Tangle - The Sunday Podcast + TANGLE LIVE at City Winery April 2024

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

Isaac and Ari talk about Isaac’s experience at TED 2024, some advice on how to interact with Ari if you meet him in person, and an introduction to the Tangle Live event at City Winery on April 17th, followed by the recording of the event, in full and uncut. You can watch our latest video, Isaac's interview with former Congressman Ken Buck (CO-04) here.We just released the next episode of our new podcast series, The Undecideds. In episode 2, our undecided voters primarily talk about Trump’s legal troubles. How do they feel about his alleged crimes? How would him being convicted - or exonerated - change the way they vote? What about his claims he should have immunity as president? You’ll hear how they consider these major themes of the race, and also what they made of Haley dropping out and Biden’s State of the Union Address. You can listen to Episode 2 ⁠⁠here.⁠⁠Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Coming up, some advice on how to interact with Ari if you see him in person, to interact with Ari if you see him in person, the TED Talk and what happened behind the scenes and how it all came to be and my story about meeting Kesha really briefly and a lead-in to the New York City live event and then a recording of that event, which we have edited and turned around in a matter of a week. Thank you, John, for making that happen. It's a jam-packed pod, a little different. 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 you get views from across the political spectrum some independent thinking and a little bit of my take i am your host isaac saul here with my co-host ari weitzman who just dropped his mic

very clumsily on his desk as i read that intro. And caught it very skillfully before it fell. Unbelievable hands. Fun fact about Ari Weinsman, one of the best set of hands on any person I've ever met in my entire life. True story. One of the nicest things I'll ever say about you publicly. Yeah, I know.

So that's why I'm struggling to think how to respond because I don't want to i don't want to make you overthink it well hug shimea thank you very much um i sorry i want to stay on the the hands thing really quick you just made me think of a funny thing that i used to do this thing where i would just throw stuff at ari randomly to see if he could catch it. And he had like a 99% success rate. So I invite you Tangle fans, friends, family, if you ever see Ari in public, just without invitation, throw something towards him and see if he catches it. And you know, if he doesn't, you can just say, I heard that you had really good hands and you didn't catch it. I thought you were going to catch it.

Preferably things that won't puncture me would be great if you do want to do that. And keep it below like the chin, I guess, you know, nothing at the face, but make it catchable report back. Let me know how it goes. Uh, yeah. Throw your, throw your objects at me and send your emails to Isaac at Retailer.com. Yeah. All right. So, look, we have a kind of a different podcast today, a little bit of a different thing happening. I am once again on the road, road warring me, but I just, the last couple of months have been totally insane. Sorry, that sentence sort of fell out of my mouth, but I'm in Denver, Colorado right now. And it's convenient that I'm a little crunched for time. And in the middle of travel, I'm out here for a family reunion this weekend, which I'm super excited about because we have something that we want to release

on the podcast. That's going to take up the majority of this, which is the recording from our live Tangle event in New York city. So we're going to talk about that. And we're also going to talk about the TED Talk, because that was an experience and something I feel like we should spend a few minutes on. Super interesting for me, kind of a wild thing, how it all came to be and what the actual experience was like. And then, yeah, we're just going to push you guys off into this live event

and let you hear that and sit on that. And the way this whole system works, you don't really get acknowledged for that in any way, which is kind of a bummer. I mean, maybe they'll, it would be cool if they could give you like a credit on the, whenever this goes up on YouTube or the TED thing. But Ari drafted the first run of this TED Talk, and then I did my edits and Will did some of his edits. And then we had to go through this whole process with the TED team, which was really intense and crazy. And I think we pulled something off that was very on brand for us and will be a nice piece of promotional material for us that also really, I think, zeroes in on kind of our mission statement and what we're after, which feels really rewarding in a lot of ways.

Yeah, and because I think of my position with the TED Talk, it was really tough for me to read how it went, because all that I could hear when you're delivering it were the changes. I couldn't even relate to it as a piece of thought. I could only relate to it as a series of words that I was already familiar with. How did it go? How did it feel in the room? Did it feel like people were connecting to it? It did. It felt good. I mean, so I'll say a few things. I mean, first of all, I think it's kind of interesting how this came to be, which I haven't spoken about publicly yet. But the origin story here is basically that I, you know, I wrote that piece about the initial October 7th attacks. The very first piece that I wrote after that happened in Tangle, that my take was the one that went viral. I shared it, you know, I copied and pasted

out of the newsletter and just put it into Twitter. And it was the one that went totally berserk and got, you know, like 30 million views or whatever. And Elon Musk tweeted at me about it and all that stuff. And in the midst of all that, the president of TED, Chris Anderson, retweeted the tweet that I had sent out. And I saw that, I saw, you know, because he has a big platform, obviously a lot of people follow him. So when he retweeted, I saw a bunch of people replying to his tweet. And I just sent him a DM and said like, hey, Chris, you know, I'm obviously a huge fan of Ted. I think they do. I mean, most people watch Ted Talks, you know, I've seen three or four Ted Talks that have left a really big impression on me. So I was like, this is really cool.

Thanks for the retweet. We should keep in touch and kind of just shot my shot. Like, you know, I'd love to do some work together sometime if it ever pans out. And he was super receptive and told me to shoot him an email. And then we had a Zoom call, and he asked me about Tangle, and I told him a little bit about our work. And in the midst of that, I talked about the editorial standards, I guess, that we've set and how we make language choices and the challenge of communicating with people from across the political spectrum. And he was really interested in that. And at the end of the call sort of

suggested like, hey, maybe we could turn this into a Ted talk. And I was like, yeah, maybe that would be really cool. Um, best case scenario outcome from this conversation. And we had this back and forth. I told all you guys, and we were all super pumped. And this was like, you know, it was in October, it was right after the attack. So it was, you know, six months ago or whatever. And then he just went silent. I couldn't get him to respond to an email and I was trying to play it cool and not pass through him too much. And then about three or four weeks ago, he wrote back and picked up the old email there and was like, hey, really sorry we dropped the ball here, but we'd love to have you at TED. The conference is in Vancouver in three weeks. And it was the week of the Tango Live event.

And we had no talk written, nothing. And he was like, I want to make this happen. How do we make this happen? Which was really scary because most people, I found out when I was there, all these speakers who do the TED stuff, they work on their talk for like six months. And we had, you know, like a few weeks, two of which I was in Bali. So it was like the absolute

bare minimum that you could put into making this talk happen. And you wrote this initial thing. Go ahead. What are you going to say? We did already have some stuff to work off of we already wrote that whole piece about language choices so it wasn't like a whole fly by your seat of the pants thing that we just scrabble together it was that's true something we sent them our this that uh some longtime tangle readers or listeners will probably remember i mean i think it's probably been a year ish since we released that but we published that whole piece that was like an update to our editorial standards explaining why we made certain decisions, like how language we use to talk about trans issues or abortion or immigration. And they were really interested in that. And so we pulled this off

somehow. I mean, I think first of all, I didn't memorize the speech. I didn't do the cool Ted thing where I was like stalking around on stage. But I had a podium, and I read a bit while I spoke. And we sort of spun that in the actual talk, I think, in a clever way, which is at the beginning of the talk, I just said, I know most speakers don't read during these Ted Talks, but I'm going to read a little bit while I give this talk because it's a talk about language choices and I want to be really precise about the language that I use. And I felt like The Room had a lot of people who were probably not crazy about some of the editorial decisions that we make. I don't want to say the audience is predominantly liberal. who are probably not crazy about some of the editorial decisions that we make. I think, I don't want to say the audience is predominantly liberal. I think the unifying factor of the audience is that they're wealthy and really educated, but there's like a lot of sort of

conservative donors and like, you know, rich conservatives in the audience. Like I know that for a fact based on the people who I saw,'re the people I met speaking to some of the folks who go to Ted a lot, but it's definitely like, you know, I wouldn't say it's like the common man conference. It's like that, you know, there are people are giving talks about like the future of AI and, um, how to save monarch butterflies and, you know, stuff like that. It's a very sort of intellectual, high-minded kind of place. And I sort of went up there and was like, the way that you guys talk is not communicating to the other side, and here are some ways to fix it. We got a standing ovation, so I think that's a good sign.

Does everybody get a standing ovation? So I think that's a good sign. Does everybody get a standing ovation? Most people got a few, got like some portions of the crowd standing up. I would say like there's a regular Ted goers who it seems like there's a custom there to stand and clap when someone's done. But I would say there's like a huge spectrum and how that response plays out. Like I sat in for some talks and I stood up and clapped for maybe like two of the six talks I saw. I think there was like a chunk of people who stand

up for every talk. And there were talks that I saw where the entire room got up and it was like a raucous ovation. We did not get that. I would say we did not get that, but we got something. I think that was like maybe like a a 7.5 out of 10. And I would say the average was probably like a 6 out of 10. So I felt pretty good about it. I think overall, it was received pretty well. And it wasn't the kind of talk that I think was super inspiring. I was sort of pointing out a lot of the flaws in how we do things.

So I wasn't expecting even that response. So it was nice to get that and felt rewarded and get that. And yeah, I think in the room it landed pretty well. Um, so that part was cool and felt really rewarding for sure. I'm excited for it to come out. I'm very excited to share it with Tangle people and the people in our community and to see like for them to see some of the stuff we do kind of distilled into a 12 minute talk and how they kind of receive it. Did you get to meet any Tangle readers while you were there? I did. I'd say maybe one of the most shocking things aside from being in a green room with Kesha was that she's cool. Yeah. She seemed cool. I met her, you know, I said hi very briefly. I just said, you know, Hey, I'm Isaac. I'm giving a talk. It's like, I'm like honored to be, be opening for you.

Basically. I made some corny joke and went, but when I addressed her, you know, she's wearing a name tag, everybody's wearing a name tag and mine says speaker on it and her say speaker on it. So it's like, you're walking around the conference. There's like these different classes. Like I'm like, I was like the highest in the cast system. Like I had a big name tag with my name that said speaker. And then there's like the smaller name tags that are like VIP people who buy some kind of tickets that get them certain. And then there's like the smaller name tags that are like VIP people who buy some kind of tickets that get them certain. And then there's like the, like we were joking, Magdalena came with me, um, our social media manager and they gave her like this little baby tag that like, she was like not allowed to go certain places. I was going to, I could go,

it was very gatekeepy and kind of weird. And, but anyway, her name tag said Kesha on it. So I said, Hey, Kesha, like I'm Isaac, whatever. And she said, Anna. And I said, Oh, sorry, Anna. Nice to meet you. And it was that it wasn't like aggressive, but it was a little like, you know, I have a real name and I'm like, it said Kesha on your name tag. And I know who you are. Cause you're Kesha. So, you know, but, but that was really it. And then, um, she was like had this really cool fade. She had shaved the side of her head and was wearing her hair up in a ponytail. And then she went into makeup and I went out. I was the first talk. And then after the talk, I sat down. Three talks later, she came out and it was a completely different person.

She was wearing like a blonde wig. She had makeup on. She had like this very artsy kind of makeup on. It was like she went into this character to go on stage, which I thought was really interesting. And then she gave a talk about losing the legal rights to her voice, which I didn't know. It's a big story. I'm not a huge Kesha fan, to be totally honest, but I like her music. She seems like a good musician, but I just don't know much about her. And she gave a talk about losing the rights to her music. And then she debuted a song on stage, which was pretty awesome. I was sitting in the front row and it was like, you know, front row seats for a Grammy winning artist. And it was the first time she had sung publicly since she won the rights back to her voice. So it was a very cool moment. Um, yeah, super powerful. It was moving. Everybody was very moved. Uh, and she crushed it.

So that was like the, you know, the cool meat. Uh, but while we were back there, some woman who was like an astrophysicist, uh, she came backstage or no, she, no, she was a climate scientist. I met another woman who's an astrophysicist who's a Tangle fan. This woman was a climate scientist and a speaker who had given a talk earlier in the week before I got there. I think her name was Sarah Daugherty. She's listening to this.

Sarah pumped me up so hard. I was freaking out. I was very nervous. And she busts into the green room and it's just like, everybody needs to sign up for this guy's newsletter. He's the only reason I can read the news anymore. She gassed me up and she was like, you're going to crush it. I'm coming through the speaker's green room to go to get a front row seat just for your talk and was like so pumped about it. And then, um, when I, when my name got called and I walked out like her and a group of some other people were like clearly Tangle fans who were there and they all went nuts and gave me like a really loud ovation and cheered for me. Like when I came on a stage, it was really cool. That was awesome it was like you know these people who are super brilliant and way smarter than I am who are just

like hey I love your stuff and I'm you know your work has made it easier to read the news or whatever um so yeah it was cool we definitely had some you know I wouldn't I definitely I would not call it home turf for us but we had some uh fans in the building for sure, which was nice. So, yeah, overall, I think received well. Great experience. Never seen a conference like it. Got to meet a few really cool, interesting people. I was only there for 24 hours.

So, you know, I hope they invite me back. And next year, I'll definitely try and go for the whole conference and catch some more stuff. Because a lot of interesting things happened that week that I kind of missed. And it'll be cool for everybody to be able to see the video when they release it. Speaking of Kesha's persona when she performs, you do kind of also have a similar performance persona. It's just very different. I think seeing you up there behind a lectern, not a podium, as you wrongly said, but a lectern, you looked very professorial.

