Tangle - Suspension of the rules. - Isaac, Ari and Kmele talk screwworm arrival, election fraud, AI in campaign videos and huge news from the Ari Weitzman household!

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Coming up on todays episode of Suspension of the Rules, huge news from the Ari Weitzman household, screwworm has arrived, more election fraud conspiracies and Kmele and Isaac debate whether or not AI should be banned for campaign videos. It's a good one!We’re coming to the stage!In 10 days, Isaac and a panel of sharp thinkers are coming to West Virginia to discuss the societal effects of artificial intelligence. They’ll tackle questions like, What would happen if AI disappeared today vs. five years from now? Who makes a stronger case between the cynics and the optimists? Could we ban AI even if we wanted to? It’ll be a scintillating chat, and you can be in the room where it’s happening if you get your tickets now.Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by: Isaac Saul and audio edited and mixed by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Jon Lall.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming up, a major breaking news story from the Ari Weitzman household. Screwworm has arrived. We're doing election fraud conspiracies again. And Camille and I debate whether we should ban AI campaign videos. It's a very good episode. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. And welcome to the suspension of the rules podcast. I'm your host, Isaac Saul.

I'm here with Tangle Managing Editor Ari Weizman and our editor at large, Camille Foster. Still a fake job title, Camille. But we're so glad you're here with us. Listen, this is our last, we've got to talk about it. This is our last recorded show before our live event in West Virginia this weekend. Technically, a live recording of the suspension of the Rules podcast, though we will only be two-thirds of our unit for the weekend. We'll be missing Ari Weitzman this weekend.

And normally I'd be really sad about that. But in this case, it's kind of, it's a good thing. It's a happy thing. Ari, I mean, what better time than now, my friend? I think, do you have something you'd like to share with our audience? Katie and I, my wife, are not leaving a 25-mile radius of the hospital where we plan to welcome our child into the world. Any day. Do you date at the end of the month? Yeah. So probably going to have another suspension of the rules or two before then. But if I'm suddenly missing and Isaac's cage you about it, and he's just not going to be here for a while, it's a good thing. It's fine. It's good. It's a good thing. Yeah. Yes.

Yeah, we're not laying you off. You haven't been fired. We're not leaving you behind for the show. Depending on how this episode goes, we'll see. Yes, no. Big shoes to bill Andy Melsana now. Yeah, yeah. I'm excited.

I'm excited to be... We need a two people, actually, to replace you. Yeah, that's right. We need two people. I'm excited to have you on the other side of the fatherhood journey so we can talk shop. And, of course, congratulations. We'll be anxiously awaiting the news. I'm on the official text threat update list with the parents and the very close circle.

So, Ari has... What did you say you have a system? I'm going to get three text messages when you go to the hospital. That's a message, too. Message one, when labor starts, which is also going to, that's going to double as the My Paternity leave the starting message.

Yeah. The second message is we're on the way to the hospital, and the third message is birth. Nice. Knocking on lots of wood. Let's go. Labor's over, and then don't talk to me. What are the rules?

Are you allowed to take your phone into the OR now? Yeah. I think you are? Probably. I mean, I'd be surprised if not, but I had my phone. I was gambling on football the whole town. No, you definitely can. Yeah, you can. I was, I was, I was definitely locked in. Okay. You know, getting tense messages from family and friends, you know, but it was there for sure.

I have some gnarly, gnarly and beautiful photos of my child emerging into the world, been covered in. What do we call that? Filth, actually. I'm doing the stuff all over the kid. First of all, I'm sure, I'm hopeful that those photos will stay between you and your family. Oh, no. I'm posting them on Instagram as we speak, actually. Okay. Well, just to create a burner account and do that.

Actually, I'm having the same experience, a similar experience that I had during that episode that I wrote the story for for Press Pass about me sending that that anonymous letter to the Pitt news about, it's a whole thing, go read press pass. I won't repeat the story here. I'm much better storyteller when I write than when I speak. So check out press pass if you haven't already. But at that time, I was like studying for the LSAT because I wanted to get a good score to tutor it. And I went to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and got both of its LSATs.

So all of their books and like prepared and studied. And I was done in three days and the test was in weeks. So I forgot all of the prep. by the time the test came around. So my score suffered. And that's a little bit what's happening with labor. Like when we were, when we learned the baby was coming and like we're meeting the milestones early.

Like I think I'm like five books in, six books now maybe. Yeah. And I forget all the, like a lot of the terms that I learned at the beginning. So I don't remember what the baby is covered in when he comes out. My experience was every piece of advice with the exception of like three or four that I got before Omri was born, I just immediately forgot them. It's just like, it's such a flood, an overwhelming experience. You're just like, you just start acting on instinct and everything is out the window and

you don't really remember any of it, except for a few really closely held tips and tricks that I got. But yeah, that sounds right to me. Well, buried in this very, very happy announcement is our final promo for our event, which again, we're sorry not to have already there, but we are excited about our guests, Andy Mills, Kat Rosenfield from the Free Press. We're going to be at the Star Theater, the historic Star Theater, in Berkeley Springs. I think this episode should come out on Thursday sometime.

So you'll have three days. The show is Sunday at 2 p.m. in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. We also have a VIP dinner Saturday night, though, unfortunately. if you're listening to this and don't have tickets, that dinner is sold out already. But there are some general admission tickets left. I'm super pumped by this because we've done New York, we've done L.A., we've done Philly,

we've done sort of like the big metropolitan areas where we know we have an audience. This is the first time we've tried to fill a room in a smaller American town that's like not really closely tied to some big U.S. city. So, you know, we've sold a bunch of tickets already, but we haven't sold out yet, and I would love to do that.

So if you were thinking of, about, you know, hey, I could use a weekend away or one night in a new place and you live within a five or six hour drive of Berkeley Springs. I think it would actually really be worth it. The show is going to be awesome. We're going to be talking a lot about AI on stage, probably the cultural implications of it, sort of the political stuff surrounding it. Andy just produced and was the journalist on the biggest artificial intelligence podcast of the year. So he's got this unbelievable wealth of knowledge. Kat's an awesome cultural writer and touches on a lot of this stuff in her writing.

And then Camille and I are brilliant. So obviously you want to hear us talk and bladded us. You guys are going to sound so much better by comparison too without me there. Right. Yeah, exactly. We want to have Arie's pedantry holding us down. Head and true. Yeah, exactly.

I knew that was coming. I thought that was deliberate. Yeah, a little layup. All you. Look, I... Before I could correct you. Yeah. Yeah.

