Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac and Ari talk about Kamala Harris and the road ahead.

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

In today's episode, Isaac and Ari discuss Kamala Harris, her strengths and weaknesses, where she differs from Biden, and the potential criticisms coming from her opponents and the media. And, as always, the Airing of Grievances.Imagine this:There are over 100,000 people on this mailing list. If every person got one friend to sign up for Tangle, we could double our readership overnight. We have made it incredibly easy. All you have to do is click the button below and you'll get a pre-drafted email pitch — then you just type in a few friends or family member's email addresses and click send. Give it a shot!You can catch our trailer for the Tangle Live event at City Winery NYC. Full video coming soon!Check out Episode 5 of our podcast series, The Undecideds. Please give us a 5-star rating and leave a comment!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th. Based on

Charles Yu's award-winning book. Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world

beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like

to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. All right, coming up, it is a Kamala Harris heavy pod. Her strengths, her weaknesses. We're going to talk about Biden dropping out, where we go from here, and then some very, very valid grievances. Hope you guys enjoy.

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, joined by Tangle Managing Editor, Ari Weitzman. And Ari, we're living in historic times, my friend. We are witnessing it all. Hashtag unprecedented. Yeah. Hashtag unprecedented. Un unprecedented uncharted waters as we say uncharted correctly stated yeah i keep writing uncharted and then people have to correct me and

then actually was just looking through the inbox our inbox and uh we missed one in the newsletter this week we had it right in one place uncharted and wrong in another and there were like three emails and i was like it was when you said it in on the youtube video if you said uncharted there and was there really one in the newsletter this is not interesting probably to people to hear us talking about things that we missed and were choice uh it is um you're in you're in uncharted waters not uncharted yeah and because we had a president drop out of the race at a very very late stage or presidential candidate a very late stage and in very weird circumstances i was tweeting about this and like i mean whatever i'm i think i might this and like i mean whatever i'm i think i might i i really should just get off twitter and i still refuse to call it x i say this all the time it's just like it brings out the worst in me like i it does to me what i watch it do to everybody else i wouldn't i would stop if i didn't know that

it's genuinely good for our business and for Tangle. I mean, when I share our stories and opinions and I have tweets that, you know, get traction or go viral, I see new readers come in. And so it's kind of a growth thing for us. Otherwise, I would just stop. But anyway, I was tweeting about how it was weird. Like Biden dropped out on Sunday. He dropped out with a screenshot of a statement that he had signed. And then, you know, you know, it's his team tweeting and stuff. We don't hear anything from him. We don't have any video.

Now, I didn't like I didn't think that he was, you was, there are all this stuff on Twitter like, oh, he's dead. He's in hospice. I was like, okay, he's sick. He has COVID. He probably doesn't want to go on camera and look really sick or sound really bad, whatever. But when it was like Tuesday and we still hadn't heard from him and they were saying he's going to come out Wednesday night, I did. I thought it was kind of weird. And I said, you know, I just said that on Twitter, which I thought was a pretty reasonable opinion. Like he could have posted a 30 second video on Twitter of him just like, you know, he didn't have to be in a suit, toss him on there in like a t-shirt sitting in his house, just saying, Hey, I'm here,

not feeling great, but just wanted to say, super proud to be endorsing Kamala Harris. And I've got a lot more to come later this week. That's all he had to do. But they didn't bring him out. I said it was weird. I got accused of being a right-wing conservative conspiracy theorist for saying that. But yeah, odd, odd circumstances. He spoke last night. We're recording this on Thursday. So he spoke on Wednesday night. I thought it was fine. I watched it live. I mean, you know, this is why he's dropping out. He looks and sounds frail and old. And even when he's like, you know, reading from a teleprompter, he gets lost in spots. But, you know, he looked all right.

He sounded all right. I thought it was a good message. It was on message. Yeah, like he hit the notes. I think he spoke to the Democratic base. He did all the stuff that you would expect him to do. It was a little bit more political than I was expecting. He didn't really explain why he was dropping out or anything, which was, again, a little weird, but I guess that's my expectation. So yeah, here we are, totally new race. We're

going to talk a lot about it today. Obviously, I mean, this whole podcast, spoiler alert, is going to be about Kamala Harris and her strengths and weaknesses and what she should do with this VP pick. But yeah, I mean, debates matter, I guess. We should probably talk about that, huh? that uh yeah let's get started there i think as much as that statement that biden gave gave us a look into the kind of president and candidate we've been seeing the last several months where we saw a pretty good message somebody who was attempting to articulate his campaign strengths to a national audience and was able to when he was doing it well still be a little difficult to hear and listen to or watch in some ways even though he was ill and sick at that time that is something that we saw dialed up to 11 at the debates and i think we've said for a long time, well, I know I have anyway, going back before term, that debates tell us almost nothing about candidates. You either know about their positions going in and you're just watching them perform, or if you show up

hoping to learn something about their positions, you don't learn anything. You just see them talking over each other, cutting each other off. There are times where you get a real look into the way somebody can hang on their feet. And the bar for what you want for an orator for public office isn't super

high, but I think what we saw is the value of debates is what it looks like when somebody does not clear that bar and how that changes the game in a very important way. And that I think is a good indication of the value of debates. You know, there's always more we can get out of it, but I think it's a bare minimum. That's what they provide. And that's the job that they did this year. Yeah. I mean, I would also say in 2020, I think Donald Trump was hurt

by the debates and I think they actually mattered in that election too. I think Biden, I don't know if I'd say he quote unquote won the debates, but I think at least in the first debate, Trump seemed so kind of unhinged. I mean, people, the talk leaving that debate, even from some of Trump's most ardent supporters, was that he basically- We're talking the 2020 debate, right? The 2020 debate was that he took all the bait that Biden laid for him and he just kind of embarrassed himself. And Biden did sort of a lot of sort of like laughing and smiling while Trump was going off. I mean, it was the total opposite of the Biden we saw where he's like slack jaw staring off into space this year.

And four years ago, it was Biden laughing and making faces and sort of like, can you believe this guy? Which I thought was actually a pretty effective way to handle it. And yeah, I think it mattered then. I feel like there might be a nice little middle ground here that's like, debates don't matter to well-informed, partisan political junkies. That's who they don't matter for because you go in just wanting to see your guy or gal dominate and you want to fact check the other person, you know, the other candidate. I mean, that's what it's about for people who are locked in. But I think for Americans who don't pay a lot of attention, I think the debates do matter.

