Tangle - Suspension of the rules: Isaac, Ari and Kmele talk about the Minneapolis shooting, the world revolving around Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell testimony and more.

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk about the tragic Catholic school shooting in Minneapolis. Then we discuss how the world and press is revolving around Trump like it's 2017 again. They then talk about how the Ghislaine Maxwell testimony and how it didnt get nearly enough attention. Lastly, some chatter and grievances about clankers and ai robots destroying the world. Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can 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 Diet 75 and Jon Lall. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Coming up, we talk about the Catholic school shooting in Minneapolis. We discuss the world revolving around Trump again, like it's 2017, and whether I'm using kid gloves with him. Galane Maxwell's testimony, which didn't really get nearly enough attention, and then some chatter about clankers and the AI robots destroying the world. It's a good one. From executive producer Isaac Saul. This is Tangle.

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the suspension of the rules podcast. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, here with Tangle managing editor Ari Weitzman and our editor at large, Camille Foster. Camille, I wanted to give you a moment here at the top to articulate. You're extremely terrible. opinion that the Cracker Barrel logo was better after the rebrand. I'd like to hear you flesh that one out a little bit, so our listeners can understand how devoid of taste and American tradition you really are.

Yeah, and how out of step I am with the culture. Apparently, Democrats and Republicans, this is the one thing they can agree on. Yeah. New Cracker Barrel logo is bad. I think it begins here. One, I've only been to Cracker Barrel once, and I did not enjoy it, and I would not go back again.

Two, the single best indicator that I probably shouldn't have gone there was the original logo, which is now the current logo again. It is bad. It is objectively bad. It is offensive. It is aesthetically ridiculous. I don't understand the scrawling caricature. I didn't even know that was an old man in a chair. It was just weird.

It looked like scribble scrabber. It was bad. So the new logo, at least, was clean. It wasn't particularly good, but neither is the food. So that is my perspective. It's not so much that I love the new Cracker Barrel logo. It was just obviously, objectively, an improvement over the original logo. None of that gets me in trouble with any of the culture war craziness.

I'm just saying aesthetically, objectively, it was an improvement. Objectively, he says. This is such an opinion to come from a member of the bi-coastal elite, tech-conscious, new media, upper crust. give me my food on a silver platter, people like Camille Foster. Just say, I don't want to go into a food store that's essentially just the cafeteria attached to a gift shop. How dare you?

I go to the food truck. I'll stop at the cart in New York and buy the halel stuff there. I'm good. I am a man. Fitting what I'm painting you as more and more, I will say. I'm just saying that Cracker Barrel not very good and neither was the original current logo.

I have to say, I will defend Camille on this point that, like, drop me into TGIFs, drop me into, like, chilies, I'm going ham, olive garden. Like, there are some really good chain restaurants in America that are making me pretty happy. High calorie, super greasy, terrible for you, but good. Yeah, Cracker Barrel is not good. And Cracker Barrel kind of sucks. Cracker Barrel reminds me of. I imagine that's what prison food tastes like. I don't have any experience with it.

It just kind of looks like it. Like, what is that? Mystery meat and gravy. That's prison food. I think my biggest qualm here, I'm not going to be the person that comes out and says Cracker Barrels, Fine Cuisine, or even on the level of TGI Fridays.

But I will say, I think Olive Garden's even to cut above, I will go ham on Olive Garden for sure. I'll hold the line about that. Free, salty breadsticks as many as you can eat. Beautiful. That's America. If you guys text me and say, hey, we're going to Olive Garden. I'm coming.

If you text me and say, we're going to Cracker Barrel, I'll say, well, just hit me afterwards when you're going to the bar. Wait, now, here's a question. What do you think of the Olive Garden logo rebrand they did a couple years ago? Do you remember? I don't even remember, no. Is it a similar kind of modernist turn? Yeah, it is. Yeah.

I mean, that's a vibe. He probably loves it. It's a vibe. That's Camille's aesthetic. I think the... No personality. I spent two months in a rebrand war room with Camille, and I'm so unsurprised that he likes the new Cracker Barrel logo. The old one's so much better.

I won't go to bat on the logo stuff because the old logo is very obviously better for all the reasons that a lot of the people who are being hyperbott. about this we're talking about, which is like, it's iconic, it's the barrel, it has this Americana feel to it. It's like, it looks good on a nice brand new side of a building, the same way it looks good on like an old, broken, dusty sign swinging in the wind, you know, and that's the cracker barrel aesthetic. Oh, this Olive Garden rebrand sucks. Oh, my God.

Just bright up on screen. It's obvious. The new one is obviously better. Yeah. Yeah, actually, okay, you're right. I actually do. I was looking, there's four of them. So I do agree from 2014 to 2015.

That's good. I mean, honestly, look at that old Cracker Barrel logo and then Old Country Store underneath. It is doing way too many things. It is a logo with a subtitle and a massive icon that is almost the size of the entire logo itself. It's totally bizarre. are. I think it's swooping K. Go ahead.

This new era of the minified simple logo, I think, takes a lot of the soul out of the things that we appreciated before. But maybe at the same time, that's a better representation of what the organizations are. Like, Olive Garden and Cracker Barrels

aren't like the mom and pop stores in the backyard. They're multinational companies that have corporations and HR departments. And maybe, yeah, maybe it is better in that regard. But the Cracker Barrel

felt that way with the old logo. It did feel that way. Yeah. I guess this is growing up, hey, boys. Yeah, that's right. Are they fine dining establishments or real estate plays? That's the real question. Would you qualify this as a dumber or more sophisticated

controversy than the Sidney-Sweeney commercial? How would you rate these? Significantly dumber. I mean, Sydney-Sweeney is at least, you know, interesting to look at and she's been on films and there's a whole lot going on. Cracker Barrow, I don't want to go to Cracker Barrel. I'm not interested.

I don't care what happens to Cracker Barrel at all. I wish the employees the best. Quality of, or the thing that we're talking about here, potentially. Yeah. I think the Cracker Braille controversy is slightly dumber, but I think it's fairly clear. This is one of the stupidest controversies in a long time. So I'll stop the conversation now because our listeners are probably ready to turn us off. There is much more substantial, important, you know, horrifying, terrible, interesting news this week.

And we're going to try to get to a few of the big ones. Perhaps the most, I would say, I mean, to me, I think the story that should be sort of dominating the headlines and maybe isn't, is this Catholic school shooting in Minnesota. And I say it should be because, A, I don't want us to ever get used to events. like this, I have to concede, I read this news differently now having a child than I did before I had a kid, mostly in the sense that like I literally just can't stomach to read it the same way I used to be able to kind of grip my teeth and get through it. But the, you know, for those you who don't know, there's, I mean, it's a familiar story. Former student, uh, return to a school, 23-year-old. There seems to be some conversation question reporting about their gender identity,

but they entered the school and had three firearms on them. I believe a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol, started shooting. This was a church, killed two children, an 8 and a 10-year-old, and injured 14 more, and then killed themselves with a self-inflicted gun wound. the response is the same as ever, you know, finger pointing. Everybody gets in their corners. There's like the thoughts and prayers crowd. There's the gun reform now crowd. There's the people kind of ripping their hair out.

