Tangle - Suspension of the rules. - Isaac, Kmele and Ari chat about the threat of artificial intelligence, Mitch McConnell's return and more.

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

On today's episode of Suspension of the rules, Isaac, Ari and Kmele chat about whether or no artificial intelligence will kill us all and some reflection on Mitch McConnell's return to congress. They then play a fun little game called "Is Isaac an idiot or not?". Last but not least, a somber but very good grievance.Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle’s podcast membership!Is our food safe?If you’ve seen a rash of recent headlines about food recalls affecting an array of products, you’ve probably wondered what’s going on with America’s food suppliers. In his latest report, Associate Producer Aidan Gorman explores what’s behind the recalls, whether they’re happening more frequently, and what the cases reveal about food safety in the U.S. Check it out here.We’re bad at this.Last week we had a team retreat. Something I realized while there is that we can do a better job making sure people know where to find us. Our core product is a newsletter, but we also have a podcast, YouTube channel, and Instagram page that all do incredible work covering the news with ideological diversity and intellectual honesty. So, here’s a reminder to take two minutes to follow us on your platform of choice:InstagramPodcastYouTubeYou 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 engineered and edited 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, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming up, we talk about whether AI is actually going to kill us all. We play a little game called Is Isaac the Idiot or not. And then we share some reflections on Mitch McConnell coming back to Congress and us not being able to film him. Also, a sort of somber grievances section. It's a really good episode. You guys are going to enjoy it. Good morning. Good afternoon and good evening.

And welcome to the suspension of the rules podcast, place where we try to discuss. us in debate some of the happenings in America's political world each week without lighting each other's hair on fire. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, Tangle's executive editor, joined by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, and editor-at-large. Still a fake title, Camille Foster. Gentlemen, this sucks. We should be in Maine sitting around the fire. Sharon. I don't know when to interrupt you anymore. Like, the timing beats are off. I have to win you to finish politely. I don't like it. Yeah. I'm getting incredibly good at the intro, so I'm just boxing.

I was going to ask if you pre-write them now, if you've got like a little dock of different things you're going to try or you'd wing it on the fly every time. You know, the great poets say that the words pass through them like a muse. To me, I just, yeah, I just, I opened my third eye and I let the intro just come to me. And then I share my genius with all our wonderful listeners. How are you guys doing? Similar to great. Pretty good.

Pretty good. Camille. Camille, are you in your home, Camille? No, no, I'm not. It'll be maybe almost two weeks. Almost. But you survived the Great Flood of 2026, the Great Connecticut Flood of 226, they're calling it.

It was absolutely incredible. One, I didn't know what a rain bomb was. So I experienced that. Two, flash floods. Well, that's because that's a fake term that got invented last week. I feel like it's like all meteorological. I'm just going to go ahead. while you're talking, Camille, to search Connecticut floods to see if this is an actual news thing

or just being a new experiencing a storm for the first time just leaving California. No. I know. Camille sent me videos of what his neighborhood looked like, and it was insane. I mean, there was, yeah, you guys got like seven inches of rain in a day or something. In a matter of hours. I think it was maybe four or five hours. It was totally nice. I'm going to speak at a synagogue in Connecticut in a. a few weeks and I had a meeting with the people who run the synagogue and asked, invited me to come speak and talk about Tangle. And we got on the call and it was like, we spent the first 15 minutes of the call just talking about the storms in Connecticut because they were like,

they both, older women both just said they'd never seen anything like it. Okay, this looks real. It struck me. It looks real. It's like a real storm that you saw. Yeah. As much as I love dismissing the things they say. No, it was very much. It was very real. It was very real. We experienced the flash flooding. It was nuts. I left my neighborhood.

I tried to re-enter, and it was impossible. When I turned back around, it was impossible to get to 95. We ended up just kind of being stranded in the middle of town for a while. It's nuts. Well, we're here now. You survive the Connecticut floods, but we're all going to die in a few months. Artificial intelligence.

Nothing matters. Yeah, enjoy your survival for the brief moment you have it. That is the big main story that I want to jump into today to kick us off and get us started. We obviously covered this a little bit earlier this week and we wrote about in the newsletter, covered in the podcast. Camille Foster had his debut, I think, take writing in the newsletter. I know you've written in the newsletter before, but I think that was the first time you author to take about your perspective on the kind of doomsdayer view of where artificial intelligence is heading. Which had all been kicked off by this kid, guy. I feel like we could call him a kid.

This guy in his mid-20s, younger gentleman who worked at Open A-I. It seems like just for a matter of race. Let's give him some credit. He sounds brighter, so it makes him sound smarter than he is, which makes us want to diminish him, but he's a proud. Yeah. It is, that accent just has an affect on me that I can't unprogram. where I'm just like, this guy is a genius. He knows what he's talking about.

Yeah. Well, he came on Twitter, launched a Twitter account to basically tell everybody all the people in the artificial intelligence world think that this product, this technology is going to kill us soon. And then did a huge media tour.

It got some of the biggest executives in the industry to respond, some calling for a slowdown. President Donald Trump responded by saying, we're not going to slow down. We can't lose to China. I'm the ultimate spotter of hoaxes. He called, I think he called himself the hoax hunter or something, which is pretty good. But, you know, basically just said, we need to win this race. We can't be scared of it. And it kind of launched the country into this debate, which I feel like we've had many times now. Camille, I thought you penned a really good position, you know, having

some humility about what we know and what we don't know. And then we got the feedback to the piece, which I want to start with. Maybe Ari, I don't know if you want to run down some stuff that stood out to you that you heard from our audience or so in the comment section. But it seemed like, yeah, you and Camille had similar perspectives. I haven't shared mine yet, but we'll get there soon. So I'll maybe start with you. Yeah, the way I pinned a concurrence saying basically that Camille and I, we,

came from different directions on this attitudeally, but our vectors aligned towards a similar point, so it wouldn't be super interesting to hear me agree at Camille about this stuff. Instead, I want to paraphrase some of the feedback we got from readers, which I have my own responses to, obviously, but

I think these are all fair comments, so I'm wondering how you respond to these. I think one of the most compelling pieces of feedback is one of the people who you quote in this take, with a very cogent take, of his own, about AI, and AI safety is Cow Newport.