Looked so calm and adult and smart, smart, big-brained boy up there. Yeah. Just really leaning into that whole side of you and just every other aspect of like the brash shit talking Jersey Philly kid is just not present in those moments. That's funny. Yeah. I did. I did feel like a little bit, like I was putting on a performance for sure. I mean, which you are. Um, but yeah, I felt I, there was, there is something, I mean, so for people who don't know, this video is not out yet, but there was a live stream. And so the Tangle team bought tickets to the live stream and then, you know, like shared the screen

and watch it. So a few people got to watch the talk live. Uh, but I, and I watched a recording of it and there, I do feel like disconnected from that person in some ways. Like I watched that and I'm like, oh, that is like, yeah, like you're putting, I'm putting, I'm definitely putting on like a professorial, like a buttoned up version of myself, I would say the most academic. Professor Tangle. And it feels good to go to that place. But underneath, I will say, I mean, I was like, my legs were involuntarily shaking for the full 12 minutes. And if you watch the video closely,

you can see. And I felt, what was crazy was I felt good. Like I had done a few rehearsals night before and I was like, I got it. Slept great. Like I was not stressed. We went to the place. They're like, how are you feeling? I was like, I'm like cool as a cucumber. I got it. Slept great. I was not stressed. We went to the place. They're like,

how are you feeling? I was like, I'm cool as a cucumber. I feel good. Phoebe, my wife's texting me. She's just like, this is your 99. You're always good under pressure. You're going to kill it. I'm like, you're right. I got this. I'm built for this. And then I walked out on stage and it's just like 1,500 people staring at you. The cameras are everywhere. They're like, you know, it's like Superbowl. They're like cameras in front of you, Ken, like, and the big red Ted letters are there. And I was just like, I had this moment of like, oh shit, I'm like giving a Ted talk and this is being live streamed and recording. And it was like, I didn't present nervous from like the waist up and I didn't feel

super nervous, but there was just like some part in my brain that was freaking out because like my legs were literally shake. And if you watch the video closely, you can see I'm like lifting my legs up and bending my knees and kind of like shifting from my left foot to my right foot. Cause I just couldn't get my legs to stop shaking. Um, yeah. And it was all I was thinking. And then after, and I was freaking out initially right after I ran to Magdalene in the front row. And I was like, dude, could you tell how bad I was shaking? She was like, what you were, she was like, and she was sitting in the front row. She was just like, I didn't see you shaking at all. Like you looked like you killed it. Like you looked unbelievably calm. And I was like, dude, I like my legs would not stop rolling.

So that was pretty funny. But I, and I learned something about public speaking on a, I guess, on that scale, which is that maybe sometimes some stuff's going to happen that you just don't have control over, which was new for me. Everything's different the day of the show. I think something that John joked about after the live event that we'd done in New York was Isaac's, oh, actually this was Will's joke, I think, Isaac's having his theater kid moment. I think every one of us on Tangle staff, the other four of us just participated in musical theater and drama in high school or in college and can kind of recognize all the stuff that you're saying is leading up to the event for the live event for the TED talk. It's just like so stressful. Why

would I ever do this? I hate this. And then you get this rush of energy and it's exciting, but scary while you're performing. And afterwards you're like, we did it guys. Hell yeah. This is the best thing ever. And we're like, yeah, yeah. You're a theater kid now. You're like us. Yeah. I guess it did feel that way. Um, that's a good transition into the, into the New York city event, which we should talk about a little bit before we, we blast off this, uh, this recording of the event that we're going to play. So, um, crazy thing. So the TED Talk, the TED Conference was the 15th to the 19th and the Tangle event was sold out for the 17th. So dead center in the middle of this TED Conference in Vancouver. So we had the New York City event and then I

drove home that night from New York to Philly, which was dumb. I should have just flown out of New York and flew directly to Vancouver, um, for the Ted talk. Uh, but it was crazy. It was just a wild whirlwind 48 hours to go from the live event to the Ted talk. But I, the live event was awesome. Um, I, I did, I was freaking out a couple of days before I was saying, I never want to do another one of these again because it's just a lot of work and it's very stressful. And I did immediately feel afterwards like that it's always worth it. This was awesome. It's so fun.

It was stressful for a few reasons. One was that we had two guests who bailed in the last like three weeks before the event. So we had to replace two of the three guests, which ended up, I mean, I think Camille Foster and Katrina Vanden Heuvel from The Nation would have been awesome guests, but it ended up being awesome because we got Michael Moynihan, who is the co-host of Camille's podcast, The Fifth Column. And then we got Catherine Rampell from The Washington Post,

who's someone who I read all the time. And they ended up being stellar on stage. I mean, they were interesting, combative, funny, all the stuff that I think makes those conversations educational and entertaining. So I was super, super grateful that they came and how it turned out. We sold out City Winery in New York, which was awesome. Really cool venue. We had to leave early because Michael Che from Saturday Night Live was coming in to do a stand-up bit right after our show. It was just classic New York stuff. Just you have 150 friends in the audience sold out. And then you're like, we got to get out of here because Michael Che is coming and doing stand up here, like on this stage behind me in five minutes. And the energy in the room I thought was great. I thought the product on stage was more entertaining than what we had in Philly. Different. I mean, Philly was like a lot of common ground and our guests were really getting technical and in the weeds on a lot of legal stuff

and I think found ways to sort of relate to each other. And this was like, as you guys are going to hear in a few minutes, there was a good bit of fighting and back and forth and at some points unproductive and not the model of civil discourse that I was hoping for. But I think for the majority of the event was interesting and combative and authentic and illustrative of some of the divides in the country with some pretty funny moments sprinkled in there too. How do you feel about that assessment? Fair. It's fair. I know we've been talking about ways that we want to tweak the format following two of these events that we've done now to think about how we can try to direct some of the conversations so that we can lean into those confrontational moments when

people want to directly debate things the other person has said, but maybe set the table a little bit more clearly. And we'll think about how to do that. But I do think everyone got to share their honest and full opinion about the stuff we're talking about. And we had moments where Josh and Catherine were challenging each other pretty directly. And Michael Moynihan's very gifted as a natural comic relief barrier which i think people also get to get to experience um i did say to you i think right after the show that you should just fire me and hire him he just seems way way better at running shotgun at this kind of stuff but i'll work on it so if anybody has any tips for what michael that they think I can do, I'm willing to hear it. Especially you, Michael, if you're listening. Yeah, he's got a, he has a gift. I mean, he, he's really smart. So I'm, you know, I'm a fan of his podcast. So it was a cool moment for me just to meet him. I think like, it was very funny. I

had a moment with him backstage where I'm like meeting this guy who I listened to all the time the time and then had that moment with other people who are Tangle fans who are meeting me. In the same night, there's this very circular thing where one person said to me, it's so weird hearing your voice in person. I was just thinking the same thing about Moynihan 10 minutes ago. ago. Um, and he's, I mean, I, I say, I would say his strike zone is like the history of conservatism in America. And then basically anything that has to do with foreign policy stuff. And he's really, really, really well-read and smart and like, um, incisive on those issues. And he talks a lot about that stuff. And we didn't spend a ton of time on foreign policy stuff in, or anytime really in the, in the live event, but he talked a lot about some of like his experience reporting on things like Donald Trump. And, you know, I think he's very in touch with, and has a really good thumb on the pulse of certain parts of America that a lot of journalists don't because he genuinely goes out there and interacts with it.

And he loves to have a drink and he loves to make like a borderline offensive joke. And he has, as you'll people hear, I think he has like a personality that's, I find very, very likable and accessible and it's, you know, him and I got into it a little bit towards the end of the event. Um, we disagreed very strongly about something and it was, it was like, I enjoyed the back and forth with him in a way that I find is hard to enjoy with people all the time whom I disagree with. And I really appreciate that about him. And, you know, I thought Josh was Josh, you know, he does this, he has a certain kind of rhetorical approach where he's just like a fire hose of information where there's so, you

know, I want to unpack every sentence and it comes at you very fast. And it's a certain kind of punditry that I think is sort of like, you know, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, kind of like there's like a flood of info and it's quick talking and like, and sometimes it's hard to sort of slow it down and pick at certain things. But he is, as people will hear, I mean, he's incredibly well-informed, especially about a lot of the legal stuff. He's an attorney. He has a legal background. He has a lot of interesting experience professionally, aside from just being a political

pundit. And then, you know, Catherine is, again, another reporter who is an expert on these topics that we talked about, especially the economy. She made a really strong case, I thought, for some of the criminal cases against Trump and articulated them in a way that I haven't totally heard articulated. And, you know, there was some really obvious tension on stage that I'm glad we got to witness and play with and sort of wade through a little bit. As always, the end of the night was my favorite part. The reader or the audience questions were fascinating and they're always fascinating. And it's really interesting to hear where people's heads are at. And I wish we had another 30 minutes of that. But, you know, every time we, both the times we've done these events, I've left feeling like we could have made that three hours and I still felt, would have felt like we were just scratching

the surface kind of. Yeah. I don't really want to add too much more. I think you broke down everybody who was on the stage and people are about to listen to that podcast. So I think we should let him get to that. Unless there's anything you want to complain about. We haven't grieved about anything. here at Tangle. It's been a great week for me. I should not be complaining about anything. You've gone soft. I've gone soft. Yeah. Now I'll have like six grievances by next week. So, but yes, so we're going to drop you guys in. This is the Tangle live event from April 17th in New York City at City Winery. Phoebe, my wife, introduces me and brings me on stage. And we have our guests, Michael Moynihan, Josh Hammer, and Catherine Rampell. I hope you guys enjoy. As always, if you want to reach us,

you can write to me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C at readtangle.com or Ari, A-R-I at readtangle.com. And we'll see you guys next weekend. We'll be right back this evening for a while. We ask that you please take a stand for our all-star group, Unwanted. Thank you. Enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. Wow, this is great. My name is Phoebe Padgett. I am Isaac's wife. Thank you. It's really great news for me.

We just want to come out and say we're so glad that you're all here. I think most of you know that we moved to the small town of Philadelphia. And so we're very glad to be back in a real city. Sorry. Back where it started. Are you kidding? This is my family heckling me. So we're just very excited to be back here where it all started.

And with that, I'd like to introduce my husband, the founder of Tangle, Isaac Saul. Thank you. Hostile crowd to the Philly joke. I was not sure how that was going to go over. Thank you guys all so much for being here. This is awesome. I just want to echo what Phoebe just said. This is a dream come true for me to be here in New York City with a sold-out room at City Winery.

So thank you guys all for coming here. Yes, give it up. Okay, I've got a few thank yous that I just have to go through. First of all, I do want to thank the venue, City Winery. Please tip your bartenders, hang out, order some food, order some drinks. They've been awesome to us. And I've come here as a guest before,

so it's really cool to be on stage. Very grateful to be here. I also want to thank my team, who you guys will meet before we get out of here tonight. Magdalena is not with us. She has a newborn baby at home, so she's back in Oregon right now. But John Lull, who's on the cameras,

Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, also my dad, who's sitting up here, who's one of our trusty editors on the newsletter, Bailey. Sean Brady, our copy editor, is also not here, but is very, very important. He saves a lot of mistakes in the newsletter every day. And Russell, our intern, who's working the merch table, you might have saw him when you came in. Please hit that merch table up before you get out of here. It's very important. All those people make this possible, and I would not be here without them. I hate to do this, but I also have to thank my brother, Ruben. Tough to do. It's hard to say those words out loud. Ruben is the one who

had the idea for doing a Tangle event. We had, when we were growing up, I would say a relationship with a lot of animosity. He was the stereotypical big brother and it's been awesome working with him. I don't know how else to say it. It's really special. Everything that's happening here is because of him. So if we screw something up and it goes wrong, it's his fault. But also he, you know, he was the one who encouraged this. He told me to do this. He's now the official Tangle tour manager, and it's really cool to have a kind of family affair thing. So thank you, Ruben. Yes.

You met Phoebe. I have to thank her. She is out here, and we thought it'd be really cool to have her come out to start the show tonight. She's the most popular podcast guest we've ever had on Tangle. Every time she comes on the show, we get, like, hundreds of emails about it. And I figured it was time to let her get a moment up here. And also, like she said, just being in New York is so special for us.

There's nothing I can say up here to, you here to encapsulate what she's done to support me to make this possible, but thank you, Phoebe. I love you very much. Yeah. In a similar vein, my mother's sitting up here too. You know, what can you say about a great mom?

I mean, there are no words she also was one of the first people who encouraged me to just go out on my own and do my own thing four or five years ago when I couldn't find a job that I wanted and uh she was in my corner and told me to take a risk and I did it and it was the best decision I ever made so thank thank you very much, mom. I appreciate it. Um, there was going to be a special guest here tonight. I found out right before the show that he's actually not here, which sucks. Uh, he is Phoebe's brother. His name's Evan. And I wanted to shout him out because he's actually the person who came up with the name Tangle, which is very important. And early on, when I didn't know what I was going to name the newsletter and I was just starting, I took reader

submissions and he submitted Tangle. And I knew right when I saw it, I was like, that was it. And I texted him, I thanked him, I told him I was going to choose it. And we made like a handshake agreement that I would give him 1% of whatever the company became, which was a horrible decision. He brings it up like once a month now. So I was going to tell him to stand up and give him a little round of applause. Unfortunately, his babysitter got very sick tonight, so he's home with his kids. But I wanted to shout him out. I also wanted to just emphasize how important what he did was. I went back and looked at some of the other names that we had for Tangle.

