PREVIEW - The Friday Edition: 19 more predictions about the future.
Tangle
Isaac Saul
4.7 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
So, today, I’m going to run it back and see how I do. As I did in 2021, I’m going to accompany each prediction with a one- to two-sentence explanation and a “confidence rating” (or “CR”), so you can see how strongly I hold the belief. The scale is 1 to 10, with 10 being maximum confidence and 1 being lowest confidence.
However, I’m not including any prediction that I don’t think has a higher than 50% chance of coming true (otherwise I’d just be throwing darts randomly at the wall). So the 1–10 rating is more like a 51% to 100% rating than 0 to 100.
I’d love to hear what you think, or hear predictions of your own.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. |
| 0:08.4 | 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. |
| 0:28.0 | I am your still somehow sick host, Isaac Saul. Today is Friday, December 19th. This is a member's only Tangle edition. |
| 0:37.0 | And today, I'm going to be making 19 predictions about the future. |
| 0:42.1 | So in 2021, for those of you who are around then, I made 19 predictions about the future. |
| 0:47.9 | And since that article and podcasts were published, all but one of the predictions has been settled. |
| 0:53.7 | You can find the results to those predictions by clicking the link in today's episode |
| 0:59.2 | description or going to our website, readtangle.com, and checking out an article we published |
| 1:03.6 | about it today where I reviewed all of those predictions. |
| 1:06.7 | I'm not going to go through all 19 of them here, but I'll say this. |
| 1:10.3 | Their final tally was 12 correct, six incorrect, and one that is still TBD. |
| 1:17.8 | That prediction was that the first elected female president will be a Democrat. |
| 1:22.2 | We haven't had a female president yet, so we haven't made a ruling on that. |
| 1:25.0 | But basically, 67% accuracy rate, not bad, |
| 1:29.4 | especially since I tried to make some predictions that weren't just easy layups. As I said, |
| 1:35.1 | back in 2021, I'm not a huge fan of political prognostication, believe it or not, making predictions |
| 1:40.3 | about the future, it has pretty little upside. Unless you're really, really, really good at it, |
| 1:46.5 | you basically get things wrong about the future, which just gives your critics ammunition to say |
| 1:52.0 | you're inept or stupid. And some people also find it irresponsible. Making predictions requires |
| 1:57.1 | making assumptions, which is by definition speculation, something reporters and even pundits |
| 2:02.2 | are often criticized for doing. At the same time, I think making predictions about the future and |
| 2:08.8 | seeing how they stack up is a good test of your own personal knowledge and understanding of the |
... |
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