Tangle - Suspension of the rules. - Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk about Trump's health, Venezuela, and Gaza.

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk about the implications of recent U.S. military actions in Venezuela, the controversial Gaza reconstitution plan, and the ongoing challenges in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conversation also touches on the personal side of life, with reflections on parenthood and the societal structures that support it. And, as always, the Airing of Grievances.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our 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.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. Fizz is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Coming up, Donald Trump dead, question mark.

Strikes on Venezuelan cartels, allegedly. The Gaza Lago leaks, which is really depressing, and then a really, really nice grievance section where we mostly talk about how virtuous we are. 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. our weekly meditation on the news, our own worldviews, and a place where we get to break the rules of pundit, seek out some common ground, and speak our minds without being insufferable about it. What do you think? I'm workshopping it. I could be, is it, it's kind of something.

It's nice. You want me to read it again? I'll do it again. No, I mean, if I tell you my authentic feelings, my authentic feelings, it reminds me of the fifth column intro. Like, in a weird way. A weekly, our weekly. Yeah, and it feels like.

Our weekly rhetorical. What do you guys say? Yeah. Well, I say our weekly rhetorical assault and the news cycle of people that make it occasionally ourselves. I'm Camille Foster, etc. That, I mean, it just kind of arrived. It became that thing over the course of weeks.

It was not at all perfected. And now it, almost 10 years later, is still the thing. Even while we're experimenting with a new format and have actually just shot. this week, the first two genuine, authentic fifth column on video for broader distribution. I suspect we actually need to rework that. And I'm inclined to retire that old thing. But, yeah, maybe that's why it reminds me a little bit of the thing. It makes me wonder, is that best for a suspension of the rules?

Does it need a time thing? I'm not done with Camille's criticism. I didn't come up with anything, you know, to, to put in its place. Have we started? Did we start? That's right. Is this real?

Are we on air? This is live. Yeah. Do you guys love our 90-second comparison of Camille's podcast between each other? I mean, we can cut that. We can cut that. No, no, no, leave it all in. I am experimenting with the introduction.

I surprised you guys by reading something I wrote. And I was just curious for your authentic response. Did you write? No robots? No AI involved. Yeah. No AI involved. Camille thinks it reminds him too much of himself, which I appreciate.

That's a nice... Because I'm a narcissist. Yes. Yeah. Captures Camille's ethos. Well, it is our weekly meditation on the news first, our weekly. I didn't. Maybe I just, you know, that's subliminal stuff happening in my brain.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Back to the drawing board. Nobody cares. Ari is completely unmoved. He's not even paying attention. It looks like he's reading his first.

phone or something. No, I don't have my phone with me. I asked ChatGPT to come up with a specifically badly written intro for a politics podcast to see what we'd say. I'm confident. News that happened this week or maybe last week if we missed it and we try to be fair, but sometimes we just read headlines out loud. I mean, that's not bad, actually.

That's pretty good. That is kind of good. It's a horseshoe theory of writing. If you get too bad, it becomes funny. Yeah, I like that, actually. Huh. I think we can work with that. Yeah.

Send that in the slack. This is a show for everyone who wants to know politics without yelling. So we just talk and explain things sort of. So, yeah, let's start now. Well, I love that we are kind of improvisationally figuring out, like, not just the intro, but in some respects, even the nature of this show, certainly ourselves and the world and the nature of being and the great mystery,

which I'm happy to opine on for the next two to three hours if possible. Strap in. Let's do it. But we could talk about other more boring temporal things of this world, if you prefer? I think we should start with the transcendence of life. Donald Trump has passed on to the next. I don't know if you guys heard.

He is dead. He didn't do, I guess he didn't do a White House press briefing with a full room of reporters for three days. And so a bunch of people on the internet just assumed he had which is a really responsible and level-headed thing to do is to see a bruise on the president's hand and then not see him do an interview with your media, preferred media of choice and then decide that maybe he's covering up a catastrophic health issue like a stroke. That was a big story this week that we didn't really talk about.

I mean, there are people, here's what I'll say. I tweeted about this. I don't want to name a bunch of names. I'll name one person who I saw, like, really pushing this, which was Adam Cochran. I don't really know who this guy is. I somehow started following him on Twitter, but his profile says he's an investor, professor, policy consultant, author, an independent investigative journalist and father, trying to make the world suck less, which I appreciate.

His tweets have just been blowing up. He's followed by a bunch of people I respect. He's filing a FOIA request with the Department of Defense to get Trump's medical records, which or like something about his pharmacy records, which I also respect, you know, do the journalism thing. But he's just been like, I mean, he was basically ramping up this press conference that Trump called at the White House. framing it as if there was going to be this major shift in like the future of the country and doing 28 tweet threads

that were making the case that Trump's having strokes. I forgot the like the schematic strokes. The is schematic, yeah. Yeah. Oh, there's an abbreviation for it, which is a pretty common thing in people of his age and that maybe he had one really catastrophic or like really serious stroke that they're now covering up.

And then it just turns out that Trump's just changing the state that the Space Force is in, which is like the least important news story of the week. I don't know. I mean, is this just like a reminder that everybody can take the conspiratorial bait? Something deeper here? I don't know.

I think there's evidence that Trump is having medical difficulties. I think we've seen some of those. Like the bruising on the hand that's not explains probably indication that he's getting IVs. That's not really proof of anything other than blood draws, right? It was explained. He shakes hands with a lot of people. That's what the press secretary said. Yeah, that sounds good, right? Yeah, we were okay with that. Isn't that more evidence that something's going on, right? Yeah, fair point. I mean, that was a ridiculous assertion to make. But also, like, it's one of those things where I could just see he got an IV. or something. And they're so unwilling to concede even that that they opt instead to

just come up with a bullshit lie. Yeah, but that invites questions. Like you're getting an IV for blood draws that routine. If it's a routine, cool. But if you're not saying anything, then people are going to invent their own like theories about what they're seeing. Like, ankles being swollen. Like sometimes he looks tired. He's the president. He'll look tired. But he is getting old. And he's going to be the oldest president we've ever had in not too many and not too long. And it's okay to ask questions. I mean, this is a lot of the same stuff I remember saying about Biden. So if we're not getting answers, people are going to start progressively saying more and more concerning things and coming up with more and more concerning theories. I think that's something

we saw in the last administration. And, you know, and absent getting information from the White House, that that's, you know, in some ways, that's natural, I think. Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of different things going on here. It's certainly totally appropriate to ask questions about the health the leader of the free world, to the extent such a thing still exists. And it is categorically different to speculate wildly about such things. For example, maybe the president is dead

and they're hiding it from us. Is that why J.B. Van said he's ready to serve? And also important to differentiate between actual media reportage that trends in the direction of that historical, hysterical speculation. And online kind of Twitter-a-Radi, which just feels better to say than Xerati, and the kind of legions of

sub-stack commentators, perhaps of which we are, one, although ghost and not substack, but that's a whole other situation. There are going to be people in that latter category that are talking about this, some of whom aren't particularly responsible and are just engaged in wild speculation. And that is interesting, and I think is indicative of the broader trend. towards conspiracyism on the left and the right. But interestingly, like, this whole thing can be dated back to some weeks earlier. Like, back in July, like, Leavitt was responding to concerns about the president's hands

and explicitly acknowledging, well, yeah, he's receiving some treatment for certain things, and he's taking these drugs that could contribute to bruising. So there have been answers on some of these things. It's just the answers haven't been particularly. sensational. And so they get a hell of a lot less coverage than the speculation about them, which reminds me of another story that is still in the headlines this week that we really don't have to waste a bunch of time talking about, but just the Epstein study, which is similar. Like a lot of these things have been knocked down, but they keep coming up as if there hasn't

been credible media coverage that makes it pretty clear that, yeah, there may not be some wider conspiracy here. Yet, speculation about wide conspiracy does not go away because it's interesting. And lots of people need to believe things like that. I think this is perhaps similar to that. Yeah, I think it is worth saying clearly. You know, I looked up CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. All the reporting that came from those places was really responsible and, you know,

say what we know, not what we suspect. And I guess in some respects, I understand Twitter is, you know, kind of the point of Twitter is the sort of open marketplace of ideas where you can say things that maybe you wouldn't put in a written piece or a published piece with your publication. I do that sometimes with tangle, you know? It's like a, it is a thought tester and it's a place to experiment a little bit with ideas or to share theories you might have. So, you know, to defend the people who are doing some of this, I guess I could easily say it's less serious and should be taken less seriously. I think the thing that bothers me is, like, you have multiple days in a row where people are telling you Donald Trump's about to resign. Donald Trump had a stroke. Donald Trump could be dead. Donald Trump is like, you know, preparing to reveal his terminal illness. They get thousands and thousands of likes and retweets

and then the thing happens and it's a space command, space force, location change. And it's like, nobody goes and unfollows those people who are saying all that stuff. Nobody just decides, oh, this person is super unreliable and I should never listen to anything they say again. Those people just kind of justify it, work their way around it, you know,

drop the next. few breadcrumbs and then sort of move on. And that part of it, I think, really frustrates me. I mean, for two reasons. One, because I think it's just emblematic of how short everybody's memories are, which just seems like a problem in our country. Our attention spans are waning and our memory is zapped. And I feel like we're often just running in circles.