So I'm just going to read a couple. Backpocket News, terrible name. The Shuffle, Unpacked, Amplify, Click and Know. I think Sean Keegan's here tonight. He suggested Deere ears. All time awful name idea. Yeah, anyway, Tangle happened because Evan submitted a really good name in part.

So yes, I had to thank him. And then last but not least, and then I'm going to move on. I also want to thank our sponsor tonight, which is Summit Impact. Yeah, they're out here. There's a bunch of them here. I am a fellow in Summit Impact. They have something called a Democracy Lab.

It's a really cool program. Summit, and I'm sure they will appreciate this, is a very hard organization to explain. They do so much. They have a huge range of, you know, policy stuff that they work on, kinds of people they bring together. They throw these awesome events that I sort of have described as like TED Talk meets Burning Man. Like, if you want to party with a bunch of really, really smart people who talk about super intellectual stuff, go to their events. It's so interesting and fun They helped make this event happen. They helped get these guests here and I couldn't have done it without them

So thank you to the whole summit team. He's here tonight and for putting this on All right, I want to talk a little bit about what's about to happen Obviously if you're here, you know the Tangle story, so I don't want to harp on it too much. But I do want to talk about why we're here, in my opinion, and what I'm hoping to do tonight. Aside from bringing together a room full of very open-minded people who I think are willing to step outside of their comfort zone and hear ideas they might not agree with. We're also trying to model civil discourse. There are three guests backstage who I'm about to introduce and bring out tonight, and we're going to moderate a little discussion. They're all very,

very smart people. They're very qualified people, and they disagree on a lot of stuff. And I just think that, just like sit with that. Three smart people, experienced, have disagreements, should make all of us very curious and open-minded. And I want tonight to be a space where we can just talk about some of the things happening in our country and hear from some people who are probably gonna offend you,

probably gonna make you wanna clap, probably gonna make you want to clap, probably going to make you want to laugh. And all of that's good. And we should all kind of lean into that feeling. I think that's like the fundamental Tangle ethos. It's really important to me that we're doing this because I don't think it happens enough in our country right now. In fact, I would say it's happening less and less every day. And I'm really proud to be part of a team that's helping kind of change that a little bit. Thank you. Obviously, all of this happens in the context of the fact that in a few months, we're going to have a very important election. Everybody says all the time, you know, big, divisive, most important election ever, most divisive election ever. This is going to be a know big divisive most important election ever most divisive election

ever this is going to be a big divisive election i don't think there's any you know there's no way around that so my goal tonight is to talk a little bit about the 2024 presidential election the two candidates that for better or for worse we have to choose from realistically and maybe the third candidate who might make things a little bit interesting. And we're going to talk about some of the issues related to the election. So the economy, immigration, abortion, some of the legal things that are happening right now down the street, which we'll talk about right off the top. So we're going to do that. And then right after we get done, we're going to chat for about 45 minutes.

We're going to do an audience Q&A. So we're going to have a live mic going around the room. And we're going to take questions for about 15 or 20 minutes. And then in the kind of tangle ethos, I will end the night with a good news story. Just to keep the brand alive like we do in the newsletter every day. Sound good? Great. All right. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our guests for the evening. First up is Catherine Rampell, who is a Washington Post columnist. She writes about economics,

public policy, immigration, and all sorts of very interesting data-driven issues. Catherine, welcome to the stage. Next up is Michael Moynihan. Michael is one of the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast. He's a journalist, former national correspondent at Vice News, former editor at Reason Magazine. His podcast is one of my favorites. Michael Moynihan, welcome to the stage. And last but not least is Josh Hammer. Josh

is a nationally syndicated columnist. He's the senior editor at Newsweek. He's an attorney and he's the host of the Josh Hammer podcast. Another person like our first two guests who I absolutely read every time he publishes something. Josh Hammer, welcome to the stage. All right, great. So I'm just going to jump right in and get started. When we came in today, we passed right down the road a courthouse where a former president is currently on trial this week. The first time that's ever happened in United States history that a president's sitting for a criminal trial. I want to start with Catherine. You've written in some of your Washington Post columns about this notion that prosecutors are kind of

overzealously pursuing Trump and argued that they've been right to charge him in things like the real estate fraud case where he was overwhelmingly guilty, in your words. And when you look at kind of this kaleidoscope of cases that Trump is facing now, I'm curious to hear why you believe they're, I guess I'd say broadly justified under the law and why you're supportive of some of the prosecutions that are happening. Sure. To be clear, I know a lot of people have argued, and my guess is that one of our fellow panelists will disagree with me on this and may say this, that Trump is only being prosecuted because he was president or is running for president. I think if we had a more zealous white-collar crime law

enforcement team, he probably would have been prosecuted for stuff like this 20 years ago, 30 years ago. I mean, maybe not the hush money payments because that was connected to an election, but a lot of the overstating of assets, for example, or understating of them for that matter, when he was dealing with the tax man, tax assessors. So I think that the fact that he wasn't prosecuted to date really is more of a reflection of the fact that our white collar justice system has, and in particular, the piece that you're referring to was about the bank fraud case, that he overstated the value of his assets in order to get more favorable loan terms as well as more favorable insurance terms. And the usual arguments that I hear about why that, in particular, should not have gone to trial, that was a civil case, are that A, it was a victimless

crime, or excuse me, well, people say victimless crime. Technically, again, civil case, not criminal. Victimless, transgression. And that B, it only empowers him politically. So let me go through each of those. On the victimless transgression, or whatever you want to call it, just because the banks didn't come out and ask for these charges to be filed does not mean that there were no victims. these charges to be filed does not mean that there were no victims. In fact, anybody who applied for a loan and reported their income assets and liabilities honestly, who played by the rules, was put at a disadvantage because people like Trump were instead shading the truth, shall we say, or more than shading, darkening the truth. And there is a finite amount of capital to go around. So the fact that Trump overstated the

value of his assets does not, meant that somebody else out there, some other potential entrepreneur or borrower did not get a loan as a result. And think about all the more productive uses of the millions of dollars that went to Trump. What if they had gone to somebody else? You know, what might have happened? And there were also huge risks that were taken by the insurance companies as a result of this. And in fact, one of the things that he lied about was that he had said he was not under investigation for some set of crimes. I forget exactly what the details were when he was, in fact, under investigation, which raises the risk profile for that entity that was being insured. And so the insurance company, as soon as they found that out, jacked up his premium.

So they clearly thought that they had the wool pulled over their eyes. Beyond that, when we're talking about fraud, laws against fraud exist to protect the integrity of the marketplace, right? We need to have trust in counterparties in order to engage in transactions. I need to know that if I send money to someone in exchange for a good or service, that good or service will be delivered. I need to know that if I sign a contract, if I hold up my end of the bargain, the other side will as well, or else there may be legal repercussions. That's what rule of law is about. And that actually enhances the business environment, the fact that we have trust. enhances the business environment, the fact that we have trust. That's why we have trust. We enforce laws against fraud. That is why it is better to do business in the United States than in China,

than in Russia, than in lots of other countries where they don't have rule of law. So again, just because you don't necessarily identify a specific victim who lost a discrete amount of money doesn't necessarily mean that it's good to let fraud go, you know, sort of laws for fraud to go unenforced because you erode trust in the system. So that's point one. Hold on one second. I actually want to stop you right there before you get into the politics of it. I'm curious to hear you respond to that a little bit, because I do think, you know, based on some of the public comments I've seen you make, I think you disagree and maybe not specifically about the civil fraud case. But I'd be interested to hear you answer that,

because I think that is actually the best argument for prosecuting Trump, in my opinion. Yeah, so thank you so much for having me to Isaac and to Tangle. It's really wonderful to be here and look forward to a fruitful and productive and, you know, who knows what may come of this conversation. Perhaps we'll even find some common ground up here. So, you know, look, I talk about all these cases every single day on my second podcast, which is called America on Trial, which is a legal podcast with a special focus on the Trump lawfare. So, you know, just kind of a shameless plug there for those of you who like what I have to say. You know, I think the Tish James civil fraud case is interesting. It's also not what you referred to when you said you drove by the courthouse this morning. I mean, that's a very separate case. That would be the Alvin Bragg prosecution on so-called hush money payments. So

I will very, very briefly address the civil fraud case and then just comment on the Alvin Bragg case. The Tish James case is worth pointing out. I think it's worth providing some context here. When Tish James ran for attorney general of New York State back in 2018, she literally campaigned across the entire state saying that she was going to get Donald Trump and that when she got into office that she would use every resource at her disposal to do so. And sure enough, she has stepped in as a third party intervener in a civil suit. This is not a prosecution. Notwithstanding the fact that no other financial counterparty, and these are very sophisticated financial institutions, these are, you know, top white shoe law firms or excuse me, top

white shoe investment banks like Deutsche Bank. Those are some of the actual counterparties that were actually involved here with lending with the Trump organization. Not only did none of them file a lawsuit, they actually oftentimes wanted to do more business with Donald Trump. If you look at the records, there are email records suggesting that some parts of the bank wanted to do more business and some were very scared off by doing business with him. The folks who were so skittish- The people who got bonuses were more interested in doing the business with him.

Right. But the folks who were so skittish as to not want to do more business apparently did not make it very high up the food chain because this thing never even got remotely close to the level of a lawsuit. More generally speaking, even if there is a black letter legal violation here, which there may or may not be, the much more important point for our purposes and your purposes as New Yorkers – I'm a Floridian. I don't live here anymore, but the much more relevant purpose for those of you who work on Wall Street and work in your fancy law firms and your investment banks and all these fancy white shoe professions is that if this precedent holds, the potential ex-ante forward-looking incentive structure for entrepreneurship and investment and venture capital and all that in New York State are genuinely harrowing, which is why you have folks like Kevin O'Leary, so-called Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank, who was doing all the media rounds, going around and saying that if this president stands, he will not invest a penny

in New York State and he would encourage absolutely everyone he talks to to not invest a penny in New York State. Because what that would mean at that point is that the attorney general could swoop in and use the power of the state to step in as a third-party intervener to try to bankrupt her company to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars because she happens to think that it is a merited lawsuit while the other counterparties do not think so. Hold on one second. Can I ask you, when you say the precedent, you mean the idea that Tish James has wide latitude to bring lawsuits? What's the precedent you're talking about? to bring lawsuits?

Like, what's the precedent you're talking about? The precedent is because virtually every business is not necessarily going to keep the books exactly in the most... This was not an error. No, this was not a simple error. You can look at the documents.

Deutsche Bank, when they give out loans, these are sophisticated counter parties. He claimed that the square footage of his apartment was like several multiples of what it actually was. These are not simple errors. I agree. People should not be prosecuted for making simple, innocent errors. such as the well-known fact that he assessed Mar-a-Lago at roughly $18 million. But transitioning to your actual driving by the courthouse this morning and the criminal prosecution here of Alvin Bragg, you know, there are more holes in this particular prosecution than your local block of Swiss cheese at the supermarket store. So where to even begin here? So we're dealing with fraudulent bookkeeping, which is a New York state misdemeanor.

That's where the 34 counts of the Alvin Bragg indictment that dropped just over a year ago are. That crime has a two-year statute of limitations, which told many years ago. Now, Alvin Bragg's attempt to get around that statute of limitations while simultaneously upping this thing from a misdemeanor to a felony is that he's going to claim that the fraudulent bookkeeping, aka the legal services provided to Michael Cohen when he paid off the porn store Stormy Daniels. I know it sounds really fun. It's like a Hollywood script. You can't make this stuff up. But the claim is that when the Trump organization recorded this $130,000 payment to Michael Cohen as legal services, it was improper because it was actually in furtherance

of Donald Trump's 2016 election. And that has many of its own problems. The statute of limitations arguably doesn't apply even there. Alvin Bragg is also a local prosecutor. He has dubious jurisdiction, to put it mildly, to actually bring a federal lawsuit, which is what the alleged campaign finance activity is. All of that aside here, it is blatantly erroneous for one clear and obvious reason, which is the fact that in order to prove a campaign finance violation as the Clinton nominee, the former Democratic FEC Federal Election Commissioner Brad Smith himself has said, in order to prove that a donation was made for the purposes of campaign finance, that has to be the sole and unequivocal and exclusive reason for the donation. It can't

have gone to any other reason out there. And I have one very, very simple reason, which I actually explained to my podcast this morning, as to why this is obviously not true here. It's Donald Trump. I mean, if it was like Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee or a Republican politician who presented himself as like a very pious Christian conservative, then maybe he might try to pay off someone if he had a personal foible in some bedroom somewhere to try to make the girl go away. Donald Trump's the dude who's been like on the cover of Playboy magazine. I mean, like this was part of the equation. This guy was in Iowa in 2016 talking about two Corinthians, not second Corinthians. The people who nominated Donald Trump knew exactly the kind of Playboy, the guy who ran Miss Universe in Atlantic City that they were getting. The notion that this was made in sole and exclusive furtherance to aid his election, the same guy that had the NBC News Billy Butch grabbing by the you-know-what tape, it's utterly absurd and ludicrous. So I guess it's interesting, and I

want to bring you in here, Michael. I mean, I guess I kind of split the difference on the Alvin Bragg case a little bit. I mean, I think it's very obvious that they paid off Stormy Daniels. I feel very skeptical about the kind of novel legal strategies that are being used to turn this into a felony, and I don't actually think they're going to get a conviction. Just zooming out a little bit, and this is a question for you, Michael. I'm curious. I think where the country's splitting right now is sort of a side that feels like there are these unjust prosecutions of Donald Trump and that everything we're seeing is motivated by politics, that they want to stop him

from winning in 2024. And then there's this side that's like, here's this guy who's just a lifelong crook and everything's catching up to him finally. And I'm interested to hear how you sort of view that dichotomy. And if you want to talk a little bit about, you know, what they've discussed here. Well, yeah, I mean, both of those things can be true, right? I wasn't aware that you were putting me next to a guy that has a podcast about this subject. He knows literally everything about the subject. It's just that he did a podcast today about it. Lord in heaven, Andy, economics, you know, it's a tough, it's a tough person to be next to.