How can we not solve this problem? But there's been a kind of determined effort, I think, to pursue some politically convenient scapegoats to... Camille, I know that you had some thoughts about the kind of political convenience of some of the scapegoats that we're seeing in the news. I don't know if you want to sort of throw us into that conversation. I mean, I just, it feels like such a familiar and similar story. It's almost hard to find new ground to tread, but I think that's not a good enough reason to not talk about it. Because like I said, I don't want to, I don't want to just sort of accept this as the status quo that we just move on from, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I resonate deeply with so much of what you said there, especially toward the beginning where you mentioned, you know, you're a fairly new dad. And it hits differently now. And I can say that I had a very similar experience, kind of navigating stories about tragedy involving children. And here you've got, you know, two children dead. I think it was 11 other people wounded, if not, if not more. And one can imagine just the profound impact on a community. like this. It was far-reaching. The name of your community becomes infamous. We'd been looking at real estate in different parts of the country in recent years, and you come across a place and you know that name, and you're trying to remember what you know it from. And it's, oh, that's why. Maybe I won't live there. Ten years removed from the horrible calamity that took place. So, yeah, we should keep in the forefront of our mind the fact that something awful has happened to these families, something that none of us would ever want to happen to us. And it is rather difficult to watch as a kind of political commentator, as a journalist,

and survey the news cycle and see immediately after these shootings are reported, there is this scrum to figure out who it is to attribute blame to the right kind of person and then to build as much of a narrative as possible about how we have to talk about it in this way and we have to be prepared to condemn this sort of person. The thing that really stands out to me with this particular shooting isn't so much, whether or not the person is trans or not, it's actually the fact that this is yet another example of not just a school shooting, but more politically motivated violence, or at least politically tinged violence. And we have seen so much of this in this country over the course of the past, not just a couple of years, but certainly since Donald Trump was inaugurated, you can remember. all the way back to that congressional baseball field assault that took place when Republicans had taken the field. Certainly the assassination attempt on the president was a pretty dramatic

thing to have happen. But we've seen attacks on federal facilities this year. And we see yet another attack where, you know, this particular shooter obviously unwell, obviously. It goes without saying. But so many of the themes were directly related to various political confrontations that we're involved in. And I think that I don't have, there's no magic wand. Clearly there's a serious conversation that we ought to be having about mental health in this country that we're not having. But I do think that there is just something about that tendency to overlook the fact that there is a very clear and obvious trend line with respect to political violence that is deeply unhealthy. And I think it's kind of, it's calamitous for us. For us,

to ignore a trend like that and not take it very seriously while we're thinking about all these other things, whether it's firearms reform or whatever else is important to you. This fact of the pronounced nature of political violence, it's the lived reality of it in our everyday experience is something that we just really need to bring to the forefront of our minds. I don't know if it's, I hear that. And I think I'm not going to push back against the idea that there's a trend up into the right of political violence. But when we put this into a context of years and years of school shootings that's happening at the beginning of the school year and the other false,

like false alarm or prank calls about shooting tips that happened that week, it fits a broader trend of school violence and school shootings. And I don't want to now engage in the same thing that we're just talking about at the top of like spinning this to fit your preferred narrative. I think we're here just trying to understand what's kind of the root problem here. And it seems like there's this very basic thing that now we have this psychological contagion that if you are going through something that's this burdensome and suffering through some sort of battle with a mental demon that one of the options to you is to go to a place where there are vulnerable people with a weapon.

That can be a school. It could be a church, it can be a synagogue, and often it is a school. But that seems like a really basic thing. That, to me, is like the heart of the trend, less, like, political violence is just like another way that that pops up. That, like, that's kind of the way I'm thinking about it. I wonder if they aren't mutually exclusive, and it's just there are two, there are, in fact, two trends here.

And I think you're correct to highlight the unique challenge with vulnerable places. like schools, like houses of worship. And at the same time, there's also this kind of trend with respect to political violence that this particular attack might not actually be contemplated in the context of. And I suspect that's what I was trying to highlight. The political back and forth about who to blame is, I think, different than attaching it, attaching it to the broader, bipartisan, whether you think the problem is predominant, whether you think the problem is predominantly one on the left or the right issue with respect to the

growing proclivity, I think, towards political violence that we've seen. But I take your point fully. I'm interested. I mean, it's funny hearing you guys go back and forth a little bit because I do think that you're both right about the trend in political violence and the sort of trend in this let's resolve this demon I have by getting a gun and going to a place where vulnerable people are and doing something horrific.

I was kind of more struck by or stuck on this idea of like at the intersection of those two things political violence and kind of like extreme resolutions for political frustrations.

How much of that is tied to the way the media has evolved and changed and the way the rhetoric's sort of evolving and changing. I've always been somebody who's like, you know, I've always taken the position that politicians and commentators and pundits are not responsible for like the violent actions of the people who consume their content. And I think that is like a obvious and just position to take

in my... my view. But there is something, I think, really real. And I just read, I read this fantastic piece by this comedian, Matt Ruby, who I am not familiar with, and I have no idea how popular he is, but somehow a substack post he wrote about this popped up in my feed that was sort of comparing the state of media today to pornography, which I thought was really interesting. and, like, you know, his, the way he talked about it was, like, the real trick to winning the attention economy is just going to the extreme, and porn did it first, and now the news is just, like, completely jumped head first into this.

He had some really evocative and kind of funny lines, but, you know, like, he talked about, like, in referring to, like, these. Jubilee, you know, Medi, you know, somebody's Medi asan surrounded by 20 people, he's like, our debates mirror the lineup and take your turn, gangbangs. Like, we want the deep state

and we want it to, yeah, I mean, it's really, it's like a, it's a really, again, it's a really evocative piece, but, you know, like he has these lines in it that just really stuff, like he said, like he said, the same middle is missionary with eye contact, so we keep getting weirder. Like, objective reporting doesn't turn

us on anymore. We want to hear how McCrone's wife was born a man. Who wants Sam Harris's meditative nuance when you can scroll Waffle House Parking Lot Fight videos? And the line that he had and that really kind of just

like hit me was you can ask any junkie how this works. You build a tolerance and it takes more to get the same high so escalation is the only solution. And I think there's something real in the fact that like maybe 10 or 15 years ago dismissing concerns about, or not dismissing, but responding to

accusations that a particular pundit or politician was responsible with rhetoric for the actions of other people was a really appropriate response. But that today, the rhetoric is so extreme and we're like going so much further that I don't know if that's a totally sufficient response anymore and I'm kind of reassessing my priors on that. So yeah, I hold both the things you guys are saying and I went straight to just like how much of this is that we live in a like the most desperate political punditry world where it's like everybody's destroying the country and they want to kill your kids and eat your children and it's all, you know, as extreme and horrifying as it can get. And people have guns or mental health issues or whatever are

just predictably responding to that. Can I pause real quick and just ask how certain are we that this was a politically motivated attack? Because I'm not sure that I've read anything that states the shooter's motives here. Well, the shooter's motives are somewhat schizophrenic, it seems. The messages that were scrawled all over the gun and the stuff that appeared in the videos that were published has explicit political. connotations to it. In fact, just explicit political themes. Kill Trump. There's a bunch of stuff

