Tangle - PREVIEW: The Sunday Podcast: Isaac, Ari, and Will talk about the murder of UHC's CEO, immigration, and presidential pardons.

Episode Date: December 8, 2024

Please enjoy this preview episode of our Sunday podcast. The full editions are available exclusively for premium podcast members. To become a member, please go to tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up. In this episode, Isaac, Ari, and Will discusses the recent murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, celebrating violence against perceived elites, the moral dilemmas of such reactions, and the broader context of immigration and deportation statistics. Then Isaac and Ari talk about the complexities surrounding presidential pardons, particularly focusing on the recent Hunter Biden pardon. And as always, the Airing of Grievances.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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All right, coming up, I sit down with Ari and Will. We talk about some insanity online and people celebrating the death of a healthcare CEO. I defend my choices on the plane game that the team played without me last week. I make Ari and Will guess the number on some immigration stuff. And we talk presidential pardons,

which are not so straightforward as it happens. It's a good one, you guys are gonna enjoy it. ["Tangle"] From executive producer, Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning and good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place you 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, I'm sitting down with Ari Weitzman and Will K. Back. There's a lot to talk about. Apparently shooting people in broad daylight is cool and hot, trendy thing to do these days, fellas. Well, maybe it's not. I don't know. I could be... There's a genuine what the left is saying and what the right is saying about shooting

people in broad daylight on the streets. Yeah, it's not great. We're going to lead the show with that. We're sitting here Thursday. This UnitedHealth CEO was killed yesterday. There is a discourse happening that makes me feel like I'm losing my goddamn mind. Excuse me. I'm sorry to take the Lord's name in vain, but oh man, it's really frustrating. Before we do though, I have some scores to settle, fellas. first of all, I'll start nicely. I'll start by saying, thank you. You guys took the reins while I was out last week on the Sunday pod, had a little family emergency. Everything's good now. Thank God. But I got to listen to the Sunday podcast where some of my own views were attacked while I was defenseless by my, you know, just sitting at home with nothing to say.

And I also had some questionable things that I'd like to bring up. So, first of all, Will Kavak is not six foot three. The top gripe that I would like to bring up is that Will cited himself as six foot three. I immediately texted him. I said, six foot three on Tinder only maybe. I don't believe this for a moment. Will then sent me photographic evidence of him standing next to our podcast producer,

John Law, who is gigantic. Shockingly, he seemed almost as tall as John, which I will say did surprise me. But I don't know, Will, do you want to defend yourself since I know you're 6'2 and change at most? Yeah, I mean, first I'd just say never had a Tinder profile, never had an inch. Wouldn't need to fabricate if I did. I mean, my driver's license says I'm 6'3. I know you can claim whatever you want on that,

but that was based off the results of my most recent physical. And just gonna leave it at that. We can do a height test when I see you there. Who cares? It's fine. I'm gonna measure Will when he's here next time. I've played Will one-on-one in basketball several times.

I'm very confident he's not 6'3", but that's okay. All right, next thing. There seemed to be some, nobody knew who the person in seat number five was in this image. Anant Ambani, the son of the richest man in India who is sitting next to RFK Jr. on the plane. And I actually didn't know who he was either by the picture, but I looked it up and figured it out, which just felt like that was worth dropping that in because there was, you know, I don't think anybody really picked that seat. Maybe Mags did. She talked about being somewhere near RFK Junior. And then I definitely did not get enough attention that Mags told Ari

that he would vibe with Mark Zuckerberg and like connect with him, which I thought was maybe the funniest part of the whole podcast. A bit of a snipe perhaps. I think there's two ways to think about that. I think the most likely thing is Mags knows that I have a background in software engineering, so she's just connecting some pretty big dots there. But the other thing is she thinks I'm a lizard brain shapeshifter and thinks that we vibe on that level, which I think is maybe mean to both of us. The nightmare scenario for you is that she really sees a lot of social similarities between you and Mark Zuckerberg. Which, when we are at the secret meetings,

we don't talk that much, so it might surprise you. I literally laughed out loud when I heard her say that, and everybody just moved on, and I would have stopped the show and really dug in on what she meant by that. That's friendship. Yeah, that's real friendship. Okay, the important thing here, I have to defend myself because the correct answer about where to sit on the plane is quite obviously between Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg. I'm going to explain why since nobody did it for me on the podcast. We tried a little bit.