But the question is, what makes him a voice worth elevating over others who are more concerned about the AI regulation space who are actually more involved or published more frequently, given that Cal is more of a professor who hasn't published a lot recently and isn't elbows deep in developing this stuff recently? What makes his voice here more compelling to you? It's less a matter of Cal's voice being more compelling and more a matter of just surveying the landscape, contemplating the things that people in the industry who are saying were deeply concerned, we think there's a 10% chance is the number that keeps getting thrown

around, although I've heard as high as 70% watching the news here. And I'm just evaluating the assertions independent of one another and kind of parsing the facts that are being asserted and using my own job. judgment here. And it's also the case that the AI industry itself is pretty diverse. And it is not the case that everyone in the industry feels this way. Jensen Wong, the CEO of Nvidia, who, I mean, they are part of the Mag 7. They are perhaps the cornerstone of the entire AI industry, since they're selling the most advanced chips to pretty much everybody. He is deeply skeptical of these proclamations of Doom. And I think that that is pretty important, as is Mark Andreessen and a number of

other people. So, you know, I think there are lots of opinions that one can look into, but I think the thing that most, most animates my sensibilities around these issues is that there is just profound uncertainty. And a lot of people are speaking with a great deal of confidence about something that even by their own proclamations is a 10% possibility at some point in the future. 10% when it comes to kind of existential risk of annihilation of the human species, it's kind of a big deal. And you don't want to ignore that. But at the same time, it is still guesswork. And that 10% actually depends on getting a lot of stuff right. One, AGI, the possibility that they can actually develop this amazing new incarnation of not

the thing that we've been dealing with, but something that's pretty much an Oracle that is capable of addressing pretty much any imaginable question that can be addressed, that they can build this. And two, that they have the right architecture to build it, these large language models, the particular technology that actually makes these AI models work, is it the right way to get there? Neither of those questions do we have a definitive answer to, but one has to presume that the answer to both of those questions is yes in order to actually even begin to entertain this 10% prediction. And I'm not sure. So my assertion is I'm not sure. And if we're going to be making determinations about what the regulatory landscape should do, certainly a regulatory landscape

that could include sweeping new laws and international institutions that have the authority to do all manner of things, I mean, that carries risks too. We actually have to consider the risks of these new regulatory frameworks alongside the risk of AI apocalypse. So that's really the case that I'm prosecuting here. Rather than dismissing the concern about AI apocalypse, it's perhaps qualifying it a bit, but also introducing this other thing that people aren't considering. If you're going to try to remediate, we probably ought to know what the risks of those remediation proposals are. And I think we're going to get into a lot of that too. I'm sorry. I just wanted to follow up very briefly with another pushback to that point, which is, I don't think we have to assume

that we're going to achieve this singularity. This is something that the Jacob Coxens of the world are pushing as the biggest fear about AI is that there's this recursive engineering. It's going to make itself smarter than us. And at the point that it's smarter than us, it's going to build itself to be more intelligent past the point that we can understand it. That's something that requires a lot of presumptions to see, the ones that you spelled out, is GAI going to be a thing?

Are we going to be able to build it through LOMs? But I don't think that you're required to believe that in order to buy some of the larger risks about existential threats through AI. And the two that are the most convincing to me and to a large section of our readership are that it's going to be able to hack into the, we've already seen it hack systems. We've seen it hack with like specific internet enabled devices that, attached to water systems, for instance, recently. So it doesn't go too beyond the pale to think

some bad actors with bizarre motivations or evil motivations, what have you, might be able to use AI to help them hack a nuclear weapons launch programming, send a bunch of nukes, or to help engineer a bioweapon that could then be weaponized against humanity. And I think you don't need general AI or a tech, God living in the machine in order to do that.

I'm curious to kind of poke at one of the things Camille talked about in his take when he wrote this, which was the whole concept of just estimating what the likelihood of these events are, which strikes me as just like a totally fake exercise. I don't know. I mean, Ari, maybe you can speak to this. I think you failed out of like a statistics pH. dropped out, actually, which is very trendy to do. 5% chance, 8% chance, 10% chance, this thing is going to kill us.

Like, I can't even begin to conceptualize how we model that. Is that real? Does that number mean anything? Like, why can't they just say there's a risk this thing could eventually do X, Y, Z, versus there's this percentage chance? To me, like, the most. compelling, scary thing that I've read was actually written by Noah Smith, an economist, who has a popular blog. And, you know, he basically said the number one risk of AI is that in a few years, somebody who is competent using it and coding will just be able to build a really deadly bio-weapon.

And with the right kind of access to labs, like black market chemical labs, whatever, could get instruction on how to build this thing and then just release it in the wild and see what happens. And of all the sort of like, how does this horrible thing happen? That to me strikes me as a theory that at least feels tangible, realistic. When you say there's a 5% chance that AI is going to kill all of us,

I'm just like my eyes glaze over, honestly, at this point. I just can't even begin to take that seriously. And I don't know if I'm dumb for thinking that that's just some made-up number and I'm just like a simpleton rube who can't wrap my head around it because I don't have a degree in statistics. Or path of one. Yeah, yeah. But it doesn't feel like something that is actually,

that we're actually capable of approximating to me. I felt the same way. I continue to think the same thing. I don't think it's ever a stupid thing either to not know something. and then ask a question. I think that's always a smart thing. And I'll break the fourth wall for a second and say,

I think it's one of my favorite attributes of yours, Isaac, is that you're never shy about asking a question and self-betterment. But to go back and attack you for being dumb here, I don't want to get too nice. Let's back to you being an idiot. Yeah, that feels a little bit more status quo and comfortable. So, yeah, I want to see the work on that. And I was having it back and forth with Will about this.

he shared a risk assessment that was put out, I believe, Bionthropic, where they were where they were trying to model what some of the larger risks were and try to assign values to them. I did dig through that. And what I saw were not quantifiable risks, which are really, really difficult because you do have to base it on something.

You have to tether it to something in reality. Risk assessments are something that are qualitative, that you do high risk, low risk, moderate risk. And they were saying low risk, the moderate of these things, or negligible, not something that we are to be concerned about with current technologies, mitigatable for like the case of bio-weapons.

They seem to be really downplaying those risks, but they weren't waiting them. And in order to do that, you have to have some tether to some thing that is analogous. And I've been saying I want to see that work. I want to see somebody show me where they are coming up with something by saying, we have seen fail, just as an example, using nuclear weapons as an analogy, we've seen failure rates of some percentage in code bases that are old enough that haven't been updated that manage some of these weapons. We can assume some of these bugs are large enough that they could cause a failure at some risk level,

assuming that our qualitative or quality controls fail at a certain risk level, like you compound these things. You start from some base and then you can do risk compounding. and that's a way that I think you can come up with a number that's defensible. What I see instead is conversations between people who are concerned saying, I would put the risk at 5%. No, I'd say probably 10. In my mind, like my eyes don't blaze over, they kind of narrow.

And I think you are doing something intentional here. You're using numbers to make it seem like you have a more precise grasp on this, when really we're just guessing. And I'd rather you say like there's a non-earned, zero risk. You could say that instead. But when you say things like five or ten percent, it makes me just want to dismiss the whole thing. Yeah, it's totally a subjective exercise in the way that most people are doing it. And I have the same concerns about modeling that you just expressed. My background academically is in economics and government and politics. So as a result,

I took a lot of social science courses and a lot of macroeconomics courses. And I think that there is quite a bit of voodoo deployed in a lot of those courses. And the science in the social science is oftentimes more a kind of presentation and a posture than an actual embodiment of the scientific method. I'm curious, I mean, honestly, to hear from you both on this, but it strikes me that the whole, sort of storm of warnings coming from the inside of these companies

continues to drive up the value of the businesses and the, you know, it's bringing a closeness between these businesses and the government, these businesses and their backers. I mean, Anthropic, the same day they talked about sort of stepping down,

they signed this huge, like $13 billion deal with a company that has ties to the administration. There's all this, I don't know exactly how to put it. I've been saying this for a while that I think a lot of this stuff is just PR. And maybe my question to you guys to sort of be a little bit edgy here is like if in two years there was this big Wall Street Journal story with like leaked internal. Slack messages at Anthropic or Open AI or whatever. But that was like them talking to each other about what journalists they could target with this story about, you know, one of their new models breaking out of the sandbox and causing, wreaking all this havoc.

