Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Tangle's 5 year anniversary, Trump at the NABJ conference, Evan Gershkovich, and more.

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

On today's episode, Isaac and Ari talk about Tangle's five-year anniversary, Kamala Harris's pick for a running mate, and the debate around Supreme Court term limits. They also discuss the controversy surrounding Imane Khelif, a female boxer at the Olympics, the release of journalist Evan Gershkovich from prison, and Trump's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference. And, as always, the Airing of Grievances.Imagine this:There are over 100,000 people on this mailing list. If every person got one friend to sign up for Tangle, we could double our readership overnight. We have made it incredibly easy. All you have to do is click the button below and you'll get a pre-drafted email pitch — then you just type in a few friends or family member's email addresses and click send. Give it a shot!You can catch our trailer for the Tangle Live event at City Winery NYC. Full video coming soon!Check out Episode 5 of our podcast series, The Undecideds. Please give us a 5-star rating and leave a comment!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Got a mortgage? Chances are you're thinking about your payments right now. Need help? Ask your bank about relief measures that may be available to you. Learn more at Canada.ca slash it pays to know. A message from the Government of Canada. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.

The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. Coming up, the five-year anniversary of Tangle, who Kamala Harris is going to pick as vice

president, plus Ari and I do the Prejudice Olympics. Supreme Court term limits where we disagree. We talk about the controversy around the Olympic boxer, some love for Evan Gershkovich, Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists, and then Ari tells a classic Isaac Ari story, which was very heartwarming

during our grievances section. We have a lot of stuff coming up. You guys are going to enjoy this one. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, joined by managing editor Ari Weitzman, and we're still in the thick of it. I'm out of the office this week. I'm out here in Denver,

Colorado, getting ready to coach some Frisbee, visiting my brother, recording for my brother's office today. And the news just won't stop, I guess, really, is basically the world we live in now. It never ends. Can't get away from it even in Denver. The mountains won't save you. Yeah, and the wildfires won't either. It's smoky out here right now.

Yeah, I'm sure it is. We have a lot of stuff to talk about. Before we do, though, I want to just acknowledge that we're sitting at the five-year anniversary of Tangle. As you guys listen to this on Sunday, it'll be a day before the fifth-year anniversary of the first Tangle newsletter that I ever sent.

And we're sending something out about this on Friday. So our Friday edition about the anniversary will be out already. I have so much to say. I'm going to try and keep it brief, I guess, by just saying that I'm kind of awestruck and just blown away by where things are at today and where they started. This was an idea to build a project that was a newsletter that I wanted to have 10,000 people reading and make a few thousand dollars a month on. And it has turned into a full-blown media operation with this a podcast uh working with one of my best friends making over a million dollars a year in subscription revenue a mailing list of 125 000 people a youtube channel instagram twitter podcast series all this stuff that

happened that i never really envisioned when we started. And I just wanted to say thank you to all the people that are listening to this and the people who have supported us both from the beginning early on and those of you who joined this week for the first time and are maybe like, what the hell is this guy talking about right now? It's been an incredibly long grind to get here. We live in an era where a lot of media organizations are struggling. I think some of their struggles are the product of bad decisions that they've made and are kind of self-inflicted wounds. I think a lot of their struggles are the product of a really difficult environment we live in for new media organizations to start.

And also just a really difficult environment we live in for new media organizations to start. And also just a really difficult environment we live in where people want news for free and aren't willing to pay for it or support the news that they read. So news organizations rely on advertising revenue, and that creates all sorts of bad incentives. And we've been really blessed and lucky and fortunate that we create a product that members, subscription members want to sign up for. And if you are not yet a member, I as always encourage you to go do that. That's what makes this possible. You can do that by going to our website, readtangle.com. And looking ahead, we have a lot of stuff coming. First and foremost, we're going to focus on the things that we're doing now that people are here for. So I've

watched a lot of media organizations struggle because they have early success and then they chase shiny objects and they try and build things that their audiences don't want and they get overextended and they have too many balls in the air and all those kinds of errors. I'm committed to not making those mistakes. So it sounds a little bit boring, but one of the big things I want you to know if you're listening to this is

we're going to keep doing a lot of what we have been doing because it works. And that's how I think you build and sustain a successful business is by doing the things that sort of got you that success and keep people interested and involved. That being said, the success that we have had this year allows us to pursue some fun ideas that build on the mission of Tangle. some fun ideas that build on the mission of Tangle. So we're going to expand our on-the-ground reporting for our YouTube channel, our podcast, and our newsletter, which is going to start with John and I going to this month's Democratic National Convention and doing some on-the-ground reporting, which I'm super excited about. We recently landed a fiscal sponsor, so we can actually take tax-deductible donations and grants now. There will be a donation page in the newsletter that came out on Friday if you want to check it out. This is just a new way for us to have a different revenue stream.

guests onto the podcast. We're going to introduce our team members like Ari has been introduced on this podcast more often. So you're going to see and hear from different people on the Tangle team. And we're going to redesign our website. We're going to launch new podcast series, which many of you listening to this might be interested in. And yes, I swear we are working on paid ad-free podcasts for our listeners. I know many of you don't love the ads and have written in about it. To give like a brief pull the curtain back on what's been happening on our end, we just did this massive migration from hosting our podcast on Spotify to hosting it on a platform called Acast.

And a part of the reason we did that massive migration, which was a huge pain in the ass, was because Acast offered ad-free subscriber-only content where you could pay to be a member and that would remove ads from the podcast. And about a week after we migrated to Acast, they removed that feature from their offering. So that was annoying. I didn't know that, offering. So that was annoying.

I didn't know that actually. Yeah, really annoying. That's why John's been annoyed. Yes, really annoying. Acast is awesome though. I don't want to like, you know, I'm not trying to demean it. It's been a great platform.

I'm very glad we made the switch. But through this huge wrench, I've been saying on this podcast for months, like we're going to do this thing. It's coming, it's coming, coming. And now it's not coming. So we're figuring out what our next move is. We are trying to figure something out

without doing another migration because migrations are messy and difficult, but rest assured it is at the top of our priority list. And I hope we have a good answer for you soon. So that's what's coming. That's what has happened. Mostly, I just wanted to say thank you. I really appreciate all the support. Very grateful for everybody who has been along for the ride for a while and looking forward to doing a lot more

really important, I hope valuable work in the future. And with that, I suppose a nice kind of transition to the future is what we have directly in front of us, which might be out by the time this podcast is released on Sunday. And that is Kamala Harris's pick for a running mate. Do you want to set the table here, Ari? There's so many different directions to go. I know you have some things you want to talk about that I think are, I mean, they're serious, but I also find them a little bit amusing, but will be fun to chat about. But it seems like this is imminent. I think, like I said, we're recording this on Thursday. I think by Sunday, you guys might know what's going on. So some of our information might be a little outdated. You guys might know what's going on. So some of our information might be a little outdated. And let's just get straight into it, I think.

