Tangle - The new report on Trump and Epstein.

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal published a report claiming that President Donald Trump signed a letter containing a lewd drawing and sexually suggestive text as part of a birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. The Journal says it reviewed the contents of the previously unreported album and letters but has not released any of the documents. President Trump strongly denied writing the letter and, on Friday, filed a defamation lawsuit against The Journal and its owners. Separately, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asked a federal judge to unseal grand jury testimony from Epstein’s sex-trafficking prosecution as part of an effort to address ongoing public interest in the case. Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.Take the survey: What do you think about the alleged birthday note? Let us know!Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.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 written by: Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong.

But there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the Summer Pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile. Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, the US and Mexico for just 39 bucks a month. Plus get a one-time use of five gigs of Roam Beyond data. Conditions apply, details at freedommobile.ca.

Condition supply details at freedommobile.ca. From executive producer, Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and today is Monday, July 21st. We're going to be covering the latest developments in the Jeffrey Epstein saga, including this Wall Street Journal story that got published last week

and President Donald Trump's response to that story. Before we jump in though, I wanna give you a quick heads up that on Friday, Tangles managing editor Ari Weitzman took a deep dive look at the latest climate science and how it actually differs from common public perceptions. Some people were pleased about the piece, including some climate scientists who wrote in,

while others were pretty annoyed by the piece, thinking that it was sort of a one-sided look at a divisive issue. I thought it was really good. Ari did a read down of it for the podcast. It's available on our feed. You can also find it by going to our website, ReadTangle.com.

Of course, this is a Friday edition, so if you want to read or listen to the whole thing, you have to become a Tangle member by going to readtangle.com forward slash membership. Be sure to check that out. All right, with that out of the way, I'm going to send it over to John for today's main story and I'll be back for my take.

Thanks Isaac and welcome everybody. Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. It is good to be back. I missed it here and I missed you guys. We got a lot to cover today so I'll keep it brief and just say that it's a new week and plenty of room for possibilities and opportunities. So let's a new week and plenty of room for possibilities and opportunities. So let's bring our best selves to everything we do today and make a positive impact on those around us. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, Israeli soldiers fired at a crowd near a food distribution site in southern

Gaza, which the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry said resulted in at least 32 deaths. The Israeli military stated that soldiers fired warning shots after individuals approached their position and did not heed orders to stop. The Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation acknowledged that a deadly incident occurred outside the vicinity of the site hours before it opened. Separately, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, announced that Israel and Syria agreed to a ceasefire after days of fighting last week. President Donald Trump signed the Genius Act into law, marking the first major legislation governing digital currencies and establishing a regulatory framework for the stablecoin

market. 3. The White House announced that President Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency following an examination. A letter from the president's doctors said the condition is benign and common. 4. Ten Americans and an undisclosed number of Venezuelan political prisoners were freed from Venezuelan prison in exchange for approximately 250 Venezuelans who had been detained in El Salvador.

At number five, officials in Kerr County, Texas said almost 100 people listed as missing after flash flooding on July 4th had been found safe. Only three remain missing. The state's total death toll stands at 135. There is no end to the controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein files. Today, President Trump lashed out at those who have demanded transparency, calling them, quote, troublemakers. The president is suing the journal for $20 billion in damages. The paper reporting he sent a risque birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday. The paper claims the letter was signed by Trump and included a sketch of a nude woman.

In 2019, Epstein committed suicide while in jail, awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking minors. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal published a report claiming that President Donald Trump signed a letter containing a lewd drawing and sexually suggestive text as part of a birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. The journal says it reviewed the contents of the previously unreported album and letters, but has not released any of the documents. President Trump strongly denied writing the letter, and on Friday, filed a defamation

lawsuit against the journal and its owners. Separately, the Department of Justice asked a federal judge to unseal grand jury testimony from Epstein's sex trafficking prosecution as part of an effort to address ongoing public interest in the case. For context, on July 7, the DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation released a joint memo affirming prior findings in the investigation into Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who was found dead in his cell in 2019 while awaiting trial. Additionally, the FBI and DOJ refuted claims that Epstein had not died by suicide and denied

the existence of a client list containing names of Epstein's alleged associates. The findings prompted outcry from prominent supporters of President Trump and the broader public, who suggested the Trump administration had broken its promise to make further disclosures in the case. In response, President Trump has downplayed the significance of the investigation, calling it a hoax, and telling his supporters to move on. We covered the DOJ and FBI memo previously, and you can check that out with the link in today's episode description. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump's purported letter to Epstein contained several lines of typewritten text framed by an outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.

