Tangle - Suspension of the rules. - Isaac, Ari, and Kmele cover a lot of ground from Trumps threats to Democrats, gerrymander backfire, MBS meeting as well as Epstein and Israel.

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Today on Suspension of the rules, Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk about the Trump and MBS meeting, Trump's extreme threats to Democrats, gerrymandering wars turning around on republicans as well as the James Comey indictment. Isaac also addresses some of the Epstein Israel situation. Last but not least the airing of grievances. Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by: Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Jon Lall.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming up, we have the MBS Donald Trump meeting, as well as Trump's threats to maybe execute some Democrats, potentially. I address some of the Epstein Israel stuff, which I think needs some explaining. We talk about the gerrymandering wars turning around on Republicans and the James Comey indictment. Things did not go very well for the Trump Justice Department in court. It's a good one. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and good evening, and welcome to the Suspension of the Rules podcast, a political talk show where we only curse when it's appropriate, unlike members of Congress in 2025. Curzing's way back in now, fellas. You understand?

Yeah, this is, I think if you were an elected Democrat, dropping an F-bomb is, like, how you think you connect with the youth today in America? That seems to be what's going on. How many F-bombs does it take to connect to the youth? Six, seven. A lot. Well, actually, I don't know. Do the youth even curse anymore?

They don't have sex or drink or do drugs or have fun or seek meaning. They're just, like, nihilistic. And they don't curse them. They are seeking meaning, actually. They're seeking meaning. A lot of evidence. The churches themselves are experiencing a bit of a bonanza, young men seeking righteousness and meaning in the pews. So, yeah.

Well, the president is accusing several Democratic lawmakers of seditious conspiracy punishable by death, which feels like, I guess, a story. I don't know. Do we just ignore that stuff now, or should we actually talk about it? It seems like I actually don't know. well we're talking about it now so we're making a decision it does feel like like when camille mentioned that this had happened my response was did you have a story to share like the president's accusing opposition leaders of a crime and wants to throw them in jail and execute them and then we yeah we kind of already knew that but that doesn't mean that every time he says it it's something that we should ignore without mentioning and there is a little bit more to it this time Yeah, the novelty doesn't grant it consequence. It's consequential because it's a big deal, full stop. I, yeah, I don't think we should ever ignore it.

I mean, it's insane. This is, come on. This is like, it's just so normal. For those of you who might not know, because literally this might not even constitute a news blip somehow. I mean, like this may not even create a news cycle, but a group of Democrats published a video on X formerly known as Twitter. I don't know if it went up somewhere natively aside from that,

but it seems to be going around mostly on Twitter, where they're just urging military members to refuse any illegal orders from the president and accuse the president of pitting the military and the intelligence community against American citizens. And Trump responded by saying that they had committed, that this was seditious behavior at the highest level. Each one of these traitors to our country should be arrested and put on trial. Mind you, this is for a X video they released telling the military not to conduct,

or not to stand by or obey idly when they get illegal orders. He said their words cannot be allowed to stand. We won't have a country anymore. An example must be set. And then later said, this is really bad and dangerous to our country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. Seditious behavior from traders, lock them up. President DJT.

Seditious behavior punishable by death, he added in a third post. So he kind of worked himself up and then he finally got to the death penalty after three truth social posts. ironic timing because today we literally answered a question to the newsletter and podcast about whether the president's mental fitness should be evaluated and look I know it's like a TDS thing to say

but I'm sorry like I'm just sorry it is true if I logged onto Facebook and my uncle was posting this post on Facebook, calling for the death penalty for members of Congress, I would like call up his wife and be like, is Uncle Gary okay? Because he's being crazy on Facebook, like talking about killing politicians. And it's the president, which doesn't seem great to me. And I'm not, and this is, you know, I think that's like a pretty objective thing to just be like,

this doesn't seem good. I don't know if there's like a, a way to massage behavior like that. It just feels totally unhinged to me. But we're just totally numb to it because it happens all the time now. Maybe I can warm up my massage fingers, give it a shot. The argument, I think,

to normalize it as much as we can would be as follows. The president didn't say we should kill them. The president said, this is behavior that should be tried as seditious and sedition can carry the death penalty and he's emphasizing this highest button-pressy dividing aspect of that statement

purposefully as he's done as he's always done and that is purposefully to try to get a reaction to get people riled up about something and keep him in the news and that's something that he's also extremely good at something that we can see sort of in the thought process of this is sedition trying to tell people in the military to ignore orders describing them as unlawful actually that requires a trial and speaking of trials you should be put on trial for sedition

oh also sedition i just recalled death penalty and that's something that can drive the headlines so it's a little bit different than the president saying we should put Democrats to death. There's a way to interpret it that way. And I'm not going, this is not me saying it's cool and it's good that the president

is telling us that sedition has a death penalty and we should try political enemies under it. That, you know, yeah, objectively not great and objectively something that we wouldn't say is a normal and healthy thing for a person outside of politics,

just a random person without context to say. But based on the way the president operates, I think it fits a pattern. And to that point, like, that's kind of why it's something that we are prone to dismiss because we understand the president's pattern. That's part of it. It doesn't make it, you know, acceptable, but it does make it a little different than this is something that we should be taking seriously to the highest degree

because the president has given us every reason to not take his words literally seriously to the highest degree. Yeah, I mean, short of completely agree. agreeing with the president's sentiment expressed on truth social, that this is, in fact, treasonous and seditious and, in fact, probably ought to be accompanied by the penalty that usually accompanies sedition. I think your interpretation is as generous an interpretation as possible, Ari, and perhaps even in that respect, a little too generous, perhaps only because... That is the generous interpretation. I'm not saying this is my interpretation.

Agreed. I'm getting me the generous one. Yes, and worthwhile to plant that flag firmly. But I'm recalling that we had a conversation about Donald Trump making similar posts about the importance of prosecuting some of his political adversaries. Pam Bondi was mentioned in some of those posts, and there was some speculation about whether or not those were supposed to be direct messages. And at the time that we had the first conversation, I believe it was not yet the case

that the indictments had been delivered. and we got them shortly thereafter. So the possibility that these statements are something more than idle speculation, are something more than histrionic, hyperbolic condemnations from the president, it's a real possibility. And it's a real possibility because we've had recent examples of this. The admonition that we ought to take the president seriously, but not literally, is something that we've been hearing since, like, 2016.

It's like a trope at this point. And yes. think in general, one has to take him both seriously and at least allow for the possibility of a literal meaning. And what is the responsibility of journalists and politicians of either side at this point? I think that is where the conversation probably needs to go. It seems to me that for journalists, the charge is, to the extent you have access to these people, you ask direct questions, and you get them to clarify their statements as opposed to lean into the most hysterical interpretation. And if you are someone, like say Chris Murphy, who is a leader of the opposing

political party that has a pretty substantial platform, making a public statement about this is totally reasonable. But there are choices that you can make. And I know Chris Murphy just recently released a post in the text of his ex post, because I'm not going to dead name the social media platform like you, Isaac Saul, is the president of the United States just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed, quote, hang them, unquote, he posted. If you're a person of influence in this country and you haven't picked a side,

maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side. Whoa, swearing. Now, the swearing isn't the issue for me. From my standpoint, I can totally understand how you could make a statement like this. I'm not even necessarily going to say this is wrong, but it does seem like there's an opportunity here, even for someone like Chris Murphy

to underscore how unacceptable that kind of rhetoric is and to do something similar to what journalists are doing, the president needs to clarify immediately what he means by this and what he's implying. And the notion of kind of side choosing

and is this the rise of fascism in America, etc., like that rhetoric has also been around for a very long time. And there's a point at which the... maximalist condemnations, like, begin to lose some of their effect beyond inspiring more maximalist condemnations. And the aspiration to try and understand the opposition to try and de-escalate is something that just kind of falls by the wayside. And I worry that a very long time ago, we left the point at which there was still an interest in kind of pragmatism and deliberation and finding ways to work together towards some reasonable outcome,