First thing, the elephant in the room for us is that the writing on the wall has continued to slowly indicate to us that Harris is preparing to pick Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania. That seems like the direction things are going. There is a report about how the Harris campaign said that they needed to get their paperwork filed in time for a deadline that indicated a governor. Do you remember the reason for that, Isaac? I remember it was something about a governor needing to have time to appoint a potential successor. No, there's a financial rule that you actually can't donate to certain super PACs can't donate to or certain excuse me, certain donors can't donate to super PACs when there's a sitting governor on the ticket. The sitting governor can't be the beneficiary of those donations. So basically, Kamala Harris and her team have been telling a bunch of Democratic donors that they need to get their donations in before they make this announcement,

which has tipped off some people that she's not picking Senator Mark Kelly and she's picking a governor. Or any other senator. But yeah, governor. So governor could be Tim Waltz from Minnesota, which is a person that you've been high on. Could be Governor Shapiro. Could be Governor Gretchen Whitmer, though Whitmer has said that she's pulled herself out of the race. But another piece of news that we've gotten recently was that Shapira said he was changing his planned schedule itinerary, which is another flag that seemed to indicate it was going to be him. We've also heard rumblings of rumblings about short lists getting shorter and Shapira finding his way to the top. And think, before we were hearing about the way the candidates were aligning themselves on this list, came up with five to seven names in Tangle that we all thought, yeah, if the Democrats put forward these names, they have a good resume, they have a good reason to be picked. And any one of them we could see Harris choosing.

a good reason to be picked. And any one of them we could see Harris choosing. And one of the pieces of subtext for us, which I think was what Isaac was hinting at me setting up, was that there's the uncomfortable, I don't know how else to call it than like the prejudice Olympics here. All of these governors and senators have some, they're either like a woman issue or a Jewish issue or a gay issue or a person of color issue or a Hispanic issue. And none of these things are per se issues, but everybody, like there's still a percentage of the electorate that's getting smaller, I think, but is still there that is going to have their biases affect their decision making. And we're like, yeah, how much of those prejudices still matter? And also, which ones are more important still? And that's like a very strange thing to discuss. But I think people are saying it in subtext, and I thought we should say it out loud.

Yeah, I don't know how sub the text is. I mean, like, Josh Shapiro is a Jew. And look, I understand that I have biases about this issue. Being a Jew myself who considers himself, you know, I call myself a liberal Zionist. The attacks on Shapiro from the left, from inside the Democratic Party, because what we're witnessing right now is everybody's pressuring the party to pick the person that they want. So the factions are out. And the attacks on Shapiro are that he's ardently pro-Israel and that he's basically like this rabid Zionist who doesn't care about the

genocide happening in Gaza. That's the talking point. When the reality is that Josh Shapiro's position on Israel, based on pretty much all the public information we have, is basically the same as Mark Kelly's and Roy Cooper's and Pete Buttigieg's and, you know, all the other people, Senator Kelly, who are up for this nomination. But nobody's talking about their positions. There isn't a movement for genocidemark.com. There's a website, genocidejosh.com, being organized by leftists to try and pressure Kamala Harrison into picking somebody else. And I get it. I think on the one hand, I do think Shapiro, because Pennsylvania has been sort of a, Philadelphia has been a focal point of the pro-Palestine movement. Shapiro's had to deal with it in a way

that maybe Tim Walz or Senator Mark Kelly haven't had to deal with it. They haven't had massive protests in their largest cities in the states where they serve. Shapiro cleared out protesters from Penn. I mean, he didn't personally do that, obviously, but he responded to Penn's call for help and, um, you know, approved of the clearing out of those protesters. I was there. Uh, I was on Penn's campus the night before that happened.

We did a whole YouTube video about it. I would say conservatively a third to half of those protesters who were camped out on Penn's campus were like grown adults who were not Penn students. They were local Philadelphia activists. And I think it was totally reasonable for the school to decide that after a few weeks, these people shouldn't be on campus anymore. I don't think Shapiro supporting that decision makes him, you know, a complicit in genocide. So I think the attacks have been over the top. And the question, the subtext, I guess we're talking about is, are these attacks because he's a Jew, not because of his positions on Israel? Or are they a product of his Jewishness paired with his positions on Israel? I think they are, is my read on the

situation. I think that it has a huge impact on how people are viewing him. I have no idea how controversial that position is. I'm sure a lot of leftists and progressives would say that, you know, I'm overreacting or being sensitive. I just think he's clearly being treated much differently on an issue where he's basically the same as all these other potential VPs. So Josh Shapiro is Jewish. So that's one. And then Gretchen Whitmer. Let's follow up on that real quick. So you've got Gretchen Whitmer ready to go, but I just wanted to read a quote for you because I think it's going to be an interesting thing. Here's the quote. Well, some of these protesters aren't even students, right?

I mean, we know that they're showing up on campuses and they're becoming involved. And when they cross a line and when they commit crimes, they should be arrested. That's the appropriate thing to do. That's a quote from Senator Mark Kelly. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Which is like exactly what Josh Shapiro did. And the big thing, you know, the thing I keep seeing on Twitter is this, oh, like Mark Kelly didn't compare pro-Palestine protesters to the KKK, which Josh Shapiro did. Which is like one of these sort of media narratives that's been totally divorced from the original context.

What Josh Shapiro was doing was distinguishing between people who are protesting, you know, pro-Palestinian protesters and the people who were acting like the KKK. He was not labeling all the student protesters members of the Klan. He was saying that there are the protesters. And then there's also these people who are clearly spewing like anti-Semitic bile, which like open up a Twitter, go on YouTube. Like there's millions of videos out there of these things happening on campus where like overt anti-Semitism is coming out

in the form of chants or signs or whatever. And he's allowed to call that out and he's allowed to distinguish between those people. He said very clearly over and over again that he did not distinguish or that he was not broad brushing students, that he was trying to distinguish between the ones anti-Semitic overtly and the ones who were out there protesting for a cause that, you know, he believed they had the right to protest for and et cetera. It's just like one of the many weird kind of disinformation things about him. The other one that I saw that's really popular among people on the left is this idea that he is anti-public schools, which I saw. There was a tweet that got a bunch of traction that popped up on my feed that I responded to

from this guy. His name is Jeff Melnick. It seems like he's an author and it says UMass Boston American Studies, and he's an anti-Zionist and he's got 10 or 11 or 15,000 followers on Twitter. And he tweeted out and said, I won't vote for the Dems if Shapiro is the VP pick. His attacks on public schools and on protesters supporting justice in Palestine are attacks on two of the core values of the family I made.

How could I look my beloved children in the eyes if I voted for him? That was the tweet he sent, which got hundreds of retweets, thousands of likes, and popped up in my feed. To be clear, the crime on public schools that Jeff is referring to is that Shapiro, while he was campaigning for governor in Pennsylvania, said he would be open to having discussions with Republicans about school vouchers and making them a part of his platform. That was the crime that he committed. He has passed record-setting increase in public school funding in Pennsylvania. He didn't just propose it. He's actually gotten it done at something like $1.8 billion or something. The guy's expanded voting access. He has gotten free preschool meals for

students. He's doing some of the most progressive stuff of any governor in the country. He's doing it in a purple state, and he's got 60% approval rating. Like tanking this dude's nomination for the vice presidency is a great example of how fucking awful, excuse my language, how awful the progressive left's political instincts are right now. I just have to say that. It's just like this guy is super liberal and they are going gonna try and ruin him and you know not vote for harris if he's on the ticket against donald trump who you know basically stands in opposition to 80 of the things they stand for um because they think that he's like a rabid zionist supports genocide and

hates public schools which is just total. It's another one of those instances of committing the crime of trying to reach across the aisle to try to make solutions with the people who disagree with you. And this is Shapiro in an election in Pennsylvania where his opponent, Doug Mastriano, one of the planks that was dragging him down in the election was him saying that he wanted to disband the entire Department of Education. And that's the comparison. So that's a frustrating thing with that faction of the no negotiations ever far left. But that's also a lot that we've talked about Shapiro, and we have a lot of other VP noms that we wanted to get through. And you're dragging us

into policy and substance, Isaac. We're supposed to be talking about broad brushing prejudices. Come on. Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. Well, let's do it really quick. And it probably would have been better to set the table in the beginning, but we can do it now. So Josh Shapiro is a Jew. Does that matter? Question mark. One of the things we're thinking about. The other thing that everybody's been talking about is that Gretchen Whitmer was like, in a lot of ways, a perfectly good option for running Nate. She's a swing state governor. She has immensely popular, immensely popular, moderate policies, uh, and you know, has really strong approval ratings and seems to do well on the national stage, but she's a woman.