I look at this in a couple of different ways. You'll be okay, Mike. I'll be fine. A couple of different ways is I tend to look at these things from, you know, I really regret something. We were talking backstage about Bill Maher's show. And in 2016, 15, I was on Bill Maher's show. And I said something I really regretted. I was, you know, said, look at these people that are voting for Donald Trump. They're dopes. It was like my own deplorables moment. But the difference was that nobody gave a shit when I said it. Nobody paid attention. And I remind people, they're like, oh, you said that. No one

cared. But I carried that with me because for four years after that, I was on the road. No one cared. But I carried that with me because for four years after that, I was on the road. And I was doing this show for HBO, this Vice News Tonight for HBO, and I met 50,000 Donald Trump supporters. I went to about, you know, dozens and dozens of Trump rallies. I went to my last one in Detroit recently. And you end up talking to people and realizing that when they turn around and boo you, by the way, in the press pen, fake

news, then they come and talk to you after and they're all really nice. It was a very jarring experience. But when you talk to, recently I talked to people about this in Detroit and I heard something pretty interesting. I mean, these points are certainly interesting from a legal perspective and getting in the weeds and this stuff. But if you talk to the average Trump voters, a couple of things that consistently come up. One is that on this one in particular that you were discussing, he paid it back. So what? He paid it back. And it wasn't the banks themselves that complained. Okay, next step. Well, you know, the integrity of the system and the response is going to be, what fucking integrity of the financial system? Do you remember 2008?

Do you see how these people rip us off? You know, this is a populist kind of message. And then the overarching thing is, and this is one I, it really resonates with me. The first couple of years of the podcasts that I do that you very generously introduced was in the first years of Trump's administration. And a couple of listeners went back and said, man, you're fairly credulous about the Russia stuff. And I said, oh, absolutely. Something smelled a bit wrong here. On the other side of this, Donald Trump says it's a hoax. I mean, we can parse the words there.

But it was a lot of bullshit, a lot of bullshit, going back through it. And it was a lot of bullshit a lot of bullshit going back through it and it was a journalist who's worked for the new york times um jeff what's the name right for the thing for the columbia journalism review going over the coverage of it and good lord how breathless it was go back and watch rachel maddow's stuff about we're going to have his tax returns we're going to have his tax returns. We're going to destroy him tomorrow. He is a Kremlin asset. What is the other side of that? Well, the other side of that is people stop trusting the things that you say about Donald Trump. And to Josh's point, they know he's a bullshitter. They know he's a liar. They expect this sort of thing. They've adjusted to it. They don't care that much. And look, he won. I mean, look, the interesting exit poll from South Carolina

was the number of people that said if he was convicted of a felony, I wouldn't vote for him. Nikki Haley voters, that was about 60% that they wouldn't vote for him in general. But so it has some effect, of course. But there is just the volume of Donald Trump stuff. And you were hoping he would disappear just from a journalistic perspective, so you'd have to stop dealing with it. It was just endlessly boring volume of Donald Trump stuff. And you were hoping he would disappear just from a journalistic perspective. So you'd have to stop dealing with it. It was just endlessly boring to hear Donald Trump. And then you go to the rallies and you're like, oh, he's actually kind of funny. This, I'm sorry to say, but he's a funny, he's funny on stage. And that's when you're trying to understand what makes this guy so popular. That's it. So when you get to these really

specific things about financial crimes, people tend not to care, particularly when in that one, they say, well, you know, he paid off a porn star. That's what we're getting as, as Josh was pointing out. Um, he paid the banks back. Joe Biden had stuff in his, in his garage too. There, everybody has a pretty, you know, not a strange justification for it, just a rather bland one. And when, you know, Tish James is campaigning on this, Alvin Bragg is an elected Democrat. We know they don't like him. So yeah, it's not a hard sell for people to think that just the volume of this right before an election, as you pointed out, the first time it's ever happened, that there's something political about it. I think there's something political and I think there's something about it, too. That's why I'm sitting in the middle seat.

Catherine, I want to follow up now about point number two, because Michael just alluded to it there. It's like, how this stuff actually plays with the public. So you were going to kind of, I think, make the case that actually pursuing these prosecutions is not necessarily a political disaster. I'd like to hear that argument. Actually, what I was going to say is a lot of the argument against the prosecutions has been it helps Trump. Like I've heard a lot of people on the left say, why are they going after him for all these things? It just helps him. It feeds his persecution complex, which is what his voters really like, you know. And I say, I don't give a fuck. Like,

if he did it, you know, I don't, to be honest, I don't really care about the hush money payment. I think the financial crimes thing is a really big deal, especially when it is that flagrant and undermines trust in the entire business environment. And in fact, I think the fact that Kevin O'Leary says that now he's not going to do business in New York because he's afraid somebody's going to go after him for fraud says a little bit more about him than about the legal environment in New York. I'm not aware of any potential crimes that he's committed I'm not suggesting he did but I I would think like if you if you didn't I'm not again not talking about honest mistakes this was not a smoking gun in the case with Trump it was a a smoking arsenal there is so much documented paperwork that shows the ways that he broke the law here. And I just don't understand

how you can, how you can ignore that. On the point about maybe it'll backfire politically, that's not what the legal system is supposed to be about. And in fact, I agree that Tish James should not have campaigned on this. I think that was very detrimental to faith in the rule of law and probably harmful in this case. That doesn't mean that he was not, he did not actually violate the law. Those are two separate things. And I don't think that prosecutors should be making decisions about which cases to pursue based on what political ramifications they will have. That, in fact, is something that Donald Trump does or wants to do. He has said publicly, oh, I'm going to go after my enemies. He has said, oh, you better be careful. If you're doing too well in the polls, when I'm in charge, I'll send the DOJ after you. I am not making this up. He has literally said

this on TV. And there are people who worked for him in his term as president before who have said under oath that he directed them to have the IRS audit his perceived political enemies. Again, this is the kind of thing that an authoritarian does, considering using the arm of the state to go after political enemies, that is not something that we should want anyone to do on either side, whether it helps our politics or not. So the idea that prosecutors should go easy on someone or turn a blind eye because maybe it'll help them win an election, I just don't think that should be part of the calculus. And besides, like, everything makes Trump stronger, you know? Like, I don't think that should be part of the calculus. And besides, like everything makes Trump stronger, you know, like I don't understand. Oh, it helps him if he gets prosecuted or he gets charges filed against him.

It helps him if he gets off. It helps him if he gets away with it, whatever. Like you can construct any narrative you want. And I don't think it should be part of the calculation. the calculation. And I don't think we even actually know. We can't run a controlled experiment here to see, you know, whether going after him for X, Y and Z actually has any bearing on the polls. Just real quick, I have to say, I think it's pretty funny, honestly, that we're talking here about being scared or wary of using the prosecutorial powers of the state to prosecute one's political opponents when that is quite literally what the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Department of Justice is currently doing in Washington, D.C. and Florida via special counsel Jack Smith, who is not actually

an independent counsel. I could get into legal distinction if we really want to, but he actually reports directly to the attorney general of the United States, Merrick Garland. So this is quite literally the president of the United States prosecuting his political opponent. If that sounds totalitarian to you, that's because it is. We'll be right back after this quick break. I'm glad you said that because the segue that I was about to introduce was that I wanted to table some of the, you know, the civil lawsuits and the fraud stuff and what's happening, you know, with the hush money payments and talk a little bit about the January 6th kind of stolen

election prosecutions. And I'll show my cards here and say that, you know, to me, that's pretty much the only thing I care about. I mean, I think the post-election actions from Trump were the most offensive to my sensibilities, whether it's, you know, calling people in Georgia looking for votes or just, you know, not turning the temperature down pre-January 6th. And I'm happy to start with you here, Josh. I mean, I suppose my question is, what are they supposed to do? Because I think there's, you know, at least I remember January 7th, 2021, quite clearly. And before everything got put through the partisan ringer, there was a sense that felt broad and mostly partisan that, A, this is the end of Trump's political career. And B, this is mostly his fault.

And C, he could have done a lot of things to stop what just happened. And then over the next few months, what we mostly got were these stories and recordings and all these things popping up that felt incriminating to me as someone who was trying to watch, you know, with an open mind and a balanced mind. And I found myself very much, you know, caught up in this idea that this guy, some of these things that he did felt extremely threatening and dangerous to me. And like they could be grounds for prosecution. So I'd be curious to hear you kind of, I guess, make your top level case about why the Justice Department shouldn't be pursuing some of these charges. So just because a certain action was icky or even monstrous or even amounted to flat

out lying on national television does not make it illegal. In fact, it was the late great Justice Antonin Scalia who famously said that if your view of the Constitution perfectly mirrors your own idiosyncratic policy preferences, then you're probably not doing a very good or honest job of interpreting the Constitution. And I would say the exact same thing to the rule of law in general, which is that if you think that every bad thing is necessarily a criminal offense, then you're probably not looking at the rule of law with a particularly honest eye. Look, just to put my cards on the table here, I don't know, many of you probably are not very familiar with me. I live in Florida. I was an extraordinarily vocal proponent of Ron DeSantis' presidential election.

I am not like a day one, you know, Mar-a-Lago MAGA guy. So I assess these cases, each and every one, with a very independent lens. I happen to think that the Florida prosecution in my current state happens to be the most legally serious of all of them. Happy to get into that if we want to, the classified documents case, because Jack Smith's actual indictment, again, this is just an indictment, it's just his view of the case, but he alleges that there was an actual ignoring of a grand jury subpoena. You can't do that, to put it mildly. So there's some other stuff in there as well. But the post-2020 election stuff, look, a lot of Trump's personal conduct and a lot

of the conduct of some people that I consider friends, honestly. I mean, like Jen Ellis, a lot of the people who I consider literal friends were on TV saying absolutely insane stuff. I mean, this notion like the infamous press conference where Rudy Giuliani had like the makeup like dripping down his forehead, you Hugo Chavez like voting from the grave. I mean look. I mean I have friends – many friends who work at Fox News. We all saw the Dominion settlement.

I mean like this stuff was nasty. Like there were a lot of lies that were said during this extraordinarily tense period. It was the COVID. It was the Black Lives Matter. It was a lot going on out there. But again, not everything that is said rises to the level of a criminal offense. And with only very limited exceptions in this country, it is not illegal to lie. So sometimes it is legal to lie. So for example, Congress passed a statute called the Stolen Valor Act, which basically says

that you cannot claim that you are the recipient of a Purple Heart or some sort of other claims of military honor. So it's not to degrade the military. It reached the U.S. Supreme Court. They upheld the constitutionality of it, if I recall. So there were very limited exceptions where they actually do criminalize lying. But Trump was allowed to go around and say that he won the election that they stole. That is not a criminal offense. Right, right. But hold on. But is he allowed to call a state election official and tell him to find votes in Georgia? I mean, is that allowed? It's vile conduct. I mean, it's abhorrent conduct. But Fonny Willis in Georgia, Fonny Willis in Georgia is attempting to prosecute him on RICO.

I agree. I mean, look, I think I agree that the way the case has been built and constructed makes me skeptical that it's going to go well. And look, what Trump's doing right now, the delay tactics and challenging all the procedural stuff, it's working. I mean, I think there's pretty much zero chance we see a trial before the election. But I also think that there, you know, I'm not worried about him tweeting so much. I'm worried about him orchestrating and pressuring actual election officials who have actual power to change actual votes. I mean, that to me is the thing that offends my sensibilities. And what is the actual crime that he violated with that?