I really am really excited for the show. It'll be the last thing, the last promo you got on this podcast about it. So if you haven't listened yet, or if you haven't bought your tickets yet, please do that in the episode description. You can go to our website, retangle.com forward slash live to check them out. So speaking of Ali Ups, Isaac. Ooh. Nice. Speaking to Alleyubes.

Or confusing alliubes with layups. Right, right. We're gonna, yeah, we're gonna, we have something special this week, something a little different. I don't know what, like, the title of the show should be, but I feel like it's something akin to the revisiting everything we talked about last week that all changed in seven days episode. Probably at the top of that list is the fact that the New York Knicks are two games away from winning an NBA championship.

So Camille, you can eat shit. That's something I'll be able to say soon on the show. But take that to the bank. They just lost. They just lost the game. They're going to win tonight. They'll be up 3-1 tomorrow night with three chances to close the series out. I'm very confident in that.

There's, you know, Camille's sending total propaganda videos to our team slack of Nick fans. quote unquote. People not even wearing any Nix paraphernalia like fighting outside the stadium is proof that he is right that the New York Knicks success is turning New York City

into some degenerate, awful town. I mean, it is. That is happening. I'm glad you didn't refer the videos as cheap fakes. So at least acknowledge that they are real videos of New Yorkers,

of the fandom, assaulting people in the street for wearing the wrong jersey. I want good things for the Knicks. I like Jalen Brunson. I am not pleased with the fandom and I want God to punish them through the spurs. That is what I want. Nine million people live in New York City and you find two videos on Twitter of a couple flights outside Times Square. Fights that are happening every night in Times Square anyway because there's nine million people who live in the city and interact with each other. I think it's a miracle.

There isn't more destruction and violence in the sea. Look, I lived in Philadelphia for four years, Okay. So I know what it's like when a sports fan base actually destroys things. I've witnessed that firsthand. We have not had that in New York City yet, and I will not tolerate New York Knicks fan slander. Even though I'm not even a New York Knicks fan. I'm a broken that's fan.

But I'm on the bandwagon and I'm in it for the city. Okay. And go Nix. It's Nix and 6th. That's the anthem. Yeah, we'll be there soon. What's the counterfactual, though? Like what if the Knicks win,

What is the level of degeneracy above which you'll say Camille was right? Statue of Liberty sinks into the... I think that's a fair line for me. I think that's a fair thing to say. Yeah, we could lose whole swaps of the city, as long as the Statue of Liberty is still standing. On its island. So that's an agreement.

Sounds like consensus. More than 100 people die or the Statue of Liberty gets taken down. That's my threshold for saying if things went too far. I'll say more than 100 arrests. How's that? More than 100 arrests related to the demonstration. Whoa, more than 100 arrests over the like third percentile of the mean or like a 24 hour. Over a 24 hour period directly related to the game.

That's what we'll say. All right. There will definitely be more than 100 arrests. So we're going to have to find a different standard. All right. Well, this is a politics show. So we should get into the real controversy of the week. Last week, this is why we're calling this the episode about the things we discussed seven days ago that have all meaningfully changed in the last seven days.

Working title. Yeah, working title. I'm going to type that one. I'm sure our YouTube team's going to love that. We were here talking about the Los Angeles mayoral race, and I was saying very, very smart things. Like, Spencer Pratt kind of gives a vibe like he might actually scare Karen Bres. Bass and the Democratic establishment and could potentially, like, he's not going to win, but, you know, there's a thing happening here that we should be watching and paying attention to.

Spencer Pratt did not end up in the runoff. He lost to a Democratic socialist, self-proclaimed, who's challenging Karen Bass from the left, which has sparked all manner of election conspiracy theories. the president of the United States, I can't believe we're doing this again, but it's 2026. It has been six years since the 2020 election, and he's still alleging every election that does not go the way he wants it to is fraudulent and fake. And he's poured some gasoline on the fire, and they're, you know, J.D. Vance is out there saying things are shady. The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson is implying that the election was somehow corrupted. And it's put us in this horrible spot where we're once again talking.

talking about election conspiracy theories. I saw a remarkable, I mean, genuinely remarkable Washington Times opinion column today, basically saying that the author basically talked to chat GPT and determined that the results of the election were statistically impossible based on a bunch of absurd assumptions that actually don't apply to the election, including one where they said that there was a batch of votes that came in where Spencer Pratt received zero votes. This is a conspiracy theory that's been going rampant on the internet. The claim originated through a screenshot of some associated press reporting on the actual election results.

Trump's own appointed district attorney came out and said, this is nonsense. This was a reporting issue when they actually reported all the candidates vote totals from the batch of mail-end ballots that came, Spencer Pratt had thousands of votes, but he was just outnumbered seriously. So I don't know what's... I'm almost out of ideas about how to address this stuff. I mean, obviously, as you both know,

I was very much in the trenches on this six years ago and in the three or four years after the election. But it is surreal to be here again. I mean, I'll just say up top, I guess my framing, and then I'm curious for your guys' thoughts. It kind of feels like if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran to be mayor of Birmingham and lost, and we're all like, fraud. There's no way this is real. It's like, well, actually, a Republican ran to be mayor of Los Angeles and could only muster

20-something percent of the vote, that sounds pretty much right on, actually, based on the makeup of Los Angeles and California writ large. I guess I'm interested in see what you guys are. I mean, I know there's not going to be a dissenting voice here because the two of you are rational things, but how you're processing the narrative that's quickly popping up out of the California. I should say the Los Angeles mayor race specifically, because conveniently, Steve Hilton won the gubernatorial, you know, finished second in the primary. So he's going to run head to head, uh, with. with Javier Becerra, but nobody's questioning that results because...

That's because you do that to throw them off the trail. That way they don't know. Yeah, exactly. What you really want to do is keep them from the crown jewels. Yeah. I think we got to start last week in the theme of this episode, title thing that is too long to repeat. But last week, we covered this race,

and we talked about how, hey, this is... there's possibly going to be a shakeup here. It would be a big deal. Spencer Pratt's on the cusp of potentially going through the primary into the general election. And we need to be paying attention to that. And we were off, I think, at least in the newsletter, the tone that we struck as a team editorially was like open to that, not just as a possibility, but as a probability, if not a thing that we expected to happen.

I think that was the tone that we kind of brought into our discussion too was like, this is about to happen. Not this might or he's performing well, but we were really on the idea that he was going to hold on to that lead, despite the fact that we knew the red mirage was going to fade as the mail-on ballots came. California has a system of counting votes that are earmarked by election day rather than received by election day, and we know that liberal voters tend to vote by mail more than conservative or Republican voters. So it's a thing that we probably could have seen coming. We did.