So everybody's been like, no way, Colin. It was just immediately like there's zero chance she picks Gretchen Whitmer. Gretchen Whitmer removed herself from the running, which I actually have on good authority as part of some advice that she got from Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats who were like, you don't want to attach yourself to this ticket. If you want a real fighting shot at being the first female president, you should wait to run in 2028.

And just interesting footnote, something people are whispering about. There's Wes Moore, who is another rising star, but he's black. So like Kamala Harris, not going to pick a running mate who's also a person of color. And then there's Pete Buttigieg, who's gay and married to a man.

And everybody has assumed that there's no way Kamala Harris picks him because, you know, is the country ready for that? And Ari and I were talking about this and it just occurred to us, this is kind of hilarious that, you know, the conversation, the not very subtle subtext

is like Kamala Harris has to pick a white guy from a swing state with moderate politics. And there's this, you know, all these other people who reasonably fit the bill, but one's a Jew, one's black, one's a woman, and one's gay. And how much does that matter and which one matters the most?

Which is a hilarious and ridiculous and very awkward conversation to have. like anti-DEI, like bizarro world thing where it's, oh, we have to, you know, give the straight white men a leg up here. It seems like the talking points are all bizarre. It could come out of a comedy skit. Like the idea of also Hillary Clinton giving Gretchen Whitmer advice about Michigan is just ironically delicious. But it's all steeped in layers of irony, but that topic is there. I think if you're trying to weight handicaps for which ones of these minorities are least electable, you have to consider that Kamala checks a lot of boxes already. So the question of like, oh, sure, like we can vote for one, but two, I don't know. It doesn't show that we're serious about trying to reach to other

demographics. And that's a little odd, but like it's lizard brainy. and I think a lot of people will sort of feel that even if they're not thinking it. running mate, somebody that's going to appear to have more approachability or not approachability, but appear to have more electability will show more seriousness on Kamala Harris's part. So it's not like, oh, it's not me who's saying I'm not ready for two women on the ticket. I'm just saying I don't think other people are. And because of that, I don't think that picking two women is going to indicate that this is a person who's taking their campaign seriously, which is like another layer of abstraction that makes it strange, but at the same time, not untrue. So it's, I think I've thoroughly talked this into a circle now. so can you help detangle this? Yeah, I will.

I think it's as crude as it is, it's kind of just an interesting piece of commentary on the country to literally flesh out what you think matters the least and the most. Which, like, I don't know why we shouldn't. It's like I feel sort of icky wading into it,, I don't know why we shouldn't. It's like, I feel sort of icky waiting into it, but I don't know why. Like it should be a conversation we can have. It's like a realistic temp check on our country. I would have said that Josh Shapiro being Jewish is the thing that mattered the least. Like if you had asked me a month ago, that would have been my answer because as much as my mom and all the Jews I know

fear antisemitism so much, it's both prominent on both sides in almost equal fashion on the left and the right. But when you look at Gallup polling and stuff like that, Jews are generally viewed really, really favorably. And it's like the, you know, compared to like Muslims in America, it's like people's favorables on Jews are just way higher. But weirdly, he's the one who seems to be getting the most pushback from the left, which kind of just like turned things upside down a little bit for me. But I think I would have said that that mattered the least.

I think Kamala picking a woman also probably would be near mattering the least. I actually wrote about this in Tangle and said, I thought that if Kamala Harris picked Gretchen Whitmer, they would have gotten like a good another 30 to 60 days of just nothing but softball media coverage as like this, like dual women, first ever two women on a ticket. I was like imagining like the Time Magazine cover of them in like Wonder Woman outfits or something, you know, I don't know how they would have, but like it would have happened. And I, I, I honestly

think that the democratic party would have embraced it. I think that it would have energized a lot of women voters across the country who are already breaking for Dems in huge numbers. I mean, the gender partisan gap in this election is the highest it's ever been. And it would have, like the attacks would have been really ugly, which would have made them just look better. And Gretchen Whitmer is a great politician who again is moderate, really, really good on camera, well-spoken, well-tested, well-vetted. I just thought like, I get why they didn't choose her and i get that like you know the patriarchy lives or whatever but just like i thought that she could

have easily been a good pick for kamala that would have maybe even increased her chances of winning in some versions of how that played out publicly um and then like do you think it matters more if she has a running mate who's also a person of color or gay? I honestly don't know I think it's hard for me to imagine I actually think that picking somebody

picking a running mate who's gay picking Pete Buttigieg would have been a trickier thing than comma picking a running mate who's gay, picking Pete Buttigieg would have been a trickier thing than comma picking a running mate who is also a person of color, mostly because the sort of like traditional Judeo-Christian values are still so prominent in our country. And I think the image of like Pete Buttigieg up there with his husband would have actually irked some people who otherwise were like moderate voters turned off by Trump that wanted to vote for Democrats. I happen to have really socially liberal views on this. So I find that deeply depressing that that's true.

on this. So I find that deeply depressing that that's true. But that is like my assessment of where the country is that I think he would have been a harder pick to sell to the voters that Kamala Harris needs than a person of color or a Jew or another woman. So yeah, in our Prejudice Olympics, I think that would have been the toughest thing. Yeah. Pete for the gold, which like I said, it sucks that any of this matters. Like I, I wish we lived in a country where none of that really mattered. Um, I think a lot of people think we live in that country. I think a lot of people say we live in that country. And then we have a moment like this where Kamala Harris becomes the nominee and it's immediately assumed, presumed, and certain that she's going to pick a white dude from a moderate political background in a swing state. And it's like, oh yeah, no, it still totally matters. All of these things matter apparently.

