Tangle - Trump's controversial nominee to lead BLS

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

In a social media post last Monday, August 11, President Donald Trump announced that he was nominating economist E.J. Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Earlier this month, Trump fired the previous commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, after the agency released a weaker-than-expected July jobs report and revised May's and June's numbers downwards. Tangle LIVE tickets are available!We’re excited to announce that our third installment of Tangle Live will be held on October 24, 2025, at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in Irvine, California. If you’re in the area (or want to make the trip), we’d love to have you join Isaac and the team for a night of spirited discussion, live Q&A, and opportunities to meet the team in person. You can read more about the event and purchase tickets here.Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.Take the survey: What do you think of Antoni’s qualifications? Let us know!Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by: Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode Hulu original limited series that blends gripping pacing with emotional complexity, offering a dramatized look as it revisits the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox for the tragic murder of Meredith Kircher and the relentless media storm that followed. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is now streaming only on Disney Plus. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer pre-roll sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expect it. Maybe it's a little too loose.

Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong. But there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infused pre-roll sale today at OCS.orgia and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile. Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico for just $39 bucks a month.

Plus get a one-time use of five gigs of Rome Beyond data. Conditions apply, details at freedommobile.ca. 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. Today is Wednesday, August 20th. I'm coming to you live. Well, I guess you're not listening to this live, but I'm coming to you live from Philadelphia. And today we are covering a very controversial pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We're going to talk about exactly what happened. This kind of took place while we were on break, but it's been an ongoing developing story, so I'm glad we waited a little bit to cover it. A lot more info has come out. Before we jump into that, I want to give you a quick heads up about something here at Tangle. Now, I know if you are

a free Tangle listener, you just got a few ads at the top of this podcast. And if you're a paid Tangle listener, you didn't get any ads at the top of this show, but I'm about to do a little brief ad for us. This is a really hard month, August. additionally for media organizations. And it's been a tough month for us. We had a week off at the top, which was very nice, but not producing content often results in people kind of disengaging. Every August, there's loads of people on vacation. People are, you know, squeezing out the last bits of summer before they go back to school or go back to work or whatever it is. And at the same time, this is happening right now, we're also kind of at this weird

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Thanks, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Took a couple extra days off for some travel I was doing, but it is good to be back with you. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, President Donald Trump said he would not deploy U.S. trips to Ukraine as part of any security agreement, but did not rule out the U.S. providing air support. Number two, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levick confirmed that the Trump administration is in talks within Intel overtaking over a 10% stake in the computer technology company. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik recently suggested that the deal could involve

swapping existing government grants for Intel shares. Number three, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked security clearances for 37 current and former national security officials, including some who were involved in the assessment of Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 election and members of former President Joe Biden's National Security Council. Number four, Air Canada announced an agreement with the union representing flight attendants for the airline ending their strike. And number five, the Trump administration added over 400 product categories to be covered by its 50% tariff on steel and aluminum imports. The new levies went into effect on Monday.

tell you about. The president announced a little bit ago that he's going to nominate economist E.J. Antony from the Heritage Foundation to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, this comes after Donald Trump fired the last BLS commissioner earlier this month after the latest data showed that the job growth have been a lot weaker than previously reported. Trump claimed those numbers were, quote, rigged, but offered no proof to back that up. If Antony does indeed get the job, he'll have to be confirmed by the Senate. last Monday, August 11th, President Donald Trump announced that he was nominating economist E.J. Antony to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Earlier this month, Trump fired the previous

commissioner, Erica McIntarfer, after the agency released a weaker-than-expected July jobs report and revised Mays and June's numbers downwards. Antony, who worked as chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, has criticized the BLS reporting and said the agency must improve its processes for collecting and sharing economic data. The Senate must confirm Anthony before he can take the position, but his confirmation hearing has not yet been scheduled. For context, the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the BLS is the agency within the Labor Department responsible for measuring market activity, working conditions, price changes, and productivity in the U.S. economy. Every month, the Bureau compiles an employment report from the monthly survey

of about 631,000 work sites selected to represent all U.S. employers. The initial numbers released by the BLS are based on partial data for the first portion of a month, and then revised as data for more work sites and the rest of the month become available. Former Commissioner McIntyre worked for the federal government for 20 years before starting at the BLS in January 2024. Before his time with the Heritage Foundation, Antony held two fellowships at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group led by billionaire Steve Forbes, and served as an instructor at his alma mater, the University of Northern Illinois, while working

toward a Ph.D. in economics. In recent years, Antony has publicly criticized social security as a Ponzi scheme, referred to data from the BLS as phony baloney, and called for the Federal Reserve to be eliminated and for the U.S. to return to the gold standard. Our economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the numbers released are honest and accurate, President Trump posted in his announcement on Truth Social. I know E.J. Antony will do an incredible job in his new role. Congratulations, E.J. Antony's nomination has sparked criticism from economists who say his confirmation would threaten the neutrality and reliability of the BL. In an interview with Fox Business after his nomination, Antony suggested that the BLS should stop releasing its monthly jobs reports.