Just to be clear, we did. People predicted this was going to happen. People predicted, but it's not a thing that we specifically said. And for that, like, I think we have to take the blame and put it all on John Law. Because John is like, I know L.A. man, and I have people telling me that this could be a big deal. Shockwaves are coming. So as always, like, responsibility, we have to look inward and we have to blame John. Shame on you, John.

And if you're upset with John and you want to give him some feedback personally, you can email will W-I-L at Rutangle.com. Just where it's supposed to be from there. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a fair point. Although I do remember during the conversation, us at least having a conversation discussing the fact that a lot of the energy surrounding this campaign for Spencer Pratt was coming from outside.

Republicans love to hate California. They love to kind of talk and marvel at the genuine dysfunction of the state, both at the gubernatorial level, but certainly when it comes to L.A. and San Francisco, which have just been models of dysfunction for a very, very long time. And it's caused a lot of political upheaval. And I do think that some of that resonance, again, mostly national. A lot of those meme ads were getting generated by people outside of the state, outside of the city.

But it is still the case that there was some cultural significance there. I do think some of those guerrilla tactics were relevant and perhaps had created some unique pressure. and the fact that even the gubernatorial race has been shaken up, and you do have a conservative outperforming expectations in the state does tell you something. You know, the result, though, and whether or not there's any evidence of conspiracy here, I'm not going to dissent because that would be an extraordinary thing to have happen. There are levels of transparency and accountability in most American elections, because we live in a generally functional democracy,

despite the fact that we have seen an increasing number of these claims of stolen elections, Republicans have done a bang-up job of really kind of dominating that particular industry, but they do not exclusively hold the rights to that. And we saw that after the last presidential race, talk of stolen elections. We certainly saw that. Even in the Hillary Trump race, people may not remember that talk of stolen elections was pretty regular and routine and certainly a lot of the Russia gate narratives connected to that as well. So that's going to be here with us for a very long time. And certainly while Donald Trump is the president, we're going to

see more and more of that. I think there was even a story in the New York Times this past week about Democrats talking about election meddling and kind of banging the drum about that. In that case, they were talking about outside dark money groups spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to boost essentially the worst kind of Democrat candidates. And that's a real thing that happens, of course, Democrats do it too, and one may call that meddling in elections, and to the extent it affects the result. I don't know that we can call that stealing elections or perhaps even cheating. I do want to ask you guys something, though, which is, like, what do you think about California's system that they count the votes that come by mail,

earmarked by election day, up until, I think, what, 10 days, seven days after? Like, does that feel like it opens the door for these questions? to you or just people have to. Sure. I think it's a terrible system. I mean, I mean, I don't, I think that there are other states. I mean, the problem of California is that it's huge. And there's so many people that live there and there's so many votes to process. And that is like part of the inherent challenge. But there are other states that are counting mail-in ballots that arrive postmarked on time after election day and are still getting things done in a speedier fashion or at least feel like they're closer to a conclusion of the race.

faster. Something, I mean, and I follow a lot of California election experts and people who, you know, work in the business of helping the government count these ballots and process them. And all of them have sort of like different hobby horse theories about how to fix the system. But it just seems like there are several different major flaws that slow things down tremendously and breed this mistrust. And this is, look, you know, this is part of my voter ID switch, where I used to kind of buy into what I think is actually probably not really demonstrated reality that voter ID laws will suppress turnout or suppress voter participation. I think we could pass voter ID laws that are paired with government programs to make sure anybody who needs a photo ID has one to increase trust in election. and also in some cases to actually speed the process up because identifying and verifying people's votes

becomes easier and simpler. I think California has a similar problem where it's like there are these bad actors on one side who are falsifying information and I think like genuinely misleading the public right now it's conservatives and Republicans in this election and creating fantastical dramas about the election being stolen. but they are preying on a system that is almost designed to breed distrust.

And so I don't think it's like those people are lying and we don't need to address their claims. It's like, no, those people are lying. And also you can improve the system in a way that makes their lies more obvious by making the system function better, feel more transparent, work quicker and increase trust with the public. there are some good counterfactuals there. Like there are states that have adopted voter ID laws and then, you know, Trump and conservatives will still claim the elections were stolen even after they have voter ID laws.

And I know that there's, that that's like a hard problem to solve if they're committed to that tact. But I do think California has a lot of room to grow here. And I think they should. I think they should reform their election systems in ways that speed the results up. that still count the ballots. You can still stick to your guns on postmark ballots, but, you know, we have to get the early day result, the day of results in faster, process faster, and those mail

and ballots that are coming in postmarked late need to be processed and counted faster because what's happening now is just not tenable. And I think there's plenty of mistrust of the system in a nonpartisan fashion. It's not just Republicans in California who feel this way. I think all of that is fair. I might dissent and say if you can at least set expectations extremely clearly with respect to when these votes are likely to come in and how they could have some impact on the election unexpectedly, that is better than what they're currently doing. Because I don't even think that is done particularly well. But I would agree that optimizing the rules to at least make it harder for people to make these assertions of cheating is certainly. be a right approach here.

I want to take a quick break and then when we come back, I actually want to talk about Nitya Raman, who just is now the finalist running against Karen Bass, which nobody's really talking about. So we're going to chat about her right after this commercial break. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, welcome back to the show. I just, I wanted to talk about Nitya Ramin because I feel like lost in all of this is the fact that another member of the Democratic Socialist of America has basically made herself politically

relevant in a serious way. She's polling ahead of Karen Bass in some polls. She's running on this really interesting platform that is kind of at the intersection of some of the stuff Pratt was doing, this kind of like disaffected voice for L.A. and also doing it through this much more progressive lens. So, you know, she's talking a lot about homelessness, cleaning up the homeless encampments before the 2028 FIFA World Cup. But it's not the Pratt angle where it's like, we're going to do mandatory drug screening for all of them. It's like we need to get these people housing, get them off the streets, clean them up, invest in, like, you know, helping this homeless community get on their feet. She's been talking about executive orders to speed up housing

across Los Angeles. She's kind of taken this, I would say almost Mamdani-like approach to talking about the city's issues where it is very, very populist, very, progressive, and it worked.