And, you know, the, this to me is like a lot of the same people who were doing the Trump didn't really get shot bit and pushing that and then we just get clear evidence that he did and you know we all just move on and the second reason selfishly is like it's really hard to build an audience to build a following to get a bunch of attention on a website like Twitter while doing what like being really intentional about trying to be responsible with the stuff you're putting out, which is like what I personally do. I'm not

like getting on a high horse, just like genuinely I try not to spread bullshit when I'm, you know, I respect the publish button. And it's like, you know, you tweet some sort of thoughtful, nuanced analysis about what may or may not be happening with Trump's health and like 12 people

like it. And then the guy next you's like, he's going to be dead tomorrow. And there's 2,000 retweets and a bunch of follows. And And that part really just eats my soul a little bit. So I don't know. I just, please, just like if you were following somebody, this is my suggestion. If you're following somebody and they sort of got you all excitable about the Trump health stuff, maybe just consider whether there's somebody to keep following.

I will end that little monologue by just floating the question. Like, what's there then? I mean, maybe there are some sort of underlying health issues that are worth discussing. The guy is 79 years old. He takes a few drugs, you know, aspirin, whatever, daily that might indicate some sort of like pulmonary issue. I'm not a cardiologist, but, you know, this is something the cardiologists say. He's overweight, for sure, despite lying about his weight on his medical. records, which is one of the funniest things ever.

You know, like, I'm sure he could have some health problems. I will say he, to me, it's not close, it's not even in the same league as the Biden stuff. But, like, he does seem diminished in some notable ways to me now. Like, in 2020, when I was watching videos, or maybe even say 2022, when I was watching him get interviewed and watching Biden get interviewed. And then I'd go look at clips from both of them in 2016. It was like there was no difference in Trump and there was this huge glaring, obvious difference in Biden that everybody was denying.

And now when I look at Trump, you know, in front of the mic today versus 2020, like, it's a little different. It's a gradient. It's not massive, but like he's more rambly. He's got less energy. he's definitely more obsessed with like stuff related to himself and always gets like caught on these things distracted by these little you know trigger words and I don't know maybe we should start talking about that at some point you know maybe like what's the lesson we learned

from Biden these should all be open questions and we should engage them I guess yeah well that's the lesson some people learned from Biden and again to the extent that's what you learned that's good and acceptable I mean look all all of the questions are fair in general, because we ought to be able to ask these questions. I do think that Trump has slowed down visibly. It's also the case that most of what you described is actually stuff that was true eight years ago. Like he's distracted, et cetera, perhaps more distractible.

And in that way, it's maybe harder to track. It's also the case that he's been moving at this blistering pace since getting reelected and since getting sworn back in. and I've almost been, like, expecting him to take a little bit of a step back and kind of slow down. So in some respects, I would say that I looked at the absence from the scene and just was a bit relieved that the news cycle was slowing down and was slightly surprised to see that it actually pre-generated a news cycle of sorts, or at least a weekend, where everyone just kept suggesting he's dead. He's clearly dead.

He's dead. Not everyone, but lots in life. lots of people. I would say, though, that I would not presume that this administration is that it's beyond the pale for them to lie about something like this or to conceal some information about Trump's poor or failing health. So skepticism in that regard is totally understandable. But when your skepticism gives way to the wildest possible speculation and extreme confidence in conspiracy theories that posit the most absurd conclusion, then you're probably doing it wrong.

Yeah, I mean, what more really can we say about it? It's just that the White House has given us reason to ask questions. The questions have been asked and the answers have been insufficient, which is giving us reasons to come up with our explanations. and it's tough for some of us to contain those theories and for others, you know, I'm sure everyone has one. Let's be honest, I'm sure everyone has an idea in their head of what is happening with Trump. I think probably a lot of people are saying, I don't see a difference or he's probably overextended and tired and fatigued. And I'm like, like Isaac, I think I hear

a difference in the way that he gives press conferences and answers. He sort of trails off at the end of sentences sometimes. He gets quiet. The distractedness doesn't seem to be like a, and another thing, this is a really bad problem, but like a, oh, and you're fake news, by the way, you're all fake news. It's really unfair what they're doing. It's like he's reading through his script

sometimes. But you know, we're kind of, we trod the ground on this and I think right now we might be doing one of the things that you said other people were doing of like filling in the space with our own cycle. So we'll keep looking. And

You know, when there's more stuff to know or think about or learn or more evidence to consider, then that's when we will. I do wonder if the answers have been inadequate or if there is a sense where certain kinds of questions, for example, is Brigitte McCrone actually a man? You only want to combat things like that so vociferously with respect to the amount of evidence that you try to produce to the contrary because there's no amount of evidence that would be satisfied. satisfactory for perhaps the most vocal critics who are interested in that particular conversation. I don't think Candace Owens is waiting for kind of sufficient evidence to abandon her particular convictions or stated beliefs about Brigitte Macron. And in the same respect, I think a lot of the people who are positing Trump is dead or dying, as we all are, interestingly, I don't know that they'll ever be satisfied.

with any sort of explication from the White House. And an acknowledgement that he's old and getting older and as a result, slowing down naturally is probably not something we're going to get, but it's something that we all know. And that's not news. But that's a comparison between the, is he dead or dying theory?

It's not a reason to defend answers to what are his health conditions like now, why is his hand bruising, why his ankle is swollen? Those are the things where the White House has given us insufficient answers. And I'm not upset for them with them ignoring the is Trump dead stuff. Like that, of course they should. But I'm saying in absence of answers to those questions, you'll get the more reasonable but not fully supported theories of like, oh, he's having constant strokes.

Like that is a thing that I can understand. Yeah. I think there's like an underlying thing that, that also has to be added to this conversation, which is a lot of the people who are discoursing about this really deeply seem to want the president to drop dead. There's that. That's in there. The, you know, the motivated reasoning element

of the whole sort of commentary from the people who are putting this out there is like, I mean, A, it's just gross, obvious. I mean, for a million different reasons, just, you know, he's the president, whatever you think of his policies. I know there are people who are listening to this who probably indulge in that sort of viewpoint. But, like, you know, a lot of the tweets and the commentary, they read to me more like wishful thinking than actual analysis. And I think that part is important to say. It kind of feels sort of like the Mueller report of people.

were reading everything that he was doing when Mueller was investigating. They're like, he's going to drop it any day. Trump's going to be impeached to be kicked out off. It does feel really similar. Like, we're looking at breadcrumbs and trying to complete a picture. And a lot of people already have the picture in place and want to see what they want to see. So I can see that comparison. We'll be right back after this quick break.

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Well, speaking of Trump, you know, his health. is not the only story from this week. There are two other really big ones that I want to get to. The first one we covered today in our podcast and newsletter, but I am interested

to discuss this with you guys, especially some of the conversations that came up. We, you know, we're playing with this new staff dissent feature in the newsletter in the podcast. And we didn't have the staff dissent today despite the fact that there was

like a pretty good deal of argumentation and push and pull in that editorial process to get today's newsletter out, specifically around my take. The short story here, if you did not listen to our podcast or read the newsletter, I have been living under Iraq for the last few days, is that Donald Trump ordered a military strike on a boat that he alleges was carrying drugs to the United States, though I think it's worth mentioning Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially said the boat was headed to Trinidad,

then Trump said it was headed to the U.S., then Marco Rubio changed his statement to say it was going to the U.S. as well. Not a ton of clarity there. I personally had like two very strong visceral reactions to this. One was just kind of the,

you know, they got what they had coming to them reaction, which is a base instinct. But, you know, I, there is just that part of me, if I'm being totally honest with people, and my pledge is to be honest with our readers and listeners, is like I've just watched street drugs, fentanyl heroin, opioids, you know, lace cocaine, whatever it is, destroy so many lives in my personal world, the county I grew up in, my high school especially

was hit harder by the opioid crisis than basically anywhere in America. And in the years since, that crisis and all the addiction that came out of like my high school class sort of got hammered by the evolution of drugs

and the introduction of really cheap heroin and the introduction of fentanyl and whatever. And yeah, there is just a part of me that's like, you know, it's nice to see these people pay the price for what they're doing. And then I think for three seconds and I'm like, holy shit, the president just killed 11 people for drug trafficking without a jury, without a trial, without any evidence presented to the public in a straight up extrajudicial killing, which I said today reminded me a lot of the Luigi Mangione stuff like Luigi Mangione. Oh, shit. I forgot how to say his name.

