Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk about Jeffrey Epstein, the Grok meltdown and then they play a population game.

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk a lot about Jeffrey Epstein and the Grok/ai chat bot meltdown. Then the guys play a fun population game that they surprisingly do well on. And, as always, the Airing of Grievances and our mutual frustration with ticks!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 also give the gift of a Tangle podcast subscription by clicking here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was hosted by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and Jon Lall. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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and then a population game that I have to say we do surprisingly well on. We're back in the saddle and of course some grievances. It's a good one. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the still unnamed Tangle podcast. We're getting close, I swear. I'm your host. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, here with Tangle, editor at large, Camille Foster, and managing editor Ari Weitzman.

We are living in a new era, post-Jeffrey Epstein era. I don't know if you guys heard. It's been shut down. The investigation is over. We've been living in the post-Jeffrey Epstein era for about six years now. Whoa! I was like, what?

I knew it was coming. I was like, the moment the short story came out of my mouth. Yeah, I knew that was coming. I Yeah, I knew that was coming and There's a lot to talk about. I don't know. I was just I've been just a little bit immersed in the Twitter drama of grok melting down which I'm excited. We're gonna talk about that a little bit today But this weirdly, despite everything going on, feels like a story that has kind of broken through. You have the Wall Street Journal opinions, you know, editorial board writing op-eds about Jeffrey Epstein. I did not have that on like my July 2025 bingo card.

That was not something that I thought was going to be happening. So yeah, I'm kind of curious to maybe start there since we gave this some coverage this week and I don't know in retrospect, I think it was really hard to kind of capture the rage at least that I'm seeing online from the kind of MAGA sphere, the MAGA world. And now there's all this, like I'm following, I follow a few journalists who cover this story closely and I'm seeing a lot of them kind of following up,

taking advantage of the story, being back in the news by following up with some of their reporting, sharing information that they have about what's public, what's still secret. And it sort of seems like Trump really wants this thing to go away and it's not going away, which is interesting. But I think we should maybe start with the MAGA rage because I don't know if you can overstate it, or maybe it's being overblown, but it seems like maybe one of the first real breaks where, like, for the first time, I

feel like I'm seeing high profile people in his base be like, what is happening? This is like the opposite of what I thought we were gonna get. I'm curious I guess a temperature check with you guys about Your read on that maybe to kick things off Maybe it's just a small reaction for me But just that it seems like these things are stickier or harder for Trump to just wave away when he can't Go to the source and say your fake news, you're running the story, ABC, CNN, whoever is on his grievance list and just hand wave them.

Feels like it's different when it's Fox News or people from the right. I think that's maybe part of why it's sticking around, but that's my first reaction. Yeah, I mean, I would certainly say that this seems to be uniquely potent and perhaps in the long run it won't be totally harmful to the administration, but it seems like the sort of thing that could have some

lingering effects. But I mean, certainly we've seen high profile people defect from Trump's camp before certainly Elon has in some respects with relation to this issue, Tucker on the Israeli-Iran conflict certainly broke with him and plenty of other people seem to do so on that issue, on the tariffs stuff we've seen this, but certainly nothing so potent of stuff we've seen this, but certainly nothing so potent as this particular issue. And it's actually really weird to me that this becomes the singular issue for MAGA. And in some other ways, it seems completely apt

with respect to the fact that this particular group has done a great deal. So many people and high profile people in the administration has done a great deal to actually foment a lot of the kind of panic and conspiracizing with respect to this particular story. So for them to own the ball and to be the people who are forced to acknowledge that there's no there there once they actually have access to the files is super interesting. But what I'm a little bit surprised by is the number of high profile people

who seem genuinely miffed by the fact that the administration is actually being so candid in their suggestion that this isn't, that there isn't something here. And then going after Trump in certain ways for dismissing any interest in this issue that he helped to cultivate interest in, at least the people around him helped to cultivate interest in.