You tried a little bit. Will was sort of above the target, I guess. He talked about how I do want to interview Trump. Obviously, as a journalist, we aspire to interview people like the president. I would love if that happened. Donald Trump, if you're watching this, my door is open, brother. Donald Trump is an all-time blabbermouth. If he is in a comfortable setting, you watch him get interviewed on Fox News, he is famously just saying the quiet part out loud. The case here is you have a 10-hour flight, you sit next to Donald Trump, you spend the first hour buttering him up, I mean, laying on as many compliments as you possibly can about his appearance, how what a fantastic president he is. I mean, I am just, I'm pouring it on like I've never kissed ass like I've kissed ass like this

before. And then the next nine hours of the flight, you're just asking him all the most interesting questions you can think of to ask a president. He's got nowhere to go. He loves you because you love him. And he's going to tell you anything you want to know. I mean, like hour nine, you're talking JFK assassination, UFOs, the Epstein files. That's the case for sitting next to Donald Trump is like, you have a once in a lifetime opportunity to sit next to a president who is famously loose-lipped about classified information, incredible stories about all the rich, famous world leaders he knows and has met. And if things go south and Trump doesn't want to talk to you, then you just bring up climate change and watch him and Greta argue for

like six hours, which would probably be pretty entertaining too. That's my take. That's why I'm picking Donald Trump is because that would be by far the most interesting plane ride of my life. And I would milk as much information out of the whole trip as I possibly could. All right. Yeah, I think we want vastly different things from flights. I would love it if we were able to get some hour plus long interview with Trump on the record would be great. I understand that you want to try to like pick the brain and learn about things. I think on a 10-hour flight, two-hour conversations, a long time, and I want to sit back next to somebody who respects

my privacy and understands it. Can I just say, yeah, Ari, your answer was the most annoying one that I heard. It was the most Jewish answer I've ever heard. You were like, I would like some peace and quiet on the flight. So Taylor Swift, we get to, I was like, no, this is not the point. You old bastard. I think just imagine what 10 hours in a chair feels like. That's all. I think we're just brushing past some hard truths here. I just don't think we should do it.

Yeah, all right. Well, we do have different ideas. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. Get ready for the movie event of the year with Disney's Mufasa the Lion King. It's time I tell you a story. A story? About Mufasa and the prince who would come to be known as Scar. So glad I brought some crickets. Bring your whole family.

Come on, Mufasa, let's get in some trouble. On December 20th, a kingdom of adventure awaits. We can do this. We're busy, let's hustle. Disney's Mufasa the Lion King in theaters and IMAX December 20th. Get tickets this Friday at noon at LiveNation.com. System of a Down and Deftones. Rogers Stadium, September 3rd. For more, visit Systemofadown.com. All right. Let's talk about something maybe the three of us agree on.

Is everybody okay? Are we societally, we might not be in a great place right now. A guy gets murdered. So okay, let's back up a little bit. Most people are their Tangle listeners. Your guys are news consumers. You probably know what happened. The CEO of United Health, of their health insurance division, got killed in New York City in broad daylight.

We're recording this on Thursday afternoon. The guy who shot him- Pre-dawn, but yeah. Pre-dawn. The guy who shot him is on the loose, shot him on a CCTV camera with nothing more than like a hoodie up, shot him several times, got on a bicycle, ran away, and there's an all out manhunt and they can't find him, which is alarming to me. I feel like there are probably more cameras in New York City than any place in America aside from like Washington DC. And then there's this weird discourse that's

happening right now, which is basically like, yeah, maybe like tough break for this guy. But also this is what you get when you're like a predatory insurance CEO, that's responsible for all these people dying. And I'm logging on to Twitter less regularly these days, because I'm trying to scale back my Twitter use, but I just spent like 20 minutes on Twitter before coming on the podcast to see what people were talking about. And there is like a really, like a consistent breadth of people who are openly celebrating the fact that this guy got murdered.