And the thing I thought didn't matter, which was being a Jew, clearly matters. All of these things matter apparently. Um, and the thing I thought didn't matter, which was being a Jew clearly matters. Uh, so really weird time to have this sort of set of vice presidents who are running mates who are potentially up to be the VP nominee. But I think that's how I, I think that's how I would break it down and rank it and I don't think she's going to pick a person of color I don't think she's going to pick Pete Buttigieg I don't think she's going to pick a woman

I think Josh Shapiro is pretty likely at this point if I had to call my shot I would say it's Josh Shapiro similarly to what I was saying about Gretchen Whitmer, I also heard some provocative rumors about Mark Kelly that I'm not going to repeat on the air because I think they are provocative rumors. But I heard them from somebody who has kind of inside information about how the Democratic

process is, the vetting process and the democratic party's going. And, uh, what I heard made me think that there's basically zero chance that Mark Kelly becomes the running mate pick. Cause I think they found some dirt on him. I'll say. And if that comes out in somebody's reported piece, I'll talk about it on the air. But, um, yeah, I think it's going to be Shapiro or Tim Wall Walls probably second or I kind of think that's it I think it's gonna be one of those two so I don't know which direction she's gonna go but if I were a betting man I would

definitely bet on Josh Shapiro again we're recording this on Thursday so if you're listening this on Sunday and I'm super wrong and it's Mark Kelly before as we were very recently then I'll have a fun time lambasting

myself in a week as we switch gears I'll just add a little bit of optimism to wash down all the dirt that we've been washing our mouths with for the past 20 minutes which is there are not a lot of countries in the world that are multiracial democracies. There are a few countries, I'm thinking of France and the UK, that are multiracial but not multicultural,

which is a little bit of a distinction. If you go to France, you're going to be French. You are going to conform to French norms and French cultural expectations. We have a country that is expressive of a tolerant ethic mindset. And that is a really difficult thing in practice. So it's really, really tough to try to be a country that takes in people and says, if you're different, that's American and defines what it means to be American as being participatory, being willing to disagree, but also showing up and just being a part of a democratic process. Like that's an ideal that's hard to define. It's something we never, ever meet, only aspire to, but there aren't, there aren't many other countries in the world that are doing that.

It's a hard problem to try to solve how to incorporate different cultures and ethnicities into the same sense of patriotic mission. And, you know, we're, we're doing all right. You know, we're doing all right. We're doing all right. You know, we're doing all right. We're doing all right. I would say we're doing better than all right, honestly. Yeah, we're crushing the Olympics. Yeah, we're crushing the Olympics. We'll be right back after this quick break. Got a mortgage? We'll be right back after this quick break. A message from the Government of Canada. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu,

a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. All right, well, let's hit quickly on the Supreme Court term limit stuff too,

because we had a little bit of a disagreement this week. A preview of what's to come in Tangle is that we're kicking around this idea of doing the hour take more often in the newsletter than the my take. And we had a fun time this week on the Supreme Court term limits debate because we had some disagreement among the staff. And it made me wish that we were doing our take because it would have been fun to flesh out some of the disagreements we had. But I had my mind changed. I went from sort of passively thinking that Supreme Court term limits were a good idea to more actively needing to formulate an opinion because of Biden's recent Supreme Court proposals and

then landing on the other side of it and basically viewing what Biden's doing is like a craven political play and also thinking that maybe the system sucked. The system he proposed. You didn't totally agree with me. I don't know. Maybe that's a good enough table set for you to voice some of that disagreement. I'm interested to hear how far apart we actually are because I'm not totally sure we are. But I know you wanted to say your piece since I kind of stifled you in the document and the

newsletter this week. Yeah, I don't think that's a fair read of what you did. I think we had a good debate, which at times got frustrating. But I think it ended up creating a good product, which is the thing we care about the most. I think there is a good coverage that we had of that Supreme Court terms limit idea and proposal. So that's the thing I care the most about.

I will try to do the pitch for what I think is the best argument in favor of Supreme Court term limits because I know, because I read your take and helped edit it, what the counter points are. So hopefully in making this pitch, I'll set you up well for your counter points that we can get in the weeds a bit. So the best argument that I know of for the specific term limit of 18 years is that one, it creates a regular cycle of Supreme Court justices being up for nomination. We currently have something that's resembling like a lottery system for presidential elections, where sometimes there'll be an upcoming vacancy or even a current vacancy on the court like we had in 2016 that will make the stakes of the election matter a little bit more for a certain kind of issues. And in 2016, I think it's very fair to say that one of those issues on the right, especially, that was driving people from the center right or the religious right to embrace Donald Trump

was the concept or the promise of a potentially abortion-friendly Supreme Court justice or somebody who would consider overturning Roe v. Wade. Fast forward eight years, and we see that that's come to fruition. So clearly that was a good thing for Republicans at the time. But if you had this be a regular part of the electoral process, that would sort of get evened out. It wouldn't be this idea of, oh, did Trump get lucky in 2016? Or did he run a great campaign and he was a great candidate?

We'll never really know because of that compounding factor. And then the flip side is for Biden in 2020, there was going to be one potential vacancy coming up, which he was able to fill. But Biden, you know, so this is why it appears as more of a left-leaning thing because in recency, you see Trump during his term nominated three justices, Biden nominated one. So clearly, it's an animating thing on the left. If you even that out to two and two, it feels better for the left. But I would also say if you're on the right, it's easy to imagine those situations being reversed. It's easy to imagine that the circumstances go the other way. And you only find yourself with a Trump term that nominates one justice.

Biden gets in. He wins the lottery. He nominates three justices. And it's the same situation from the other direction. So if you even it out, it sort of makes it a regular thing. It doesn't make it any different. So that's one of the aspects. The second is we nominate people for life to the Supreme Court and lifetime terms are a little complicated because it creates a perverse incentive of wanting to nominate somebody who the wording that we use

that we agreed on was minimally qualified and then the youngest possible of the people who meet those minimum qualifications. Qualifications for the Supreme Court are pretty high. So those minimum qualifications are still having like a successful clerkship after leaving a prestigious law school, then becoming a federal justice or an appeals court justice and serving for a number of years and being well reviewed, well thought of writing amicus briefs that are, um, inspirational or like convincing and having a good reputation in the jurist community, I think it's like a minimal

qualification. That's a pretty high bar, but still, if you think, well, if we nominate somebody who's 50 or 55, they have even more experience, even more wisdom, they're going to be serving 18 years, we can do that rather than get somebody who's 45 and on the cusp and somebody who just has those qualifications met. So that's another good argument. And the last thing is that it sort of evens out the partisan nature of the federal government in general. This is where there's a little bit of divergence with, I think, the argument that I'm going to put forward and the way that you spelled it out in Tangle earlier this week, Isaac, which is that it's not necessarily fixing Congress's bias, but a general political bias towards partisanship that I would

say is pervasive across the three branches. We for a long time have been able to, as a country, say the judiciary is independent of politics because they're promoted to this position for life and they don't have to worry about being reelected or elected at all or have to be confirmed again. However, it is unavoidable that you're going to have a record already when you're getting nominated and then confirmed by the Senate. And that it's kind of hard to close your eyes to it. There is a political nature to this. There just is when you nominate somebody to the Senate. And it's kind of hard to close your eyes to it. There is a political nature to this. There just is when you nominate somebody to the bench. And if you take away the lottery process, if you take away the lifetime appointment, you just get to a point where you're able to regularly

appoint people to the bench and know that that's coming. So you aren't pressured to pick somebody who you know is going to be definitely in on whatever the issue du jour is when you're nominating somebody to the court as a president or as a party forming their platform. And I think those three things are the pitch for why 18-year term limits make sense. What do you think? Yeah, I think it's mostly the strongest arguments for them. The perverse incentives part about picking the minimally qualified justice, I think is the one that kind of resonates the most. I will say, thinking more about that, I'm sort of like, if you're picking somebody who's 45 and really qualified and they're going to serve for 18 years,