I think it's Man Joni. I think so. Man, Joni. Yeah. Okay. But, I mean, we all have so many other things to respond to what you just said in the pronunciation of his name. Yeah. It's just, it's frightening.

And it's like an escalation for me in terms of his already exorbitant love of stretching executive power as far as it can go. now there's a body count, you know, and I think it's, I think it's really, really scary. And I think the whole redefinition of drug dealers as terrorists is incredibly alarming. And it's not made less alarming because they're Venezuelan or not American citizens or because this happened outside U.S. territory. I don't know if he's trying to invade Venezuela or, or start some war, but the fact that I don't know that is not good. I don't, that's not a comfort to me.

So, yeah, I'm interested to hear what you guys think. You know, there was various kind of pushback, I guess, on my take today that we could talk about. And Ari, maybe you're the best person to kind of kick that conversation off. But this just feels to me like a really, really big step. You mentioned Mangione. I think I want to leave that aside for a second. There's a lot of discussion amongst us and the editorial team about how that analogy kind of lands with us and the difference between prevention and enforcement of laws and

retribution for harms. But the two points here that I really want to make is one is a little bit related, which is the these people, a feeling of it all, of like, There's an opioid epidemic that the United States suffered through, and the millions of, well, not millions, but the huge epidemic of overdose deaths that we'd suffered at the same time makes it so. We have a very righteous sort of feeling of indignation about wanting to do more to prevent drugs from being trafficked into the United States that are dangerous and or illegal and or lace with fentanyl, all very reasonable things. But at the same time, these, we don't know that, I mean, this is the most important thing. Like, we don't know whether the people that were killed on this boat were engaged in that. We have the allegation of the military and, or the Pentagon, the leader of the Pentagon, Pete Hagsteth and the president, but we don't really know.

And what we were, what was alleged was that they were smuggling cocaine, which is, we don't know if that was laced with fentanyl either. cocaine is very different than opioids. And if it's not laced with fentanyl, very different than fentanyl. So it does feel a little bit like us using this, like weaponizing this hurt that we have as a country in order to do more hurt. I think there's, I have a thing that I say sometimes that there's a couple things we can always use to justify anything at a government level, which is terrorism and child molestation. So I'm always sensitive to that. Trump, very importantly here, is using terrorism as the justification. He's saying these cartels are engaging in terrorism in the way that they're spreading drugs to the United States.

And in so doing, justifying any strike or killing under terrorism. And who's going to argue against terrorism, right? It's really tough to do that. But what he can do is say this doesn't really fit the bill. Not just for the reasons mentioned, but because if we are going to argue, going to be using force against terrorists, like there has to be a justification for that. We had a president who was trying to use an authorization for the use of military force against terrorism to do extrajudicial killings, and he got raped by Republicans, and his name was Obama.

And I think us being able to keep that in the back of our minds here, if not the front of our minds, is a really useful way to respond to this. We should be concerned about the overreach of the state's power. We should be concerned about the executive using a justification to kill. whether or not we agree with the reasoning. Even in this case where we don't, let's say that it becomes more concerning. But even if we did, even if I were to say, yeah, I see the proof. These people on this boat were bringing drugs to the United States. They were laced with fentanyl.

They were part of an operation. And Maduro is a part of it. Even in that instance, it is the executive making unilateral decision. And I think that's the principle you can use to defend or use. to criticize both Trump and Obama and any president who engages in that kind of behavior. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think alluding to Obama and perhaps even going further back and talking about 9-11 in the context of so much of the Trump administration's effort to reintroduce kind of terrorism as a central theme of American foreign policy and domestic policy,

quite frankly, to the extent we've been talking about this and have been linking this to various South American gangs or narco states, we're doing it in precisely the same way that this was done around 9-11. It gives the government and officials more latitude to deploy a greater range of tools and to perhaps not so much obfuscate for nefarious purposes, but again, for the sake of perhaps just the alacrity of being able to move quickly and do things like, say, drone people in foreign countries under the auspices of a program that essentially just gives the president carte blanche to decide who lives and who dies. Whether or not you're at war, officially, you're kind of perpetually at war.

That was the prior circumstance with the drone program that was heavily criticized, that Barack Obama presided over, and that W had presided over for a time. It was created by W. And I believe Trump was critical of that at different points. Right. And now is essentially doing something fairly similar. We had this massive buildup of kind of naval assets that began almost immediately after Trump was sworn into office and began this designation.

And now we're reaping the fruits of it, which is a strike that is almost certainly unconstitutional. And it doesn't even matter in some respects. The courts may challenge it. But unless Congress gets involved, it feels like this won't matter. Unless Republicans suddenly find religion. and decide that they want to actually be somewhat consistent here, perhaps embody a conservative value that is explicitly conservative in a way that is coherent to most people,

it almost doesn't matter because the administration has made it pretty clear by this point that they're interested in expanding the parameters of what the executive can do. And the way that they're going to do that is not with some well-understood legal theory that we're all familiar with. It's with these kind of ad hoc reasoning. and this kind of perpetual state of exceptions and emergency in every single instance. And the fact that they've just lost a really prominent high-profile case that made it pretty clear

that it's unconstitutional to deploy troops in this particular way, to unilaterally make these decisions without Congress being involved or without the assent of local governments, hasn't been an obstacle to them trying to do these things anyways, persisting with kind of slight modifications and essentially taking as many inches as they possibly can, even when they face a defeat in the courts when they're trying to expand executive power. And it is a pretty remarkable change for conservatives here, not just because it's hypocritical, but just because it is a meaningful deviation from so much of the rhetoric that I have seen from conservatives on these very issues. over the course of decades now, and to see all of it fall away in the course of months here

is somewhat astonishing and a little bit shocking and worth talking about in very sober ways. I think it's interesting, and I'm now conflating things, but I've already mentioned the National Guard deployments, but I'll specifically mention D.C. and Chicago, it's very interesting that this is happening. It's the sort of thing where I find myself generally opposed to these troop deployments and the federalization of National Guardsmen when there's supposed to be this very clear line here where the state and the feds are kind of cooperating and the feds here are insisting on these deployments irrespective of what local officials want. I can be critical of it. I can question the efficacy of it. But what I'm not doing is going to

going a step further and insisting, well, this is clearly a dry run for military takeover of the United States of America. And I think one mistake that's that many critics have made and perhaps some journalist is to take that third step and to go to the worst imaginable manifestation of what these misguided in my estimation policies are likely to yield. And I think in general that has a lot of different, there's a lot of reasons why that's problematic. But the most obvious one should be that we just don't know that that's where things are headed. And I'm not sure that that kind of maximalist expression of concern is necessarily the best one to help illuminate the nature of the problem and perhaps to animate some genuine action on the parts of the people that we would most like to see get involved and kind of assert themselves here, which in this particular case isn't even the courts. It's Congress.

Yeah, I mean, for what it's worth, on the troop deployments to the, like the National Guard deployments, I think it's far more likely that Trump believes that crime is a really strong political issue for him and that the deployments put Democrats on their heels and put them in this horrible place where they have to like deny the reality people are experiencing about crime in these sort of urban centers. and it gives Trump inroads to voters in Chicago and voters in Philadelphia and voters in Washington, D.C. I mean, he's probably doing the D.C. thing, A. because he can legally and it's easy. And it's just like he loves the confrontation with the D.C. population. Like, that is, you know, the swamp to him. Yeah. But Chicago feels like this sort of pet project where he's obsessed with the city

and talking about it and all the ways it's broken and corrupted and it's local politicians for sure. Yeah, yeah,

and it's local politicians but I also think like, you know, getting J.B. Pritzer to come out and be like, we don't need

the National Guard here is actually a good thing for Trump politically. You know, I think that's right. I see the White House promoting these videos of like,

you know, young black man in Chicago. talking about how terrible the crime is there and how they need help and all this stuff. And like the administration sees a pathway to those people, I think, with stuff like this, the strong men stuff. And, you know, the version of that in the Venezuela story to me is like, are we about to start a war or invade Venezuela? Like that's sort of the leap, you know, that assume the worst of what this is about is

that this troop buildup is because Trump is exceptional. expecting some sort of real confrontation, or he wants to, you know, signal something to the Venezuelan population. So there's this organically fermented uprising or there, you know, the extreme is like, we're about to actually put boots on the ground or invade Venezuela or go trying to arrest Maduro or whatever it is, which, you know, it is hilarious. I mean, hilarious. To be sober, to take your suggestion and talk about soberly, it is jarring to consider all the talk that we've heard from Trump and his biggest supporters

about, you know, the myriad of reasons that we need to pull out from these foreign engagements in the Middle East and elsewhere across the globe. there's this new right that's kind of left position that's like really clear and sober-minded about the and I mean this earnestly really clear and sober-minded about like our influence in places like Central and South America and how it's gone South in various ways throughout history. I see right-wing commentators saying things

that they never would have said 20 years ago about us overthrowing, you know, authoritarian leaders in South. in Central America with the CIA and these coups. And, you know, that was such a lefty talking point for so long. And now a lot of the kind of new Trump rights embraced it. And now it's like Trump is literally openly trying to organize a coup, basically. I mean, like, they're saying, they've put a bounty on the president's head and said they want,

they will pay somebody to give them evidence that allows them to go arrest Maduro. Yeah. And they're all just, yeah. Like, cheering, woo, go Trump. Like, we're going to crush the drug dealers. I'm like, this is literally the thing that we've been talking about happening right now. And it's like, you know, it's, yeah, it's one of those weird partisan worm eating your brain moments where people just have a hard time seeing it when their guy does it, I guess. There's something, Ari, you said a moment ago that I actually don't want to lose the threat on.

