Tangle - Suspension of the rules. - Isaac, Ari and Kmele discuss aliens, Trump's power and the gigantic tax dollar slush fund.

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

Coming up on todays episode of Suspension of the Rules: we go deep on some UAP/alien chatter, Trump's growing power, the gigantic slush fund made from tax payer money going to the aggrieved and more. Last but not least, a very good grievance section. It's a good one.Our next event!Today, I’m pleased to announce that we are coming to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, on June 13 and 14 for a special VIP dinner and a live taping of our weekly podcast, Suspension of the Rules. Tickets are on sale now! Why Berkeley Springs? It’s an American gem. Incorporated in 1776, history abounds — George Washington used to visit with his ill brother, who believed the springs could improve his health. Now, it’s known for its greenery, spas, and resorts. Speaking of history, we’ll be recording live inside the historicStar Theatre.Berkeley Springs is just a few hours from Washington, D.C.; Pittsburgh; Philly; Maryland; New Jersey; Ohio; and even parts of Virginia and North Carolina. If you’re looking for a summer weekend getaway, this is it!Right now, this is the only live event on our schedule. We’re hoping to hold a few more this year — but for now, it’s the only one we can guarantee!Most of the Tangle team will be in attendance, which is unique. Unlike past events where it’s been just me and a few others, this is shaping up to be an opportunity to meet and interact with the full team.We have already sold over half of our VIP tickets, and general admission tickets are going fast. This is a small theater, so to secure your tickets before a sellout, you should hop on it now!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 audio edited and mixed 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 are talking aliens, Trump's power, and the gigantic slush fund of our tax dollar money going to the aggrieved. Before we jump into today's show, though, I do have a special announcement. I want to let you guys know that we have a live taping of the suspension of the Rules podcast coming to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia on Sunday, June 14th at 2 p.m. There are tickets for sale right now for that live show. They're up on our website, reetangle.com forward slash live. They'll be in the episode description of this podcast, of the YouTube video. Wherever you go, you can probably find a link to go buy tickets for the show. It's going to be an awesome event.

If you're not familiar with Berkeley Springs, it is a beautiful historical gem in the United States. There's tons of history there. There's a beautiful historic theater called the Star Wars. Star Theater where we're going to be doing this live show. We're going to have Andy Mills on stage with us. We're going to be talking about AI and energy. We've got another guest, a soon-to-be-announced guest that's coming out to the show as well. Also, Saturday night, before the show on Sunday, we're going to have a VIP dinner at a restaurant owned by a very generous Tangle Reader, which I'm super excited about. About half of those VIP tickets are already sold. So if you're interested in meeting

the Tangled team, having a beautiful dinner in a beautiful part of West Virginia, shooting the shit with the Tangle fam. This is a great opportunity to do it. This might be our only event of 2026. I hope that's not true. But right now, it's the only one on the schedule. So I encourage you to go check out the episode description, the YouTube description, our newsletters from last week, wherever you go to consume Tangle and click on the link for tickets.

If you're in Washington, D.C., Philly, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Ohio. Virginia, West Virginia. Many of you are probably in West Virginia. We're close. It's a drive. And you can even fly into an airport in the region and then hop in a rental car for a beautiful summer getaway. But it's coming up. Less than a month away. Hope to see you guys there. And thanks. Here's the show. Good morning. Good afternoon and good evening. And welcome to the suspension of the rules podcast. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. I'm here with you this week. But very sure. shortly I might be in a castration center in Texas's 35th district. Oh, God. If their new Democratic nominee has anything to say about it. So enjoy me while you have me, gentlemen. Is that the, wow, no pun intended, I hope.

But is Tara, is that your Tara Lingwood district? No, no, it's not. It's not. Okay, so you're safe for now. They're coming for the Zionists, but not your district, so you can say nothing. Yeah. I was, I newly acquainted with this woman who I think, I think her name's Miranda Galindo, is that right? I don't, I honestly don't know how to say her name. Maureen, Galindo, excuse me. I hope to never have to learn it. By if, you know, by the grace of God, she'll be an irrelevant politician sometime in the next three or four months. But I found out about this this morning while reading and learning about the, midterm elections in our country. And I think I would like to start by just reading this Instagram post that she posted where she was trying to explain very gently that she's got

nothing against the Jews. However, she did promise to convert ICE detention centers into internment camps for quote American Zionists. She added that it will also be a castration processing Center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists, end quote. This is a Democratic nominee in Texas's 35th District who just, by the way, came in first place in the Democratic primary in April. She's headed for a runoff now. She got 29.2% of the vote. So we're doing well. I mean, everybody seems good. I just last week we had Rand Paul's son. This week we've got Maureen Galindo and

we should note, by the way, I don't know if John got this edit in. We were recording the show last week and I made light of Rand Paul's son's kind of crazy anti-Semitic rant at a Mike Lawler in front of a reporter and I said that I said that he had not apologized

and we started recording the show around 4 p.m. on Wednesday and about 5 p.m. on Twitter, he actually did post an apology and said that he was going to seek some help for his drinking. So, you know, I personally have never gotten shit-faced and started accusing a non-Jew of being a Jew who was destroying the country. But I do appreciate the fact that he owned the conduct. And I'm less worried about him, more worried about this new woman, Maureen Galindo, who is now on my watch list for people I am scared of, who I hope I never run into in real life. Her assurances weren't credible to you, Isaac?

No, no. Her assurances, no, her assurances were credible to me. They were just also terrifying. They were not comforting, I would say. It's not the Jews. It's just anybody who supports the state of Israel's existence in any manner. You could make a pretty broad definition of Zionist, which definitely, a broad definition of Zionist includes me, for sure. So, yeah, she scares me. Anyway, in lighter news, she only wants to castrate the petos. Oh, right.

It's more evidence for my unified theory that you can get away with whatever you want in politics if you just blame terrorism or pedophil. yeah. But at the same time, like, you know, this is another example of other parties also perhaps wanting to prop up extremists in the opposite party. Like, this is a person who benefited a little bit from fundraising from conservative right wing packs. So like kind of, we're stuck in the cycle, I guess. Hopefully it just washes over, though. We are definitely stuck in the cycle, though. I will note, I believe Texas's 35th district is currently represented by a Democrat. I think it got redrawn.

So I think it's one of the districts that Democrats are expected to lose post-Gerrymander, but a little too close for comfort, nonetheless. I'd prefer this woman was not getting 26% of the vote in any election. There's a lot of other news to get to. The three of us have kind of been, what's the word? We've been like gallivanting in different directions recently. Camille, you just finished a trip to D.C. It sounded like you got to interview a whole bunch of interesting people.