I almost prefer that to picking someone who's 55 and really qualified and is going to serve for 18 years. I almost prefer that to picking someone who's 55 and really qualified and is going to serve for 18 years. It's the difference between like them ending their term when they're 73 versus 63. And I don't know that that would change the outcome that much. Though at the same time, the point is like, there are a lot of people serving on the court now well into their old age when they probably shouldn't be. Ruth Bader Ginsburg obviously being the prime example from recent memory. This is like an argument purely about the merits of the proposal versus the way that it's being pushed by Biden, which like, I don't think my position is going to move on. I think Biden's doing it for purely partisan gain and for the wrong reasons because he

thinks the court's really extreme when I actually don't think it is. And it's not good when like a partisan president is pushing a partisan policy proposal like explicitly so he can get the court to rule in the way he wants. I don't think that's healthy. But I will say, I think that because of how many justices have sort of clung to their seats recently. And then you throw in like the really, really, really ugly politics around tapping a justice, which, you know, we saw the Democratic side of it with Brett Kavanaugh and his hearings, where like, you know, I have no idea

whether the allegations against him were true. I don't think anybody does allegations against him were true. I don't think anybody does, just to be clear. It's his word versus another woman's, and there's literally almost no evidence from either party that affirms their position or undermines it. But it was a really, really ugly confirmation hearing that really tore the country apart in a lot of ways that I thought was just like proof of how nasty the politics have gotten around this issue. And then what Mitch McConnell did, which was, you know, basically just like a

bald face lie and flip flop when it became politically expedient. flip-flop when it became politically expedient. I want to avoid that stuff. I guess that's like a primary concern of mine is I want that to be less a part of the, like just the political framework. And on the one hand, if you have a justice that's getting nominated every time a president is a presidential election's happening, you're sort of watering that stuff down and you make it less explosive and less important because even if future president Kamala Harris or Donald Trump gets to appoint another Supreme Court justice, we know that four years after that, whoever gets reelected will get to appoint the next one. But at the same time, that then makes it a part of every single presidential election versus a part of one

in every two or one in every three, which is what we have right now. So it's like, do you want that kind of constant war around the justices that's going to be maybe lower level and less, you know, extreme and over the top every year, every presidential election, or do you want it, you know, in fits and spurts? I don't know which one of those is better. I just think it's like something you have to weigh. I also think the experience argument that like, you know, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who literally held onto the seat until she died, there were no, I mean, there were a few, but only at the very, very end. And there weren't many reports, leaks, et cetera, that she was, like, incapable of doing the job. I mean, she died with the enduring respect of the most conservative justices on the court. And I think there's something to that. Like, in 10 years, in 20 years, Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson and, you know, Brett Kavanaugh are going to have 20 years of a working relationship together.

And I think that's good. I think it's actually helpful and matters. And they won't get cycled out for the next group. And then whenever the new justices get appointed because Clarence Thomas is going to be too old or whatever it is, that justice comes in and has two people who have been on the bench for 20, 30, 40 years to learn from and to look up to. And in the context of the Supreme Court, I find that argument way more compelling and convincing

than the context of Congress, where I do support term limits because the downside of the congressional term limits or the downside of not having term limits in Congress is that incumbents have a bunch of power. So you can suck at your job, but still get reelected every year because the power of the incumbency is so strong. So we should remove that power to make the elections more of a fair fight. And one way to do that is with term limits, which I think would be helpful. But the justices aren't getting elected. And so I don't know, I buy that argument a lot more. And I think that's one of the things that I kind of get stuck on and go back to. Yeah, so I guess that would be my, those are the things that come to mind when I respond. Okay. So I think the concept of congressional term limits is something that I,

maybe I can, I think I want to leave that aside. The analogy is there. So it's like begging to be discussed, but I think that's where I'm going to kind of draw the perimeter of my response because I think there's a lot to talk about there. I also want to just do a quick self-correction because I wrote it down and it's bugging me a little bit. I said amicus briefs earlier. I should have said court decisions. Sorry about that. But to your points, I think justices retiring strategically is a big problem. I should have mentioned that. So I'm glad that you brought it up. It's not just when they're appointed. It's also when they retire and that's politically timed.

But to your point about, you know, we're smoothing this out now over multiple elections under this idea. Is that better or worse? We can discuss and debate that. I think that's a little bit of what we're doing here. I would say it's better because it's regular instead of being sporadic. And then when it's sporadic, it feels intensified. Right now, it's just like in the back of your mind. And I think when it's spread, it's going to always be in the back of your mind.

My evidence for that is that presidents already have the power to appoint federal justices. Presidents already have the power to appoint federal justices. And we talk about that at elections, but it doesn't bubble up to become the big reason why we nominate or why we elect presidents. Now, of course, a Supreme Court justice obviously has way more power and authority than a federal justice. But I think that's a useful analogy for trying to think about which way that would go. And I think there's a lot of places where we agree. So you saying the court isn't that extreme, as extreme as people are saying it is not as predictable as people say it is. Totally agree. That's the thing that we've discussed before. Totally agree about Biden's being partisan motivated here and attacking the record of the court and trying to resolve that record with term limits. It feels like the wrong tool for this purported problem he's suggesting.

And I think that is an issue. But when we're talking about in theory of this being applied, to me, I think the arguments of maybe spreading it out doesn't help. I'm still not fully convinced against that. I think it would. And the second thing that you brought up as a point against it in theory is this idea of like the fraternity or Latin doesn't have a non-gendered word

for fraternity or sorority, but the camaraderie, I guess, of the courts, justices, when they form a lifelong or decades-long relationship into a lifetime appointment. There's something romantic about that in a civic sense, and that's kind of a beautiful thing. I don't know if we lose that. I don't think that we do. It's an 18-year appointment still. It's a long time. That is a cost though. It's not something that I think would be a primary motivator for me. I think the things

that really opened this plan up, this term limit plan up to attack is just how it gets enacted. Like there are two big open questions to it that I think aren't fully solved. And I don't know how they get solved. One is how do you enact it? Who's the first to go? Because right now the longest tenured Supreme Court justices are conservatives. So of course, the Democrats suggesting it will go, well, let's look at the list. Oh, what do you know? These are the people who should go first. That doesn't sound right.

I think there's probably a way to say we're going to grandfather the first person in and maybe roll it in. And it's going to be like a 30 or 40 year slow walk in order to get to full adoption where maybe the first appointment is like 24 years and the next is like 20 and then we get to 18 by the time the next person retires. And I'm not sure what that looks like. I'm not sure if the thing that I said would even make sense. And I think that's a very important problem to solve. And it might be a thing that foundationally makes this plan not work. It might. But I think it is solvable. I just don't know what the solutions are. And the second thing is what happens if somebody retires or dies early? How does that affect the schedule for this? Because that's still possible. People serve lifetime appointments to the court and then they retire early. So that's something that could still happen out of political experience unless you solve for it.

And I don't know how you do that. So do you leave the court vacant for the entirety, that seat vacant for the entirety of the remainder of that person's term? Possibly. That's not the worst thing in the world, but it is another cost. And I think those two issues are the hardest things to solve, but my inclination is that they're not unsolvable. I think we agree that there's an issue that needs to be solved and that there's no great, perfect solution out there because I definitely

don't appreciate or love the way that the Supreme Court nomination process is happening right now because I do find it overtly political. I do think that, I mean, not that I, not that it needs not to be, but that it's just so over the top. And I think that it's very clear that kind of political parties and the justices are working hand in hand in some instances, which makes me really uncomfortable. I also just think like, yeah, we shouldn't have people dying in office of effectively natural causes in old age, which we have happening in Congress and on the Supreme Court, which I think is a big issue. which we have happening in Congress and on the Supreme Court, which I think is a big issue. We're coming up on an hour here, so I want to make sure we pivot to get through a couple really quick.