Like, would you be surprised by that? Would that be a shocking revelation to you? Because I, again, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy. theories here. And I think this is like borderline conspiracy theory stuff because I'm just making a bunch of inferences without having evidence. But I don't know. I just, and I guess if we all die, nobody will be around to tell me I was an idiot for doubting this stuff. So it's like a safe, an argument to make. Yes. But it just feels so much like how is it that every time they do this, every time momentum around this story ramps up,

they all make a bunch more money, they sell a bunch more of their product, they get more investors, they get more deals. It seems to me like it's a button they just keep pushing and everybody just keeps abiding by it and the slowdown never comes, the regulation, serious regulatory stuff never comes.

You know, they write some cute essays and release them to the public and then look like the good guy and then they just rake in a bunch more cash. I don't know. It all feels so concocted to me. I can't shake that feeling. Hmm.

I don't know that I would be surprised. But that doesn't mean that I rule out the possibility that they are being dishonest when they talk about a fear associated with their projects, when they talk about the danger associated with their projects. The reality, though, is that one doesn't really have to be a cynic here to accept the fact that there are some perverse incentives. Talking about how dangerous your product is is almost the same as talking about how powerful it is. The fact that you are developing a radical, innovative, disruptive technology is necessarily means that there are also going to be some attendant dangers there, that one has to take into account.

that you're in unprecedented territory. We've never seen anything like this before. You're saying all the same things. And the fact is that there are some places where the software can be deployed rather safely. And there are these existing models that are related to the new models that apparently for a period of weeks or months

are simply too dangerous to release publicly until they aren't. And that can make one a bit more cynical. But again, I don't think you have to indulge that cynicism or doubt that everyone here means what they say. We mentioned Cal Newport a little bit earlier. I think you brought him up, Ari, or the person who wrote in what that question did. And Cal's essay in the New York Times back on September 5th was, how scared should we be of AI right now? And in that piece, he goes on to talk about the rationalist community and their influence within the AI industry broadly. The fact that there are lots of executives and lots of the leadership

who are a part of these communities. And a lot of these people hold almost as an article of faith a belief about AGI and the likelihood that we will achieve it and the danger and the promise that are associated with it. And to that degree, there's something like a kind of religious conviction that can be imputed to some of these people, in which case their belief, one could, say it's earnest, but it's actually a kind of fundamentalist belief, which means that the earnestness

doesn't matter. What actually matters is whether or not there's any reason, any justifiable reason to believe it. And one more note on this kind of odd religious dynamic in the AI community, if you look at the mission statements of OpenAI, of Anthropic and even GROC, they're bizarrely quasi-Messianic. They're talking about ushering in this future, revealing the kind of knowledge of the cosmos in Groch's case, and essentially midwifing AGI and bringing it into being as though it were a kind of divinely ordinated, kind of fatalistic thing that must happen, and that they are kind of playing this essential role in doing it. I find that dynamic of things just very fascinating.

and worth talking about it. I didn't introduce it into the piece that I did earlier this week, but I thought about it. And it's a little uncomfortable even to talk about in some level because it seems sort of ridiculous. But it's a real thing. There are certainly people who are genuinely devoted to this. And the rationalist community and the effective altruism community

are very real things that have meaningful influence all throughout Silicon Valley. But pause, because how representative do we think it is? He did an interesting thing that I think in a different context you would have been attacking yourself for just a second ago where he said something in the AI community that they believe and something these people are professing. And I just want to ask, what do you mean by these people?

Because I think a lot of the people that you're, the opinions that you're offering here are the ones of people that are putting up press releases or leading companies. And I think it is their job to try to turn whatever cards they're holding into a winnable hand. And in this case, that could mean I'm concerned about, like, imagine I'm Dario Amity. I actually harbor real concerns about the safety of this product we're developing. I also want to see it succeed. I'm going to amplify those real concerns in a way that feels PR-ish acceptable and makes my

company look powerful and strong and responsible. There are, of course, competing, like, motivations amongst those people. But I think amongst the rank and file, I'm just going to, you asked me a question as a former stat student PhD dropout, Isaac. So I'll put my my former engineering hat on for a second and talk about this as a former engineer, which is to say a lot of the people that actually work on this stuff don't really. really buy into fringe beliefs. As much as it's easy to dunk on engineers who are high on their supply in a lot of cases, I think something like 18% of people who are self-report as being developers and AI

think that there's a significant chance that AI is going to have an existential threat to humanity. That is still a small portion of people who sign up to build this thing with their lives. and I think an even smaller proportion of that are people who would define themselves as rationalists or in some sort of cultist group. I mean, I've lived and worked amongst these people for a while and they are mostly normal. If anything, like most people they have,

who get to a certain level of success in their field. A lot of people in engineering have this tendency to overestimate their ability to reason into other areas and also to over-amplify what they're building into other areas outside society. That's kind of the nature of bubbles in general, and Silicon Valley is a pretty big bubble. Amongst engineers,

I don't think that there is the same sort of religious fanatic fervor. I think it's more, I see a part of the puzzle. There's this great analogy that I love about what it's like to be an engineer, which is you're a person with a really powerful flashlight and an incredible math going through this landscape, of coding and coding knowledge and technology, and the landscape is vast,

and it's amazing, you can see 10 feet in front of you. And you feel like you never really understand the whole picture. You're filling in and as you go. But, I mean, for my time in engineering, most people that I worked with and myself felt a great deal of self-consciousness about not having the whole picture. And when you feel that way and you're building something, how could you not be concerned about what it's going to end up being?

I think that that is not rationalist with a capital R to me. I think that's rational to be concerned about what you're building when you only see a part of it. For the outside looking in, I think we can be a little bit more cautious because it's not our lives on the line, or livelihoods on the line. But from the inside for the people building it, I think the argument professes itself a little bit more stably. Yeah, I think that's a fair flag to throw. Although I did not attribute the belief to most people in the community. I'm just saying it's non-tribial, a non-trivial number of people who believe it.

I mean, when I say the community, I'm talking about people who work in AI and not being essentialist. And when I talk about effective altruist, I'm talking about people who actually hold these particular views. So in that respect, I don't think it is essentialism to try and characterize the share. I was being a little glim. Like, yes. I wouldn't accuse you of being essentialist in this case. I just think that it's probably an overrepresented sample, even when it is not zero. I think that's true.