especially in a world where Marjorie Taylor Green is defecting from MAGA, it feels like there's an opportunity there. And rather than insisting, pick aside, maybe, maybe there's an opportunity to do some of the, I don't know, the pragmatic legislating that you guys are supposed to be there for. You've got six members of Congress who produce a video. Is there a piece of legislation to support this effort? Like, are you actually doing your jobs and finding means by which you can protect people who insist

that they're going to decline to carry out orders because they believe them to be illegal? Are the processes clear? Is there a call to action beyond publicly released video declaration that creates a kind of messy public spat between Congress and the White House? That can have its effect. But you also have a job, and that job has particular duties associated with it. And maybe, just maybe, some of those duties might come in handy right now. You know, to the generous interpretation,

to give the generous interpretation to Senator Murphy here too and to the Marjorie Taylor Green of it all, I think you could see this as him trying to do that thing of inviting Marjorie Taylor Green in by saying pick aside. Like this is directed towards Republicans in Congress. It's directed to people of influence. It's not saying, hey, president voters, like people who voted for Trump, pick a side.

It's saying, I'm noticing some fissures right now. If you're concerned about the president, cough, you voted for the Epstein thing, cough, cough. Maybe you can consider taking a side against the president. Obviously, pick a side, probably not the most effective way of phrasing that and maybe won't be effective at accomplishing his goal, not tactful. But I think that you could see that as the stress. that he's enacting, is actually trying to find a way

to make a path forward to work with Republicans in Congress. You know, I'm just sitting here thinking, like, is, what, what, and this is actually a hypothetical I want you guys to answer. What could Trump do at this point or say that would actually cause, you know, a meaningful majority of House Republicans

or the U.S. Senate to stand up and be like, no. Like, this has to stop. It's like, I talked about this a few weeks ago when I wrote about, you know, things being pretty bad. It's like the Overton window is actually so obliterated now. I'm, like, I'm actually being serious. Like, if Trump posted, you know, calling, like, a senator's wife a whore

and saying that, you know, Hillary Clinton, should be nuked into outer space or something. Like, it literally, I'm serious. Like, there wouldn't actually be like a meaningful blowback from the party for that. So, like, okay, like, what's sort of like a worse violation of decorum? Like, how, you know, like, he calls, he can call everybody, like, you know, call J.B. Pritzker fat or whatever and make fat jokes. he can say... Journalists are piggies.

Yeah. Suggesting with clear overtures that these Democrats should be hanged for a video that they put online telling the military not to conduct illegal orders. I honestly don't... He is maybe just going to start bombing Venezuela. Like, I don't know that that's like the probable outcome here,

but there's news reporting about a war starting in Venezuela where we are like... considering an overt, unambiguous overthrow of Maduro that will involve striking the Venezuela and mainland. Like, the administration is considering this. And there is no meaningful block of Republicans being like, no. So I'm like, I'm honestly not exaggerating when I say, like, I'm trying to think of a something Trump could do

that's like a realistic thing I could imagine him doing that would actually upset a meaningful or cause like a meaningful rebellion in the Republican Party and I'm kind of coming up empty. And that seems not great. Yeah. No, I would agree with a lot of that. The one thing I'd say though is this week in particular, we seem to be finding the level for some of this. I mean, Republicans have pushed back hard against the president on a particular issue, Epstein, and forced him to come around to their position. I mean, the president is not signing this legislation that got sent up to him

because this is something he supported. Up until the weekend, he was insisting that this was not something that they ought to do and was forced to come around because it was going to be hugely embarrassing defeat for him. I mean, this is the most defiant the Congress has been, and it seems to me that this is an opportunity to build on that. precisely that, that there are definitely Republicans who, concerned by the tariffs, concerned by so many of the recent defeats that Republicans have suffered, including the recent elections, knowing that the midterms are less than a year away at this point, knowing that

if the economy doesn't improve dramatically, that they're going to have serious problems, there are lots of Republicans who might be willing to lock arms with Democrats in service of pursuing solutions and remedies and perhaps just issuing statements and proclamations that curtailed some of the president's ability to do this stuff while only dealing with kind of limited blowback from within his own party. And I think you see the fissures happening. I mean, we talked about it at length with respect to the broader Republican Party and some of their internal ideological schisms, the kind of Tucker, the, kind of, the Shapiro contest and now the Marjorie Taylor Green v. Trump contest, the fractures are there

to be exploited by a smart opposition party. But I think that's a little bit different than the question that's posed, which is what is something that's going to make a majority of members of Congress say, okay, that's too far, without needing it to be a tipping point on a petition in Congress that you're going to have to side with or else face condemnation from your voters, from your district when it comes time to explain why you said yes or no on something. Yeah. Like this was Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert and our friendly, cantankerous Kentuckians standing up in ways that we're kind of used to them doing and then tilting

the power such that it was obvious where this was going to go. that people kind of aligned in one way and then it was, I think it was closer than it seemed for a while until the dominoes broke and then things fell. I think the question is like, what's something that the president could say that

called it the Ted Cruz test, that Ted Cruz and Congress will come out and say right away, hey, we don't do that in America. Like, we don't talk that way. And it has to be about somebody that isn't a Democrat or an oppositional person or it has to be about somebody who is.

like not a Republican, not on the right, and also not Epstein. So if Trump were to come out and say blank about Obama tomorrow, what could that be that Senator Ted Cruz without waiting to gauge the public reaction would say, that's unacceptable? What would that line be? The hypothetical is tough to address, but I do think the current landscape suggests that whatever that threshold is, it has been lowered as opposed to raised in recent weeks

and quite frankly the trajectory doesn't seem particularly good even. I'll take back my agreement real quick. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I agree with that either. I mean, he just sat in the Oval Office with MBS and called Jamal Khashoggi a guy people didn't really like

and suggested that he didn't kill him and undercut this entire CIA assessment. And there wasn't even a peep I mean, what did, I, maybe I missed it. But as far as I know, not a single Republican senator or member of Congress issued any kind of scathing statement about the president responding to a question about the Saudi Crown Prince murdering a Washington Post journalist by framing the journalist as a controversial person a lot of people didn't like, which, by the way, isn't even that true. I mean, he was controversial, maybe a little bit in Iran and Saudi. Arabia because of his reporting, but controversial corny the last person

he spoke to, which was my all-consuming theory of Trump of like he adopts whatever the last position he heard is, which is good sometimes and bad other times. But like, I, you know, it's I can't, I'm sorry to do it because it's

so, again, talk about tropes, but it's just like, you know, Obama doing that with like Bashar al-Assad or something or, you know, any Arab leader, it would be wall-to-wall. Like, Obama sits next to the Saudi Crown Prince and questions, takes the Saudi Crown Prince's side on a CIA assessment about what the Crown Prince did

from the Oval Office to, like, while denigrating a Fox News reporter, I mean, it would be apoplectic. Like, it's just totally bonkers. But isn't it similarly apoplectic right now from one side? Like, do you think that apoplecticness would also spread to the moderate Democrats in Congress? I think that would be hard. And it's also just a circumstance where the current media ecosystem is different. And the volume of scandal and the number of things that the president is actually taking income and

fire for. From outside of his party, from the media broadly, and from within his party, both publicly and behind closed doors, is pretty astonishing. He is, this is an administration in the most substantial crisis it's faced, perhaps more substantial than even the first administration, the first term when he was facing impeachment, if that's, if that's something I could throw out there. Wait, I'm sorry. What's the actual crisis? I don't think I understand.

The president does not have control of the party at this point. The president doesn't have the ability to simply make some declarations and kind of point Republicans in the directions that he would like them to march, not nearly in the way that he did in, say, April, when everyone was kind of quietly accepting the Freedom Day tariffs. Like, try to imagine him pushing an initiative that unpopular with his own party at at this particular moment in time. I think it's impossible to imagine it. I can imagine that, though.