A pair of small arcs denotes the woman's breasts, and the future president's signature is a squiggly Donald below her waist mimicking pubic hair. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime associate, reportedly compiled the birthday album, which the journal says includes letters from billionaire Leslie Wexner and attorney Alan Dershowitz, among other public figures.

President Trump sharply criticized the journal for publishing the story, writing on Truth Social, I told the Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch it was a scam, that he shouldn't print this fake story, but he did, and now I'm gonna sue his ass off, and that of his third-rate newspaper. Subsequently, Trump filed a lawsuit in Miami federal Court alleging that Murdoch, Dow Jones News Corp, and its chief executive Robert Thompson, and two Wall Street Journal reporters defamed him and caused overwhelming financial and reputational harm.

The president is seeking at least $10 billion in damages. Separately, on Thursday, Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent grand jury testimony from the Epstein case, subject to court approval. The next day, Bondi filed a request for grand jury testimony from Epstein's and Maxwell's cases to be unsealed, writing that the DOJ will work to make appropriate redactions of information related to victims and other personal identifying information before releasing the transcripts. Today, we'll break down the latest developments in the Epstein story with views from the left

and the right, and then Isaac's take. We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose, maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong. But there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale

today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile. Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left used the journal's story as plausible and suggests it could do significant political damage. Some argue Democrats should continue pressing for answers about Trump and Epstein's relationship. Others say the story is rightly animating both sides of the political spectrum. In The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan wrote, Trump worked to kill a story about his friendship with Epstein.

Now, we know why. It's not just that the 50th birthday card he reportedly penned for the future convicted child sex offender is so damning in itself. It's not just that Trump has been denying a tight friendship with Epstein, who died in jail in 2019, for some time, and that this would clearly put the lie to that, Sullivan said. No, there's another element, and a brutal one for the president. It's where the story was published, in the Wall Street Journal, whose conservative opinion

side has often backed him and whose news side has a reputation for ensuring that explosive stories are bulletproof. When the paper has taken a big swing at exposing wrongdoing, do you remember John Kyrgyzou's expose of the blood-testing company Theranos by any chance? Their reporting holds up, Sullivan wrote. Granted, Trump has had a lot of success in recent months in his various suits against big news organizations. This I suspect will be quite different.

A lawsuit won't make this damning story go away, and I doubt that Trump really wants to put himself through legal discovery, with all the ugliness that might be exposed. In Vox, Eric Levitz wrote, Trump's relationship with Epstein is indisputably scandalous. The Democratic Party's decision to dedicate so much energy to promoting this controversy might seem dubious. For one thing, Democrats' ostensible outrage over the alleged suppression of the Epstein files is obviously hypocritical. After all, he died six years ago. A Democratic administration was in power from January 2021 through January 20th of this year, Levitt said.

Thus, by affirming the notion that incriminating Epstein files exist, Democrats risk perpetuating the idea that both parties are toxically corrupt, a form of cynicism that Trump has long exploited to excuse his shameless graft and malfeasance. But those worries are misguided. The Democrats' decision to lean into the Epstein controversy is a political no-brainer for several reasons. First, the incontrovertible facts about Trump's relationship with Epstein are unflattering and eyebrow-raising, even though they are not incriminating," Levitz wrote.

Even if we put Trump's conspiracizing to one side, his claim that he doesn't understand why the Epstein case interests people still seems disingenuous. It seems clear, then, that Trump knows perfectly well why the Epstein case interests people. The fact that he now feels compelled to claim otherwise while begging his supporters to stop talking about the controversy seems rather odd, and also like an indication that Democrats would be wise to keep attention focused on this matter. In Bloomberg, Matthew Iglesias argued bipartisan outrage over Epstein is just what America needs.

