Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Our Team Retreat, Kamala Harris' first interview, and reader questions answered.

Episode Date: September 1, 2024

On today's episode, Isaac and Ari discuss our recent team retreat in central Oregon, including some fun (very late) nights, beautiful views, and discussions on the growth and future of Tangle. They also talked about Kamala Harris' first interview, an insightful post by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and answer a bunch of reader questions. And as always, the Airing of Grievances.You can watch the entire Tangle Live event at City Winery NYC on our YouTube Channel!Check out Episode 6 of our podcast series, The Undecideds. Please give us a 5-star rating and leave a comment!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Help share Tangle.I'm a firm believer that our politics would be a little bit better if everyone were reading balanced news that allows room for debate, disagreement, and multiple perspectives. If you can take 15 seconds to share Tangle with a few friends I'd really appreciate it. Email Tangle to a friend here, share Tangle on X/Twitter here, or share Tangle on Facebook here.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.

From Searchlight Pictures comes A Real Pain, one of the most moving and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th.

Got a mortgage? Chances are you're thinking about your payments right now. Need help? Ask your bank about relief measures that may be available to you. Learn more at Canada.ca slash it pays to know. A message from the Government of Canada. 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+. Coming up, AOC says something really, really smart. We talk about the Tangle retreat and Kamala Harris's first interview. And then we do a reader mailbag for

most of the episode, answering your questions from our listeners and readers across the country. Hope you guys enjoy. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and I'm here with Tangle Managing Editor, Ari Weitzman, fresh off a week of debauchery and not a lot of sleep in Central Oregon together with the Tangle team. Ari, how are you feeling, man? I still feel like I'm recovering. I was going to say, I kind of object to the word fresh being used at all.

I do not feel very fresh still. I feel stale. I feel like when, you know, we were younger men, we could spend several days with sub five hours sleep and then have one good night of 12 and be good to go. I think this whole week I've been getting like 11, 10, 9. And I'm still like, I feel like I'm just back to my old self this morning. It's tough. Yeah. I finally unpacked my bag this morning after getting home five days ago. So I think that basically, yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at now. Um, we're gonna, we're gonna do something a little different today.

We're going to do a, a reader listener mailbag edition, which is what we have coming out in the Friday edition of the newsletter. And we thought it'd be fun to kind of do a, a podcast version of it and chop it up a bit. So, you know, for, for those of you who don't know, we love involving our listeners and our readers in the podcast and the show and in the newsletter and on our YouTube channel as well. So if you ever have questions that you want answered or you are curious about something as it relates to, you know, our team, the Tangle team or our work or the business or whatever, you can write to us by just writing

to staff at readtangle.com and somebody will see that email hopefully. And, uh, you know, if you put in the subject line reader or listener question or something that, that usually catches our eyes and we try and address a lot of them. We have a huge bank of these reader and listener questions. You know, we do one every day in the podcast and the newsletter, but every now and then we get really caught up and try and do a bunch in one edition and one podcast, one newsletter, a listener reader mailbag edition. And that's what we're doing today. So we're going to get into that before we do. And Ari and I try and tackle a bunch of these very interesting, sometimes random slash bizarre questions that we get. I do want to talk briefly about the Kamala Harris

interview. And then we actually got a reader question from Ari's dad about our retreat in central Oregon. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that since Ari and I are both still apparently hurting from it. But the news of the day, we're recording this on Friday morning, which is a little atypical for us. We typically do this on Thursday afternoon. But the big news of the day is that Kamala Harris finally sat down for her first interview last night on CNN. And she did something interesting, which I was not expecting, which is that she took the interview with Tim Walls by her side, kind of a co-appearance between the two of them, which she got some criticism for that I thought was kind of silly. I mean, I saw a bunch of stuff on Twitter and whatever else, just how, you know, the first woman who might be elected president does her first interview as the nominee. And she chooses

the optics of having her male running mate sitting next to her, which like I get, I get the point. I know the, I understand the angle people are trying to take on that. But I think it's kind of stupid. Tim Walls is not very known to the American public. They picked him obviously because they think Americans are going to like him. Americans are going to like him. So it seems totally reasonable and smart to bring him along for her first nationally televised interview. I don't know if you have any thoughts or reactions to that kind of attack line, but it just seems a little bit dumb to me. Yeah, I think I've got something on either side to add. First, I think there's a little bit more to the critique too,

side to add. First, I think there's a little bit more to the critique too, which is that we know that she's been getting criticized since she became the nominee for not taking any interviews and not coming out with clear policy positions. So it's something people have been asking for, for a couple weeks since the beginning of her campaign, you know, which has been about a month. But the fact that she would come out with her first interview, not doing a long hour long sit down one-on-one with somebody did seem to play into that narrative of this is more softball politicizing campaigning rather than introducing your policies to the public. So I think that's maybe a stronger argument than the argument about this is bad optics. If you're trying to be the first woman president,

stand on your own two feet, which I also get. But I do think that's a little bit more, you know, grandstandy. The counter to that, which I think is pretty salient, is that this is sort of the time in the campaign when you do a sit-down interview with your running mate. It's just that this is an unusual campaign. It's not very common. It's not something we can remember ever happening in our lifetimes, at least, that a nominee will be replaced at the top of the ticket or be decided on this late in the campaign. So the last several presidential candidates have had their sit-down interviews with their running mate late August. That's pretty standard. You can go back and check. Trump and Pence did it. Obama and Biden did it. Romney and

Paul did it. It's not really out of the ordinary. The only thing that's out of the ordinary is that we just haven't had that long tail of getting to know Harris as a presidential candidate before here. So sure, I think it's fair to have that complaint, but I also think it's fair to dismiss it. And it sort of washes out to me. And it's only going to be salient if she doesn't have further one-on-one interviews, which I think she will. I think that's going to happen, but you know, it's a, it's like a good point, but also don't really care. Don't think it matters. I don't think most people care. Yeah. Yeah. I also am skeptical that most people care. Well, the last time we had a Sunday podcast and we, we didn't do one last week because, uh,

alcohol, I guess, which we'll talk about. We tried, yeah. We were planning to, but we were a little banged up on Friday and Saturday and Sunday morning. The last time we were here, I think, we talked about what questions we would ask if we were doing this interview, and then we exchanged some ideas for how we might answer them if they were, you know, if we were, if we were Kamala Harris really

quickly, I just want to go through, I think we each had three questions and, uh, I'd love to just like follow up briefly and say whether the question got asked or not. And if so, um, you know, how, how she answered it, we could summarize that really quick. And I watched the interview, so I'm happy to talk a little bit about kind of how I thought it went, but just really quickly, I'll do my three. And then Ari, um, if you want to tell me your three, I'd be interested to hear. I'm struggling a little bit to remember what yours were, but I remember we had a couple that were kind of similar. So her questions, the questions that I listed that I wanted to hear asked were, you endorsed a ban on fracking and then you walked your position back a year later.