The White House later said BLS would continue publishing the report each month. Separately, there is video footage showing Antony leaving the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as others entered the building. The White House says that Antony was a bystander who wandered over to the Capitol and was in Washington, D.C. on business. E.J. Anthony is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner, Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Barack Obama posted on X, he is an extreme partisan and does not have any relevant expertise. Today, we'll get into what the left and the writer's saying

on Antony's appointment, and then Isaac's tape. We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Rroll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expect it. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect.

The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at OCS.ca and participating retailers. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode Hulu original limited series that blends gripping pacing with emotional complexity, offering a dramatized look as it revisits the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox for the tragic murder of Meredith Kircher and the relentless media storm that followed. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is now streaming only on Disney Plus. All right. First up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left opposes

Antonio's nomination, predicting his fealty to Trump will outweigh his commitment to accurate data. Some call Anthony unqualified and say he poses a threat to the U.S. financial systems. Others say the appearance of politicization at BLS could do as much damage as manipulated numbers. In the nation, Chris Lehman made the case against E.J. Anthony. Antony's only remote qualification for the job is a dogged commitment to the administration's fanciful interpretation of leading economic indicators, a demonstrably false story of tariffs and tax cuts working a miraculous across-the-board recovery from an economy that was left for dead by the Biden White House, Lehman wrote. Unlike other commissioners of the BLS, Antony, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, has no background in labor economics and his social media forays into macroeconomic debates show vanishingly little knowledge there as well.

Even before Trump's midsummer massacre at BLS, Antony had been calling for the equally data-challenged Department of Government Efficiency to take a chainsaw to the BLS. In an August 4th Fox News interview, he also suggested that the BLS should simply suspend the release of jobs numbers until they're subject to fuller vetting, Lehman said. If something as important as the collection and publication of fact-based assessments of real economic conditions were to fall completely under the sway of the administration's maga-boosting narratives, it will place many Americans already living precariously at the mercy of whatever appeasement strategy hacks like Antonio adopt to appease the great leader.

In the New Yorker, John Cassidy argued big business and Wall Street need to stand up for honest data. In a public statement on Anthony's nomination, the friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics called on the Senate to assess whether Anthony had the necessary qualifications, management experience, statistical experience, knowledge of the BLS and its products, and commitment to its mission of providing timely and accurate statistics, Cassidy, wrote. Looking at Antony's record, the answer seems obvious. He obtained his Ph.D. in economics in 2020. Since then, he has worked for conservative think tanks and defended Trump's policies.

He has also openly derided the BLS. The L is silent, he wrote on X last year. With the BLS facing challenges from all sides, the responsibility of protecting its mission and preserving its integrity, seems likely to fall on Republican senators, whose track record on vetting Trump's appointments and restraining his authoritarian tendencies is woeful. But big corporations and Wall Street firms that depend on the official data in their day-to-day operations should also be applying pressure to the White House and the Senate, Cassidy said. In attacking the Federal Reserve and now the BLS,

Trump is undermining the institutional foundations on which business confidence, American financial dominance, and the reserve status of the dollar are based. In the Atlantic, Egan Reich suggested the damage to the economic data may already be done. BLS data may not be completely tamper-proof, but they're pretty close. The sharpest economic minds in this country, both inside and outside the Bureau, pay meticulous attention to the deepest layers of the data, many strata below the headline unemployment rate, and change in payroll employment. Deceiving them all would be very hard to do, Wright wrote. Unfortunately, that might not matter. Antony doesn't have to manipulate any data to undermine the reliability of the

government's economic statistics. That damage might already have been done. Perhaps Antony can mandate methodological deviations that bias the numbers in Trump's preferred direction, but I don't think he needs to. Confidence in the Bureau is already badly weakened, right? said. This is about much more than just our trust as consumers of the jobs report, because we are also its producers. To create its reports, the BLS needs businesses and citizens to take the time to respond to surveys about changes to their payroll and about who is going to work or looking for a job in their household. Even before Trump won the election last November, the trend in survey responsiveness was declining, posing an existential threat to the robustness of the data.