I've been sort of like up and down the East Coast traveling out west a little bit. Ari's finally watching the summer bloom in Vermont. I saw a beautiful picture of Ari's dog today. And then we get to sit here and spend an hour together and decide what lovely topics we're going to talk about. And today, we have to touch on the political moment that is before us, which is Trump dominant, as per usual. But I think especially forceful in the last 48 hours, it seems like the president is remaking the dregs of the Republican Party. that used to challenge him in real time and just finally scraping the last crumbs off the table,

not to degrade Thomas Massey as a crumb, but it does feel over and complete now. Bill Cassidy out. Thomas Massey out. Senator Cornyn probably out soon if this Ken Paxson endorsement actually works. The whole project, is feeling like near completion.

And we talked a few weeks ago about, you know, the Indiana legislator targeting and whether Trump still really had power over the party. And then we sort of, in real time, we're reflecting on what an absurd question that was. Like, of course he controls the party. It's been his party. This is such a tired trope. But I guess to start, I mean, I'm just curious how you guys are feeling after watching the last few days unfold.

what reflections come to mind in terms of where the Republican Party is and what it means to cross the president. I mean, Cornyn didn't even really ever cross the president. He just wasn't really sufficiently, quote-unquote, loyal or supportive of him. He still votes with him like 98% of the time or whatever, one of those ridiculous statistics is. But yeah, I'm curious where your guys' minds are right now. I got to dominate a bit in the newsletter and the podcast today,

but I haven't heard from you, too. I'm always able to get my oar in there a little bit as an advocate. I'm doing the thing behind the scenes. All right. The thing that stands out to me is what you just ended with by saying that Cornyn wasn't sufficiently maga enough. And the two things in Donald Trump's post where he endorsed Paxton, which may have been a record for length for him, it was paragraphs and paragraphs included such exotica as punctuation. and subordinate clauses. But the two things that were at the top of the list from Trump on that endorsement

were support for the Save America Act, the Voting Security Act, as well as push to abolish the filibuster. So it's nothing really that Cornyn did. It's just that there's somebody who seems to be in Trump's camp more. And now I'm very much wondering what we're going to see next from Cornyn. I mean, there'll be up until the primary, then up until the election. And up until the primary, I'm sure that it's going to be a different person than what we'll see afterwards. Imagining a world where Paxton wins that Republican primary, which is now likelyer than it's been,

I think John Cornyn becomes the most interesting person to watch in Congress. I think given what we saw Cassidy do by voting for the Iran War Powers resolution, trying to limit Trump's military actions in Iran. I think maybe we see some movement from Cornyn what he's willing to support or oppose. Maybe we don't. I think he's a really, really interesting parameter. He's a person who's a lot of respect from his colleagues

in Capitol Hill. And if he starts to sway at all, then I think that shows a really strong indication that what people are voting for is more just based on electoral survival than principle. I mean, it's always, a combination, but that would be the most interesting tell to me. Cornyn expected or seen as a person who votes on principal or a person who's very in line

with the center of the Republican Party, if he shifts, that's going to be a really notable tell. And I mean, I've got more I could say about the things that we're seeing out of Cassidy as well as Massey, but I mean, it really is the headline the way that you set it, which is Trump's Republican Party underscore on Trump. Like, it is his party and he's setting the agenda. And a lot of people are making decisions based on electoral survival. Now the question is how much of it. Camille, I'm curious here from you. I mean, I know Thomas Massey, somebody who, you know, He's orbited your circle a little bit, the libertarian-minded folks kind of right of center. I'm fairly certain you sat down with him for an interview or two over the years.

What's your read on the narrative arc of his political career? What kind of comes next for him and what you expect out of this development? What comes next is an interesting question. I'm not quite sure. I mean, I suspect he probably goes the way of Justin Amosch and a number of other Republicans. who've kind of run afoul of the president for being insufficiently MAGA, which is to say not a whole lot in terms of public office. Maybe, you know, kind of taking shots at him from the sidelines

and the way Marjorie Taylor Green is doing and some other people, Lone Borbert, managed to make herself a pariah as well by going out to campaign for him. And we can talk perhaps a little bit more about some of the scandalous things that have been reported. I actually do air quotes when I say reported with, respect to their relationship. But the dimension of the kind of massy situation that I find most interesting, and I mean, I think maybe you mentioned it, but perhaps not worth saying,

the most expensive primary contest in like the history of the country for inter-congressional race. It's extraordinary. And all of this because the president of the United States felt that a person who votes with him nearly all of the time, virtually all of the things, was insufficiently in line with him. And what specific issue is it that kind of pushed him over the edge and made this the place where he needed to draw the line, the place where he needed to have the defense secretary essentially show up and campaign against an incumbent Republican?

We don't really know. I don't know that you can actually point to any one thing. Was it the Epstein stuff in particular? Was it the fact that he was critical of the tariffs in particular? We're not really sure. the one thing that seems pretty clear to me, though, is while this district is a solid Republican district, it is unlikely to fall to Democrats, the national political narrative surrounding the president isn't improved at all by what looks like a pretty petty effort to take out someone who

is kind of marginally critical of the administration in certain respects. And certainly they've had some kind of pretty substantial public dust-ups as well, but certainly ran a race where he kept trying to align himself with the president. The president has really low polling numbers with Democrats, obviously, but also with independents who are going to help decide plenty of races. And the calculus, from my standpoint, if I were a conservative in this country who wanted to see Republicans maintain control of the House and the Senate, would probably have a lot to do with, how does this look to independence? Is the president really positioning himself to be in a better position to ensure that we're actually able to maintain control of Congress. And I don't see how

this strengthens his hands much at all. I mean, the legislative priorities that you mentioned, Ari, that he's actually flagging in this true social post, it's not clear that Massey would have been a real obstacle to achieving most of those things. And with Cornyn in particular, I mean, you had the Republican leadership lobbying the president really hard to actually get the endorsement there. And again, just the same sort of pettiness. that we've seen so many times before where what seems to be most important to Donald Trump is his particular interest, his ego,

and not so much the fortunes of the party more broadly. An interesting thread that I started to pull that today in the newsletter in one of the, you know, one of the bulleted numbered takes that I had about Tuesday's primary that I'd really like to spend more time ruminating on is not just the pettiness of Donald Trump, but the pettiness of other politicians too. Trump is not the only person who can hold a grudge or be petty.

And I think there's a story emerging quickly that he just basically nuked his Senate majority, maybe not in literal technical sense, but in practical governing sense, going into the midterms, which could actually literally and technically nuke his Senate majority. I mean, if you take a quick stock of the lay of the land right now, Republicans have a 53 to 47 advantage over Democrats in the Senate.