You pledged to decriminalize border crossings in 2020, but you recently said you believed unauthorized migrants crossing the border illegal. You supported Medicare for all. Now you don't tell voters where you land on these issues and why your views keep changing. Donabash did ask these questions. She she asked a version of this. She focused it almost entirely on fracking, which makes sense, Pennsylvania. And she just said, you know, your views have changed, whatever. And Harris had a different answer than the one that we proposed. You know, I said, my answer would be I served in the White House for four years. And like, I had a reality check about,

you know, what it takes, etc, etc. She basically just said, my view changed on this in 2020, She basically just said, my view changed on this in 2020, not in 2024. I've held the same view since 2020. She offered zero explanation for why her perspective changed between 2019 and 2020. And then she said, basically, my values have not changed, but my view did, which is a cute line. I get it. But she didn't actually explain why her perspective changed at all. So she was just like, I still believe there's a climate crisis, but,

you know, I don't believe that we need to ban fracking to address it. So I thought that was kind of interesting. It was nice to see the question get asked. And I guess, you know, Harris offered some kind of response. The other question I had was whether what the biggest difference between President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris governing will be. And this question did not get asked. I really wish someone would ask this question. But Donabash did ask, why did you not get this done in the three and a half years you were in office? Why did you not get these things done that you're listing? Which I thought was a good version of this question.

And I thought Kamala Harris actually gave her the right answer and a good answer, which is we inherited a crisis, which I think is pretty much true. good answer, which is we inherited a crisis, which I think is pretty much true. Like in 2021, when Biden took over, you know, we had just experienced an incredible economic disruption. We were in the midst of COVID still. Life was not normal. And they didn't, you know, they didn't cause that. They inherited that. So she basically did the we were playing clean up for the first four years. And now we're going to really get to work line, which I think is fine. And then, of course, my last question was, where do you agree with Donald Trump on major policy issues?

Which, unsurprisingly, was not a question that was asked because that's not really in the interest of CNN to highlight the ways that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump agree. And is maybe a kitschy, you know, gimmicky question. So that one was not brought up in any way, shape or form. And I think just to answer the sort of implied second question of how does that compare to the way that we answered it? So I was doing the like put on the Kamala Harris cap thing to answer some of those questions. And I remember we were discussing fracking, and that's the one that was most directly compared. And I think the thing that continues to surprise me is that there's this assumption that if you

come out staunchly pro-fracking, or at least saying fracking should be available, that it's going to play well in Pennsylvania. Because polling is pretty split on fracking in Pennsylvania. I just pulled up a YouGov poll from 2020 that polled people from each state, their opinion on fracking. In Pennsylvania, it's a dead even. It was 41-41, and then the remainder were unsure. So it's kind of odd to me that there's this continual play to the middle here. I think something that, you know, it's a dynamic we've talked about before is that Democrats are going, well, anybody, Democrats, Republicans, either party will run to the fringes in the primary, then run to the center of the general election and hope that they can keep the extremes along the way. And I think

we're seeing that happen for sure right now with both candidates and for sure with Harris in this interview. And I just don't know that running to the middle by saying my values haven't changed, running to the middle by saying my values haven't changed, fracking should be available, is the answer that's going to keep the base while winning moderates and PA. I do think that the answer that I gave, maybe obviously since it was my choice to give it, but the answer that I gave would have played better, which was that we don't get to a green energy future without some natural gas and fracking provides a domestic source for it. So we should do it while trying to transition off. I feel like that's a better answer rather than, no, I never changed my mind. Actually, my values have been the same. Don't look at the receipts,

which is the way it felt like that kind of felt like a gaffe. of the receipts, which is the way it felt like that kind of felt like a gaffe. Yeah. I, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it hits gaffe territory for me, but I sort of put it in a similar category where I was just kind of like cringing when it happened, like, Oh God, I can't believe this is what they're doing. Um, but yeah. All right. Really quick. Let's hear, refresh my memory on what your, your three questions were. Yeah, you got it. So my first question was kind of a subset of your first question, which was where do you stand on Medicare for all? Like generally, the second question was, what would you differently, what would you do differently in your position of addressing root causes of illegal immigration

than what you've done over the past four years? Which I think was kind of the same answer of like, you know, I've been doing this, actually. It's my values are unchanged here. And the last question was, what makes you a better candidate for president now than Senator Kamala Harris, who dropped out of the 2020 primary early? Which is one of those questions that, you know, maybe it's similarly gimmicky and kitschy. And we didn't hear that asked and we probably wouldn't have expected to hear it. But we covered some of that ground on the first question. But I think the second question about immigration sounded like the

same answer. But I don't know if you heard anything different. Yeah, I mean, so the Medicare for all thing did not get asked. I think the last question did not get asked. The immigration stuff got brought up. The way the question was posed to her was you were appointed to this position and then your administration oversaw the largest number of migrant encounters in U.S. history, like what happened basically? And she did kind of what I talked about her doing, which was the defense that I saw. I think it was Senator Coons, I can't remember exactly who, or maybe Chris Murphy, Senator Chris Murphy had levied this defense for her on Twitter, which was that she was assigned

this very specific region of the world, which was like, you know, Central America and Northern Southern America, Northern South America. And she used a portion of that answer. I mean, she basically said, these are the things that I was assigned to do. And we actually made some progress in these ways, X, Y, and Z. So the question wasn't the same, but we kind of nailed the answer on how she was going to respond to questions about the border. Uh, so I thought that was kind of interesting and, you know, overall, I mean, we're, we'll see when we cover this, we have a labor day on Monday. So we have no newsletter Monday and you know, who knows what's going to happen in the next three or four days. So this might be the topic for the Tuesday

newsletter. I'm not entirely sure yet, but I will talk more about it if it is in the newsletter. I would just say, I think, you know, Donna Bash actually, I thought did a pretty solid job. Um, I don't think she was, you know, great. I think she was fine. I thought Kamala did very OK. I gave her a C minus in my post about it on Twitter. Walls, C plus. I mean, he was, you know, I thought a little bit more clear with his answers and came off a bit more approachable and less scripted than Harris did, which is one of his strengths as a politician. his strengths as a politician. The interview was fine, not a disaster. She didn't do great. It's not going to change anyone's minds, which brought me back to the newsletter we wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. And I'll give some kudos to you, Ari, because I'd written this kind of take about what's going to happen when she comes out and does this first interview. And I said, you know, whenever she does take a tough interview

and she's going to do it soon, she's going to be challenged on her record. She'll be asked about her flip flops, her role on the border as vice president, the Biden administration's record, and what she really believes now. All of those things were true. All of those things got asked. And then I said, one of three things will happen. But initially I had this written. I said, one of two things will happen in a draft of this had this written, I said, one of two things will happen in a draft of this newsletter, which was she's going to step on a few rakes and remind us why she struggled so much in the 2020 primary. And then number two, she'll show that she's the refreshing or she'll show that she's the refreshing and engaging candidate,

give us something new. And the enthusiasm for her will go into overdrive. And when we were editing the newsletter, Ari said, I actually don't think either of these are that likely. I think the most likely is a third scenario, which she added to the newsletter, which was this. She'll have some gaffes, some great moments. Each side will cherry pick those parts and the race will not actually change that much, which, you know, it's only been 12 hours since his interview came out, but I think is basically the reality that we're living in now. I'm watching the reactions from conservative and liberal media, from people online, from the way the pundits are talking about it. And basically everybody's just

cherry picking certain moments that they think make her look really good or bad and running with those. And I'm not entirely sure this is going to move the needle in any real meaningful way. entirely sure this is going to move the needle in any real meaningful way. Yeah, that's why we're a team. Thanks. I think it could have easily been me writing the first draft and you reading it and thinking, you know what, actually, if I'm thinking about it, this is what's going to happen. I think that's a thought anybody at Tangle would have had just kind of random who's doing the initial drafting and who's doing the second order thinking. So that was me that day. But, you know, I think that made the cut for a reason, which was that you read the thought and you're like, oh, yeah, I think that's true. And,

you know, that's just us each playing our role there. And good, good job. Good process. Yeah, for sure. But before we get into some of the reader mailbag questions, which I want to smash through, I actually really quickly want to talk about one other thing, which is this post from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Instagram that caught my eye this morning that I think is pretty fascinating. And I actually did not have this in our show notes to discuss, but as I was just pulling up the old newsletter there, I saw it open in my tab on my web browser, and it reminded me that I did actually want to discuss this.