related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So it's there. In that respect, it's kind of tinged with politics. And honestly, your breakdown there, Isaac, is very consistent with what I was trying to get at anyways. I think to the extent it's kind of politically tinged, it is mirroring the kind of language that we see in a lot of not just the debates that are happening, but also in the punditry. And it is that kind of lowest common denominator, like extremist rhetoric, certainly some of the responses that I've seen to the shooting amongst certain kind of fringe communities are, well, what did you think was going to happen? You know, you're threatening trans communities. You want to genocide them. Like all of the, all of it seems exceptionally

overheated. And all of it is maximalist in the most extreme ways. And I'm not saying that it directly causes it. I am saying that just culturally, it does feel as though there's this sense of this kind of exotic perversion and thrill-seeking in our kind of relationship with the media and that kind of deep, intimate connection and nuance that you might expect from something a bit more substantive and meaningful isn't really there. And there I am trying to weave the kind of intimate themes that Ruby had in his piece into my response there. And I don't know if I'm doing that particularly well, because this is complicated. But there you are. Well, hold. Because I actually don't think that we, like, I think we're still jumping from the assumption that it's politically

motivated just because the person had all these political messages, like, surrounding what they were doing. They had statements that they put online and we saw reports about what was scrawled under the gun. But to me, that can just as easily be evidence of a person who was bringing their same sort of discontent and schizophrenic mindset, which is another assumption to everything that they were involved in.

And it could be animus towards an institution that they knew and inspired by something completely out of left, where this person seems to have been living in conflict that they're in boarded in the whole time. I'm cognizant of the fact that when we're talking about this world of extreme polarization and political bias and bias confirmation and how we run to corners and point fingers, that we're a place where what we do is we point out that happening. So our bias is to come into these news events already thinking about that.

And I don't want to jump to conclusions thinking that the thing that we see, spend most of our time focusing on is the thing that matters the most in this case. It may not be true. It's not to say that political bias and polarization isn't a big issue. Still believe it is, but just when it comes to what's motivating individual actions, I'm not ready to, like, change the way I think about political violence in general because of something where I'm not sure if that was even the main cause of this one instance. It doesn't have to be the main cause to be important and relevant?

and part of a kind of general trend? Well, no, but if we're talking about this is making me rethink some things already thought about political statements and violence, then I'm saying that that's maybe something that we can't do when we're not sure if that's at play primarily here. I mean, I guess, I certainly think that it's our job to not jump to conclusions and from like a journalistic perspective about the person's motives, especially because we haven't heard that from officials yet.

You know, the FBI or local police or whoever are investigating this person. Seems just as plausible to me that maybe there was some like teacher or student there that they had beef with or, you know, who knows? Sometimes these stories end up being like a kid returning because a teacher abused him when he was young and he wanted to go kill the teachers. You know, it could be anything. But it seems pretty likely to me that this person was motivated by some, like the desire to make some sort of political statement or manifesto famous.

A, because there was so much political imagery and content in their sort of public-facing persona that they were putting up on YouTube and social media because of the way the gun was decorated in all this stuff. that I would be, I guess, like, you know, pretty confident that we're going to end up hearing that there was some sort of writings or something that they wanted to make fan. I mean, that's typically the motivation here. I guess, like, even if we're, even if we're going to say, put that on pause and say, we don't really know, a potentially more pertinent question than I have or a potentially... I guess, more pertinent way to get to the point that I was trying to make earlier is, like, let's assume, for sake of argument, maybe one in a thousand people in our country are both unstable and armed in a way where, like, they'll be set off by really heated, intense political rhetoric. And then we're looking around at the sort of, you know, the body politic as a whole.

our political environment and we're observing that like over the last 10 or 15 years the rhetoric has seemed to get more and more extreme, then it would stand the reason we're going to see more mass shootings and more of these events as that rhetoric gets more and more extreme because there's like a fixed amount of people who are going to be sent up the wall by that kind of rhetoric and by consuming a lot of it. And when there's more of it and it's more accessible, more people are going to be driven to do stuff like this. And I think, like, years ago, I would have rejected that premise a little bit because I want there to be responsibility for the shooter and the police response and the gun laws

and all that stuff. And I don't know. Like, at what point do we start saying, actually, no, the people who are producing this kind of content bear some responsibility here and, like, their rhetoric actually matters. And I think that, yeah, I just. feel my position moving a little bit on that, I think. Okay. I'm curious how that argument lands.

I see that. I think one of the pieces of structure we used before in responding to instances like this has been this concept of a blame pyramid where we talk about who's at the top of the blame pyramid and they get the most blame and then proportionally as we go down. and the shooter at the top, the community around the shooter just below it, the people who are responsible for security that maybe could have known had some leads. We don't know if that's the case in this instance, but sometimes we hear that in stories and just below that.

And then underneath that is like a broader political context that feeds into it. And I think maybe what you're saying, Isaac, is as we construct these blame pyramids and we see like there's different tops, that base remains the same. So that keeps coming up. We can build a bunch of different blame pyramids that have different people who are most to blame at the top, but they're all built on the same foundation. And it was certainly the case in Pittsburgh at the synagogue shooting there, that the person who ran into the shoot to do the shooting was inflamed by political life or death statements on Gab. It's certainly been the case in, well, I, you know, I'm struggling to think of other examples now. I'm now thinking just about the Pittsburgh shooting.

But when we know that, well, Butler, now it's all Western PA, but the shooting against Trump inflamed by some really high life or death, existential rhetoric makes people, when you believe that, feel like the actions they have to take are also life and death. So I see that. I think that that's the line that makes sense to me. That's the argument that you're making. I wouldn't want us to park here too long.

and I know we want to get to some other things, but perhaps at some later date when we return to this, it just occurs to me that a lot of times we have these conversations and perhaps when things are calmer and it's not in the midst of tragedy, the approach that we can take is,

well, sure, there are some really politically challenging conversations to have, like around the Second Amendment and people who just are not going to budge whatsoever and people who think that we need to seriously curtail gun rights. I get it. That's going to be challenging. But it does feel like there ought to be someplace for us to make some progress on issues related to mental health. And it does seem that within a household, there are so many opportunities to perhaps intercede in the life of a young person in a lot of these circumstances, especially where

schools are involved, who you can see is in distress. There are usually some signs. There are even in some of these circumstances, incidents where law enforcement had been involved early on or some counselor or some other professional had been involved early on. And there were warning signs. And there were warning signs that were not acted on in a meaningful way that almost certainly or perhaps even just probably could have prevented the tragedy from happening.

And it feels as though we're perhaps missing opportunities to just figure out what some of those. tweaks might be that could meaningfully kind of alter the trajectory of the country with respect to these kinds of occurrences and save lives, not just the lives of the victims, but the lives of the lives of the shooters who are also victims here. To the extent you're suffering from severe mental illness and there isn't ever the kind of intervention necessary to prevent you from doing something really, really harmful to yourself and others. There's a sense in which we've kind of failed corporately. And if we're so consumed by our contempt, and that's certainly

not the case here, that we're mostly kind of doing finger-pointing and not really doing the kind of sober assessment we would need to do to figure out what the practical, politically feasible things are that we could do with respect to addressing mental health in a more sober and substantive way, then it just feels like we're really missing the mark here. And I do think that there is a kind profound political and cultural and journalistic failure in that regard. There's something amiss with us primarily talking about these things once they've happened in the wake of the tragedy and then kind of moving on until it happens again. And perhaps I'm charging myself and you guys with doing a little better in that regard because it feels like we can. I mean, I do I do feel

like they're really tangible, even at this point, solutions. I mean, we're going to be publishing, well, republishing a piece tomorrow that I wrote after the Evaldi shooting in Texas. So it'll come out on Friday by the time people listen to this. It should be up on the Tangle website. And, you know, a good deal of the piece talks about gun control and, you know, various ways we can address and kind of, I think, meaningfully tinker with gun laws that would induce a reduction. in the sorts of crimes like this that we see. But we also talk about sort of, you know, the multifaceted nature of this.