Well, I'm saying successfully, successfully pushing it through without the sort of, without the sort of pushback that he is experiencing now on, say, the Epstein stuff. I think it would be a completely different circumstance. But again, this is hyperbole. I think Epstein's just like a, it's an exception. I don't think that there's a pattern to extrapolate from. I think this is just an area where he's weak.

I mean, we've seen this on foreign policy stuff in particular. And certainly the Israel-Palestine conflict is something that actually animated a lot of the distress within the party before we got to this particular moment, before we got to the Epstein stuff, which again had been lingering for a long time in the background of conversations about the shutdown and everything else was the contest over this. And as was just mentioned a moment ago, it wasn't clear how this would break. It didn't break in the president's direction. And that is after he tried to cast out Marjorie Taylor Green. Again, this is not a president whose influence and control over the party is growing. It is a president who sees his influence waning. Maybe.

Maybe. I mean, it's not inexorable. It could very well turn around for him. But it seems like it would be hard for that. It's hard for me to imagine that turnaround without a lot of deft political operations and maneuvering as opposed to what seems to be happening now, a kind of spiraling. What kind of hinges on this Epstein report, I think? in the way that the, like, what's the Justice Department actually going to release

and what's going to be in that release? And when? That's going to matter a lot, depending on how we extrapolate the president's control of the party, I think. Okay, so well, we're there now. I mean, I wanted to talk a little bit about the MBS meeting, but I mean, we gave it a lot of space in today's podcasts, and I thought Will had a pretty smart take. I mean, I think if I were writing it, I might have focused a little bit more on the Trump family, Saudi Crown Prince relationship. I almost would have gone more extreme in both directions than Will did, like on the negative side.

I think I would have focused more on just the self-dealing and how, I mean, he will, to his credit, had this excellent paragraph in this piece about just as clear, about how clear this relationship is. The Trump Organization at Saudi-based development partner, Dar al-Arkin, announced a project that will allow cryptocurrency investors

to buy into Trump-branded real estate. Jared Kushner is now running a private equity firm that's taking $2 billion with a B from a fund led by the Saudi Crown Prince a reminder that like we were losing our minds about Hunter Biden making $30,000 a month from Ukrainian energy. In September, real estate developer,

Darglobal announced it's launching a $1 billion with a B dollar project to build a Trump Plaza in Jada, Saudi Arabia, the second such Trump-branded project in the city. there's just like to me you can't remove the context of those things from the deal making that Trump is conducting

with the U.S. government and the Saudis at the same time on like the flip side of that I think it is remarkable the degree to which Trump is welcoming the Saudis into like the new Western world

and while I don't I don't suspect Saudi Arabia is going to soon become a hub for democracy and civil rights. I also think, like, this is the way. This is how you de-radicalize. This is how you foster peace in places like the Middle East globally. I mean, the isolation, the way that we're treating a country like Russia with, like, sanctions and condemn nations. and isolation and surrounding and whatever, like as much as I think some of that's necessary,

I also recognize that that is not a good long-term peace plan. Sure. I think, like, the open arm embrace, even of unsavory characters and, like, showing them how good it is to be in this world and to have relationships with these, like, you know, Western democratic nations, I think that's good. And so I give Trump a lot of credit for that,

Because I, you know, with Abraham Accords, see me of the ball forward. I think with Saudi Arabia, potentially joining Abraham Accords or building out their own relationship with the United States where, you know, they are, there is a fundamental understanding that like they are going to be held to a different standard, a better standard. I think all of that's really good. And I'm pretty optimistic about the idea that Trump can pull some of that off. It's just like it's a hard pill to swap. when you know he's going to get like a $2 billion hotel out of it too. You can pursue. I agree with most of what you said there.

And I think the qualification is, of course, you can pursue all those good things, like pulling them in close, making certain you have these kind of mutual interests internationally without the appearance of exceptional levels of corruption and self-dealing. You could do that.

And there could be more transparency about these deals. There could even be a deliberate effort on the part of the president's family who was still in business and they're still private citizens. So they should be able to do mostly what they want to do, but to evade getting into situations where their deals are likely to be scrutinized because they seem to align so closely with the active, proximate concerns of the United States of America and what they're doing. And it would be easier to give them the benefit of this. doubt if they weren't, like, openly doing things like launching the executive club in Washington, D.C., where you can pay a lot of money and get insider access to the president or selling cryptocurrencies, and the person who buys the most of it gets a meeting with the president of the United States, it's impossible to suggest that you're not directly involved in all

of this when, in fact, you do seem to be involved in it. The one thing I would add to this briefly is to just provide a little bit of historic context, specifically for this high-level meeting with the Saudis. And there's just something, there's a pattern that I find really, really interesting with the Trump administration where between this, the Helsinki meeting from, what, back in 2018, that summit with Vladimir Putin, where the president is directly contradicting like the intelligence community's assessment of whether or not the Russians were involved in various nefarious actions, which seems very similar in certain respects to him directly condemning reporters for asking questions about this Saudi leader.

MBS and whether or not he had any involvement in the Khashoggi murders, for example, a murder, for example. I think that there's something interesting about the fact that the president tends to have these high-stakes meetings in more public settings in ways that are more unguarded with less preparation than, say, W or Obama, or even a Biden would have had. Definitely Biden. There used to be with W in particular, I mean, this was statecraft. the questions that were being asked in these meetings were vetted questions. There is not somebody just kind of throwing a grenade into the conversation like, hey, why did you murder Khashoggi? So there doesn't end up being this kind of embarrassing moment. If anything, it's somebody shows up and they throw a shoe.

They're asking a question they're not supposed to ask at a time when they're not supposed to ask it, and it gets ignored because they're better political operators. The president of the United States doesn't have those skills. He seems to hate the kind of preparatory stuff that precedes a lot of these meetings. And for whatever reason, they insist on doing this stuff in public. So dust-ups over controversial things with international partners who, in fact, are a little bit more controversial, are much more likely to unfold in public in really explosive sorts of ways. Whereas before, this might have been a kind of below the fold from insider sources.

that's the sort of thing that you're reading. So I do think that that dynamic here is at least interesting to highlight and it does help to explain why we see more of this with the Trump administration relative to prior administrations. It's not that they weren't having

high-level conversations and even state visits from nefarious characters from time to time. It's that they were better at it's in certain respects. Better maybe, but this is actually an argument we hear a lot is, well, at least he's up front about it.

Like, that's actually a pushback you get all the time is Trump's corrupt tears. In certain respects. But like in certain respects, right. But these are the respects in which not. Which is the easy refrain that we hear is, okay, Trump, a potential self-dealing fraud, X, Y, Z, sure. But at least we know about it.

Like Biden was doing behind the scenes. We had to have those, we had to rely on those reports from mediopies. in order to know about it. We see Trump. He's himself in these meetings. He's coming in off the cuff. We know what he wants. We know who he is. We see the deals that he's signing that are going to be benefiting his holdings, his family. Good. At least we know. And I think it doesn't to be fair, to be clear, my opinion is that those things don't cancel out. The magnitude of self-dealing that we're getting from the Oval Office right now is unlike anything that I think the media is prepared to even report on it's such a different animal but it does provide a

qualifier that I think does a lot of work in the public for people who are Trump supporters or even Trump curious I think so I think it's a feature not a bug I guess if I were to lean on a cliche to explain that same thing that you're critiquing I mean I I love that part of Trump like it is my favorite not my favorite but it's one of my my favorite parts of his entire ethos is like, we're just going to do it live and let you guys watch. I mean, I, you know, in some respects, in some respects, I think there is a case that he is like the most transparent president of all time. I also think he's covering up a lot of stuff like the Epstein file is a good example of him sort of not exercising transparency. Now he is, but it was like

pulling teeth. And, like, you know, he doesn't turn in his financial records and taxes and stuff. I mean, but, like, from a media accessibility view and just like, like Camille said, sort of not orchestrating events like this to be these perfect curated sit downs. Like, they're, you know, I mean, what happened with Zelensky? Like, we actually saw something that felt to me authentically like what? would happen behind closed doors, but we were in the room.