AOC is somebody who I have criticized a lot on this podcast, and this is why I'm bringing this up is because I think she just posted and said one of the smartest things I've seen a politician on the left say in a really long time. And so I want to give her some kudos for it since I'm typically very critical of her. She put this on her Instagram story, I think. And she was basically responding to a follower of hers who said, why do leftists attack you despite multiple Palestinian rights groups ranking you as one of Congress's best on this issue? And she responded to the question in three different ways. She literally listed them one, two, three. And the first one, she just said, you know,

I'm an elected U.S. official. That's a fact. Obviously, people, if they're opposed to something that I'm doing or saying, they're going to criticize me. So I signed up for this. Number two, she said, there's a lot of disinformation going around. So that's one of the reasons I'm being attacked by leftists on this issue. And she gave this example that she was in Chicago for the DNC and a protester broke into a restaurant where she was eating and demanded to know when she was going to call what was happening in Gaza a genocide. This is despite the fact that she's done so many times, and she actually did so even in a very high profile House floor speech that was covered all over the media. I remember this. So

she was like, disinformation is basically hurting movements from the inside and discredits them from the outside. So people are getting bad information like this protester who thinks I've never done that when I have. But then at the end, she said something that was really, really profound, I think, and very true and accurate and something not enough people on the left say. And I'm just going to quote, especially on the left. Yeah. And this is true of political movements on the right. I want to be clear. This is not just apply to lefties, but this is just like generally a very good insight into political movements. She said, quote, you can't build power by recreating the punitive,

angry, expulsion-focused cultures that we seek to replace. It will require new skills from us. It is not enough to be right. We need to be right and win. I believe that we have a moral obligation to be effective in addition to having a just stance. Otherwise, who are we doing this for? We must accomplish, build, strengthen, repair, grow, win, survive. And that is hard, hard, hard work. And we are going to disagree on the way. If we can't learn to handle that in good faith, we will stay small. And we owe the people we are fighting for way more than that. This is like, I mean, something that I never hear from people in kind of leftist movements or people in the sort of Trump right movement. I think the Trump right movement has done a much better job expanding their impact and reach largely because of Donald Trump.

he's led the party and led that faction in such a kind of monumental historic way that they've grown their numbers where they now outrank the establishment, right? But on the left, people don't talk like this ever. And I just like, this is just on the money, in my opinion, it's, it's 100% true, there aren't enough people on the left to believe it. And I don't know if this is, you know, a product of her real world experience now being in Congress, if it's, you know, her idealism about the movement changing after experiencing what it's like to affect change. But yeah, I just like it really struck me as a really smart insight into political movements, especially the part about not being able to build power by recreating punitive, angry, expulsion-focused cultures. And also that they have a moral obligation to be effective in addition to having a just stance. So being right on an issue is not enough.

You also have to be effective in kind of acting on that issue. So I don't know, it caught my eye and felt like something worth highlighting. I think it's somewhat, well, I think two points, a small one and a big one. The small point is that I think it's a clever bit of phrasing to say expulsion-focused cultures instead of saying cancer culture, because that is a buzzy term that's going to make people and their feelings and then turn off their brains from listening. But you know exactly what she means by expulsion focused culture, I think, which is just that if you are somebody who's trying to be on the same side as somebody in a left circle, a left leaning

circle or far left circle, If you put a toe out of bounds, or if you're not fully on the team about something, you will be doubt. And that's sort of one of the, if not the most toxic things about that culture and something that I think she's right to say is hurting that movement. And I think her phrasing is helping. The second thing, which I think is a broader point, is that when you think about what AOC has had to, what her life has been like since she's been in Congress, I would argue that she's been the biggest target of hate of any elected official over the last six years. I'm including Trump, but I think definitely in Congress, because you think a leftist politician who is visible is going to be absolutely a target for everybody on the right, and she has been. But also, since she's a left-leaning politician, because of that, you're either fully on her side or you're not. She's the target of a lot of hate from the left,

too, even from people that are in her caucus, as she highlighted in that second bullet about being accosted by somebody for whether or not she called what's happening in Gaza a genocide. And that's a person she agrees with who's going out of their way to accost her when she's at dinner. So that's what her life's been like. So I think whether or not you're on her side with her issues, I think you kind of have to tip the cap to her durability and resilience in Congress because she's putting up with a lot and she keeps going out there and doing her job. And, you know, again, I know that you've criticized her a lot. We've had some criticism to spare for her in the pages of the newsletter, but I think it's a reminder that she's been in the trenches and she keeps showing up. And I think that's something to, uh, to admire. Yeah, definitely. I, and politicians are allowed to evolve. Like I, i you know i'm not saying her positions or you know this is doesn't strike me as some kind of meaningful evolution that changes

a lot of my opinions about her but i think this is sort of a maybe a canary in the coal mine on how she's starting to feel about some of the people who are her peers in the leftist leftist movements and you know she's seeing the shortcomings of those, which I find pretty interesting. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. Are you sure you parked over here? Do you see it anywhere? I think it's back this way. Come on.

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to help you manage your home finances and clear your head, visit Canada.ca slash ItPaysToKnow. A message from the Government of Canada. From Searchlight Pictures comes A Real Pain, one of the most moving and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin. A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother.

The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th. All right, without further ado, we should definitely get into this mailbag edition. I have a couple of questions I've picked from the bag that I really want to

cover. But relevantly, I think the first one actually comes from a familiar name in the Tangle family, which is Rich from Plum, Pennsylvania, who is Richard Weitzman, who is Ari Weitzman's father, who wrote in to say, since we are sort of a community, very sweet. Can you fill us in on what goes on when you have a staff retreat? I think that readers would be interested since you share other aspects of the newsletter's operations. This is a kind of a very sly way of a father finding out what his son is doing. Yeah. Yeah. I did. I heard, well, I heard you talk to your mom. I think it was her birthday, right? Yeah. Yeah. It was my mom's birthday over that weekend. Yeah. So narrow casting Ari's parents. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so a great question. So one that I think is worth, uh,

worth answering. I'd be very curious to hear some Ari's reflections on the weekend too. I'll try and be quick. I mean, first of all, John and I were at the DNC together for the first few days. So part of the reason that I feel just completely whipped even now a week later is that we came from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at the DNC. I left Thursday morning. John came Friday morning. He stayed for Kamala's speech right into a team retreat in Oregon. So Magdalena Bikova, who runs our social media stuff and is our ad ops person, lives in Oregon. I'm not going to say where without her consent, but she lives in Central Oregon.

It is beautiful in Central Oregon. And we went and had a team retreat out there because it's beautiful in Central Oregon. I have kind of a philosophy, I would say, about this sort of team building stuff, which is born out of one of my experiences in life playing Ultimate Frisbee and playing for really good coaches and other team sports. But one of my favorite coaches ever is Bren Van Hoovland, also known as BVH in the Ultimate Frisbee world. And BVH always had this thing that he said to us, which is the most rewarding thing in life is doing really hard stuff with people that you love.