I mean, it is genuinely a holistic crime. Like, you can't, it's not just about somebody having a gun and it's not just about somebody who is in mental distress. It's not just about like a family unit broken enough that nobody is paying attention to this person or seeking help for them. It's not just about the, you know, immediate police response and the way schools should be prepared for this stuff or whatever. And it's not just about the rhetoric that I, you know, was talking about.

It's like it is the confluence of all those things that have to go wrong, which also means, like, breaking the link at any one of those junctures could help prevent this stuff, you know? Like, so it's interesting to me, I guess, because it's both like a, in order for something like this to happen, we have to be so profoundly broken as a country. And also because something like this happening requires so many different things being so profoundly broken at the same time, it gives me a little bit of optimism that like fixing one of them could meaningfully make a difference that would like compound over time. we're just like apparently fucking incapable of doing that which sucks so yeah I don't know I mean it's

yeah there's a lot there and I'm sure we'll have to revisit it at some point soon I'm you know I I think it's I think I agree that we should be more preemptive about these conversations obviously

from a solution oriented perspective at the same time I totally disagree with, like, the notion, and I don't know if this is what you're putting forward, Camille, but I hear a lot of people put it forward that, like, we shouldn't talk about this right now because we don't want to politicize the tragedy. No, I don't think so at all. Yeah. It's like, this is a very good time to talk about it because, like, we should feel motivated and driven by the things that we're reading and, like, how horrific all this is. Yeah. All right.

Well, I want to get to some maybe more narrow political news. You know, it's funny because I almost feel like I got what I wished for, and it was horrific because I was begging last week for just like a non-Trump story for us to chew on and dominate. And then it's like, oh, a mass shooting that has nothing to do with Trump. like, great, this is, what a relief. And I was feeling that way because of kind of the thing I want to talk about next, which is just, we are just like, it feels like 2017 again to me all of a sudden. I think there are some reasons for it. But, you know, the world is just revolving around Donald Trump.

And we had a week this week where I think all four of the newsletters, and podcasts that we published this week circled a direct Trump action which hadn't happened in a long time but all the sudden it's just like he raided the home of John Bolton so he had that his $500 million fraud penalty got thrown out

he went after Lisa Cook at the Fed and then he signed this executive order to try and make flag burning illegal and they all felt like stories that we needed to cover but it was just like we are back in Trump's world and I think there are some reasons for it

one of them is like there's no elections right now another is the Supreme Court's on recess another is that Congress is on recess you know it's it's August so it's like this is this happens frequently I think but

it is sort of jarring to just like get to the end of a week and realize we've been totally sucked back into the vortex and it's just Trump Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump again. We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS summer pre-roll sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expect it.

Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll.

Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at OCS.ca and participating retailers. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most, when your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecues lit, but there's nothing to grill, when the in-laws decide that actually they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.

So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. I want to talk a little bit about some of the reactions that people have had to some of our writing and my writing in particular. But I'm curious, like, I guess how you guys are feeling, I mean, A, whether the sort of Trump-heavy coverage is justified

if maybe we're airing in some specific or particular way that we should course correct for, or if, like, this is just what happens when we have a president who actually does a whole bunch of stuff and floods the zone. And, like, we can't really, you know, as frustrating as it might be to just have the redundancy, we can't really afford to look away. And I feel torn about it some days.

The idea of the not looking away is maybe the least convincing one to me just because the easy counterpoint, you can do the point from the left and right. So on the left, in favor of covering Trump, it's the don't look away. We have to cover everything he does. And the counterpoint is, you're falling for the shiny object.

He wants you to be talking about this to distract you from other stuff that's happening. Then the point to cover it on the right is this is the most active president we've had in a while. Compare that to what happened under Biden. He's doing stuff. He's advancing the agenda. You're only reporting on the bad stuff. You should be covering more. You should be talking about the stuff he's doing that's working.

You should be following up on, like, this D.C. where the mayor is now endorsing some of his actions. and a counterpoint to that is it's Trump derangement syndrome, you're falling for everything that the left's telling you to do, you're trying to get sucked in, or you don't know it, but you're getting sucked into this negativity vortex about stuff that he's doing when some of it's working. And like they all sort of come together and cancel out to me. And maybe that's not fair. Like if you, I'm sure it doesn't sound fair if you're one of the people saying any one of those things. But the basic point is that this is a president who is very active and it's a time when the rest of the government is not as active. And the things that he's doing, if he advances them, are very high leverage things. So changing out a board of governors, one of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, extremely impactful. We have to talk about it.

Rating a former national security advisor. Yeah, like these are things that we'd be talking about if any president was doing them. So it's different because you know of the trend line. And I think we now are understanding what the trend is with how active. Trump is being, but it's not like, we also just came back from a week long break ourselves. So we're going to take the things that are most active and focus on them. And the point to me is to keep trying to think what is the actual stakes at hand of what's happening, less so who is the person that's doing it.

Just because that's going to, over time, Congress is going to get back. The Supreme Court's going to get back. There are going to be other things that happen in the news that we're going to have to cover. And right now, this is what's happening, but we're covering it because that's where the most high leverage effects are. And that's kind of the end of it to me. Yeah. I mean, since, since, what, November of last year, once we actually had the results of the election, Democrats have been something of a non-factor. They're largely responding to the administration to the extent that they're particularly vocal at all. I think you're right. Certainly right now, it's pretty quiet.

in D.C. and the only game in town is the Trump show. But even when Congress is in session, the Republican-controlled Congress is largely deferential to the president. Things become interesting on the few occasions where there's some actual static there. And it doesn't even matter if the Democrats are in opposition. What matters is if there's one or two very vocal Republican senators are congresspersons who are breaking ranks with the president. And beyond that, we just have an exceptionally activist administration who is not only breaking with convention in terms of the norms around things like the Federal Reserve, they're breaking with conventions with respect to the norms of conservatism more broadly. They are actively redefining conservatism.

I heard J.D. Vance referred to himself and perhaps not for the first time, but certainly for one of the first times in a public context as a post-liberal conservative. This is very interesting stuff. And it is necessarily consequential. It has the potential to reshape the nature of the country. And I think the important question to ask is, you know, should, yes, for sure, should we be covering this? Are we getting the right mix of things? As Ari just pointed out, to the extent it's consequential, it's worth covering. Then the question becomes, how do you cover it? There are still, I think, as you mentioned, Isaac, like it does feel like kind of 2016 again. Like, it that hyperbolic rhetoric is still there. A lot of the same kind of intense intensifiers are being

deployed. And, you know, fascism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, these are words that have become fairly commonplace in our political lexicon. And the question of whether or not they're appropriate or when they're appropriate or what the thresholds are is one that we ought to be entertaining as well. And it's also the case that this administration does seem to employ. almost as a tactic, whether it's on the campaign trail or while they're in office, doing things that are provocative in a way that is going to elicit those kind of extreme responses and then pointing to the extreme response as ridiculous. But they also deploy the same thing in reverse.