All right, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. on Antony's nomination, though some say his efforts to reform the BLS are worth undertaking. Some worry that Antony lacks the qualifications for the role. Others say he could improve the BLS, but only if he eschews partisanship. In The Daily Caller, Alfredo Ortiz argued Trump made the right call in picking E.J. Antony. The BLS's credibility has eroded in recent years due to wildly off-base economic estimates. Observe its announcement last August that it had overstated Biden administration job creation by nearly a million positions, resulting in Biden receiving positive jobs numbers headlines month after month that he didn't deserve, Ortiz wrote.

President Donald Trump was right to fire BLS Commissioner Erica McIntyre, a Biden appointee, for these mistakes, even if they were the result of systemic flaws, not partisanship. Antony, who Trump nominated as her replacement on Monday, can restore integrity and precision to our most critical economic data agency. Antony was one of the first and most articulate critics of problematic post-pandemic BLS data. His expertise and dedication to reform make him the ideal candidate to ensure Americans can once again trust what the numbers say, Ortiz said. Critics claim Antonio is under-credentialed for the position.

The reality is that conservatives rarely climb the traditional academic ladder, not because of lack of skill or scholarship, but because universities, especially in the social sciences, overwhelmingly deny tenure to right-leaning scholars. It's a vicious cycle. Conservatives are shut out of faculty jobs, which in turn means they don't accumulate the elite university credentials to their detractors demand. In National Review, Dominic Pino wrote, Trump wants a Bureau of Maga Statistics. Antony is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. He has been a relentless booster of Trump's policies on social media, and he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand

economic statistics, whether that is due to willful misinterpretation or ignorance on Anthony's part is up for debate. But the pattern is undeniable, Pino said. Maybe you could excuse these posts as ragebate for social media and point to Antony's more serious work to prove his competence. But there isn't serious work to speak of. He hasn't published in any major economics journal. His claims to fame include being a frequent guest on talk radio shows. Antonio is nowhere near qualified to be BLS commissioner. If it was really true that Trump wanted to modernize and improve the BLS, he would have nominated someone with deep experience and economic data collection who has published research on statistical methodology and has ideas on

how to make the nuts and bolts of the BLS work better. His nomination of Antony proves that he wants a lackey instead. In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Bunn and Kyle Palmerlow explored what could happen if Antony produces overly optimistic inflation numbers. Every statistical tool for measuring the economy has room for improvement, but the BLS's methodology is sound and its team ensures reliable estimates of price changes. When it has adjusted its methodology for measuring inflation, the BLS staff has always been transparent and thorough, Bun and Pamela said. Will that be true under Mr. Antony? There are reasons for concern. He co-authored a 2024 paper with Peter St. Ange for the Brownstone Institute that critiques the way government measures the cost of living.

Messengers, Antonio and St. Ongch created an alternative measure of inflation and used it to claim that the U.S. economy has been in recession. We hope that Mr. Anthony approaches the job with deep respect for the value of consistent and defensible measures of the economy. If, as he is said, he is interested in improving those measures by boosting data collection efforts, that would be a valuable contribution, Bonnen Pamela said. But if he uses his role to develop alternative economic measures for political purposes, taxpayers will feel the effect. Workers may not feel the ebb and flow of monthly data reports, but they will notice higher tax bills if Mr. Trump, aided by the BLS, undersells inflation.

All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it forward, the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. Sometimes making sense of the news is complicated. Sometimes it isn't. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not have a problem with partisanship. It has a problem with data collection. President Trump is not. solving one problem, he is creating another. He does not want more accurate job numbers. He wants

job numbers that look more favorable for him. Fortunately, very few writers and pundits outside the most loyal Trump sycophants are pretending otherwise. Even some of Antony's backers, like his friend in Washington Examiner columnist Tiana Lodosher, conceded that the BLS is not fudging the numbers and couldn't get away with it even if it tried to. Dosher believes Anthony will improve the way BLS conducts its job surveys, and maybe he will. But she at least does not entertain the absurdity that the previous leaders of the BLS were working to undermine Trump. It's a small thing, but still heartening to see that our partisan lines haven't been drawn so definitively that pundits are incapable of agreeing on a common sense view. Economists want timely economic

data. In order to get that, the BLS surveys employers to create a preliminary monthly jobs report, which economists accept will be somewhat inaccurate. in exchange for its timeliness because it's preliminary. The BLS then adjusts its report once it gets more data for a given month, and once a year, it releases its most reliable report on its most reliable data sets, which are state unemployment records. Simply put, there is always a trade-off between accuracy and timeliness with data analysis at the BLS's scale.