And that's really rare. It didn't reflect very well in the president, in my opinion, but, like, I was still glad for it. And I think he deserves credit for that, despite all the wild, abnormal, other stuff that might come with it or that he's doing. All right, the Epstein stuff has come up a couple times,

and I think we have to, look, I'm exhausted by this story. I'll just say up front. I think that's shared. Yes. Yeah, I'm tired. But I think, I think there's at least one part of this that we haven't really touched on

because we have talked about this a lot. That is probably worth addressing. I've seen it come up in our comments section. I've gotten a few emails about it. I was like, are we going to do the pedophilia? thing or not pedophilia. It's not pedophilia. Okay.

No. And then I got the, I got the, I got the, I've no interest in that. You know, there's like that comics joke. Like if you are trying to delineate between like the pedophilia and the hebophilia, there's like no way to do that without sounding like a pedophile. Which is a really good joke. You know, the, then I saw it on the R-Tangle News subreddit, which is,

this sort of demand that I address the Epstein-Israel connection which I think is worth talking about actually and I'll say up front I think my perspective here might be disappointing to the people who are

insisting that I talk about this or take it on I struggle when I read some of these stories to see something that is much deeper and more sinister than what we know about the stories. I don't think that Jeffrey Epstein is a Mossad agent or spy. First of all, if he were,

he had an extraordinary amount of free time for somebody who is working for like an intelligence agency abroad. His emails are like just those of a roaming rich socialite who is getting his hand involved in every possible, little social circle event, policy issue, whatever that he can, which I guess if you're coming in with the framework that this guy's a spy, then maybe that's proof of something. But to me, it's just like, no, this is just somebody who like builds relationships everywhere he goes and uses those relationships as certain kind of leverage and got really wealthy in some ways doing that

and also built a sort of social life that I think for a lot of people before he went down for these sex crimes was like an envy, you know? But there are specific allegations here like the fact that Glane Maxwell's father worked with Israel, Robert Maxwell. He was, you know, he's alleged, I guess I should say,

to have worked for Israeli intelligence and Glenn Maxwell and obviously Jeffrey Epstein have a relationship. So there's like that's one point of reference. There's the Ahud Barak, former Prime Minister of Israel. He had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. There's all these emails of them exchanging notes. You know, Epstein participated in the brokering of security arrangements between Israel and Mongolia. there's like back channels that Epstein was trying to access Russia through.

He offered himself to the Russian deputy foreign minister as like somebody who could help him understand Trump better. Everybody sees this stuff and they're just like, this guy has deep ties to Israeli government. And there is an implication here, and I think an allegation in some cases overtly with some of the stuff that I've been on the receiving end of, that Epstein was basically running a sex trap

trafficking ring in order to collect damning information on people that he used in his spycraft while working for Israel. I actually want to hear from both you guys about this theory. And, like, Camille, I know you've been going, you've gone down the rabbit hole a little bit on this topic. I will just offer mine really quick. And I do think I can actually do this pretty quickly, which is when you look at the full picture of Jeffrey Epstein, he is a person.

who had relationships with foreign governments all over the country, or leaders or players in foreign governments all over the world, excuse me, not just Israel. I think it was very obvious that he was somebody who wanted to leverage these relationships for his financial social gain. I don't think that his much more sinister, dark, sexual desires that he was acting on through the sex trafficking ring

were part of some intelligence operation. I think they were a product of him being a predator and wanting to live this life as a sexual predator. And I don't think a country like Israel who, you know, has basically pioneered some of the most advanced military and spycraft technology known to man like, you know, no-click malware.

and they put bombs in pagers of Hezbollah leaders. Like, I don't think they need some random New York City financier having sex with 15-year-old girls in order to advance their spy apparatus. Like, I'm sorry, like, that sounds as absurd as I just said it is. Like, it sounds as absurd as it is when I say it like that because it is a sort of ridiculous notion. Like, I think that Jeffrey Epstein, first of all, the Hoobarak relationship should also, last thing I would say is the hood Barack relationship should also be seen through the lens of, like, he was a prime minister who was a New York City socialite.

Like, this is like a no, you know, people who understand Israeli politics or remember him, you can probably go find it on his Wikipedia page. I don't know, I didn't look, but you could look it up about him. Like, he is somebody who was very well connected in this sort of New York power player scene. It wasn't just a Jeffrey Epstein. like he had these relationships with lots of people. It was a character trait of his. And F-seen was just one person in that cladiscope. But when you take all this stuff, you're like, you know,

you're doing the always sunny thing, like connecting all the dots and your hair is all frazzled and you're like, this is it. Maybe it sounds a little bit more plausible to you. To me, I don't see that picture. I think, like, in a vacuum, you can take those individual things and explain them pretty easily.

And again, it's just like, Israel is so, so, so capable and they have so many spies. They have so many people inside the U.S. government who are allies, you know? Like, an easier way to think about is almost just like, why do they need Jeffrey Epstein to get, you know, intelligence reports

or like U.S. information when they could just call the U.S. senator who's in their pocket of which there are a couple, you know? And that's not like a big Jew conspiracy. It's just like there's a lot of, Israeli political influence in U.S. politics. I feel totally comfortable saying that. And there are a lot of U.S. senators

who want to do right by Israel because they view them as like a really powerful ally. The Israeli intelligence services don't need Jeffrey Epstein to sleep with a 15-year-old girl to get the information they want. That's just my perspective. So I don't find that story.

Maybe they want that, Isaac. That's what they want. Yeah, right. Yeah. Monsters. Yeah, right. I don't find that story particularly interesting. I don't think there's a lot of there there. I think I could mimic the sort of connections, loose connections, and like links and whatever

and make a similar story about many, many people with all different kinds of, you know, nations across the country. And it would be like equally as unconvincing to me. I don't have a lot to disagree with. I mean, I don't know if you do, Camille. I think maybe there's an interesting idea for a Friday piece there of like, I'm going to untangle the vast conspiracy with. Liberia or Pitbullied in a country and just find some connections and build some crystalline structure that is based on spider thread like thin evidence that you can connect together to make

look larger than it is. But I mean, I don't know. I don't feel especially compelled to add anything to that. I don't know if you do, Camille. Briefly, I think it's interesting that after days now, almost a week with these emails, a lot of people seem interested in trying to fill in holes and perhaps gesture in the direction of broader conspiracy, the involvement with kind of foreign leaders suggest something. I think it is entirely possible to look at all these emails and acknowledge that they uniformly support to the extent I've seen all the reporting on this, or a lot of the reporting on this, but they uniformly support the appearance of someone who is constantly striving for, or at least determined to seem

consequential. And they are also determined to have proximity to people who one might deem important and consequential. And that is a kind of reinforcing, a self-reinforcing loop that one could get into. And that seems to be the kind of person Jeffrey Epstein is, like giving to high-profile politicians so that you can have direct access to them via text message, letting people spend the night in your compound, your palatial Manhattan apartment, because, hey, you're rich, you have extra rooms and extra beds. How strange that people are spending the night. Is all of that indicative of someone who's kind of playing 007?