To the extent you disagree with the troop deployments in Washington, D.C., why are you siding with criminals and murderers and rapists? It's just, it's utterly insane. But, I mean, again, I think it's appropriate to talk. about this particular administration for all of the aforementioned reasons. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the brilliances of Trump, you know. I mean, I don't really know how else to describe it. There's a little bit of evil genius, but it's just he understands how to keep the attention

on him and how to keep the media circling him. And I think because I know that he understands that, my ego makes me want to resist. it and find some way to like crack the code and do something differently and the reality is just like he's doing it's not like he he's doing real stuff real tangible things that we have to respond to and cover um but yeah it just struck me this week that we just had this sort of back to back to back to back like all trump centered very specifically tied to actions trump took almost in an individual fashion, which I would have to go back and look, but I would be surprised if that happened a single time

during the Biden administration that we had for consecutive stories that were just like really tied to his person and to decisions and things that he was doing. And I think our readers and listeners in some ways are, you know, it's sort of a mix. I think some are a little exhausted by it and are tuning out a little bit. I think some are like totally on tilt and just like, you know, feel like they're watching the floor come out on the whole country and that like we're on the precipice of this experiment failing, the experiment being America.

And then there are others who are just, you know, giddy because Trump is just injecting the red meat directly into their veins and they're getting everything they want. I've certainly noticed, like, an increase in the accusation that we are sort of softballing the Trump administration and, like, you know, the kid glove thing that came up this week that I was replying to in one of the comments sections of our articles, which, of course, I find deeply frustrating and, you know, mostly because it's like I will write a piece that's really critical of Trump. and piss off all these diehard Trump supporters who unsubscribe and cancel and write in and tell me you know how full of shit I was about being biased or moderate or whatever and then in the same vein, same article I'll hear from all these liberal readers telling me that I'm using kid gloves on Trump and I refuse to go far enough

and you know I have no balls and da da da da da and it's like you know I don't want to spend spend too much I miss, but I do, I did want to say one thing, which was like, I don't, I don't do this work in order to persuade people and bring them to my position. I think it's great if my writing does that. And I like, I love instances where I hear from somebody and they say, hey, you made me think of this in a new way and like, I changed my mind. And I like that not because I think I'm starting some political revolution, because I'm like,

oh, I did good work. Like I wrote something that was compelling today and that feels rewarding. It's so frustrating to get the kind of criticism from people where I'm like, I am writing in a way where I'm trying to get through to the people who I think are going to be most resistant to the point I'm making, whether that's Trump supporters or Trump haters. And then the response is from people upset that I'm not being hard enough on Trump. and then I watch them try and use their means of persuasion, like in the Tangle community, in our comments section elsewhere or whatever, and they're just like telling people to fuck off

and calling them like rubs and house... And I'm like, you are not moving anyone's... You're not changing anybody's mind. We actually seem to maybe agree on some of the rough outlines of this particular issue, and I'm approaching this in a way where I think I actually do break through and get across to people.

and you'll never do that because of how you act and then on the other side of it you're just criticizing me who's like somebody who could potentially be on your team and now I hate you too so good job

and it's just like I think that's the part of it that's really frustrating and I felt this by the way I felt this during the Biden administration I mean the other the extra frustrating part was I felt this during the Biden administration

where it was like I spent so much time defending myself from liberals who were just accusing me of being some closet Trumper because I thought that Biden should very obviously step down because he clearly wasn't right. And, you know, I think I've been vindicated on a lot of that now. But, like, at the time, it was just so infuriating because it required so much throat clearing. Covering the election, you know, Trump's on the campaign trail, proposes something I think is a good idea. I have to throat clear for two paragraphs so, like,

people don't freak out. And then those same people are, you know, upset now because I'm trying to address Trump supporters in a way that they can hear me. It's the struggle of the work. And it feels like it's only getting nastier and uglier right now in our community specifically, which I worry about because it's a pretty special place. And, you know, I don't want Trump to drive everybody off over the edge. So there's something that I'm, I'm, going to try to maybe take a Camille-esque turn and attempt to coin a phrase here in response to what I think's happening, which is, I think I would call it referee syndrome, which is the idea that what your job is, Isaac, is not to state your opinions and talk as if you were speaking

to a person who disagrees with you, but to call penalties and put people in time out. And that feels the meaning but like as if you have power that is going to when you say this person violation four out of five this is a serious thing and then people are going to stand up and applaud and because of that the Supreme Court or whoever now has to like take two minutes in the penalty box and it's this idea that there is cultural power and that's real but that the cultural power is the end game and that's I think not the point the point is that you want to try to, and as much as we try to leverage cultural power at all, it is towards the end of being able to converse with people who disagree with us,

and not towards the end of being right or wrong on any individual point. So I think that's what's at play here, is this idea that, hey, you look like you agree with me on this issue. You didn't penalize the people who are wrong enough, where that's a fundamental misread of what we're trying to do with the editorials in a daily basis. Hmm. All right. I mean, I'm just going to have to ask you force for now to stay in your lane.

Okay? The coinage, that's my thing. I've got an autonomous car and it does not recognize lanes. That's good. That's pretty good. I was literally, the two things I was thinking were tone policing and motive attribution. And that is kind of what referees do. So that fits very, very well.

And it's precisely what's going. on here. And I think once that inclination to kind of police, not actually the conclusions, but the degree to which you're sufficiently vociferous in your condemnations, I think you've made an error. Like the question is, is what's laid out in this essay factually accurate? Is the context there to help one arrive at their own conclusions? I'm not interested in telling you how to think. I might be very interested in sharing with you how I think. in which case we can have a conversation about perhaps the ways in which our reasoning is somewhat different. But once it becomes, well, you're only doing this because you feel obliged to do that

in this particular way or to say it in that way or maybe soften the blow because. I think you get into some really dubious territory and it's mind reading. And I just don't, I'm far less interested in mind reading than I am actually understanding the terrain of really complicated political arguments and really complicated issues that perhaps I'm trying to wrap my head around. It may be the fact that I've got some inclinations and some particular conclusions and even some unique skepticism about particular political actors. But on a given issue, like crime nationally or crime in major American cities, I might be trying to figure out exactly. Well, what does it take to really drive down crime rates and keep them down for a long period?

of time. And is it okay to talk about that while there is this other conversation about National Guard deployments in American cities? And I actually think it is okay to talk about that in that context. I think it's necessary and important. But I will say that hyperbole has its own problems. And to the extent that you're engaged in that kind of tone policing and mode of attribution, it might be the case that you are engaged in a great deal of hyperbole. And the capacity to acknowledge that you might be wrong to have an abundance of intellectual humility is just something that we should all keep at the forefront of our mind. And I think it's a core component of the work that's done here at Tangle. And I think it's the most essential component of good

journalistic work. If you have intellectual humility, that makes up for a great deal. Yeah, I appreciate those sentiments a lot. I mean, and I'll add to, I guess, to just in the interests of intellectual humility to counter some of my own perspectives. I can understand watching the way other media organizations treat the Trump issue and just coming to us and having some sort of inherent bias and scarring and like traumatization from that. Whether you're a Trump supporter and you're like, sure, I'm never going to trust anybody who describes himself as a journalist ever again or you're, uh, you know, a Trump hater and you have to suffer through like these sort of milk a toast

corporately approved TV segments and, you know, opinion pieces and whatever that are all so clean and, you know, tidied up and bulletproof against some lawsuit that they come out being just extremely vanilla and boring and not nearly forceful enough, that then, you know, you read something like Tangle and maybe there's frustration there if I'm being critical because you view me as like another unfair journalist or if I'm not being critical enough because you're pissed that nobody's saying the thing you want them to say.