I think that's true. Yeah. Sorry, Isaac. Go ahead. I'm going to, no, no, it's okay. I'm going to break us off here because we've got a lot more we need to get to today. But I think we'll let this lie and see how the next few weeks play out. I'm going to be watching really carefully to see if anything actually happens,

aside from, again, these guys raising a bunch more money and, you know, getting a lot more free publicity. Because right now I don't see a ton of tangible slowdown, regulatory interest. I just see 3,500 word essays and lots of Twitter threads about how we're all going to die. So I'd really love to actually see some meaningful change before I say, it seems like these guys are accomplishing what they want to accomplish to keep us all safe, which I just haven't gotten a single signal on that yet. So, all right, we're going to break. When we come back,

we're going to do a segment called M.I. It's going to be a good one. I thought we just did that. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, welcome back to suspension of the rules. This is a first time segment because I like inventing segments every week. This one I'm going to call Am I the Idiot? I wrote something after Trump's little $5,000 dividend promise to all Americans that quickly

aged, well, maybe, maybe aged like milk. I'm curious to get your guys' thoughts on this. And also raise a kind of interesting polling question. So really quickly, I'll read what I wrote in Monday's newsletter and read here on the podcast. I said, if you plucked 100 random voting age Americans off the street and asked them if they'd support $5,000 direct cash payments to all Americans, what percentage would say yes? 50, 65, 85, even if you would support? Even if they'd support $5,000, $5,000, even even if I largely align myself with the pundit class that's unconvinced by policies like this, the gap between how many normie Americans would support this policy and how many pundits feels notable. Trump's ability to keep his finger on that pulse better than politicians is one of his defining political strengths.

So basically I was saying, I suspect the $5,000 dividend is really popular for obvious reasons, which is Americans would love it if the president gave them $5,000. Turns out maybe it's a little more complicated than that. Two polls came out this week about President Trump's proposal. The first one was done by the economist and you-gov. Regular voters favor, oppose it, were 48% in favor and 40% opposed. Likely voters was 43% in favor and 45% opposed. And then the GOP split was 61% in favor,

29% opposed, Dem 39% in favor, 48% opposed. So obviously some partisan effect happening there because it's a Trump policy. Indies were basically split 4144. All the racial groups, white, black, Hispanic, all came out in favor to varying degrees. But here's the interesting thing. The question in the UGov Economist poll was asked like this. quote, would you favor or oppose the government in Washington sending $5,000 to every adult citizen in the United States?

Which is about as straightforward a way as you can ask the question. And the top line is that registered voters said 48% to 40 that they supported it and likely voters were just negative on support 43 to 45. So it's basically split, which is not even close to what I was suggesting it might be, like 65, 80%, and then there was another poll that came out about this very same question, but this one was different.

It was a poll that framed the question in a way that I think added some context and also inserted some bias. So in this poll, the question was asked this way. As you may know, President Trump promised to pay a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000 if the Republicans,

if the Republican Party retains control of the U.S. House and Senate in the 26 congressional elections. Do you believe it is appropriate or inappropriate for President Trump to propose this dividend? And Americans in a 63 to 17 percent split said that they thought the proposal was inappropriate. Aaron Blake, who tweeted this out and is a senior political reporter at CNN, tweeted, it is a pretty remarkable feat to make free money unpopular. I don't know, actually, if this was a CNN poll or not, because Aaron did not link to it, but he's a reporter. I trust that he pulled it from a reasonably reliable source.

Anyway, I thought this was super interesting, and I was curious to get your guys' response to it if you found these results surprising at all. I am honestly a bit shocked that there is a totally even split on the really neutral question. I think that 63 to 17% split on it being inappropriate is not totally shocking, given the way the question was framed.

But I think it's fair to say my writing did not age very well, sort of surmising that 50, 65, or 80% of Americans would support a proposal like this, because even in the most neutral writing of it, it's basically a 50-50 split and doesn't hit 50%. support among registered or likely voters. So is that surprising to you guys at all?

The output's somewhat surprising, I think. It's not surprising really that the difference in responses is that is high between these two questions, which are almost totally different questions, actually, like functionally. The first one's saying surveying is hard. I'm going back and putting on my stat dropout hat, but not physically because I think that's a one-time gimmick. But the idea of where do you draw the line with context, how do you ask an informed question versus how do you avoid biasing the respondent is a really tricky problem?

And here, I don't even think that amounts for all of the variance. The first question is would you favor or oppose Washington sending $5,000? The second question is, is it appropriate if the government, if President Trump sends you this money in response to the Republicans winning, if it only if. And those are like completely different statements. I think in the first question, which I would say is a little bit more illuminating about the abstract principle of what would a voter support, even that is couch within context, which is this comes after the COVID stimulus checks. And then the other COVID stimulus checks, I think most people who are answering this question

are aware of the inflationary concerns that followed those stimulus checks and are living in another ground of inflation now. And a lot of people are going to take that experience into the way they answer this question. I would imagine that if you ask this exact same question, the exact same way four years ago, you'd be getting a different proportion of the responses or a different proportion of respondents saying yes, they would favor it. And you can see that breakdown of a little bit in the way likely voters answer this question. So to reiterate what you said, Washington sending $5,000 to every adult citizen in the U.S. support or oppose, regular voters were 48 to 40 in support.

Likely voters were 43 to 45 favoring opposing it, which tells you the more informed somebody is generally about current politics, the less likely they are to favor this, which means they're probably basing it on the actual proposes. and things they've experienced a little bit of economic policy. So it's not too surprising that carrying that context and the question people would say that.

But if you were to extract it even further, maybe to be deferential to you, Isaac, and just write a question that said, would you support the U.S. government sending you a larger refund every year, sending you larger rebates after tax season? That would be like 90%. I'm sure.

People would be like, yeah, spend less, give me more money. But I think with the specific information that we have and most people have right now, it makes sense that it's discounted. This much, surprising to me, but it does make sense. You know, I wonder, Ari,

Isaac highlighted the fact that there's this kind of strange split where there tends to be support for this policy across the board, at least majority support for this policy across the board with various demographics. But then you look at the partisan split, and it becomes very clear that the fact that Donald Trump is the one who offered this policy

is part of the reason for the skepticism. And my presumption here is that I don't think that most Democrats have kind of found religion on deficit and debt spending and that they aren't enthusiastic about a lot of entitlement programs that they might otherwise support that would have pretty big price tags associated with them. That in general, if a Democrat had offered a similar sort of proposal, presuming it's not tied to the outcome of an election, just a policy to stimulate the economy by sending everyone $5,000 checks, they would find a way to get there.