Two of those are Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who have an independent streak. So now you're down to 51. Then you have Tom Tillis, who's retiring, who's clearly enjoying his forthcoming retirement. I mean, he is bucking the president at every. return when he feels it's appropriate. He's been calling for Cash Patel to resign. He held up a Fed nomination. I mean, he's going after the administration in some ways more aggressively and more forcefully and more

kind of in the headlines than many Democrats. Now Senator Bill Cassidy just got primaried by the president. And if you're wondering whether he's petty or how he's going to navigate that, he literally overnight, I mean literally overnight flipped his vote after losing the primary, on this war powers resolution with regards to Iran and help Democrats push it forward. So now you're at 49 reliable votes instead of 53. And then you have Senator John Cornyn, who I don't have a great read on how he's going to navigate

the next few months. I think the thing that really distinguishes him is he still has a runoff to win. So we'll see how that plays out. Everybody is basically assuming that Ken Paxson is going to win. I was just on a podcast with Mike Peska earlier today before this show, and he told me that the Kalshi odds of Ken Paxson winning are 94%. I think that's quite a bit high.

I mean, I think Paxon has the advantage, but I would maybe put it more like 70-30. John Cornyn has never lost an election since he ran for his very first election in 1990 for a judicial position in Texas. So I'm just not quite ready to count him out before he actually loses. But either way, I'm sure he's spurned. I mean, I'm sure he doesn't feel great about the whole situation. So now you're at maybe 48 reliable votes in the Senate.

And then maybe Fetterman sometimes, apparently. Yeah, I mean, maybe Fetterman jumps the line here and there on stuff related to Iran or Israel. But, like, it just became a lot more tenuous. And then you have a literal midterm election that's going to control. the Senate a few months from now. Republicans have all these bills. The reason Trump's talking about nuking the filibusters is because Republicans

have a bunch of legislation. They want to push across the finish line while they control the House and control the Senate from immigration bills to crypto regulation. I mean, there's all manner of stuff. And Trump just put himself in a really tough spot. I mean, imagine being the president, even with a nuked filibuster

and needing 50 votes for something and having to go not doors with Tom Tillis, the Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins. I mean, that's not exactly a friendly lineup of folks given what he just did. And I just don't think a lot of people are considering that element of this quite closely enough. I mean, the president certainly isn't. And again, I think considering this from the standpoint of a conservative who essentially cares about the president's agenda, who cares about his priorities, I mean, you ought to be a bit of a bit of outraged by the short-sightedness of the administration, at least in the way that the president

seems to be dealing with his majority, his party. You could police them with a firm whip hand, or you could find opportunities to compromise. And an interesting thing with that is it creates an odd situation where the best thing for Trump legislatively could be his favored candidate, not gaining the party's nomination, which is, I guess, maybe a win-win as well. The thing that I come back to, though, is what is this something that Trump may want to pass through Congress that he isn't doing on his own as an executive unchecked by Congress? The thing that I think gives the most peril to the president is this war powers resolution. Like, it's this big canary in the coal mine right now where we're looking at it and seeing,

okay, we got McCursky, Murkowski, Collins, now Cassidy, who knows what Corden might do. and then Federman's in the mix for like depending on what the, Antilles and depending on what the topic is. But let's say that there is some big check against the president, against what he wants to do, coming out of the Senate. And let's even say that, you know, maybe there's a couple leaves of absence or what have you from the House of Representatives or people vote one way or the other, and it passes.

Let's say this war powers resolution passes. Nothing happens. It's just going to get veto. There's no veto-proof majority in these chambers. So, like, there's going to be no check on Trump and Congress. The only check there is is what is on his legislative agenda, which as far as I can tell is the thing he spelled out. It was abolish the filibuster and let's pass the Save America Act. And I don't, like you were saying, Camille, I don't see how this advances those priorities.

And as such, I think they're kind of down the list on the priorities for him. It seems like what he wants to do is foreign intervention. and he got the tax reform that he won with the one big beautiful bail act last year and then being able to get things through with executive fiat like we just saw with this big fund that he pushed through the DOJ

and like that, I don't think he needs Congress for these things. So like the stakes are already kind of mitigated. The question is like how much this is really going to hurt the midterms, yes, but then what will that do for two years from now? I mean, it kind of comes back to that for me, and that's still too early to say. So while we're looking into what the implications are right now for the medium term, it's still like really, really mitigated by the fact that this president is just using power in a way that's different than any president has before.

He's found a new lever to push, almost or pull, I suppose. you don't push letters, but pull a new button to push. Almost seemingly every week of the presidency. I mean, it's from the very beginning, it was tariffs as a tool to force countries and pressure countries into trade. It was, you know, effectively ignoring or working around certain court orders to push through his immigration agenda. It was repelling helicopters out of the sky.

onto Chicago apartment buildings in order to deport people. Like from the little kind of granular stuff to the larger scale, I will spend time, money, political resources to run state Indiana Republicans out of office if they don't gerrymander one seat the way that I want them to.

I mean, the breadth of it is pretty remarkable. I was listening to Graham Platner, get interviewed on the New York Times podcast. And he said something about how when he comes into office, his aspiration is to effectively govern with the kind of power-wielding ambitions that Republicans have, that Republicans have been, you know, exercising for years now, this theory of power that they operate on behind Trump, which is basically, like, if you can do it, you should do it. And if there is a historical precedent for it that you can point to, you should do it. One of the things Federman talked about

was how he wants to impeach Supreme Court justices. I mean, there is a remarkable door being open that we do not consider enough about what this means for the future. I mean, I saw a Democratic aid being quoted, I think maybe in the Washington Post. I forget from more. what office, but basically saying, like, we have no aspirations to undo the executive excesses of Trump's government. Like, we have aspirations to take those excesses and own them. I mean, they want the presidency so they can do the things they've watched him do. And it's naive to imagine that that's not how this goes. Historically, it's how it's always gone. And I think one way to think about a lot of this stuff, if you're a supporter of the president,

which is what I often try to implore people who are to the right of me on their view of Trump and power and what this Republican Party is doing is every single time he does something like this, he is making a blueprint for how Democrats can do it in the future. And so if you don't want John Federman, if you don't want dissenting Democrats in the party, you know, if you're somebody on the right who, if you're somebody on the left, excuse me, who doesn't want those people wielding power in the party. Trump is just laying a roadmap out for eliminating them. And a lot of conservative voters, I don't think, have considered that enough

because it's just it's the reality now, and we're all going to live in the post-Trump world and figure out, you know, how far Democrats are willing to go once this is all done. And I think it's going to be pretty far. I think we're going to see a lot of this stuff become political norms, which is frankly kind of terrifying. We'll be right back after this quick break.

Well, as we were kind of talking about legislative stuff on the agenda and what Trump might try and do before the midterms come around, I was really hoping one of you was going to mention immigration because then I was going to do this really awesome transition to aliens. But neither of you did. And so I can't. The layup joke didn't fall into my lap. But we did decide today that we're going to have a brief interlude

here to talk about UAPs and aliens. And I suspect John will have some fancy X-Files-themed alien music that he can play on the podcast or else I'm just going to lay him off. But hopefully he comes up with that and we can just play the music. I thought a little bit about how to do it. So first of all, let's just say, let's start here. We had a big UAP disclosure. We did not talk about it in the show.