And I love that line. I think it's 100% true as it applies to sports. And what we were doing, you know, winning a world championship in Ultimate Frisbee is really hard. And doing that with people you love is unbelievably special. So the hard thing in this instance is building a really successful, sustainable media company, and especially covering politics, not losing your mind while you do it. So doing that with people you love, in my opinion, is really important. But

I think the love is cultivated. So as someone, you know, who's the boss, leader of the company, whatever, I index extremely high on having fun and building relationships with each other. And so on our last retreat, we went to central Oregon and we just hung out. I mean, really, we had one actual work meeting the entire time. That wasn't the plan. I'd planned for like four or five, but we got there and, you know, there's hikes to go on. There's bars to see. There's fancy restaurants to have dinner at. There was so much stuff to do. And we just leaned into hanging out. And, you know, Magdalena was there, her, her husband, Chad, who like all time, dude, uh, one of my new favorite people ever, he was there.

She has two beautiful children, including a young son who is rambunctious and energetic and just ran us. He's a tornado. Yeah. In the best way, but like the quintessential little boy just like long hair loves to take his clothes off and get naked and is looking for trouble just constantly if i can interject quickly the first time that i met magdalena's son showing up at her house he came screaming from the other room saying hi what's your's your name? And came up to me and gave me a big hug wearing no clothing and just grabbed my leg and was like, come on, come on. And then we were, you know, just hanging out. Yeah. He's a, he's awesome. Just like wants to race, wants to climb stuff, wants to wrestle. He was just like, yeah. So we did a lot of that. We did

a lot of hanging out. I will concede for the younger folks listening to this. Don't drink, you know, alcohol is bad and a casual drink here and there is good. Binge drinking is terrible for you. I'm so glad I am past the days of, you know, college when I myself used to binge drink like an idiot with other college kids. But we did stay up late. I mean, I, I saw four 35 AM on several nights that we were in Ben together and we weren't doing anything too crazy. We were just, you know, our Airbnb had a pool table. We're playing pool.

We're, you know, just like, yeah, sure. What's one more little whiskey or another beer and talking about life and getting to know each other. And it turned out everybody on the team's extremely competitive, which, um, I guess wasn't a surprise to me, but was like really fun to see, uh, which was cool. It was nice to see that side of John also. Yeah. John, uh, our, our handy podcasts and YouTube producer. I mean, I've seen this side of him mostly because we've gotten some one-on-one time together, but John and I are, we relate. Uh, I am, I'm known, I would say in certain circles is having a mouth. I'm a little bit of a shit talker. You might say, uh, and John is, as Ari put it, he is yappy. You put a couple of drinks in

John and put him on a pool table and his New Jersey side comes out really quick. There was a hilarious moment that I was recounting to Phoebe where John and Ari were arguing over a rule in pool and Ari was talking and John started talking over him and Ari said, excuse me, I'm not done talking yet. I don't like being interrupted. And John said, where are you from? Where are you from? That you lived your whole life without ever having to get interrupted. I was just sitting in the corner laughing so hard. And we were just, you know, arguing over some obscure rule and pool about like when the ball can touch what ball I'm not a big pool player, but John and Ari both had very different ideas about how pool

was meant to be played. So there was a lot of that. I would say that occupied a good bit of the weekend. What else? Anything else I'm missing? Oh, will is a young still will. He had like energy. Will's the youngest one on the team. He's 25 or 26. He had a level of energy that Magdalena, John and Ari and I, I don't think physically we're capable of matching. I woke up Saturday morning after our first night there, we stayed up till like 4am and I kind of came out of my room at 9am feeling like I was all of 33 years old and was not capable of handling this anymore. And I opened the door to my bedroom, which is right next to the kitchen and the Airbnb.

And as my door opens, I just see Will drop a French press of coffee into the sink and just shatter the glass of the French press and just put his hands on the counter and take a huge deep breath and look down at his feet like so crushed about what he had just done. That was how our Saturday morning started, which was really funny.

But for the most part, he kind of, he had a level of energy, I think, that was in a different stratosphere than the rest of us. He's got great teammate energy because Will also went out and like got breakfast sandwiches for everybody on Saturday. Just no problem. He went ahead like ahead of time, got a Planet Fitness trial membership that had guest passes so he could go to the gym and bring us and then canceled it afterwards, which is an elite move. And he also, I remember waking up on Sunday morning, kind of early and feeling good. And I

was like, I'm not questioning this. I'm going to run with it. And Will was up too. And I was like, dude, let's clean the house. And he's like, on it i'll do up you do down and we just like got a lot of it done ahead of time so when it was time to move out most of that was already taken care of which um you know i really appreciate that kind of teammate energy i wouldn't have done that by myself but with somebody else there for sure yeah um yeah a hundred percent all great people and i felt like we left the weekend extremely well bonded. We did have one work meeting where we talked about where Tangle was. To be fair, it was about a five hour meeting. So it was like a mega meeting. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it was a mega meeting where Tangle is, some of our growth projections, kind of set the table for some conversations later. And then we were in the middle of this long meeting. I don't think it was quite five hours,

maybe two and a half or three. It was at least four. I checked my watch. And while we were sitting there talking and then Magdalena just like, briefly want to interject, we are losing daylight right now. So if we want to go see a waterfall and hike

and go to dinner, we should wrap this meeting up. And I was like, okay, message received from the people. Uh, so we, we killed the meeting and got back to having fun, but overall it was an awesome weekend. And I guess the very, very short answer to, uh, rich from plum Pennsylvania is that these retreats are typically just us hanging out and trying to find ways to have fun. Uh, Ari, you've got the next one. Okay. And briefly to assuage some of your subtextual concerns, Rich, the drinking, I think, is still pretty responsible, even if it does go late in the night, like we weren't getting really sick or anything. I think it was like a whiskey every hour and a half or two. Didn't feel too bad. We were drinking like full, full grown

adults. That's for sure. The responsible way into the evening. drug prices piece. So this is as much of a change in tempo, I think, as I can possibly do. Let's get into some really specific policy feedback on a piece that we published a week and a half ago. So reader, take a second or listener, take a second and recover from the whiplash and then we'll get into it. So we got this question or this piece of feedback from a number of people, but I think the person who posed the question really well is a reader named Gina, who asked, quote, as I have traveled and visited family in Europe, specifically the Netherlands and Italy, as well as Canada, I am in both shock and awe at their low drug costs. Traveling through Germany last year, a local shared that they only pay five euros for every prescription drug. Other countries have much lower drug costs than the