This story differs from the more extreme, russiagate allegations against Trump or Trump's infamous charges that Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya, and that they are not narrowly partisan. As such, they are especially appealing to the kinds of people who are disengaged from politics and alienated from mainstream institutions. In other words, just the kinds of people who flocked to Trump's banner over the past decade, Iglesias Ripp. The conspiracists turning on Trump now are part of the more natural process of restoring

balance to the political system. Democrats, especially Democrats who aren't socialists, need to relearn the habit of standing up for the little guy versus the establishment in ways that go beyond the disruptional tables of a tax bill. A core reason that Epstein conspiracy theories are so widespread is that the public is broadly cynical about the way rich people are treated by the state and the legal system," Iglesias said. The kind of change that many people want is not necessarily dramatic policy change, but change in personnel, the elevation of

outsiders uncorrupted by ties to the system, either the parties or the governments. Alright that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right has said. The right is skeptical of the journal's report, suggesting it mirrors past media attempts to take down Trump. Some criticize Democrats for exploiting the story for political gain. Others say the grand jury testimony shouldn't be unsealed and is unlikely to satisfy Trump's critics if it is. In The Federalist, Eddie Scarry said, the report reeks of being a fake plan to implicate

Trump. I have no idea whether the note is legitimate. We know Trump did have at least some semblance of a relationship with Epstein that goes back to the early 1990s, but so did a lot of people, Scurry wrote. We also know that this all sounds almost exactly like another story involving the FBI and a newly discovered document that was damaging to Trump, the case of Paul Manafort and the Black Ledger. Recall that in August 2016, just after Trump secured the Republican nomination for president,

the New York Times broke the story about allegations of secret foreign payments to demonstrate a link between Russia and Trump using Manafort's business dealings in Ukraine. This is the same FBI that has been handling the Epstein case. link between Russia and Trump using Manafort's business dealings in Ukraine. This is the same FBI that has been handling the Epstein case. And so here we are. Another seedy book turns up out of nowhere to associate Trump with criminal conduct. What a coincidence, Scary said. The two events are almost comically identical.

An office space in Ukraine was pillaged by political activists, but what luck! A little paper book was eventually recovered. Oh my! Inside is damaging information associated with Trump. In 2025, as Trump set about quickly restructuring the executive branch of the federal government and attempting to hold corrupt Democrats accountable, well, I'll be. A leather-bound book that makes him look like the dear friend of a notorious pedophile. In The Washington Examiner, Christopher Tremowgli asked, Why do Democrats suddenly care about

Epstein? The Trump administration has botched the long-promised release of Epstein-related information, but Democrats acting as if they're the night's errand of Epstein's victims is the bigger scandal, Tremowgli wrote. Among the vociferous have been congressional Democrats, who all of a sudden are interested in the villainous and disgraced sex trafficker. Their conspicuous silence excludes the period from January 20, 2021 to January 20, 2025. Merrick Garland was the attorney general appointed by Biden and ran the Justice Department.

They had access to everything related to Epstein. Yet it appears that up until recently, the overwhelming majority of Democrats showed little, if any, interest in the Epstein files. That is, until the Trump administration walked back a campaign promise and created a public relations nightmare with such an unforced error. It's shameful and speaks volumes about their vulture-like tendencies. Once again, Democrats seek to exploit the tragedies of innocent people, in this case sexually trafficked minors, solely for political gain," Tremokley said.

Their silence from when Biden was president and Garland was attorney general is the real indicator of how little they cared about Epstein. In National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy wrote about the Epstein disclosure morass. Weary, but indulgent of his MAGA base, President Trump yesterday directed Attorney General Bondi to seek the release of all grand jury testimony from the Epstein investigation. This is a double whammy. It is legally dubious and it won't satisfy the mob, McCarthy said. Grand jury proceedings are secret by law. There is no overarching public right to know what is uncovered in the criminal investigations.

If the government actually formally accuses someone of crimes, such allegations and the relevant evidence become public. Absent secrecy, the presumption of innocence would be eradicated. That is, people publicly identified as connected to a grand jury probe, including completely innocent people who were just witnesses or whose names randomly came up for some reason, would be assumed by the press and the public to be under suspicion of committing crimes," McCarthy wrote. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the grand jury testimony typically amounts to just a small fraction of the government's investigative file.