We didn't talk about it in the newsletter. it has not appeared really anywhere in Tangle. Maybe a quick hit last week, I think is possible it came up. I honestly don't remember. And I got some email and some texts about it because people have been reading Tangle for a while. No, I'm a believer. I think everybody gets one conspiracy theory

that they can subscribe to. Just one, any more than that, red flag. But you all get one. It's fun, you know, embrace it. My conspiracy is that the guy, government's covering up the existence of extra-trestrial life. And I was really excited about the UAP disclosures. Click this unbelievably, like, I mean, almost, I don't even know the way.

It was like a satirical website for alien information, like alien news, UFO news. But it was a government website with government disclosures. I clicked three or four links. They're all stories that I've seen before. many of them hogwash debunked, you know, old newspaper articles with images clearly doctored into the sky of flying saucers and such. But we decided, let's spend a few minutes to talk about the UAP disclosures. And I think Ari, maybe you came up with the prompt here, which was just hottest, hottest UAP take slash your strongest evidence that the aliens are here and among us. And I would love, love to hear how you two approach that prompt because I honestly have no idea what you're going to say.

Okay. So I'm kind of with you on the latest release being underwhelming. I think I'm putting myself fairly squarely in the Mick West camp, this famous The Bunker who looks at any videos. Former guests on the show. Former guest on the show. Yes, we should listen to that interview. great. McWest was a great get and he's a great interview. He went through this one high profile video of some craft that seemed to be moving in and out of wind turbines in a way that was erratic.

And he's like every video that you see where you see something in the sky moving strangely, it's a perspective that's really confusing because it's being filmed by an aircraft that's thousands of feet, tens of thousands of feet away from its target. And this is somewhere in between. and it's usually hard to tell how far. And that aircraft is changing direction. And the actual camera that's mounted to it is pivoting. And all of those things make this, whatever the thing is in view, appear to be moving in ways that it actually isn't.

It's a trick of perspective. And I haven't seen anything that disproves that. My general perspective is it seems curious to me that the amount of reported incidences of aliens, sightings or spacecraft sightings just happen to coincide with humans inventing supersonic flight. That's interesting. But I could put that aside and engage with the prompt directly, which is what is the best evidence that's hard to deny about the proof of extraterrestrial life?

And I would go back to, I'll set the scene. So I am 20 years old. I'm working part-time at the University of Chicago's Science Library. And a fun thing about the science library at the University of Chicago is it it classifies both cooking books and books about extraterrestrials, science. So those things were in the library. So I got some good recipes and I got some interesting stories. I pulled this one book from the stacks one day.

It was called Alien Discussions from 1994s based on proceedings from an MIT conference about extraterrestrial theories or evidence. And one study in particular, I remember it very clearly, was some psychologists wanted to test the hypothesis that children age eight or younger, or maybe 10 or younger, I'm not, I can't recall exactly, had reported seeing visually or encountering extraterrestrials. What they did, and remembering this was 1994, is they showed them pictures of different caricatures,

like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, a fireman, things like that. And one of the characters was like the classic alien gray face with the big black eye spots and everything. The people who ran the study had a control where they showed that most people in 1994 could not spot that image of an alien gray and say what it was. That long ago, that wasn't in the popular conscience to a strong degree. Certainly was true with the control group with children. But when children had reported having encounters in their rooms at night that gave them nightmares,

more often than not, they pointed to that picture as the visitor that they saw in their room and they would have stories about it and things would come back to their minds about, oh, this is the man, the skinny small man who took me into the sky to see the doctor. And those kinds of stories are really hard to confront and I'm not exactly sure how to explain them. I'm not convinced that it is aliens per se, but that is the piece of evidence that I always stumble over when I think about it. Yeah, man, 100% totally, I don't need to hear anything else.

I'll probably use that over and over for the rest of my life. Camille Foster, the ultimate skeptic. I mean, Camille always asking, is that, is that true? Is that true? Is that Camille or Tucker Carlson? Yeah, yeah.

I don't know what the Antichrist says. want you to not ask questions about whether that's true. Where'd you go with this UAP prompt? Look, I, the word that I would use to describe the disclosure is farcical. Isaac, you were reaching for one earlier. I'm remembering like Caroline Levitt's initial posts, like stay tuned, alien emoji, alien emoji, Donald Trump's true social posts. Previous administrations have been very secretive about this,

but we are going to disclose all of these things so we can figure out in all caps, what the hell is going on? Enjoy and have fun. That is how he ends this. You don't conclude a message like that when you are actually going to reveal evidence of aliens. Also, my favorite thing is that someone

managed to register alien.gov and aliens.gov, which they didn't end up using, but they did register them, which they're trolling you. Anyways, if I had to look at all of the available evidence, and actually give you some sort of case for why maybe there's something here. I suspect it would have to be the fact, and this somewhat runs parallel to yours, Ari. There's been a sustained interest in this topic.

And there have been formal inquiries into this over the course of many, many decades. Things did kind of go silent during the, say, 1970s up until fairly recently, like the mid-20 teens. And more recently, yeah, like we, actually, actually have agencies and kind of internal working groups that have been devoted to these things. We have seen the classification of documents. We have gotten reports that indicate clearly that there are any number of unexplained, unidentified, unidentified objects that have been tracked by military, during military operations. And then we've gotten these disclosures. The reporting in the New York Times. All of that creates at least the appearance of something substantive here that is

worth taking seriously. And you mentioned, Isaac, that I was in D.C. this past week and did a bunch of interviews with folks. I mean, I talked to Congresswoman Maxwell Frost, who he was in those hearings. And he in particular, I thought, conducted himself in a really responsible manner, wasn't overly skeptical or cynical about it, was asking thoughtful questions. And when you see that, it's hard to just dismiss it all as utterly ridiculous and baseless. All the same. I don't think the fact that people are taking this more seriously is evidence of much in and of itself. And the disclosures thus far just aren't impressive. A bunch of weirdly redacted military photos, videos that while they were perhaps not explained before once they're released to the public, are explicable.

Like we can't, oh, wait, that is a plume from a jet engine. There are people parachuting in this photo. That's almost certainly a balloon going through those wind turbines or alongside the wind turbines. It's explained readily. And I think that that old dictum is the thing that we have to adhere to here. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. And thus far, we have seen none of it, despite what Congresswoman Luna continues to insist. Okay, great. I love it.