You know, I think like if you're a voter, I mean, it doesn't matter. If you're a voter, I mean, it doesn't matter. Maybe in this election, we would expect it to matter the least. And then it ended up mattering the most because it was two very known candidates. But, you know, if Trump and Kamala debate, which we're going to talk about a little bit later, you know, there's going to be a lot of people tuning in who will be getting their first impression of Kamala Harris. And I think it's going to matter how she performs and what she says and how she answers certain questions on really hot button issues. So yeah, I'm pretty staunchly team debates still matter. I think for people who really care about politics, they don't. But I think for everybody else, it's a big deal.

they don't. But I think for everybody else, it's a big deal. And I think based on what you just said, saying people are going to form their first impressions of Kamala Harris and people who maybe are still not sure. And we're interviewing a lot of those people for our Undecided podcast. But something that we hear from them is, I'm leaning one way, but I'm not sold yet. Or that we hear from them is, I'm leaning one way, but I'm not sold yet. Or I'm right in the middle. I want to vote for Trump or I want to vote for Biden or Harris, whoever it is, but they need to sell me. They need to prove something to me. And I think the debates do provide that proving ground. I think for me, what's helpful is to switch my perspective for what a debate is. what's helpful is to switch my perspective for what a debate is. You're not going to see two people go up and have some kind of Socratic comparison of two viewpoints and expose each other's arguments and weaknesses. You're just going to see two candidates put their talking

points to the public test and see if they can pass some basic scrutiny from their opponent if they can hand up to or if they can hold up to uh some adversaries in the moment if they can not blink under the bright lights and present a message and then at home you just want to be able to hear that message see the stand deliver and get their message out there not who's going to be able to put the other person's logic to the test the most and i think as far as that goes it's a valuable exercise so uh i hate to break this to you but i think you're on your air pods on your mic no really yeah i it sounded something just happened where it sounded weird to me and then then I checked on my end, and it says Soundcore Liberty AirTube Pods, whatever.

All right. All right. We just took a brief pause because Ari had his AirPods hooked up to his Bluetooth instead of his really nice, expensive microphone. Something that Isaac didn't check in Soundcheck, so bad job, both of us. All right. But it gave us a nice little pause for a transition to Kamala Harris. I mean, we might as well just get into talking about the new candidate. I've been talking about this all week.

We covered it in the newsletter that's coming out on Friday that'll be out by the time you're listening to this. And if you're hungry for a deep dive on Kamala Harris, we definitely have you covered. We published, we'll be publishing a beast of a Friday edition about her career in politics. And I thought it'd be fun today to just talk a little bit about the five reasons that I think she's strong as a candidate and the five reasons that I think she's weak as a candidate. And maybe the first thing that I guess stands out to me is just some of the fresh polling we have.

This is a really, really weird situation from like a data standpoint, just trying to discern whether she's an improvement or not, because I don't totally understand how this stuff works. Like Kamala was getting polled before she, you know, before she got declared the nominee, which she basically is now before Biden endorsed her and stepped down. You know, a few weeks ago, these polling outfits were doing polls of a Kamala versus Trump head-to-head. And she wasn't doing that well.

She was polling similarly, in some cases worse than Biden was. But then this simple fact of her becoming the nominee has this impact on voters and people who take these polls where it just improves their numbers a little bit, which is the thing I don't totally understand, like the psychology of how that works or why it works or what's behind that. But the upshot is basically, as we record this, we have four polls that are out on this head-to-head matchup between Harris and Trump. In one of them,

the one that was very newsy and got a lot of attention, she's leading Donald Trump in the latest Reuters Ipsos poll, 44 to 42%. And her lead is 42 to 38% when RFK Jr. gets thrown into the race, which is fascinating. RFK Jr. eats 4% into Trump's support, but only 2% into Harris's. In a Yahoo YouGov poll, she's tied with Trump 46 to 46 in a head to head. In an NPR Marist poll, she's trailing Trump 45 to 46, but is tied dead heat 47, 47 among likely voters. And in a morning consult poll, she's trailing by two points. These are much better numbers for her than Joe Biden was seeing, which seems notable. And we can add one poll hot off the presses to that, which is Nate Cohn of the New York Times just posted the first time Sienna poll since Harris became the presumptive nominee. And it's currently Harris 47, Trump 48, which the Times is framing as Harris narrowed his gap against Trump, which is true.

But Trump's still with a slight edge there as the New York Times-Siena released their first poll. You're breaking news to me live on the... Yeah, yeah, that is big news in fact i heard nate kuhn get interviewed on the daily a couple days ago and hypothesized that she wasn't going to close the gap that much so i think that result maybe undermines what he thought was going to happen does that tweet or whatever you're reading contextualize it in terms of what the last biden trump poll was in the new york times yeah let's check that out i'm looking at both the article linked and the tweet um yes it does uh the last time the sienna the times in sienna had a poll was in early july showed biden behind trump by six points and that was immediately following the poor debate performance.

that she is, you know, it's advantage Harris, not not versus Trump, but definitely a step up for the Democratic Party by nominating her by pushing her forward. I'd also add that she is smoking Biden among young voters, which we had as our under the radar story in the newsletter today. And smoking Trump. Yeah, by a really healthy margin. I think Biden was leading Trump by six points, and she was leading Trump by 20 points among voters between the ages of 18 and 34. Does that matter? I don't know. I think she'd much rather be winning that among 65 and up. Notoriously, 18 and 34-year-olds are always kind of overhyped and then never actually turn out in the numbers that they say they're going to. But it's really important that that's like a slam dunk for Democrats. If they're not winning the youth vote, they're losing the election. That's how Nate Cohn framed it, too, by saying this poll represents a bit of a return to familiar demographic patterns with Harris up 27 points in this poll among 18 to 29 year olds, but trailing among seniors. tend to disproportionately exclude that younger tranche is 48 to 46 for Trump. So an extra percentage point there. And we'll get into some of the psychology, I think, with these polling

numbers being so fresh off the change and how it represents a shift. And this is still a hypothetical candidate Harris, I'd argue, and not a real candidate Harris. We still are getting introduced to who that is, but it still is obviously a step in the right direction if you're just looking at the top of the ticket for Democrats. Yeah. And strategically, the thing that's going to happen here, and I think people are going to hear a lot more about this, the political junkies, I guess the folks who listen to this podcast, is that the map changes because Harris is going to poll much better with Black and Hispanic voters.