I can get that. But yeah, it's just like, you know, we've lost the art of persuasion in this country, it feels to me. And I so rarely see people actually really trying to move somebody to their position in a way that's genuine versus performative. for the people that already agree with them. And I feel like I really do genuinely try to think about the people who are reading my work

who aren't going to agree with me and talk to them. Because as much as I don't have it as a primary goal to change people's minds and move them to me, I think the writing is just incredibly boring and unoriginal when you're just writing for the people that already think what you think. And it's a sort of waste of time in a lot of respects, aside from maybe strengthening their argument. We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS summer pre-roll sale.

Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at OCS.C.a and participating retailers. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most when your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard when the barbecues lit but there's nothing

to grill when the in-laws decide that actually they will stay for dinner instacart has all your groceries covered this summer so download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes plus enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders service fees exclusions and terms apply instacart groceries that over deliver Well, look, I mean, staying in the Trump world and despite the fact that we, you know, we did this whole week that revolved directly around him and all of these stories that were tied to him, there was a story that we missed this week that we didn't cover. We didn't talk about in the podcast. We didn't talk about in the newsletter. That was actually pretty Trump-oriented. And it was the Galane Maxwell testimony. And I mean, Camille, you said this off air before we hopped on the podcast. you were just like surprised at how little traction some of this got because we were just so obsessed with the Epstein stuff. And then, you know, I mean, I guess the readers I was just talking about would suppose that

Trump has successfully distracted us from all of that and moved us on and that I'm falling for the bait by not covering the Epstein stuff every day. But it was surprising, I guess to me at least that this didn't generate more conversation and interest. And so I think we should spend a few minutes on it before we wrap up here. But the upshot of it is basically that Glein Maxwell, who, you know, I mean, is considered the person with the most direct knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking operation testified. I guess, I don't know exactly the word that we should use

here. I mean, she spoke to the Department of Justice. She offered her testimony to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. And she said, among other things, that there was no client list, no blackmail scheme, no high profile Jeffrey Epstein Associates who committed illicit acts in connection with his crimes. She said that as far as Donald Trump goes, she had always observed him being a gentleman in all respects, quote on quote, and was cordial. and she described Bill Clinton as truly extraordinary as a man and a fantastic ex-president.

So not saying everything the president wants to hear, but yeah. Not saying everything the president wanted to hear. She did concede that she had been misidentified. Sorry, she didn't concede. She claimed that she had been misidentified by a key witness in her criminal trial. And she insisted that she was not actually ever involved in the sexual exploitation of saying that she introduced Epstein to women, but not underage women. And she did look for masseuses and went to spas.

But, you know, she was not, she was looking for people who had some sort of actual credentials to do the job, not people to be part of this sex trafficking operation. So she basically... That settles it, right? Yeah. So basically she denied everything. She quote unquote cleared Trump in the words. of many Trump supporters.

And I guess... Yeah, and Bill Clinton. And I guess we can just wash our hands of this entire thing. No, I have to say, the Politico is normally not the place that you'll find like super biting kind of like

punchy writing. You know, they do a lot of insider stuff, but... No, they're not flamethrowers. They're left of center and the language use and I think some of the topics they choose to cover. But generally speaking, they're just like insider little bit of like this, you know, they do a little bit of like a gossip, personal magazine tone sometimes, but on the whole, it's just sort of like wonky stuff and, you know, big scoops.

I got to read this excerpts. In their newsletter around the testimony, they said, as a practical matter, this would mean one of two things. The first possibility is that Maxwell was indeed innocent all along, that the first Trump Department of Justice falsely accused Maxwell when they charged her. that she was wrongfully convicted at a trial by a unanimous jury, and that most, if not all of the overwhelming evidence against Maxwell at the trial, was false or fabricated, and in addition,

that for some reason she did not testify in her own defense despite watching all of this false evidence come in. The second possibility is that she is a serial liar who committed terrible crimes and whose self-serving interview with Blanche should be dismissed out of hand, whether it helps or hurts Trump or anyone else. If you need a refresher on what the evidence at trial revealed about the type of person that Maxwell is, we suggest pages 5 to 14

of the DOJ's post-trial sentencing submission. We're going to go with Occam's razor on this one, which I thought was unusually... You want to buy any more of razors, or if that one is? No, I'll leave them to it. Unusually biting and

much appreciated by me, because it was my reaction pretty much to a T was like, how much of a rube do you have to be to think that this woman's telling the truth right now? I'm sorry, that's just like it seems totally absurd to me. But I'm happy to hear some countervailing points if they're out there or they exist.

Keep being silent. No, no, no. This is great. This is good. Intellectual humility, right? Could still be wrong. We, it's possible. People get falsely Jews and convicted of crimes

all the time. I guess that's one thing you could say. No, I mean, it seems like pretty obvious that she's playing the hits trying to get a Trump pardon, right? Like, goes, does this meeting, is sure to say all the things. I mean, you know, the old, like,

what was the character Trump used to, the name he used to go by when he would call in and write? Oh, gosh. Oh, God, I can't remember. I think he actually had a couple of those aliases that he was using. Yeah, like John Barron or something like that. It sounds like something that one of Trump's like alias human beings would write into the New York Post with like,

every time I've seen him, he's always been a cordial, perfect gentleman and I've never seen him do anything on Jordan. But I don't know if he would have said the same thing about Bill Clinton. I mean, that might be the single detail that makes me think, huh, maybe. It's just that it's also the case that she's confirming a lot of the things that have been out there in the reporting for a while, that there is no client list, that there is no black book. There was no blackmail operation. So a lot of the details of the multifaceted conspiracy theories that have been unfurled with respect to this particular case, she says it's not true. And I could believe that. The questions about Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and what she knows or doesn't know, I mean, her credibility is shot with respect to the Trump administration. She is desperate for, if not some sort of pardon, at least was desperate for better treatment,

which she seems to have received. And one could not expect her to provide some evidence in that context that is particularly biting and troubling, that implicates the president of the United States. States. So the fact that she doesn't give any is perhaps consistent with what you might expect in that context. But what's most interesting is just how intense the interest was in this story, not just from Democrats and people who dislike Donald Trump, but from MAGA supporters. And the Maxwell testimony doesn't seem to move the needle at all. I at least expected because some of the interests had died down that there might be another round of why won't someone

and tell us the truth. Like, what is he doing? This isn't what we expected. Instead, everyone just seems to have moved on in a way that I find somewhat surprising, but also, like, not entirely surprising. At some point, this had to end, and it seems that it's ended with Donald Trump and his administration being able to survive a circumstance where they were at stark odds with the bulk of their base.

and it perhaps hasn't left him any worse for where. Do you think that maybe it's just that everyone who's reading and would normally be responding to updates in the story is just having a similar reaction to us, where they're thinking, I throw all of this testimony out under duress, obvious motivations of play, and I'll just wait to comment to I see anything that's actually different. Do you think that's possible?