But I want to believe. I do want to believe. I want to be clear about that. So I'll offer two things. I think one is, I think, my answer to the prompt. And two is my theory of the case. I'll just plant the seed. My answer to the prompt, I think, is almost a retort to the most common thing I hear. And I think even maybe one of you two guys, because you're low IQ simple. and said this in this slide. No way it was me then. You said something along the lines of, you know,

it's not something that government could cover up if this was something the government was doing, then we'd be hearing from all these people. To which I respond. That does sound like me. We are hearing from all these people. That's the thing. There are people coming out,

government contractors, former CIA, pilots, physicists, physicists, whatever. Every year, there's a new person who had at some point access to some high-level classified thing who comes out and says, they're real, the government's covering up. I mean, Harry Reid, the former senator, was very famously demanding of more disclosures because he felt the American people, quote, deserve to know or whatever. So, like, actually, if you were to paint a picture of what would be happening, if this was something the government was trying to cover up, the picture would look pretty similar to what we have today,

which is a bunch of people coming out trying to say, hey, the government's covering this up. I know because I worked on XYZ projects. And then those people are immediately lambasted and sort of scarlettered as being crazy conspiracy lunatics by the government who's trying to cover it up. So that's my, it's my counterclaim to the thing that I always hear, which is the government could never cover this up.

We'd be hearing from all these people. And then I say, we do hear from those people. you just call them crazy and say that they're idiots and they're making all of it up. But there's a lot of them. The new film came out, disclosures or whatever it was called. Kind of a bad movie, not going to lie. I was really excited for it, a little bit disappointed.

But there were a lot of people, some quacks for sure, but a lot of people in that film who were pretty legit, who had a lot of questions, and maybe they didn't say explicitly, there's the big green walking alien men here, but they were willing to go kind of far in saying there are a lot of things that have indicated we've encountered extra trustual life

and we think the government is covering up and I was involved in program XYZ. But of course, the moment they say that, they're immediately discredited. So that's kind of my, yeah, that's my view is there are actually quite a lot of people raising the flag and saying... I do want to respond for 30 seconds, if you'll let me.

Which is, I think what we're seeing is cover up of questions and not necessarily cover up of definitive answers. I think there's a lot of proof of people that have seen things that are hard to explain. We all know about Project Blue Book and the things that the Air Force pilots saw. We didn't see things that they actually had as definitive proof. However, the government has been doing a lot of strange things throughout the past several decades. that we do know about. Like if you look up the gateway tapes

where the CIA was trying to get people to learn how to astro project for espionage, that's not something that you can just say, oh, that person's a quack. Like, we know that happened. So there's things that the government does for sure, but what we don't have is like, here's the proof of the fact that this is what they found

and this is the stuff that works. So we have that it's a bit of a different story. But it is interesting that we have plenty of detail about those failed programs to astro project. We have details about that. Didn't work out so well. Great segue to my final point, which is my theory of the case. Obviously, obviously, they are in the ocean.

We need to look down, not up. That's where all the aliens are. If you were to land on planet Earth and think, I need a place to hide for a few thousand years so I can observe this birgin and new species, you would not return to your home planet 100 million light years away. you would go into the ocean depths

where nobody will ever find you. Okay. And more reason to map the ocean. Also, those Tick-Tac things, they always plunge into the water at the end of the videos. Why would they do that if they didn't have some mothership thing

to get to down there? Sure. Have you ever seen an octopus? I mean, there's a million things I could throw out there. The aliens are in the ocean and that's where we should be looking. Yeah.

And alien grays aren't creatures. Those are spacesuits. The aliens are in the ocean. side. Nice. Love that. Little tiny. Yeah. My size aliens with joysticks walking around the... Who's the same? All right.

All right. That's enough of that. This is, of course, a politics podcast. Yeah. Hey, UIP government disclosures. Covers everything. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right. The last thing we got to

get to this week is the, I want to call it a slush fund. I guess we're calling it a... Oh man, what a, what a pivot. Yeah, government weaponization. It's like a, what's the actual... Anti-weaponization fund. Yes.

You know, it's hard to really put some of this stuff into proper framing. And I think, Ari, you said, when we were working on, the Friday, or excuse me, the Tuesday newsletter. I think you said, I'm having a hard time editing today. Like, it just, it feels, I feel myself getting some emotional rise out of the content of this, the basics of this story.

And then Camille, when we talked in pre-production, you were kind of using words you don't typically use, like, astonishing. And, you know, I'm sensing that there's some. particular valiance here that's kind of getting to us because we're dumb woke libs, I guess. Austin Bill Cassidy, man. Yeah, Austin Bill Cassidy, yeah. You know, I, and I've been thinking about that.

Like, why, what is it about this? And I think for me, the answer I kind of settled on is it so emblematic of the Overton window shift that I talk about constantly. and just, you know, even at the top of the show, we talked about it with just like what Trump is normalizing in terms of going after people in your own party for insufficient loyalty. And I hate to have an episode that's so Trump dominant, but sorry, the day necessitates it.

But I think the thing for me was, I remember like it was, you know, a year ago, because it was a year ago, when we were talking about whether Trump was going to pardoned, the January 6th rioters or insurrectionists or tourists, whatever you want to call them. I literally don't care what you call them. But there were people who committed real crimes that day and Trump wanted to pardon them or was considering parting them. And I would, I mean, roughly say maybe half of the right-wing conservative commentary.

It was like, he's not going to pardon all of them. Maybe a couple who really deserve a pardon who were unjustly given long sentences is they threw the book at them when they didn't have to, which, by the way, those people exist. I'm not denying it. QAnon Shaman's one of them. Yeah. Stand on that too forever.

But yeah, go on. Yeah, stand on Q&N Shaman. Ari, hell, yeah. That dude was just made an example of because he was visible. Sorry, I'll back up to your show right now. You got it. Chill guy. I, but like, that was where the conversation was a year, 18 months ago.

And then he blanket pardoned everybody and now has created a fund worth as much as, you know, we talked about it, mid-sized city annual budget close to $2 billion, designed specifically for people like the people who were arrested on January 6th and had the book thrown at them. Like, he didn't just pardon all of them. He's positioning himself to give them a bunch of money. I saw one example today, the mother of some kid.

I don't know. He was probably in his early 20s, actually, I think, who was there on January 6. She posted this long thing with an appeal to Trump. It was going super viral in the conservative Twitter accounts that I follow where she's saying my son was, you know, in prison for two years and we got charged with all these things. So I was like, oh, maybe this is one of these legit anti-weaponization cases that this was a kid who was unjustly prosecuted and he showed up and he's, you know, went to jail for two years for walking in the Capitol after the doors were open and whatever. And then I looked up the kid's story and he literally planned with his friends going to get wooden batons

and talked about how they were going to go beat the shit out of a bunch of cops and then went to the Capitol and did that and helped like push steel barricades through and move everybody out of the way so the crowd could get into the Capitol so they could go hang Mike Pence. And then texted his buddies and joked about and laughed about it afterwards.