For the most part, the BLS's system has served us well. Big revisions happen, but for a $30 trillion economy, they actually aren't as big as you would think. For decades, a good balance between reliable and timely labor statistics has allowed presidents, members of Congress, employers, banks, and the Federal Reserve to pull certain levers to keep our economy humming. And as we sit here today, we still have the largest economy in the world, which has recovered faster than any of our peers from COVID,

putting us in a globally and historically strong position. Of course, our data collection system can be improved, and in the post-COVID world, it has been getting worse. Survey responses have been fizzling and statistical agencies are woefully underfunded, which a lot of people think is contributing to less reliable initial numbers. This is a frustration I myself have shared, and it is the reason a lot of Trump's defenders offered to justify his decision to fire a mecantarfer. It is also not the reason Trump gave. Trump fired McIntyre because, as he said himself, he believes the jobs reports were rigged against Republicans. There is a simple

way to measure whether or not Trump's allegation is true. When the jobs report gets revised, as they often do, how are they revised? Consistently downward revisions would mean rosy initial report, showing bias favoring the administration, and consistently upward revisions would imply the opposite. So, are Democratic presidents getting more downward revisions than Republicans? No, they aren't. There's a lot of noise here, but the story is really simple. Trump fired the head of the BLS for releasing unfavorable jobs numbers, then hired someone to publish favorable numbers instead. And despite some protestations from people like Dosher, who again is a friend of Antoni's, I agree with critics on the right and left that he is not qualified for the job.

Even if he ignore the enormous partisan asterisk here, Antony was a January 6th attendee and a Project 2025 contributor whose feed is a firehose of the most sycophantic commentary imaginable. As Dominic Pino said, in National Review, under what the right is saying, quote, he does not understand economic statistics. Pinole highlighted seven different posts from Antonia in just the last year that show a clear misunderstanding of basic economics. In one example, he said this, import prices just came in way below expectations. June was up just 0.1% month over month and down 0.2% year over year, while May saw a huge downward revision from flat to 0.4% month over month, still waiting for tariffs to be passed on by foreign producers.

Pino addressed this tweet like this, quote, the import price index does not include tariffs. If foreign producers were eating U.S. tariffs, they would need to cut their pre-tariff prices so that the post-tariff price doesn't rise. The graph that he shared shows the pre-tariff prices on average stayed roughly the same between April and June, which means that foreign producers on average were passing the tariffs on to Americans. And there are more examples like this.

You can find similar arguments in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Cato Institute, the Dispatch, End Unheard, as well as from conservative economists at the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. William Beach, Trump's pick for BLS Commissioner during his first term, even penned a letter questioning Antoni's qualifications. As much as I oppose his nomination, it's perfectly possible that his nomination won't become the disaster I expected to. Antonio's initial ploy to stop releasing the monthly jobs report was shot down by the White House.

As Dosher explains, he is going to have a hard time politicizing 2,000 economists even if he wants to. Additionally, there are numerous ways to measure the health of our economy and job growth that don't involve the BLS, ADP reports, indeed job postings, independent business surveys, and even other reports from the Department of Labor, like unemployment insurance claims, just to name a few. I'm also skeptical of how long Antonio will last. This position is not a lifetime or even 10-year appointment, as Trump just demonstrated, a future Democratic president could fire Antony. And honestly, I don't think the business sector, which heavily influences the Senate and president, will tolerate fudge numbers or other kinds of chicanery if Antony goes that route. Still, the appointment will justifiably undermine trust in an agency responsible for crucial economic reports that the entire government and many private sector leaders rely on to make decisions.

and we shouldn't dilute ourselves into believing the BLS is being shaken up for any kind of thoughtful reason when the man responsible for this change has explained his motivations clearly. Trump wanted to punish McIntyre for a correction that is part of her job and is rewarding Antony for being loyal to him. His hope, obviously, is to get more politically favorable numbers from the BLS, but thanks to his decision, the public will have to view those numbers with skepticism. We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS summer pre-roll sale.

Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expect it. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong. But there's one roll that's always perfect, the pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at OCS.ca and participating retailers. What's better than a well-marbled ribby sizzling on the barbecue?

