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Hey, it's Marc Maron from WTF here to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. And I'm sure the reason you're listening to this podcast right now is because you chose it well. Choose Progressives Name your price tool and you could find insurance options that fit your budget so you can pick the best one for your situation. Who doesn't like choice? Try it@progressive.com and now some legal info. But Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.
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Good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast. A place to get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host Isaac Soul and we have a special edition for you. Today. We're doing a listener mailbag. This is an opportunity to answer a ton of questions all in one episode. Because we get a lot of these questions. Obviously we answer reader and listener questions in every podcast and every newsletter on a daily basis, but there's a lot of you guys, so they pile up. And every now and then, you know, once every couple months or whatever, we try and do a whole edition just dedicated to responding to questions from our audience. Some of them are criticisms, some of them are questions about stuff we've covered, some of them are questions about stuff we haven't covered, or trying to clarify thoughts that were published in the podcast or the newsletter. So this is an opportunity to do that. We're going to have a lot of voices on the show today. Myself, Ari, Will, Audrey, Lindsay and Russell are all answering some questions that came in. We get a lot of questions, so like I said, we try and divide and conquer them. So it should be a pretty good show. As a reminder, you'll get a free preview of this if you are a free listener on the podcast. But to unlock the full thing, you will actually need to subscribe. You can become a member by going to readtangle.com membership and as always, memberships are the best way to support our work. So if you want to put some love behind the show and you want us to keep growing, become a member. It's cheap. It's like 59 bucks for a podcast membership for the year, which gets you ad free and members only podcasts. And it is. It's a little bit more expensive, about $99 for a bundle, which gets you the newsletter and the podcast together. All right, with that, I am going to jump right into the first questions that I got.
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This is Managing Editor Ari Weitzman reading this question, which comes from Ann from Missoula, Montana. Ann asks when researching a new story to write a My Take. How do you avoid or minimize poisoning the water, so to speak, with opin opinions and biases that might affect your take? Or do you just absorb it all and then try to press a mental reset button before forming your opinion? For me, it's definitely more of the latter. I find that my first reaction to a story is almost never the full opinion that I end up having after I pause, read more and consider multiple points of view. As an example, look at the last take I authored on the appeals court greenlining Trump's National Guard deployment to Portland, Oregon. I came in thinking that the arguments the Trump administration had been advancing were insufficient to justify the deployments, but their arguments had actually evolved to something I found more convincing, so my perspective shifted. I think that's the whole point of doing this work with tangle. You come in with a bias, you read more. Then your opinion shifts to encompass the validity of different viewpoints.
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Hey, this is Senior Editor Will Kbach jumping in to give my perspective on this question. So, like Ari, I typically start by reading a range of sources and opinions about the topic, often taking notes about disputed facts, differences in framing, and areas where the sides seem to be talking past each other. I also make note of my initial feelings about the story before I start the research, and then I assess how my position has moved, if at all. After doing this reading from there, I feel pretty prepared to start organizing my thoughts and writing.