I mean, one of the things that we talked about several, a couple of years ago now, which comes to my mind all the time, Isaac, when we're talking about villains in the public sphere, we did a piece on FBI entrapment, I don't know if you remember that, and the two parties that we're talking about, how it's always tough to be on the side of these parties in a PR fight are terrorists and child molesters. And if the FBI can justify any sting operation or anything by saying they're fighting against terrorists or child molesters, what are you going to say in response? So in that way, it feels like that's been the train that they've been riding for a year or two, five, six.

I've heard we've been in the post-Jeffrey Epstein era for a while. So ever since then, we have to do more to go after the child blasters. They're protecting them. They're protecting them. And then once you have the reins of power, if there's no there there, then the points that you're

dunking easily on the easiest villains to score points on become a whole lot harder to protect against when you're on defense. And I mean, maybe it's just that simple. I think the thing that's hardest for me to wrap my head around, I guess, is just like what the before this, what their view of the situation was. You know, it's like you have this lawyer Trump has in the first, I use labor secretary Alexander Acosta, who's like responsible for the sweetheart plea deal that Jeffrey Epstein got serving in the Trump administration.

There's this like voluminous public records of Trump describing this close relationship he has with Epstein and making these comments about their shared affinity for young girls and Epstein saying that he was one of his closest friends. And then that reporter, Michael Wolford, whatever his name is, who has written some total hit job nonsense pieces, but had all these recordings of Epstein talking about Trump

and how close they were, and Trump saying that he knew Ghislaine Maxwell. And like, it's just on and on and on. There just seems to be this relationship between the two of them. And yet he somehow managed to be, like his distance from him on this was so much further in the eyes of his supporters than Bill Clinton

or all these other alleged Democrats or Hollywood actors or whatever. And that's the part that was always so hard for me to grasp. I never really went down the rabbit hole of a lot of the Epstein conspiracies. I think it's like Jeffrey Epstein was trafficking these girls and committing these sex crimes. And he was doing it while partying with a bunch of his rich, famous friends on this island that he had. And I think all that's real. And I think it'd be great if we got some exposure about,

you know, more exposure about who all these people were. But before this moment, this week, it was just always so confounding to me that Trump wasn't someone his base found suspicious or questionable in this kind of, in the framework of the Jeffrey Epstein story and Pam Bondi too. I mean, like she was Florida attorney general when all this stuff, the flight logs

and everything started coming out. And she could have pursued a case against him and she didn't. And yeah, that part of it, I think I've had a really hard time wrapping my head around. It's just like, what did you guys think before now? Obviously Trump doesn't want this stuff coming out. Um, I never thought he did.

I never thought he would, even though there is really no quote unquote list or whatever, uh, there does seem to be a lot of information that the FBI has that it's keeping, you know, under seal. And I just never ever in a million years thought this administration be the one to do anything about that. Yeah, that kind of selective outrage, willful ignorance is probably one of the most prominent features of our deeply divided and political landscape. The fact that you can imagine all sorts of things that seem to be completely inconsistent with facts on the ground, that the hypocrisy of your own side

when it comes to, say, deficit and spending and their pronounced concern about it while also passing massive pieces of legislation that seem to exacerbate that problem, you find a way to live with the dissonance by ignoring it. And I think it's something similar with the Epstein thing. And as Ari pointed out, this has been such a prominent feature of the MAGA movement, this concern for children.

There was a bit of it there with QAnon as well. And there's still vestiges of it now. It will be interesting to see how things unfold because I just don't imagine the Trump administration is going to actually taco in this particular case and reopen the investigation and reverse itself, in which case people have to make a decision. Are they going to continue to beat the drum about this

because of their dissatisfaction, or will they just forget about it and move on to the next kind of culture war flare up, whatever that's likely to be? I think, you know, I'm reminded of when Trump was discussing the stock market going through its troubles following one of the many rounds of reciprocal tariffs, snip, snap, snip, snaps. And his sound bite was, everything about the economy that's bad

