From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

This is Tangle.

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 my take.

I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are sitting down with Noah Smith.

Noah is one of my favorite writers to read on the internet.

He is decidedly liberal.

He is somebody who has left-wing views, but he does a really good job of criticizing his own side.

He does a really good job of thinking critically about the things he's written in the past

and updating his views when they change and correcting things he said

before that maybe he got wrong. He's an economist and it is hard to find economic writers who can

write about economics in ways that are interesting, but he manages to do it. There's a lot of

personality in his writing, which you can read on his blog, no opinion. So a few years ago,

I had Noah on the podcast for the first time. And I brought him on for this story I was doing.

I was interviewing him and another economist, a conservative economist named Jessica

Riedel, and I was asking them both how important the debt actually was, whether the debt and deficit

really mattered. And I structured this kind of conversation a way where I interviewed them separately,

and then I put their answers to the same questions up side by side in a podcast and a transcribed

article. It's one of my favorite articles I ever did with Tangle, because you got to see how they both sort of separately

frame the arguments through their worldviews.

And it was really interesting.

And a few months ago, I noticed that Noah had written

a new piece just recently, like, again, in the last few months,

...