A well-marbled ribby sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribby you ordered without even leaving the kitty pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy zero-dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. All right, that is it for my take today, which brings us to your question's answer. This one's from Dean in Carbondale, Illinois.

Dean said, how do the feds determine the poverty rate and why is the functional poverty rate so much higher than that? Great technical question. So the federal government tracks the poverty rate through a pretty simple, three-step process. First, they develop a baseline poverty threshold, then they alter that threshold based on the number of income earners and children in a family, and finally, they compare a given family's net earnings to that adjusted threshold. The government actually keeps three different poverty measures. The most common metric is the U.S. Census Bureau's official poverty measure. To set the poverty line of the official measure, the Bureau simply multiplies

the cost of a simple diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation by three. Then they adjust that threshold based on a family's makeup. So you can see a link to that in today's episode description or newsletter, and then they compare it to a family's pre-tax earnings. The percent of the population below the official poverty measure in 2023 was 11.1%. Since 2011, the Census Bureau has worked with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate a more comprehensive supplemental poverty measure. That measure includes costs for food, clothing, and shelter,

including utilities from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, plus a modest amount for personal care, household supplies, and non-work-related transportation, treating taxes and child care as income deductions, and then it makes cost of living adjustments before comparing the sum to a family's earnings. Although this supplemental measure also considers assistance benefits from the government as income,

the broader considerations for costs are usually larger, meaning more people fall under this poverty line. The portion of the population, below the supplemental poverty measure for 2023 was 12.9%. Lastly, there is the Department of Health and Human Services, which keeps a federal poverty level, which is a simplified version of the official level that determines who is eligible for federal health care programs. HHS released a table of simplified thresholds for family sizes, but does not release data on the percentage of households that exceed them. Now, as for the quote-unquote functional poverty rate, you're probably thinking of something

used by NGOs to measure poverty. There is not one single functional poverty rate, but one of the most widely reference of these measures is United Way is Alice, that's asset limited, income constrained, employed. In setting this measure, the United Way considers not just food, clothing, and shelter, but child care, education, transportation, health care, and technology. With this much broader consideration, the United Way considers 42% of U.S. households to be below the Alice threshold. All right, that is it for your questions answered, and my take, I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod, and I'll see you guys tomorrow.

Have a good one. Peace. Thanks, Isaac. Here's your under-the-radar story for today, folks. On Monday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that British authorities had dropped their demand that Apple provide a backdoor to access U.S. users' data in national security and criminal investigations. In January, the UK asked Apple to disable its most advanced encryption for information stored in its cloud services, later telling U.S. officials that they would only seek this data when investigating serious crimes, such as terrorism and child sexual abuse. However, the Trump administration balked at the request, and Gabbard said dropping the protections would have encroached on American civil liberties.

Bloomberg has this story, and there's a link in today's episode description. Right, next up is our numbers section. There have been 16 commissioners in the history of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There have also been 10 acting commissioners who served between the departure of one commissioner and the appointment of another in BLS history. The first BLS commissioner, Carol D. Wright, assumed the role in 1885. There have been six BLS commissioners who have served in the 21st century. The number of days between President Donald Trump's firing of BLS Commissioner Erica McIntyre

and his nomination of E.J. Antony to replace her in the role is 10. The number of time Antoni's academic work has been cited is one, according to Google Scholar. And the total number of times former BLS Commissioner McIntyre's academic publications have been cited is 1,327. And last but not least, our Have a Nice Day Story. In 2007, four-year-old's Ellie Coroner and Dawson Naylor were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Both children were treated at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, with Coroner's cancer going into remission in 2008 and Naylor becoming cancer-free in 2010.

After their recoveries, the two did not cross paths again, until Naylor approached Coroner at an orientation event for the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. Both cited their childhood experiences as inspiring them to pursue medicine, ultimately reuniting them after 17 years. CBS News has this story and there's a link in today's episode. description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, please go to reetangle.com,

where you can sign them for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law, signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace.

Our executive editor and founder is me. Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saw, Lindsay Canuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reetangle.com. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Rroll Sale.

Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at OCS.ca and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile.

Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico for just $39 a month. Plus get a one-time use of five gigs of roam beyond data. Conditions apply, details at freedommobile.com. The twisted tale of Amanda Knox is an eight-episode Hulu original limited series that blends gripping pacing with emotional complexity, offering a dramatized look as it revisits the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox. for the tragic murder of Meredith Kircher and the relentless media storm that followed. The twisted tale of Amanda Knox is now streaming only on Disney Plus.