The fact that we don't know things about this book that was just blown up. Yeah, it feels crucial, right? They could have interdicted. Like, they could have actually stopped the boat. Yeah, which the UCOS guard does all this point. We've got tons of military vessels in the area. It's just one boat. We could have interdicted.

We could have arrested these people. We could have found out what they had. And if there were suspicions that needed to be acted upon, that could have been the action. Instead, you obliterate them. And you create all manner of consternation. And that speculation about how things could escalate, it seems to me that talking about the various ways that pretending you're at war with Venezuela

formally when in fact you're not could quickly become a hot war. I could see that much quicker than I can imagine the National Guard deployment in D.C., which was just extended, I believe, to the end of the year. Now putting us in territory that is less clear the president can do on his own, probably does require an act of Congress again, which is interesting. Like, there's just, these are the kinds of things that we could be paying attention to, but for some of the more kind of hysteric, hyperbolic things that we're talking about. And relatedly as well, like drug interdiction in general, to use that word twice now in different contexts,

like I am still one of those people who is pretty concerned that our efforts at prohibition have helped to make the supply of illegal drugs in this country more dangerous and not less. dangerous. In which case, there are very real questions to ask about the kind of escalation and the militarization, the remilitarization of the drug war in South America. It's also interesting that we're going after Venezuela here. When I believe Mexico is actually a much bigger player in America's drug war, not to give the administration any ideas about the United States taking military action against. It's just odd that that's where they're focusing. In the same way that it's odd, the D.C. is where you deploy the National Guard when it's hardly the most

dangerous city in America. Right. And there's a couple of things. I think one that I think is useful to talk about is we sort of made some gaffaws and shoulder shrugs about the legality of the of the National Guard to D.C. And I think it's worth, we should say kind of clearly that Trump installing a new head of police and doing a police takeover in D.C. is justified by the law. That's something he can legally do. Using the National Guard as a police force is not. Like that's something that would be against, like the army isn't allowed to act as a police force. No matter where you deploy it, can't be D.C., can't be Chicago. I think that's just like a caveat that we should, you know, say boldly.

I think when it comes to the drugs that are coming from South America, we did have something that Will K. Backer, senior editor, put into the number section today that I thought it was illuminating about where drugs are coming from. And when they do come from Venezuela, which is normally, even the ones that come from Venezuela, come through the Pacific and not the Caribbean and that a lot of the drugs that we do get into the U.S. that are leased with fentanyl are, like you said, coming through Mexico and that it makes me wonder why the hard plaster. Is it just that Maduro is not playing a ball with Trump? We've seen like Trump likes to, he's doing something similar in Brazil, with Brazil, with

Bolsonaro saying if you aren't going to drop these charges against him, we're going to tear off the heck out of you. But the question then becomes, based off of what the pattern Trump is displaying with this foreign policy is, what does the president want to get out of them? Are we going to get favorable deals for Chevron oil drilling out of Venezuela now? I mean, I could, if I'm going to predict and put on my prediction hat, and if I'm wrong, I'll say I'm wrong. Like, I'll call it right here, two weeks on this podcast. If any of this is wrong, I'll eat crow. But if I'm right, Like, I would prefer, I would prefer that we remember, you know, what this, what I'm saying, which is that I would expect we're going to hear more stories about military enforcement or boats in the Caribbean, maybe another boat gets sunk or too. I don't know, but a thing that I expect will be the end result of it is the boats return to the U.S. or they get deployed elsewhere in the great oceans.

And we hear great deal just announced Venezuela. going to yada yada, something about the drug enforcement team that they already have, and we allow us favorable terms for oil drilling or what have you, and we're going to move on to the next thing. That's just what I would expect to happen based on what's happened in other country so far. Although there's a unique contempt for Maduro, and it's been kind of longstanding, so it's possible that there really isn't a kind of easy off ramp here. That's a good point. This is a fight that the administration desperately wants, and there are plenty of people in our politics who are on board with it.

And I think it's fair to say. He's a malevolent actor. This is a country that is a meaningful geopolitical rival within our sphere of influence, so to speak. And there's reason to be concerned and to take a kind of aggressive posture here. But you do it the right way. You get Congress involved.

And it's the strangest thing about this administration is the fact that he has, an incredibly compliant Congress and reliably chooses to ignore them. Reliably. Yeah, I do want to say that Nicholas Maduro is a dictator and, like, he's an authoritarian leader. In a fair election, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much every independent organization that monitors these kinds of things considers

his rule authoritarian and that, I mean, there is just literally. systematic repression of political opponents, you know, not a good guy, fine to say. I also, I mean, Ari, it's funny, like, even listening to you to talk about what's potentially coming. And I, Camille's comments notwithstanding, I do think that is a fairly good prediction. Something in those contours, like, Tom's the fruition. Taco prediction, maybe? Yeah.

I don't know. I think it's a lot. leverage thing, but yeah. Well, I also just want to say, like, it's insane that we've already moved there. Like, you're talking about this and, you know, maybe another boat or two will be sunk in. It's like, dude, he deleted 11 people. Like, you know, and this is like we had this, this is part of our back and forth that we had an editorial process this morning. I mean, Will asked me something in the comments of the.

Google Doc where we were working on it, like, you know, this is, he thought like the opening to my take was pretty aggressive and was kind of just like, is it like the nature of the strike that is like jarring to you? Like if this was DA agents who got into a shootout and killed a bunch of people who were members of this gang, like, what if, and I was like, yeah, it's the nature of the strike. Like, he fired a rocket at a boat full of people that he thinks

are smuggling cocaine like one of the most popular drugs in America to who knows where according to Marco Rubio Trinidad before you know

Trump sort of corrects the record that they're definitely coming to the United States like you know and then Audrey was

another editor was like you know this is like I don't know how much there isn't how unprecedented

this is like she was sort of pushing back on my framing and that there's precedent for this because, you know, like Obama killed, you know, bombed like a wedding in Iraq. And I'm like... Also controversial. Extremely controversial.

And we should not be desensitized to that. And like, I, you know, I adopt a prosecute them all mindset of, you know, war crime is war crime, is war crime, make them pay the price. But like, Barack Obama at least had the pretext that he was responding to terrorism, like al-Qaeda attacking United States troops, ISIS, you know, spreading, and this being like a cell, you know, and these are people who are storming schools in Iraq and murdering children or putting bombs on buses. They were terrorists, not because Obama said they were. Right. Like, it is actually unprecedented that a president used a cruise missile or a drone or whatever they fired

to blow up a boat full of people that were allegedly smuggling drugs. I just don't want to lose sight of that and it has definitely made me animated like watching the coverage of all this. Now, that being said, because this is a muscle, I try to flex and this is the work of tangle and what we do,