I'm not hypothesizing that. She does. We know that already. So theoretically, what that means is while Biden had one path to win the election, if he was going to overcome his horrible poll numbers, which was basically hold the blue wall, you know, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Harris has a path to win the election that includes winning Arizona and Nevada and Georgia. And that gives them options. It gives the campaign different ways to get, you know, to the numbers they need. So that's really, you know, having more than one pathway

to 270 is a big, big deal. And I think Harris opens the door to that. Kind of tied directly to the polling and maybe the number two thing I'd talk about is just like the donate, I mean, the donations we saw, which were completely bonkers. She raised over $80 million, I think, in the first 24 hours. It's now, as of this morning, I think, or Wednesday, it was $126 million raised since Sunday. And then on top of that, another $150 million in new commitments to Super PAC. So that's the $126 million was grassroots donations. Over 60% of the donors, not the money, but over 60% of the donors were first-time donors through ActBlue, which means she got some people off the sidelines. And the campaign's been bragging

about how nearly 2,000 people applied to work for the campaign in the first 24 hours and over 100,000 people signed up to volunteer for the campaign since Sunday. Republicans is that they have better infrastructure on the ground. Republicans can see this. This is not like my, I'm not expressing some kind of like liberal tainted viewpoint here. This is just a fact. Republicans' biggest weakness in a lot of these elections is that they don't have really organized campaign infrastructure and Democrats do. And so activating that is a big part of the Democratic strategy to win elections like this. So it's a huge deal that she's doing this. So yeah, I would file that big time in Harris' strengths and just say, it's kind of hard to overrate the importance of having that organized infrastructure. And I think you're going to hear a lot more about it going forward. So, um, yeah, the polling and, you know, the, the donations coming in, I think are big ones

for me. Um, and I, I guess the third and maybe the most important is just the abortion issue, which she's going to make the campaign. Now, I mean, we're going to hear a lot about abortion, so buckle up for that. There are a couple of pivots to policy positions or even just candidate positioning that I think Democrats can make now with Harris. One of them is without Biden's age questions, sucking up all the oxygen in the room, the campaign can just put a laser focus on abortion and talk about it. So I think that's the number one winning issue for Democrats. We've talked about that a lot. So let's just start with obvious consensus on that. I don't know if this is something that you would group in this area of this being able to reframe the candidates and the debate, but is we've been hearing a lot about Biden's age for the entirety of the primary and the campaign. And if we are still thinking candidate too old in our brain, now the oldest candidate to ever run for public office as their party's official nominee is Donald Trump.

So that's something that Harris can make a pivot to, as well as to say, I was a prosecutor and I prosecuted people who committed fraud or some kind of sexual crime or abuse and say, my opponent's accused of both of those things. And that's something she's already done in her acceptance speech that she made last week or earlier this week, last week as you're listening to this. So that I think I'd file on a similar category, but maybe like abortion 1A and then reframing the debate is like 2A and 2B. Yeah. I mean, to me, it's just, you know, abortion is basically the Republicans' version of inflation. It's their weakest issue. It's where they're most divorced from a lot of kind of moderate centrist voters. And it's the reason Democrats have, you know, been able to resist the red wave in 2022 when all these ballot initiatives in places like Ohio and Kentucky and

elsewhere that they maybe weren't expected to win and energize their base and turn out lots of women. Not that all women are pro-choice. They're not, obviously, but I think it's a winning argument with a big majority of women in the U.S., which is why we see, part of why we see such a huge disparity between men and women in terms of who they're going to vote for and preferences. Yeah. And preferences. So it helps. I would say also, I mean, just to be clear, I'm not saying all of this because Harris is a woman. I think that'll help on the optic side when this comes up on stage. But I'm saying because Harris has literally made abortion rights a really big centerpiece of her career in politics. So, you know So it's not just or not even primarily that she's a woman. It's to me primarily that this is an issue that has been a core important issue for

her as a politician. So it's going to be a really easy, I guess, field to navigate for her. She's going to be playing on home turf when arguing about this, if they debate when it comes up, all that stuff, it's going to be really, really good for her. And I think that's just a different thing than what we had with Biden, who, you know, could hardly articulate what his wins were on the abortion issue, but I think also won't be able to speak to it with the same kind of eloquence and passion that she's going to be able to. And I think that's going to move some moderates and probably activate some liberal voters who sort of are on her side. And then I guess related to that,

maybe my fourth uh my fourth pro here for her strength is this fresh face younger politician thing which is you know you just alluded to it there's just a new person here um we're kind of having this debate about this sports analogy i i wrote last week, which, you know, I heard Bill Simmons, who, for those who don't know who Bill Simmons is, is a, you know, sports analyst who has his own podcast. He's the godfather of podcasting, a lot of people say, and he has a great podcast. People hate Bill Simmons. I love Bill Simmons. I think he's awesome. I listen to all of his stuff. I love his podcast. I'm a huge basketball junkie.

So I'm always interested in what he has to say. And he got out of his lane this week, which I thought was cool and interesting. And he brought on a reporter from Puck News who talked about the 2024 race and how it just changed and all this stuff. And he made an analogy to football and just said, you know,

there's this thing that happens in football games where a starting quarterback sucks and he's having a really bad season. And the whole time, all the fans are just panning for the backup to come in. They want the starting quarterback to get benched. They all convince themselves that the backup quarterback is better. And then they bench the starting quarterback and the backup quarterback comes in and it becomes apparent very quickly why he's the backup

quarterback, which I think is a great analogy. And I think it's a great kind of framing for something that very well could happen in this race. And what I said is, you know, I think the thing Simmons was kind of ignoring or didn't, he didn't really address, which to me is the huge elephant in the room is that the other thing that also happens pretty regularly is a backup quarterback comes in and actually lights it up, even though they're worse than the starting quarterback, because the defense had a different game plan that had nothing, you know, they weren't prepared for a different quarterback who had different skills and strengths and weaknesses. And the Trump campaign was planning for the starting quarterback. They were built to beat Biden and there's three months left in

this campaign and now they have a new candidate. And I think that is an advantage for Kamala Harris. And yeah, I mean, Ari, you sort of, I guess you're pushing a different analogy, which was suggested by Russell, one of our interns about the struggling coach rather than the starting quarterback, which I also liked. Yeah, it's an interesting debate now, which analogy is better. I don't know how, which one actually convinces me, but this was Russell's argument. And I thought it was a really good point when you compare what a campaign is to what a season's like for a professional sports team, in this case, an NFL team. It's like a giant campaign. Every week you get tested by playing a head-to-head matchup