is the Biden economy, and everything about it that's good is the Trump economy. And I think like, I'm sure, I mean, if it's true, then what better defense could you possibly muster? But I think, I bring that up because I think there's elements in everything that Trump has attacked where he could also be uno-reversed on it, which is, so when you weren't president,

so obviously Epstein died when he was president, but it's pretty late and then he was lame ducked, so obviously can't really get into that too much, like the Trump DOJ, but when he wasn't president, easy to attack Biden, easy to say that there's a coverup, like the Trump DOJ, but when he wasn't president, easy to attack Biden, easy to say that there's a coverup, easy to say the people in power don't want this getting out.

And then when you are in control, then I think it's still gonna be that same one too. It's a little tougher to make that dance when it's not, you know, separable. It's just one indiscreet thing. But I think we'll hear, well, the cover-ups happened under Biden. And all the information that we have, it's all protected because of victims' rights,

which may very well be true, and is probably true. But it's, I think, pretty easy for them to make that turn and say, well, who knows? Maybe there are more files. Maybe there's more paper on this. But Biden and DOJ, what did they have to cover up? I mean, I think that's probably going to be the play. And for what it's worth, like... It certainly hurts some of that.

There's going to be, like, I think the party line here is probably real. Just anything that you can release that incriminates Epstein or his associates more is also naturally going to implicate victims. And I think it's true that they want to keep that under wraps. But what do you, what do you think about that, Isaac? I mean, I, yeah, I don't really view much of what's happened around the case as being shady, I guess. And I don't suspect that there's much this DOJ could do differently than the last one.

Like I think, I mean, I don't know this for sure, but I think that if Biden could have scored some kind of win on something like this by just adding some transparency to the case or whatever. He probably would have done that. It's sort of like a low hanging fruit thing as a president to be like, hey, we're going to release some of these files. Trump's certainly, he's like trying to do the JFK thing and then OK thing and the UFO

thing. And he wants to... He's in this whole idea, I think, of like, we're going to release it. Give him the file. I don't know. But I don't know. There's just a... And maybe this is the institutionalist brain of mine, but there's been a lot of public pressure

for more information about the people who are involved in the kind of the Epstein network. And I think if Merrick Garland could have appeased those people in any kind of way, he would have done it. I think if Pam Bondi could appease those people in any kind of way, she would do it. I don't think there's some big cover up. I just think, like you said, there's these dynamics like victims' rights at play that make it more difficult to kind of give the public the transparency that they want, especially when you add in the complicating factors of plea deals and whatever

else and agreements that are happening behind the scenes and now Epstein's dead. There's all sorts of stuff that I think makes it a little bit more complicated of an issue than people want to believe. I just don't, I mean, just to your final thing, I'd say like, I don't get the sense that any of the people like in the MAGA movement are willing or ready to let this go yet. Like that doesn't feel like I don't I think in six months, we'll still have people like doing the occasional, you know, it's been six months since we were supposed to get

the Epstein List post on Twitter, that gets like 10,000 retweets, you know? And we'll just be living in that world for a little while. I want to- So what does that look like? You got it. What does that look like? Is that Tucker Carlson,

like continuing to bang the drum about this, like months from now, or does he not move on? And perhaps has he not already in some respect moved on from this issue to focus on the real enemy on the left? He being Trump or Tucker? Not mine, Tucker. If Tucker Carlson were doing a Jeffrey Epstein podcast a year from now about like all the things that have

happened since Pam Bondi said she was going to close the case down and new victim testimony and why don't we have answers and Trump's biggest broken promise and whatever. That would not surprise me at all. I think that's like a very likely and I mean even Charlie Kirk the real sycophants, like he was pissed, you know? And I'm like, again, I can't tell if they're legitimately duped or they're saying like, this is a place where I can break from Trump, align myself with like the base and, you know,

be like, I'm a real one here by calling Trump out for not fulfilling this promise. Like Charlie Kirk is a smart guy. He seems like a really smart guy to me. Whatever you feel about him. I don't- I think some people think a lot about lots of things. Yeah.

