't know, or just some total, you know, like, like, he's just like, Donald Trump
Starting point is 00:44:05 Jr. is my vice presidential candidate. And we're like, oh, right, duh, we should have seen that coming. Or a character from The Apprentice from 12 years ago or something. Yeah, exactly. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break all right well listen we we had one more thing we wanted to get into but i don't want to rush through it because it's it's some of this wealth tax stuff actually i guess you could do this quickly do you do you want to give your your two- wealth tax gripe? And that's probably a good transition into the grievance. It's almost a grievance, and it's a good one. It's almost a grievance. It's more like a critical observation, I think, of the way a lot of this was handled. So
Starting point is 00:44:56 earlier this week, we talked about this proposal for a global wealth tax and a lot of the meta commentary surrounding it. And this proposal wasn't something that was broadly existing in the ether and a lot of different people had and were drawing from different proposals and coming to a conclusion that's presented very formally in some economic forum. This was a very specific thing. It came from one report from an organization called the EU Tax Observatory, and it's only a portion of this report. It is just one section of a nearly 100-page report about tax evasion with the suggestion that said, you know, if we implemented some theoretically global tax on billionaires just for their wealth, that would really take a lot
Starting point is 00:45:54 of revenue in and be really helpful for a lot of governments and could probably be a big lever that we could pull to try to help fight poverty and famine and a lot of the worst aspects that are haunting the global poor. When we read commentary about it, there are some good questions and skepticism, and this is mostly on the right-left line. So a lot of the questions and skepticism was coming from the right that said, we think that there are a lot of questions we still have to ask about who's collecting it, what does it look like to implement it, why would we trust governments to be efficient, what government are we even talking about here, taxing wealth is tricky. is not everybody on the left, but by and large, there's a lot of momentum on the left that took up this policy prescription as a good idea without a whole lot of that same caution. Because one of the largest questions we had when covering this was what we just said, who is going to collect it? That seems pretty foundational. And that's not really something that this report specifies. This is just a jumping off point. It's just an idea. It's just a thought. And it wasn't
Starting point is 00:47:12 to say the IMF is going to collect this tax. That wouldn't make sense. That'd be problematic. But it's to say, if we imagined every global economy linked arms and agreed to some international compact that would tax billionaires, and then the report went on to specify, it doesn't even have to just be billionaires. It doesn't have to be a threshold thing. It could be bracketed, starting with multimillionaires, decamillionaires, centimillionaires, and then you bracket it up. And we don't really even know what that would look like because this is, again, just the first idea. But if you had something like that, collect taxes. And we're just talking about billionaires because we think it gives us really good visualization of disparity in global wealth, which is all true. But the fact that that wasn't the second point, like if you're somebody who's really enthusiastic about this idea, rather than say, yes, these
Starting point is 00:48:04 authors are right. Yes, billionaires are too rich. Yes, wealth should be transferred. I think the next thing to do is to say, this is a good idea and this is how it should or could work here. And I just was really wanting for those specifics in the commentary. I didn't see any of it. You? I did not see any of it. And I am not totally sure it exists and i'm also not totally sure whether i care if it exists because like i said in this piece i'm i'm i was so moved by that argument that i heard rory stewart make about just the efficiency of sort of these one-time cash handouts versus you know setting up governmental infrastructure in order to process and, you know, decide what to do with all this money that I just like totally unconvinced
Starting point is 00:48:52 we're going to solve global poverty by giving hundreds of billions of dollars to, you know, dozens of different governments and expecting them to spend it really wisely. But it is startling to me. I mean, maybe that's just like where this proposal is, I guess we should say, is like maybe we're just at a point where the wealth tax proposal is not in a place where it has all these details fleshed out. And that's just that, which is, you know, that's fine. But it's certainly not something i would support until
Starting point is 00:49:26 i had those details in hand i guess is a good way to put it and i think that's i think that's very appropriate for tangle and specifically for you for your role in the media ecosystem but maybe this is just a request um for other people in the media ecosystem who are pundits and especially economic prognosticators. If you're a person who read this proposal, thought it made sense, and wanted to apply it to your country with more specifics, I would love to read that. I'd really like to see what the next more fleshed out version of this idea looks like because we talked about this in a reader question this week.
Starting point is 00:50:04 lashed out version of this idea looks like, because we talked about this in a reader question this week. There's a lot of thorny issues with taxing wealth, and I don't know how to get around it. And I'd like to see what a serious proposal specifically for the US would look like. I'm really curious. Yeah, I like that idea. All right, we're coming up on an hour here. I want to make sure we get in our grievances today. So we're going to wrap, as always, with a little bit of venting about all the things in the world, the little things, the meaningless things that have been annoying us recently. The airing of grievances. That's what my life has worked to him, $25.