It could be that. It could also be Yeah, I mean it could be that It could very well be that. It could also be that they're just not really paying attention. I would expect them to actually say that they're not paying attention to this because she's not credible

and I didn't really see anything. It just kind of arrived with not even a thud. Yeah, I had a similar thought that maybe there was so little buzz around this because just on paper, Galane Maxwell gives her first testimony since being convicted directly to Trump's DOJ in the midst of all these threats of Trump releasing all these files and whatever, you would think like that story alone

would just generate an intense amount of interest. And the fact that it didn't made me think maybe people who care about this just do understand that this is just sort of theater and there's nothing here. Like, oh, Gleine Maxwell said she was innocent. of horrific crimes that are like shameful and could send her to prison for, you know, whatever the next couple decades or whatever her sentences. Like, I guess there isn't anything really surprising about that in a meaningful way. And so maybe that's why it was such a non-story. Yeah, I think that that's sort of the way that I'm reading most of it.

And yeah, I see your point to, Camille, that you would expect most people who feel that way who have been following the story to say that. but the fact that they haven't gone as far as to say that is a little surprising. All right, so we just wasted 20 minutes of everybody's life, but whatever. We'll... I don't know what to the clock. It was like 10. I think we're good. All right, well...

Let's make the 20. Let's go. We're a little past an hour here, so maybe that's a good cue to wrap it up. Some complaints about the grievances section, notwithstanding, which I'm not quite ready to address yet on the show. I think it's time to air some grievances, especially since we skipped last week. So, John, you can play the music for us, my friend. The airing of grievances.

Between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal. All right, Ari, get in there, man. Yeah, I got one. This is, we've taken some of the criticism that This feels low stakes. It feels first world problems-y. After all the things that we discuss, not big enough, we've said, like, no, this is something that it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek and allow us to sort of get in to be human and talk

about little stuff and add some comedy. To that end, I have something that is of extreme importance, and I think is not a mere first-world problem, but it's something that everyone can really relate to, which is I am now completely unable to find my favorite flavor of juice and grocery. stores. It's a huge problem. Dole would make this blended drink, which was called orange peach mango. And I would see it very often was the one that in the juices section, sort of next to the dairy where they keep all the processed juices, one of the more popular ones.

But now it is not there at all. And I'm looking for, they changed the way it looks. So they changed the box. I had to adapt to that, so I know what I'm looking for. And I just don't see it. Like, the local grocery stores aren't carrying orange peach mango anymore. And it was the perfect fruit juice. And I don't know where it is, and I don't know where to find it.

So if you live in the greater Burlington, northern Vermont area, let me know where the hookup is so I can go shop there. What are the odds somebody listening to this podcast works for the company dole? How many, like, if you had to guess, How many people, how many people work? I just found it. How many people work at Dole? What would you say?

Work for the company, Dole. Yeah, for Dole, PLC, the parent company of the global fresh produce business. I don't know. Does that include the people who are actually getting, gathering, distributing the fruits themselves? I think so, yeah. Global workforce. Jeez, like 50,000? Is that absurdly high?

be good get. No, 34,000. I would not have guessed that many. I say if there's 34,000 people who work, there's like, there's a chance. I don't know what the numbers actually come out to, but maybe a single percentage point chance that somebody listening to this podcast. Yeah, if that's you, write to Will W-I-L-L-R-Tangle.com with information on how to get the fruit juice that Ari is desiring. All right, Camille. Yeah, well, so this is a strange one, and I'm pretty certain that no one involved directly is a listener to this podcast because it involves the citizens, or at least the residents of North Sentinel Island, which is this island that I suppose is under the control of the Indian government. And it's one of these things where you've got a remote tribe that is not really been in contact with the rest of the wider world. And I find myself going down this rabbit hole and reading a bunch of stuff about the just kind of consensus perspective that we shouldn't be bothering with these people, that we should leave them alone.

And I don't know why. I don't understand why people are comfortable with that. I know that if I was born on North Sentinel Island, there's a strong possibility that I might have an aversion to you coming to visit and bringing us kind of news of the outside world. I hope you would disregard my feelings about it and kind of come anyways. Because if not for my own benefit, perhaps for the benefit of my progeny, I think there's some benefit to the kind of knowledge of the wider cosmos that that, that, you know, all of us benefit that all of us have today that would perhaps be beneficial to the citizens of that particular island or residents of that particular island since I'm not sure we can really call it a government. And I don't know. I'm just having aversion to the sentiment that because

they're on their own, because this is kind of a natural division between their world and ours, that it's one that must be upheld and respected perhaps indefinitely. So, imaginably for most of these people, it's for generations and generations, perfectly fine for them to live in this completely isolated. And I think in many respects, somewhat backwards way. And I'm not comfortable with that, personally. So that is my grievance. Yeah, this is an interesting thing that I'd want to pull this thread more,

like when I talk to you, I think maybe every time I talk to you in the future. But what is the reason for just, let's, like, Let's start there. What is the reason for us to want to go to North Sentinel Island? It doesn't seem like it's in a shipping route. It doesn't seem like there's anything that's like really close to a major city. It's like eastern, northeastern Indian Ocean. So what are we losing, I guess?

We're fucking men, are we. We discover and conquer. We did this. We did this. Why go to the moon? It's the same. What's your problem, dude? I want to bring them literature and knowledge of the outside world.

I suppose in that way I'm kind of proselytizing, and maybe it's my kind of Western supremacy that I'm looking to bring to bear. But it really isn't Western. In some ways, this is probably informed by my perhaps somewhat bastardized, like, Eastern influences as well. Like, I don't know. Like, just my inner world is better for having had exposure to Shakespeare, for having imagined, like, the strange. of the cosmos and to have some knowledge about, like, the moon landing. And I just think that there are kids who will grow up on North Sentinel Island who won't ever even have the opportunity to be exposed to any of that.

And I just feel like maybe we have something to offer them. There's a sense in which we have this kind of pessimistic take on modern society, like the Internet and TikTok are ruining everything, etc. They're ruining some things. Like, in some ways we're worse off. in a lot of ways we're so much better off. And I just think that some of that better off might be better for them too.

What if they don't want us to go there? Like my understanding is these people violently fight to keep us out, right? Again, which is why I offered that thought experiment. If it were me, if I were born there, I probably wouldn't want you to come either because of various things. But I hope that the rest of you,

and perhaps you two in particular, would be bright enough and moral enough to disregard my feelings about this matter and come anyways. I actually can't decide how I feel about. On the one hand, I feel like this is such a, there's like a, we should name this, it's like Neo-Camele politics or something.

I don't know what, it's like, it is like, yeah, you're articulating. Like this is a small, sliver of your worldview that I feel like is really representative of everything else. Like, you're the kind of guy who thinks the new Cracker Barrel logo is better than the old one.