I think it's very clear how I feel about this. I do want to just present an inquiry or ask, like, the rationalist argument, like the really sort of emotionally detached, cold-blooded, rationalist argument here, if I could formulate it, would be, it's worth killing these 11 dudes to send a message to this entire region

that if you get on a boat and leave Venezuela and you've got a bunch of drugs and you're headed to traffic this stuff to the U.S., there's a chance that you're going to, going to get hit with a drone strike on your way. And if you're the Trump administration, that is an act of deterrence and you believe that that's going to be the outcome. That's what they've said they believe is going to be the outcome. And I guess I wonder, like, let's buy, let's take the hook line and sinker of Trump framing. Like, every gang member in Venezuela

knows that this just happened. And they're all going to think twice before they get on a leaving some port in Venezuela with a bunch of drugs coming to North America. Is that worth it? Is that a good thing? Is that like a reasonable thing to pause it? Yeah, I don't know. And that is like the really detached, again,

rationalist inquiry that I think is fair to float that like has to be floated because it is the stated rationale of the administration. But I could engage with that question without presuming that the only way to affect that sort of concern on the part of drug smugglers is to blow up the boat. Like, an open, vociferous debate inside Congress where the president is asking for authorization

to do exactly what you just described, exactly what they just did, and is starting to build support for it, could be the sort of thing that begins to send that message. And if you're having that conversation while taking the action of actually stopping a boat that you have every reason perhaps to suspect is actually engaged in the trafficking of narcotics

that perhaps helps to underscore the point that you're making. It seems to me that actually going about things the right way, having a meaningful political consensus that's pointing in the direction of this activity, and then actually having a demonstration of enforcement where you catch these people, you have the opportunity to perpwalk them, to demonstrate that, yeah, these are dreams,

drugs and their bad dudes and look at the other things they did. And the interdiction would be perhaps of less expense than firing missiles of this craft and would almost certainly be something that you could execute at minimal risk to U.S. service persons. It just feels like a situation where doing things the right way could totally get you that kind of fear and intimidation response that you're going for. But I will acknowledge that, yeah, a president who might do anything at any time and could defy the law may put some fear into the hearts of certain geopolitical rivals, but quite frankly,

it also puts some fear into the heart of an American citizen who was born here, who cares deeply about the Constitution, and is worried that we are degrading it because the administration is far too cavalier about their interpretation of the Constitution and their regard for it in general. Doesn't it put a little bit of fear into you for what could happen to people who are in that area, who aren't drug runners too? I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm an expert in the South Caribbean and migrant patterns. But it's not as if there's nothing in the South Pacific,

or South Pacific, South Caribbean. There's like Trinidad, Tobago, Aruba, Kurosayal, like plenty of islands just off the coast of Venezuela. So it's not difficult to imagine members or citizens of a country from which we had a huge flood of migrants not too long ago under a dictator are looking to try to flee

and go to one of those islands or be on their way to somewhere else in the Caribbean. And in such a world, those people probably aren't aware as much of what the United States is doing in the news. And it does feel like I'm not going to sit here and say, like, I'm really concerned this is going to happen now.

But it does make you, feel like that there's now an elevated risk that some people who are fleeing a dictatorship in Venezuela could be, instead of meaning their, meaning border patrol in the United States could be meaning a cruise missile in the Caribbean. And that does feel like a way, way over escalation over what the United States should be doing and what our posture should be capable of. I mean, just to like put that point in bold, that's what I was just going to say was there are literally, we know there are tens of thousands of people fleeing Venezuela every year. I mean, it is like a hub of the influx of migrants we're getting because the economic situation is so dire there

and because Maduro's so insane. So, yeah, I mean, I don't think that's a bad thesis at all. Like how many more boats with 12 people leaving in the middle of the night with, you know, luggage on board. are going to be navigating the area where this strike happened. I mean, again, maybe all the intelligence and everything is buttoned up, but we just don't have that from the administration yet, at least not publicly. Also, Ari, I just have to say this is tangential, but you just reminded me that the worst vacation I've ever had was in Curisale,

which is a place that I will never go back to. No offense to anybody who lives there. I, Phoebe and I went once, I had this awesome idea where I was like, I'm going to pick a vacation spot for us that's just like, I'm going to look at a map and pick a place that looks really cool geographically that, you know, is different from the places that all are friends, the people you see on Instagram and everything going, like, I'm not doing the Cuba thing, you know, it's just like it's played out. Let's go somewhere cool. And I was like, whoa, there's an Kind of. It was like, this was like, when we went, this was like everybody was going to Cuba because it opened up to the U.S. for like a year. And, you know, everybody's like taking their pictures in front of the old pickup truck on the cobblestone street in Cuba. I'm like, all right, whatever. So I chose Curacao because I found on the map and I was like, this is crazy. Off the coast of Venezuela, a beautiful island, incredible beaches, never seen anything like it. We went. We were in a huge fight when we went, which is definitely the core reason that the trip sucked. But we were just, like, in a bad place. I can't even remember what was happening, but just, like, in a bad cycle of fighting. So we got there.

We're both in, like, a horrible mood. And then it turns out, I'm pretty sure it's Danish, maybe. It's owned by, I mean, Curisow was, like, invaded and colonized by some other European. You can look at up on talking. But I think it's Dutch. Yes, it is. Like a Ruba. Yeah, Dutch.

Yeah. So Dutch people, again, you know, Again, no offense, terrible food, nothing good happening there. They just like, they've done nothing. And then there's incredible, they've done nothing on the, on the culinary front. And there's like incredible wealth disparity on the island. So it's like classic, like you're staying in some nice hotel and then you go outside and it's just like unbelievable poverty that's like, wow, this is devastating to just witness and drive through and whatever. And then you're getting all the skeptical looks from like the locals who are just, you know, like we're tourists and we're like, you know, doing the thing kind of like in the resort but not really experiencing the country.

And when we leave the resort area where it's just like, ah, feels icky. And then on top of that, there's like a whole other group of non-American white people there who also hate you, which is the Dutch who are just like, they're just pissed there are Americans there. like we interacted with the few and it's just like oh like this is our island kind of so curious how sucked the beaches were beautiful but yeah

I left there feeling shitty about Dutch people their food and my relationship but we bounced back and now we're married happily with a child so happy ending I guess yeah not American

happy endings I mean the epilogue to this is still to come we're going to get so many responses from Dutch people and Caribbean vacationers and say something nice about O'Gruba or somewhere else. If you're Dutch and you have something to say about Curacao

write in, I'd like to hear your defense. I'll give you the Dutch oven, I presume, was you guys. So maybe that was your contribution to culinary stuff. But yeah, I'm ready. Bring the heat. Tell me about what I'm missing. I like all of it. that. I will say briefly that

I think the phrase you used a moment ago was other white people who hate you and you might have said community of European expats who hate you. Well, is

a, hold on, I'm curious, say how technically is it technically Europe though if it's part of, never, let's move on. Let's do something. No, I said community of European expats. Because if they go there, it's European, are they expats? But is it really European? I mean, it's still kind of colonial.

They're kind of ecotically. Yeah. Like there's parts in the Caribbean that are French that are technically France. Like, France makes sure a distinction. Yeah, yeah, fair. Can I say one other thing about the Dutch? Let's go. They call Curisal a kingdom of the Netherlands.

Yes. Come on. Just, you know, get it. over yourself. We don't call Puerto Rico a kingdom of the United States. It's like it's a U.S. territory. We did the thing. Just own it, you know. But it's a

kingdom of the Netherlands. Yeah. Yeah, whatever. After we get Greenland, we're going to acquire Carousel as well, so don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah. We'll make Carousel great again. Yeah, please. Nice liqueur carousel. Let's agree to that, maybe.

Dutch I'm going to insist we move on. What else is on our list here? Oh, my God, dude. They have some good stuff. They have some good stuff. Waffles and pancakes and donuts are allegedly a result of Dutch. Oh, yeah, Dutch pancakes.

Sure. Contributions to American comfort food. I think the Belgians would be upset to hear waffles listed under the Dutch. Yeah. Yeah. They claim Gouda cheese. I don't believe it, though. We'll be right back after this quick break.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. All right.

Well, in much more serious, much more serious news. We do have one last topic to cover, which we haven't touched in a little while, and similar to the Venezuela stuff, it's, I think, a pretty somber one. And it is this new relocation plan, post-Gaza war plan that we got to news about in the in the strip um you know sometimes there there are there are stories like this where it's helpful to kind of summarize and you know rehash in our own words what a proposal is or what happened in this case i actually think it's worth just like reading a news report to share the details of this,

to be very clear that this is not us editorializing in some specific kind of way. But I'm going to pull this from the Washington Post, who was, along with the Financial Times, they kind of broke this story. The Washington Post saw a 38 page, they called it a prospectus, which envisions at least a temporary relocation

of all of Gaza's more than 2 million population, either through what it calls voluntary departures or another country to another country or into restricted secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction. Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property to be used to finance a new life elsewhere were eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new, quote, AI-powered, smart cities to be built in Gaza. Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies

to cover four years of rent elsewhere as well as a year of food. The plan estimates every individual departure from Gaza would save the trust $23,000 compared with the cost of temporary housing and what it calls quote unquote life support services and the secure zones for those who stay. They're calling it the Gaza reconstitution economic acceleration and transformation trust or great trust, the proposal was developed by the same Israelis who created and set in motion. The U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the GHF, which, you know, I mean, by all accounts, has unleashed both more famine in Gaza and also confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Gaza and civilians where Gaza and civilians are being killed. So they haven't exactly had a Sterling record on this stuff so far.