Starting point is 00:50:47 Do you want first or second today? How are you feeling? Yeah, I'll play ball. It's sports season. So I'll go first and start with my sports grievance, which is just about this turn of phrase that you hear a lot during playoffs. And right now, NBA, NHL playoffs are going on, baseball season starting, if for some reason you think baseball is a cool piece of time. And something that I hear commentators say all the time when they're talking about sports, especially high stakes like playoffs, is this is a team that just knows how to win. And I don't know if you're a person who uses that phrase, if you're aware of how stupid that sounds.
Starting point is 00:51:27 It's not as if winning changes. Scoring more points than the other team doesn't become fundamentally different in hard games. You still have to do that. We're both people who played a lot of sports in our lives. We've been on teams together. We've watched a lot of sports growing up. I understand that pressure creates different situations. It's a whole other feeling when you're playing under the lights or in big important moments. And maybe it's just a complaint about the specifics of the
Starting point is 00:51:55 idiom, but what you want to say here is not this is a team that knows how to win, but this is a team that can deal with pressure or that this is a team that can win under pressure, or this is a team that can deal with pressure, or that this is a team that can win under pressure, or this is a team that's prepared to win under pressure. These are all more specific things rather than this is a team that knows how to win. It's not like the Steelers for the last four or five years have gotten into the playoffs and gone, oh, fuck, we forgot. Damn it. Tom Brady just remembered he had the blueprint in front of him about throw a ball to own team equal touchdown and we just didn't have that knowledge it's such a stupid turn of phrase and announcers are probably like announcer speak is the dumbest dialect of english that's ever been invented and it's just
Starting point is 00:52:38 like the the the i think clearest example of it to me um but i mean there are other examples too of announcers sounding like idiots like if you're pittsburgh here you're gonna want to it's like yeah i am i'm the city of pittsburgh so thank you for telling me about what i want in the situation so dumb i i totally agree about um announcing being the the worst dialect of humankind i'm sort of i'm trying to decide whether i agree with you on the fundamentals of your grievance here i maybe this is like a little bit of an insight just into like my own ego and arrogance but i would consider myself somebody that kind of knows how to win and And I don't know that I know exactly how to define that. It's squishy. But like, the lessons I've learned in ping pong, or
Starting point is 00:53:37 basketball, or ultimate frisbee, or some day to-day life i feel like they sometimes translate through sports and through situations where i i'm it's almost like i know how to get what i want out of this competition and i don't know there's part of me that thinks like there is some weird magic special sauce that allows you to perform under pressure like you put it or that allows you to to kind of take control in a game or you know a competition of some kind in a way that you know you come out on top uh it's i have to think more about it because i will definitely say like i that's like part of my personal ethos and identity is like i can learn a game really quick and win at it and i feel like confident like if I like watch somebody who's really good at something, I can kind of mimic them and learn. And, and when I
Starting point is 00:54:51 play, you know, I play a lot of competitive sports still just like, there are like these certain moments that I recognize in all kinds of games, like the edges of the game or turning points or pivotal moments in games where I'm like, I know what needs to happen in this moment in order to win. And I do feel like it's a knowledge almost that maybe some people might not have. Yeah, I had a canned response up until that last sentence. So I need to consider that because I think a lot of the things that go into just that a lot of this isn't knowledge, that stuff that you're describing. And then you said, and I think this is knowledge. I'm like, ah, but a lot of the things are like belief, competitiveness, willpower, the ability to perform under pressure.
Starting point is 00:55:47 but this idea of, I think I can, in a way that's really hard to describe, see a moment when something has to be done differently or understand that in end games for whatever it is, or in straight up competitions when stuff matters a lot, like how to exert pressure on the opponent, how to deal with more pressure, how to do something unexpected at the right time. I don't know. Maybe there's something to that, but I don't, I don't, I don't like it just linguistically. I like pushing. Yeah. I like pushing back in your grievances. It's fun. Uh, okay. No, I know you do. It's really cool. My, my, my, yeah, this is supposed to be like a safe space to air the things that are wrong with you. And every week I just tell you, what do you think is a problem?
Starting point is 00:56:26 Yeah. Uh, I, funny enough, I was, I had potentially on my list. Cause I always have multiple grievances for every week, a sports grievance,
Starting point is 00:56:37 which was related to Philadelphia sports fans. And I was just going to say, and I'll do, I'm not going to make this my central grievance because there's a better one, but just very briefly. You can't do two. Wait, wait.