but as a coach you're still organizing a team and trying to get them in the best position to execute a game plan and maybe that's what a campaign manager does but i think you could argue very convincingly that a candidate is more like a coach because they're setting the agenda and they're setting the game plan. Everything follows from their philosophy and their theory about electability. So when a team's struggling, rather than look at the players on the field, which you do both, but you tend to look at the top first and think who is ultimately responsible for setting the game plan, and that's the coach. So when you look at a struggling campaign, you think who's the person ultimately responsible for setting the direction of this campaign and leading it with their ideology and

their philosophy, and that's the candidate. So maybe the better analogy to make is if you're seasoned struggling, you want to remove the coach. The coach is on the hot seat. Biden was on the hot seat the whole time. Just as Mike Tomlin has trouble game planning against the Patriots, Joe Biden has trouble game planning against Trump. And maybe it's time to, if we want to move forward as blue team, maybe it's time we make a change of coaching position, see what happens. Which is not an endorsement on my part to replace Mike Tomlin. I'm a big Mike Tomlin guy, but it's just another way of thinking about the debate. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

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From Searchlight Pictures comes A Real Pain, one of the most moving and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. See A Real Pain only in theaters November 15th. I think what's really interesting to me is two weeks ago, there was a pretty robust debate,

I think, about whether to replace Biden with Harris. And today, as we sit here, I think that that debate is basically dead. It's pretty much settled. Yeah, it's like, OK, this was the right move. Will it will Democrats win? I have no idea. I think they're still slightly underdogs. But all the signals that we're getting so far are pretty much clear that this was the right decision and that the party, grassroots Democratic voters, are happy that this choice was made

and are going along with it. So yeah, I think that's really interesting just to reflect on the fact that this has changed pretty quick. So the final strength I'd say, and, you know, in our Friday edition, I actually had a slightly different five, which was I sort of combined the new polling and new donations into just the reaction to Harris's campaign. And I added one, which is her position on crime issues. So the final two here, really, for me at least, are crime and her debate skills as her strengths. The crime one is nuanced because, and this is part of her weaknesses which we're going to talk about kamala flip-flop pretty hard i mean she in 2020 she adopted a very progressive view of policing and of addressing crime she basically went full chameleon on where the party was and where progressives were. And it was kind of the George Floyd,

post-George Floyd era. And she pretty much turned into somebody she's not, which a lot of progressives made fun of her for by calling her Kamala the cop and sort of just like calling her out on being phony. But in this election cycle, I think her genuine true self, who she is, what her record is, what her record was as a prosecutor in California, is actually pretty fit for the moment. She had a pretty moderate slash tough on crime stance that I think voters are a lot more receptive to right now. stance that I think voters are a lot more receptive to right now. And, you know, she had this whole shtick about how safety is a human right, basically, which I think is good messaging for this moment. I think if she's smart, she'll hammer that. She'll use that to her advantage. She will ignore the kind of progressive wing of the party and present what I think is her true self on crime, which I think will appeal a lot to moderate and

swing voters that she's going to need to win. So I sort of view that as a strength for her now, though it was a weakness for her in 2020. I think the environment's just changed that much, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. And going back to just to kind of underline for extra clarity before the 2020 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris was called Kamala the cop. And that was based on the way that she was positioning herself as an attorney general in California. She wrote a book in 2009, I think, about her background on crime. It's something that she made part of her career. And I think it's fair to call out the shift after the campaign started in earnest for her. Joe Biden to adopt a more progressive attitude towards policing and a more progressive attitude towards police reform. Because if that's something that was so foundational to her image, it does make you wonder what would shift if the winds of politics demanded it.

I think you can chalk some of that up in the pros and some of it in the cons. Obviously, you want a candidate who's going to be able to respond to democratic will, but you also want somebody to be able to articulate their ideology. And you want to be able to predict what that person's going to do. When you vote them in office, you want to be able to have a sense of who they are and be able to say, this person's going to carry out the things that I want them to do, good and bad. And I think maybe this is a little bit of a bridge to talking about pros and cons. We're talking about her stance on crime, because right now we're talking about her changing her position

again to being this comal of the cop, enforcer, reform, who can talk about crime in a way that has bona fides. But we don't know what that'll mean tomorrow, which is bad, but it's also good. And it's sort of, we're fooling the gray area now, I think, when we're talking about Kamala. Yeah. So I actually think we should get to the weaknesses. The last thing I'll just say is like, she's a good debater. I just think she's, you know, she has these public speeches that are kind of corny and overwritten and whatever. But on the debate stage, I think she's pretty strong. She's definitely stronger than Biden. So if she debates Trump, she's going to look pretty good in that scenario, I think. And if

Trump ducks the debate, which he's kind of given some indication, he might try and change the rules or back out. I think he looks really weak. So I think the debate situation is going to be advantage Harris. I could be wrong about that. Trump could totally steamroller because he's also good in the debates. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see. So throwing that out there as her final strength, I guess I would just add that. The weaknesses are big, and I think they're, you know, in some they're the reason why she is probably still an underdog. The first and the most important one, to me at least, is that she's basically run nationally to the left of Biden on almost everything. So she's a complicated politician at PEG for these reasons. I don't think in her bones she's actually truly a lefty progressive.

I mean, she was a prosecutor in California. That's not something like a hardcore progressive does. However, she did kind of attempt to remake herself as a progressive in 2020 and even in her Senate career, you know, in the in the late 20 teens. And, you know, that's going to be a problem. Now, you know, that's going to be a problem now. There's like some, some data points out there that are going to be tough selling points for her gov track, which is a pretty nonpartisan kind of think tank watchdog group rated her the most liberal Senator in all of the United States. I find that pretty silly. I think maybe she's top 10, but it might've been most liberal Democrat, which I guess excludes Bernie Sanders, but even so-

