From executive producer Isaac Saul, 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 I'm joined by four colleagues today, one, two, three, four colleagues today.

We have a very special Friday edition. I think maybe just to set the

table here, I'll talk a little bit about how this came to be. One of my favorite things about

Tangle is the process that happens before publication, the one that our readers and listeners

never get to see or experience. And I've been thinking a lot about this in recent months.

How much debate and dialogue and discussion goes into everything that we publish.

How much I learned from the conversations that we have pre-publication.

How desperately our country needs more of what I think our staff models every day.

I also think a lot about how trust in the media is at an all-time low and all the

innovative ways organizations like ours could try to win that trust back. Then, a few days ago,

during a discussion in our team Slack channel, I fired off a message about a discussion we were

having. I said, interesting discussion. I wish we had a podcast running. Maybe we published

the transcript of this slack.

I'm half kidding. And after sending the message, I couldn't really shake the thought.

Maybe we should publish a transcript of that conversation. Maybe actually showing what happens

behind the scenes would interest our audience, model civil debate, and help build trust

in our brand. In other words,

good content, good citizenship, good business. That's a win, win. So deciding I'd ask for

permission after the fact, I did something a little bit invasive. I started copying and pasting

some slack messages into a Google Doc. I pulled four exchanges out from

...