I mean, the votes, as we just talked about, the votes she got were real. They were not fraudulent. I mean, maybe we'll find out there was some fraud in the election, but I think she won legitimately. And I think she,

she has a real shot to actually unseat Karen Bass, based on some of the polling we're seeing, especially if California Republicans or Los Angeles Republicans who are going to vote for Pratt now check out. So I don't know. I'm sort of surprised. I think because the election fraud stuff and Pratt's story was so dominant, now nobody's really talking about the fact that we have another progressive candidate who ran a populist campaign getting a bunch of foothold. and I mean, if she wins, you have her on the West Coast and Mamdani on the East Coast. This is a huge win for progressives who are trying to push the Democratic Party left and bring in more progressive leadership, especially in these mayoral seats that have huge, huge power nationally,

despite the fact that they're obviously ensconced in this kind of urban metropolitan areas. like Mandani has thrown his weight around nationally, clearly. And she feels like somebody who's going to do the same. So I guess I'm curious maybe to start, why you guys think that story is not being talked about as much. And if this feels like a trend or another sort of flash in the pan and maybe her odds against Karen Bass are being overstated a bit. I mean, that narrative is going to be competing against the national narrative

with respect to stolen elections in L.A. So I suspect that's the number one reason a story like that isn't trending. I think the other reason, though, is we've had Mandami and we've had other DSA-adjacent and DSA candidates do pretty well in other parts of the country so long as it is a deep blue place. These talking points, these narratives, can be popular in certain places.

I think the real question is whether or not this translates into national politics in the same way. I mean, Bernie Sanders was really, the first person to have tremendous success and get a tremendous amount of attention running as a DSA person in kind of the modern era of our politics and was the template for a lot of these races as well. But again, when you're not running against the Republican, when you don't have to appeal to moderates in the same sort of way, is this likely to be the right thing? The other thing you see with candidates like this is them frantically trying to scrub their social media history to get rid of all of the posts about how they said defund the police and all sorts of other stuff that for a moment

seemed to be part of a rising tide amongst mainstream Democrats. And today are very clearly not what the standard bearers of the Democratic Party are talking about. And it doesn't really seem to be what most Democratic voters are interested in outside of these really deep blue enclaves. So it's hard to know whether or not these people are kind of running against unpopular incumbents who represent the kind of rank-in-file or at least establishment Democratic Party, and they are the young new upstarts, and they can win by being kind of particularly muscular and aggressive and pushing the kind of left edge of the party, or if there is genuinely this kind of rising tide of DSA-oriented sentiment amongst voters across the country. And I'm not certain

if that's true. I think the populist sentiment is clearly something that has gained a real foothold in our politics. That's going to be with us for a while. It's happening on the left and the right. I do still think a lot of what the DSA program has to offer is stuff that just for the moment, I think a good thing, actually, not necessarily going to win you a lot of national attention. But that's national attention. I mean, we are talking still about these deep blue enclaves where DSA candidates are performing well. I'm sort of in one of them in Vermont where we have the er Democratic Socialist Senator and Bernie Sanders and then New York City with Mayor Mammondani and now potentially Los Angeles. I think if that is the trend and you narrowly define it that way, very good chance that Rahman ends up winning this election.

I think you've got a historical kind of quasi trend line in the last couple years showing support for Democratic Socialists more. progressive candidates that have a template to succeed against, like you said, on popular incumbents. The thing that is, I, now, again, I don't think it's going to be a national trend. So I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time getting into that analysis because I don't think you really have enough data to say that's there. But the thing that's interesting to me, when I look at Nithio, sorry, when I look at Nithio Raman's resume here, I see a lot of boxes that could check for something that might appeal to President Trump. I see populist socialist agendas. He's talking about the sovereign wealth fund for tech companies

with Bernie Sanders. We've seen Trump be very supportive of Mayor Mimdoni, wanting to work with him in ways to try to advance more economic populist agendas. And I also look at a resume and I see Harvard undergrad, MIT. Trump loves those things. It might be very possible that there's a world where, okay, we get to the general election. Look, the Democrats may have rigged the primary against Pratt, but now they're definitely going to rig it against Rahman. And we could see, like, I don't know. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if, like,

there is a little bit of a heel turn in portions of Trump's camp towards Rahman. I'm not endorsing that fully because one of my theories about Trump is the number one thing he loves in the world more than anything else, more than Trump is New York City. So I think, like, he's just uniquely situated. to support Mamdani. But I think it's possible. Yeah.

And also, I mean, not to be like totally stripped down bare bones, Simpleton here, but the obvious thing is she's also beautiful. Mom Donny's like this handsome guy.

He's like, Trump's like, he couldn't help himself but kind of comment on that stuff, you know? He loves good looking people. Yeah. He loves good looking people.

Good looking men, good looking women. You know what? Fair to Trump, The man does not discriminate. He knows good mucks when he sees him. He's like a tree trunk. He's incredible.

Yeah. Yeah, that much is definitely true. All right, I want to move on to our third topic from last week that we discussed, which I feel like has escalated quickly in the last seven days, which is the screw worm story. I don't, I'm wary of, well, I'm not, I was going to say I'm wary of falling into being the screw worm guy, but actually I'm kind of embracing it. They'd be a tough label to wear, for sure. Yeah, you haven't seemed wary of wearing it.

Yeah, my neighbor who listens to the podcast said, he said something to me like, dude, the screw worm thing. It's like, you were right. And I was like, don't forget who told you first, bro, it was me. I was here. I put my line in the sand.

But no, it's, there's now front page stories about it all over, you know, the media industry. I saw the Atlantic did a big write-up on screw where I'm being a problem and already messing with cattle. The U.S. cattle herd is already the smallest that's been in something like 70 years. Prices of beef are already astronomical. And this story has arrived.

I was talking to my cousins who are cattle ranchers in West Texas. And they're, like, frantically trying to get some of their cattle and horses out of Texas because they're hearing stories from other ranchers in the region who are seeing the screwworm stuff pop up already. The kind of like real-world stuff for people who live in areas where this is going to start spreading is that you have to be really careful with your domesticated animals. If they have like open wounds, things like that,

they're going to need to be bandaged and keep an eye on them because that's kind of the thing that this, you know, flesh-eating animal-killing fly larvae, disgusting horror movie insect does. It finds open wounds and then lays eggs and then does its weird little flesh-eating thing. And I think so far, again, I want to be wrong about this, but it feels like it's developing quickly into the story that I thought it was going to, which is going to be one that's like pretty disruptive for our country and potentially the, you know, the agriculture and and cattle industry.