Even with Warren and- Yeah. I think top 10 maybe. Number one, I don't think so. Regardless, we're seeing it already. There's an ad Republicans have out on her that I think perfectly encapsulates her weak spots. Among other things, she's in the ad saying that she would get rid of the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal. She would ban fracking and offshore drilling. She would decriminalize crossing the border illegally. She'd make it a civil offense. And she'd support a mandatory gun buyback program. She said she would back banning private health insurance. She flipped up on that. She compared ICE to the KKK. She raised money for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which was paying to get people out on bail. She supported giving taxpayer-funded health care to undocumented

immigrants. All of this is going to be everywhere you look in 2024. And that kind of stuff is really out of step with a lot of moderate voters. So I'm not really sure how she's going to navigate that. Maybe she just tries to pivot all this stuff back to the center, but then we get to the whole inauthentic flip-flop thing, which we're going to talk about in a second, which is another huge weakness for her. And it's why I think she's kind of trapped. Yeah. And I think, honestly, it's something we can kind of get into maybe now because this viewed as being on the left of Biden thing, it's really tough to be able to make that judgment because

you're looking through a kaleidoscopic lens. You sort of have to make sure you're setting your filters at the right time. Like if I wanted to get a sense of Kamala Harris's views on healthcare, and I was looking at her in 2017, I would see her as a person who wasn't sure about, or I'd see her as a person who had co-sponsored a bill for Medicare for All. And then if I look at her a couple years later, I'd see a candidate who wanted increased medical coverage, but wasn't for Medicare for All. medical coverage, but wasn't for a Medicare for all. And I don't know what I would see if I set my filters to 2024. So you could say she's to the left of Biden. And that's, like you said, in her bones, maybe a bit, but it's hard to say how far because it's hard to say, you know, what really is in her bones and what the policies are going to be that she's campaigning on.

So I think maybe take us there now, because there's a lot to cover with this changing positions for Kamala Harris. Yeah, these things are definitely, they run together, the inauthenticity and the fact that, you know, the question of whether she's the left on Biden. So, I mean, I guess this is now number two here, but on the inauthenticity element, I mean, first of all, there are millions of videos out there of like the Harris word salad speeches, the like being burdened by what has been not by what will be or whatever. And just like, I watch her talk and it's, it's like an overwritten episode of the West wing, you know, it's. I see somebody like vamping and not sure what they're saying and just going in a circle until they think the thought will get there.

Yeah. Maybe an underwritten added episode of the West Wing. the way certain politicians land. I'm saying that separate from her policy views at all. I just mean like her vibe, I don't connect with, it doesn't hit for me. And so I sensed the inauthentic part of it really strongly. And then she's just flip-flopped, you know, on healthcare, on fracking bans. She was for them. She was against them. She was for them. She made a career being tough on crime prosecutor, focusing on safety as this fundamental right. Then she went all in basically on the anti-cop movement in 2020, started talking about how, whether funding police and putting more cops on the street was the right way to respond to crime. She didn't really know. This was like, that was her solution, which she kind of abandoned. And it makes her a hard

politician to peg because I'm genuinely unsure what she really believes. So that's why it's a little hard to say she's runs to the left of Biden on all these things. Can she fix this in 2024 i have no idea i i think she's between a rock and a hard place because the more she pivots back to what i think is her genuine self which is a moderate democrat the more the flip-flop inauthentic stuff is gonna kind of pop up like if you're saying this now, what about what you said then? This was four years ago. You know, that's a huge problem for her. So I don't really know how it's going to play out, but I am certain that Republicans have a ton, a ton of material to sell voters on the fact that she's A, very, very liberal, and B, basically a lying politician who's inauthentic and flip-flops and doesn't hold any real positions. And they're going to do that at the same time, and it's going to land for a lot of people. And I think this is going to be the first actual test of her campaign. Now that she's becoming

not a hypothetical candidate, but a real candidate, she's going to have to sit for interviews, friendly and moderate and probably unfriendly. And she's going to be asked these questions. People are going to tie her statements she's making today to statements she's made in the past and ask her to explain the difference. And I'm sure Democrats are in a lab somewhere uploading into her brain the answers that will make sense, but she's going to have to feel them and she's going to have to come up with those answers in real time and we'll see what she has to say. I think that's going to be the question on a lot of undecided voters' minds is how does she handle these tough questions

when she's faced with them and what is her record and how does she square it and what's her platform going to be moving forward. So it's an opportunity for her to make that message clear, but it certainly is going to be a challenge to square those circles. All right. So that's one and two. She's left of the Biden. She's left of Biden slash maybe she isn't because she's inauthentic and flip-flops, and neither of those things are really strengths. Number three is the border, which is going to be the albatross on her neck. It might be number one. Yeah.

It's tough for her to come over. Yeah. And for people who maybe are not online all the time like I am, God forbid, I hope you're not. I really hope you're not. all the time like I am, God forbid. I hope you're not. I really hope you're not. There's this whole thing happening right now where a lot of news organizations are quote unquote fact checking this claim that she was the border star. And then people are digging up those news organizations like Axios who are doing these fact checks referring to her as the border star in like 2021. It's very funny. It's, you know, these media outlets, I think, are kind of chasing their tails on a really stupid issue. There's nothing. It's like it doesn't matter

whether she was the official border star or not. What matters is President Biden rolled her out as the woman in the administration who was going to be overseeing immigration issues, the border. And it, you know, a lot of people are saying, oh, she was just responsible for, you know, root causes Central America, South America. true. If you go back and read the way the administration phrased it, it was about migration inflows that were happening right now and how to stem future flows in the future based on the root causes. So it was both. And she got trotted out fairly or unfairly. I think unfairly. If I were her, I would have been like, hell no, don't give me this one issue that nobody's ever been able to solve for the last 20 years. And no, Donald Trump did not solve it. And then basically hang her with it. And it's what they've done. She's screwed on this now because whatever she did didn't work. And the border has been in crisis for several years. For three consecutive

months between, I think, January and April, immigration was named the country's biggest issue. That's what voters were citing. The migrant crisis is not just happening on the border. It's hitting urban areas. It's hitting rural areas, major cities, New York, Chicago, et cetera, et cetera, are dealing with this. This week, I just saw, I think it was either today or yesterday, six House Democrats joined Republicans to pass a resolution strongly condemning the Biden administration's handling of the border, including Kamala Harris. This is not good for her. So she's going to carry this into the election where immigration is going to be a huge issue where it's donald trump's strongest issue it's the thing that he has built his whole campaign around

and she's gonna have to get up there and explain why the border is a mess and all this stuff is happening when she was the one who was tapped by the administration to oversee it and i spoiler alert she's not going to have a good answer. It's going to suck. I promise. Whatever her answer is, is going to sound not convincing. Maybe she'll prove me wrong, but I doubt it because I don't think there is a good answer. I think, you know, she, she was responsible and there was very little good movement on it. And so, yeah, you're right. This could be number one for her. I mean, this is going to be a really, really big thing for it to overcome. And it's an issue that matters a ton to independent and swing voters and never Trump Republicans who otherwise might be ripe to get pulled over. So, yeah. Yeah. And I think let's kind of clear the air with the borders are thing too. So we can focus on talking about this, which is the administration never called her borders are, but that does,