I don't know. You're the lawyer. But it seems like that shouldn't be allowed, right? Like in a democracy, can a president just call up a state election official and say like, you know, I'm going to campaign against you and tank you if you don't go find me 10,000 votes? That seems like problematic. For conduct that is so blatantly unpresidential, that involves lying, that involves intimidation, harassment, things like this that we traditionally and properly look down upon. The remedies are, one, the ballot box, which he had at that point already lost in November 2020, two, impeachment, which they tried and they lost a second time, and three, hypothetically, it would have been the Republican presidential primary this year. So the ballot box and the political process can continue to be a check. Again, not every actual instance of

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Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. So, like, how do you reconcile all of these things? Like, he can't be held accountable by Congress. He can't be held accountable by Congress. He can't be held accountable by the courts. The only remedy for any kind of crime is you have to run for president and then get turned down by the voters. I don't speak for Mitch McConnell, and that would be very humorous to Mitch McConnell to think that I do because I've been very vocally critical of him many times over the years.

But I think that the impeachment remedy would have been probably the proper remedy. I mean, if you think that his conduct breached the public trust to use Alexander Hamilton's language in Federalist No. 65, which is the precise language he uses to describe the aegis of impeachment, then if he breached public trust, then he should try him for impeachment. That really was the time to do it. I want to give you a chance to get in here, Michael, before we move on from some of the Trump trial stuff. Is it showing the look on my face? Can you see what I'm thinking here? Yeah. I mean, look, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat either. And I think that I very much am on your side that when that tape, the Brad Raffensperger thing in Georgia, was when I first saw the transcript of that, I mean, I saw that as a voter and I guess as a

political observer and pundit in some way. And I was just appalled. I don't really care if it's illegal. I just, it's enough to see that, find the votes, a particular number of votes. And I had friends that, you know, because, you know, people in the political world are on all different sides of issues. They were trying to parse that statement. Get the fuck out of here. You're kidding me. You don't think you know what somebody is like notoriously thuggish as Donald Trump is trying to say. Find the vote. He's trying to steal the election, right?

Whether that is legal to suggest that, because like, look, I get Josh's point too. I mean, there is a case here is that, you know, I might make your life hard. Well, that's clearly illegal. If you don't do this, if you say, find them and Brad Raffensperger says, no, and then we all move on. Is that illegal? I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. What I do know is that as a voter, I could never pull the lever for that person. And I'm shocked that people can. And I'll tell you what, I don't have that deep internal hatred of Donald Trump.

I don't like the guy. I know exactly who he is. And I was mentioning that earlier today, I did a podcast in which we talked for two hours. Very odd. Talked for two hours about the PBS documentary about William F. Buckley that came out. I don't know if anyone's seen this.

Came out two weeks ago. Nobody's watching that. Nobody's watched it. Defund PBS. It was really funny to watch because William F. Buckley was part defund PBS it was it was really funny to watch because William F. Buckley was part of my political education growing up because

I'm a huge loser and I watched that in McLaughlin group right I didn't really know William F. Buckley was a conservative I just knew he was this patrician Connecticut guy who spoke in that way but there's a part in the documentary of course that if you know William F. Buckley's history in which he runs the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement, right? And

Robert Welch, the founder, the Milk of Duds junior mints, I think he was responsible for, a millionaire that funded the John Birch Society, was a funder of National Review, his magazine. So he gave him money. And there was a point at which this was becoming a little too much for the conservative movement. It was basically founded by William F. Buckley in the mid-50s. And said, let's get rid of these people. Let's run them out of the movement. Why do I bring this up? Because my hope is I have a lot of conservatives in my world that I love. And I want that moment for somebody to stop caring about elections and start running these people out of the movement because they're a disgrace

to the party. They're a disgrace to themselves. And I just want that moment where we all say, that was a horrible mistake, wasn't it? And we go back to some sort of sensible conservatism. I'll give you an example of this. My friend Peter Meyer, a representative from Michigan, Republican, who voted to impeach. And guess who teamed up on him? You think it was just the MAGA people? No, it was the DNC too. They funded his MAGA candidate, his opponent in the primary, and that person won. And then that person lost in the general. Well-played DNC,

but a little bit scummy, isn't it? We're in that world where, you know, the internecine fighting of Republican politics has given us people that, you know, Donald Trump made fun of Peter Meyer, the spelling of his name was the weirdest thing. He's on stage denouncing these people. Those fights within the party, and you see what's happening now with the Speaker of the House, is that we're in this moment of clout. Why do we know about Marjorie Taylor Greene? She's a halfwit. And I'm saying this to somebody who likes a lot of Republicans. I mean, her, AOC, these people stand out because they're on social media, they get clicks.

And when I saw that Georgia thing, I hoped, and I was wrong, of course, that we were in a moment where we would get beyond the kind of Trump madness that has gripped the Republican Party and destroyed conservatism. I don't think there's anything conservative about – there's a few things here and there, but not much. And you'll see Donald Trump, who's the only thing he cares about is political survival. The man who said he was, you know, he saved more babies' lives than abortion and the rest of it. And guess what? Did anyone see that all of a sudden

he's moderated his position on this? Because Republicans are losing everywhere. Why do we trust these fucking people? They believe nothing. Peter Meyer, the representative, told me, lovely man, and I shouldn't be saying this, but whatever, we're only amongst friends and on video and audio. I am sorry, Peter. That the number of Republicans that came to him and said one thing publicly and said, he said it was like 95 95%. I mean, I was on, I was filming something, and the person I was filming with got a call from Mick Mulvaney, this was in 2016,

and he was saying, don't you dare leave the Republican Party if Donald Trump wins the nomination. This guy is a psycho, but we can get beyond it. On speakerphone, we were filming this. What happened to Mick Mulvaney? In the documents case, I guess he was very important, right? But yeah, I think that when I see that stuff, I just weep for the party itself. I think it's in a really bad state. But at the same time, I can agree with Josh that I think the ways of Democrats, liberals, et cetera, trying to dislodge him have been both wrong, sometimes morally wrong, and largely ineffective. I want to just make a small pivot here to, well, a pretty large pivot, I guess, to some

of the, I guess, another crucial issue I think that we're going to be hearing a lot about in the next few months, which is the general vibe around the economy. And this is going to be something that I think a lot of people are centering in their political campaigns, whether it's, you know, for the White House or down the ballot in the House and the Senate. And Catherine, this is, I think, something that's really in your strike zone. You write a lot about economics at the Washington Post. I'm curious to kind of hear how you would characterize the current state of the US economy to just set the table for a discussion about it. Because I think one thing

that I struggle with is just like explaining where we are, because it feels like everybody's feeling bad, but it looks like things might be good. And then you get an inflation report and you're like, oh, maybe I'm right to feel crappy about my rent or whatever. So I'd love to hear you just kind of characterize where we are right now. Sure. You are not the only one who is confused about the economy. Everyone is confused about the economy. If anyone tells you they understand what is going on in the economy, they are lying or deluding themselves. On paper, on most metrics, the economy looks awesome. Really. We have had unemployment below 4% for over two years. The last time that happened, Nixon was in office. We have had really strong GDP growth. In fact, our GDP numbers and our jobs numbers are beating every other

major country on earth. Not only that, they are doing better than had been predicted before the pandemic began. The IMF just came out with another report recently this week looking at where they thought economies were going to be in January 2020 as of now. So like the forecast they made in January 2020, right before the pandemic was officially declared, what would happen by 2024? The U.S., above those forecasts, everywhere else in the world, understandably way below them due to a combination of scarring from the pandemic and, of course, a lot of other complications since then. You know, the EU, for example,

has borne the brunt of the war in Ukraine economically. So on paper, things look really good with one exception. I'm sure you can guess what that is. That is inflation. And saying, well, the economy's good except for inflation is a little bit like saying, you know, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show? And look, the inflation numbers have gotten a lot better. They're still way above target. They're like in the threes, three percent year over year. The Fed is aiming for two percent. But right now, Americans' wages are actually outrunning inflation, which is a good thing. That doesn't mean people feel great about it. And I don't think people are making it up when they say that they don't feel good about it. I feel like there are a lot of Democrats

and progressives who say, oh, Americans are just like brainwashed by all this negative media, you know, Fox News telling them the economy sucks. Everything looks great. They're so rich. They have so many jobs. Like they're just imagining the fact that their finances aren't great or the economy isn't doing well. I don't think that's quite right. I think inflation actually has been very painful. We have a lot of data to show that in industrialized countries, at the very least, presumably also in lower income countries, when you have a surprise shock of inflation, that is among the worst possible things for a political incumbent party. People really don't like it. They hate it much more than a recession, for example,

because it feels very destabilizing, right? It is destabilizing. And the fact that people's wages are now outrunning inflation, I think, is kind of cold comfort because there's this sort of conventional wisdom in economics that people think that if they got a raise, they deserved it, they did it. If prices went up, it happened to them. In fact, part of the reason people have been getting wage increases is because of inflation, right? Like they're pressuring their employers to raise their pay so that they can keep up with the cost of living, et cetera. But people don't necessarily think about it that way. Like only nerdy economists think about it that way. So I think people are

legitimately pissed off. And they've also seen a lot of price growth to date. And it happened so fast, even if it's slowing down now, it happens so fast that they're like still having sticker shock whenever they go to the grocery store. You know, they remember when milk was a dollar or two less because it wasn't that long ago. Prices always go up over time. You know, there's like that stereotype of the old man saying, I remember when coffee was a nickel or whatever. And it sounds silly. But like people actually do remember a year ago when stuff was a lot cheaper, when going out for dinner was, you know, 25 bucks a head at a, you know, mid price point place rather than 50 bucks a head or whatever it is. So I think people are legitimately pissed off about that stuff. And I think it is unhelpful for Democrats to just kind

of tell people to feel better. The challenge, of course, is if you're Joe Biden, if you are the Democrats and you're trying to sell people on this economy, how do you do it in a way that doesn't feel tone deaf? And I think that is legitimately very challenging to say, like, look at all these great job gains, but we feel your pain. You know, it's like it's so difficult to to thread that needle. I think the good thing going for the economy politically for Democrats is that if you look at the consumer confidence numbers, they have been improving. at the consumer confidence numbers, they have been improving. They're still not where you would expect them to be today, given all of the other stuff I was just talking about, you know, jobs and GDP and all that stuff, and even, you know, cooling inflation. Like, there are, for, I don't know if this is still the case, but when I looked a couple of months ago, people were as negative

about the economy today as they were during the Great Recession, following the financial crisis, which is just, like like wild to me because it is objectively better, like whatever your complaints are today, like it is objectively better today than it was in 2009. And I think it'll just take a little while for consumers to catch up. And I think that's honestly part of the reason why Republicans have been pivoting away from messaging about the economy and more towards immigration, more towards other kinds of issues that are probably going to be much more salient by November. Moinan, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this a little bit. One of the things that kind of interests me about the politics of

this is that, you know, we've seen polling where someone gets elected, a new president comes into office, and the sentiment around the economy will literally flip in like a matter of two weeks. I guess I'm curious, you know, if you think this is an issue that Biden can run on strongly or not? No, not at all. And why everybody feels so bad? I think that was a really great kind of summation of it. And the thing is, I mean, it reminds me of when people were polled during the Obamacare debate, and it was like, you know, is American health care a total disaster? And it was like, you know, whatever, 70% of people say it's a total disaster. And then asked about their own doctor. They're like, oh, it's incredible.

Mine, 99% of people are like, mine is perfect. And I think that's the thing that people miss about this is that they might be doing fine, but they presume that everybody else isn't. And one of those, you know, indices is prices. And you have to really not pay attention to the problem. And look, I was really mean about Donald Trump a second ago. I feel bad about it. I'm going to be nice about him now.

And say the one thing that was actually helpful of the inclusion in the discourse that had been taken out of the political discourse for so long was the idea of talking about elites and elitism and class and things like that. And so many people who are making these comments, whether they're progressives or whether they're just general economists or political people, live so far outside of the world where they see price increases. They just don't see it. I happen to be very cheap. I'm an amazingly cheap person. So I notice these things all the time. And I can't believe the price of things like this is absolutely insane. And, you know, I make my own money. So I don't, you know, my wages keep up with however good or lazy I'm feeling that week. And so the other thing about it is that, you know, maybe you have an adjustable rate mortgage. Anybody have one of these? I'm sure some people do.

Or maybe you want to buy a new apartment or buy a new house and sell your old house. Guess who's not going to buy your house? A lot of people. Because mortgages are 7% now. I mean, this stuff matters to people. That ricochet effect for people is very, very serious. The perception of things is everything in politics. So I always loved the Thomas Frank, who actually weirdly has been very good recently. I liked a lot of his stuff recently. But he wrote a book called What's the Matter with Kansas? Did anyone read this back in like 2004?