And there's this whole debate that's coming with it now about the responsibility of the Trump administration and Doge and whether they played a part in this or not. And so, you know, the tweet that I saw that sort of brought this back to the forefront, actually speaking of California, was from Governor Gavin Newsom's office. And he shared, I have to say,

a rather damning screenshot from a Newsmax article dated June 24th, 2025. The tweet from Newsmax was a government agency spending $300 million in taxpayer dollars to produce sterilized flies sounds like a dream scenario for a Doge team

looking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. And Gavin Newsom's tweet was, hey, Doge and Newsmax, can we get an update here? It turns out preventing flesh-eating parasite from invading U.S. livestock wasn't government waste. And it's true.

This was something my cousin actually brought up to me too. She said, like the thing, the solution that we have is basically creating these sterilized flies that reduce the population of the flies that have the

screw worm infection or whatever the terminology is. So it's legitimately a science problem, but we did, we cut into all these programs. And I am, yeah, I'm curious to hear

are some thoughts. I mean, I was a little bit dismissive of this take last week. And then the more that the story has come out and become important, the more reporting has come out about how like these specific programs were getting targeted. And I think the best defense of Doge is, look, this was happening in South America and Mexico. I never really left. We knew we had eradicated it here, but it could always come back and, you know, the timing sucks. And, But the correlation is kind of hard to ignore. And yeah, it feels like certainly in retrospect, there's a lot of tweets and news articles and proud thumb-chesting from the Doge fellows that just not look so good anymore.

Now that this is becoming an issue that we're all going to have to navigate. You know, the thing that I will just say until I'm wrong about it, which may be soon and hopefully is not, is the bias that I think we are one of the most pernicious kind of sneaky biases that seep into our brains as humans that's really hard to detect while it's happening is the belief that a trend that we're experiencing is going to continue to go up, that we're in the middle of a rising trend rather than one that is climaxing or reaching its crest and is about to go back down. I do believe what we're seeing is still trend. up. I think there's probably going to be more screw worm cases. But I'm cautious to extrapolate from

there that it's going to be a rising tide beyond a few pockets that are devastatingly affected. Some herds that are going to be really, really impacted by this, and then most herds that aren't. So we'll see. I mean, maybe you'll be right, Isaac, and take the grimaced victory lap of all time or decline doing so. while I just continue to say like I did not want to be this guy. But I'm hopeful that it's going to flatline sooner than maybe the stories imply. I don't want to take any grim victory laps. I just, yeah, you know, the haunt the virus stuff, the monkey pox stuff,

we've had these sort of stories that I would put in a similar genre. Measles, yeah. I just, yeah, I was just always like, eh, I don't really foresee this becoming an issue. And this one just to me had the makings in the beginning of something that I felt like was actually going to be really disruptive. And it's happening. I mean, it's becoming a story quicker than I think. And I will grant, it is certainly hard to know how much the media attention sort of distorts the actual reality on the ground. Like how much is the reality on the ground change in the last week?

Not all that much. But the media attention has come in, which sort of makes it all feel a little bit big. to me, especially when I have all these pre biases about this becoming a big issue. And I think that is like an important caveat. It could be all thoughts on the on the Doge responsibility for the screw worm outbreak. Well, Isaac, I want to just say that you are the most charismatic and respectable sky's falling dumber that I know. So I just want to put that out front and just pay that compliment.

But I think that there is, it is difficult to ignore the parallel there. The fact that there was a program that had a name that suggests that it may have some direct implications for the current outbreak that we're seeing. But by the time they were getting around the Doge, these particular cuts, Doge was getting around these particular cuts last year. It was already making its way into the country, as we talked about last week. And as you mentioned a moment ago, I think that that is pretty, important if we're going to talk about pointing fingers here and try to address what could

or could not have been done. I still haven't seen any tangible evidence that there was something that they could have done in the period where that program would have been in place to help mitigate against this. At least so far as things have gone now, maybe there's something that they would have been doing in the interim that could have helped later on down the line, but it's just not clear yet. I think it's always important to differentiate between the stated purpose of a program and perhaps even its name, which suggests that it's very good, and the actual efficacy of the dollars being allocated to particular government agencies who may or may not actually be eradicating homelessness

or poverty. Places like Los Angeles that we talked about earlier have spent tremendous amounts of money on anti-homelessness programming only to squander that money completely while homelessness explodes. So the need for reform and the need for actual programs that address these real problems that we have, those two things can definitely coexist. And it's always worth keeping that in mind. And you can dunk on the Trump administration as you well should in this particular instance and dunk on Doge in particular, again, as you well should. I think that there is a desperate need to curtail government spending and to put more accountability in government. I also think it is entirely possible to take that appropriate aspiration and to pair it with total incompetence

and a lack of self-awareness and a proclivity to be performative over actually doing something consequential and beneficial for the country and to get a really bad result. And I think that's what Doge managed to do above all else. They were trumpeting all these cuts, insisting that billions and billions of dollars were being saved, and they were doing it with smoke and mirrors for the most part. And I think that that's actually worth keeping in mind, too. They did manage to close a lot of agencies. They did manage to fire a lot of people,

but they barely managed to cut spending. And that, in and of itself, is a kind of totally different story of government mismanagement and disaster and sadness. And I think the story there is perhaps even bleaker than the story of, wow, they cut doge and look, now we have this epidemic of horrible flies that eat flesh and will cause a massive,

economic calamity. All right, we're going to take one last break. And when we come back, Camille's going to offer one of his worst takes he's ever offered. I hope you guys are ready. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, welcome back to the show. We had a good exchange in the Slack today that I decided I want to bring to the forefront and air out. not an airing of the grievances,

but an airing of some disputes here on suspension of the rules. I thought you were going to say you're going to air me out, which is another thing that can be said. Only if you show up for game six at Madison Square. Then you're getting laid out in the street. I'll be one of the hundred arrests. The thing that I saw on Twitter, let's start there.

I saw a video on Twitter of James Taurico. All right, maybe you can play the video for us, and John can share it on the show so we can give people just a quick flavor of what we're talking about. Boys in white dresses with blue satin sashes, girls dust with hormones till they grow moustaches, changing the gender of all your offspring. These are a few of my favorite things. That's James Talariko. Well, it's not actually James Talariko. It's an AI, a generation of James Tellerico singing about wanting to turn your kids into trans children or something. Very scary like that.

In the sound of music dress, which is great. Yeah, yeah. So I posted about this on Twitter. This is a campaign ad that Republicans have put hundreds of thousands of dollars behind. It's up right now. It's running in Texas. And I posted on acts, we need to ban these.

I think we should ban these, make them illegal. This should not be allowed in political campaigns and political adverts that are going out to the public. And Camille responded, hard disagree. So should I make my case first, or do you want to make your case first? I think you should make your case. I have to be arguing against something concrete here.