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This is Associate Editor Audrey Moorhead. Our next question comes from Sonja from Los Angeles, California. She asks, can you track the effects so far on women from the Dobbs decision that undid the Roe v. Wade decision, specifically the medical restrictions? For example, Adriana Smith from Georgia, who was on life support and forced to birth a child against family wishes. How else does this decision affect women's health access in this country? I'm going to address this question in two parts, starting with how Dobbs has affected women's health care. Then I want to talk about the case of Adriana Smith, because contrary to media coverage, Smith's case would likely have played out the same way regardless of Dobbs. In the aftermath of Dobbs, states took various approaches to their laws on abortion. According to the center for reproductive rights, 12 states enacted complete bans, 14 states are hostile, which encompasses a variety of restrictions that fall short of total bans. Five states have no protections for abortion but still permit the procedure, 14 states have officially protected abortion access, and 11 states have even expanded abortion access. This analysis leaves out some detail about abortion restrictions and protections in each state, but it's an effective summary. Beyond access to abortion as a procedure, the Dobbs decision has impacted women's health more broadly. One analysis from the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that the maternal mortality rate in states with abortion restrictions is up to two times worse on average than in states with abortion protections, and this disparity disproportionately affects women of color. Meanwhile, other analyses have found that restrictions on abortion access worsened access to contraceptive miscarriage and maternity care more broadly because of funding issues, stigma and providers fears of litigation. However, many states abortion restrictions provide explicit carve outs protecting providers ability to remove miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. While data and media coverage show that some women have been turned away from necessary non abortion related care in states with abortion restrictions, pro life advocates who track women's health contend that the issue lies with fear and miseducation, not the laws themselves. In response, these states are issuing more specific guidance on how to implement their laws, which could improve maternal health outcomes. Now let's talk about the case of Adriana Smith and how the media got it wrong for the unfamiliar. Adriana Smith was a Georgia nurse who was declared brain dead in February 2025 after she suffered from blood clots in her brain. Her case garnered national media attention because at the time she was eight weeks pregnant and Smith's family claimed that the Georgia hospital treating her said they were legally required to keep Smith on life support until her fetus could be safely delivered. Smith's mother, April Newkirk, told the media that while she wouldn't say whether the family would have chosen to take Smith off life support and terminate the pregnancy, she felt that they should have had the choice. Multiple outlets claimed that Smith was kept on life support as a result of Georgia's Life Act, a law that went into effect after the Dobbs decision and banned abortions after fetal heartbeats became detectable. In fact, Smith's family even said that this was what the hospital had told them. The hospital claimed in a statement that it made its decision in compliance with Georgia's abortion laws and all other applicable laws. The last part of that statement is the key here all other applicable laws because, as Georgia's attorney general said in a statement, the LIFAX language only prohibits actions taken with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy, with exceptions for miscarriages or spontaneous abortions and ectopic pregnancies. Taking Smith off life support doesn't fit those guidelines because Smith's pregnancy would have ended as a secondary effect of stopping Smith's treatment, not as the result of an intentional abortion. However, another Georgia law likely created the legal gray area in which Smith's case tragically fell a 2007 law regarding advance directives for pregnant women upon brain death. This law requires physicians to satisfy two conditions before ending life support care for pregnant patients. First, the fetus she carries must be determined and viable. Second, the patient must have had an advance directive in place requesting the halt of life saving measures. In Smith's case, the heartbeat language in the Life act may have impacted doctors determination of fetal viability. But even in that case, the 2007 law's language requires inviability and an advance directive. Smith didn't have an advance directive in place, and the Georgia law didn't include a provision that allowed her family to make that decision after she was incapacitated. So legally the family shouldn't have been in consideration. Smith's case presents a genuinely unsettling picture of the way medical advancements have created fraught questions surrounding the definition of death and the ethics of life support in cases of pregnancy. But these questions aren't predicated on abortion access. Indeed, many states with abortion protections have life support laws similar to Georgia's. Unfortunately, the media attention's focus on Georgia's abortion law obscured the important details of the case that are worthy of more nuanced separate debate. Finally, an update on Adriana Smith and her child. Smith's baby, whom her family named Chance, was born on June 13, and Smith was taken off life support the following week. In mid October, Smith's mother shared in a GoFundMe update that Baby Chance, who's still in the NICU, is doing well.