Which I always thought was the weirdest premise. And you read a couple of pages in, it's like, why do these people not care about the issues that I care about? Like they're all up in culture war issues. They should be progressives because they care about abortion. They shouldn't care about that. It's like, never tell people what they should or shouldn't care about. And I think that's the weird thing about perception and the perception in politics is that we want people to care about certain things. We get mad when they don't care about them,

and particularly when they don't see them in that way, because people live things. They don't live them through charts and graphs. And people are selective, right? I mean, they see one thing's gone up, maybe everything else has gone down, but the one thing that they see that they like has gone up, and that's going to affect them. I don't think this is a good issue for Democrats, even if the numbers are good. I mean, I think that they're flailing in a lot of ways because of things like immigration. And you see Trump's pivot on abortion and Biden's pivot on immigration

trying to go to where the center is. I mean, out of primary season, you're just trying to go where the nutcases are. And now you have to win a general election. And now everyone's diving towards the center a bit. I mean, not, but Trump, you know, like someone I heard the other day making the case that Trump is becoming a centrist candidate and it's not totally wrong. I mean, people don't want to think that because they just dislike him so much,

but there is a certain centrist, centrist, and there's a certain continuity, particularly on economic issues with Trump and Biden. My biggest dislike of Trump's economic policy was his unbelievably idiotic reliance on tariffs and his love affair with tariffs. I did a film for HBO. I don't know why they let me do this. I pitched them. I said, can I do a full hour on the trade war? And they said yes. And I was like, are you fucking serious?

And they're like, yeah, OK, yeah, fine. They weren't paying attention. So we took as a premise Donald Trump's idea, like, we're going to make all the iPhones in America. We should make them here, right? And then this unbelievable boondoggle with Foxconn in Wisconsin, which was an unbelievable waste of taxpayer money. They never made anything. They said that then they changed the screens. And the premise of the piece was you cannot make these in America. We don't have the material to make this stuff in America. And it was bad for the economy. Economists all point this out. I think you've written about this, but the tariffs were bad. And guess what?

Joe Biden kept them right in place. So from one idiocy to another, we see them fighting. We see the left, right, and your friends fighting on social media. But there's often a lot of continuity between these policies and continuity between bad policies. I mean, we have inflation because everyone wanted to spend a ton of money. Everyone wanted to just print and spend during COVID. Now there's a reason for it. It's not irrational in certain ways, but everybody, who's spending? Donald Trump's, yes. Joe Biden's, yes. I mean, it's a hard issue to run on. One thing I will say about the trade stuff is that I think politicians recognize that tariffs are bad and raise costs for consumers and kill jobs when they're the other guy's tariffs. But then once they're their tariffs,

then they're great. And literally this happened this week with Joe Biden. So like three days ago, there was a White House spokesperson who was rightly criticizing Trump's plan to have a 10% global tariff, which is, as some of you may know, something that Trump has been... Which is completely insane. It's completely insane. It's one of the most insane things. I think we disagree on a lot,

but that one I think we agree on is completely nuts. If you are trying to get prices down, why would you do something to make them go up? Like it's legitimately confusing besides the fact that we're going to have counter tariffs and trade wars because we saw this before. And that's going to potentially tank the U.S. economy and global economy, all that good stuff. The point is, a Biden official said this is bad, this is inflationary. Guess what Biden did today? He announced new tariffs. He said that he was going to triple the tariffs on Chinese-made steel and aluminum,

which, if it were successful, would raise the costs of goods that American manufacturers buy. There are about, there's a much larger universe of companies that rely on steel as an input to make other stuff, like cars or washing machines or whatever, than there are people who actually make steel in the United States. It's a ratio of about 80 to 1, in fact. And we already have a gazillion tariffs on steel and aluminum from China. If it were successful, it would raise those costs. It would make American companies less competitive. The only upside is of this whole announcement is that we are we now import so little steel from China because of all those other tariffs that it's like probably not going to make any difference. Scott Lincecum, those other tariffs that it's like probably not going to make any difference. Scott Lincecum,

who's a trade guy at Cato, said it's like double secret probation. You know, it's like putting China at double secret probation. It's like they already have so many tariffs, it's not really going to do anything. But I am worried if you look at the statement from the White House today, there was some hint that they were going to maybe consider tariffs on Mexican steel, which actually we do buy a lot of. So, you know, like a few days ago, Biden says tariffs bad. They raise prices. They, you know, they contribute to inflation today, the exact opposite. And if you look actually at what, as Michael was just pointing out, if you look at what Biden said in 2019, 2020, he also was very critical of Trump's tariffs and then kept them in place. Can I say something really quickly because I'm in the middle seat and

I see the middle thing. OK, the middle thing is this, is that in the 90s, we were very bullish on trade, myself included. There are downsides to trade. We did not foresee a lot of this and we were not prepared for it. It is that tariffs are a tax on the middle class.

They're a tax on the lower middle class. It raises prices on imports, obviously. But there was a hollowing out and that is the MIT economist david otter who's written about this and that is actually true i think that the benefits outweigh the the negatives but that's it's not without consequence i want to make sure to point that out because i'm in the middle and can someone get me a casamigos and soda please thank you very much don it's been done for ages and i I'm so thirsty.

Ironically, I probably find myself, I guess, the most pro-tariff, whether it's Trump or Biden up here. But I'll come back to that in just a little bit there. I actually don't really disagree with much of what Catherine had to say with kind of her macro level view of the economy in the 2024 election. So y'all might remember that last year, the Biden-Harris campaign tried to roll out their big Bidenomics campaign pitch. They actually did it during NFL opening weekend. It was a Thursday night game. It was like Detroit versus Kansas City, if memory serves. They had this big 30-second ad. The whole thing just went over like a lead balloon. And, you know, for those of us who are in the weeds on this stuff, and we read all the morning newsletters, you know, Tangle included, obviously, and you see just how much the Biden people are struggling. They're palpably frustrated.

You can basically hear them screaming, why don't the American people buy that this economy is so good? And a lot of it does have to do with the fact that there has been extraordinarily high inflation. So in the summer of 2022, inflation reached 9.1% annualized on the CPI index. That is the highest inflation in 40 years. I mean, that is no freaking joke. That is really, really high. And Catherine's correct that we now have positive real wage growth.

Wage growth has finally surpassed inflation again because inflation has gone down from 9.1% to somewhere between 3% and 4%. But for most of the Biden presidency, wage growth was actually negative in real inflation-adjusted terms. And people feel that. The price of eggs increased 33% year over year. Chicken was like 20% back in 2022. Gas, I mean, the war on energy has been a massive, massive contributor to people feeling like the state of the economy is not very good. They are feeling that very much at the pump.

Energy resources are 100% hurting people here. But just a quick word on the tariff debate here. Look, we're here in the heart of the Acela Corridor. I don't expect this crowd to particularly relate to what I'm about to say. But for anyone who has actually spent some time in either proverbial or real America, you see— That's how you make sure they're not going to be on your side. That's the exact recipe to make them not on your side. But go ahead. If you spent any time in the Midwest, in the American hardland, you have actually seen

the tangible, very practical results of bipartisan neoliberal trade consensus, the so-called Washington Consensus, the mentality that led that infamous economist, the George H.W. Bush White House back in 1990 to say, computer chips, potato chips, what's the difference? It is this utter hubris to just let the chips, no pun intended, fall as they may on a global scale. Well, what has that resulted in? Well, it has resulted in, obviously, in no small part, our emboldening and our engorging of our number one geopolitical threat, the Chinese Communist Party. American hero. I love you so much.

For those of you who have spent any time in the Midwest, I have stayed in the same hotel. Same hotel in Toledo, Ohio, right on the river there multiple times. You cannot go to towns like Toledo, Ohio, Steubenville, Ohio, where I spoke at a conference a year and a half ago. You cannot go to these towns and not think about what trade policy and the of people are firmly rooted in their communities. That's where their pappy, their grandpappy, they're buried in the local cemetery there. It's very easy for people in kind of a white collar profession just get to pick up and leave. Heck, I've done it myself. But to kind of speak down to Americans and just say that, it's just simply not going to cut it. So do I support a 10% global tariff? No, that would not be my ideal policy. But we have this economic policy conceit that economic policy consists solely for the maximization of consumer

welfare. Look, I majored in economics at college. I worked in economic consulting between college and law school. I went to the University of Chicago Law School in large part due to the fact that they developed the law and economics curriculum back in the 1960s. So I know a little bit here of what I preach. The idea that economics is solely and unambiguously dedicated to the maximization of consumer welfare and the minimization of prices is partially what got us into this mess in the first place. You obviously have plenty of competing dimensions. The high inflation is due to too much emphasis on low prices? Like, I don't understand how you can argue both. I didn't say that. I'm talking about trade. Okay. We have 3.7% unemployment I'm talking about trade.

Okay. We have 3.7% unemployment nationwide. Okay. That's great. I mean. Yeah. I don't understand. Are you saying that like America is massively suffering because we don't have enough manufacturing jobs because most Americans work in services?

I agree. I'm saying that America's resilience and national security on the world stage has been grossly impeded by bipartisan economic policy hubris when it comes to neoliberal trade policy because we are radically reliant on foreign powers for some of the most national security sensitive goods in the world, such as the semiconductors that are conducted by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to the tune of 35% global market share, which we rely on for our F-35s. You can keep filibustering, but I'm someone who cares about data. And I can tell you that we make as much manufactured goods by value as we ever have. We make as much steel. Apparently not due to the policies that you support. We make as much steel today as we did in the 80s. We just make it with robots.

Do you support the buying of U.S. steel by the Japanese company? Yes, I think that's fine. Would you rather that company go out of business? Those people will still have jobs. robots. Do you support the buying of U.S. steel by the Japanese company? Yes, I think that's fine. Would you rather that company go out of business? Those people will still have jobs. They might go out of business and lose their jobs if they are not purchased. Washington Post columnist selling a U.S. steel to foreign investors is literally why America is in the state of syndrome. Japan is our ally. Japan is our ally. Yeah, I think there's a difference.

There's a difference between believing a policy because of the outcomes and believing a policy because of, you know, where you publish your work or being out of touch with people. I'm in favor of a much stronger welfare state. I think we should do more retraining. I agree that there are places that have been dramatically hurt by trade, and we have not properly compensated those who have lost out because of trade. I 100% agree with that. That does not mean we can turn back the clock to the 1980s through tariffs and hope that these jobs will come back.

Because again, it's not entirely about trade. It's largely about automation. Because we have moved up the value chain. We are no longer making T-shirts and other low-value items that have largely moved to South Asia. We are making much higher-value items largely through automation and through people who require much more education, even the CHIPS Act. That's not really going to create that many jobs. The jobs that it is going to create are going to be for like engineers. It's not going to be for white collar people who lost their jobs at the steel mills. I'm sorry to tell you. And besides, your comment before, I just, I'm sorry, I can't let this go. The comment before about the war on energy is just such complete bullshit because nobody seems

to know this because it is inconvenient for both Republicans and Democrats to acknowledge this, but almost every form of energy in the United States, energy production, is at a record high right now. Oil. Certainly in no way due to Joe Biden's policies, he has put a firm ban on LNG exports. He obviously stopped the Keystone XL pipeline. He has shut down drilling in Onwar in northern Alaska. Oil production is at a record high. Do in no part that his policy, do the fact that

technology by the frackers is at an all-time high. It has nothing to do with his policies. It would be even higher were it not for him. I just need to say something. Two things quickly.

Let me relax. I have towels if you want to towel up from that fight. It's like a boxing match. I just, by the way, denounced the people, well, not denounced them,

I said it was very nice of the people at HBO. Now I understand why they greenlit a documentary on trade. A bunch of people drinking here at night and getting rowdy about trade.

I was the one that was fucking wrong. This is an exciting topic. One small thing, and then obviously we want to get to something else, but one small thing is technology is a huge component of this.

I mean, there were people that were opposed to the tractor, right? Because who sowed the field before? One person driving a tractor or 50 people? You lost 50 jobs and you had one guy in a tractor. Do you want to stop progress? Progress happens, and a lot of job loss is due to technological progress. As was pointed out, we have more manufacturing in America than we've ever had, but with a lot fewer people. And as it was pointed out,

also on both sides of this book pointed out, is that's a problem. We need to figure out what to do, job training, et cetera. But you can't, to quote William F. Buckley, because we're talking about it today, stand athwart history yelling stop. It is going to run right through you. And you can sit there and say, well, the technology, let's just, let's not use those things that will eliminate jobs, because it will hollow out places in the middle of the country. There's a certain amount of that that's

just going to happen. On top of trade, which is a very important thing, but technology eliminates a lot of those jobs, too. technology eliminates a lot of those jobs too. We'll be right back after this quick break. I'm sensing you're a little outnumbered here on this issue. So I just want to give you the last word. I guess something you said raised a little curiosity for me. I mean, the last word, I guess something you said raised a little curiosity for me. I mean, you know, we have to move on to some audience questions here in a minute, but maybe in 30 seconds or a minute, I'd like to hear your explanation for why energy production is where it is and why prices are coming down and all these things, if it isn't because of

the policies of Joe Biden, because I think that's something he's going to run on. And I think it's something that he's going to make a centerpiece of his campaign to try and win over some more middle voters. America became a net exporter of oil and gas under Donald Trump. It is no longer a net exporter. It absolutely is. It absolutely is. It has actually gone up and down. At some point, that's where it's going to import. Two years. Audience, Google EIA.gov. You can look at it. If that were the case, then Joe Biden would not have been begging Mohammed bin Salman to open on more Saudi oil production two years ago. Obviously, bin Salman did not do that. Joe Biden looked like an idiot. He would not be talking about now about this whole debate as to whether to reimpose oil sanctions on Venezuela because he's scared about possibly affecting the flow of energy. So look, again, my first job after law school, I worked in Houston, Texas as a private equity

oil and gas lawyer. I was working in private equity-backed oil and gas transactions. And our clients were primarily drilling in shale fields out in West Texas, Oklahoma, a little bit of Wyoming, and other parts of the Rocky Mountain West. What's happened in shale and fracking over the past 15, 20 years, really since around 07, 08 or so, is incredible. Like remarkable, remarkable technology. And again, the fact that it happens to be doing very high now says nothing about the

fact that it would be even higher if federal lands, if federal lands were leasing more oil and gas drilling space. Joe Biden has cracked down on that. He has cracked down on LNG exports. He has canceled Keystone XL Pipeline literally in the first day of his presidency, January 21st, 2021. That would not be built by now. And he has massively cracked down on Onwar and drilling in Alaska. So yes, it would be higher were it not for his policies. To say that they happen to be high is not a reflection of his policies. It's a basic A yields B error. It's a logical error. Go ahead, Catherine. I'll give you a little space here. Oh my God. Sorry. I just, I do need a drink now. Look, I disagree with Biden on a lot of his energy policies. And I agree that it is largely technology that has resulted in our

producing record high oil production, including the record longest period of time in which we have been a net oil exporter. We were briefly one while Trump was president, then the pandemic hit and we weren't. And now we have been for a long stretch of time. Again, EIA.gov, that's the Energy Information Administration. So that is all to say that, like, Biden did not turn off the oil spigot. A lot of these things would have happened regardless of policy. I agree with that. I just think it is fundamentally misleading slash dishonest to say that the numbers are not what they are. They are high. And gas prices reached five and a half to six dollars in California.