All right, great. Here's my case. First of all, I don't want to be one of like those cliche guys who's like, I'm a free speech absolutist. But go on. Just don't use the word absolutist for your side. Yeah, I don't say, it's possible I've said I'm a free speech absolutist. I don't think I have.

I think I usually hedge, like I say, I'm close to or I'm a free speech zeal it. But people listen to a show often know I very much lean in to a free speech ethos. And it's pretty rare for my sensibilities to be offended in a way where I abandoned that ethos. But here's what I'll say. There are limits on what is legal in political campaigning already. There's, for instance, you can't run a commercial claiming, like, I couldn't run for Republican Senate and say Donald Trump endorsed me if Donald Trump had not endorsed me. That's actually illegal in political campaigning. So there are like some boundaries that we've created in terms of of what is or isn't allowed

that I think fit perfectly well into our kind of free speech framework and I would say generating images, videos, sound bites of candidates saying things that they haven't said are clearly out of bounds

of like the spirit of political campaigning and if you're a television station a radio station or you're a podcast you're somebody who host these advertisements. I think it should be, the onus should be on you, and it should be illegal for you to take money from people and then publish something that effectively amounts

to just like open real-time live defamation where you are portraying somebody in a way or portraying them doing or saying something that they haven't done. Do I think a lot of people are going to watch that James Tolarico video and think that that's actually him? No. Some people might, but I don't think a lot of people will.

But like this was the, this is kind of like the Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, 2020 election fraud defenses. Oh, this was all entertainment. You know, they actually have to go to court and defend what they said and defend the lies that they spread.

And they say, this was all entertainment. We, nobody, no reasonable person would watch the show and take it seriously. It's like actually a lot of reasonable people did and they do take it seriously. and that's why you're sitting in a courtroom right now is because you lied about, you know, smartmatic or whatever, Dominion voting systems.

So I think, you know, if there were a television show portraying James Tallerico in the context of entertainment doing something like this, fine. You know, if you're a YouTube channel and you do comedy and you're like, you love making fun of politicians and that's what your whole show is, and you create this AI-generated video of him doing this song, whatever. This is a pack spending money on a political ad that's running on television, radio, etc.

And I think these should be illegal. I think we should ban them. I think we can do it. And I think it's bad for the country and bad for democracy if these are allowed to just happen freely unchecked without any regulation. I think in general, it is a bad idea for candidates to lie. and it would be great if they didn't lie. It would be great if PACs didn't run nefarious ads and ads that made dubious claims.

And in that respect, I would agree that making these fake ads, these AI generated, generally speaking, because presumably, I mean, that's how this was done. I don't know that for sure, but I presume that that's the case, as opposed to hiring an actor. But the reality is that you can just make these. It's really, really cheap. And it's even easier to disseminate them.

And it's really, really easy to make them cheaply and disseminate them in ways that have absolutely no connection to the campaign. So do we really need laws to prevent the campaigns themselves from engaging in this behavior? In fact, is it really even advantageous to the campaigns themselves to engage in this kind of behavior? It seems like exactly the sort of thing that helps burn your credibility, that maybe gets you marginalized, that the other candidate can point to

to look at the dirty tricks being employed by my opponent here. Aren't these the worst of the worst kind of human beings? They think that this kind of thing is great and ought to make certain that we're sort of taken seriously. As you said, this particular ad, no one thinks that this is actually James Telerico singing as Julie Andrews in this particular ad. I wouldn't say nobody, I think most people,

but I actually think there's probably people out there who have been so kind of red-pilled about how crazy is for transatl, people or whatever that maybe he went on some show and he did this. Okay, fine. So someone may. But in general, the reality is that you can't stop everyone from making these. And the fact that anyone could make them and that they could travel just as far,

if not further, being made by someone outside for no money whatsoever, means that this is a law that gets enacted that's likely to have no real consequence in terms of actually limiting the number of these things that gets produced and could very well lead to some kinds of, even if unknown and hard to predict abuses by various campaigns, kind of making allegations back and forth about whether or not people are engaged in this kind of conduct.

So I think that's the real concern I have. The proliferation of laws policing speech in different ways is actually a specific sort of concern that is perhaps not talked about enough. And that's where the actual free speech, absolutely just like myself, I get a little bit mift. Like, I get it. The FTC is there. They're trying to defend things like decency.

I get frustrated watching the NBA finals with my kids because every other commercial is for a horror movie or some betting app or something else that I don't like. And generally speaking, I would love to have the ads be more family friendly. But I don't need anyone to police that for me. And in much the same way, I think the best thing that we can. can hope for for voters is that they become more thoughtful and more aware of the fact that these fake ads can be generated as opposed to trying to police them into oblivion through legislation of various kinds. Let me ask you two follow-up questions and then I want to bring Ari in and get his, as a neutral observer of sorts, his thoughts. First question and try and answer quickly,

briefly, if you can, would your position, I don't know who I forgot about. I was talking to. Would your position change if the video was of Tala Rico, like, if it was a really convincing video of him saying some things he never said about illegal immigrants or something where it was like, you know, a new recordings release of Tala RICO and it's like some footage that looks like it was done on a camcorder and somebody had, and it's like really convincing and it looks like Tala RICO is saying, actually, if I ever become a senator, I'm going to ensure that we let all the illegal immigrants in. Would that change your mind if the content were more persuadable and less obviously fake?

I want to give that some thought. My initial instinct is to say, no, I might not change my mind. I mean, would it matter to you if the same thing was being done by a voice actor who just kind of sounded like him? Or if someone was reading a statement that was kind of attributed to him but not actually from him? or that was Frankenstein and not actually his. I mean, all of those are things that real campaigns have done

in traditional campaign ads and have done many times for years. And what the opponent does is call it out and say, that isn't what I said. That isn't how I said it. That's certainly not what I meant. And I think that that is just something that's always been with us. Again, it's just, it is really hard to police that kind of, let's call it slanderous conduct in the context of an election

because so much of what's said in the context of election is half true. Okay. Second follow-up is what about just saying you can't do this on TV, which is the most prime time? Like you tell TV, you make it illegal for TV stations to air AI-generated ads showing people doing or saying things they didn't do. Yeah, even there. TV is less and less the most important place where we're watching and consuming things.