I mean, it's a quibble. They never used that word there. She was described that way in the press, and I didn't see any big fact checks about it at that time. And at that time when she was put in charge of the border and just to also clarify she like the administration said and what you're going to not put in charge of the border but immigration which affects the border um what the one of the ways that liberals and democrats like to solve immigration issues is by trying to talk to nations that migrants are coming from that's one of their go-to tools so it wasn't you're only doing this it was you're doing this and this is how and that's something that she co-assigned at the time when she got that position um encounters at the southern border were on their way up there they were on their way up from a very like a huge lull from

the pandemic but they were sort of you know around 75 000 what i'm looking at right now chart from pew and then a year later they're over 150 000 um and that's uh and those are monthly totals and so i can understand why in that moment of time, the administration might say, hey, VP Harris, this is becoming a problem. Encounters are surging again. We need to make sure we're putting a face on it. And she would say, okay, that's great. Give me something to do. I can do that. became a huge problem. It just got massively out of control. And then she was saddled with it. She didn't know what she... It doesn't seem from the outside that she had a strategy or a plan. And it is something that got at least measurably worse if you're just looking at border encounters during the administration's time. It's something that you can see she was a person who had at least at the most charitable read possible an amount of accountability for. So it's obviously something she's going to have to answer for. It's a huge issue, like you said, amongst moderates, amongst

never-Trump Republicans. And that's, you know, if we're talking about the tests for her campaign, that's the next one she has to face, if not the most important one that she'll have to face in the coming weeks. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. From Searchlight Pictures comes A Real Pain, one of the most moving and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. A Real Pain was one of the buzziest titles at Sundance Film Festival this year, garnering rave reviews and acclaim from both critics and audiences alike.

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spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. That's, I think, a good transition because kind of my next big weakness for her is this sort of half-skeletons-in-the-closet, half-coverage thing that's going to happen. So, first of all, right now, Harris is in a classic honeymoon phase with the press. I just Googled her name and filtered it for news stories yesterday. Here are some of the ones, the first ones in the Google search results that came up. And I know Google's a little biased. I use DuckDuckGo and stuff and try other search engines too, but Slate, the Republican line that Kamala Harris is too hot for office isn't even the stupidest kind of attack. The Guardian, I was not voting before, now I am. Gen Z voters on what they think of Kamala Harris. The New York Times, what's more exciting than a Veep Stakes? A surprise Veep Stakes.

MSNBC, black men backing Kamala Harris fuel another fundraising spree. USA Today, internet warrants J.D. Vance after video resurfaces implying Kamala Harris is a childless cat lady. I mean, this is the stuff the media is doing right now. This is where their coverage is. And this happens, you know, it happens more with liberal and democratic politicians, but it happens sometimes with conservatives, too. It happened with J.D. Vance. You know, it happens more with liberal and Democratic politicians, but it happens sometimes with conservatives, too. It happened with J.D. Vance. You know, there are people like this who get this kind of coverage early on in their careers. She's not early on in her career, but this is like a honeymoon phase.

She's the new candidate. So she's getting a bunch of softball coverage. That's not going to happen forever. It's going to change. And I think there's a big question about the skeletons in the closet and how scary they are and what they're going to be. There's kind of a sensitive subject here that I just like we can't. It's like the elephant in the room we have to talk about, which is that conservatives,

a lot of conservative pundits, the sort of I I don't want, I shouldn't say conservatives. I should say a lot of online, like Twitter, conservative pundits, Matt Walsh type, you know, Megan Kelly, who's obviously a very big, more mainstream name. They're going with an attack line that I think is idiotic. I think it's going to make them look bad. I think it's going to hurt them, but it's this whole, she slept her way through, you know, whole, she slept her way into a successful career. The roots of this are, I guess, a real story. I mean, she had a relationship with Willie Brown, who was basically the king of California politics in the 1990s. He is the guy who helped Dianne Feinstein, you know, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, a lot of the big names, you know, he helped them

early on in their political careers. She and him were dating. He was 30 years older than her. And sometime in the early 90s or something, he appointed her to one of her first posts in california government like two years i think they were dating it was eight years later after they got done dating that she ran for office for the first time and won he supported her willie brown supported her in the race um but she was also talking at that time about what an albatross he was around her neck. Uh, you know, I think her albatross is going to be immigration at the time she thought it was Willie Brown. She has made it very clear that, you know, she had this relationship. She was open about it. It wasn't some big secret. They were dating publicly at the time.

It was 30 years ago. She's done a ton of stuff since then. I don't think this is like a quote-unquote legit attack. I think it is kind of run-of-the-mill sexism. But it's an attack line that's happening. And it's going to be out there. backline that's happening and it's going to be out there. And I think what is real is that it's reflective of the fact that she's been in politics for 30 years. And when you've been in politics for 30 years, you have a lot of people who don't like you. And when you came up

in a system like California's system in the nineties, it's a really in the muck, mudslinging, dirty game. It's mafia-esque. It is ugly politics. The way that stuff went down was not clean playing politics. And I think if I were a democratic strategist, one of my biggest concerns would be whenever this little honeymoon phase ends, which if you want to hear my bet on it, I'd say like middle of next week, the hit pieces are going to start coming. And the people who knew Kamala Harris in the 90s and the early 2000s, the staffers, she has this like unbelievable staff turnover. 90% of her staff from when she started came into office in 2021 as a vice president are gone. How many people she's pissed off or, you know, ruined relationships with

because of her leadership style, which is another big flag, by the way, this stuff's going to start coming out. And, you know, for a lot of Democratic voters, it won't matter because Donald Trump, the rapist, predator, sexist, convicted felon, you know, that's how they view him. That's all that matters is she's running against him. They're going to vote for her. But for some people, the on the fencers, the people who still don't know, I think it's going to matter. So I file this as a weakness. Skeletons in the closet, end of, you know, the honeymoon phase press coverage, what happens then? And I'm expecting at least a couple really juicy, ugly stories about her past that we're going to see and that the campaign's going to have to navigate and could change the race. And this is something we talked about a little bit

in response to a reader question I don't have in front of me right now, but it was a couple months ago when somebody was asking about what the vice president had been up to. And we turned up a story about how her staff was getting cut out of conversations that the president's staff was having and how there was some disrespect between the two offices. And that it was intentional that because the staff was being poorly managed or some sort of organizational issue within the vice president's office, they were being left out of important policy discussions. So that's a real thing. I also, since we're talking about skeletons here, and we're relating this to issues with her staff, I have a New York Times article from 2019 during the primary season for Democrats for the 2020 race. And they talk about some of these organizational issues. I'll just read a little bit from it, just a short paragraph to quote it. And this was a piece about