Like I don't know if that guy deserves a pardon actually or that guy deserves, maybe he deserves a pardon. I don't know if he deserves a million dollars from the Trump slush fund. And I think that's the thing. It's like we went from this conversation, like, who deserves a pardon and should he and whatever to a year and a half later? Everybody's pardoned. Also, we made a bunch of money, put a bunch of money in a taxpayer-funded fund. And now my tax dollars that I give the federal government, 35% of my annual income is going to go towards paying.

these people out. It's offensive. So I'm upset, too. But I don't, you know, like my perspective is feeling skewed. Anyway, long monologue to just say, you two seem to actually be in a similar boat as me. I sensed a little emotional rise out of both of you. And I was curious what, in your view, kind of prompted that. Well, go ahead, Arndt.

Okay. I'll collect myself. No crying though, okay? No crying, no liberal tears here. Yeah, the thing that is different about it, there are a couple things. The first is that this is kind of, it feels like a weird trick where Trump is like suing the government. And then he's like, oh, that's me. And then he's taking up the lawsuit.

as the person who's the present, who's not supposed to be puppeteering the Department of Justice, but as we've seen, that's another precedent that's broken, which is, I think, an underappreciated aspect of this issue. Since that seal is broken,

this is the thing that can happen. And then he's like, okay, private citizen, whoever you are, you've got a good point, I'm going to go make sure that you're made whole. What feels like a good number? I don't know. Let's say $1,776 million,

because that's like a fun number that recalls our nation's highest principles. And I can just invoke that here. That sounds good. And then that's a thing that you could just do again is the thing that kind of gets to me is that this doesn't feel like a one-trick kind of situation. I could see this happening again where the Trump organization or Eric Trump, because he's, I saw a story about how he is upset about the way his cancer nonprofit is being covered because it's being a cute.

of being billed by the Trump organization for services and then claiming profits, which I think is fair. And then he's claiming grievances. And I think I could see him suing and then the Justice Department's settling. That aside, that's just one aspect of it is Trump is like sticking himself up. And the second thing is that he's paying himself with like Isaac's money and your money, Camille, and my money and everybody's money who is listening to this. A thing that I think- You were going to say, not my money because I don't pay my federal taxes here in Vermont. I really just, it would have been nice. No, yeah, what an, yeah, that would have been nuts.

No, I pay my taxes, so promise. But the thing that's, like, the thing that I felt like you could always use a qualifier to, like, take the edge off of some of the claims that were highlighted in your Friday edition a couple weeks ago about stories of Trump, corruption and grift, was that these are people who opt in. in some way or another. People who invested in some business, in some crypto scheme, who wanted to donate money to a Trump organization or buy some branded product. It was people who made a choice.

And this is a very different thing. It's just the U.S. treasured. And that's categorically different. And the third thing, and this is small, compared to those other two, it's just the arguments were so poor in support of it. I think normally you can see something where they're drawing a corollary and you're like, okay, I can get that.

The argument they made was that Obama, or the Justice Department under Obama, because it was different back then in the days of yours, had a practice where they would settle out of court for high sums with people who are suing it, especially the EPA. And what they cited explicitly as precedent was a class action settlement that a group of Native Americans came to with the federal government for having been denied loans. And that class action settlement was agreed to by both parties.

It was approved by a judge. It was the $680 million plus another $80 million to pay off unapproved loans. And that money went to people who were already in a court said to have suffered a harm that the legal system found. And then when enough people claimed those funds, there were some leftover amount. So the government said what we're going to do is we're going to give grants, if you apply to a grant, if you're in this approved, if you're in this aggrieved community, and you can prove it, you can apply for a grant and we'll portion it out.

That is just extremely different than saying, here's an amount of money, it's going to be available to anybody who can prove some sort of harm, and the people who are going to adjudicate that are hand-picked by the person who brought the lawsuit, essentially. Like, if you think those two things are analogous, like you are using motivated reasoning to get there. There's no argument that I can see where that,

logic, logic's out. It just doesn't make sense. So all of those things just leave me particularly feeling piqued by this and thinking, people like John Cornyn, if they're let off the loose, they're probably going to be calling this out. Maybe I'm wrong, but like I don't see a way that there's anybody who's looking this with a stone sober face and saying, this is cool. Like, it's just what aboutism? It's the only good excuse you can have for this. It's just, I don't know, I'm at the end of my rope with it. It's a pretty tough one to swallow. I think it's the scale. It's the audaciousness. And it's the fact that it has been so consistent.

I mean, Isaac, you're absolutely right. There were so many people who assured us. I mean, the tariff talk, he's not going to do it that way. He's not going to go that far. The immigration is he's not going to go that far. I mean, obviously, come on. And I will say even for me, I can remember a moment, particularly in the summer shortly after the assassination attempt in Butler, the president seemed at that time to have moderated in some meaningful way, at least for a little while. And during that moment, during the inauguration in those early weeks when there was so much attention, and he seemed to really have essentially overcome the people who were trying to put him in jail, secured re-election, and was essentially getting kind of patted on the back by so many people in various elite circles.

who would have given him the cold shoulder before, you had the sense almost that, you know, you've been victorious here. The excess isn't necessary. The campaign of kind of reprisal and revenge probably isn't necessary here. But not only has he indulged in all of that and participated in exactly the same

and worse kind of lawfare, targeting his political opponents, targeting law firms who represented his political opponents, targeting universities in the broadest possible ways, bypassing all sorts of mechanisms that he could have, that he could have used to try and address what I think in some instances were definitely legitimate overreaches on the part of the Biden administration and certain Democrats in various jurisdictions. But he didn't do that.

He made the problem worse in every single one of those instances. And here again is doing exactly the same thing. the filing a lawsuit, being on both sides of the lawsuit, deciding to pull it when it was clear you're going to lose, and then embarking on this bold new methodology for essentially creating a fund to enrich people who are your political allies. During a week when you're also, I mean,

and I don't even know if it's been mentioned today, but he secured forever immunity for himself and his family against future tax investigations. I'm sorry, huh? Like, how does that work? It's one thing for the Biden administration to say, you know, pardon forever for any number of things that you might do or have done. Specifically, securing forever immunity for all future tax investigations. It's incredible.

It's incredible to do that in the same week that you're saying, oh, that $100 million fine, yeah, we're not going to worry about that. in the same week that we're looking into, you know, insider trading related to not just the president, but people who had some sort of foreknowledge of various actions and decisions that were going to make with respect to Iran that move the market in distinct ways. Is there clear evidence of wrongdoing there? There is not yet. But do I have faith that the apparatus of government, that the various agencies responsible for investigating this will do it in an impartial way? Why should I? Like, why should I at this point? It's astonishing on a number of levels.