I don't really know how else to explain it. I saw Taylor Lorenz in this insane tweet basically saying, this is why people want guys like this CEO dead, basically celebrating his death in a way that like, I can't believe somebody who was a professional writer would do this. She was subtweeting More Perfect Union saying, "'Blue Cross Blue Shield' in Connecticut, "'New York, Missouri' has declared it will no longer pay

"'for anesthesia for the full length of some surgeries." And she quote tweeted that post and said, and people wonder why we want these executives dead. This is insane behavior. I'm deeply concerned about societal rot and like online brain rot happening to people. I think the person who most clearly articulated my worldview and response to this was Ben Dreyf the person who most clearly articulated my worldview and response to this was Ben Dreyfus, who's one of my favorite Twitter followers. I will say Ben Dreyfus says a lot of things that I don't necessarily- He's a volume shooter. Yeah, he's a volume shooter. That's it.

Well said. That's a really good way to put it. I do not typically, That's a really good way to put it. I do not typically, you know, but not, I would say not, I don't regularly agree with the things that he says and shares, but he was basically just like, if you are somebody who's celebrating the fact that this guy just got murdered, like some, he, his exact sweet said, if you're reveling in the fact that some random dude you had never heard of until a few hours ago was gunned down in cold blood simply because you don't like the industry he worked, I think you should spend some time away from the internet and go on a hiking trip or something, which is the appropriate reaction in my view. So I don't know. I'm a little concerned. I'd be

curious to hear what you guys are making of all this because I feel like I'm living in a really dystopian world that I don't want to be in. Well, I think I got a five paragraph essay queued up. But you want to go first or me? What do you want? I'll give a quick thought, and then we can turn it over, because I'm eager to hear your essay and spiel on this.

I think the part of that Ben Dreyfus tweet that resonates the most with me is the idea that all of these people who are posting these things, they weren't people who were outspoken about Brian Thompson before this happened. I would be willing to bet they did not know who he was. And now they are picking up this mantle

in a way that feels horrifying and disingenuous. So there's just a lot to feel bad about. And that's my overwhelming feeling. Right. And I think this concept of, I saw some people picking on the word choice of some random guy, but to reiterate your point, Will, I think in the sense of no one two days ago was using

the name Brian Thompson conversationally. No one two days ago was talking about him or knew who he was or had them in their thoughts at all. In that sense, he is a random person. He's no relationship to you at all. And if you are taking some time to appreciate the fact that he's dead, it is only in relation to a story you've built in your own mind. I forget where I first heard this, but I remember several years ago reading an essay by somebody

asking why do we care what happens to celebrities because they're not real people. That was like the punt. that was like the hook, just to get you to click in. The way that they described not real people was they are random people to you. They don't exist in your lives. They may as well be fictional characters. For the purpose of your life, they may as well be fictional characters. I think people are reacting to this the same way that I remember people reacting to the Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie of like, yeah, get them, stick it to the elites, shoot that talk show host in the chest because that's going to fix systemic inequality. Obviously not. It's obviously not.

It's just something that you're taking, allowing yourself to have some emotional reaction to because it feels good, that is stupid. I can appreciate where it's coming from while at the same time saying that you allowing yourself emotional leeway to respond to an actual person being shot. It's stupid because this is actually not the Joker. This is actually not a fictional story. This is a person being killed in New York City in our universe. And people shouldn't be murdered just full stop.

Civilization's good. We rely on it. And if we are celebrating somebody being murdered for healthcare not working, that's not fixing healthcare. Obviously. It's obviously not. And allowing yourself the only way to respond positively is a LARP because you aren't going

to go out and shoot people and you shouldn't and you know that. You're not going to celebrate people being shot in other boards and executives, because where's the line drawn? It's arbitrary. It's just, it's not a principle that anybody would seriously defend. You're fooling yourself. You know, like it's a joke for most people. It's a dangerous joke because it shouldn't be something that we celebrate as, anyone should celebrate as like a principle. And if you're not fooling yourself intentionally, you're doing it unintentionally, which is worse. Like this is not a good thing. If you're not fooling yourself intentionally, you're doing it unintentionally, which is worse. This is not a good thing. If we want to change healthcare and our healthcare system, which we should, which we've written about, and we are going to be talking about more for the next

coming years, this is doing the exact opposite of pursuing that goal. Brian Thompson isn't the reason why United Healthcare isn't renewing claims. He's a person who's fulfilling the wishes of a board of directors. He'll be replaced by another CEO. Once the board of directors, some people retire, they'll be replaced by others. It's part of a broader system that only gets addressed at a broader level.