Kamala Harris, again, written by, I always just want to make sure I'm giving people their bylines, Jonathan Martin, Astead Herndon, and Alexander Burns. The article says, quote, many of her own advisors are now pointing a finger directly at Ms. Harris. In interviews, several of them criticized her for going on the offensive against rivals, only to retreat, and for not firmly choosing a side in the party's ideological feud between liberals and moderates. She also created an organization with campaign chairwoman, Maya Harris, who goes unchallenged in part because she is Ms. Harris's sister, and a manager, Mr. Rodriguez, who could not be replaced without

likely triggering the resignations of the candidate's consulting team. Even at this late date, aides said it's unclear who's in charge of the campaign." So that speaks something to the organizational issues that Harris campaigns and Harris-led offices have had. And I think I won't even touch the Democrats in California in the 90s stuff. I think it's just, if you think about it, states that are dominated by one party tend to be less democratic with how they appoint people. It's an issue. We'll talk about it in Tango more, I think, in the coming weeks. But just to talk about the skeletons coming out of the closet, I think you're going to be hearing some more about that campaign mismanagement stuff. And that stuff's very real. That's coming from not influencers on social media. Those are sourced articles from reputable news outlets and i don't think that's going away yeah and to be clear like i i can almost hear some people kind of rolling their eyes like oh we're gonna get you know like a staff mismanagement piece in this era when when we've become so numb to even the most kind of egregious lack of decorum

or political corruption or whatever. I would say, I think it's three-pointed here. One, it means a lot of angry ex-employees are gonna be ready to just spill tea to news outlets. If you turn over 90% of your staff, there's a lot of people who are going to talk. That's bad for her. Two, it means she goes into the campaign with very few longtime staffers, which is significant. She's about to have the fight of her life and she doesn't have people around here who have been there for a while.

However you feel about Trump and Biden, they both have that in spades. They have family and longtime political aides who have been there from the beginning. Trump, less so. He turned over a lot of people, but he still got some- Turned over a lot of cabinet positions. Yeah. But the people around him are a lot of the same names we've seen. Definitely. And then three, I would just say it reflects very poorly on her as a leader and her capacity to motivate and maintain a staff if she has 90% turnover. I mean, that's just like looks bad. It's something she can get hit on in terms of being an executive.

So yeah, the skeletons, media, honeymoon phase ending, I would say that's number four on the weaknesses. And then finally, number five is Joe Biden. I mean, look, we talked about the polling as a strength. She clearly just closed the gap. But there's a simple reality here. Joe Biden was losing this race handedly. And Kamala Harris is Joe Biden's vice president. She has her name attached to his record. She's going to inherit many of the same sentiments that he's facing, all of his failures. And she's going to have to defend the worst parts of his record while also distancing herself from parts of his record, while also not upsetting his longtime supporters who love him but don't really like her because she can't sort of throw him under the bus because that'll be bad for her relationship with those supporters. It's a really, really

tricky place to be. So I think just Joe Biden not being a popular president is going to hurt Kamala Harris, and that's a big weakness for her. We can call this maybe the classic vice president problem. This was something that people were discussing during the Republican primary, if you can remember such a long time ago as 10 months ago, regarding Mike Pence, and it does not respect party. The last time that we had a vice president run for president and win, coming off of their term as vice president, because we know obviously Joe Biden was Obama's vice president from 2008 to 2016. But the last time somebody just stepped into the presidential role after serving as vice president was George H.W. Bush, affectionately known as Papa Bush in 88,

coming off of a back-to-back Reagan administration that was very popular. So it's hard to do. It's hard to walk that line of being able to So it's hard to do. It's hard to walk that line of being able to tout your record in office while distancing yourself from it. You have to, if recent history is any guide, you have to be following a two-term incumbent who was popular. And we don't have that. So it's going to be a tough road to walk for Harris. It just definitely will. So to recap there and put a bow on this, her strengths, the response to her candidacy, the polling, the fundraising has clearly been strong. She's injected new energy into the race. She's got her original record on crime, kind of tough on crime stance, which I think will be an asset if she wants to run on it. Abortion will be front and center. It's an issue she knows well. It's an issue she's made senator of politics. It's one where Republicans are really weak. We've got the newness of her campaign.

Just she's a fresh face. She's younger. She's getting a bunch of softball coverage right now, and that's good for her. And then the debate where I think she's going to do better than people expect. And even if she doesn't, she's going to do way better than Biden. So that's a good advantage for her step up. The weaknesses, she runs the left of Biden on a lot of issues. But also number two, as part of that is that she's actually kind of inauthentic and flip flops a lot. So it's almost hard for me to say that. And those issues kind of feed into each other and are circular in some ways. And she's going to have to decide if she wants to revert back or kind of keep being

inauthentic or whatever it is. I don't really know what her true positions are. She'll pick a lane and that's a problem. She's going to have a, it'll be a lose issue. There'll be a losing element of that pick no matter what she does. Number three, she's got the border, which her name's all over that. The border's in crisis. It's a big issue. It's a big problem. Number four, what skeletons does she have in the closet? She's been in politics for a really long time. I don't personally think these attacks on her as like sleeping to the top are credible at all. I do think that's just like sexist nonsense, but she's been in politics for a really long time and there's going to be a lot of people out there who Want to hurt her and I think we'll see some really bad stories come out

And then finally joe biden who's just a deeply unpopular president who she's tied to for better or for worse. So those are the strengths and weaknesses for Kamala Harris. We had a newsletter come out and a podcast come out about her VP picks, which you guys can go check out if you want some more on that. We broke, my rankings of her potential vice presidents. All I'll say right here is I think she should pick Mark Kelly. That would be what I would do. But we're coming up on an hour here. So we're going to wrap. And before we do, as always, we got to get into our grievances for the week. The airing of grievances. It's made from aluminum.