This is wild. I don't even know how to, I mean, how would you describe it? I don't know what to say. I mean, another clip from this Washington Post article is that perhaps most appealing it, it being the plan, purports to require no U.S. government funding and offers significant profit to investors. Unlike the controversial and sometimes cash strapped GHF, which uses armed private U.S. security contractors

to distribute food in four Southern Gaza locations, the trust plan does not rely on donations, the prospectus says. Instead, it would be financed by public and private sector investment in what it calls mega projects from electric vehicle plants and data centers to beach resorts and high-rise apartments. calculations included in the plan envision a nearly fourfold return on a $100 billion investment after 10 years with self-generating revenue streams.

Isn't it a little bit, I mean, this is by far not the one detail to focus on, but isn't it a little bit oxymoronic or paradoxical to say, will require no funding from the government, but we'll have private and public investors? This smells wrong. Which public investors? I think that's the important question. And perhaps if you don't view government spending on its own projects as expenses, but recategorize them as investments,

where the United States citizen is definitely going to make a profit, obviously, then you kind of eliminate the need for any protracted discussion. Yeah. I don't think there's anything I like about this. Is there anything to like about this? The AI coverage sportsies are ridiculous. The idea that maybe if there's one thing, it's the idea that like Israel is doing this forced expulsion and it's state-sponsored ethnic cleansing by other sanitized names. But if there's something where you can offer people money and funds to actually pay for themselves on their way out, I think that's the thing that I could talk about as being potentially.

a good idea. Everything else just feels like, what the hell are we doing? No, I mean, the thing to like to me is, like, it is a forward-looking, here's this extremely rich and natural resources along one of the most beautiful, important coasts in the world, territory. Let's develop it and bring prosperity and economic growth there and all these things that Palestinians have been begging for for literally, decades. And it's like, the plan to finally do that requires removing the two million people who have been waiting for that moment from the territory to do it without them, basically. Yeah. I mean, there's something like so...

You're going to give them better housing. Suddenly there will be these international partners who materialize. I don't understand the plan to return that. I mean, look, this plan is clearly have baked. There's all this stuff going around about maybe it was AI generated. It seems like it was AI generated. The images are definitely all chat cheap. Images are definitely, yeah. Yeah. But it's like there's something so sick and perverse about it, to me at least, from where I'm sitting, where it's like you're talking about doing the thing that the, you know, so many Palestinians who have wanted this, who have been like, you know, who have been saying for years that the path towards reducing extremism in the Gaza Strip

towards like overthrowing Hamas towards creating this free state is like capitalizing on all the opportunity that's there with all these people who are hungry for a better life than the one they have. And now there's a plan. I mean, this plan sucks because it's all about crypto and it seems like some massive scam to just basically make some investors rich. I mean, we can't even, I don't even know where to start with like, you're going to get a token for your property and you can go use that crypto token to buy something else. Here's five grand, whatever. They're just doing this in a way that ensures that the people who like really want this thing and have really wanted it and really should enjoy the fruits of this country or territory or whatever you want to call Gaza.

that they won't get to, that they'll be gone, dead, expelled, whatever else. It's just so perverse to me. I don't really know how else to describe it. Good, good. And I'll just say, too, like, you know, to criticize myself a little bit, there is this conundrum here where the way Gaza was described before I October 7th, you know, like the open-air prison language and things like that, that I myself used, they're undermined by the reality now of what pre-October 7th Gaza looks like and was like

when you see these before and after images of like, there was still so much of the Gaza strip where life was bustling and beautiful and redeemable and have. all this potential and now it's all been leveled and now like the same people who helped level it are basically like give us a bunch of money and we'll build it back up but we're going to get all these people who are here out first and we'll make a bunch of money and the return will be really good i mean it's sick i find it sick like i think it's gross and i think there's a point that you're making there that i in this this may be a little bit of a can of worms. I don't intend it to be. I'm just like thinking more about this point that we described

it one way before October 7th. And in using those terms, we would probably want to use them now, but we've lost the ability to use them because we misapplied them. And I feel sort of similarly about the word colony and colonization in this sense. Because this, if I'm trying to grasp for what I would describe this plan, it would be public investment in an area where we're pushing out the native inhabitants so that we can profit. That's the description of a colony to me. That's what that sounds like. Or a forcible territory. It's not exactly a perfect fit, but it's an ambiguously like accurate term. And I think the way people describe, a lot of people describe Israel as like a settler colonialist state, I think makes it so it's hard to put accurate terms to what

we're hearing about in this plan for Gaza. Yeah. There's so much going on here. I want to say that I laugh when I hear about this plan, not because I think the plan itself is funny, but because it is also kind of absurd in this kind of myth of sycifist sort of way. And in that respect, like one almost has to laugh. Like the plan is so half-baked that the best analogy I could draw. is to that underpants gnome meme in South Park, where, like, phase one is you collect the underpants. Phase two, I don't know. Phase three, profit. Like, everything will work out. I find that, like, almost every single panacea

that I hear proffered by politicians throughout time in memorial, like, turns out to be not just bad, like, unbelievably bad. I, moments ago, before we started recording, was in response to a question that I got. from someone who listens to one of the podcasts that I participate in, was asking about Katrina and whether or not racism had anything to do with it. And I just found myself thinking about, like, Robert Moses and the various other people

who have had these bold aspirations for how they're going to do something radically different and address poverty in this way that's just amazing. And they weren't talking openly about their efforts to build radical new, futuristic public housing from the standpoint of we can finally isolate those people and purge them and give them places that are kind of suitably awful to them because they're so bad. They go into it with the best of intentions. Perhaps even there is some graft and corruption there because that happens in government. But the way that they talk about it is in these ways that suggest it is a panacea. We can finally do it. We have the technology. We can make him

better. And it turns out absolutely terrible, like almost diabolically bad. And were this plan to be implemented, it seems rather obvious that that is the territory that we would be headed towards. I would say one other thing really briefly, and I don't want to go on about this, but I am not some sort of squish, but I am someone who is sufficiently kind of frustrated by the whole of the Israeli-Palestinian circumstance that I'm still not at a place where I can use language like genocide or ethnic cleansing and feel very comfortable with how kind of aptly it fits. And that's not because I don't see things in the conflict that I find intensely disturbing

and concerning, but just the conflict around those words and phrases, kind of like the open-air prison thing, is so hot that it oftentimes just seems. to obscure the really salient details about just the most important attributes of the entire ordeal, which the word intractable is always the one that comes to mind here, and I just don't know that there is one that's more apt. It feels like a situation that we are kind of destined to see and revisit like every couple of months and years, and that whenever we have some kind of calm here. It'll only be an interregnum between flare-ups. And it's, it's frustrating to have to talk about something, even only occasionally, that feels so hopeless and inevitably terrible.

So, yeah, it's frustrating that this is what is being generated by the United States. I am hopeful that this would never be implemented because it would almost certainly be disastrous. I mean, there's also just the reality of, like, the implication here, which is, is that there is no plan for post-war Gaza. If this is it, they don't have one. And they never had one. And Israel doesn't have one. And the United States doesn't have one.

And that's been one of my issues with the, I think, the frameworks of like where we've been after the first few months of the October 7th response passed, which was like, okay, you're going to do this thing until, Hamas is gone, even though destroying them seems like a squishy thing that I don't really know how you define that. And then what? And there's never been an answer. And the gap that that has left, a lot of the harshest critics of Israel have said the answer's obvious. They're going to ethnically cleanse the strip. They're going to remove the people who live there. And they're going to

take it back and make it Israeli territory. And Israel has used to deny that. that's what they were going to do. And now they don't, and they let these plans get floated into the ether. And it's like, oh, yeah, that seems like what they're going to do. And that is the plan. And it raises questions about the fundamental premise of the war, which is like, ensure the Palestinian people are no longer being ruled by Hamas and make sure Israel's not under threat from terrorists who hate them that live next door to them, which I think is

a totally reasonable goal. Yep. But if, like, you do this thing where you just end up reoccupying the territory and then taking it for yourselves, that answers a lot of questions about why a war that could have ended six months ago has continued to go on. And I think, like, to me, a lot of the details that come out in these stories affirm my priors and my kind of worst and most hopeless thoughts about the conflict. and about Israel, too. Like, it just sort of builds on some of the stuff that I already hold, I think. There's, I think we, I don't want to come back to this idea about language because I do think it's a hot topic thing when we talk about ethnic cleansing. That's another one of those terms that when we decide to use it or not to, people get really fixated on historical analogies and saying whether or not one's worse than the other or better.

tends to like divert us away from the situation rather quickly. So it's just, it's kind of frustrating that like we have to have that in the back of our minds. Like, okay, what do we call this? What's the right word to say? When really the thing is, if we want to just say it the long way, and the long way is the United States is developing or has developed somewhat a plan involving Israel that will see or cause the expulsion, voluntary or otherwise, of, you know,

gossens from the strip for the purpose of development for an international community that may or may not include the people who currently live there. You can say that is ethnic cleansing or not. Sounds like it to me, but forget the term. Does that sound like a good plan? Who's the person who's an objective observer of this and saying yeah, that sounds like a reasonable solution? You can have your hate for Hamas and your visceral reaction to October 7th.