And I think what I think has been most frustrating about this is it isn't clear what sort of legal remedies might be available to opponents of this particular proposal at the moment. You know, is it the emoluments? Is there some sort of clear constitutional violation? Isn't clear yet. If Congress weren't so dysfunctional. If he hadn't brought his own party to heal so much and you could have some faith that, you know, traditional conservatives who used to be concerned about things like spending might be a little miffed by this, maybe you could have some faith that they would do something. But that seems unlikely

in the short run as well. So it's pretty frustrating and it's pretty dispiriting. And one certainly has an expectation that all of this will be leveraged by future presidents and future administrations in nefarious ways as well. And we just, we are left here waiting for someone to be the upstanding grown up who can say enough of this nonsense. We need actual transparency. We need meaningful accountability. And we have to know to all of this insidious self-dealing. Yeah, there's so much there. I mean, the nearly 4,000 stock trades in the first, for just the last quarter, many of which involve businesses, companies, whose profits Trump is directly impacted with announcements or regulatory announcements.

I mean, it's just that is crazy, especially in the context of Trump and J.D. Vance and this administration sort of pushing a congressional stock ban as a kind of, you know, populace, economic populace policy push. but exempting themselves and then, you know, having disclosures like this come out. I mean, it's pretty remarkable. The stuff about the IRS is interesting. I read a few follow-ups to that news from some people who are these like really nerdy tax experts who are basically saying it's not quite clear how ironclad this sort of immunity he tried to carve out for himself is. the offense is no less egregious and offensive.

Yes, the effort's still gross. He tried. And it's Todd Blanche, his attorney general, who he put in there to do exactly what he's doing now, sign off on these sorts of things. But there seem to be some interesting kind of legal questions about whether the IRS actually can't bring those sorts of investigations forward if they decide they're necessary or they want to.

The context of that that I would also throw out there too is Joe Biden preemptively pardoned his son and his family members and a bunch of his associates. I think with a reasonable suspicion that Trump would use the Justice Department to come after them, but also in a way that now and forever, as I wrote at the time, will give the Trump administration and its allies and future presidents and their allies the ability. to point to President Joe Biden and say, somebody has done this, the precedent has been said. This thing exists already. And I mean, I think it's a slam dunk that Trump is going to pardon his children, his family, maybe even try to pardon himself,

himself and many of their associates, either while he's in office or right at the end of his term. The last thing I'll just say to about the period of time around the assassination and Butler, assassination attempted Butler, Pennsylvania, I remember too, there was this sort of Goldilocks Trump two weeks after that. And, you know, it was different. A lot of people, it's sort of like a trope on the left.

People make fun of like, oh, is he being president? Oh, tonight was the night that Donald Trump became president. Because like he'll do some sort of responsible establishment kind of accepted thing or give a national address. And then everybody does the dance of like, he's so presidential. And then the next day he's like, praise be to Allah. we're nuking Iran. You know, it's like we go through that cycle a lot.

But I will say, I don't think that period of time was actually part of that trope. I think, like, he, I mean, he almost got shot in the head and killed. And, like, I think it did actually impact him. And I watched a bunch of his interviews and his public speeches. And there was just, like, a different presence to him where he was much more demur. And, like, and, I mean, I don't know exactly how. to put texture to it, but he seemed different. And then it just evaporated. And it reminded me of George Santos, who I don't know if you guys followed this or we might have even talked about

on the show, but, you know, George Santos went to prison. And then when Trump pardoned him in the lead up to the pardon, he was releasing all these opinion pieces and stuff saying that he was going to dedicate his life to prison reform. And just a few days ago, that occurred to me. And so I went to like, what's George Santos been up to recently? And he's not dedicated his life to prison reform, is all I say. You know, he like made a big fuss about when he got part in like in October of last year. But I did a Google search like in the last six months for news stories about George Santos and part and, excuse me, prison reform efforts. And it's just like all about his different media appearances and clubs he's joining and opinion pieces he's written supporting the president.

It doesn't seem to be a big particular focus. And, like, I believe at the time it was earnest, but it's clearly not something that's translated into long-term changes or action for him, which sucks. It sucks to watch that kind of thing change in a person when it feels like they sort of see the light for a second, and then it just kind of fades away over time. So, yeah, I, he is who he is.

And to me, it's very clear that he is interesting. in wielding the power he has now as taking it as far as he can go in the next few months when he's unchallenged and for the rest of the presidency he doesn't care what happens to Republicans he doesn't care what happens to the office

after he leaves. I mean, this is just about him making his family and his family right, his personal enrichment greater and crushing his enemies. And, you know, being the center of attention and winning the political moment,

of the day. Like, he wants to win. He's somebody who gets high on that. And this to him feels like a win. I don't think it's a win for us, but it feels like a win for him. So that's where we are and it's what we've got. All right.

Well, with that, we've been sitting here for about an hour, and we've had a little bit of levity, but probably not enough. So, John, you can play the music and we'll get into our grievances for the show today. The airing of grievances. Between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal.

Well, before we get into the grievances section, just as a tone changer, I want everybody just to imagine a little two-inch alien, just joy sticking that gray, space dude. I think that's something that gives me a lot of joy, just to picture it. And I think it's a nice palette cleanser. Maybe if there's a cartoon image, you can think of men in black, style that what a great movie men in black was too. I'll die on that hill too. We need more men in black movies. Well, movies like it. You need a neuralizer, actually. For the DOJ trust fund, yeah, for sure. No, this isn't happening. Either of you have a particularly aggrieved feeling

you'd like to air with our audience? I do. Camille, you have something. I've got something. I can at least complain about it. I don't have any sort of remedy whatsoever. I've been talking about my glasses for the past several weeks. This morning, departing D.C., and for a period of maybe four or five hours afterwards, I was kind of blind. I'm certainly glad that I wasn't responsible for driving at that point, but my brain has somewhat adjusted to these bifocals that I have. And when I take off the glasses. My vision is terrible. But for a period, like, the glasses weren't really working either. And all I was seeing was just kind of stars all over the place. And the difficulty of our brains, like, adjusting to these new prescriptions, particularly this kind of progressive thing

that I've got going on for the near and far-sided stuff has been extremely disorienting. Like, it's very weird. It feels like there's something horrible happening, a kind of deterioration of whatever kind of ocular sensory gears in my head. It feels almost inexorable. So I'm a little bit distraught today. Even looking at you guys on the screen is slightly blurrier than it's been. And it sounds like, because I reached out to my optometrist, it might be that my

sleep deprivation, which is just kind of a function of my lifestyle, is having an impact on my ability to actually adjust to this new prescription. So apparently after I get eight hours of sleep, I'm supposed to let them know if my vision kind of comes back and self-corrects. But it's been a rough day. I don't, this whole glasses adventure feels wrong. And I, to the extent there's a conspiracy I believe in, it might be that once you start wearing the glasses, you're actually vision, your natural one, begins to meaningfully suffer. I don't think that's silly. It seems that way. No, no. It feels like it actually is suffering. I think it's true, too. I mean, my vision has definitely gotten worse without

glasses since I started wearing glasses. I think that's... I don't think that's an illusion. It's just been barely a month for me. It's been about three and a half weeks. And if I take these off now, like things are blurry. Everything is blurry in a way than it wasn't before. I do love the wasn't before. The sleep-deprived, induced blindness. That's pretty legit, man. That's when you know you've been burning the candle at both ends is when you lose your vision over how little sleep you've gotten.

