Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Tangle gets some love, the Jack Smith filing and Isaac and Ari argue about cooking techniques and more

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

On today's episode, Tangle gets some love from some big pod casters, Isaac and Ari argue about cooking techniques, talk about the Jack Smith filing and Isaac tries to guess which movies are which president's favorites. Ad-free podcasts are here!For the last few years, our daily podcast has been ad-supported. In that time, we’ve gotten complaints from our listeners saying they find these ads annoying and would happily pay a subscription to get ad-free podcasts — and we finally launched it. You can go to tanglemedia.supercast.com to sign up and get 17% off during our launch week special! Once you subscribe, you’ll get instructions on how to add the premium version of the podcast to your feed, and then every time we publish a podcast you'll have an ad-free version in your feed (plus, you'll get premium, paywalled podcast content).Check out our latest YouTube video on misinformation about North Carolina here.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 Dewey Thomas. 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.

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+. 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 help at Canada.ca slash ease the burden. A message from the government of Canada. Thank you. this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th. Coming up, Tangle gets some love from some big podcasters. Me and Ari argue about cooking techniques, the Jack Smith filing, and I try and guess what movies are which president's favorites. It's a good one. You guys are going

to enjoy it. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a 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, here with Tangle Managing Editor Ari Weitzman. Ari, do you want to share your terrible cooking opinion to start the show and just get right into it? Often such a bad thing for our listeners that you're the host because you can just frame things so poorly. But yeah, let's do it.

I think maybe before we get into it and before we can see where people land as listeners, the question is, when you are cooking food in a pan, when do you add the oil or butter or grease, what have you, to say butter? Do you do it after the pan gets hot or while the pan is heating? That's the debate.

That's the debate. Yeah. Well framed. And now most of our listeners are thinking there's an obviously right answer here. Which is you add the butter while the pan is heating. You definitely don't add the butter. I can't even believe this is a thing. I was dumbstruck to hear that there are people who exist in the world this way. You just don't get the satisfaction of dropping a piece of butter into the pan and hearing that first sizzle and then smelling the aroma of the butter come off the pan. That's just like a life experience that you don't enjoy. Is that the way you feel?

Yeah, I can't smell butter when you add it on gradually. That's true. I never get that experience. What are you talking about? Of course, I smell the butter as it cooks. But it's the sizzle. It's the sizzle. You won't think you should go all in it.

Well, here's where this is my opinion. Is that when you add the butter as it's heating, you know when it's ready and you know when it's hot enough to start cooking. So you're in control of like, I can start adding things to the pan now, add my seasoning to it. You also, this is the more important thing or the thing that's kind of informing my opinion more. I know I mentioned something about like, if you add butter when the pan's hot, it's going to splatter and get your work surface um messy which is true but like whatever you're going to have things splatter anyway while you're cooking the thing that really informs my decision here is i've been cooking with friends before where they've like we've brought pans to a shared Airbnb and they've done the cooking. And I've had them add oil to the pan too late as they're getting the pan ready. And just heat the pan.

And that has damaged the pan. So if there's a potential for error, I think the potential for error is worse when you forget to add something to the pan while the heat's on compared to adding something to the pan too late if you forget that the pan's heating. I'm not saying that I'm going to, which also can be its own problem, can damage the surface in its own right. But I'm not saying that i'm making my decisions around the assumption that i'm going to fuck up i'm just saying being defensive and thinking there's ways that you can mess up there have been plenty of times that i'm cooking and i like put butter on the stove and i'm like oh shit i didn't turn the piano i remember to do that if i do that the other way if i put

the heat on and then i forget oh i put the i think the heat on I need to add the butter I could crack the surface of the pan by heating it without it being like greased first I yeah I feel I feel offended by your opinion I can't quite it's strange to me I know

I don't know exactly why but I just like it feels to me like you're wrong in a way that feels meaningful to me. Like, it matters to my worldview. I just like… Okay, what about like… I mean, maybe I don't… Maybe I'd be curious what actual cooks do.