So it feels like another law that's unlikely to really have the kind of meaningful impact that you'd want and may actually be a terrain for some sort of abuse. All right. Ari, thoughts, and then we'll get into our grievances, but I'm very interested to hear your perspective listening to this. I wonder how much of it's already illegal, even. Like, there's laws against slander and misrepresenting somebody's likeness, and that regulates campaign. messages specifically differently than what you would do if you weren't receiving campaign funds. So maybe it will be sued. I don't know. I think if so, then we can learn something about that.

I know there's also people who have sued for having their likenesses sort of used in ways that are close enough. I think there's a great example is Scarlett Johansson suing for the use of her voice in AI text features. I forget which one did that. Camille, maybe you remember, but if not, it doesn't matter. Oh, Open AI. Yeah. And they used an actress with a voice that sounded very much like hers and her. And, yeah, that actress lost out on the opportunity to make some money.

I mean, yeah, your voice is, like, if it's distinctive enough that it comes across as you, if somebody doing an impression of a thing that, like, is representative of you, yeah. Like, you can enforce your copyright for that. So I think if there are laws that already say, like, you cannot send a message attributing to somebody something that they'd not say in a reasonable way that isn't obviously satire, then it's illegal. But that obvious satire is a thing that courts adjudicate, like, see South Park,

like they've adjudicated for a long time. So I don't know. I think my instinct is to see and learn more about what laws already are in place and how they interact with this before we talk about what to add. But I don't know, I also hate it. And I wouldn't be upset to see the laws changed in a way so that that falls under the same umbrella. It does make me wonder a bit about Donald Trump, who's tried to use and threatened to when he was running for office and has actually done it now in office, but use the law to punish his political enemies, going after them for frivolous things generally. I actually haven't seen him do it in a case

that feels real to me at all, insisting he's been mistreated by someone or liable. in some way. Those kinds of abuses are real. And that is an actual consequence of trying to, again, have these protections where maybe the best protections aren't legal at all.

But I don't know. A little different with AI generated video, I think. Agreed. Fair. Fair. Definitely. And it's interesting. I mean, I feel like

the fastest way to kind of nip this stuff in the bus. would be to really, really punish people who roll it out with this sort of like wave of lawsuits rather than going through Congress or whatever to legislate this stuff out of existence. It's like drain people's finances who stand this stuff up and bring them to court and make them answer for it. I don't know the context of like how a James Tala Rico would even approach that in this

situation if, you know, how he pays for that sort of lawsuits if it can come out of his campaign funds if he wants to even do it because it'd be such a huge distraction. But it feels to me like the Wild West. I made a prediction in the latest forward-looking future predictions that I had, that there would be a major deep fake in either this election or in the 2028 election. That, that like meaningfully moved the race for a period of time, like be it six hours or a couple of days or whatever. But like something is going to happen where a bunch of people, including journalists, are going to fall for an AI generated video that is purporting to show, like somebody is going to do something really, really sophisticated

and like break a story that we will find out after everybody freaks out about it was actually fake and AI generated. This obviously isn't that thing. But I don't feel like I feel like we're inching closer to it and we don't feel prepared to me. I don't know how many people are going to see that and think it's real, but I can easily see a very, you know, different video that's kind of doing the same thing. James Tolariko talking whispered tones about wanting to, you know, transgender for everyone your kids or whatever Trump says. And like getting that out the door in a way that looks and feels really, really nefarious.

and convinces a bunch of people he's doing it. And yeah, it's terrifying to me. So I appreciate the pushback and the gut check on the free speech stuff. I still think you're violently wrong. You know, that's why we're here. All right, gentlemen, we're coming up on an hour here. It is time for one of my favorite 20-minute segments of the entire week where I get to complain with my friends about all the small things happening in my life.

John, you can play the music for our grievances. The airing of grievances. Between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal. All right, gents. Anybody feeling compelled to be lead off battered today? You know, I'll take that very specific bait for the thing that I was going to make my grievance, which is I've opened up about, like, becoming a little bit more of a pirates fan, trying to... Oh, wow. Baseball. Hell yeah.

You know? Like, trying to embrace dadhood in that way. I'm going to be interested in America's pastime. Go bucks. While painting the nursery while doing random chores and cooking and stuff, it's really well-paced for that in ways that when I was a kid, I didn't have the attention span for. It doesn't hurt that the pirates are a team for the first time, maybe second time in my lifetime.

Sorry, forget about 99. But now that I'm learning more about baseball, I'm appreciating how important this thing called a bullpen is, apparently. like the pirates do this thing pretty reliably when I'm watching where they're like get a lead in the first couple innings they've got great started pitchers they're holding on to it fifth sixth inning you know how many in how many runs the pirates gave up in the seventh inning last night to the Dodgers I'll just tell you it was 10 10 in the 7th my god two days before that they had a lead going or three days going into the 6th against the

Braves and gave up or going into the 7th they gave up three and then the day before that was another few in the bottom of the fifth. Just any time the starter goes out, the Pirates Tank. And I just wish that like this wasn't a thing that I opened up to caring about now. Now I care and it hurts me. Yeah. They're so close. They're so close to being good and it's almost so fun.

And they're in the best division in baseball for some reason. It's fair. Like this is my first time watching really in a concerted way. So I'm not going to feel too tortured about it. but like, it's just like the most annoying kind of flaw for a team to have. It's like everything else is good, but like, oh, here comes the bullpen, say goodbye to that win. Woof. Tough, dude.

Yeah. Sorry to hear it. Nothing worse than heartbreaking sports fandom. Yeah, we'll have to compare notes on baseball because I do not understand the sport at all. I kind of get the rules, but there's so much I don't understand. but Cohen is obsessed with baseball now. And I don't know where it came from. I don't understand.

He's constantly, when he's not pretending to do crossover moves, which is hilarious to see in this like four and a half year old, but he's swinging his imaginary bat. So of course, we've ordered a bat and tee ball set for him, which will be at his grandmother's house when he gets there on Saturday. And we've signed him up for some sort of tee ball thing. And yeah, Daddy is at least beginning to, pay some attention to this and reading a book about sports now, about sports ball.

I cannot recommend the YouTube channel, John Boy, Media, highly enough. Boy, is he good? He just does these really in-depth breakdowns and lip readings and you learn more about the sport from him analyzing it. And it's entertaining and unique and fresh. It's all really good. Yeah, I'm going to take him to a game because the tickets for those tend to be a lot more affordable than, say, finals tickets.