I suppose it could be, but it also all seems entirely consistent with high-profile socialite who desperately wants to be a man about town. and wants to involve themselves in high-stakes, international, diplomatic efforts of various kinds. And that seems, all of that is consistent with the evidence that's available. Does one want to go further and try to project or try to fend a much more nefarious interpretation of things? Sure, but I think that old dictum, you know, dramatic, exceptional claims ought to demand exceptional evidence. And thus far, I just haven't seen the exceptional. evidence yet to lead me in the direction of believing in a conspiracy that it would cost me

nothing to endorse this conspiracy, except for my credibility. And I'm just not willing to do that yet. I just like, Ari, you gave me an example. Actually, I don't remember, one of you said it like 20 seconds ago about me. Yeah, maybe you can just like, I just did like a random, I asked Grock, because by the way, Grock's way faster than chat GPT. I said, um, who are like the top financial players in New York City right now and they gave me a list and I just picked a random one which was Jane Frazier

the CEO of City Group and I just said what connections does Jane Frazier have to and then I thought for a second I said French authorities and intelligence services just like pick around the country in Europe and it was like no substantiated connections

but yeah but like she serves on board like the Council on Foreign Relations Business Roundtable and Monetary Authority of Singapore's International Advisory Board and these places have lots of relationships with French government and French intelligence services and they've had these meetings.

And Citigroup has a Paris hub for European Trading Advisory and Services subject to EU French regulations. And you know, like, and then there's this, and they're like, you know, it's like, you can do this. Like, it is not really hard to craft something like this. and that is literally like I just picked the first country that came to my mind in Europe

and like through a dart at some random board of like important New York City financial people and it's just like all of a sudden making those connections is really not that hard. This is Ian Carroll,

this is Candace Owens, this is what they do all day long. That's it. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's like a cheap trick, you know, it's like a crappy version of mentalism or something.

Like I don't know, there's just, you were like, You were making the thing real by speaking it, and I don't, I just don't totally buy it. Amen, amen. So, yeah, I'm happy to field your pushback. You can write to me, Will W-I-L-L-L-Reed-Tangle.com.

If you have theories about Jeffrey Epstein's connections to Israeli foreign governments and intelligence, yeah, or France, will W-I-L-L-Reedtangle.com is a great way to reach me. we'll be right back after this quick break okay okay I do want to get to some a couple quick hit news stories two of them actually

neither of them are that quick but I think they're really important. The first one is this Texas gerrymandering ruling that we got. We've been talking about gerrymandering a lot on the show, you know, sharing various debates about our viewpoints on how Democrats should react to Trump's effort here. And in the midst of all of this debating that the three of us have been doing, because this is something where we've actually disagreed quite a bit,

I think something maybe none of us really expected. I certainly, I won't speak for you guys. I did not expect what has unfolded in the last week or two, which has been just like a series of breaks for Democrats that feel unlikely that has kind of flipped the tables on the gerrymandering wars, such that Democrats now, after having responded to the offensive from Trump, and Republican governors across the country and Republican legislators across the country

are now sitting at a net win because this Texas map got struck down by two judges, including one, I believe including one Trump-appointed judge on this three-person panel in Texas. So Dave Wasserman, who's very famous in the political world for being like the king of redistricting. His at handle on X is literally redistrict. He works for Cook Political Report.

He is sort of considered like the most credible person covering election outcomes and the way, you know, various districts across the country are operating and leaning, you know, Democrat, whatever. He said if the new ruling blocking Texas Republicans' map is upheld, Democrats would be on track to come out ahead by roughly three. seats in the redistricting wars with Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia, the biggest remaining variables, which are important states, obviously, I mean, Florida and Louisiana are going gerrymander for Republicans, but Virginia will gerrymander for Democrats. And like, in a world where that's a wash or even Republicans pick up a couple seats out of that, this basically

ends up being a draw when a month ago, I would say the absolute consensus among the political chattering class, pollsters, redistricting people was that Republicans had like as many as seven to 15 seat advantage to come out of this redistricting push. I mean, this is like next to the definition of fuck around and find out in like the colloquial

dictionary. Trump has started something that I do not think he expected to go this way. I am personally elated, not because I care about Democrats having more seats in the House than Republicans, but because I really, really want to see this nonsense stop. And it feels like stepping on a rake like this is a good lesson for everybody to maybe not try this stuff in the future. But I'm curious to hear what you guys think about how this is played out, reflections on where we are. And maybe, I don't know if this we, maybe this has some sort of meaningful.

impact on the way people think about doing this stuff in the future. It's interesting because I think both you and I, or all three of us and Camille, both your argument and our argument could rush to claim this news as a win for our argument. From my

perspective, the idea that Republicans are getting their cases challenged in court where they'll potentially be thrown out. That hasn't happened yet, so it's still potentially means that in a year, Democrats will be the one

wearing the label of gerrymanders. And memory is a funny thing. In a year's time, we might not remember how this all started. I'm sure a lot of people who are going to be punching their ballot for Dems anyway will. But we'll be looking at California

passed this law. They're trying to gerrymander the House. Maybe we're Democrats win the midterms. And we're looking at something that feels tilted and unfair. And now Republicans get to wear the mantle of the people who are fighting against an unfair rigged system that Democrats are rigging. And that will be tough for Democrats to respond to.

The argument that I think Camille and I were making was that if you want to stop gerrymandering, you don't gerrymander more. And this ruling is a win for that side of any time that gerrymandering is challenged in courts and we're seeing the potential for them to be stopped, then that's a good thing. I would have thought, even, that this could be detrimental to your argument, Isaac, which was that the best way to get it to stop

is that they sort of arms race to this point where we're over the cliff, and now we have to come back because it's our only option. And the farther we get from the cliff means we're farther away from that being the solution to it. Whereas the step, like the step. reeling back to the point where we can normalize it and have it be something that states pass multiple laws on and then eventually we can have a federal law about it, maybe even an amendment,

one can dream. That feels like the path that we might be on more so. If anything, the thing that I regret the most is not advancing this argument earlier because I would say that it makes Camille and me look really smart to say that this is something that could backfire for Dems. I mean, obviously right now, if they get more seats, it's not going to backfire in the short term, but to be the ones that want, there are the party of election reform previously. And now they aren't. And that's not something that they can run on anymore. I mean, they're definitely going to get questions on this. If only for me at some point in the near future, they're going to get questions on this.

I am pretty sure. Pretty sure. And someone will have to check the tape because I haven't yet. That at some point when we were having this conversation over the past couple of weeks, I mentioned the potential outcome in Texas in the courts not going in favor of the Republicans. So we at least noted the possibility, and I would agree with everything else that Ari said, one could interpret this in multiple directions, but certainly it seems like a circumstance where just stick to principles. Take the actual high road here, the virtuous road, and defend the value of not cheating. And it does suggest that this kind of, this.

kind of gamesmanship is actually really, really hard to pull off well. And maybe, just maybe, this will prevent people from wanting to do this kind of stuff in the future. But yes, it would be great if there was actually some sort of legislative action here on the part of Congress to try and rein some of this conduct in to ensure that this isn't the way that people are competing for votes and to control electoral outcomes. I think it does help your guys argument in a lot of ways. I mean, I'm still like...

You reluctantly arrived at that position anyways in your defense, so... Yeah, yeah. I mean, wanting more gerrymandering to force everybody, you know, to step back from the brink is understandably like an easy position to criticize. and it's not something that I felt. It's not something, you know, it's like I wanted to shower after making those arguments.

