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- [00:00]
Isaac Saul
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- [00:41]
Ari Weitzman
Bombas are so absurdly comfortable you may throw out all your other clothes.
- [00:45]
Isaac Saul
Sorry, do we legally have to say that?
- [00:47]
Ari Weitzman
No, this is just how I talk. And I really love my Bombas.
- [00:50]
Isaac Saul
They do feel that good. And they do good too. One item purchased equals one item donated.
- [00:55]
Ari Weitzman
To feel good and do good, go to bombas.com acast and use code acast for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M b-s.com acast acast and use code ACAST at checkout.
- [01:07]
Audrey Moorhead
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- [01:41]
John Law
From executive producer.
- [01:43]
Isaac Saul
Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.
- [01:56]
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of money. My take I'm your host Isaac Saul and on today's episode we're doing a reader listener mailbag. So we solicit reader questions and listener questions about politics and our work every day in the newsletter. And every few months, so many questions we want to answer pile up that we just take them all at once in a members only mailbag. So today is one of those days. It's not just going to be me on the podcast. As the team grows, which we've been talking a lot about recently, we have more writers on staff, more thinkers on staff. We have questions being addressed to people that aren't me so you'll also hear Ari and Will and Lindsay and Audrey today on the podcast, which I'm really excited about. Without much further ado, we should just jump right into it. First up, we're going to answer a question from Terry in Springfield, Ohio. Terry said, what did you think about Trump's foreign policy speech in the Middle East? It struck me as a pretty big deal. Yes, Terry, like you, I thought it was a pretty big deal and I loved it, genuinely. If you were someone who didn't watch it, I really highly recommend giving it a view or reading the transcript. It was the kind of speech and worldview that Trump espoused in 2016 that I found really appealing. Among other things, he insisted on building a path toward peace in the Middle east on trade rather than war. I particularly love this flourish and I'll quote Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts, entire divisions of the past, and forging a future where the Middle east is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence. He also openly criticized the failed nation building of past US Administrations, emphasizing that strides towards regional peace have been made not by Western, Western interventionists, nation builders, neo cons or liberal nonprofits, but by the people of the region themselves, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies. During Trump's first term, he made quite a bit of progress in this mission with the Abraham Accords. He is clearly interested now in bringing Saudi Arabia and Qatar more fully into the fold. And I expect any grand deal or vision for the Middle east will include advancing the Arabian Peninsula's relationships with the Israel and charting a definite path forward for Palestinians in Gaza. Of course, Trump opened himself up to easy criticism. His typical exaggerations about past successes, some inconsistencies between his speech and his current actions see saber rattling with Iran, his green lighting of the bombings in Gaza, and the undercurrent of corruption that permeates many of his dealings with the Middle east countries. These are not small caveats, to be clear, but I can separate them from his overall vision for a prosperous Middle East. Next up is a question from Sandy in Spokane, Washington. Sandy said President Trump answered Kristen Welker's question on if he has to uphold the Constitution with an I don't know. Did he not read his oath of office? Is he playing dumb? Doesn't the average person realize that isn't a logical answer thank you. I'd love to hear you comment on this. So, actually, I think this is a classic example of a misleading headline. If you watch the full exchange, it lands a bit differently. I'll try to summarize as briefly as I can here because it's important. First, NBC's Kristen Welker asked Trump on Meet the Press if he was defying the Supreme Court by not facilitating Kilmar Abrego Garcia's return, to which he said, no, I'm relying on Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is very capable, adding that he is not involved in the legality or illegality question. He has lawyers to do that. Quote, they're not viewing the decision the same way you said it, trump tells Welker. Welker then asks Trump if he will seek clarification from the Supreme Court to better understand their ruling, and he says, we may do that. She follows up again, saying, secretary of State Marco Rubio has said everyone who is in the US Deserves due process, citizens and noncitizens alike. Trump again demurs. I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know, Welker responds. The Fifth Amendment says that this time, Trump replies more directly. It might say that, he says, but if you're talking about that, we would have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials. Finally, Welker asks, but even given those numbers you were talking about, don't you need to uphold the Constitution? And then Trump says, I don't know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court says. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation in context. It's clear to me that Trump's not saying he's confused about his responsibility to uphold the Constitution, but instead responding to a line of questions about court rulings and his deportation actions. Now, you may think Trump's answer is tactful deception and that he's dodging an important question about the rights of unauthorized migrants he's attempting to remove from the country. That's a reasonable response. By now, Tangle readers know how I feel about due process and Trump's defiance of the courts. It was a worthwhile series of questions from Welker, but the NBC News headline, which was then blasted across the media, was incredibly misleading and deceitful. Some alternative headlines might have been, Trump, we obviously will do what the Supreme Court says, or Trump says he will listen to scotus, his lawyers, or if they wanted to get a bit more clickbaity without being too dishonest. Trump says he doesn't know if everyone gets due process, but NBC didn't do any of that. Instead, they squeezed out the scariest, worst looking headline they could make for Trump. I think this is actually a prime example of why so many people, especially Trump supporters, no longer trust the media and their grievances are valid. Summarizing this entire nearly 3 minute exchange by saying Trump says I don't know when asked if he needs to uphold the Constitution, is woefully unrepresentative, even if they can claim it's technically the truncated version of what Trump said. I also think it's the kind of thing that happens nearly every day now, which is part of the reason trust in the media is at an all time low. We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [08:36]
Patrick McGrath
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- [09:42]
Ari Weitzman
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- [10:50]
Isaac Saul
All right, next up is a question from Matthew in Boston, Massachusetts directed at me. Matthew said, as others have noted, when you've announced growth in the past, many of your readers trust you personally. Your judgment, your voice, your approach. As Tangle grows and more of the team contributes across the board, how do you plan to maintain that trust? Specifically, how will you ensure that readers come to trust the entire team rather than feeling like they're losing the connection that drew them to Tangle in the first place? Trust is deeply personal. There's a reason many people trust you more than traditional media outlets, and I don't think it's just because of your format. A big part of it is the parasocial relationship. Readers feel like they know you. It's easier to trust a person than a brand. So how will you keep Tangle from becoming just another faceless organization and ensure that the brand doesn't overshadow the team or erode the trust you've built? That's from Matthew in Boston, Massachusetts. I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure, or at least I'm building the plane as we fly. What I do know is that I'm unbelievably enthusiastic about the team we have assembled. I trust the people involved in our publishing processes, and I hope that by some transitive property of trust, your trust in me bleeds into them. I do have some ideas for a path forward, though. First, I'm not going anywhere. In a lot of ways, I'm staffing up so I can focus more of my time on writing the My take section, hosting our podcasts, and generally maintaining my focus on content instead of all the other elements of the business and editing process that have needed my attention. Second, we've developed the hiring process to ensure that anyone we add to the team understands and shares the values and culture that I've built and Tangle. And third is just exposure. Like you said, I'm going to give members of the team more space to show our audience who they are like we're doing today. And because they are all such quality writers and thinkers, that exposure to the whole team will organically build readers trust and Tangle writ large over time. Despite our growth, I feel quite remarkably like my relationship to our audience has deepened, even if I can't give my full attention to every single comment, email or piece of feedback anymore. But I never want Tangle to feel like a stiff organization, and I'm keenly aware that the personal nature of our brand and content truly is the special sauce all right, next up is a question from Trevor in Pasadena, California. Trevor said, I think Isaac is a great host for Tangle. I like his thanks Trevor. I like his balanced commentary. However, it's natural for people's political preferences to change over the years. Depending on their circumstances and life experiences, they might become more liberal or more conservative. How have Isaac's politics changed over his career? Now that he has built a brand for himself as Tangle's voice of reason, does he feel locked into that political identity in the future? If he feels his political opinions are steadily drifting away from the middle, how would that affect the My Take section of Tangle? So first of all, thanks Trevor for the kind words. I appreciate it. Interestingly, my answer is yes, my politics have changed in deep and profound ways over the last six years. If I were to consider which of my views have moved right or become more conservative, I'd probably point to my perspectives on government spending, immigration, voting reform, and navigating our relationship with China. I think I've also subscribed to a kind of anti woke viewpoint, and while I still maintain pretty unambiguous pro choice views, I've learned to have much, much more empathy for pro life positions I used to feel totally disconnected from. In the other direction, I would say my views have moved left or become more liberal on Israel, climate change, family first policies, and PR reform. I think I've also become much more critical of Trump in the last six years. For what it's worth, I should note that my evolution on these issues is not just internal, but based on all