For sure. I'm just saying like, I would be a little bit surprised if he was all in on the Epstein conspiracy and really thought that this list was gonna come out in some great big redactions raining from the heaven moment, whatever. I just don't buy that. So, again, I think if you're on the right

and you wanna, even if you're a big Trump fan and you wanna demonstrate some sort of independence or loyalty to the cause or consistency, this is kind of an easy one to hammer Trump over and keep in the news for a little bit, you know, hoping that maybe something changes. And I gotta add some evidence to the, it's gonna not go anytime soon case,

which is it's not just sycophants on the right and it's not just people on the right. This is a widespread cause that people care about. And we saw no stronger evidence of this, in my opinion, than our reader survey, which we do every day in the newsletter, where we asked our readers if they believe that the government is in possession of an Epstein list. Isaac has been saying that people who follow the news and people, reporters

and people who are all over this case say there's no such thing as a client list. There's no client list that the government has. And Isaac's like, yeah, I mean, we haven't seen any evidence that says that there's some sort of big incriminating list of names with people on it, some like Inspector Gadget looking thing. And 52% of our readers disagreed, which is pretty rare. I think we have the strongest bias that we have in our reader surveys, people agreeing with

Isaac's opinion in the take. And to see our readers disagree and say, no, there is a list, was interesting to me. And something that I want to highlight here just before I get a reaction is one of the comments that we got to that reader survey, which I thought was a bit of a nuanced way of defending this answer was, of course there's a list, but I don't think it's the bomb people think it is.

People like him, Epstein, who are widely networked, keep contact lists, phone books, etc. Those things are probably in the file. And of course they include Trump and also likely people and nothing to do with his legal activities, but who just knew him. So when people are talking about the quote list, that's probably what they mean. And are they right?

Maybe there's something that they just aren't really seeing that they could Hmm I Mean I yeah, I don't know I I guess it's possible Yeah, again I Just the thing that I go back to is that at some point, I mean, yeah, at some point in the next like six, 12 months or whatever, I imagine there will be some kind of event or person in the kind of MAGA movement who will do their best to make this like a salient issue again, maybe it's something as simple as like Pam Bondi steps down and everybody's like recounting her time

and the MAGA world's like biggest failure is she didn't get the Epstein files released. Let's bring in an attorney general who will pledge to do that or whatever and they make it an issue again, you know? That is a totally plausible scenario to me. It's just that the president is not on board with that at all at the moment. I mean, he certainly seemed, you know, I actually, that's a good, maybe a good final thing to talk about on this was the moment with this reporter where, you know, he's like steps in for Bondi and he's like, are we really talking about this right now? And I initially hammered him for that because just sort of hand waving away this story that you

cultivated. He was pumping the idea that the Clintons were responsible for Epstein dying, which is insane. I mean, it's insane. In retrospect, like, I mean, not even in real time, it was insane. And in retrospect, it's insane. As former President candidate Trump was doing Clinton body count hashtags and basically implying that they were responsible for killing Epstein. And then he waves away the supporters question, like, I can't believe we're still talking about this, which is a bait and switch on his supporters. If it's true that Donald Trump at one point thought that Epsom is killed for being in possession of some incriminating list of all these people, that would be a really big story.

Big enough that it would matter always and forever and now. And Trump has to live with that. But I thought about it a little bit more, and I went back and watched that interaction when I was writing my take. And there was sorta, they were there talking about the Texas floods and all these young girls dying and getting some serious questions about the economy, whatever, and I felt like maybe Trump was just just like, this isn't the time for that.