Baseball games are the best, man. Baseball games are the best. All right, Camille, you got a grievance for this week? That was a little too happy. Yeah, you know, I have been looking for a house, and I've been doing a bunch of real estate stuff, and it is in a state that I do not currently live. So when I go do it, like I brought like the entire family,

and we're currently patrolling the area just north of New York, and that includes New York City, not New York City, but New York State and Connecticut. And I just want to say that property taxes are the absolute worst. And in particular, like the high property taxes that they, and I think it's fair to call it extortion, criminal theft, whatever graft corruption. I mean, honestly, like $20, $40,000 a year being collected in taxes

to support public school education and being collected from you whether or not you have a student currently enrolled. And in many instances, and this is the actual. actual grievance. I hate the taxes, but that's fair. I mean, you should expect that. In many instances, the buildings that the children are being consigned to inside these, like, prestigious in many cases, public school systems look like actual carceral institutions. It just look like prisons. How is it that you're collecting $40,000 a year from me forever? And these buildings look like jails. Like why? Why can't they be beautiful? Some of them are. Coming at this from both sides,

huh? You're like, you shouldn't take a dime for me. And while you're taking these dimes from me, make what you're doing better. Yeah, you better use it the way I want to. At a minimum. But I don't expect the person who's robbing me to actually do it in a way that's always going to make me happy. I do have a much firmer grievance, but I'm going to save that for later because I want the petty one to be on the record right now. You should join that credible niche group of Americans who just refuse to pay their taxes and talk. Oh, prisoners. I thought you were going to say moms for liberty or something like that. I don't know if they'd accept me. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to do that. That didn't work out well for Wesley Snipes.

Yeah, good point. All right, great grievance. I couldn't agree. I mean, look, I'm in New Jersey, so I'm getting hammered. But yeah, it does seem like something's off. I'm similarly in a very highly tax area and just found out that the school district where Omri will be going to is somehow completely burned through their budget and is like over the budget. And I'm like, this is like a wealthy area where the taxes are exorbitantly high. How are you guys not in the confines of your budget? That just can't be right. Guess I'll have to raise taxes. Yeah. I mean, and maybe the simple answer there is like not enough of the tax money that's being collected is actually going to things that are important,

like schools and it's going elsewhere, which is probably a fair retort. Property taxes are usually earmarked, though, but yeah, go on. Yeah, fair. I have a similar domestic genre grievance, which is air conditioners. My grievance is air conditioners this week. Our house is very old. It was built in 1923. There's no central air.

I've heard, interestingly, that getting Central Air is actually not that big of a deal. It costs like five or ten grand and they run it through your closet. I don't know. People keep telling me, just do it. I imagined it being like 50 grand and like the house is demolished for months. But I haven't really looked into it or had anybody come and quote the house. And I also don't know if I want it. It's like Central Air just has a whatever kind of mustiness to it.

Why do you, it's like a couple months. out of the year you actually need it. So I've just been doing window units. And they're adding up quick. It was like first, okay, the baby needs a window unit because the nursery gets, it's like 85 degrees. He can't sleep. So we got a window unit for Omri. Phoebe and I were sleeping with a fan. We're like, you know, we kind of need a window unit. It's getting really hot. It's been like 90 degrees every day. All right, get a window unit for us. Then it's like, we have guests coming and stay with us. So the guest room now needs a window unit. I'm like, all right, that's three window units. but I guess that's fine.

Like, we'll put one in the gas room. So the only, like, room now on the second and third four that doesn't have a window unit is my office, which is fine. Then Phoebe's home with the baby for a few days is like, it gets so hot in the house. We can't have them here with the babysitter. We need a window unit for the living room. Like, okay, that's another window unit, so that's four.

Last night, I spent time. I bought an air conditioner big enough to cool down this whole living room that had this weird. Instead of just being like an air condition you put in your window, it was like an AC and then this like gap and then like the whole back of the air conditioner. I can't really explain it. So you like you put the whole thing in and there's a little bracket that AC kind of sits on it outside the window. And then you slide the window down and it like there's like a cut out in the AC. I'd never seen an air conditioner like this before in the window like a window unit like that comes down.

And it was just like very complicated and annoying to set up. And yeah, I hated this entire process. I've now spent like $1,000 on air conditioners. And all I keep being told is that central AC is actually a really easy solution for my problems. And then it occurred to me this morning as I was walking around the house, marveling at how many air conditions that I had, that A, I was soon going to turn my detached garage and do an office space. So the office would turn into another guest room. and I know I'm going to have to get another air conditioner for that guest room.

So that'll be five. And then it's going to be like September, October, and fall's going to hit. And what's going to happen? I'm going to need to take all those window units out for the winter, and put them away somewhere in storage, and then put them all back in again next May or June. And, yeah, that thought made me want to drive my car into traffic. So that's my grievance for the day.

Let's remember to turn right in a situation. I just remember to turn right. Do you have gutters as well? Yeah, I've got gutters. It's a weird question, though. Just anticipating your grievance for October, that's all. Oh, right. Do you have ducks in your home already, Isaac?

Ducks? The ducks. The air ducts. Yeah. No, no. Okay. So that's, I mean, those will be expensive. Maybe what you should look into is those, the mini-split system.

Splits, yeah, splits. But then even that, it's like, Split solve for a room, but they don't solve for a floor. Then I have to get them on every floor. This is true, and it is expensive, but it is so much more efficient. You only run it in the rooms that you're actually using, and you don't have to run it all over the house. I mean, I do think the acquisition cost tends to be higher on the split systems,

but that's mostly in cases where you already have the ducks in your house. If you've got to put ducks throughout your house, then I think it maybe begins to kind of even out a little quick. and you can expand your mini split system as you go. They also work for heating and cooling, and you don't have to store them anywhere. They just stay up on the wall. That part is the most appealing is the knot up and down.

God willing, I'll be in this house for another 50 years. And then I was like, God willing, I'm going to have to take these air conditioners up and down a hundred times. Yeah, I don't know about that. Yeah, that's 500 ACs. And now I'm getting upset again. You know, before we get back into it, maybe we should close the window on this because we're just going to be going off each other for

another hour. Nice. Very nice. Sorry. That was really good. All right. We'll close the window. Gentlemen,

thank you, as always, for spending some time with me. And we'll see you guys in West Virginia. If you listen to the show, if you listen to end of the show and you don't have a ticket to West Virginia, like, what are you doing?

Just buy a ticket, plane ticket, bus ride, whatever. You can fly into Pittsburgh, D.C. You can drive if you're in the Northeast. or anywhere in Appalachia, we hope to see you there. And we'll be back here next week with Ari,

probably in West Virginia. So probably. I think definitely that baby's coming late. All right, peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wolfe. 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 Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Canoeth and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at readtangle.com.