You know, it's something I felt really good about. At the same time, like, I... Yeah, I think this outcome was almost like totally outside my purview of expectation. I mean, I just figured, with the way the judiciary has been built out by Republicans and the rules, on this kind of stuff that we were getting from the Supreme Court that we weren't going to see

a lot of these maps getting struck down. So I'm surprised that's happening at all. I'm especially surprised it's happening in states with conservative judiciaries like in Texas. I'll be curious to see if they can turn around and appeal this to the Supreme Court in time to overturn the ruling if the Supreme Court would overturn it before the election. I actually read Russell Nystrom, kind of social media manager slash jack of all trades. He sent over the dissenting opinion in the Texas case, which I read the first 15 or 20 pages of, which is, I mean, biting. It's one of the most fiery dissents I've ever read. It's basically this federal judge saying, you know, in like 37 years, he's never seen a process on the federal bench like he witnessed for this ruling to come down

and attacking the ruling itself from a position that looked to me maybe strong. Again, despite my hatred of gerrymandering, he seemed to have some signals and precedent from Supreme Court rulings we've gotten recently on his side. So I don't know what happens with that case long term, but I suppose this is the system working without Democrats having to respond in kind. And that alone, I think, like, strengthens the position that you guys were talking from, which is just like, you know, let Trump hang himself with this politically and I guess now judicially. I will say, I mean, this is, it's remarkable the degree to which the Trump administration

keeps shooting themselves in the foot. But, you know, this case happened, which the judges who ruled in the majority, I mean, they used comments from the Justice Department and the president as evidence against them that were, you know, to prove that this was like a racial gerrymander, basically. because the way that they operated in court, the public statements they were making were so unhinged and undisciplined that it basically became something that

that became a problem for them in the ruling. And then at the same time, we're getting the news around this James Comey indictment, which was the other thing that I wanted to talk about. And it's actually related in this way because it's like the Trump administration is trying to prosecute James Coney, James Comey, and the woman on the case is this lady Lindsay Halligan who's not really prepared

for the job, it seems like, yeah, I would say she's new at this. Legal intern. Yeah. Yeah, there is, I am trying to sort the mess a little bit here because I read the New York Times write up of what happened in court with the Comey case, and it was. dripping with, I would say, like, quote-unquote analysis and, yeah, derision and subjectivity, despite being a straight news report. You know, yeah, to just read from a few excerpts from it.

The questioning by the judge, Michael S. Nachemnonov, Nakmanov. Yeah, that's a tough one. took place at an excruciatingly awkward hearing in a federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia that was nominally held to consider the narrow issue of whether the charges against James Comey had been filed as an act of vindictive retribution

by President Trump. The judge peppered prosecutors with questions on a range of topics, including Mr. Trump's own statements about wanting Comey to be indicted an earlier decision by career members of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Alexandria to forego bringing charges. In one remarkable moment, the judge posed

some of his questions directly to Lindsay Halligan, the U.S. attorney handpicked by Trump to bring the case quizzing her on how she had presented it in the grand jury. Just this week, that subject led another judge involved in the case to suggest that she may have engaged in prosecutorial misconduct. The judge's inquiries were extraordinary by almost any measure, but the answer prosecutors gave to him in return were even more so. At one point, Ms. Halligan admitted that she had never shown the second and final version of the Comey indictment to the full grand jury before the four-person signed the charging document, Mr. Comey's lawyer is immediately seized on that irregularity,

calling it another reason to dismiss the case entirely. And at another point, one of Ms. Halligan's subordinates acknowledged that someone in the deputy attorney general's office had instructed him not to discuss an open court whether his predecessors had or had not written a memo laying out their reasons for not bringing charges because that was privileged information.

In the end, appearing unnerved under questioning, he confessed that the prosecutors who had previously handled the case, had indeed written a draft of a memo declining prosecution. Did not sound like a good day for them in court by the New York Times telling. And again, there is, in my view, there's some words in there that I'm not sure

should be in a news report like this. Things like excruciatingly awkward, you know, where was the other one? In one remarkable moment, there's just some stuff here that's sort of the judge's inquiries were extraordinary by almost any measure I don't know

then I went and read the Wall Street Journal piece which I'll say this is like a great reason this is like a use case for Tangle like why Tangle exists because that's how the New York Times reported on this case Wall Street Journal sends a reporter

to the same place to witness the same court courtroom and they come out and say the Comey case is hit by surprise setbacks legal basis, on legal basics. And therapy said the prosecution of James Comey hit a new and surprising skid Wednesday, as the Justice Department acknowledged that a full grand jury never reviewed the final indictment of the former FBI director, a concession that could further jeopardize the case. The judge sharply questioned prosecutors about lapses in the case. The judge pressed the

Justice Department, Tyler Lemons, about why there were two copies of the Comey indictment, one showing the grand jury had declined to indict on a third count and the other showing only the two counts the grand jury approved. Mr. Lemon struggled to answer the additional questions. They describe a tense exchange, not necessarily excruciatingly awkward.

But they also got into this whole other element of this case, which was that Comey was testing a new kind of legal defense was kind of how the Wall Street Journal framed it, that he was using the, I'm being politically prosecuted defense, which is not something that typically comes up in these cases because the bar for that is extremely high, though, because Donald Trump tweeted out directions to the attorney general to prosecute him, the bar might be met in this instance.

It's a total shit show, basically, is the quickest way to round it up. I don't know what's going to happen with this case, but it certainly seems like there's a good chance that it gets thrown out based on this reporting. I mean, it does not seem like the Trump DOJ is doing a great job right now. It just makes me, I can barely add much there. I do appreciate that the New York Times use the word nominally, which is underutilized. It's just very valuable.

I mean, I like it. It's good. Nominal. Good. You could have also gone with notionally there, but nominally is certainly better. It's profoundly better. Yes. I knew you would agree with that, Ari.

Beyond that, it just makes me think, again, not for the first time at all, that if the Trump administration were better at things, the current moment would be a lot scarier in many respects. To the extent you're concerned about politically motivated prosecutions of persons who have run afoul of the administration, that one saving grace is not merely that there are checks and balances and various courts one can appeal to. It's that the people who are carrying that out at the moment are just not nearly as competent as one might expect. And a lot of the very capable people who had a lot of experience were purged from government in certain instances early in this administration or refused to work with them. So that is something of a saving grace, although not at all what one hopes to have to depend upon in a circumstance like this. that said, I would hardly suggest that Comey has definitely done nothing wrong in any of these circumstances. There may in fact be things here that are legitimately prosecutable, but the administration has done itself zero favors whatsoever. So even if you are someone who has had

grave concerns about the way that the intelligence community was operating back when during the first Trump administration, as I did and continue to, actually, you can't be happy. with the way that the administration is going about doing all of this, essentially creating a great deal of noise. The theater is there. But the actual follow-through is nearly always just sideshow bob, surrounded by rakes, stepping on every imaginable rake at every opportunity. What an image.

Oh, we love that. Old Simpsons references galore. I'm a man in his 40s. What can I tell you, Ari? Hey, I appreciate it. We all love The Simpsons. We'll leave it at that. The old Simpsons.

We'll add more. No, we'll come back. So the idea that we're depending on like ineptitude in order to stop executive overreach. I think maybe, maybe not. We're not sure if not for the prosecutorial error in filing the indictment. If this case would have succeeded, I think our suspicion was that no. But it does prove something interesting. and I'm going to throw a little bit more kudos to members of the Tangles staff here.

Audrey Moorhead answered one of our editors. She answered a question a while back from a reader about why people who are political appointees or members of the federal government staff would resign and what they're trying to hope to achieve, which was a fun one for Audrey to answer, considering that she's generally conservative and tends to not appreciate, or tends to think there's not a lot of value into mass resignations. And one of the theories is when you resign, you are making a statement that en masse says something

and can then inspire others to resign as well and can hamper some actual proceedings that you would oppose. And the way that that ends up working is somebody then gets appointed who, if enough people resign, if there are enough people in the Justice Department who are saying, look, I'm uncomfortable with what we're doing here. I don't like the way we're going about our investigations. they feel more like witch hunts, they feel less like independent inquiries, then eventually people are going to be promoted

who don't have the requisite experience to pursue those cases in ways that are normally competent, normally befitting the level of execution you'd expect from that department. And that's one of the things that can happen when you have resignations and then you bump down to people who aren't ready to step up. So it's just a way to say like, look,

if you're looking for ways that the quote-unquote resistance is working, sometimes they're a little bit harder to see, and I think you could say that this is happening here. Though I do think it's all washed out by the fact that it probably wouldn't have succeeded anyway. And I'll end by saying, like, I truly hope that this is the last we talk about it. Because I think more so than any other case or any other issue we've covered in Tangle, I just, I'm so over talking about James Comey. and why we're even, why he's in the news?