It shouldn't be really quick, but a couple of topics that I know we wanted to discuss today. It's Thursday, so there are three big things that are happening right now. One is that there's a massive controversy blowing up on social media at the Olympics right now about Amani Khalif from Algeria, who is a boxer that a lot of people apparently think is trans, even though she's not, which we're going to talk about. Evan Gershkovich was just released in a prisoner exchange, which I want to talk about very quickly. And then Trump's appearance at the national association of black journalists conference, which we touched on in the reader question in today's podcast. But, uh, I want to talk about the Imani Khalif thing first. Um, so Imani Khalif is an Algerian boxer

she's fighting in the women's division at the Olympics she fought an Italian boxer today who quit the fight after about 46 seconds said that or maybe it was a minute 46 seconds said that she had never been hit so hard in her life

and basically just didn't feel safe in the ring and stepped out and this is really controversial because Imani is a she fights as a woman she is a woman effectively raised as a woman her life. I think the understanding has been that she's female. But she recently failed a test that the IBC, the International Boxing Committee, or I think it's committee. They did basically a gender test on her and they disqualified her from a fight. basically a gender test on her and they disqualified her from a fight. And the reason they did that was because as part of that test, uh, it came back that she had X,

Y chromosomes, which is what males have. The X, Y chromosome thing is possible in cisgender women with certain, basically like genetic DNA, uh, conditions. And this post has gone viral all over social media. Basically, as far as I can tell, with like 95% of the people consuming the media thinking that Imani is trans. And the narrative that is quickly shaped is that this trans, this male to female trans woman is being allowed to fight in the women's division and like beating

the crap out of women and everybody's cheering her on and the Olympics are totally okay with it, which actually is not what's happened. Imani's from Algeria, which is like one of the most repressive countries in the world. They would not allow her to identify herself on her passport as a female if she were trans. Everybody's understanding seems to be that she was born with female genitalia and XY chromosomes. And she failed a test not for elevated testosterone, which is one of the things that some trans athletes are often disqualified for. She's been boxing on the international circuit for years. She loses all the time. But, you know, there is this kind of image narrative,

admittedly very powerful, of this like large kind of more masculine looking woman that everybody thinks is trans beating up on a boxer in the Olympics and turning it into like this big woke ideology made this happen. I have seen an incredible number of just like dim-witted tweets about this and, you know, responses to this controversy. J.D. Vance tweeted out, this is where Kamala Harris's ideas about gender lead to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match. This is disgusting and all of our leaders should condemn it. Some people whom I like really like and trust, like Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine, who I have published articles with. He's a great dude and typically a very smart and skeptical guy, tweeted about how male

to female trans women are not women, they're men. They should not be allowed in women's sports, bathrooms, changing rooms, prisons, etc. That's a fine view to have. It's totally irrelevant for this. It's a fine debate to have. I disagree with the view. Totally irrelevant to the conversation that's happening or that should be happening right now. So I don't know how much we want to talk about this. I just want to get it out there that like you're probably going to see this video I wish this podcast were coming out today

I've been tweeting a bit about this the really sick irony of all of this to me is just like imani's Living proof that gender and sex are actually not always simple. It's not always black and white and if people like could pause for a second and just reflect on this fact that here's this woman raised in a country where she would be killed if she were trans, has identified as a girl her whole life. Her father didn't want her to box because it wasn't a women's sport, and she did anyway. As far as we know, and my best understanding, born with female genitalia otherwise would not be able to identify

as a woman in Algeria and has XY chromosomes. And we don't really know the status of like these other tests that we use to figure out whether an athlete should compete in women's or men's divisions. It's just like, this is a person who is proof that sometimes this stuff isn't simple. And, you know, I'm like, I know that I practice and try to live in this sort of nuanced gray space of our political stuff. And this isn't really a political issue. It's more like a science question or science issue, but it's become so politicized. And I'm not even arguing that she should be able to fight as a woman. I literally don't know. I, and I genuinely mean that like Like the IBA says no. My position on male to female trans women in sports, which is like where a lot of this controversy happens, is that like the governing body should set rules

and figure it out and it should be sports specific because some sports it really matters. Like boxing, I think is a sport where it matters and other sports, I don't think it matters. And like, that's okay to have these organizations decide. The IBA says no. The IOC says yes. Both of those groups have really much better qualified experts than I am to determine how to test this stuff, how to categorize people, what to do in situations like this. And I'm not passing any judgment on whether she should be able to fight in the women's division or not. I'm just saying at the most basic level, this is like the example that it's not always simple. And I just wish that that was

the conversation people were having. And instead it's like all these people telling me I should be calling this person he instead of she, when it's like, she has literally been a girl and a woman her entire life from birth. And that is always how she's been addressed and identified. And like, there's all these pictures now circulating of her as like a, like a four-year-old, very clearly a girl looks extremely feminine is her parents clearly think she's feminine. They're dressing her in pink, out circulating of her is like a, like a four-year-old, very clearly a girl looks extremely feminine is her parents clearly think she's feminine. They're dressing her in pink, all this. It's like, you know, the thing that's happened is that she took this test and has this chromosome disorder basically. And, um, and is also maybe benefiting from that physically, which is a thing that the IOC and the IBA have to figure out.

That's really, really, really complicated. So I don't know. I just wanted to get that off my chest because I took, I thought, a rather benign position on this online, which is always a huge mistake to think that you're saying something benign about a controversial topic. Which was like, this person is not trans. And if you think that you have literally not taken two minutes to read about her, and also she is an example of this being really complicated. And it's like, the transphobes are just like out for blood. There's like tangle fans in my inbox telling me that I am a lib, like a woke lib. And then there's like the liberal progressive feminists who also think she's trans and are like telling me that I'm ruining women's sports by taking this position. I'm just like, all of you guys seem like really narrow-minded idiots to me.

So I don't know. This is a really, really tough issue and I don't have a good answer for it. I actually, if it weren't so ugly and the conversation weren't so like vile right now, I would say it's really fascinating and a really like interesting stress test for how to make decisions about this. But instead I'm just distracted by the fact that like the dialogue around it is just so ugly and black and white and simple, which is, um, is really frustrating. I don't have a whole lot to add. I'm going to, we agree on where I think you land here and on the steps that you take, which is sex and gender are a little complicated, if not very much so. When it comes to sport participation, we're talking about markers of biological sex that matter for that sport, of which there are multiple. We talked

about chromosomes being one of them, testosterone levels is another, whether or not an athlete was able to or did go through male puberty is another. There are things that each sport knows more about than we do, which is why we share the opinion that it should be left to the governing bodies of the sports to decide these things. And there are a number of ways where people either identify themselves or may be defined by one metric or another as having intersex characteristics of which there are several one of them being at the endocrine level and hormones that are produced which contain like that category encompasses a wide number of people. And there's a debate over how much that should, like the debate of what qualifies as intersex

within intersex is already complicated. So there's never going to be a clear dividing line. The fact that this, or the idea that there should be something that's left to the sports to decide, The fact that this or the idea that this should be something that's left to the sports to decide, I think, is the best conclusion I've been able to reach. And the last thing that I'll say is just to quote Khalif's opponent in this match, which is Angela Carini of Italy, who said, I'm not here to judge or pass judgment. If an athlete is this way and in that sense, it's not right or it is right. It's not up to me to decide. I think that's a good take. Yeah, I think so too. And also like appreciate the, like, you know,

her heartbrokenness that's on display. She's seen like, you know, on her knees crying after she quits the fight and everything. And it very well may be that she's at like an inherent disadvantage that she can't overcome. Imani's lost fights. So, you know, I don't think it's like impossible for a woman boxer in the world to beat her right now, but yeah, it's a really, really intense convo. We'll be right back after this quick break. Everybody has housing costs on their minds. For free tools and resources to help you manage your home finances, visit Canada.ca slash it pays to know.