I think that's universal. But it's another one of those instances of we're going to use something that was so horrifying to justify anything we want. There's going to be a line and if this isn't your line, what is your line? Yeah, I do think I mean, Camille, I saw you sort of scoff at the Hamas universal hatred of Hamas being universal.

Well, I wish it were the case that it were universal. Yeah, I would think we're beyond that for sure. Yeah, all right, I can retract that. I think for people who are pro-Israel anyway, a distaste or dislike or hatred of Hamas is unimpresent. And it just feels like it should be that way for people who are pro-Palestinian as well. I think that that's actually of the many things about the kind of prevailing approach to discussing

this circumstance. It's hard to even call it a conflict because it's so weird. The fact that they aren't as animated and outraged at that, it's not a government. kleptocracy is frustrating. And the talk of a two-state solution that doesn't ever really get around to explaining how you deal with that completely untenable political reality

is as frustrating to me as like a Gazalago project. And unfortunately, that's actually as close to a kind of official plan as you get from people who are quote-unquote on the other side of this. And I don't think, I say quote-unquote, because I don't think that's fair. I don't think it's reasonable. I don't think it's binary. I think it's far more complicated than that, even if our debates about these things, not ours here, but generally, globally, often ignore that fact.

Thank you. Thank you. And just to clarify, because I think I understood you correctly, but just want to make sure you're saying that we should work with Hamas, Like, quote, we should work with a mostic form of a two-taste solution is as close as you get for an opposing plan to this one. Yeah, that's what it feels like to me. Because I don't know that there's anything better being articulated. Who is the leadership that comes in?

The Palestinian Authority? I don't know that that's actually. I mean, we did hear about that in some of the statements that we got from last month, like in early August, from the world leaders who were pushing toward to recognize Palestine or God. as a state, we're saying, we will do so. I think, was Isaac, maybe you remember, I think this was part of Canada's statement or Australia's. I think Canada's was saying we recognize a Gazan state or a Palestinian state under the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

And or that that was like a almost a precondition implied in one of them. And that does invite the question of, okay, but how? how because you have to make Hamas leave and they aren't. And who's going to ensure that outcome? Nobody at this point. I mean, literally nobody at this point.

All right. Well, I don't know how to transition you can't. Listen, let's just give in here. AI powered city, crypto tokens for people asked to leave. And Dutch people to leave. for everybody.

Dutch pancakes for everybody. This is going to work out fine. We're probably over-complicating this. This transition is why people write in complaining about the grievances is how from the Gaza, hellscape, horrifying story to let's complain about all our, you know, first world problems. But do we want to respond to that criticism? I mean, you kind of just did.

And to the extent I have a grievance, it might be, it might be with that sentiment today. Wait, you're aggrieved. You share the sentiment or you're grieved that hearing the sentiment? I'm somewhat aggrieved that the sentiment has been, not so much that it's been expressed, but that I can imagine there are a lot of people who share it who feel like, well, you know, you're making these transitions,

you're talking about a very serious issue, and then suddenly you're talking about something personal, closer to home, and kind of complaining about it and joking about it. And I think levity is actually really important and valuable. And the fact that we have to traffic in really difficult subject matter about conflicts that affect real people's lives that many, oftentimes, and in this particular case, we have deep personal entanglements in. And then we can transition from that to talking about something that is closer to home and perhaps a little funny. There's something good about that and virtuous and appropriate.

And I think you could certainly do that in a caustic way where you're expressing or demonstrating kind of disregard for the more serious fare. But I don't think we've ever done that here. And I think while I have a bit of a difficult relationship with the project of complaining about things because my mindfulness regimen is often informed by, I'm thinking about things and I want to be present and I want to be affirmative. And those are the things that I'm foregrounding. that's my only kind of resistance

but in general there are things that are worth complaining about in our everyday life if you stub your toe you still get to complain about that at the same time that you're having a conversation about some grave

matter of grave importance that actually threatens people's lives Yeah, not the same time just after. I mean if I'm having the conversation and I stub my toe I might stop to actually grieve for myself and then return back to the other

conversation. I will say as just an observation in my personal experience, I think the people that I've been around who spend the most time living in circumstances that my peers here in the first world would consider, you know, horrifying are the most likely to diffuse their daily struggles with humor and laughing and being self-admonishing. And I've experienced that in really impoverished places in Mexico, in India, in Thailand, the Netherlands, Curacao. No, and also I have a friend, a dear friend of mine who's done a lot of reporting in Iraq. And he always told me that the most striking thing about Iraqi people was like their sense of humor.

You just said they have the darkest, funniest sense of humor I've ever been around. Like any time something really truly awful happens, there's always like a sort of punchline or somebody making an edgy joke about it. And he always kind of respected that as like an almost virtuous thing. So thanks for the green light to complain a lot, Camille. That's really nice of you. I'll start, I'll start, John, you can play the music for the grievances. I guess maybe Camille's is on the board already, unless he's got more to add. That's it.

Go ahead. Hit the song. The airing of grievances. Between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal. All right, I'll start. Mine is actually semi-serious, so maybe that'll help. like a total laughable. Is it virtuous, though?

We're virtuous now. Yeah, virtuous complaining. Mine is daycare, is starting daycare with a child. So this is a serious topic because it matters. But the grievance is just, A, nobody told me how emotionally difficult it would be. I was just sort of like, I mean, my wife tried to, but, you know, I ignored her. Um, calm down. It's going to be fine. He's going to be totally good. And then we drop him off for his first day of day care. And we're just both immediately weeping. Um, I, the thing that I, like, knew about, but was less prepared for was just like, it's just a complete dynamiting of all the things, like the nap schedule and the feed routine and the timing. And now we're getting updates. And he's like going from sleeping an hour and a half in the morning and is sleeping for 30 minutes in the morning. And of course, he's he's napping differently in a room with seven other babies than, you know, around people he doesn't

know, than he was comfortable at home and our like perfectly manicured sound machine, you know, system that we've been napping him in. So that all sucks. And then it's just like this overwhelming sense of like, how is this the system that we've landed on? I mean, all credit, the people who do this work are unbelievable. They're incredible. like the men and women working at his daycare center. But, you know, it's like we're paying for the village instead of having it organically. And society now is just built in a place where like if my wife wants to have a career and ambitions, which she does, which I love and support. And I want to do that in the, you know, which has been traditional and the norm forever, then we need somebody to take care of our kids.

and like grandparents are sometimes close, sometimes far away, but not prepared to do that sort of thing five days a week. And, you know, we know our neighbors and we're friendly with them, but we're not like in some societal structure. We just like dump our kids there five days a week. And so instead we do this thing where we pay exorbitant amounts of money to go leave him with a stranger for the day when he's eight months old. and it's really hard.

It's emotionally taxing. It seems like a fundamentally broken way for society to work. I don't have a better idea or a solution. But yeah, we're living through it right now. We're in day two. Yesterday, he was totally fine. Today, we plopped him down on the floor in there, and it's like he knew.

Like, we're about to leave for eight hours or six hours or whatever and did his little fuss. but yeah, I don't know. It's a tough one. So that's my grievance is I'm going through first week of daycare. Parents out there, you have advice. Send it to me.

I'm open. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how to get through this stage. But it's a tough one for sure. Camille, you have to respond to it because I'm not going to tell my story about dropping a puppy off at daycare. That's just going to be so...

You can. You can. Before I had a kid. kid. I had the dog. He kind of felt like my own and actually taught me a bunch of lessons that made me a better dad. He suffered through things so my children wouldn't have to. They suffered through different things as a result. I think the best thing I can say, Isaac, and I've said something like this to you before is let it burn. Like actually lean into it, feel it. And do your grieving and also be preposterous to grateful that you have the opportunity to do this thing. And I think what I said to you yesterday was, this is the first of many times you will endure something where you're taking your kids someplace, you're leaving them on their own, and they begin this bizarre adventure of having a life that does not involve you, or at least portions of their life that doesn't involve you. And at the moment, you know, he's still becoming fully conscious

and self-aware. But at age three, at age seven, at age 16, with driver. license at age 18 again when he goes off to university, to the extent we still have such things, you will be experiencing this thing over and over and over again. I actually saw someone yesterday, I think it was George Packer at Thomas Chatterton Williams event. And we were talking about one of his kids who just went off to college. And I said, how was that? And he said, it was hard. And I'm sure it's also rewarding and wonderful because you're seeing this manifestation of the quality of the work that you put in and the returns and dividends. And on it, I hope.