Starting point is 00:56:50 No. Commit. I just feel bad that we're doing two sports things. That feels like a little... It's thematic. I feel like that's good. Philadelphia sports fans have it way better than they think. And it is infuriating. Being in a city that's dominated
Starting point is 00:57:07 by Philadelphia sports fans where the Eagles have a Super Bowl championship in recent memory, the Phillies have a World Series championship in recent memory. The Sixers haven't gotten over the hump, but they are good every year. They have an MVP candidate player. Like they go to the playoffs every season. They're so exciting. And the Philadelphia sports fans are like, it doesn't matter. They're just, they're so distraught and defeated. And like their entire ethos is just this unbelievable negativity all the time. I am a Washington Commanders football fan. My parents are both from the DC area. So I grew up in a Washington Redskins home, no longer the Redskins, now the Commanders. And they are the team that I care the absolute most about. Second to them is the New Jersey Nets,
Starting point is 00:58:07 who are now the Brooklyn Nets. So I have two teams who have gone, the only two teams I care about, who I like diehard watch both of them. The commander's a little bit more than the Nets. One has changed six states and cities. So gone from New Jersey to Brooklyn, which worked out for me because I was living in New York, uh, or I moved to New York right after the Nets moved. So it was a very seamless transition for me. I just kept being a Nets fan. And then the commanders are like one of the all time worst franchises since I've been born. I was, I was born in 1991. That was the last year they were in a Super Bowl.
Starting point is 00:58:46 And they have fewer playoff wins than all but like two teams since then. The last 15 or 20 years have been marked by one of the worst ownerships in all of professional sports, Dan Snyder, complete scumbag, horrible person who did horrible things to the fans, who has, you know, started fights with everybody he possibly could in the city and in the States of Virginia and Maryland, and eventually had to sell the team because of like rampant sexual harassment allegations all throughout the organization. That's been my existence is just like going back to the well over and over again for a team that never does anything but loses. And I'm like, stay optimistic and loyal and cheery. And every off season, just like this off season, new ownership, just drafted a quarterback in the
Starting point is 00:59:39 first round, you know, like I'm all in, I'm like right now today, I believe the Washington commanders are a playoff team next year. I think that basically every off season. And then I go back in and it's, and it's, it typically ends horribly and in terrible heartbreak. My, my wife, Phoebe's like during football season, I come home. Oh, how'd the game go? They lost it. They always lose. Don't they? And I'm like, shut up. You don't know anything about this you know like god yes they do um and like and that and then i just exist in this city and where i grew up where the team they've always had one awesome team. Like the Eagles were so good all through like, you know, 2005 to 2010, the Donovan McNabb era. Yeah. They were in the NFC championship game. Then they got a world series and the flyers are up and down, but they're, they're pretty, they've been,
Starting point is 01:00:36 they've had some really good season. It's just like, just shut up. Just stop, just stop, stop complaining. Just like shut, just grateful. Also, they have the best setup in sports. Like I've been to a lot of sports games all over the country. I'm like a sports junkie. I've been to a lot of different stadiums. The Eagles, the Sixers and the Flyers and the Phillies, their arenas are all in the same complex in South Philly, super accessible, right off the highway, right down like a main road that runs directly into Center City, Broad Street into Center City and like City Hall. It is awesome. And they're about to blow it up. They're about, the Sixers are about to move, they're trying to move their stadium from South
Starting point is 01:01:21 Philly into Chinatown, which a ton of people don't want them to do because it's going to destroy a bunch of businesses. It's going to ruin this whole neighborhood in Philadelphia. That's now just going to be like half parking lot, half stadium and all traffic during games and terrible. And I'm like, you guys are, you just don't know a good thing when you have it. Like you have a great franchise that's making ton of money in a, in a good city and an awesome sports complex setup. And you're just going to blow it up to like go ruin some neighborhood a mile and a half up the road. It's totally nuts to me. And, uh, yeah, I've had it with Philadelphia sports fans, which is just, you know, how, but just be grateful. Just like have some gratitude for how good you have it.
Starting point is 01:02:04 Maybe it's because you're speaking my language here. As somebody who grew up in Pittsburgh, as a Pittsburgh sports fan, hating on Philly sports, it comes so easy to me. And they make it so easy to do. But maybe the best counter-argument that you have to my grievance is Philadelphia sports know how to lose. And if you can know how to lose, you can know how to win. Because I do think there's something about that irrationally, like we were talking about earlier. I do believe that there's something about the energy that those
Starting point is 01:02:38 sports fans create in their city and the expectations they put on their athletes and the way they criticize them and they don't support them and they expect the worst things to happen that creates losing atmospheres and i think their teams fail specifically like in part because of their sports fans great place to end just and if you're a flyers fan let me know let me know what you use to drink your coffee out of in the morning because as a pittsburgh sports, I've got a lot of cups. That is so cringy and corny. I can't believe you just said that. Oh my God. I can't wait to read the emails about this, the grieving segment. All right, we got to get out of here. Ari, a blast as always. Take care. Peace.
Starting point is 01:03:27 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,
Starting point is 01:03:36 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.
Starting point is 01:03:48 If you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. We'll be right back. 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.
Starting point is 01:04:56 Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.

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