A message from the Government of Canada. 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+.

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So, yeah, we can, I, first of all, Yeah, we can. I, first of all, I just want to say like, this is tremendously relieving and I'm really happy. And I cared a lot about this case and we've talked about it a bunch in Tangle. And it's just like super scary. I felt the same way with Brittany Griner to think that somebody can go to a country like Russia and just basically be picked off for pretty much whatever. Um, and, and then thrown into prison and get these sort of show trials and just be sentenced to like 20 years in prison. I will not be going to Russia anytime soon. I have Russian ancestors and family. My mom used to live in Moscow. I would love to go spend time in Russia. And you won't catch me there. Not a place that I'm going to go, especially not with my computer or my cell phone. And certainly not to go do any kind of interesting reporting or writing, because that's how scary I think this current iteration of the Russian government is.

And I'm very happy he's out. I sent this to our Slack, the Tangle Slack. Incredible ending passage of this Wall Street Journal story about Evan being released. And the story basically says that one of the things he had to do in order to be released from this prison, there was this protocol where he can leave with the papers that he wrote while he was in detention, the letters he scrawled out, the makings of a book he had labored over, all super interesting, cannot wait to read those. But they had another piece of writing they required from him, an official request for presidential clemency, and the text should be addressed to Vladimir Putin. The pro forma printout included a long blank space the prison could fill out if

desired or simply as expected leave blank. In the formal high Russian he had honed over 16 months imprisonment, the journal's Russia correspondent filled out the page. The last line submitted a proposal of his own. After his release, would Vladimir Putin be willing to sit down for an interview? When I read this, I literally got chills. I just got goosebumps just reading it again.

We live in an era, we just talked about this and it's a relevant transition to the National Association of Black Journalists stuff where like there are journalists quitting their jobs over Donald Trump being allowed to come speak at a conference they're hosting and advocating for the deplatforming of all sorts of different kinds of people that they disagree with. And here we have a journalist who just spent over a year in prison and was about to be shipped off to a penal colony by a oppressive authoritarian leader who is known for killing political

dissidents and disappearing journalists who write critically about him. And the thing that he's thinking about as he gets released from prison is whether he can get a sit down interview with the guy who just did this to him. That is the spirit and heart of a journalist and of journalism and reporter. It's the reason I have so much admiration for the people who do this job really well and much, much better and more brave than I ever could or ever will. And this dude is an absolute legend to me. I am going to buy his book. I will gobble up anything he produces about this experience and this story.

I will cheer at the TV when I see the images of him getting off the plane in the US. I can't wait for that. Just like what a total badass legend who just suffered this awful, awful thing. My worst nightmare being unjustly in prison literally is one of my biggest fears. And he did it with a smirk on his face. And he walked out of the prison with a final request for Putin to sit down for an interview with him. I mean, that's it. That's like, that's what journalism should be. That's what reporters should do. And I can't, it's impossible for me to put into words how much respect I have for the guy. So wanted to shout that out and just very glad to see him coming home.

the guy. So wanted to shout that out and just very glad to see him coming home. Again, not a whole lot to add for me. I think that was one of the most badass last lines that I've read in a news article, maybe ever. I mean, certainly in recent memory. I think the only word of caution that I have in my head is something that our friend Marquez, MKBHD on YouTube, has said in a YouTube video several years ago when he was talking about role models was he was saying he always looked up to Kobe Bryant, the athlete and not Kobe Bryant, the person. And that it's just always gets a little dangerous when we get too enthusiastic about people because you never know what things are going to come out that are going to ruin our image of them. And I think it's a moment where I think for the day, I'm going to indulge in some hero worship for Gershkovich. But tomorrow, I'm going to just admire him as Evan Gershkovich, the journalist. But for the day, I think the things that he's endured,

the way that he's endured them, are all things worth aspiring to, that level of inner strength and perseverance. And it's hard to imagine what that requires of a person. So kudos to him and welcome home. Well-earned hero worship and welcome home. And then the last quick hit that we wanted to cover was just the trump uh appearance at the national association of black journalists unbelievable yeah i mean we i talked about it in the reader question

so i don't know how much more there is to say but i will say it was on this podcast last week that i you know we talked about the the strengths and weaknesses of kamala harris and this is relevant to one of the strengths and one of the strengths that i said that she had was that when the debate happened, I thought she was going to bait him into saying some dumb stuff that was like self-destructive. And apparently it didn't take a debate. It just took him showing up at the NABJ. And, uh, you know, like the, it's so interesting to me because I think that there are so many good ways to attack Kamala Harris. She's not a good politician. I mean, maybe she'll be better than we remembered from 2020, but she's, she has a ton of weaknesses that they could go after.

that they could go after. And instead, they're doing this like DEI bit. And then Trump comes out and is like, is she black or Indian? I mean, it's hard to tell. And she was one and now she's the other. She turned black. I don't know what that's all.

Somebody should really look into that. And it's just like, dude, what? Like if he were on Steve Bannon's podcast, this would be a dumb thing to say. You're being interviewed by three black journalists at the NAPJ conference. It's like, I said it in the reader question, it's idiotic. It's classic.

It's like 2016 vintage Trump, like him just saying or doing something where you're just like, you smack your forehead. And if you're rooting for the guy, you can't believe that it's this silly. And I'll just say, like I said in the newsletter and the podcast, Kamala Harris has identified as both Black and Indian for as long as we have any kind of public record on her She did not switch. She did not turn black. This was a new thing. She went to Howard University She pledged to the black sorority She has always identified and embraced

Her blackness and she's always talked about being south indian and this is like part of her political story It's part of her narrative. It's all this stuff. It's just like, so on top of just, even in a world where this was true, let's say like different alternate universe, Kamala Harris never talked about being black until she like ran for vice president in 2020 or ran for president in 2020. And then all of a sudden she started,

even in that world, the way in which Trump brought it up and how he discussed it, I think would have been self-destructive. But it's like the fact that he's just literally making this up or somebody's fed him bad information makes it even worse and look worse.

And this is his weakness that is going to come out again because Biden is no longer in the race. And when you're not running against the person who has trouble finishing sentences, your own mistakes get a lot more attention. And the crazy stuff that Trump says is going to be a part of this election again. And that's one of the ways the race has changed, I think. One of the ways the race has changed, I think. A thing that I was left with, but also reacted to with almost immediately was, oh, wow, I have not seen him in a confrontational environment in five years, I don't think, since he interviewed, since he debated Joe Biden before the last election. Because certainly the last debate wasn't very confrontational for Trump.

And the room was empty. So that kind of mattered too. And he started when he got a question that he wanted to pivot from, he started going into bits of his stump speech, it felt like, and trying to talk about the radical leftists bringing in rapists into our country, and they're going to replace black jobs, and these aren't good people. And it just wasn't working in that room. It wasn't working with the people who were talking to him. And it seemed like he was having trouble switching gears. And it left a big question for me of what it's going to be like when he's in these moments more, because he's been in campaign mode for four years. And then he had one test where Biden put up almost no resistance. And now it's an open question of you put before, it's going to be tough for him when he's on stage with Harris, how's he going to respond?