You know, there was a war, right? You think the gas has to do with Putin? First of all, this was in summer 2022, just a few months. How much gas do we get from Russia? It's a global commodity market. Understood. Yeah, it's a global commodity market. They're set by global prices. I find this talking point just so humorous that the left tries to pretend like Putin's war in Ukraine was singularly responsible for the fact that gas prices pumped. Like there's absolutely nothing that Joe Biden could possibly do. I'm just stating facts.

All right, we're veering into unproductive territory here. So a quick round of applause for our guests tonight. All right, at the risk of sending things totally off the deep end, we're now going to transition into audience questions. So I want to just say something really quickly about this before we jump into it. The first time we did a live event in Philadelphia, the Tangle team had a huge, like days long debate about how we were going to do this portion of the show. And I was very adamant that the ethos of Tangle would be to just send it and do it live. And there

was some concern about that, I would say. And a lot of, you know, suggestions about maybe we should do pre-submitted shows, have people write stuff down, and we can screen the questions and do all that stuff. I'm not doing that. So I'm trust-following our audience here tonight. And I want to just set a couple of ground rules for your question. The first one is ask a question, please. Don't take the mic and give a monologue about your opinion. You can ask a question to anybody on the stage, myself included.

I'm happy to answer anything. Obviously our panelists, but just ask a question. Keep it as brief as you can. We only have, you know, 15-ish minutes for this. So, you know, no five minutes set up for your question. Keep it to like 30, 25 seconds. And just in the spirit of what you're doing,

I would like to encourage you to ask your question in a way where you're not answering it while you ask it. Genuinely seek an answer to the information you're looking for. Don't sort of lead the question to get the answer that you want. I literally can't see anything, but I'm very confident that Ari, my managing editor, is walking around the audience right now with a microphone. So if you're interested in asking a question, you can just put your hand up, and Ari will come find you and hand you the mic. Hey, guys. Thank you all for doing this.

So my question is for Josh. All right, so we can both agree that it's not illegal to tell a lie. The First Amendment guarantees that. But it doesn't protect speech that incite people to cause harm to others. Certain lies have consequences. If you look at federal law, it defines an insurrectionist as anyone who cites a rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States. So I'm wondering how you can defend someone's lie that prompted thousands

of people to storm the capital of this country in an attempt to disrupt and stop the peaceful process of transferring power from one person to another, and how you can claim that that action was protected on the First Amendment. So I don't defend the underlying substantive conduct. I think that Donald Trump's actions, for the most part, in the aftermath of the 2020 election were somewhere between reckless and oftentimes even disgraceful. And in particular, I thought his decision to hold his big speech at the White House eclipse that day on January 6, 2021, was extraordinarily reckless. And I'm pretty sure I publicly said as much, I have to go back and look, but I thought that was a very, very bad decision. Having said that, the actual legal standard for incitement is it has to be imminent incitement to violence. There has to be a direct causation,

a proximate cause, to use the legal term of art, between your statements and the action at issue. So this is actually kind of ironically what the university presidents, Claudine Gay, Liz McGill, and so forth, were getting at in their now infamous congressional testimony, where they infamously said that the permissibility of calls for genocide depends on the context. They were getting at this idea of, is it imminent incitement? That's the Brandenburg versus Ohio standard from the 1960s. It may or may not be right as a matter of First Amendment interpretation, but it happens to be the Supreme Court standard.

It has to be imminent, direct, proximate causation. So I don't see it. I do not see that whatsoever. When it came to anything that Donald Trump said, he very clearly said, if you go back and read his remarks, again, he shouldn't have held the speech. A lot of it was reckless. But he very clearly said, go make yourselves heard peacefully. Okay. He literally said that. You guys can like shake your head all you want. You can literally go back and review the transcript.

That is verbatim what he said. Now, should he have gotten on Twitter immediately after the riot got out of hand and said, stop, slow down? Yes, it took him too long. Again, he took many steps that were deeply imprudent and very unpresidential in those moments. But again, the fact that it was imprudent or unpresidential does not make it a First Amendment. There's no First Amendment lawyers that I've talked to who said otherwise. And keep in mind, there is a famous thing that everybody knows, but I think that there's an end to this story that most people don't know, is we all know the Supreme Court sentenced fire in a crowded theater. Does anyone know what that refers to? What the case was? It's really amazing.

Because this is what happens when people weaponize the First Amendment. That case was a Yidd because this is what happens when people weaponize the first amendment that case was a yiddish language socialist newspaper in 1917 who was advising against in this left-wing socialist newspaper from a a yiddish-speaking immigrant that america should not enter world war one he was right and what? He was arrested for it and cited, and he was yelling, fire in a crowded theater. That is where that comes from. It is a very, very bad thing to think of when you think of the First Amendment, because the protections are very strong,

and that's what makes America, this is why I become very nationalistic, so much better than so many places in Europe. I mean, you see in Scotland just having these horrible speech laws, Ireland about to go through an insane speech law. Nobody has the right of free speech in most of the places in Europe like we do here, and we should thank people for that. I don't like Holocaust deniers. I think they're unbelievable knuckle-dragging pieces of shit, but I don't want to see them in jail. So we, and the reason I bring that up in this context is that if you talk to any First Amendment lawyer, and most of the old school ones, by the way, are very, very lefty. Because guess what?

In the over part of the century, when fire in a crowded theater happened, they were attacking the left. People on the left were being attacked by the government. Because the one thing that you'll always remember is the thing that you think is great to punish your enemies will come for you. And that's the reason that the First Amendment is as ironclad and as tough as it is. And it's a very, very difficult standard to say that somebody created the situations in that imminent way. And I don't think it qualifies here. All right, Ari, where are you? Next question. He's walking around. I see him walking around. He's handing the mic to somebody. So we're probably going to have two horrible candidates to vote for.

Probably. We do. One of them who I think is a horrible president and another one who did horrible things and doesn't deserve to be president. I live in New Jersey. What do I do? What's the right thing to have my express my voice to say Biden shouldn't have run and Trump shouldn't have been nominated? Can I just very quickly say something here? And the answer is not Robert F. Kennedy. I'm not a fan of his, but whatever.

You know, it is also a choice Not voting. That is a choice. No, don't groan. Do not groan. If I didn't vote in Massachusetts where I'm from, if I didn't vote in New York where I'm from, where we know the result, I am getting a lot of mileage out of saying, fuck you to this process and to these two bad candidates. I don't have to vote for somebody that I don't like, or I don't think deserves to be in that seat. And I don't think either of them do. If you're in a place where your vote matters, no, it does not. In certain places it does. And guess what? When I know it does, I vote. I wouldn't vote if, you know, last time it was three people. It was, you know, 99%. And there's three people that I could have affected the vote. If you live in DC,

who's going to win in DC? It's like a Syrian election. It's like Saddam Hussein, like 90% votes for the Democrat. It's no problem. It's no sort of moral quandary to not vote in DC. Not voting is a choice. Giving the middle finger to the system is something that you are allowed to do. And you should not feel bad about it because I don't want to choose from these two shitty candidates. And, you know, people can give you an argument. You have to vote. Why? Why? Why do I have to choose one of these people? Why don't I? If turnout is low, that makes a point to people. Like, political scientists pay attention to this stuff. And every election, by the way, is the most important election of everyone's lifetime.

Every single election. I'm not saying it's not important, but I'm not going to vote. I have a different answer than Michael. Surprise. Yeah. I'm a bit radical on a few things. Can't be in the center all the time.

I think he's right. Something he said at the end there is right. That political science scientists do pay attention to this stuff on a very micro level, which is why I think you should vote. And I think regardless of where you live, that your vote actually does matter, even if it doesn't change the outcome of the election. It sends a signal to the people who are watching what voters like you are doing. So, you know, I can't see who you are from where I'm sitting, but you know, if you're like a 30 year old woman who lives in the suburbs of New Jersey, then there are political scientists who care very much about where you're leaning in this election. You know, if you're the democratic party and you don't go vote for Joe Biden and you've cast a ballot for a third party, then, you know, or you vote for Donald Trump,

then that's a signal to them that they've lost voters like you. And so I think whether you change the outcome of the election or not is sort of, you know, almost irrelevant. It's a signal that they're going to act on and respond to. And I think that's, you know, like something powerful you should exercise. So definitely vote, please. Michael's a fucking idiot. The best thing about it is he's paying for this drink.

And I'm just going to keep ordering more and more. You're kind of right, but not really. If you vote for one of the two major party candidates, it doesn't tell them anything. You don't get to vote as like, I'm 70% in. You can write in candidates, but the third party candidates, it's very hard to get on the ballots.

And unfortunately, I'm sort of more closely associated amongst people with the Libertarian Party, which is full of complete lunatics. So it's hard to vote for them too. I do think that that is right though, in the sense that, mostly because he's paying for my drinks,

I think that it's right that voting for a third party candidate is a viable fuck you too yeah i know just just one last thing about that too is that you're not gonna you might not live in new jersey forever maybe you'll move to pennsylvania one day and the act of going to the options the act of going through the act of going through the process of figuring out what candidate you want to vote for and participating in the game that we're all playing, whether we like it or not, I think is something that's going to be important for the rest of your life. I take it very seriously. And I agree there are different ways to give a middle finger to the system um in terms of what you should do you know in your personal life about the fact that you hate these two candidates i think you should just be vocal about it the way you're being here i

think it's an important thing to talk to about your friends talk to about your family why you feel that way i mean you know people make a difference in the way others view the world in really small and big ways all the time. And I don't mean to be all magical about it, but I genuinely do believe that, that you have friends who probably care about your opinion. And if they heard that you were like, I can't vote for either of these candidates, that makes a difference to them.

And the network effect of that is probably bigger than you're imagining. So that's my advice. Don't listen to Moynihan. Why are you so next wrong about everything it's incredible how wrong you looking over here all right uh a question primarily for isaac uh but fair game for anyone who also travels a lot just to the work throughout Throughout your work with Tangle, what have been the greatest hopes that real America, Toledo, Ohio, and the gap socially between this Northeast corridor is closing in any kind of way in terms of ideology

or how they think about the world? And what are some of the best tools we can have to start bridging some of those gaps, if you think it's possible? Bridging? You're And what are some of the best tools we can have to start bridging some of those gaps, if you think it's possible? Bridging, you're asking what are some of the best? The divide between rural urban areas, like areas like Toledo, Real America versus here. Yeah, great question.

You did this, by the way, just for the record. You can't see. Look, I lived in New York City for 10 years, eight years. I live in Philadelphia now. I have family. We spend a lot of time in upstate New York City for 10 years, eight years. I live in Philadelphia now. I have family. We spend a lot of time in upstate New York, kind of rural. I've spent a lot of time in West Texas, very, very rural. And my impression is that when you go and actually talk and meet people, and I know this is really corny, like they're very much not that different. I think most people, politics are very, very personal. The data and the things that they see, you know, news outlets like CNN or whatever reporting matter way less to them than the

things that they experience in their day-to-day life. You know, I mean, the crime is like the classic example that a lot of news organizations have sort of scared people into believing that crime is in a really horrible place right now, you know, murder rates, whatever. And they've come down, they've gone up, they've come down, whatever. But that's like, in a lot of ways, it's kind of the unicorn one where the media has really changed people's opinions in my mind. I think most people react to the things they see in their day-to-day

life. So I don't necessarily know that there's a bridge to divide there in ideological sense. I think it's just, we all experience the world very differently. When I'm living in New York City, the things that matter to me day-to-day are like the subways on time and the bodega still has $3 egg and cheese sandwiches. And you know, like those are the things that I care when you live in rural West Texas, it's like, is the river with have water right now? Like, are we going to be able to get tourists this year to run them on our horse ranch or whatever? You know, like those are the things that matter to those people. So, um, I think the, the bridge is spending time in those places if you really want to, you know,

feel it for yourself. But I think it is almost entirely about the experiences that people are having personally. Yeah, I think the coastal thing is wrong. I mean, it's rural versus urban, right? I mean, you go to Kansas City and it's votes for, you know, Obama. It's not a surprise. It's a great city, by the way. All the cities in the Midwest, you get those places. It's just those are little blue hotspots and it's going to be right outside. But it's also the class thing. And I think this is something that Josh and I would agree on is that, you know, he hired a woman who I'm interviewing tomorrow for the podcast, Bacha Ungar Sargon, best name of all time. But she's kind of a Trump supporter.