I presume we're both novices. Like, I have steel pans, which are harder to cook with, but they're what a lot of like professional chefs use. And I've had to learn how to like cook on those pans. And one of the things that they teach you when you're like, if you want to make eggs on a steel pan, is that like a stainless steel pan is that you heat the pan up and then you sort of sprinkle water onto the pan when it's hot. And if the water

beads, that means that the pan's hot enough to like add butter and add the eggs and they won't stick to the pan. So that to me tells me that like real cooks who are, they're not, they're not putting the butter in there and heating up because then you just don't like dropping the butter or the oil in, maybe this is it. I think I have it now dropping the butter or the oil in that's like, it's like a temperature check on the pan. You're saying like, I slowly heat up the oil and I melt it. And then I know it's ready when it's melted. I'm saying like, if I drop a stick of butter into the pan and it doesn't sizzle and melt, then I know the pan's not hot enough. But if I drop a stick of butter into the pan and it doesn't sizzle and melt, then I know the pan's not hot enough. But if I do it and it does, then I know the pan's ready

for the actual food. I don't know how I would cook if I just allowed the oil or the butter to gradually heat up. Yeah. Okay. So there's a couple of things there. Maybe the surface matters because I cook with ceramic pans at home and I have like, I've never worked as a real chef in a real kitchen or anything. Some of my first jobs were as a short order cook in kitchens that were sandwich shops. And the grill is always hot. So that surface isn't getting really messed up over time by the fact that there's always a flame under it. So yeah, I'm willing to see that the surface matters. And, you know, maybe that's not a concern worth having. But to answer your question, like how do I know when it's hot? I'm pretty much never just cooking things only in butter. Like I'm always seasoning the butter.

So I'll be adding garlic or like a shallot or onion or salt, pepper, like crushed red pepper, seasoning and stuff. And you can see the seasonings bubble and you can hear them bubble once it like reaches a temperature. I can't wait to hear the feedback

to this totally meaningless debate. I'm very curious to hear what people are going to say. All right. If you have an opinion, you have to write to both of us. That's the rule. Ari at readtangle.com and Isaac at readtangle.com.

There's way more important stuff to talk about, but Ari and I got no fight. Yeah, maybe. Ari left an offhanded comment in today's Tangle edition about this. Related to the Supreme Court argument because Justice Alito

was dropping bombs about it was a very culinary style Supreme Court decision strangely or not a decision

but a response to arguments right it was all about whether an omelet's an omelet and then I brought the potato gun thing into it

to just keep the food thing going. We'll be right back. Feeling distracted? You're not alone. Many Canadians are finding it hard to focus with mortgage payments on their minds. If you're struggling with your payments, speak to your bank. The earlier they understand your situation, the more options and relief measures could be available to you. Learn more at Canada.ca slash it pays to know. 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. Before we get into actual news of the day and some of the stuff that we want to talk about related to our coverage this week,

it does feel worthwhile to do a little meta navel gazing. We're recording this as always on Thursday for a Sunday podcast release. But today was, I mean, for me, was kind of a remarkable special day. I mentioned this at the top of the Thursday podcast, so people who listen to that will know. But the folks who produce the podcast S-Town

and are behind Serial, basically the best audio storytellers in the game, led by Brian Reed, who's somebody whose work I admire and look up to a lot. They are doing a podcast series on journalism, which is really interesting. interesting. It's probably not going to have a super big audience because I imagine the number of people who are really interested in a podcast about journalism is a little bit more narrow, but I'm very interested in it. And it's a lot of reflections on the failures of journalism and how to improve the industry and how to make it better. And they did a episode that was basically dedicated to Tangle. And the way they told the story of Tangle was through two readers of ours, Dick and Emily, who say that they basically almost got divorced and that Tangle effectively saved their marriage. marriage. And it was maybe, I mean, for me personally, it was probably the most powerful representation of Tangle that I've ever heard. And it was the most rewarding 30 minutes of my career as like, in terms of listening to somebody review your work or talk about it, I don't think anybody has really told the story as well or has captured the things that I want to be captured about our work as well as they did.

to tears this morning as I listened to it because it just felt like we were seen and like the all the work that we do and the labor of love that this is got noticed by people who understand the industry and recognize uh you know how hard we are working so people should go listen to it the podcast is called question everything we are episode four and the headline of the episode which is very catchy is can journalism save a marriage and I highly recommend it for anybody who wants to hear a fun story about two tangle readers and also hear I think a nice portrait of some of the work that we're doing it's always I think for me it's probably I don't think it could be to the same magnitude since this is something that you've been working on by yourself for so long before adding people to it.