United States. Why do the lower costs those countries pay not impact research and development? How does every other country get such low drug costs? Finally, is the United States funding research and development for the rest of the world with our higher costs? Unquote. And that is from Gina. And I will say that yes, the answer is yes to Gina. The United States is, I think in my opinion, because this is a demonstrable fact, but it is something that you'll see a lot of writing about and quoted some of those writers in this Friday edition mailbag answer. But in my opinion and the opinion of others, yes, the United States is funding low drug prices for other countries. A more specific way of putting that is that the United States is funding research into drugs that then everybody gets to enjoy, and Europe is paying less, other countries are paying less, we're paying more. This isn't a

rule that is hard and true for every company. Obviously, there are a lot of good European drug companies like BioNTech is a German company, they developed one of the COVID vaccines. So it's not like European drug companies don't exist. It's not like they're innovating. But it is something that you'll see a lot of ink spilled over. And I'll give you some sources that are making the same argument. You can find an article from The Hill or that's published in The Hill about it, one in National Review, an explainer in Vox, which are two pretty opposite sources on the political spectrum. And speaking of opposite sources on the political spectrum,

there is both a PBS article about this, as well as a piece from the Tennessee Star that says why Donald Trump is right about this. So when PBS and Donald Trump agree about something, that's probably a sign that there's something real there. I also wanted to address a second piece of feedback we got to this piece pretty commonly, which was that a lot of the drugs that were negotiated for lower prices for Medicare were about to have their patents expire and be subject to competition from generics. have their patents expire and be subject to competition from generics. So these drug prices are going to go into effect in 2026. It just so happens that that's about the same time that generics will be able to start to compete with these drugs, which kind of means that these drug companies got a win here because they scored contracts while their prices were high

before they were going to be lowered. before they were going to be lowered, so they were going to be lowered anyway. And then they locked in to a deal before their competitors could get their foot in the door. All the while, they're loudly crying foul about this. They're saying this is going to hurt R&D. This is going to cause unintended consequences. They sued the government and said this was unconstitutional in court cases that they're losing and seem like they're doomed to lose. And that, you know, after reading feedback from readers and looking into the issue more, which healthcare is super complicated. So it's really tough to get this all right on the first

swing. And I think we did better than most publications about it. But something that an impression that I was left with after like thinking about this issue for a couple of days is that they kind of took us for a ride here on the way that we covered this. I think the, if I were to try to have us rewrite this piece again, it would include this line from a reader named Scott who wrote in talking about unintended consequences with drug prices. And he wrote, quote, all this to say, I don't believe the pharma companies are going to be losing money on the new lower drug prices, but we'll figure out some elaborate shell game by which the consumer may pay less, but may having to start paying for medication they've been getting for free or at a discount and may be incentivized to switch to an alternative medication or treatment that ends up costing Medicare, parentheses, the federal

government more. It's a complicated game. Pharmacy is very good at not losing. As with many well intentioned governmental policies, what seems like a win isn't always as straightforward as it appears, unquote. Thank you for that, Scott. Thank you for the question, Gina. I think these are all really good points. And if we cover Medicare drug pricing again, you can expect to see them mainstreamed in the newsletter. Love that. The next one I want to get to here is from a reader, an anonymous reader. And this is funny. It's a town in Texas I've never heard of. I'm pretty sure it's Cibolo. It's C-I-B-O-L-O, which I don't know how to spell, or I don't know how to pronounce,

but I'm presuming Cibolo, Texas. Cibolo, almost certainly, because it makes me think of like a bolo tie. But the anonymous reader from Cibolo, Texas said, how much can we depend on election integrity this year? I appreciate the question. Also, it like makes my blood boil a little bit because of just what's happened in the last five years and how much we've had to deal, how much I personally have had to deal with this and how much we as a country have had to deal with it. You can depend on it, is what I'll say, first of all. Second, for anybody who's relatively new to the podcast or new to Tangle or has not been following

my work for a long time, I'll just say I was on the front lines of reporting election fraud claims in 2020. We got a lot of attention at Tangle and I got a lot of personal attention, did a bunch of interviews and went on different TV shows and radio shows and all this stuff because I was tracking election fraud claims in real time and trying to investigate them. And I was doing this with an open mind because voter fraud happens, election fraud happens. And I thought that the mainstream media in a lot of ways is being too dismissive of the claims without actually trying to address them or look into them. And all that's to say, I spent an incredible amount of like personal time, sweat equity into trying to learn about the claims that were being made, figure out whether they were legitimate or not, explain them, debunk them, break them down, whatever it was.

And we're sitting here now four years later, and there is, I want to be really clear here, there is zero, no legitimate evidence that the election in 2020 was fraudulent, was stolen, was thrown to one side based on election fraud or whatever. There are some stories, some narratives about 2020 that I think are much more legit. They weren't the stories we heard four years ago. Like, for instance, one might argue that the way the media covered the Hunter Biden story impacted the 2020 election, because in the weeks leading up to the election, a lot of the mainstream media was telling voters that the Hunter Biden laptop story was, you know, Russian disinformation or whatever. There are flaws in that argument that are separate from the flaws in the election fraud argument. Like, I could pretty strongly make the case that we're sitting here four years later and we've learned a lot more about the Hunter Biden laptop story. And I don't think it would have changed that many voters' minds. So I don't

think it impacted the outcome of the 2020 election or would have, even if it was covered differently. But regardless, the real thing here is that the initial claim about 2020 was that there were voting machines from Dominion voting systems that were flipping votes or inaccurately reporting them. voting machines from Dominion voting systems that were flipping votes or inaccurately reporting them. That claim has been debunked. It's a defamatory claim that's cost people who made that claim millions of dollars and jobs for promoting it. We had claims that dead people were voting. That was a lie. We had Rudy Giuliani's claims about election fraud in Georgia that were a defamatory lie. We had the 2000 Mules documentary from Dinesh D'Souza, which I did a huge monster piece on. And I look back on that piece now two years later with much pride because

basically everything I said in it was true. And that has turned into just total bunk. 2000 Mules is not based on a real thing. There was not mass ballot stuffing. Dinesh D'Souza has never brought forward any evidence to support the obscure, bizarre, broad claims that often contradicted themselves that he made in that documentary. We had claims of widespread illegal immigrant voting, which is something that we're still seeing a lot today, in part thanks to Elon Musk, who keeps saying this is happening at a massive scale, that's going to change the election. This stuff gets investigated and it has not been proven. Yes, illegal immigrants vote. I'm not saying that they don't. That definitely happens. But you have to show that it's a kind of voter fraud that's happening at a scale that brings it into the election fraud realm, which is when it's sort of

organized and done the way that's intended to change the outcome of election. And there's no proof of that. Elon has not proved that. And many change the outcome of election. And there's no proof of that. Elon has not proved that. And many of the people on the right who are amplifying those claims have not proven it. We did a whole story about that recently. Now, a lot of people are claiming that, you know, the election was rigged because of the Hunter Biden stuff. We keep going back to that, the social media thing. And like I said, there's some truth to that argument in some ways, but it's a much different argument from what we got in 2020. It is not true that judges threw these cases out purely on standing.

Many got hurt on the merits and were tossed. In Texas, we have Attorney General Paxton, who has spent millions of dollars trying to prosecute election fraud claims over the last four years. He's gotten a grand total of four claims prosecuted. He's still looking. In Arizona, we had rumors about what happened in Maricopa County. We're going to flip the election. They lasted for several years, and then we got confirmation they were all bunk. I really can't emphasize this enough. The people who are telling you that the 2020 election was stolen and are selling documentaries about it or paywalled articles

about it or merchandise about it. They are grifting. They are doing this because they can make a ton of money. They can ask people for donations to investigate the claims and they can sell content about the claims for money. Please do not give them your money. They are not legitimate allegations. There are some of them that are based on half-truths or whatever. But on the whole, the 2020 election was relatively secure. There are things we can do much better with our elections. I support paper ballots. I support all kinds of things, election reforms that would make them more secure. But at this point, I'm just annoyed. I've covered this so many times. We have links to it in today's newsletter or in Friday's newsletter

if you want to go check them out. The election, as far as I can tell, will be fine this year. I will track claims like I did in 2024 and try and keep an eye on some of the allegations that I know are going to pop up. If you have questions about a claim, please go to our newsletter that got

published on Friday and read some of the articles I linked to about election fraud claims that I've written in the past before you write in asking me about a specific allegation, because there's like a 95% chance that I've covered it. I can't believe we're still having this conversation. I can't believe we're still having this conversation. But yeah, we are. It doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. So that's my big riff on that. All right, you're up, Ari.