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We'll be right back after this quick break Cold Mornings Holiday Plans this is when I want my wardrobe to just be simple stuff that looks sharp, feels good and things I'll actually wear. For me, that's quince. And the bonus quince pieces make great gifts, too. This season's lineup is simple but smart and Easy with quints $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like an everyday luxury. I bought one of these. It's incredible. Honestly, sometimes doing these host red ads can be a little bit of a drag, but this is one of the brands that I am really proud to support. Quince material is just top of the line, so if you want to give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince, go to quince.comtangle for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.comtangle free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comtangle if you're like me, instead of learning to skateboard, you wish you were learning to write code. Instead of scraping through college, you wish you bought Bitcoin at less than a cent or secured a few Nvidia shares before they boomed. We might beat the FOMO generation, but don't miss out on protecting your future. For around the same price per month as one of your streaming services, you can break our generational cycle and secure your and your family's future by finding life insurance@SelectQuote.com if you're new to life insurance or it's your first time hearing about the idea, you're not alone. I found Selectquote and for over 40 years, SelectQuote has helped more than 2 million Americans understand their options and get the coverage they need. Over $700 billion in coverage and counting. The good news is life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50%@SelectQuote.com tangle save more than 50% on term life insurance@SelectQuote.com tangle today to get started. That's SelectQuote.com tangle this one is from Sarah in Estes Park, Colorado. Sarah said, as the person who asked the question about how Tangle would cover Nazi Germany in the 1930s, I want to say that I've been able to have a fruitful email dialogue with Ari about it. He let me know that part of his interpretation of the question was that it was my attempt to imply that present day United States is the same as early 1930s Germany. I was honestly trying to understand how to contextualize Tangle's perspectives on the differences between the two and thought that that was a concrete way to ask the question. I want to be clear that I absolutely agree that it is unhelpful to throw around historical references in callous, simplistic, unthoughtful and inflammatory ways. I do not and never have called any public figure Hitler. I have no illusions about the horrors and atrocities of the Holocaust, and I would never invoke it as a way to gain political points. But this wasn't the question I really wanted Tangle to answer. I was hoping that Tangle would have covered the Nazis on their ascendancy in the late 1920s, when Hitler was just out of or still in prison and before the Reichstag fire. I was wondering if Tangle would be able to see the rising fascist state coming and if they think their format would have prevented them from calling it out. All right, so first of all, let me just throw out that when I read your initial question, I also interpreted it the way Ari did. I appreciated a lot of what Ari wrote in that context, including the stark comparisons between how Nazi Germany operated in the wake of the Reichstag fire and how different and far away that world is from anything we are experiencing here today. To answer your intended question, I genuinely don't know if Tangle would have seen the rising fascist state coming. It feels, candidly like an impossible question to give an informed answer to. Plenty of people in the German press missed it, and they all had the context that comes with living through the era and being experts on the country. Indeed, only a select minority of German writers warned that the Nazi Party was ushering in an authoritarian regime until it was too late. They wouldn't have even been able to call it fascist, since that term itself was developing in real time in Mussolini's Italy. I think a larger sector of the American media is probably warning about a fascist authoritarian Trump today than had been warning about Hitler in the German media, which to me reflects poorly on both the 1920s Germany press and the present day media. That being said, I suspect my commentary would be far more biting, direct and worried if I had been running tangle in 1920s compared to today. As early as 1919, Hitler was promoting removing the Jews altogether. In 1920 the Nazi party was explicitly calling to revoke Jews citizenship and strip them of their rights after his two year imprisonment ended in 1924, Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925. In retrospect, Hitler's plan was quite obvious, but I also think it was pretty obvious at the time too. The hard truth is that antisemitism was so commonplace in Europe that these ideas were just less offensive or alarming to people in the region in that era. As for our format, I think it genuinely gives us more freedom to call these things out, not less. The My Take section, much like these audience questions to me, is permission to offer my personal opinion and analysis without insisting that Tangle is perfectly unbiased and our coverage represents the one single truth. So yes, I think, I hope, that had I been covering the rising Nazi regime, I would have had the clarity of thought and morality to attack them openly in the pages of Tangle and and warn about what was coming. But again, all this being said, Hindsight is 20 20. There's an element of hubris to imagine that I would have seen something so many contemporary thinkers missed. I'm looking back on anti Semitic diatribes and promises to wipe out the Jews from the 2025 lens, an era where that is mostly an unacceptable view to take. Hitler's plans were not always so clear, and his success in carrying them out was certainly not a foregone conclusion. It wasn't until 1939 that he delivered the Prophecy speech which called for the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. And by then anyone denying what was coming had blinders on.