Very high strength to weight ratio. I find your belief system fascinating. All right, I think you went first last week, so I'm going to go first this week with my grievance. Yeah, great. You steamrolling me is my new grievance. Got it. Sick. So my grievance this week is a little bit cliche and i actually was having

trouble thinking of one which was a weird experience for me uh because i usually have so many things to complain about but it's gym etiquette it's it's some gym etiquette that i've been observing recently um number one beef that i have at the gym these days, and I'm spending a, I'm a total gym rat these days. I'm working out a ton. I've, I'm trying to get out of my skinny runner, ultimate Frisbee phase and go buff. So I've been trying to just get big and put on weight and lift a bunch. So I'm doing, I'm squatting dead deadlifting, doing bench and pull-ups primarily. I mean, doing other stuff, but building workouts around those. And we have one squat rack in my gym and there's like three different pull-up stations. And at the top of most squat racks,

there's a bar that you can do pull-ups on. And these people, these dudes mostly, always dudes, they do pull-ups at the squat rack, at the one squat rack that exists in the entire gym at the Y. And they do it because there's a mirror there, I think. So it's sweet to watch yourself lift. I get it. I love it. I like lifting in the mirror. I'm not ashamed to say it. Anybody does. But just like a little self-aware, like anywhere out,

there's this one super in-demand thing that you can't do squats without a squat rack. I mean, you could, but it's super dangerous. So just like get off the squat rack and go do your pull-ups somewhere else. You don't have to look at yourself in the mirror for your whole pull-up set. It's incredibly annoying. It bothers me to no end. And it's my number one gym etiquette failure in the gym that I'm in. I'll also throw out there just, you know, the classic people who don't spray down and wash a thing when they're done, just like takes three seconds. I'm sure you can do it.

Uh, I got a couple of people in my gym who listen to music, not on their headphones, just out loud, just no way. There's just, what year is it? You can't do that. Who are you? Your music sucks. I don't want to listen to this. Also, sometimes I can literally hear it through my noise canceling AirPods. That's totally crushing. I think those are my big three, but I've been being back in the gym, lifting regularly. I'm seeing a lot of the stuff that I really don't like. And I'll concede one that I do with my new thing. And this is a new thing for me. And I have to admit, I'm sure this pisses a lot of people off is I'm a chalk guy. Now I've been using chalk in the gym. That's fine. That's not a, that's not a,

you think so? Yeah. Use chalk. It's good for your hands. It's great for your hand. I mean, I'm adding reps, brother. Like my lifts, my lifts are going up. What's the argument about chalk being poor etiquette? I don't know if it's poor. I just like, I wiped out, I try to wipe down the machines and the weights, but it's like, there's always just a little bit of chalk residue that's out there, you know? Um, it's just like, it's, it's a mess. I feel mostly bad for the people who work at the gym who probably have to clean up after the fact and like, they're going to have to deal with that. Just, yeah, as long as you're not leaving excess mess, like there's a little residue, people are going to be wiping down this stuff at the end of the

day. As long as you're not making their job harder at the end of the day you're good i feel like and i think when somebody's lifting or using a machine or like using a pull-up bar and there's a little chalk on there near it like you're gonna have some of that you're at a public gym or a gym that you're sharing with people like you're gonna have to accept that there's gonna be a little bit of like residue or a little bit of leftover sweat even like the not wipe down the machines thing you can be annoyed but you're like yeah i can expect this what you don't expect is somebody to do a pull-up at a squat rack and then hover like especially these people hovering they're doing their set and they're just standing under it yeah you can't standing at the spot rack looking

at their phone you know on instagram reels in the mirror while like between their reps cut in dude it's like i'm gonna start saying something uh but when i just like sort of embodied my um my bro there about getting more reps on the chalk it reminded me of the i don't know how we could have shoehorned this in earlier but we had we should have talked about that Ted Cruz clip of him. Dude, Ted Cruz, John, you should just play the clip. Well, let me say at the outset, Kamala can't have my guns. She can't have my gasoline engine and she sure as hell can't have my steaks and cheeseburgers. I was like, hell yeah. Hell yeah, brother. No way. Keep hands off my cheeseburgers, Kamala. I'm with Ted Cruz. I'm voting for that, man. Hands off my cheeseburgers, Kamala. I'm with Ted Cruz. I'm voting for that, man. Hands off my cheeseburgers. Oh, God. I cracked up. I mean, it's just such a performance.

It's theater. It's WWF. Any day of the week, if Ted Cruz is running for Senate and the Democrats decide that they're going to run the Hamburglar against him, he's going to trounce him every time. The Hamburglar is going to lose in Texas. Get out of here. It's so good. All right. We got to get your grievance in before we get out of here. Man, you know, I want to give a little bit of lip service real quick too, because you're doing an indoors one. I'm going to do an outdoors one. And I just want to like, as I'm transitioning outside, we're going through the doorway and we're going outside is the people who are listening to speakers on trails. I think it's like an extreme breach of etiquette to be doing that inside in the gym. But if you're on a trail and you've got your clip to Bluetooth speaker and you're listening to

something, I can almost not even embody the mindset of a person who does that, of the amount of hubris and selfishness that you'll have to have in order to say, I'm outside in a place where I'm sort of trying to get away from things, and I'm going to make my soundtrack everyone's soundtrack. There's no amount of reflection about what that space is for. If that's a thing you're doing. I like I've talked with my wife about this too. I think there's like levels of this being acceptable. Like if you're walking on a trail, absolutely terrible. If you're at the beach, I get it. That's a little better. That's much better. If you're on like a bike path and you're running, that's probably in between those two. Other runners don't want to listen to your shit. Like even if it's good shit, like your soundtracks, your own, keep it to yourself. And I feel like if you're on a bike or if you're like, this is a thing I see in Burlington, Vermont, there's people rollerblading, carrying like 1990 style boom boxes in their hands just like i'm in for that that's that's where i channel my inner ted cruz i'm like oh yeah brother that's a vibe do it but you know

i had another grievance uh queued up i'll keep it i'll keep it away i'll keep it tucked for a future date because i feel like this idea of providing your own soundtrack where it is not wanted is enough of a grievance for for one day and i can go in on you with that i mean have you ever been on a i know that you're you're city boy but have you ever been on a local trail on pennsylvania or western or central jersey which is lovely by the way and experience the person who's walking around with a bluetooth speaker just pumping their tunes on the trail which i'm just like this is this is i'm here to just like listen to the silence of the trees and soak in the birds chirping like that i will never understand that uh that just like people who are running walking whatever back there and ripping music. I'm like, I get in the city, suburbs, whatever.

But yeah, incredibly infuriating and also inconsiderate. So I'm glad we're aligned. So PSA, if that's a thing you're doing, stop it. Yeah, stop it. Definitely stop it. Good PSA. All right, we got to get out of here. Ari Weissman, good to see you.

Unchartered waters. We're drowning. We've never before chartered them. And here we are. Yeah, we have not. All right. We'll see you guys soon. Take care. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bacoba, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.