And we got a little bit of a preview of that. And now if you're in Trump's camp, you're probably highlighting that portion of your concern list and circling it with big red marker and saying this is going to be one of the top things we have to do is prepare for oppositional questions in contentious environments so we can have questions that are going to appeal to neutral voters because that was a big miss. And it's going to be a problem for him if he can't figure it out. All right. We're at hour 15, so we got to wrap it up. Again, there's just so much news. It's hard to keep up with everything that's out

there, but I think it's time to close things up with our grievances. The airing of grievances. Between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal. All right, I'm going to go first. I have a grievance about X. The Twitter, the platform formerly known as Twitter,

already just threw up an X by crossing his forearms, which was sick. I'm going to start doing that every time I say X. The platform formerly known as Twitter already just threw up an X by crossing his forearms, which was sick. I'm going to start doing that every time I say X. X Twitter. Yeah, X Twitter. Okay, this is a new thing that's happening on the platform. I mean, it's been happening kind of since Elon Musk took it over, but we don't have to say that, I guess. But it's been happening a lot more in the last year, which is that if you go to the replies of a viral tweet, it's all just engagement farming. It's so annoying.

It's like there's a video or a screenshot of something that is like interesting or crazy or is this true? I can't tell. Is this a fake video? And in the old Twitter, you used to be able to go look at the responses to the post and there would be all these people discussing the post

because that's why you're looking at the replies. You want to see how people are reacting to stuff. It's like Kamala Harris releases a statement on something. As a journalist, I'm very interested in how these people on Twitter are responding to the statement. So I go look at the replies and it's like, did you know that Walter Payton was the best running back of the 19th? And I'm like, what? And it's literally, you have to scroll for 30 seconds to get to a comment that's relevant to the post. And it has the least amount of engagement of anything else. And there's this new strategy.

I don't know if it's bots or just like savvy social media people, but there's a name for it. They're calling it engagement farming. Elon like briefly suggested maybe he was going to do something about it. As far as I can tell, it's getting worse every day. And it's my grievance for the week because it's so unbelievably annoying. It's one of the key ways the platform has been ruined recently. And I hate it. And I wish people would stop doing it. I'm reading the comments to see people talk about the original post, not to see a bunch of totally irrelevant links to other videos and tweets and people trying to get likes and follows and comments. And by the way, like, not an insignificant portion of those replies are just like porn. It's like 10% of them are like nude pictures and women or men saying, you know, follow me, DM me for whatever. It's like

that it's so spammy and awful that I can't even look at the replies if I'm in like a shared office space. Um, so do something about that, please. If there are any Twitter engineers listening to this podcast, X engineers, X, uh, I just threw the X out. That would be really awesome if you could fix that because I hate it. And it's part of the reason I hate X right now. I'm curious what your most common engagement farming reply is that you've noticed and if it varies from person to person. Because for me, I keep getting replies that I see that are about random Japanese mascots. Yes. No, I get that too.

I see those all the time. And it's like, it's Japanese-related content, often the Japanese mascot thing, which I've seen. And then also, it's always like history videos, like colorized history videos. That's like the number one thing I'm seeing is like Beijing in 1832 in response to like a tweet about the no-hitter in Major League Baseball. I'm just like, I don't care about this.

I want to read about the baseball play. You know, it's like it's so… Anyway, yeah. It's probably not something to get too worked up about, but I wish somebody would fix it. Yeah, it's so... Anyway, yeah. It's probably not something to get too worked up about, but I wish somebody would fix it. Yeah, I wish somebody would fix it too. I'm going to bring us back a little bit with my grievance. I'm going to bring us back like 13 years ago.

Just dusting off an old one from the shelf. And I will warn you that this is going to end in a place that, you know, maybe feels a little better than what a grievance normally feels like. So sorry about that in advance. But you're going to very quickly see where I'm going with this, Isaac. 13 years ago, I had just dropped out of a graduate program, which is a thing I'm great at, just dropping out of grad programs, University of Pittsburgh. And at the time, there was a person who was just spamming bomb threats at Pitt, who was almost every day or every other day calling in a fake bomb threat, shutting the university down. There's a giant tower in the University of Pittsburgh called

the Cathedral of Learning where a lot of people have classes and they'd have to close that down, do bomb sweeps somewhat regularly, and it was really tough for the university to respond to. It lost a lot of days of learning for students, and it was frankly embarrassing. And I, as a proud college university grad student dropout, grad student dropout wrote in to every editor at the pit news saying, I have a pitch for an op-ed that you should run. I think that this person, when they call him the next bomb threat, all the university students should not comply with leaving. They should continue to stay in their classes. We know it's fake. It's not a risk of like a public safety. So we should just resist. And, you know, I know that's going to be resisting the police, but I think there's a way to do it peacefully. And I explained this in my pitch to

every editor at the Pitt News. And that's something that annoyed me that that happened, that that person who made those bomb threats, that's my grievance. That's one of them. That person was eventually caught. Their story was a little weird. We don't have to get into it. The second grievance though, was that I know what I was asking for is kind of extreme. And I was aware of that, but I thought, maybe there'll be some editor who will have a conversation with me. Every single editor ignored my pitch to the Pitt News, except for one person who was the editor of the sports desk. And his name was Isaac Saul. And he sent back a reply to this random email. It was anonymized, so he didn't

know it was me. And that was a big moment. I think as we're talking today, we opened the podcast by looking back and being grateful for five years of Tangle. This is a little weird for this podcast, but I wanted to take the opportunity to look back for about 15 years of friendship. So it's been wild. I'm looking forward to more. I appreciate it, man. And for the record, for my free speech absolutist credentials, I went to bat and fought for you to try and get that piece published. Yeah. I mean, I took the pitch to the editors, was told that there was absolutely zero chance the administration would allow it to happen. I made a stink in an editorial.

And again, I was a sports editor and I was like, the whole point of the school paper is like we're supposed to be able to represent the students. And this is like a really good pitch because I thought you were totally right. And this was all before I knew it was Ari.

Ari and I were friends at the time and he was writing from this burner email account. Yeah, thanks, man. That's a great story. Heartwarming, fun to reflect on. A kind of cool full circle thing because then you had like a 15-year divergence where you didn't really care about media

or journalism related things or work in the space, I guess you could say. And now here you are working for a media company with me, um, which is really bizarre. That is a totally wild, I can't believe that was 15 years ago, but, uh, also I can. Yeah. Anybody who is interested in that story should go Wikipedia pit university bomb threats. It's actually a super, super interesting story. And you were right. Your pitch would have, if you had published that piece in the school paper, it would have been legendary and nothing, we would have been totally safe. And it would have

saved like two months of the school basically being shut down by a guy with like a anonymous email account, which is pretty much what happened. So your pitch aged very well despite nobody having the guts to publish it. Well, almost nobody. If Tangle had existed at the time, I know where I'd be sending that pitch. I would have ran that thing in a heartbeat, man.

All right. That's a great way to end it. Thank you, Ari. I appreciate you bringing that story up. Good little surprise. We'll be back here next week with I'm sure 9 million more insane stories to talk about. So we'll see you guys then.

Take care. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our script is edited by me isaac saul and edited and engineered by duke thomas our script is edited by ari weitzman will k back bailey saul and sean brady the logo for our podcast was made by magdalena bakova who is also our social media manager the music for the podcast was produced by diet 75 and if you're looking for more from tangle please go check out our website at readtangle.com website at readtangle.com.

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