Far more extensive are witness interviews conducted by law enforcement agents, evidence subpoenaed from various sources, and the fruits of search warrants. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take. Alright, that is it for the left and the writer's sandwich brings us to my take. I'm going to start here with something I said on X that actually ended up getting quite a bit of traction. I'm 97.5% sure, roughly speaking, that Trump wrote or signed the letter described in the Wall Street Journal story.

Why am I so sure? Well, five main reasons. Number one, Trump has a well-documented history of drawing. This may seem kind of silly, but a key part of Trump's and his surrogate's denials is that he would never send someone a note, including some kind of a doodle. Donald Trump Jr., for instance, said, quote,

"'In 47 years, I've never seen him doodle once. "'Give me a break with the fake journalisming. Yet I can easily find example after example of signed Trump drawings. You don't have to take my word for it. In his own book published in 2008, Trump wrote about drawing for charity. Number two, the language in the note

does actually sound like Trump's. Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis, who always seems to take Trump's side, claimed that he asked Grok to search every record of Trump speaking or writing and never found him using the word enigma, which the note tapstein used. It seems that Grok actually just got this one wrong,

which is odd since Trump has said enigma repeatedly, both in writing and in speeches. Davis' post on X was immediately plastered with community notes describing all the times Trump has actually used that word. Number three, Trump was really good friends with Epstein. Even though the two eventually had a falling out, the timing of the birthday letter lines up quite well, actually.

Trump purportedly wrote the message in 2003. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine what a terrific guy he thought Epstein was and how it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. Likewise, Epstein thought he was Trump's closest friend. Trump flew on Epstein's plane several times in the 1990s and the two were repeatedly pictured together at parties.

So, yes, it is totally plausible that Trump could have written him this intimate and cryptic birthday note in 2003. Number four, Trump is not only well known for drawings, but also sending personalized signed notes. The Washington Post ran a whole story about Trump's lifelong love of letters just this month. The New York Times ran a similar piece all the way back in 2016, referencing his, quote, most powerful and memorable form of communication,

the old fashioned ritual of a personal letter, end quote. Finally, number five, I sincerely doubt the Wall Street Journal would publish a story if it weren't 100 percent sure about its veracity. Trump has been successfully intimidating news outlet after news outlet with lawsuits. The Journal is obviously aware of this and would never take the massive risk of lobbing a grenade at Trump if it didn't have the goods. A lot of people don't understand the layers of review these pieces go through to get published,

but the process is substantial. I'm quite confident that the journal has buttoned this piece up and protected itself because Trump's suing was a predictable outcome. Now, a few points on what we can take from any of this. For starters, I certainly don't think we should dismiss the relationship between Trump and Epstein. All told, the stories of them partying together,

the allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump, the footage of Trump judging underage models, and the other oddities like this letter can and should set off all sorts of alarms. At the same time, I also agree with Trump that if he were criminally implicated in the Epstein case, that information would likely have leaked during the Biden administration or any one of his three presidential campaigns. I do not think Trump decided to crush the story to cover up his own wrongdoing.

I think it's far more likely that he's trying to protect his or his friends' reputations, knowing that a mere mention in the files would result in being publicly tied to Epstein. If you read how Julie K. Brown, a reporter who initially investigated the Epstein case, talks about Trump's role in it all, I think you'll see the facts are much less interesting

than all the speculation. As for the implications of Epstein's other personal connections, we still don't know. After all these years, how Epstein built his wealth, if his powerful friends were actually part of his sex trafficking scheme, or where his web of professional connections and his sex-related crimes overlapped.

As I said on the Sunday podcast this week, there is no quote unquote client list if you define that as some kind of running record of clients he brought in to abuse underage girls. There are Epstein files, which include FAA records on where he flew, potential connections to intelligence agencies, or even his autopsy report, all of which could be released but haven't been. Still, we actually know quite a lot already.