But the feeling that I get from listening to readers speak about anything is this real deep sense of personalization. We're often looking at dashboards that have numbers and reading comments from people and grouping them into types and categories of people who lean left or upset about us saying this, people who lean right or upset about us saying that. And reading the comments and thinking about our readership is giving us barometers and feedbacks and checks and thinking of it as like an entity. But it's easy to forget that each of those data points is a person and that those people have an emotional connection to what we do. And as much as we have an emotional connection in general to the responses that we have. And that really gets captured from hearing people's voices.

This week, I was on two separate calls with readers individually for two different reasons, one of whom was I'm speaking with and bouncing ideas off of about what a potential tangle newsletter might look like if it were in Europe, which is a whole can of worms. And it was a very fascinating conversation. But it was a reader that I've responded to through emails before. And just speaking with him and hearing his voice felt very personalizing. And then there's another reader who I hope is listening. I don't know, John, if you were listening, but he was somebody who was having difficulty

figuring out how to place a subscription online. We talked a little bit through email. He asked if I could call him over the phone so he could give me his credit card information so I could manually enter it, which is a little bit of a hassle to do. But we spoke over the phone. He was absolutely delightful

and was really gratifying to just hear somebody who was excited about our work who said that they benefited from it through their voice that just feels so personal hearing these two people talk about their experiences and you can really hear them as individuals feel like that just puts such a human face on it so much more emotional to hear about what it's like. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, what was funny for some of the people who maybe don't really know how this stuff works, I mean, I think how these stories are crafted

is really interesting. And if you listen to really well-known podcasts like S-Town or Serial or Criminal or anything like that, I think it's easy to miss or not properly appreciate how much goes into telling these stories. So what happened in this case was that one of the producers of the show reached out to me. They said, hey, we're thinking about doing a story. We're doing a series on journalism. We're thinking about doing a story about Tangle. And we're interested to see if I could be a fit for this series we're working on. Q hop on a call for 30 minutes and talk. So we hop on a call. We talk. They ask a bunch of

questions about Tangle. I explain the story. And then we have another call after that. And on that second follow-up call, the producer's like, hey, so I wanted to follow up because you said this really interesting thing when we first talked about Tango. You said that you've heard from readers who said that the newsletter had helped them in their relationship because they had a husband or wife who disagreed with them politically, or they had a niece or nephew or their son or whatever it was. And I thought that was a really interesting thread of the story. And I was wondering if you could tell me more

about those emails, what you've heard from people. So we talked about that for 30 minutes and then they follow up and they say, hey, can you connect me with some of these readers? Do you have any examples of the readers you said who have like these personal relationships that have been impacted by the newsletter? And so I did.

So I just forwarded the producers, you know, five or six emails I'd gotten over the last couple of weeks and said, here are some examples of the kind of feedback we get. And then the producer goes and talks to these people. He interviews all these people. And then he came down from New York City to Philadelphia

and he did like a two hour sit down with me in my office. And all of this work, like these, you know, he probably did 10 hours of interviews and tons of legwork comes out in like this 30 minute episode where he tries to tell this story in a really concise way. And what I said to Dick and Emily, who I didn't know, I mean, I don't know them. I only have the email relationship with them that, you know, I emailed them this morning to thank them for participating in the podcast and telling their story

because parts of it are pretty vulnerable. They talk about, you know, their marriage being on the rocks kind of and how much stress there was and where they disagree and all this stuff. And I said, we exist mostly in a space on the internet where people are really comfortable being critical and being glib and being rude. And they respond on social media in ways that are meant to be evocative and get likes and reactions. Or they send us emails when they're pissed off or whatever.

And we get a lot of nice, good feedback too, which I'm always so grateful for. But it is genuinely really, really rare for us in our work to just hear from actual humans, like hear their voices and their person sort of explaining what it's like for them and how the newsletter or the work has impacted them. So as an organization that's like a little bit mission driven, we miss a lot of that. So I think for me, that's part of, on top of, you know, having people, media critics who are journalists who are doing a whole series about journalism, profile our work in a story that I think was put us in a pretty positive light.

That's powerful enough. our work in a story that I think was put us in a pretty positive light. That's powerful enough. But then actually hearing from like the readers who are telling this story in their own words was, uh, it was, yeah, it was just really moving for me.