So you have some gestalt. I can understand where that comes from. Be smarter about it. Yeah. I think that what we're seeing with these kinds of reactions is effectively a kind of moral surrender from the far left since the election. It reminds me of other tweets and interactions I've seen

of people on the left telling Latino journalists that they're excited to see them deported when Trump becomes president, or people who are in a minority and who express not even support for Trump, but try to just maybe understand a little bit of his appeal and communicate why he might have appeal. And the response is, oh, well, I can't wait for you to get deported, or I can't wait for X, Y, and Z terrible thing to happen to you. And to me that just indicates we don't want to have a debate on the merits anymore. We don't want to try to advocate from our positions in a way that we might be able to reach out and bring people in and make them understand our point of view.

We've basically just been reduced to saying the meanest and nastiest things we can because we have nothing else to offer. And that's not exactly new. That's kind of part of the outrage machine that's existed on social media and has been for years. I think online social media is not real life and people want to go and unleash their id online, but that has actual effects to people offline. So if you find yourself in a position where you're actually rationalizing this as a good thing to do, that brings it back to the Ben Drythus tweet, which is like, just go into the world, go into the real world, look at people, talk to actual people, because

these are the stakes as human lives, not your id and whether or not people are going to agree with you full stop on something. That's not the way that consensus gets built. That's not the way people actually talk to each other or should talk to each other. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. Miami Metro catches killers and they say it takes a village to race one. Anyone knows how powerful urges can be? It's me. Catch Dexter Morgan in a new serial killer origin story.

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cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCelvax.ca. Yeah, I think it's worth reiterating to Ari, like the point you made that is so resonant for me is just like, some other person is just going to get appointed to this guy's position and the machine's just going to keep doing what it's doing. Like, even if you're accepting the premise, which I do accept some major parts of it, at least like the sentiment I'm seeing expressed that like, you know, our health insurance system is really broken.

And there are people who are just like so profit motivated. They're doing things that are fundamentally evil, like denying care or making care prohibitively expensive for millions of Americans who like desperately need help, but can't get it because of the systems that these like companies all thrive on. I think that that's like morally, there's a perfectly good argument there to advance. You don't get what you want by killing people in broad daylight.

Like, and of course this, this ain't nothing of the fact that like this guy has a wife and a kid and is like a human being who just got shot in the back of the head and people are literally celebrating it. I saw this guy, this writer who runs a sort of independent publishing house. He's clearly like a lefty writer. I don't know his exact background before he was working for this place, but his name is Charles Have. And he tweeted about this, like a few sentences in some article he wrote that got

deleted because all these people have been, you know, there's been backlash to it. And he's very upset that these sentences got deleted. And this is what he said. He wrote, I don't generally approve of murdering people on the street, nor do I know anything about the dead guy. But it's good and salutary if the very many guilty among our elites start to live in fear of expedited, unanswerable and unexpected punishment for their sins. This is like such an insane thing to write. I just want to be clear. I think it's worth saying very clearly that the inverse of what this guy is saying, this idea that it's good and salutary if the very many guilty among our elites start to live in fear of the expedited unanswerable and unexpected

punishment for their sins. The thing that he's also saying is that it's really good if the non-elite start to execute people for perceived sins as long as they are members of the elite. And it's especially good if they do it in ways that are unexpected and unanswerable and expedited forms of justice. That's fucking bonkers. Stop writing stuff like that. Don't say it is not a good thing. No, that's actually not a good way That's fucking bonkers. Stop writing stuff like that.