All right, let's just take another hard turn and get into this question from Bill from Wayne, New Jersey, who asked, quote, I think you wrote a Friday edition similar to this at least once, but given the mission statement of Tangle, if you were to put together a curriculum and or action plan to improve media literacy in this country, what would it be and how would you propose implementing it? Could be solely school or even aimed at adults, whatever you feel is most effective, unquote. So that's from Bill. And I think this is something we've talked about a bit. I don't think that we've done a long Friday edition about civics education, but it's something that I have thoughts on. And I think we can bifurcate the answer into two pieces. So this curriculum idea and then action plan idea and the first part, the curriculum.

some limitations here, which is that we have a large country. We don't have a really centralized federal core curriculum that is taught everywhere, which I think is by design. That's not something that is within the scope of this question to debate or change. Every state has its own standards on top of federal standards. Every district has its own curriculum. Schools within those districts have different choices, different classrooms of teachers make different emphases, so on and so on. So we're going to have to come up with something hypothetical that I would, you know, propose to districts singular or in aggregate, and I can make it specific and talk about where I grew up. So this is going to be a lot of narrow casting at Plum, Pennsylvania today. So we're in Plum when I was a kid in the school system. We had social studies in elementary school and a U.S. history course up before sixth

grade. And I took a civics class in seventh grade and then another U.S. history and world history and then AP history classes as electives in high school. So I don't really have too much issue with the elementary school curriculum of social studies and U.S. history. I think that's all fine. I think that's a really appropriate way to introduce students to civics in general. I think my issue is that I had civics too young. I had in seventh grade, we weren't really old enough to get into the nitty gritty about it. I remember a couple of things about my civics class. The one I remember it was taught by like this big, strong guy who was a wrestling coach, which no shit on wrestling.

I was a wrestler and I, a lot of the smartest, most intellectually curious people in my school were wrestlers, but he, uh, he, I don't think put too much of an emphasis on the nuance in civics. He, I would like kind of make fun of kids, which was funny. I remember he sort of taunted me for having a large trapper keeper. And that's one of the things I remember most from that because it was seventh grade because I'm not thinking about school. The two things I remember him teaching were one, it is essential to have a bicameral legislation. I also specifically remember him not saying why, but you just wrote that on the test. It has to be bicameral. Otherwise it fails. And, you know, I don't really know what the logic was behind it. I still kind of have to think about it. I get it in theory, but it's kind of nuanced and we definitely never got into it in seventh grade.

seventh grade civics was him saying that the only way the U.S. or the colonies that then comprised what is now the U.S., the only reason they won the War of Independence in 1776 and that era was because of divine intervention. And I did go to public school and that was one of the things that he taught. So, you know, I think we can probably put a little bit more emphasis on civics in high school. I think we should have it taught later. I think there should be hands-on excursions to like a courthouse or to a state legislature. I think there should be AP civics available more broadly. That'll help. As for an action plan, I think that this might be a little controversial. I don't think we've talked about this, you and I, Isaac, but I think that this might be a little controversial. I don't think we've talked about this, you and I, Isaac, but I think that there should be a mandatory public service for people between 18 and 22, maybe a little older, 18 to 24,

it's fine. But it doesn't have to be two years, a year, 18 months. That's, I'm good with that. We can debate specifics. 18 months. That's, I'm good with that. We can debate specifics. And importantly, mandatory national service does not mean mandatory military conscription. I think that's an option people can choose. Definitely can choose to go through the military. Can also choose to take conservation work or do afterschool tutoring and volunteering, can work on infrastructure projects. Something like that, where you're getting out in your communities or going to

Montana and planting trees or clearing scrubland or doing forest fire prevention with people from all over the country. It's a really good way to meet people who are different than you and work on a team together and really have skin in the game for the functioning of our country. And that sort of motivation gets people interested, which creates the desire to learn more, which is a virtuous cycle. And again, that might be controversial, but I do think when you look at polling, there is majority support for something similar to this. There are differences in opinion and how it should be implemented. I know that that's college age for a lot of people, but it doesn't have to be like that forever. Colleges are changing.

The amount of people who say that they value a college education is changing. And I think changing a cultural standard where we all have some effort and skin in the game out of high school and get to understand the world a little bit more before we enter college might even be better for us as we undergo that experience in a really transformational time as young adults. So I think that would be really helpful for making us invest in a specific process, which creates self-education. And I think the education should happen when we're children, but also when we're in high school and not when we're adolescents. So that's my take there. Just like not, I mean, it's not tangential,

but something that caught my ear there is the national service thing. I don't know if we've ever talked about that together. I don't think we have. Yeah. So I am big time pro. I'm like way in a national service. Uh, I, I mean, part of it comes from my experience in Israel and talking to people. I mean, I don't think people should have to, you know, conscript in the military, but I definitely saw and felt the impact that that had on society and like the common thread it created. And I think national service and a national service program in the U S would be legitimately awesome. And I would totally support that, uh, because it doesn't have to be like serving the military.

You know, there's a million different things people could do. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. Working in the trades is intense. It can be stressful and painful. Some guys use drugs and alcohol to cope. But when we ask for help, or we see someone struggling with addiction, our silence speaks volumes. See how you can help or get help at Canada.ca slash ease the burden.

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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, the next one I want to tackle, and this is one that I've gotten from a lot of different people, came from Jason, who I believe is from Lexington, Kentucky, but I actually just emailed him to confirm that.

He said, how much do you think journalism drives interest versus interest driving journalism? For example, Gaza has been piled on for months and the most extreme language has been used in covering it, genocide, Nazis, et cetera. While other much worse conflicts are virtually uncovered and met with a shoulder shrug by the public, the Economist just put out an extensive review of the Sudanese civil war and demonstrated that it is orders of magnitude worse than what is happening in Gaza. Can this coverage drive public opinion or does the public just not care? So journalism can drive public interest, but more often than not, I think it's the other way around. Journalism is driven by interest. So, you know, there's a question here, which is like, why aren't you covering the Sudanese civil

war? Like you cover Israel and Gaza when what's happening in Sudan is worse? And I hear the direction of the question, and I think it's a legitimate question. But I also think there are several good reasons why something like Israel-Gaza gets so much more space in our news and Tangle and U.S. news. Number one is Israel is one of the most important and biggest allies, the United States, especially in the Middle East. So our relationship matters a great deal. We have policy that directly impacts Israel and Israel's policy directly impacts us in a way that, you know, what Sudan does does not have the same impacts on the U.S. or Americans. U.S. readers, which is our audience that we're trying to serve, are far more interested in Israel, just straight up. or Americans, U.S. readers, which is our audience that we're trying to serve,