So, uh, I guess that's maybe a good place to quit the navel gazing, but I'll just say once again, question everything. It's outside of the tangle stuff. It's a really interesting podcast. I've listened to the first few episodes.

I love it. I think it would be interesting to people who even aren't in media or journalism. But if you want to just go hear the Tangle episode, we're episode four, Can Journalism Save a Marriage? And it's super fun to listen to. So I hope you guys enjoy it.

And I definitely want to shout out Brian and the rest of the team over there. And a big thank you for giving us some airtime. 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+. 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. Whether renting, renewing a mortgage, or considering buying a home,

everybody has housing costs on their minds. For free tools and resources to help you manage your home finances, visit Canada.ca slash it pays to know. A message from the Government of Canada. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, let's get to the news. Let's get to the real news. We talked about a few big things this week. I think the two I want to talk about before we get into our game, which is now going to be our weekly thing. I don't know how we're going to come up with enough games,

but we're on a hot streak of games and we're going to keep it going. So Ari's got one to wrap up the pod. But I want to talk about two things today, which is the Jack Smith case and then a little bit of follow-up on some of the Hurricane stuff. I don't know.

Do you want to drive here? You seem to have a little bit of a... I don't know if it's a bone to pick is the right way to put it, but you had something you wanted to dig in on. Yeah, definitely not a bone to pick. More of when we are going through the editing process, I kind of always have my eye out for points of contention or argument that by the time we resolve what's going to be written in the newsletter, I remember that it doesn't feel like we're all in agreement about something. We're in agreement about how we want

to word it. And we're in agreement about how to best strongly state your opinion for the my take. But a lot of the time, we're not always going to see eye to eye about everything that's written. That's impossible. So I think it's always interesting to remember those moments and see if we can bring them up. And one particular moment happened when we were discussing Jack Smith's recent filing in the Donald Trump election interference case that's being litigated at DC, where the judge, Tanya Chotkin, had decided that as she is scheduling the pretrial motions before the trial date is set, which will not be until after the election following the Supreme Court's ruling about presidential immunity, she's decided to make this brief that was, I believe she gave him 180 pages, which he used 165 of in order to make this argument, which she then unsealed publicly, which was both of those things are uncommon. And in describing this, you compared Judge Chotkin to Judge Eileen Cannon, who was overseeing the case against President Trump

for his handling of classified documents in Florida. Cannon's behavior or her decisions were that she decided to throw the case out and that decision was appealed or is under appeal currently in the district court of appeals. But you compare those actions as being political. And the comparison, I know that, like, I think I understand what that point is, which is they're making biased decisions, both of them. But I know that Will, sort of another one of our editors, he had a disagreement about the way that that comparison was framed. So, I don't know, I think that one of his arguments was that we weren't as equally critical about canon at the time. I remember discussing that on the podcast here and being critical of canon, at least verbally. And I know that we had some words to spare in her critique at that time.

But what do you think? Do you think that if you could do it again, would you change the comparison? Or do you think that Will's right? Or do you think that maybe you're right? Or that there's room for compromise in the middle? So I think if I were to cede something to Will, and I wish he was on, we should start bringing him in for this stuff.

I just feel bad sometimes for summarizing his arguments, maybe when we could take it from the horse's mouth. I think he was right that maybe the upside of the comparison was not as strong as like the risk of just distracting people by drawing the comparison. Because I mean, I said literally that Chuck was basically the liberal version of Eileen Cannon. And I said that because I think neither of them have much defense left for what they're doing. I mean, I found Ellie Honig's

piece to be really, really compelling where he's criticizing Shuck in. And I gave Cannon a lot of leash. I mean, early on, I was just like, look, she's Trump appointed. She's inexperienced, whatever. But let's not judge her before she really makes any rulings in this case. But then she went and did a bunch of stuff that higher courts were overturning. She was doing procedural stuff that was extremely shady. She kept basically breaking on every contentious issue in Trump's favor and then effectively threw the case out in a case, by the way,

that I still think is the strongest one against Trump. I mean, I am most offended personally, my sensibilities by the election interference stuff, but I can concede that building a legal case as Jack Smith has just shown all of us for Trump's actions leading up to and after January 6th is actually difficult. It's harder than you think. The legal case against him on the mishandling classified document stuff was straightforward. And the arguments that, you know, this is what Hillary did and whatever are all just BS. Like, what he did was markedly different and worse than what Hillary Clinton did. And I think any objective person could see that. I think, you know, Bill Barr even said that.