I can't believe you're asking that in this setting. Um, I'm curious what you guys think about how you read his response there. And if you buy any of it, or if you find any of it, like an acceptable way for him to handle that moment, I guess. I mean, I guess acceptable is a very broad term, I think. I have a more, my read remains closer to your original one. I think especially considering the context of the trend of Trump handling the questions about Epstein, which have always been cagey and

qualified in some way. So I think he probably has, for reasons that are obvious and that you've talked about, he's been a very public associate of his in some way for a long time. And that, you know, obviously is a long way from saying that he is subject to any guilt here, but it just means that it's a bad look and he doesn't want to have that in the spotlight. And I think that's kind of all that is. So is he trying to scuttle this acceptable? Yeah, I think it's acceptable political discourse. If you're a person who this is an issue that you care about, if you really believe there's a client list, then this is something that really looks like scuttling an important thing. And in that regard, you know, if I had that as one of the things

that I kept close to me that was a thing I cared a lot about, I would probably find that response unacceptable. But at the same time, I do pick up a little bit of what you're putting down. It has been six years and it is probably a good idea to try to move on with things given that the Justice Department has looked into it for a long time, but also understand how it falls flat given the trend of his answers. Yeah, it's interesting. There are a couple of different dimensions of this that I want to mention.

And I'm curious because we haven't talked about it yet, but this week we also got it came out that James Comey and John Brennan are going to be under investigation by the Justice Department, which is yet another old score that's being settled here. The suggestion that they were kind of colluding or doing something unseemly with respect to the Russia collusion investigation will now be adjudicated by the same Justice Department that is reluctant to go after this Epstein situation. So that's interesting, an interesting dynamic that perhaps could be the sort of thing that they hope will distract from the fact that they've created a great deal of consternation amongst the faithful

with their particular actions here. But the thing that really stands out to me with the entirety of the response here, the rollout of the memo, the media tour that preceded it, where Cash and Bongino were showing up in these different contexts, talking to Joe Rogan about things, Bondi's various

statements and misstatements and counter statements in the press. And then Trump's rather kind of desperate attempt to obfuscate in the context of that cabinet meeting. You all knew that there was no there there for a while and

had been trying to message around it for a bit. And one of the things Trump is frequently lauded for is his sophistication with respect to kind of communications and engaging with at a minimum energizing his base. The fact that they didn't do a better job of, I know many of you are disappointed. I know many of you expected the results to be different. Otherwise, they simply know they're there.

And for the president not to try to make that effort alongside the people who work for him is just further indication of the kind of lack of sophistication and organization in this administration. Whatever else you may think of them, whether you like them or you dislike them, this is just another incident, another rather revealing incident

of them just getting it all the way wrong on so many different levels from just an execution standpoint. So was there a reasonable, credible way to kind of deflect that question? Sure. They failed to do that repeatedly and have stepped and stumbled all over themselves with something that they had, it was well within

their power to slow walk this. The JFK files came out, but the MLK files are jammed up in courts. No one is really asking about those files. The UFO revelations haven't really panned out all that much. They released this document when they wanted to, and they chose a very weird time to do it. Like on a Sunday into going into a Monday. So you've got an entire week to chew it over as opposed to on a Friday or right before a holiday

so that you could hopefully mute this a little bit. It's just bizarre choices that don't add up to sophisticated political operators who know how to maneuver in Washington and get things done. It also doesn't really conform to what you would expect if there was a sophisticated cover up being carried out by Pam Bondi or by Trump himself or other people within the Justice Department because they just needed to obscure the facts here. Just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Why would you have made all those bold promises before only to cover it up now? Didn't you know if you're covering it up for the boss that you'd need to cover it up for the boss? Just there's so many things that don't add up. So I'm not really sure how I feel about the deflection, apart from it just being further evidence of them not really knowing what the hell they're doing.

We'll be right back after this quick break. We'll be right back after this quick break. city driving closer to the truth while curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. 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-Rroll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers.