Don't say it is not a good thing. No, that's actually not a good way for civil society to function. It's not a good way for us to make actual genuine progress. Again, if you think killing some guy who's the CEO at United Health in broad daylight or pre-dawn as it happens is going to long-term change the system. Like you are living in a delusional, sick fantasy land and you really need to come up for air. So, yeah, I was not expecting this. I didn't have this on like the bingo card of horrible shit for 2025, but it's a very,

well, I guess you're still in 2024, but it's a very weird start to the end of the year. Pre-dawn 2025, we'll say. Yeah, exactly. It's a very weird start to the end of the year to have this be the thing that we're debating, man. I don't know. I just don't know. I just don't think it's real. I really don't, like, I don't think people mean it. I think they are trying to hype themselves up into meaning it. But I'm going to say something a little bombastic, so bear with me. But if you take any one of those people that's like, yeah, maybe we should be putting fear

into these CEOs, you put them in front of the CEO of a different healthcare company, give them a fucking gun and say, what are you going to do? They're not going gonna pull the trigger. Like that people don't actually believe this. And if you want to write sentences about we should be putting a little bit more fear of quote unquote justice, which is this obviously not justice, this is barbarism,

but some fear of repercussion we'll say into elite CEOs. Why is your first thought murder? Why do you have to defend that? You can get 15 people and for a month, into elite CEOs. Why is your first thought murder? Why do you have to defend that? You can get 15 people and for a month stand in front of the headquarters of this place on the street with signs and pastor him when he goes into his job. That's probably going to be way more effective. And guess what?

No one dies. And you can do that and it's legal. Do that instead. Like have a little bit of like mental creativity here. Yeah, I mean, I think we're obviously all in agreement in our reaction to this. I think in terms of real world effects, because I agree with you, Ari, that this is a social media bombast at its core. But you know, what I've observed as a downstream effect of this, especially among my friends

and just among what I'm seeing on my own timelines is this has kind of been turned into a joke already, like less than 48 hours after it happened. And not a joke always at Brian Thompson's expense, but there's a lot of jokes about, you know, the guy escaping on a city bike. There's, you know, jokes about, like, who he might have been affiliated with or not been affiliated with and about the New York City police. And I don't know, it's just troubling to me when these

kinds of things happen and, like, we don't really know how to process it and so everybody just starts making memes out of it. And this has epitomized that to me. I'm not sure how to feel about that, because I also find some of the jokes funny. Some of them are creative and witty, but the overall response of, okay, maybe we're not celebrating his death, but yeah, we're gonna do a bunch of jokes about it,

and it's gonna be the big thing on Twitter for that day. That also feels like not a great sign of where people's heads are at. Like, yeah, we talked about this a little bit, but I think the line for what you can and can't joke about is you can joke about anything that's funny. I think that's humor's great superpowers. It allows us to talk about things that are uncomfortable. But the joke here, if there is one, is the punchline has to be the joke teller.

The punchline has to be if you're a person who feels at all a little bit of gestalt for this, which I totally acknowledge and recognize and I can understand. Isaac's like the way that you described it of like extreme discontent for the way healthcare claims get settled. The joke has to be at the expense of people who are pushing forward the idea of, like, yeah, then this guy had it coming. Which, like, Will, you shared that tweet about somebody saying, I was a huge fan of his work as an assassin, but I found out that he supported Starbucks because he went to Starbucks allegedly before the shooting and he wasn't supporting the workers' strike, so I'm out now. That's a good

joke because of who the punchline is. I think there'll be humor in response to things, but I think when somebody pushes back on that humor and you're like, well, I mean, to be fair, it's not such a bad thing, dot, dot, dot. If you feel yourself going to that place, that's again, indication that you're letting yourself maybe go to a place you shouldn't be. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right. I'll set off for that. Will, before we get you out of here and let you go, I have a little bit of a game, not so much a game, I guess. Ari and I have been doing some of this, but I came across this statistic that I thought

was pretty interesting. 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 us grow Tangle Media, please head over to tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up for a membership.

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-Mal signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Take care. Peace. 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 K. Back, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was

designed by Magdalena Bacopa, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. and Polifia and Wisp, live in Toronto, Roger Stadium, September 3rd. Get tickets this Friday at noon at LiveNation.com. System of a Down and Deftones. Roger Stadium, September 3rd. For more, visit SystemofaDown.com. Get ready for the movie event of the year with Disney's Mufasa the Lion King. September 3rd. For more,th, a kingdom of adventure awaits. We can do this.

We're busy, let's hustle. Disney's Mufasa the Lion King in theaters and IMAX December 20th. Got a mortgage? Chances are you're thinking about your payments right now. Need help? Ask your bank about relief measures that may be available to you. Learn more at Canada.ca slash it pays to know. A message from the Government of Canada.