She's kind of, it's surprising, but she has very kind of lefty economics. But I love her just because she's pushed class into the conversation again because I think the left has forgotten about it. I think the right always forgot about it. And that is always the thing, right? I mean, if you talk to people who are rich in Minneapolis,

they're probably going to be pretty similar to people who are rich in Brooklyn. It's not going to be too different. There'll be some things that are different, but mostly it's a class thing. And, you know, those urban centers and, you know, being rural, I mean, the most enlightening thing I ever did is I shot a film in Starr County. Anyone know Starr County in Texas? Yeah, you can look at that. That's why he's on the stage.

Star County, Texas. The most Hispanic county in America. 95%, right? No, I think it was like 98. There's like two guys that are like, what the fuck happened? They're just still there. And they can't speak Spanish. And I went there and it was like, I'm not joking.

It was the wildest shoot of my life because they voted like, you know, 40, like 40 points for Hillary Clinton. And they voted for Biden too, but like by four points. And you're like, what the hell? These Tejanos. And I was with these people and they had like MAGA hats on and we're all drinking beer. And they're the funniest people in the world. They're all Mexican American-american and they just had the concerns like anybody else and i was like oh we are those dummies in america who in new york who say latino and they're like yeah that's fucking stupid and i was like why is it like what do you think cubans nicaraguans you think we're this i'm mexican like we look down

on people from el salvador like Why do you lump us all together? I was like, it's just easier and it makes us feel better about being white, but whatever. It's not a thing. But you go into these places and you realize that race doesn't matter. I mean, the indicators with Trump are really interesting. I mean, the last poll, I saw this New York Times-Siena poll, what was it? 45% of Hispanics, which again is totally meaningless, are supporting Donald Trump. I mean, the Mexicans, you're rapists, whatever. We think we understand what's happening in the country. So whether it's urban or suburban or, you know, rural and rich and poor, it is really important to get out and just talk to people. and poor, it is really important to get out and just talk to people. It's really important to just talk to people and like, wait, and not be a dick about it, but just like, wait, why do you think this? Like, didn't he say all these horrible things about Mexicans? And you get these really fascinating answers. And I'm not promoting the film that you can find on YouTube and see their

answers at all, because the company that I did it for is totally out of business. So it doesn't matter. Thank you, Vice. But yeah, that's's you should that it's really interesting to talk to people in the middle of no middle of nowhere for me middle of nowhere all right I think we've got time for one more uh I can't see our no pressure at all last question okay um I kind of had a question for all of you about the the primary system of like isaac uh we've talked about this on email back and forth kind of like you have the primary system and you have like extreme voters on both sides about the primaries and then you get to a general election where you have you have to have a more appeal to the middle voter, right? So like, what would you guys say is the best method for changing the primary system?

And how do we make it so that like the general middle of the ground voter has a real say in what the final election is? And like, how do we, you i like you i like you a lot um like how do we have a say in that like um because in the primaries you're just kind of the either side has their their base voter that gets the say, and then you get to the general election and the general voter doesn't really have a say. What do you guys have to say about that? I'll really quickly take a first stab at it. And then I actually am quite curious to hear what the panelists might say about this. I mean, I've written about this in Tangle. I think that an

open primary system and probably ranked choice voting in a lot of scenarios are going to be, would be really good reforms. And just to be clear, like, you know, there, I think there are a lot of questions about how exactly to execute that and what the best ways are. But you look at a state like Alaska that has done it, a state that's very politically eclectic and all over the place. And they come out of it with a never Trump Republican senator and a Democratic House representative and like a MAGA governor. And, you know, those things like that, that to me is representative of a system that's, you know, working when you see that kind of mix that you might not see in other places. So, um, I am very, very disheartened by the current primary system that we have. I think it's not working.

And, uh, I, I feel like open primary systems and rank choice voting are, are gaining momentum and we've seen it work. And we've had some podcast guests who've come in and talk about that. Um, but I would be interested in, we're a little tight on time, but maybe if you guys want to, I'm very curious to hear how you guys might react to that. Yeah. To paraphrase Mark Twain, I think the rumors of the demise of the current primary process are greatly exaggerated. I mean, I actually don't have a massive issue with how it's currently done, to be honest with you. I think that the argument that the extremes are choosing the nominees is actually just not borne out by the data. So the first presidential election that I was able to vote in the primary and then the general

was 2008. And literally every single time that there has been a competitive Republican presidential nomination, they have not chosen someone on the extremes. They have chosen a moderate candidate. So John McCain, 2008, Mitt Romney, 2012. People don't remember this. In 2016, Donald Trump's number one demographic subslice of the Republican electorate was moderate Republicans, people who actually—you remember back then in those campaign debates, Donald Trump was the one who was excoriating the neoconservative adventures overseas. He got a round of applause for it in the South Carolina debate. He was the one who was saying, oh, don't, we're not going to let you die on the street because you don't have health care. He took a lot of populist positions because the

man is fundamentally a populist. And he actually captured really moderate voters, people who weren't necessarily kind of culture warriors. I personally was a supporter of Ted Cruz in that process, so I remember it very well. You know, in 2020, obviously, he was the incumbent. And then yet again, this time, you had people like my own preferred candidate, Ron DeSantis, who ran on policy to his right. And yet again, you know, he couldn't even hold the torch to Donald Trump. So I'm just not sure that this is accurate. Even on the Democratic side of the aisle in 2020, there were so many candidates who were running far to the left of Joe Biden in 2020. And obviously, you know, I think Biden finished, what, fifth in New Hampshire before his, you know, before I think it was like Jim Clyburn got behind him in South Carolina,

and then you had Liz Warren, other people started to drop out. But there were so many options way to the left of Joe Biden. So I'm just not sure that this narrative is correct, that the extremes are choosing the nominees, at least in my adult lifetime, frankly. Just quickly, I would say, I think, you know, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the way I heard that question was really about Congress, not necessarily the White House. So, you know, I agree that maybe a general election or, you know, a big Republican primary, a big Democratic primary, we get more moderate candidates out of that. I don't know, Michael or Catherine, do you guys have thoughts on that you want to share? Yeah, I generally agree with you, Isaac, on open primary with ranked choice voting. And maybe I feel this more personally because in New York, not only does

my presidential vote not count, but basically none of my other votes count either because I'm not registered with a party. And that means I cannot vote in a primary. So by the time we get to the general election, the choices are already made. And I find that very frustrating. And that's not the case in every state that you can, in Alaska among them, you don't have to be a member of a party to have a choice in the primary. The other thing I would say is that part of the reason why you might have some more extreme candidates getting elected in the primary, whether we're talking about in Congress or other down ballot races, also has to do with turnout. So if only the diehard crazy people show up for the primary, whether it's an open primary or not,

their voices are going to be louder, right? Their votes are going to matter more. So if you're in a state where you do have a choice to vote in a primary and primary turnout is generally very low, much lower than that for the general turnout. Can I end on a very positive note? Yes. Can I agree with everyone and be like this unbelievable, boring, hippie? Because everyone's right about this. A couple of things. I mean, Josh, I think is right. I mean, one of the things that you see about this uh a couple things i mean josh i think is right i mean one of the things that you see about this i think it is also true that in you know congressional races etc you see a lot of batty people get through primaries but guess what republicans

suffered dearly for this i mean all of donald trump's preferred candidates got fucking creamed and you know it's like you have to i mean, Republicans will try to figure out how to get around that in the future. But I think Josh's point is also right, is that there was a thing that we tried to obscure on the presidential level, Donald Trump's appeal. And as journalists, we didn't kind of, I think, properly engage with this idea. And it's like, yeah, primaries, they favor extremists. And it's like, no, people really had gone towards the kind of populist conservatism and kind of MAGA. And it makes people feel a little better if they say, well, you know, if that primary system was different, we wouldn't get him. It's like, well, 65 million people voted for this person, and we have to confront why that is. And I'm not saying that as if it's, you know, I'm totally neutral on this in the sense that, like, it's some clear and present danger.

I'm just saying that as journalists, just from my perspective, good Lord, did we ignore this? Did we? And I said, I started by saying that Bill Maher appearance where I was, like, being an idiot. And, like, yeah, then I spent a number of years trying to figure this stuff out and trying to talk to people. That was all my personal edification. But I really kind of was like, oh, yeah. I mean, what Josh is saying, it was right. I mean, there were people, the John McCains of the world were gone.

He was rapturously greeted by denouncing the Iraq War that Republicans, for a certain period of time, even after the disaster of the Iraq War, wouldn't say. It was considered kind of gauche to say that George W. Bush screwed this up. But in the end, everybody's right here. Yeah, because I think that there's a problem with the primary system, but I think also there's a way

that it tries to obscure the fact, like maybe we're safe and these Trump people aren't real because the primary system screwed up. No, I think the primary system is screwed up and I think Trump is very real. And that is very influential. All right, on that note, we're going to let these guys go.

Big round of applause for our guests tonight. Thank you guys very much. Thank you. All right, thank you guys so much. Okay, I have to be relatively quick here. Fun fact, Michael Che is coming to do a stand-up set here in a few minutes. So I'm not kidding. We're Michael Che's opener tonight.

Do you get to stay? No, you do not get to stay. You have to, you can't stay here. Okay. Listen, I promised a good news story before we got out of here. And I thought Moynihan's feel good thing was not as good as this. So I'm going to share it really quickly. A few months ago, I was looking through my phone for something, like looking through my notes app, and I stumbled across this old budget that I had when I was living here in New York City and was working as a journalist. And I made a note of it because I decided that I wanted to share it. And the budget was basically just like, how was I going to pay rent and live in New York as a reporter? And so I had four items on the budget.

And the first one was to keep the job that I had as a full-time editor. And the second one was to freelance four articles for this little conservative magazine called The Independent Journal Review. four articles for this little conservative magazine called the Independent Journal Review. And then the third one was to freelance one article a month for Vox, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. And then the fourth one was to get 100 paying subscribers for this newsletter tangle that I was starting, which was going to come out to $400 a month, which would make a big difference, and that was how I was going to put some money away.

That was almost exactly four years ago that the note was from. We're a little past the four-year point. I just want to take stock of that really quick. We have 100,000 subscribers on our mailing list, 15,000 paid. Just in this room, there are 200 people right now. And I do not take that for granted. I'm incredibly grateful. I count my lucky stars every day. industry is in decline. Please pay for your news, support local journalism, support reporters who do work that you value. It's incredibly, incredibly hard out there right now for us. And I'm so, so lucky. Part of what happened because of Tangle's success was that I got to

not be alone anymore. I got to build a team, which was the best thing ever. Being in the trenches by yourself sucks. I missed the newsroom. I missed the back and forth. Being in the trenches by yourself sucks. I miss the newsroom. I miss the back and forth. I miss the arguing. I miss the debating. I miss having people in the room with me. And because of all of you,

because of the people who have supported us and supported our work and paid for what we're doing, I got to hire people. And I want to acknowledge them tonight quickly because Michael Che is coming. But I'd like to just really briefly invite John and Will and Ari up on stage really quick. Come, come.

I had a lot planned that I want to say about them, but we went a little over time. I also want to acknowledge that we're not just like four white dudes who do this, three white dudes and John who do this. We have Magdalena also who's not here. I miss her dearly. She was my first hire.

And she's so important to the team. And I'm so sad that she's not here tonight. But she's being a mom, she's doing the right thing. And I just want to say about these guys that like what I do every day is not possible without them. Will researches everything that you see in the newsletter. He does like a first blush on stuff before it gets to me. John edits our podcast and our YouTube channel. Every single day he does the podcast, he puts out, you know, one or two YouTube videos a month. There's like, there are companies that have six people who do what John does by himself. It's literally insane. And Ari is, on top of being an old friend, also the best editor I've ever had in my life. And I mean that very sincerely. And I've worked for a lot of editors. And he didn't even get professionally trained doing it. He's just an

awesome writer. And nothing that comes out in Tangle comes out without his touch on it. So thank you, Ari. Thank you guys all so much for being here. If you have a VIP ticket, there's you guys in the front. We're going to do our meet and greet across the hall in a few minutes right after the show. There's a little dining room over there. Please tip your bartenders.

Please come back when we do this next time. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. 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+. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province.

Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.