I get that like the political prosecution is an issue, but we're 10 years removed from the thing that we're initially concerned about, the investigation, the counter investigation, now the suit into the investigation about the counter investigation. It's just like, I hope this just dies and dies here, and then we're done and we could talk about other stuff. And I don't know.

Like I feel similarly, I'm more so exhausted about this. than I do, the constancy of Epstein being in the news. Like there's more recency with that. There's reasons why that's salient. But this, great, maybe Lindsay Hannigan did us, or Halligan did us a huge favor. She made a misstep and she's saving us all the agony of having to go through this in headline news any further.

I find it. I think it's so odd that you don't give a shit about this case. It's just, I mean, I've said why. So what about that feels off? I mean, it's like the president is openly prosecuting the former FBI director who's a registered Republican, maybe most responsible for tanking the career of the president's number one political rival, Hillary Clinton. And also obviously played a role in this investigation into, Trump and the Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia hoax stuff.

But, uh, like, 2017. It's all 2017 stuff. Yeah, I've heard it. Yeah, it, it, it, I mean, yes, but like, I still feel like there's so many interesting threads of the story and it is of the political prosecutions or whatever, it shouldn't, you know, of the alleged political prosecutions. Um, like, to me, this one's a way bigger deal than Letitia James or John Bolton or, you know, some of the other people. It's like, because James Comey to me is just a much more important, significant figure in U.S. politics. Like, he was more powerful.

He had a bigger role in all these events. I think there's something that's just surreal about the idea that he could have to go to court and defend himself from this administration. That's crazy. And look, you know, I don't think you can talk about this without talking about the fact that, like, President Biden's Justice Department went after Trump. And that was also surreal. And there was also something about that that felt like totally mindbending, like a former president being, you know, under investigation, not just by the federal government, but by the state of New York and whatever else. So, you know, I get that it feels day.

but it's also like it seems important too. But the levels of absurdity feel so meta at this point. Like I just don't want there to be, because this, I mean, I'm with you. I think this feels and appears to be an openly political prosecution. But I am praying that if a Democrat is in the White House next term or whoever's in the White House next term, they don't put out a political inquiry into the prosecution of James Comey. because the shell game is the thing that maybe it's as a writer

and as an editor who has had to describe the story several times the amount of backtracking you have to do in order to talk about the whole thing just feels like it's preventing us from being able to move on to other stuff like it's a narrow thing

it's probably a petty thing on my part it is an important story to pay attention to but I'm just exacerbated that's not the right word I'm exasperated by the fact that this is still a name we have to discuss

like just get it out of the headlines so we can talk about other stuff. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah, there's that, that, what is it, time is a flat circle. Yeah.

It's true detected. Time is a C. That becomes an M, E, Y. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. All right, well, we've been at it for a bit over an hour now,

so I think it's time to start to put a bow on things here. John, you can play the music and we'll sit down for a nice grievance session. The airing of grievances. Between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance

on shoe removal. All right, I am, this is immediately relevant to me, so I'm going to go first. I'm exhausted today. I got to tell you guys, honestly. I mean, I don't know I don't know how you feel my performance was in the last hour in 10 minutes, but I'm pretty spectacular, actually.

Thank you. All right. Well, thanks, man. Wow, spectacular. What a nice word. I went to New York City last night to just, I took the train in Philadelphia to go see a bunch of former colleagues of mine that I work with. The last company I was at A plus was having a like a happy hour reunion. And that was delightful. It was awesome. Saw some people I hadn't seen in a few years. who I built a newsroom with and worked alongside for seven, eight years. So it was really cool to get to hang out with them. Not my grievance. My grievance is that it's sort of twofold.

One is that the Amtrak schedule for New York to Philly and back sucks. There are gaps in it in the wrong places. In my case, my options were to either take a train home at 8 p.m. or, I'm sorry, my option were to take a train moment at 9 p.m. or a little after 10 p.m. And it's this hour and a half train ride where, like, you're either getting home at, like, 10, 15-ish if you catch the first train or, like, 1145 if you get the second one based on how long they run. And I was just like, I just really want, like, I want to get home in, like, the 10.30. to 11.30 range. Like, that's the nice time to kind of get home.

I'm not going to get as much sleep as I normally do, but maybe a good six or seven hours if I wake up at six, whatever. Anyway, of course, I get pure pressure and talked into not leaving when I was going to leave. So I take the late train home, and I get back at, like, 1130. I have a really great taxi driver

who had a book of gratitude. He asked me to write in in the taxi cab, which I thought was really cool. Yeah, really just making a difference one ride at a time. Wow. Yeah, a Jamaican guy. Of course. Yeah, always.

One of mine. Good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. One of yours. All great, all great, whatever. I get home. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so exhausted. I can't wait to just go to sleep.

I walk upstairs and I just hear Amri, my son, screaming in his bed. I'm just like, no. He's sleep trained. He never wakes up in the middle of the night, whatever. I go look at the monitor. He's just standing up in his crib, banging on the door, basically. trying to get out of his crib. And I'm like, what is going on?

My wife's awake. She's like, he's been doing this for like 10 minutes. I already went in once. We're like, what? Like, we slept, sleep trained him probably six, seven months ago. Not once in the six or seven months has he ever not slept through the night. Like literally shooting 100% since then. And I'm like, of course, the one night I'm getting back from like a trip to New York.

I'm already low on sleep, whatever. So I just spend basically one. 30 a.m. till like 4 a.m. alternatively trying to get him to go to sleep in his room and get him to go to sleep in our bed. My wife has this fantasy of us being like co-sleeping parents. She loves the idea of like snuggling with him. And I'm like, no, get him in his crib, whatever. But so last night she was like, yes, he can come in the bed. Like he needs to snuggle and sleep with us. I'm like, all right, we bring him in the bed. He's just like sitting up in bed, literally just smacking my forehead. Like, all he wants to do is play.

and wrestle, he's fully awake. So yeah, I spent like three hours trying to get him back to sleep and then finally just gave up and put him in his room and let him cry for 10 minutes and he fell asleep without any help. But I then woke up at 6 o'clock to an alarm, which was one of the most devastating wake-up alarms I've ever had. Now I'm operating on two or three hours of sleep that were a little bit alcohol influenced

due to my sharing time with my former colleagues. So, yeah, I'm feeling like the delusion setting in soon. I'm like, you know, when you're so tired, your knees kind of hurt a little bit. I'm just like I'm, I could maybe go to bed at 6 o'clock tonight. So my grievance is that my son picked his first bad night since being sleep trained to be the one night that I didn't get any sleep by the time he woke up and just completely obliterated me today.

But my performance here was still spectacular, so all is well. I'm right in the world. Quite good. I will say, one, we'll get someone at Amtrak on this right away. It does seem like Isaac, though, like a train every hour and a half or so. After 9 p.m. pretty good, actually. Just saying. How much money do my taxes give Amtrak?

But I would go step further. Like this co-sleeping business, I think I, I think I, appreciate why someone might want to do this. But it just feels like it is from a different time and norms have changed. And my biggest beef with co-sleeping is entirely selfish. And it's not just that it disrupts my ability to actually sleep. Other things I don't like to do, other things I would prefer to do to sleep, like sensual communion within my marriage. The kids get in the way. And there was a time when people didn't care about that sort of thing. Like we're getting down. But we do care about that sort of thing today. So y'all got to sleep in your bed,

okay? I need by then for other things. Just saying. That's a good, I think that's a good norm to uphold. I agree with you. All right. Which one of you jokers is next? Do you have something, Camille? I mean, we're a couple weeks removed from daylight savings, and I may have complained about this already, and maybe someone else did. I don't think you did. But I am still struggling with the time change. And I didn't even have to go to the East Coast this week and I am struggling with the time change. My sleep has been decimated and it was already bad and I

just cannot get with it. And I think as a nation, it is far past time. We defeated slavery. We gave women and other peoples the right to vote in this country. And for whatever reason, we are still struggling with this draconian policy of pretending that something is different about the sun on some regular basis and we need to save it. Stop it. We don't have an agrarial society anymore. We don't need this preposterous, dark ages nonsense. This is a superstitious nonsense.