I thought about when I saw this an opinion piece that just ran in the New York Times earlier this week. I think the 14th, the national debt never scared me. It scares me now. I think was the title, was Jared Bernstein, who was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under the Biden administration. and it's a piece that I read with some satisfaction,

some mix of satisfaction, frustration, frustration, and outrage. I, for one, have been kind of involved in policy stuff for a while, both covering things and working alongside different politicians in different capacities. And I think I've mentioned in the past that I was in the room when Paul Ryan was putting together some of his early kind of projects, trying to make the national debt a real issue for people to take and to heart and to make sort of their raison d'etra. And that didn't really work out well. Now, however, it does seem to be kind of catching on.

I can't imagine that that is what is enhancing most people's skepticism of this policy. Because even me, I paid debt and deficit, is at least a part of me that would love to get some of my money back. so it's hard not to have a soft spot for the general idea of these rebate checks. But certainly we have to take into consideration the broader economic implications. Yeah, Jared Bernstein actually a guest I've had on the show before. It's been many moons now, but in the early days of Tangle, he talked to me about some of the things that were happening in the Biden administration.

And yeah, I was surprised by that piece too and a little bit alarmed by it and like you a little bit frustrated, it does feel like one of those things. The debt is a classic example of just like everybody flips their position the moment that they're in power. Well, I'll say this. First of all, my takeaway, one, I think my writing did not age. I mean, plainly did not age while.

I think if you had asked me what the poll response, that question would have been, I would have said 70 to 80% of people supported it. I'm actually surprised that even with the context of like including the president's name or whatever that it's not low. The inappropriate, appropriate question, it makes total sense to me. There's so much disapproval. Yeah. Which brings me my second point, which is just like, it's so fascinating how the crafting of a poll question is so determinative of the response you want to get.

I mean, you could classify both of these as polling on whether there's support for. President Trump's $5,000 dividend. You could say that, like, broadly speaking. And in one of them, there's basically majority support, though slim, all across the board. And the other one, the policy's underwater. And it is just about how the question is asked and how it's framed. So to answer the question of this week's segment, I think I am the idiot, but the pollsters also deserve some scorn.

And I don't know that I'm any more informed about how Americans feel about this after reading through these two polls, but it does seem like maybe there's softer support here than I was expecting. I'll say there's one interesting thing in the cross-tabs before we move completely off it, which is they didn't ask specifically, explicitly in this U-Go poll about economic factors, like your income, how much you have in the bank. But they have various proxies for that, which would indicate that, like, for instance, the easiest proxies, no college degree, which tends to track with lower

incomes over time. So amongst no college degree, you see 54% support as opposed to 37% support amongst those with a college degree. So there is certainly some daylight there that suggests that if you need the money, then yeah, you're going to want it and you're going to say yes to this proposal. Yeah, that tracks completely. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, we've got to get to our last segment today, which is the return of former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Senator to Congress. Alleged Senator.

Yeah. I've been thinking about how to tackle this segment because I got a little fired up this week about the senator's return. And I think it's just important to make what's happening abnor. and make it as abnormal as possible. I felt this way about Lindsay Graham dying and his sister just replacing him and becoming a senator. You guys have patiently listened to me,

go on my screens about that long enough now. Participated. It's okay. Just like baseline, here's your story. Mitch McConnell left Congress with a health emergency for three months, out of sight, no public appearances, some weird photos release where he's like, you know,

holding the newspaper with the day's date on it to disprove everybody who was worried he was dead or a vegetable, sitting in his hospital bed, smiling with his wife. The reports around him going into the hospital included reporting and 911 calls that somebody had some sort of cardiac arrest or event, there was CPR being administered.

his office is telling the public that he just simply took a fall. He needed to go through rehabilitation. They used the line that Senator McConnell's office has used many times with his various health issues over the years, which is that he had polio as a kid, and that impacts his recovery. And, you know, it's the reason he sometimes stumbles and all this stuff. And all well and good, and I think fair, good context to add.

But not publicly viewable for three months. a sitting United States senator heading into election season. And then he leaves the hospital, finally, or leaves his home, goes to home, leaves his home. And the first video that we get of him is him sort of coming out in this wheelchair, kind of awkwardly smiling and waving to the press, who's all, you know, soak around his car. And then this very bizarre video that went viral where, you know, he's sitting in the car, just smiling, kind of staring blankly ahead while reporter shout questions at him and he doesn't answer immediately when viral became kind of memeified. And then there was the thing that that genuinely sent me over the edge, which is Senator Mitch McConnell

shows up in the halls of Congress. And purportedly, he answers questions from a gaggle of journalists that are there waiting for him. And I say purportedly because one of those journalists, a senior congressional reporter for Punch Bowl News, whose name is Andrew, and I always mess this up, Desiderio, I believe. He tweeted this out. Some more photos of Mitch McConnell as he returned to the Senate for the first time in three months following a fall at his DC home, reporters were banned from recording video. Reporters were banned from recording video. United States American press reporters were banned from recording video of a sitting United States senator inside the halls of Congress because the senator's team wants to cover up his condition.

And even if you don't want to use that conspiratorial language, maybe they want to obscure his condition from the public. This is a genuine absurdity. I mean, if something like this happened in another country, if Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin were incapacitated for many weeks due to some health episode, and then came back into public view and did interviews with the Russian and North Korean press and then told the press that no video was allowed to be released from those interviews and the press obliged. We would hammer them from abroad about the differences between America and these dictatorships and what a free press looks like compared to

what state media looks like. And here, I mean, I don't even know what. I don't even know why reporters should, could have to abide by this request that I presume came from McConnell's office. But this is like insane stuff. I would like a video of Senator Mitch McConnell answering some questions, actually. I would really, really like to see a video of him answering some questions.

So I know that, you know, two of the hundred most powerful politicians in the country aren't Lindsay Graham's sister and a guy who can't speak. This feels crazy to me. and for some reason, the story is like a total blip in our news cycle. A couple people, I mean, in response to Andrew's post online, which kudos to him, I guess he shared pictures of McConnell.

I did see many responses asking why people weren't allowed to record video, but there hasn't been a great explanation for that, except I presume that Senator McConnell's office doesn't want video of him circulating on the internet. So this to me was the most bizarre and potentially alarming story, alarming that the senator's office did this, and also alarming that the press obliged, that the congressional press will oblige. I understand there's like a cordial, collegial relationship there and you want to, you know, maintain that and respect the wishes of the senator. But I have a really hard time imagining a world where I would have accepted those conditions. And yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to. overreact, but it feels like one of the bigger stories of the last week. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing McConnell answer some questions on video live. I would like that to happen sooner rather than later, porfabore. Unless Camille, you want to defend this policy about no videos. Yeah, me neither. I don't want to defend that. I'll see. No. I think the idea that this is something

that you could put on the press to do is actually probably the more pernicious of these two things. Like if the campaign or the staff wants to ask, then they can ask. But it does seem odd, actually, that the press wasn't like, oh, no, if you want to have the senator for the great state of Kentucky have media exposure, which is an asset, usually, we're going to set the terms. We're going to record. And instead, they didn't. Like, that is interesting. I don't know what to make of that, though. Yeah.