are far more interested in Israel, just straight up. I mean, they write in with questions about it, they follow news about it, they want to know. And then part of that is because the U.S. has loads of Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, and Palestinian citizens who, for them, this is like their number one issue. It's like abortion is to some evangelical Christians or the climate is to some leftist protesters. It is like the thing that they care about. So that makes it more important for us. The United States is directly involved in this war. We're funding it. We're supporting Israel militarily. We're at the negotiating table to get hostages home, to negotiate a ceasefire, not like some diplomat in a building overseas in Sudan,

not a small team of people like the head of the CIA and our national security advisor and our secretary of state are going to Cairo and spending weeks on end trying to negotiate a ceasefire. So this is like very, very relevant top priority for our government. And then finally, I would just say in the geopolitical space, I think the Middle East is still just a lot more important and relevant to the U.S. and our future and our, you know, policies than Eastern Africa is right now. So all this is to just say, I think there are really good tangible reasons why an issue like this gets a lot more coverage. But I hear you that, you know, we've done 40 issues on Israel, maybe we should do one on Sudan, You know, like that proportion

feels pretty right. And the fact that we've never covered the Sudanese civil war seems important and seems like a fair criticism. So it's something to think about. I would just throw out there as like a last little asterisk. And this isn't the most important thing because our team is incredibly good at research and fact checking and building out articles. But I also don't know anything about Sudan and maybe the solution is just interviewing an expert about what's happening there and kind of getting the one-on-one story and sharing that with our readers. But, you know, we also try and cover stuff that we have a good grasp of and can explain to our readers. And when it comes

to international news, that typically means covering stuff that there's a history of coverage on, you know, that we can refer back to and reference and use. And so it often gets tied to, you know, China and Ukraine and Russia and Israel and, you know and Mexico and South America and these sorts of relationships that we've covered in the past repeatedly. And this is just new territory. So maybe that's on us for not exploring it yet, but it's part of the answer too, if I'm being totally honest. So that's why I'll just wrap all that by saying, yes, I think journalists can drive interest, but I think in this instance, there is interest from readers that is forcing the issue on us and other journalists.

So that's why we're giving it the coverage we do. And I do think it's a good call out to try to interview somebody who's an expert on Sudan and get their expertise and knowledge in front of our readership. I think that's a good idea. All right. I think I have one more. So I'm going to go to what is kind of a really specific interest for me, which is niche language choices. Oh man, do I love it. choices. Oh man, do I love it. We get some version of this question. I'm not exaggerating. Every time we talk about the Democratic Party, which is kind of a lot, they're a major party, I think it's fair to say. And this question goes like this. I'm not trying to be disrespectful. However, you often refer to the Democrat Party as the Democratic Party. Democrat is a political party, while Democratic is a form

of that government. That's from Linda from Silver Springs, Maryland. Yeah, so I appreciate that this question was asked and posed very respectfully. I think a lot of the time it isn't. So thank you for that. I can answer this question pretty directly. And I have four different kind of answers. And they each get progressively, I think, more wonky. First, this is an audio format. So I have to spell something out. This is phrased in a way where the question contains capitalization, which sort of gives the game away. So capital D, Democratic Party, lowercase d, Democratic form of government. Even the way this question was posed uses that difference in capitalization. That's also true of Republican, by the way. So lowercase r

Republican does also refer to a manner of government. A capital R Republican refers to the political party. In both cases, you can tell what we're talking about based on the capitalization. And as another quick little aside, we also get comments from people saying, stop referring to the U.S. as a democracy. It's a republic. It's kind of similar. Democratic Party, Republican Party, democracy, republic. It's both, guys. Like, it's a constitutional republic, which is a form of representative democracy. Like, we can chill. This doesn't really matter. But let's keep going. My second point about Democratic Party is that I will remind that our standard editorial policy is to refer to a group based on how they refer to themselves. So if we go to the Democrat's official website,

after you close the Harris-Wallace pop-up, the first thing you see is the line, quote, we are the Democratic Party, end quote. So that's pretty unambiguous. That's the Democratic Party. That's what we'll call them. Third thing is that this is pretty standard. This isn't a choice that we specifically make. It's a choice that every outlet makes, with some exceptions. And I'll get to that at the end of this point. But here's a list of publications that uses Democratic Party. So some encyclopedias, so Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, they both do it. Publications left-leaning The Nation, left-leaning New York Times, right-leaning New York Post, right-leaning Fox News, right-leaning Washington Examiner. about they all use democratic party so if you are calling it the democrat party and you're insisting on that you're saying it sounds odd the other way that actually says more about the sources that you've been getting news through than it does about us which is which we are using a very common

convention it's it is and has been a right-leaning thing, and I'm not passing judgment on it, but that right-leaning radio hosts, going back to Rush Limbaugh, have used Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party. I don't really need to opine on the motives. It's just a thing that you can see. It's pretty observable. And that's just something that's indicative of right-leaning news sources. And that's just something that's indicative of right-leaning news sources. There's tales all over the place. It's not like the right is the only side that does that. But that's just one of them. Okay, point number four is let's just really dive and roll up our sleeves and talk about the linguistics here. Democrat is different than Republican because Republican is both a noun and an adjective.

Democrat is a noun while democratic is an adjective. So it's different. I can use a noun as a modifier in some cases, like if I'm describing a collection, like the Democrat convention, a convention of Democrats, or as a categorical characteristic, like this is a Democrat position or you're stating a Democrat value. And I personally, as I kind of said before, I wouldn't correct someone who was saying the Democrat party because they're describing who the party's composed of. But I personally would rather use the adjective form as a description of either the party or of anything else. So other usages like democratic policy positions instead of democrat positions or democratic candidates instead of democrat candidates. Both of those things sound weird to me if I say democrat positions or

democrat candidates. I think it's better if I use an adjective instead of taking a noun. And honestly, I prefer that in pretty much every case. I think when you use an adjective, you're making neutral descriptions, whereas when you take a noun to modify, you're leaning into identity-based prescriptions. So saying like that's a Democrat position is more identity-based than saying that's a Democratic position, which is more type-based and descriptive. So consider how these pairs sound and feel different from each other, taking into account what I just said. That's a womanly trait, and that's a woman trait. That's the Canadian government,

and that's the Canada government. And lastly, and this one feels pretty bad, that's a Jewish belief, and that's a Jew belief. So obviously these things are a little different, but I think that drives the point home. You can keep sending the emails about you should call it the Democrat Party, but you will from now on be ignored. And thank you for the question. All right. For those of you who are asleep now, I'll wake you back up really quick. That was riveting. I don't understand. I'm going to do a couple of really, really quick ones, and then we got to get into grievances and get out of here. One I got from Betty in Lombard, Illinois, that just came in this morning. And Betty just said straight up, who will win the election?

Great question. If I were a betting man today, right now, as we sit here, I would bet on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I think I reserve the right to change because we have two months till the election. I think it's probably going to change. But I'm a metrics guy, and I'm just looking at polling odds, you know, enthusiasm among registered voters, the donations that we see on the ground, the operation, voter registration, all the stuff that you can measure. the Harris-Walls campaign is ahead there. And then I look at all the stuff that you can't measure, like momentum and, you know, the way the campaigns are being covered and how focused they are and that kind of stuff that's much more subjective. And I think Harris has the advantage there.

I think she's going to come back down to earth because she's in the honeymoon phase right now. But that's what I would say right now. We got another question from Dave in Edmonds, Washington. Dave said, has there ever been a topic that you decided was too controversial to write up? If so, do you now regret your decision? Very proud to say no, never. There are certainly things that I get nervous covering, like abortion or trans issues or Israel, but we've never run from a story.