So to me, that's part of what makes the Cannon thing offensive and hard to swallow, is like, she was a Trump-appointed judge who was too inexperienced to take this case and she did it anyway. And she ignored the guidance of people who were more experienced. And then she did a bunch of stuff higher courts had to overturn. And then she effectively like delayed and tanked the case until it got thrown out. Whereas Chutkin's doing the opposite in some ways. She's allowing this case to be the political tool that everybody wants it to be, everybody on the left wants it to be,

without the case even going to trial. And as other commentators have said, who have stronger legal credentials than I do because I have zero, the reality of what Jack Smith has done and the latitude he's gotten to do it is abnormal to the point of being very obviously unethical. So I'm just making the comparison to say the way that partisans might feel about Judge Gannon, the way that liberals might feel about Judge Gannon is also in some ways how they should feel about Chutkan, which is that, you know, she's doing something that I think is genuinely bad. And she's allowing Jack Smith to do things that are unethical. As much as I want Trump to be held accountable for what he did post-election and around January 6th, I mean, the very most basic thing is like we need the justice system to act outside of politics. And I think it's clear Jack Smith is wading into things that aren't that.

So. It's interesting. I think regarding the Jack Smith case, I think there's an element here where I'm a little bit more forgiving towards Jack Smith. I think part of what he's doing as a prosecutor at the federal level is playing a political game and trying to win his case as best he can. He's aware of the election and the deadline that that sets and trying to

win in the court of public opinion. I think as much as we want federal and federal appointed prosecutors to be apolitical and to be 100% focused on the law, I do think I expect a federal prosecutor to be somewhat political in the way that they pursue a case, or the tools that they use, at least. Not as much the DOJ is politically motivated in bringing a case. That's a different story. And I think people who are blaming the DOJ for delaying the case initially for it being pushed back to after the election have a reasonable argument there because the DOJ did wait a little while to bring this case forward.

And if they had done so sooner, then we would be less concerned about whether or not a trial date would have been able to be held before the election to kind of wait until primary season started. And that's not really Jack Smith's fault. Jack Smith is trying to use the tools available to him in and out of the courtroom to bring the case that he was charged with forward to the best of his ability. Ideally, it would be best if he does so without bringing politics into it. I think you're consistent when you call out federal prosecutors for being political. But I do think that, you know, judges, fair to criticize,

prosecutors, maybe a little bit of a different bar there. For me, anyway. Yeah. I mean, I, it's hard. I'm trying to think like to what degree I want to hold people to different standards.

And I don't, I think, but I, yeah, I think like broadly my, my heart is in a similar place as that. There's another question here too that came up, which you proposed in our little show notes here,

which is the odds that if Trump wins, he throws this out. And I think it's 100%. I mean, I also, you know, we had a sort of similar but different conversation about the odds that Trump might deny the results of the election if he loses. And I was sort of maybe less sure

about that one a few weeks ago. And I think now I'm just watching him and listening to him as the election gets closer. I think it's very clear that he's going to, if he loses, he will claim the election was stolen and come up with a whole bunch of stuff. And I know some people on the left are like, it's been clear. And you know, how could you be so naive? I'm like, listen, I know I've reported a ton on claims of election fraud and all these things. But I think there was a world where a few months ago, maybe some of the rhetoric that was coming out of his camp was sort of starting to take the tone of like, this is one last fight.

And if we lose, then whatever, we're going to walk away. And I think as the election has neared, they're leaning way more into this idea that the elections themselves are under threat and they're making this work. Hey, everybody. This is John, executive producer of YouTube and podcast content and co-host of The Daily Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. We are now offering this podcast exclusively to our premium podcast members, along with our ad-free daily podcasts, Friday editions, in-depth interviews, upcoming new podcast series, bonus content, and much more. If you want to receive all that and give your support to help us grow Tangle Media, please head over to tanglemedia.supercast.com.

Again, tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up for a membership. If it's not the right time for you to sign up, please don't worry. Our ad-supported daily podcast isn't going anywhere. But if it is in your ability to support by signing up for a membership, we would greatly appreciate it. And we're really excited to share all of our premium offerings with you. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off.

Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by Duke Thomas. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was made by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social media manager. The music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle,

please go check out our website at readtangle.com. That's readtangle.com.