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Hi everyone, this is Senior Editor Will K. Back. This next question is from Paige in Missouri and Paige asked I've heard many times over the years, from different sources, mostly conservative, that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from American citizens. Can Tangle, confirm or deny that? Or at least break it down so that I get a factual, non biased explanation of how deportation affects the American job market? Here's my response. The relationship between illegal immigration and the US labor market has been studied and debated at length for decades and the top line answer to your question is that unauthorized migrants can both take jobs from native born workers and help create new jobs for native born workers and it doesn't happen in a uniform or a broad way. The negative consequences when they happen typically look like an increase in competition for jobs and the suppression of wages for native workers in specific sectors. Economists studying this issue have found that migrant workers do not decrease wages or employment of US Workers in the long run. Conversely, they can actually increase employment for native born workers because migrants often work for lower wages, reducing labor costs, boosting outputs and creating demand for new jobs. However, immigration can also have localized negative effects. Some studies have found evidence that newly settled immigrants negatively impact the wages of earlier immigrants. Other studies have reported modest negative effects on employment for workers who did not complete a high school education as they sometimes compete for the same jobs. In these cases, unauthorized migrants do take jobs sought by citizens. In these cases, unauthorized migrants do take jobs sought by citizens and these jobs are often categorized as low skill and low wage. At the same time, more recent evidence suggests that unauthorized workers are critical to meeting demand in sectors like agriculture, construction and hospitality, among others, given that the available pool of temporary work visas is not sufficient to meet these industries needs. And as Vanda Felbob Brown wrote in a 2017 paper in Brookings Quote, undocumented workers often work the unpleasant backbreaking jobs that native born workers are not willing to do. End quote. Now this observation raises a separate, equally salient question about the morality and sustainability of such a system. But it also shows that unauthorized migrants aren't taking jobs that are in high demand. Consider that in September 2025 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 7.2 million job openings in the U.S. the jobs are out there, but many U.S. citizens just don't want those specific jobs. Overall, while some native workers in low skilled jobs do face more competition from unauthorized workers, many industries rely heavily on migrant labor and deporting these workers en masse would likely cause shortages, raise prices and reduce economic output.
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We'll be right back after this quick break.
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This is Ari again, answering a question that comes from Andrew in Burbank, California. Andrew asks, the LA Times says there has not been an increase in profound autism Andrew links to a story from the LA Times here. I assume you two are getting your numbers from different places. Can you give any insight? Here's the key passage quote the rate of children with profound autism has remained virtually unchanged since the CDC started tracking it, said Maureen Durkin, a professor of population health science and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Indeed, the highest rate of new diagnoses has been among children with mild limitations, she said. I actually don't think we're getting our numbers from different sources. I'm unsure what Dr. Durkin said to the LA Times they're paraphrasing. But she was a co author in a study that I linked to in our piece on Tylenol that shows profound autism rates increasing, though less sharply than non profound autism rates. Here's the quote from our piece where I characterize the findings of that study. A 2023 public health report study found that incidents of both non profound and profound autism increased from 2000 to 2016 from 3.9 to 14.3 non profound cases, and from 2.7 to 4.6 profound cases in every 1000 people. I read this study and checked back on the passage we quoted multiple times before and after we published it, as did other Tango editors, and I don't see a way to interpret the findings to say that the rate of children with profound autism has remained virtually unchanged, as the LA Times wrote. So I was also confused here. And to address my confusion, I got in touch with Dr. Durkin. As it turns out, the difference is a matter of relativity. She sent me back a screenshot of a figure from their study that she said supports the claim that the proportion of all autism classified as profound did not increase between 2000 and 2016. If you want to see the study, we're going to have a link to it in the show Notes so the LA Times was referencing the fact that of known cases of autism, just looking at those who we know have been diagnosed with autism, the proportion of those cases deemed profound has not increased. In fact, if you're just looking at those with autism diagnoses, the proportion of profound autism has decreased through 2016. However, as we wrote, the proportion of the general population with profound autism has increased from 2000 to 2016. So even though the LA Times and Tangle seem to be saying different things, both statements can actually be true. That said, I think the way we represented this finding was more clear and accurate without the qualifier that we added in here. The LA Times seems to be saying that cases of non profound autism have increased while profound autism has remained flat, implying that that the proportionality of non profound autism has exploded and that it accounts for all new cases. The data supports the opposite conclusion. As I stated in my take that both rates of profound and non profound autism have increased between 2020 and 2016, although the rate of non profound autism has increased at an appreciably higher rate.
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Hey everybody, this is John, Executive Producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription. Or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings. So stay tuned. I will join you again for the daily podcast. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day y'.
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All. Peace.
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Our Executive Editor and Founder is me, Isaac Saul and our Executive Producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Wall. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will Kaback and Associate Editors Audrey Moorhead Bailey Saw Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@readtangle.com this episode is brought to you by Adeo the AI native CRM add IO is built to scale with your business from day one. Setup is instant and in seconds of.
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