CNN's chief congressional. correspondent, Manu Raju, added Mitch McConnell, appearing frailer and his voice slower, tells reporters, I must admit, after two years, two decades, actually dodging your questions. I wasn't sure how many of you would be here today, but I'm glad to see you. Raju, who only shared photos, added that McConnell said, time to get back to work, finish the job for this Congress. I'm here to work on the farm bill. As I think you know, I have an ongoing issue in NATO and backing up our good friends who were totally in the fight against the Russians. He did not answer any questions, Roger, you concluded.

Like, you work at CNN, dude. Turn your video. I'm just like, I'm stunned by this. I really can't understand how this is the world that we're operating. I mean, the most generous thing that I could say here for Senator McConnell and his team is that plenty of senators depend on their aides to do a great deal of their work. And when you say, I'm going to go work on the farm bill, your aides are going to hand you something that they've been working on and you're going to read it or not read it and then perhaps go out and do a press conference about this. But I think having an expectation that the people that you elect to office will actually have the capacity to pretend they're serving is fairly reasonable.

And I think it is decidedly different from Lindsay Graham's sister, Darlene. assuming her brother's office after he passes away. These are fundamentally different kinds of things. And I still remember that weird proof of life photo when he was in the hospital where he just casually holding the day's newspaper while seated next to his wife in his hospital bed and a gingham shirt that certainly he's been wearing that all day as opposed to whatever gown they had him in.

It's just, it's not laughable. It is infuriating in a way. And this is the kind of game that certainly both parties have played. I would agree with you, Isaac, you have cultivating outrage about this, maintaining it, and hopefully it becoming a thing where voters make candidates who manage to win and serve and do this kind of thing, suffer the consequences for it. But the party would have to suffer the consequences here. Lindsey Graham will be gone in a matter of months.

I don't mean that he will have kind of moved on to that undiscovered country. But, I mean, at this point, I suppose that's a possibility, too. Apparently, just add a little bit of context here. It's like Lindsey Graham has. And that was in poor taste, Camille. Apparently, I just found this.

The Radio and Television Correspondents Association, this just came out today, released a statement saying that they are going to continue to push for our First Amendment rights and expanded access for credentialed press in Capitol Hill. Apparently, there are these obscure rules that are never enacted that video recording in the Senate wing requires advance permission, even in areas where journalists can take photos or audio. No such restrictions exist in designated areas of the House side or in Senate office buildings. But what happened this week was that as video cameras started to pop up and people took out

their phone, members of the Senate Rules Committee interjected and stopped people, stopped the reporters from recording Senator McConnell. So it sounds like it's just specific to the Senate wing where he was speaking, which I did not notice that he was in the Senate wing when this video. came out. But the confrontation brought renewed attention to a July letter. The group sent urging Senate leaders to monetize press access by permitting handheld filming in select areas and allowing reporters to use silent electronic devices inside the Senate chamber. I totally understand filming requiring permission inside the Senate chamber, obviously, but he is like in a wing where

the press is typically, like I've been there. You know, you just pull people over and stop them and try and get an interview. But yeah, these are just rules that are very rarely enforced, I guess, unless you're trying to prevent the public from seeing what's going on. Well, Isaac, I wanted to ask you about that because I'm not sure I do understand why one would be permission to record inside the chamber. I mean, it is the chamber. Why should there be an expectation that you're not on camera there?

I mean, I'd be fine with them not recording the floor speeches that they give to empty, empty rooms. I'd love to have both angles there anytime you do. that. But beyond that, if you're working and you're in the building and a journalist is around, yeah, they can film you. Yeah, there's an expectation that I think is reasonable that there's a lot of private conversations that happen, you know, in the Senate chamber and the different wings of the Senate chamber. They, you know, people might be in a room and step out and start talking to each other. And they don't want a reporter who has a press pass to just be able to film these private

conversations that could be happening outside the confines of an office without a heads-up or permission, especially because there are areas in the Capitol that are specifically designated for reporters to interact with and talk to sitting members of Congress. Sometimes it's just as simple as, you know, all the kind of whole, you know, Manu Raju, who I was just citing, I mean, he's famous for just popping up and following members of Congress through hallways between chambers, whatever, walking to their offices, sticking a mic in their face, getting a quote from them.

So I'm not like, I'm not totally opposed to this concept in principle, though I will say my experience from times that I've been in the Capitol with the press pass is there's not a ton of enforcement going on. You know, people are typically able to grab a senator and say, hey, can I ask you a few questions, turn on the camera and they just start talking.

So what I imagine happened here and why people made the note that they weren't allowed to film Senator McConnell is that these reporters attempted to do that and they were stopped and this rule that is very rarely enforced was kind of invoked in this moment, which is what is still really, to me,

a bit alarming and feels icky, I think. That's, I mean, I can see it both ways. I can see the reason behind the question, I think, from Camille, to say, like, maybe these restrictions are kind of part of the problem, and I can also understand the reason for privacy. I'm thinking a little bit now next,

like the second order conversation from this, which is nobody's looking at this video and going, that seems good. It's good, Mitch McConnell, or the lack of video, I guess, and say Mitch McConnell can't be filmed speaking. I'm fine with that. I think the interesting conversation now, I assume, is going to turn to term limits.

And I was just to prove that I'm not fully anti-AI. I was turning to Claude to do a little bit of analysis about what's causing the gerontocracy in Congress, as the meaning age of members of Congress has gone up so much the last 20 years. And I was a little surprised to learn that from some of the analysis about what's, like, the people who are staying in Congress longer, is that it's not people who are staying in Congress longer that's driving the mean age or even the upper-corporated. It's the fact that we're voting in people who, when they're elected to office, are older than they used to be. And I'm going to just quote the robot here and give Claude his or her flowers, depending on Claude's gender. Congress isn't getting, tell me how LLLMee this sounds.

Congress isn't getting older, mainly because members are refusing to leave. It's getting older because voters keep electing older people to begin with. Congress's oldest members aren't old because they want to retire. They're old because Congress increasingly recruits and elects older people in the first place. and that entry age shift accounts for roughly 73% of the total age increase in that group versus about 27% from people staying longer once they're in. And I think I'm kind of in favor of term limits for different reasons, but I'm going to predict that as we have discussions about term limits,

they're going to be a little misapplied. Like Mitch McConnell's not the representative of Congress writ large, and he's more of an aberration, and we should try to vote out people who aren't. like visibly going to be able to perform the job. But I don't think term limits is going to be the answer here. And I'm sure that that debate's coming. And I just kind of want to plan a flag about that. Yeah.

I mean, the term limits suggestion to me makes a lot of sense. I think there's pretty low-hanging fruit ways to justify it and to argue for it. But it just like, I don't. I want Americans to be able to choose the leaders that they want to be in office. But it's really hard when you're a sitting senator and you have a secure term and you can go from 78 to 84 or 84 to 90. And a lot can happen in those six years. A lot of health difficulties can come up.