It's the coast-to-coast travel. That is the problem and the time zone differences. It's just, yeah, but I'm going to sleep tonight. Remembering a theory that we maybe pioneered at Tangle, that like there's an action you can do as an employee or like a coworker at work, that is either exemplary of you being the best possible coworker or the worst possible coworker, and it's falling asleep during a crucial meeting

because that either shows you were gunning it out as much as possible or you were just completely checked out. And like, I think for you, you're probably gutting it out as much as possible. Just to be clear, Ari fell asleep during a team meeting, which I was flu ravaged. very little sleep and I was gutting it out like the hero. I like how Ari just told that story completely detaching his own person from it as if he

weren't the one who fell asleep. I think it's the principle that's more interesting. Okay. The guy you fell asleep would say that. All right. All right. What do you got, man? You meant to say hero who succumbed to sleep.

But the, yeah, I had a couple that I could go with today. Obviously, it's on top of my mind now that we don't make movies as good as men in black anymore. But the thing that I think I want to talk about is it's summer. Isaac mentioned this. Summer has finally come to the northern reaches of New England, and it's beautiful. We are sleeping with the window open and the breeze coming through.

We hear the owls at night as we fall asleep, but we hear the birds when they wake up in the morning. And that sounds nice. But morning to birds in these northern reaches is 4.45. And I know this because that's when I wake up now. we're going to have to close the windows, I think. I can play you all some audio of what it sounds like at 445, but it's exactly what you think it would sound like.

It's the middle of the fucking rainforest is what it sounds like. Robins and chickadees and Phoebe's and like every manner of bird that I don't even know are just waking up and saying, hey, how are you? And they're just like, oh, not bad, how are you? I'm pretty good, how are you? And just it's like that for an hour. And I really wish that we can.

The background of your microphone that I'm hearing right now? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, those nice, cute little Robbins. They've been at it for a while. I could tell you that much. Robbins like to get up and they like to yell about it. This is a great...

Shut up. A great grievance and I will add a layer to it, which is I, for probably 10 years now, on my iPhone, I've used the alarm setting that is birds chirping, which is like this specific ringtone. And it's like, it's a very organic. I think it literally might be like a recording of these little birds. And it starts kind of quiet and then it turns in this course.

It's very realistic. And for years, it was just the way I used my alarm. And now Phoebe and I's bedroom, the master bedroom in our new home in suburbia, is like tucked in between trees. And so I've had the exact same experience where in the last few months, birds are starting to chirp at like 5 a.m. and my brain thinks it's my phone alarm going off. And so I'm just like immediately adrenaline hit

and wake up super early and then I have to like wrestle the windows closed and try and go back to sleep, which is always impossible to do. So a perfect grievance, finally. Do you have, is it same for yours, just co-sign? This one, that wasn't my grievance, but I could adopt it for sure.

My grievance is also animal related though. So we are very synced up today. Mine is that I have deer in my yard, which I thought would be really cool. It's less cool. It's cool for a little bit. There was actually a great moment when we first moved in. The mailman came and he told he was like, hey, really nice guy, Jimmy. I've gotten to know.

And he was like, you know, I just want to let you know that your yard is like this throughway for deer. So just the heads up, like a bunch of deer, you know, they, they like, like a migratory path or something he said. Deer eye. And I really, I resist. I was so close. I wanted to be like, oh, awesome. Well, I'll be sure to lay out some traps and just, you know, no problem. But I was like, no, I'll be, I'm just, yes, thank you. And yeah, they're here, they're real. They sit in the backyard, whatever. And the reason I'm aggrieved, they, looking at them, they're beautiful. makes me feel like I live in the wild and I see them sort of walk and it's fine. They can eat whatever they want, whatever, but they're pooping everywhere in the yard. And I have a 15 month old son who

picks up anything that looks even remotely like food or pebbles or whatever and tries to play with it and eat it. So now it's like Omri, who is feral right now because it's summertime, just like naked, dirty, in the grass, whatever, living his best life. He'll just be like plodzing along in the yard and then I see him squat down and pick something up out of the grass and look at it. And I'm like, no! And yeah, so that's my new battle is the deer poop, which unlike dog poop is actually not easy to kind of excavate and remove. It is just like a mound of tiny little pebbles.

And yeah, so... Yeah. Yeah. Are there not more severe concerns associated with deer, like ticks and other awfulness? Yeah, I think like if you, you know... Ticks are already among us. Yeah, ticks are among us. I don't know.

I mean, the other thing is like, these deer do not care about humans, so I've gotten pretty close to them. And deer actually... Oh, it's trying to scare them off. Yeah. When they're like 10 or 15 feet away from you, they are terrifying.

Like, they are big, strong animals. Yeah. And like, they've got those scared, beady eyes where like they're just really crazy looking. Like, you don't know what they're actually going to do next. And they're always kind of twillings. switching. So, yeah, I don't know. I had this whole vision of the beautiful yard and the deer being awesome and it wasn't awesome. Similar to Ari, it sounds like you were like, oh, you might

think waking up to the sounds of birds would be beautiful and wonderful. And it's... Everything's trade-offs, you know, if you want to commute with nature, nature's going to commune back. Yeah, I would trade you, I would trade you our wild turkeys for your deer. Wow. I assure you it's much worse. Not only do they shit everywhere. They crawl all over the car. Huh. That's great. Yeah. Is that something that happens all the time?

All the time. Now, my second year here, we have a turkey day, which has happened like once a year. We'll see like 20 turkeys just like marching up the hill and then they go on their way. Whatever's in their path they go over. But like, it's just a day. But for you, it's an all-the-time thing. I can't believe this hasn't come up in your grievances. You have turkeys that destroy your cars and stomp all over your Tesla.

Well, the car is all right. destroyed. This has happened a while ago. It's scratched up. It's going to stay scratched. The car is in orbit. It's too late. To protect the other one. But yeah, it's just at this point, I'm resigned to my fate, but it's pretty bad. Wow. Wonderful. What a great animal-oriented grievances section. I never knew. Animals are awful. Yeah. Yeah. They're beautiful majestic creatures. They're proof of a greater spirit that surrounds us. and I wish they would shut the hell up.

The malevolent spirit. Yeah. All right, gentlemen. Well, thank you for sitting down and complaining with me and sharing space on this beautiful Wednesday evening. I'm going to let you guys go. Always good to be here. And we'll see you soon next week, I guess.

What if ticks are aliens? Oh, God. All right, bye. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wolpe. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Panuth, and Bailey Saul. 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 retangle.com.