But you're also, you're losing something. And you ought to mourn it and feel it and be present for it. Because there will be a time when you miss all of this. So being aware of that in the moment and really feeling it is probably for the best. And I think even yesterday you had this response about like really wanting to be available to like be there and spend a little bit more time with him before you took him. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly. right. That's what we do. Yeah. I'm going to try and lean in. I think the one small change we

already made that help is we stopped calling at daycare and we started calling at school. We're just taking him to school. We're dropping him off at school. It's a normal thing. He's going to go hang out. It evokes this feeling of like friends and teachers and learning, which is what it is. He's spending time with all his first like daycare. We're going to just like give him to other people who are going to care for him while we abandon him. So yeah, we've, we've, our little language change, I think, helps a bit today. I don't know. I don't think it helped him at all, but it helped us.

I have a little small theory that I'm trying to nurse. Maybe a theorlet, I don't think it's fully evolved yet and see what you existing dads think about it. I think that there are ways that we're getting like a sort of dispersed village

that support us in ways that are less obvious. Like there's no, somebody's going to come in and watch my kid all the time and I'm going to go do all the work things that I need to support them to the household. But I think there's, there's ways that people kind of step up to help share your other burdens. Like, at work, I mean, this is not a complaint, but like, Isaac will need to pick up Omri from daycare or drop them off or something, but like, hey, I'm out for 30 or whatever. Like, can you guys just handle whatever task?

And we're like, yeah, man, of course. And right now I know, like, my co-coach for the University of Vermont Frisbee team, Jake, like, he just had his, he and his wife. just had their second kid and he's been running fall tryouts for like 11, 12 years and he's really good at it and he's, he can't be there for fall tryouts and it's tough for him. And he's asking like, can you help and do this? And the dev team coaches are stepping up to do more and we're like, yeah, of course, man, we got you. People send food. People step up and help you take care of stuff that's outside of your like intimate daily routines. I think there's still a village there is what I'm saying. And I don't think it's necessarily a terrible thing that there's

like an industry of professionals that have evolved standards for how to help you watch your child more, rather than relying on hopefully you have somebody nearby who you trust. Because that's kind of hit or miss. Like that village to raise a child sort of implies that you have a stable village. And I don't think that's historically been constantly the case. So it could actually be a good thing that this is the way things are developing. I'm not sure if I'm like committed to that, but it's something that I'm thinking about. Yeah. I think it's a reasonable theory. I mean, I have a piece in the bank. I don't know when I'm going to publish it, but I've started outlining it already about just like how having a kid has, you know, what was the old viral construction? It is restored my faith in humanity. That was like the old, every BuzzFeed article was like, these 10 pictures restored my faith in humanity. But it kind of has. Like I, all I heard before we had a change.

child was like this country hates kids, we're anti-children, we're not equipped for kids, you know, we're like the birth rates plummeting and parenthood's so hard and stressful and all this stuff. And like, yeah, parent, it's hard in some ways, but it's also like super simple and other ways, just like changes diaper, you know, at this age at least, you know, it's like keep them happy and like, you know, it gets more and more complex as you get older, I'm sure, as they get older. But like, we take this big. Maybe everywhere we go, people are just brimming with courtesy, generosity, advice. You know, they, like, old women in their 90s, paws walking down the street to look at him and marvel

at him and tell us what a cute baby is and, you know, what their kids were like. And, you know, then they give their one-liner, like the, you know, the days are long, the years are short, whatever. And then, like, two minutes later, we turn a corner and it's like a five. five-year-old kid is like, oh my God, look at that baby and freaks out and wants to stop and look at him. And like we just, you know, every flight we've taken, there's like half dozen people ask us if we need any help carrying the stroller or getting them out. It's like, people are so warm and generous. And I'm like, oh, like I totally bought this like bullshit online narrative that like I was like

bracing myself for like, we walk into a restaurant with a kid and like the hostess is like no children allowed like we don't you know we don't have any high chairs get out of here and it's like the complete opposite just like so much joy and love and whatever and so yeah it's really given me a much more positive view about the society we live in so to that end like i do recognize the village i feel it a little bit um it just feels a little broken or weird to like dump your kid with these strangers who are strangers right yeah yeah yeah can me out you have a Do you have a grievance? Are you aggrieved? Apart from the one I gave, not really.

If I were to add any addendum to it, would only be that if one can publish a profoundly important work on man's search for meaning and the context and setting for that book is a concentration camp, it feels appropriate to be able to kind of grieve for yourself and complain and to talk about meaning and purpose in virtually any context. I appreciated the earlier talk of people who live in desperate situations, finding humor and love and manifesting those things in their own circumstances. And yeah, I think that that's powerful and worth remembering. That's all I will say. It's not much of a grievance. Well, I don't want to open up a whole new debate here, but I think it, I don't know that it logically follows from that,

that, like, people who can be in the dire situations can joke about it means that people who aren't who are talking about the dire situations can then do so in a way where it kind of presents a holistic product to the listener. I think that's the complaint. I mean, I feel I'm off air. I'm going to complain anyway, but the purposes of what we produce as a show. I don't know. I still think it has a purpose.

Yeah, I think there are ways to be callous. I just don't think that we manage to do that ever. But perhaps I'm going to be overly generous to us. But I also try to be generous to everyone. Yeah, well, I like that. All right, you're up. Take us home. Okay.

So 13 years ago, I was kayaking through Lake Powell in January offseason. I was taken to a little slot cannon on a boat by one of the speedboat captains. He was the only person on the lake that day, which meant when he left, I was the only person on the lake that day, and I was kayaking down this bizarre alien landscape. I don't know if you've ever been to Lake Powell. It's a flooded canyon, controversially so, but it's like a big crystal blue lake in the middle of what feels like Mars. It's an incredibly rare and strange landscape to be alone in. And I remember when I was on the lake feeling aggrieved by the fact that there was a distant hum of,

a power generating plant a few miles away. And I was thinking, where in the world could I possibly go where I could feel somewhat even momentarily disconnected from society? And the lesson that I learned from that is there's nothing you can do ever that is solitary. And there's things, no matter how far you go, you're wearing shoes that somebody produced for you, you ate a meal that somebody helped you pack, whatever it is. There's something where you are serving or you're existing at the grace of the others around you. And that is germane to my grievance, which is with Google Docs. I wish it were the case

that we could just produce Tango in a vacuum with no kind of tech reliances at all. I wish there was no greater ecosystem around us that we relied on. And yet, when somebody makes a mistake for a software company that we use, such that you click a button in Google Docs this whole week, you click a button and it just locks up.

You want to see the comments that people tagged you in? Tough. Now your screen's broken. Now you have to restart your whole browser. my fault. That's, that sucks. And I really wish that we weren't dependent on them, but we are. We are no, no company is an island. We're all attached to the main. And in this case, the attachment that we have is through Google and they've got a death grip on this industry of collaborative simultaneous editing documents. And they are just getting progressively worse. That's my, that's my grievance for the day. I love it. Perfect. I mean, I've done.

I heard about this there's this submersible called the Titanic that you could take into the ocean if you want to really get terrible. That's a terrible way of proving what I said wrong is that you're in something that somebody made for you to do that.

Yeah, that will also break and kill everybody on board, which just happened. I just watched the Netflix documentary about that and it blew my mind. All right, we got to. to get out of here. We're way over time, fellas. I'm going tonight to, well, I won't say it yet. I'm going tonight to the free press Amy Coney-Barrant conversation, which I'm very excited about. So by the time people hear this, that'll be over. And I'm looking forward to talking

about it next week on the podcast because I'm going in, I will put my flag in the ground. I'm going into this believing that Supreme Court justices should not do interviews like this. I bought a ticket for it, and I'm going to watch, and I can't wait. But I'm interested if that opinion holds for me by the end of tonight, and maybe we can chat about that on the podcast next week. Hard disagree. Hard disagree.

Hell of a day for the free press, too. Yeah. No, yeah, huge day for them, and I'm unbelievable a get for Barry. I'm so happy for them. If we could get Amy Coney Barrett to come do a tango live event, I would of course do it. I'm not sure that

that should be happening. But Maybe that'll be a good, ripe discussion point for us next week. Yeah. All right, we've got to run. Fellas, great time, as always. I'll see you guys soon. Bye. Later, Travis Day.

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. 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,

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