I hope I can say we never will. And I certainly have no regrets about anything we've decided to cover. All right. And the last question I got is from Dwight, who called himself a digital nomad. And I want to answer this because it was a weird question, which like he said, Dwight said, my question is probably ridiculous. So please take it as a funny but sincere way to try to connect with you more personally. Have you ever considered being a Christian? And is there fundamentally a difference between all the religions? Yes, this is a little bit of a funny, ridiculous question, but I totally appreciate the curveball amid all these politics questions. No, I've never considered being a Christian. Fun fact, though, my dad's side of

the family is actually very strong Quaker roots. So, so much so actually that all my brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, all that side, they still use what's called Quaker plain speech, which is a less formal, more consistent way to address people via pronouns in the old days. So they say the, thy, and thine instead of you, your, and yours. So if I'm talking to my dad, I would say, is this thine? If I'm asking if something belongs to him, or I would say, you know, did thee do thy laundry instead of did you do your laundry? which is apparently not unheard of among descendants of Quakers. My dad, though, went through a formal conversion to Judaism when he married my mom. So I didn't ever get an ilk of Quaker roots other than that language stuff. Growing up, we were raised in a

Jewish household, and I have a very deep connection to Judaism and my Jewish upbringing, both because I think it's incredible that I can trace my ancestors back 2,500 years on my mom's side. Also, because I know that 2,500 years ago, my ancestors were saying the same prayers and doing the same traditions that we still do today. And because Jews are one of the most persecuted people in the history of the world and their survival that has extended to me engenders a really strong sense of loyalty. So no, have not considered converting. The question about fundamental differences, I'll just say, yeah, there are fundamental differences in all the religions. I actually studied religious studies a bit in college. I took a bunch of classes on Hinduism and Daoism and Christianity. And I've read some books, you know, making the case for Jesus Christ as the

Messiah or giving a historical breakdown of Jesus, the person who definitely existed, by the way. And obviously, if you do that, you'll take away like Jews and Hindus believe fundamentally different things. Jews and Christians believe different things. take away like Jews and Hindus believe fundamentally different things. Jews and Christians believe different things. Even reformed Jews and Hasidic Jews have really fundamental differences. Sex inside these religions are fundamentally different. So yes, those fundamental differences exist. But I'll just close by saying, I do think there's a through line, which is this sort of fundamental belief that there's something beyond our five senses out there that we don't understand, probably a creator or creators of some sort. That's certainly my belief. I think that is a foundational thing in every religion. And the second thing is that there

is always a community built around that belief. So every religious group that I've ever learned about or spent time around or in has a really strong sense of community, which I think is part of why it's so attractive to a lot of people and part of why so many people are still religious. So good question, Dwight. A little bit absurd, but I appreciate the absurdity. And with that, I think we have to wrap up our mailbag edition. We've got like two minutes.

Wake everybody up from that and go to grievances. Yeah, yeah. We've got two minutes left to get to grievances. The airing of grievances. You have no eye for fashion. I have no eye for fashion. All right. I'm going to go first on my grievance really quick.

And I think we both got to keep it short because we've got a live newsletter we got to get back to. I tweeted about this and somebody responded to my tweet and said, I smell a grievance coming up. And they were 100% right. I was foreshadowing a grievance. And maybe I'll just read my tweet. One second. Let me pull it up. This is not going to be two minutes. That's my me pull it up. This is not gonna be two minutes.

That's my grievance. It will be, it will be two minutes. Here's my tweet, which I sent out yesterday is, it's incredible that the best functioning part of every major American city is its parking ticket enforcement. And then the top response on the tweet is, all caps did you just get a ticket which is 100% what happened i had just gotten a parking ticket my car was parked out front and uh

phoebe was like we we knew we had to move it as a day we had to move it for street cleaning and phoebe and i were both working from home and so i was we were like i was really busy on the newsletter yesterday morning i was like could you move the car? She's like, no, it's your job. You move it. I'm like, all right. And then I said, is there a ticket on it yet? And she said, no. And then I was changing to go to the gym. So in like the 10 minutes I changed to go to the gym and then went outside to move the car, we got a ticket. It was like, they did not miss a beat. And I hate it. I can't it's like everything in this city. Not everything. A lot of things in the city just function so poorly. And the parking ticket thing,

it's like they never missed that somehow. It's so odd how that works. So that's my grievance for the week. Very briefly, if you could say what should be the most functioning part of every city, what should it be? Public transportation i think uh gas lines personally but cool people in plumber when i'm talking about more narrowcasting i'll go to uh my grievance which is i'm gonna i already sort of like i guess prodded our european listeners and friends earlier about claiming that we subsidize their health care. So I'm going to go all in and talk about how we are using a superior system for measuring temperature with Fahrenheit. Celsius is dumb. Sorry, it's dumb. But it's dumb for measuring ambient air temperature.

But it's dumb for measuring ambient air temperature. It's really good for measuring water temperature. But you know how often I have to do chemistry and say what the boiling temperature of water is? Pretty much never. I can tell water's boiling by watching it boil. I really care about a couple things when it comes to water temperature. One is the temperature of water in a hot tub. And two is the temperature of the water when I'm making coffee.

And both of those things have really, really good metrics or really good bars in Fahrenheit, which is 200 degrees for Fahrenheit for what water should be when you're making pour over coffee. And 100 degrees is what you want your hot tub to be when you're sitting in a hot tub in Fahrenheit. I couldn't even tell you what they are in Celsius. I'm sure others can, but I'm sure those numbers aren't quite as square. The reason why Fahrenheit is superior for measuring ambient air temperature is that it is both more specific and at the same time more generalizable. So it's really easy to say that it's in the 60s, it's in the 70s, it's in the 80s and have that mean something. And there's more of a difference between something being 26 and 30 degrees in Fahrenheit

than the same difference in Celsius, though it's more specific. So I can talk with more accuracy. And if you really like Celsius and you don't want to change, I have good news for you, which is that Fahrenheit is essentially Celsius. It just has a linear transformation. You just subtract 32, multiply it by five ninths which is essentially half really easy to do it isn't a whole new scale it's just taking the thing that you for whatever reason love and you shift it so that it applies to ambient air temperature i'm really really thankful that the united states exists so we can keep the superior way of measuring ambient temperature for humans instead of measuring whether or not water is going to freeze or boil

for the rest of the world to enjoy when you all finally come to your senses. Celsius is dumb. I love it. We got in a great – well, there was the seedlings of an argument between Magdalena, who's Canadian, and Ari about this at the team retreat, and I'm not surprised it has come back up. Love you, Magdalena, who's Canadian, and Ari about this at the team retreat. And I'm not surprised it has come back up. Love you, Magdalena. Yeah, love you, Magdalena.

All right, we got to get out of here. Thanks for tuning in, guys. We'll see you on Tuesday in the pod because it's Labor Day. So have a good weekend. Hopefully some of you guys get the day off. Never forget the labor that built this beautiful, wonderful, diverse, incredible, economically flourishing, pride.

Fahrenheit loving. Prideful, patriotic. Olympics brushing. Country. Yeah. Incredible military. Nah, I'm just kidding. I'm not kidding.

All right, we gotta go. Take care. Peace. I'm not kidding. All right, we got to go. 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 Bacoba,

who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was designed by Magdalena Bacoba, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.