A lot of stuff that I think really genuinely authentically changes the way that you can do the job and how much you should be relied on to do the job. So I don't know what the perfect construct is to implement term limits or to sort of limit the quote gerontocracy in Congress, in the House, in the Senate. But it's getting a little bit absurd. I mean, we have a regular cadence of news stories about members of Congress who are serving with Alzheimer's, who are dying in office, who are in the hospital for three, months without any public appearances. I just don't, I don't really get it. I think if you were to make a

defense of Senator McConnell, actually, Philip Wallach, who is a Tangle reader, he's a senior fellow at AEI, he's a guy who I respect a ton. He's a very interesting, thoughtful writer and, you know, economist, analyst. I actually don't know if he's technically an economist. I think he is. But I turned to him a lot for, you know, issues of governmental separation of powers and executive action and economic decisions

the Trump administration has made. He responded to my tweet about this and said, retiring Senator Mitch McConnell is not this country's dear leader, pretending that his health is an urgent matter of national interests or national interest or national interest or security is just shiating. If he were to retire now, would Kentucky or the nation really be better served between now and January? Why? And I think that's a good question. But my answer is like it actually is national interest. I mean, a lot is going to happen between now and November, now and January. I mean, if President Trump loses this election, he's going to have November and December and January to ram through as much of his legislative priorities as he can. And now there's a senator who's going to be making decisions about those priorities and casting votes on those priorities who, like, for all we know, could not be fully functioning.

I mean, just sorry to put it so bluntly. And I don't mean to be, like, crude about it. I hope Senator McConnell's health is good and I hope he improves and whatever. But, you know, the guy was just, again, incapacitated for three months. He was out of public view, not willing to do any public appearances, not able to do any public appearances, not able to. to do the job. He took three months off. Now he's back and they're not letting us take video of him. It's just, I do actually think that maybe not, maybe it's not urgent national interest, but I think it is national interest. And I would like to know that he's capable of doing the job

for the next four or five months at what could be a really consequential juncture for the country, in my opinion. Which is totally fair. And I agree. I think, yeah, it's a good call out to say that you're maybe overreaching by making comparison between McConnell and like an autocrat. Sure. Fair, but it doesn't disprove the idea that we should expect the people that are in office are going to be able to perform the duties that they're elected to serve to do. But I still kind of have a little bit of pause over saying, like, this is a growing problem because we see the people who have been in the Senate the longest

and the people who are not representative generally of the people that we're sending to that illustrious chamber having these medical issues. I think that's really more of a problem that I would identify with a polarized political climate that is incentivizing incumbency rather than something that is an open, moderate climate that is allowing challenges from younger candidates. And I think we are seeing in the last five, six years, like the data proves that out, we're electing younger people into office just in the most recent couple of cycles. Like the lower quartiles are getting younger, even as the people that are in that narrow gap at the top that are having these health crises are getting older. And I think it's, I always bristle

about crafting policy around the extremes. I think, and again, I did say earlier, I think term limits, I'm not against them. I'm actually kind of in favor of them, but not because I think we have to prevent like a rising tide. I think maybe we're agreeing here. I think it's to prevent like these worst cases from happening. But I do want to encourage more people to enter Congress who are younger, which is the root problem that we are electing people who are already in their 50s or 60s. And I've said, I've argued in Entangle even, that the way to do that is by giving them raises. past laws that say no more. Stock trading, give them huge raises,

make this a job you can do for 12 years, and while you're raising a family and attract more talent and younger talent to the job so that we can have the best of the best representing us, rather than the people with the most time and the most hateful energy, which kind of feels like it's the case, and a lot of the people that we see in campaign season.

Yeah. All right. We're at about an hour, and my computer conveniently is probably going to die soon. So we need to get into our grievances section. There was a joke there about Mitch McConnell and I bit my tongue. That's all I'm going to say. All right. Camille, Ari, you want to kick his off? I actually thought, I said at the beginning of the show. Actually, sorry, excuse me, first of all, John, Mick, Aden, we can play the music and then John from the grave play the grievances music and then we'll get into it. The airing of grievances.

between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal. I didn't have a grievance, but it came to me in the middle of the show just, like, beautifully. So I have one, but I'll see. Which one of us is it about? It's close. You're close. It has to do with the main retreat, but it's not related to either of you. You go, you go.

Oh, sure. All right. I'll go. Okay, so I flew obviously to our main, well, not obviously. I flew to our main retreat. My wife and my son came. And so, you know, just like packed way too much stuff. I'll never pack light again.

I have these monster suitcases to just, you know, a week of my wife's stuff, my stuff, equipment to record the podcast, my child stuff, you know, etc., etc. And I'm flying on United, which I think is a good airline. I mean, Delta is maybe the best of the best these days in America. United next, then like American air lines or something. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of how I would rank them. But I'm expecting, like, a decent, good experience.

So I buy my ticket. I get to the United, you know, I have to check in. I get to the United Bag Check. And I'm, like, rolling this heavy suitcase, carrying another one. I got the car seat tied to the suitcase. And so I go up, you know, there's like six United people standing there and then the kiosk with all the bag tags. And I go up and I'm like, hey, here to check my bags.

You're like, oh, you have to go to the kiosk and print out your bag tag, check in and print out your bag tag. And I'm like, okay, I had that thought just like, you can do it. You're right there with the machine. You guys have the, I can't believe this is we're doing like self-checkout at the airport now. But I just like, you know, I said to myself, That's the Jewish voice in your head, bite your tongue. Just go do the thing.

Don't complain. Don't get upset. I'm like, all right. So I go do the bag tag thing, and I come back with my bag tags. And now I've waited and come through the line once and then come out of the line, got the bag tag, come through the line a second time. And so I get up there, give them the bag tags, put the bag on the scale, and my bag is overweight. So the woman, very nice woman, says,

your bag's overweight. You have to go reprint the proper bag tag. At this point, like, okay, is there any way you could do that? Like, you have the bag tag printing machine that you're standing at. I don't want to go, have to get back in line, whatever. And she's like, no, you have to go back to the kiosk and talk to a representative, and they'll help you print out the proper overweight bag tag for your bat. I'm just like, oh, my God.

So I come back, you know, I have the, I've now mulling like two bags with the third thing, which is the car seat that I have to check. I go back. And I'm a little frustrated now. And when I get back to the line, Phoebe's like standing there holding Omri. And I get back to the kiosk and I kind of like just sort of roll, like slide my bag, like annoyed out of the way as I like putting my stuff down to stop and go into the kiosk line and tell somebody I need a new tag.

And I just kind of let it go a little early. And so the bag just like, the wheels come out and the bag just slams on the ground, like very loudly. And really has the effect of me throwing the bag. Like I'm pissed off and I just like threw the bag. So Phoebe's like mortified and immediately mad at me. She's just like, this is so embarrassing. Just print out the bag tag.

Stop acting like a child. I'm like, I didn't mean to throw it out. It was just, like, annoyed kind of sliding the bag, whatever, but it made this huge sound. So, like, all the people who work at United, like, kind of turn their heads and were like, oh, this guy's, like, pissed off or whatever. So I go to the guy and like, hey, I need my bag tag. I'm overweight, whatever. I'm annoyed.