the ways that broader circumstances have changed since I started this newsletter six years ago. And I don't just mean changes in our cultural climate or literal climate. Trump himself has changed, as have his policy focuses. His actions starting with January 6th and in some cases overt corruption like we've seen this term have fundamentally altered views I used to have about him from 2016 to 2019 and made me more critical of Trump. The woke ideology that evolved and peaked in a kind of anti police and extreme race and gender conscious fervor in 2020-2021 became much less innocent to me and turned into a horrifying marriage of groupthink, narrow mindedness and cancel culture, which helped turn my initial skepticism into a genuine aversion. The immigration and inflation crises under Biden move my feelings on border policy and government spending. Conversely, the climate disasters we've seen, the war in Gaza and my experience becoming a father all significantly impacted my views on climate change, Israel and family oriented policies. I think what Tangle has done, in a very overarching sense, is make me much more confused and open minded. I'm no longer so confident about my initial perspectives on an issue. I hold a healthy degree of skepticism about both parties and the two major ideological forces in our country, and I am way, way more comfortable acknowledging when I'm wrong, have made a mistake or changed my mind. All of that has opened the door for me to evolve and has made it easier for me to see the way some views I used to hold should change. Which leaves me sitting here now knowing that the views I hold today are ripe to evolve again over the next five years. And this is my last question. This is from an anonymous reader in Marshalltown, Iowa who said, do you have a yard sign available that I could order to suggest to my neighbors to politely investigate your site? I don't, but this is now 100% an idea that we're going to do. So thank you for the brilliant advertising idea and we're going to put that together. I love that. Thanks. All right, I'm going to pass it over to whoever's next. I don't really know who's going to be after me. Ari Lindsey Will Audrey Somebody all right, see you guys Sunday. Peace. We'll be right back after this quick break at Memorial Care Saddleback Medical Center. Future mothers are enjoying the journey of childbirth in private suites under the watchful eye of physicians, midwives, nurses and a level three nicu.
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Ari Weitzman
Just in case.
- [17:10]
Isaac Saul
Saddleback Medical Center Caring is our calling.
- [17:13]
Ari Weitzman
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- [17:52]
John Law
Hi, I'm Audrey Moorhead, an associate editor for Tangle. Chris from Georgia Asked what specifically is the administration saying Harvard has done that makes them antisemitic? If organizations or groups of students protest the actions of Israel, does that make them antisemitic? If so, does protesting the actions of the US or the Trump administration make a group anti Christian? I just don't see anything that suggests Harvard condones or supports the hating of Jewish people. Am I missing it? Is this one of those things where the dictionary definition doesn't match the perceived definition? Connotation vs. Denotation this topic contains a lot of nuance, but the short answer is less that Harvard itself is antisemitic and more that Harvard has allowed antisemitism to grow on campus. The university started investigating claims of rising antisemitism on campus in spring 2024, and the presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti Israeli Bias released its 300 page final report on April 29, 2025. The task force found that Jewish students on campus reported greater levels of discomfort and alienation than Christian students, though not as great as Muslim students, and it listed a number of disturbing incidents where students faced ostracism from friends, instructors used materials with antisemitic undertones in class, university employees intimidated Jewish students, and university sponsored events featured mostly or exclusively anti Israeli perspectives. The report doesn't paint a picture of a university that is top down antisemitic so much as one whose political environment is so monocultural that Jewish students, particularly Israeli or Zionist Jewish students, felt uncomfortable and unsafe and in some cases faced real discrimination even if they didn't express any political views about the Israel Palestine conflict. While you're right that protesting Israel's actions is not inherently antisemitic, the report on antisemitism at Harvard makes a pretty good case that the university did allow an antisemitic environment to fester for the better part of the 202324 academic year. If it had just been a few loud or uncomfortable protests, that would have been one thing, but teaching staff sending out email blasts informing students of these protests, or an office staff member telling a Jewish prospective student that they should know the difference between feeling unsafe and uncomfortable are decidedly not fine. Given the content of that report, the Trump administration can credibly say the university has an antisemitism problem. That's something we can all credibly say. After all, Harvard itself admitted to it. But Harvard and the Trump administration differ on the proper response to that antisemitism, as well as the degree to which it's entrenched in university leadership. Harvard's willingness to investigate the issue and publish such a damning report about it to the public tells me that university leadership is genuinely concerned about it. And the antisemitism at Harvard is an extemporaneous problem, not an institutionalized one.