We should do away with daylight savings time. We only need one time and let's just leave it that way. I'll give you your leap years. You can keep those. Those make sense. Daylight savings time does not make any damn sense and we should abolish it immediately because it is inconvenient for me personally. I think of being for many

I said we covered this a couple years ago and I think you had a take that ended up being like you know actually if I remember correctly I think the conclusion was I think it's okay maybe for the best no no yeah I don't remember exactly

where I landed on it I would love to go it's actually one of the ones that like I feel like I didn't my heart wasn't in it so much I had trouble caring a ton Now my position is totally changed because I have a kid and my kids don't understand daylight savings. And so I had Omri on this perfect go-to-bed at 7 p.m.,

wake up at 6 a.m. every day. And now he wakes up at 5 a.m. And he's been doing that for weeks. And there's just nothing we can do about it. Because it's like, he's just like, you set my internal clock. Why aren't all of you awake? What's going on? And he's right.

Yeah, he's right. Yeah, he's right. He's like he's locked into the cycle. and his rhythm is all doing what it's supposed to do, and we're the ones who made up some insane nonsense that has totally disrupted his world. It doesn't make any sense. I'm going to quote an author to you.

His voice may sound somewhat familiar. Quote, after reading all these arguments, though, I think I ultimately land to the place where what we have is both annoying and terrible, but also probably better than the alternatives. Josh Barrow's piece basically put me over the top. If we want permanent standard time, we'd be getting sunrise in Manhattan

at 4.25 a.m. in June. Blah. If we go permanent daylight savings time, the sun wouldn't come up until after 8 a.m. in the winter. Blach. If we keep what we have, we avoid the worst of both worlds and deal with this miserable week once a year. What do you think of that? I think, yeah, that guy's an idiot.

He doesn't understand how things work. Throw up on the fire. Dude, I think I think I just pick darkness still after 8 a.m. in the winter, I think, give me that. I'll take it. That's the better of the two options. Yes. I think that's the correct. I don't want to be outside before 8 a.m. in the winter anyway, so what do I care?

You know, winter's the time for dark and cold. For everything, there is a season. Jens, we have it. A consensus. We've done it. We've solved it. You're up, Bari. Yeah. And that 20, 23, Isaac's dead to all of us. We're never talking to that guy again.

May his memory be a blessing. So I have something that I feel more internally conflicted about. So now that we have this thing that we all agree on, here's something that I really don't know what to do with. Callie, my dog, 11-girl-at Australian Shepherd, she'd been having some leg stiffness in the last couple weeks. And it looked like it wasn't getting better the way that it's happened before where she's exercised.

We had a couple people visit who had dogs and she played around with these younger dogs and so we assume that she was sore and sometimes she'll have like a little trouble putting weight on one of her limbs or getting up for a day or two and then she'll be okay. But it hasn't been getting better.

Took her to the vet and it turns out that she has a torn ACL in her stifle which is what dogs have instead of knees I learned. So I don't know what to do. There's good compelling arguments either way. Getting a dog in ACL surgery feels a little strange when you think about what an ACL surgery means to humans. I mean, Isaac and I played Ultimate Frisbee. I venture to say that probably 30% of the people that we've been on teams with in their lifetimes have had ACL surgeries. And the recoveries are terrible. You have to get.

get a graft from a different part of your body, usually hamstring or patelotendin, you get that sort of stretched onto the space where your ACL was to try to do the job of the ACL. It learns how to be an ACL. It takes about for professional athletes, like Adrian Peterson set the record. It was like four and a half months he was back, which was absurd. For most people, it's nine months until you're doing anything. Usually it's more like a year until you're back to close to 100%. So it feels like weird to say we're considering ACL surgery, but for dogs, it's different. They will, instead of getting the ACL rebuilt, they get their bone reshaped. And it will, the way the joint will operate after surgery will do the work of what an ACL was doing before,

so they no longer need it. And it takes, it's two weeks, the way a friend described it to me was two weeks of hell like they can't move you have to pick them up help them go to the bathroom they're in pain it's sad and it you know it's no fun for anybody the next two weeks are hard but better and then four weeks of gradually getting them back up to speed after about eight weeks you can start doing most activity with them and then four three to four months they're pretty much back it's a little expensive it's a lot to go through but on the other hand it's gets you back to kind of where you were. That's the argument in favor. Then against, it's like she's 11. She's going to be slowing down. So would we want to put her through that kind of

ordeal when it's getting into her senior years? It's tough because we don't know how much time she has left. I'm looking at a, I saw a Facebook post from the dog breeder where we got her from today that said one of her dogs just passed away at 15 years old. So it makes me me think, you know, if Cali's healthy, do I do a dog ACL surgery and go through the painful recovery? Or do I say she can manage and we're just going to walk a little bit less and try to not put her through that? I'm just really stuck on like the humanification of dogs, you know, like what's next? We're going to give dogs DUIs or something. Now they're getting ACL surgeries. This just feels like, I don't know.

Like, she's a, does she need it? She's a dog, right? You know what I mean? I know what you mean. Don't you have that voice in your head where you're like, I don't know. This is the thing. Like when any, I've heard friends dogs have, their ACLs torn. And you're like, oh, shucks, wait, you're not getting the surgery.

You're getting your dog in ACL surgery. That feels kind of over the top. But then like when it's my dog and I'm watching her struggle to get up and she's not able to go up and down steps the same way she used to and her leg shaking. all the time. I'm like, I can do something to fix it. Then I think I want to. There's definitely a part of my dumb brain that thinks like, it'll just heal on its own because she's a dog. Like, she's built different, you know? And I guess that's not true. Not necessarily. I will say, actually, I do have a personal anecdote about this, which is I'm pretty sure my

brother's dog got ACL surgery and it went really well. So there's that. I mean, there's a good positive story for you. I mean, my concern, all right, and one, just, I'm sorry. It sucks, like, on a bunch of levels for you guys and for the dog. Two, even the case you laid out there is, like, the optimistic circumstance where things go well, like, over this protracted time period. It is entirely possible to have setbacks. And, I mean, the most insane setbacks. I remember when our dog injured his tail, had to have a piece of it amputated and got home and a day later ate the bandage off of his tail and had to have a second surgery to remove. bandage from his lower intestine.

So, you know, these things just tend to get worse over time. And I don't know, there's no, there's no good, good answer in a lot of these circumstances. And yeah, no, that's tough. It's a tough call. Yeah, so if you are listening and you have any advice, just send it to me at WI-L-L-L-Retangle.com. And we'll be sure to take it to heart. But, yeah, I'm actually struggling with this one. I think I'm kind of leaning towards doing the surgery,

but I need more information. All right, fellas. Ari, I'm sorry about Cali, too. I love her. Great dog, all-time dog. So whatever happens, I'm sure she'll come out stronger on the other side. Boys, good hanging out. Hopefully we'll do it again next week in a timely fashion.

We're pumping out some of this on video, by the way, for those of you're interested in that kind of thing, you can go to the Tangle News YouTube channel and check it out, unless you're watching this on YouTube, in which case, welcome and smash the subscribe button or something. I don't know what the kids say anymore. There's got to be a better, cooler way to do that now. Just not think you nailed it.

Fons. All right. I'll see you guys soon. Our executive editor and founder is me. Isaac Saul and our executive producer. producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is

led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Hunter Asperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Canuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website

at reetangle.com. Thank you.