And he's like, yeah, no problem. Here's the thing. It's going to be $100. And I was like, oh, well, no, I paid for both the bags already, 50 bucks each. And he's like, yeah, it's $100. $150 for an overweight bag. So you're paying, or it's $200 for an overweight bag. So you've paid $100 already, but you need to pay an additional $100 for the overweight bag.

And I was like, I feel like we're miscommunicating. This bag weighs like 54 pounds. And I paid for two bags up to 50 pounds. And I already paid $100. He's like, yep, you owe us $100 more. I'm just like, okay, now I'm mad. I am officially pissed off. So I'm like, all right, this system sucks.

I'm like kind of look at the bags. I'm thinking about, can I switch stuff out, unpack it? And then I'm just like, I'm sweating. We're running up against the clock a little bit. Armory's getting fussy. Phoebe's pissing me. I'm like, whatever. I'm just going to pay the bag.

So I pay for the bags. And yeah, I go back. The lady, you know, I get up, I bring my tags. And now I don't know if she's like prodding me, but I'm like, I hand her the bag tags. and she's just like, you can put them on the bags. And I'm like, you, you, you, you are the person. You are, you're wearing the United outfit.

Here are the bag tags. Here's the thing. But no, I have to like rip the stickers off and loop them through. She's like telling me which parts of the car seat to put them on. I'm like, you know, you could just do it since you do this all the time. And I don't, I'm not saying any of this. I'm just boiling inside. Anyway, I guess point of the story is I guess now we're just doing self-checkout at the

airport, which infuriates me. There are people we don't need machines for this. It reminded me of the incredible Louis C.K. I think it was Louis C.K. Oh, no. Oh, no, it's not Louis C.K. You're really doing the old Jew thing now. Who was it?

What was that guy I like? I'm blanking on the comedian's name, who I really love. But he does an awesome bit about just like walking up to the self-checkout at the grocery store and doing a three-count and just being like, oh, guess, they don't want to get paid and just walking out and like rolling hams underneath the self-checkout thing just like out the door. And that's how I feel. I'm just next time I'm just going to walk to the gate and just say, oh, I saw the kiosk, but I didn't see any people from United there. Nobody wanted to check my bag. So I figured you guys didn't want me to pay you.

And I think you'd be like, that'll be $400. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I hate the airlines. That's my grievance. And Phoebe was mad at me for like the first 30 minutes of the trip because she thought I acted. I was acting too frustrated and annoyed. So, which just compounded my anger, obviously, at the entire situation. So that's my grievance for the week. I'm sorry. Yeah. Thanks for saying. I haven't had to check a bag in years and I dread it. I dread it. That sounds dreadful. I don't know what I would do in that situation other than also boil inside. Yeah. Yeah. I have a, I have a Bill Burr, that's the comedian. So you were profiling the other

sort of balding red-headed comedian. Yeah, exactly, yep. Speaking of being over. Yeah. What do you mean these comedians? Speaking of being overweight at the main retreat, that is sort of my grievance. The last several times we've done retreats,

I've come home just like having gained weight, like more than a small amount. like five to 10 pounds. When we went to Oregon two years ago, I came home at, I'll be transparent here, I guess, which is a tangle value, but not one of mine. I tip the scales

at 186 when I came home two years ago. I know. I'm 5'9. There's not a lot of places for that to go. I didn't look visibly fat, but I felt, you know, like a cave that was leaking inside, just overly humid and uncomfortable. I'd been doing such a good job.

like pre-baby birth, eternity leave, just like being on my feet and watching my intake and portion control. And I was like coming to Maine just under 170 and feeling good and light. And came home at 176. I don't really even know what happened. I just like ate too much and moved not enough. I felt like we were moving a good bit. But like these retreats, they are...

they're life-giving, and they're also artery plugging. And I want to see if there's a way I can also go into my Phoebe mode here and blame you for it. I don't know if I can, but I'm going to try to. I'm a foodie, and I make everybody eat a good restaurant, so I think that helps. And you're welcome for that. I try to budget for that, but I didn't expect. I mean, Isaac, what are we doing? Come on, man.

I mean, to be fair, there were non-stop snacks and three meals a day served in the cafeteria, and then we're eating really nice meals out. And, I mean, I gain weight too. It was just hard not to crush it. We can't do these. We're only going to do these once a year, partially because they're, you know, expensive. And like, it's great to be in person.

But, like, the meals a day, like, we're running a tight ship here. And I don't want to, I don't want to take that and put it into my gut. I feel like it, I don't feel good. You just got to slim down ahead of the retreat. That is it. That's what you got to do. Did. At least I'm 176, not 186. I guess that's the silver lining here. I'll just get back on the rowing machine and sweat it off. Yeah, it is very hard for me to hear this grievance from you

because we're almost the same height and I'm not going to disclose my weight. I don't need to. I don't need to. Transparency is not a value. I get it. It's a transparency about that health information. I don't know. And I'm giving a story I told you two before we started the show. I mean, come on. So my grievance today is about death. I have had a rough go of late getting bad news about people I like passing on. And I don't even know that I really like that euphemism. Just dying. Kind of sucks.

And I just discovered this afternoon that Annie Dillard passed yesterday. And I've always loved her work and her writing. I have these Dillardisms that just kind of go through my head on a regular basis. I think about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek all the time. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. And she has this just incredible way of helping to remind us of our obligation to be present and recognize the remarkable persistent strangeness of the world and our position in it.

And I'll just share like a little bit of one of my favorite bits here, where she is essentially talking about this and saying that we need to take this wider view of things so that we can at least at least wail the right questions into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to it, choir the proper praise. She, it goes on to say, at this, I'm going to do it here.

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairie on fire was a well-known signal that meant come down to the water. It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it's that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagance, flinging intricacies and colossi down eons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacy with ever-fresh vigor.

the whole show has been on fire from the world word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes, but everywhere I look, I see fire. That which isn't Flint is tender. The whole world sparks and flames. We lost just tremendous light with Annie's passing, and she was on the short list of authors who I desperately wanted to interview,

and I will never have the opportunity, but I am heartened that we will still have her works that we can read and reread, and I commend her work to you. So, bear. Thank you for going last. Damn. Yeah, one of the greats, dude.

I was so bummed to get that push notification. Yeah. And we'll echo the sentiment. I'll be buying, you know, it's always sucks that we do this when people die, but it's like I go buy the book of theirs I haven't read or, you know, pick up the album I never listened to or whatever. But I suppose it's a good way to honor them.

So, yeah, RIP, Annie Dillard. Thank you, Camille. We're all anti-death here. Let's keep it real on that. Let's go. Yeah. Gentlemen, as always, a pleasure. I look forward to our next chance to do this in person.

And we'll see the rest of you guys next week. Bye. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Lull. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will Kback and Associate Editor

Audrey Moorhead and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com.