David Wallace-Wells summed it up quite efficiently in a recent piece. Gawker has published his address book a full decade ago. New York Magazine delivered an annotated version in 2019 and Business Insider a searchable version the next year. There, followed investigations by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, prolific enough that they now have their own landing pages and depositions in civil suits and a public criminal trial for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime partner in crime. The Epstein flight logs were made public in 2021, the same year that Michael Wolff published

an astonishing account of Epstein's final months, including the long transcript of an interview that Steve Bannon conducted with Epstein. Bannon has said he is sitting on 15 hours of material. Wolf says his own audio recordings run about 100 hours. In one clip released just before the election, Epstein calls himself Trump's quote unquote closest friend. The difficulty with the Epstein story has always been separating the speculation from the facts

or the conspiracies from the open questions. Trump and his own camp have helped to stir some of those questions into a conspiratorial mania, and now it seems to be swallowing him up. He's fighting back with his usual bluster and victimhood, pursuing lawsuits and claiming fake news, even though his history with Epstein is very well documented. If the end result is more disclosures and attention

to the story and the victims, that's probably a good thing. But if we follow the speculation further down the conspiracy rabbit hole and further away from any solid facts, we'll only be left with more questions. We'll be right back after this quick break. and dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile.

Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, the US, and Mexico for just $39 a month. Plus get a one-time use of five gigs of Rome Beyond data. Condition supply details at freedommobile.ca. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from Guy in North Haven, Connecticut. Guy said, in regard to budget cuts to NPR and PBS, I am under the impression that the cuts will amount to about three to three and a half percent of their annual budgets. Am I correct in this

impression? Yes and no. On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted to pass a package rescinding about $9 billion of funding from the already allocated federal budget. Among the clawbacks was a roughly $1 billion cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the CPB, which funds the Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, and National Public Radio, NPR. The cuts effectively eliminate all the government's funding for the CPB over the next two years. Even though the CPB's budget to administer these stations will be eliminated, neither NPR nor PBS are dependent on government funding for the majority of their operations. About 1% of NPR's national budget and about 15% of PBS's national budget comes from government

funding. The rest comes from audience donations. And although affiliate stations can broadcast much of PBS and NPR's offering for free, some stations pay dues to run nationally syndicated shows. Local stations that rely more on government funding say their operations are seriously threatened and some are already making a push for donations to address the shortfall. Later this week, we plan to cover the rescissions package more broadly and in more detail as a main topic. All right, that is it for your questions answered. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod,

and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. [♪ Music Plays. [♪ Music Plays. [♪ Music Plays. Thanks, Isaac. Here's your under-the-radar story for today, folks. On Monday, July 14th, chipmaker Nvidia announced

it would resume selling one of its artificial intelligence chips to China after the Department of Commerce lifted export controls on the product. Treasury Secretary Scott Bissett called the export controls a negotiating chip in United States-China trade talks, and Commerce Secretary Howard Ludnick said resumed chip sales were a provision in the recent agreement with China on rare earth minerals. The Trump administration had previously restricted Nvidia's chip sales to limit China's use of U.S. technology to advance its military and AI systems, but Nvidia lobbied the government to lift the controls, arguing restrictions could spur unwanted Chinese innovation on

AI. CNN has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. Alright, next up is our numbers section. Of registered voters, 17% approve and 63% disapprove of the Trump administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, according to a July Quinnipiac University poll. Of Republicans Republicans 40% approve and 36% disapprove of the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files. Of Democrats 2% approve and 83% disapprove of the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files. Of independents 11% approve and 71%

disapprove of the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files. According to a July YouGov poll, 46% of U.S. adults consider the Wall Street Journal report that Donald Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein a birthday message in 2003 to be completely or mostly true. 10% of U.S. adults consider the Wall Street Journal report to be completely or mostly false. And 27% of U.S. adults said they hadn't heard of the report. And last but not least, our Have a Nice Day story. Baltimore struggled with a rising homicide rate in the years leading up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in April, the city recorded only five homicides, a record monthly low. Furthermore, the total number of homicides, 39, through the first four months of 2025, is the city's lowest for the start of any year on record, with both homicides and non-fatal shootings down significantly from 2024. Local leaders stressed that they still have a lot more work to do, but praised a collaboration between the city's police department, district attorney, and community violence intervention partners for the progress to date. These numbers show that we're moving in the right direction together, Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Richard Worley said. WYPR has this story and there's a link in today's

episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, please go to reetangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. 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 K. Back and associate editors Hunter Kaspersen, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com.

This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect,

the pre-roll. Shop the Summer Pre-Roll and Infuse Pre--roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile. Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, the US, and Mexico for just 39 bucks a month. Plus get a one-time use of five gigs of Roam Beyond data. Conditions apply, details at freedommobile.ca.