And this feels, that feels tied to this somehow, but I can't quite tell you how. It is an imperialist project. I don't know if it's colonialist because I don't want to live there. You should know that Wikipedia is a thing.

You just want to, you want to show them show them your Tesla one time so they can just see it and be like, just this is what's out here. I mean, there is an interesting, I would say my gut emotional reaction is to totally be drawn to their position of like they've somehow managed to stay isolated from the rest of the world. Let's just leave them the fuck alone. Like, why can't we just do that?

They want that. We don't need them. They don't need us. Great. They can live in their little. Then I have the like, let's go to the moon attitude of we got to go find out what's going on there. Like, I'd love to learn, drop a film crew there and learn more about their lives. And then I have the view of, like, what you're arguing of, I don't care what they think, there's probably

kids there like dying of polio still or something. And we could just go fix that. And some who have wider dreams, who imagine things. Maybe they have a Galileo amongst them. I don't know. I'm just saying, I'm sympathetic to that a little bit. I think if that's the case, they'll probably like there'll be some movement internally in a reach out. Maybe not. Maybe they'll build a ship, build their own boat and just leave. Yeah, the Galileo amongst them will make a seafaring vessel. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's possible that the fact that we've attempted to contact them has made them more averse the Galileo among them to want to reach out.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about. It's always my beef with Star Trek, to be honest. It's the same sort of thing. Hang on, we shouldn't meddle. We have to leave them alone. That's their way of doing this. Nah, if we've got a better way, you should probably tell them about it.

Give them the choice, at least. It's all that same. Okay. I want to ask you in person. No, no, no, no, we're not going to. I'm not doing 20 minutes on Star Trek. I'm sorry. I'm not happening.

All right, I'm going to go. My grievance this week has a happy ending. I'll start there so you don't get too distraud. for how awful it is. I am going to Italy. I think I talked about this. Did I talk about this in the show? Maybe this came up.

I was on Mike Peskis podcast and we did some complaining and I talked about this. I'm flying to Italy for a wedding, which I'm extremely excited for. And, you know, flying British Airways, whatever. And I realized that I booked the flight out on the wrong day. And I have like a bassinet seat for my son. So I called British Airways to try and get a flight change because I booked it over the phone in order to get this bassinet seat for the baby. It's a red eye.

And I call them and I am talking to this customer service agent who's like a change your flight agent. And he tells me on the phone that he can change my flight to the following day, which is what I need. but he's not sure if that flight has a bassinet seat available for me. And I was like, okay, well, I can't, I need the, you know, I have to bring my son. So like I have to, you know, what do you suppose I do? And he said, well, you have this flight now. We could book it. And when we make the booking and we change the flight, you can, like, I will be able to find out whether there's a bassinet seat on the plane.

and then if there is, we can give it to you. I'm like, okay, but if there isn't, and then I change from this flight, the flight I have to the one year proposing, and there's no bassinet seat, that flight's not going to work for me either. So then I've just given up my seat on the flight that I have now that has the bassinet seat.

Like, that seems like a terrible solution. And then he's like, yeah, but well, if we get there and then I can check once we make the booking, I can only see about the bassinet seat once we make the booking. If it doesn't work, then we can talk about like some other options. I'm like, okay, like, how much is it to change the flight? Like, maybe I'll do this. You know, I'm sort of thinking out loud on the phone.

He's like, oh, well, the change fee for the flight is only like $18 per person, but there's a $220 tax on a $220 tax on each seat, each passenger. So to change the flight, it'll be $660 plus, you know, the like $80 in change fees. I'm like, okay. So now you're telling me that I'm paying a $220 tax for a seat for my son that you don't know is available on the other flight. Also, I have to pay you $700 to change the flight in order to get on a new plane that might not have a bass and that's seat that actually need. Now I'm starting to get frustrated. And so I am like, this is insane, whatever.

I'm, you know, I explained them like, you're telling me I have to pay basically $700. to get on a new flight that I may not even be able to take. Can you please tell me if there's another solution than the one you're offering? And he said, well, you could wait a day or two and just call back and see if any of, you know, availability is opened up on other flights. And I'm like, okay, fine. So I hang up. I'm like, I'm just going to call back.

I can't deal with this right now. And then I had this thought of like, I was calling at six o'clock U.S. time to British Airways. So it's like midnight in England. This guy had a British accent. So I asked ChatGBT, GBT, like, hey, I'm dealing with this British Airways issue, explain the issue. Do you have any suggestions for me because I can't seem to get what I need and, like, the service is terrible and whatever? And ChatGBTGT tells me that I should try calling during business hours in the UK rather than business hours in the U.S.

because I'll get full-time agents who are going to have more access and more capabilities. And that when I'm calling to change the flight, and this is the lesson for everybody, instead of calling and selecting two to change your flight, press one to go back to booking, even though you're doing a flight change. Go to the booking agents because they're the people with like the most power at an airline. And I was like, oh, sick, thank you, chat, GPT. and then I called back the next day during British business hours.

I went to booking instead of changed flight, explained the problem to this person, and she literally changed my flight in two minutes and rebooked me with the bassinet seat for $6.50. And I had my mind blown. And I don't know how much of it was like maybe the guy I talked to originally was right.

Some seat opened up in 24 hours. That seems very unlikely to me. But at the very least, she was able to book the flight and tell me before she booked it that there was a bassinet seat on it, which seemed obviously like something an agent should be able to do. So my grievance is the first person I spoke to at British Airways, and my Have a Nice Day story is the advice I got about how to navigate terrible flight agents that maybe will be useful at all the people listening to this.

So there you have it. How is that for a first world problem? Yeah, you'll be happy when those people lost their jobs to attract. I thought. Yeah. Take it easy. No, no, no. Hey, I'm part of the AI backlash, brother. Don't forget it. I'm anti-A-I. That's me. But I do use ChatGPT a little bit now. I'm starting to like them. Building a relationship. I feel like it's been getting, I run a lot of what we write every day is like the last line of defense through ChatGPT as a fact check. And I feel like it's starting to take a little bit of liberties with me. I'm not sure how I feel. about it. I'll say, make any fact check for this essay for me and we'll say, here's some things you could add to make this essay more convincing. And I'm like, not what I asked for. Thanks for that. Just, why don't you just Google these things for me? And it's also said things

where like what, like yesterday we talked about a story of like what the allegations that a governor, federal reserve governor had committed fraud. And chat GPT responded by telling me, I don't see this. Are you getting this from irreputable far right websites that this person was alleged the fraud? I'm like even the allegation itself you're saying can only come from the far right.

Chad ChiPT is maybe getting a little little blue-pilled by the liberal media right now, Camille. I don't know if I talk to your guys about it. Have you guys seen the new like slur people are using for Chachi the Clanker? That's great. It's like, yeah, it's the, This new TikTok and, like, Gen Z, they're called all the AI robots and stuff, Clankers.

And it's being described as like an anti-robot slur. Oh, no. Yeah. How long till Democrats propose a bill to ban the word clanker? I'm sure they'll spot a really popular winning issue on that one. All right. Robot rights now. Yeah, robot rights now.

Yeah. We should get out of here. All right, clankers. I'll see you guys soon. That felt targeted. Bye. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wohl.

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 Casperson, 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 reTangle.com. on. This episode is sponsored by the OCS summer pre-roll sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expect it. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and

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