- [20:44]
Ari Weitzman
Hey, this is Ari Weitzman, managing editor at Tangle, answering this question from Alex from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who asked why is historic levels of immigration a problem? Why are low birth rates a problem? It seems like a solution to both low birth rates and the problems they create Relating to the age structure of society is More Immigration so I have two reasons why I think more immigration is an insufficient answer to a decreasing birth rate, which we covered in a Tango edition a couple weeks ago. But first, let me back up a little bit to set some context for the discussion the way I see it. So going back to before the pandemic, in what feels like a different version of reality, this kind of fringe economic proposal called degrowtherism was gaining some steam on the left. The idea was that premising our world economy on infinite sustained growth was an existential problem, that we didn't have the resources to constantly grow without eventually consuming ourselves to death. The concept was probably best summarized in my mind anyway, by a piece of graffiti that I saw in Chicago, which was the only two things in the world capable of infinite growth are capitalism and a brain tumor. The implication, of course, being that the two can only grow to the point where they destroy their host, killing themselves in the process. That degrowth, or mindset, provoked the response, as now championed by Derek Thompson in the book Abundance that he co wrote with Ezra Klein, that we can grow infinitely more prosperous and infinitely more efficient and abundantly more happy without consuming an increasingly unsustainable amount. That worldview is gaining a good deal of traction right now, and a lot of people are buying into the idea that we can continue to grow economically without leaving anyone behind. So I say all of that to say this focusing our population increase or decrease on immigration tends to ignore the causes that lead people to immigrate in the first place. Which leads me to the first of my two criticisms. As the abundance theory suggests, we can continue to grow in both population and in our ability to provide for everyone in a healthy and sustainable way. And when I say we, I mean a global we. Places like South Asia and sub Saharan Africa can advance economically and can benefit from innovations to support their population the same way that OECD countries did. And assuming that perpetual immigration from those countries is a natural state of affairs is a little uncomfortable to me. We were worried about the global population choking us out of a future back in the age of Thomas Malthus, before the green revolution brought advances in agriculture that completely shifted our perception of what's possible. Something similar is going on right now with energy production. Instead of assuming that countries with high birth rates will never be able to sustain their populations, we can answer the demands with next generation power sources and agricultural advances advancements. Meanwhile, we see developing countries tend to get their birth rates to decrease over time, at which point we'd be having a different discussion. Second, we also don't have to see that a lower birth rate in the United States is a natural state of play indefinitely. Personally, I think that it's a problem that adults in my generation have to choose between a comfortable home and having a child. I also think it's a problem that many women have to choose between careers and ever having the chance to be a mother. And it would be a problem if we accepted as a society that to sustain our economy and our population, we just aren't going to have as many of these magical and inspiring creatures we call children in our society. Moving forward, I think that on its own is a problem worth solving. A population sustaining birth rate and a civilization sustaining society do not have to be mutually opposed. The United States can encourage more adults to become parents and countries like Tanzania can do more to provide for its growing population. It's very possible to hold both of these views without slipping into an anti immigration or nationalistic stance.
- [24:59]
John Law
Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer of YouTube and podcast content and co host of the daily podcast. I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. We are now offering this podcast exclusively to our premium podcast members along with our ad free daily podcasts, Friday editions, in depth interviews, upcoming new podcast series, bonus content and much more. If you want to receive all that and give your support to help grow Tangle Media, Please go to readtangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, a podcast membership, or a discounted bundle membership which gets you both access to the premium newsletter and the premium podcast if it's not the right time for you to sign up, please don't worry. Our ad supported daily podcast isn't going anywhere, but if it is in your ability to support by signing up for a membership, we would greatly appreciate it and we're really excited to share all of our premium offerings with you. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day y' all.
- [26:04]
Ari Weitzman
Take care.
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John Law
Bye y' all.
- [26:07]
Isaac Saul
Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our Managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our Social Media Manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75 and if you're looking for more from Tango, Please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.
- [26:47]
Audrey Moorhead
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- [27:17]
Isaac Saul
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- [27:46]
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