So something interesting happened to me when I was researching this story, which I think is a nice transition into some of the grok stuff that I want to talk about today. And Camille, I know this will be up your alley and you'll be interested in it. I started in the last like six months, probably five or six months, just trying to use some of these language learning models a little bit more chat GPT, whatever they're called, LLMs, large language models, chat GPT, GROK occasionally, perplexity, which I really like. Just this bouncing ideas off of little research tools. And so I opened a chat GPT window when we got into the Epstein stuff. And I asked it one question about, you know, I think I asked it,

is there actually an Epstein list? What do the most qualified journalists on this topic say? And it gave me a bunch of answers about it. And then I said, can you just give me some background on Pam Bondi and Jeffrey Epstein's relationship or history? And one of the first things, that was all I asked, basically unprompted, Chad GPT spit out this thing that Pam Bondi had received a donation from Jeffrey Epstein when she was running to be Florida attorney general. She received $50,000 from

him or something like that, which I was like, holy shit, blew my, I never heard of that. Pam Bondi got a, you know, so I sort of put this as a note in my take that I was writing about like, you know, sort of building this case that it was this kind of corrupted administration. And then I went looking for the source on this and I couldn't find it. So I just said like, hey, can you send me the primary source for this claim? And then it sent me a couple of articles

about Jeffrey Epstein's donations. And I opened the articles and read them. And there was like nothing about Pam Bondi. And then I just said, I don't see any evidence here that Pam Bondi, you know, I'm talking to Chad GBT. And it's just like, oh yeah, I'm sorry, I got that wrong. And I was like, what?

Like that is a huge, like you almost just like made a career ending mistake for me. Like, not cool, you know. And I said like, that's a huge, and then Chad GBT is like I said, like, that's a huge, and then Chad GPT is like, you're right, this was a huge mistake, I really apologize. And I'm like, so did you just hallucinate that? No, I want to emphasize I made a big mistake, but it probably born out of this thing

where I was reading scraping stories about donations Epstein gave to Trump, and Trump, you know, Pam Bondi's relationship, Trump gave Pam Bondi donations. And anyway, it was bizarre and was just like one of those moments where I, you know, my trust in AI just collapses. And I'm like, I'm never using this thing again.

And later that day, Grok had its like insane, I mean that night, I guess, Grok had its insane meltdown where it started calling itself like Mecca Hitler and people, which I don't even know what that means. People... No one does. That's all right. I'm not even gonna, you got it. Go ahead. think people... That's all right.

I'm not even gonna... You got it. Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead, all right. Enlighten us, sorry. No, I feel the color rising in my cheeks right now. I'm not even talking about anime. It's cool.

We're gonna keep going. All right. I think... I don't wanna talk about anime. And then people were asking it to like fantasize about, Lindy Accarino, the CEO of X, or like- Outgoing, yeah. Yeah, outgoing, or Will Stancil, the journalist

who's like a big lefty about like raping Will, I mean, really dark, wild stuff, and Grox just playing ball, just going completely bananas. And then they shut it down and start deleting all its posts and then release this statement that of course all of this is coming just literally two days after Elon Musk declares on X, we have fixed Grok. You should start to notice some improvements. I was like, yeah, I noticed some changes for sure.

Pretty, pretty intense changes became very noticeable very quickly. I'm just going to throw all that out there. I'm curious, like what struck you guys about this story? I mean, I have my particular, particularly skeptical and cynical views about these products that I know is very divergent from Camille's view on them. Ari, I'm sort of less certain where you are,

but this just struck me as like, I don't wanna say like a canary in the coal mine, but certainly a nice red flag of this is how quickly and weirdly things can go bad fast when we have humans sort of tweaking these things the way they want. You know, thank God, Chad Jeep or thank God Grok wasn't like at the controls of some kind of military industrial complex when it suddenly decided that Hitler was a really model citizen of the 20th century. But, you know, it seems a little unnerving

to me personally, I guess. I'm curious how the it landed with you guys. I guess I have three things. I think the first thing, obviously, is that we should continue to treat with great skepticism claims about enlightenment and human level intelligence that language models have and have reached. I especially think that in reflection of the basic fact that since we cannot agree on an operative definition of the word intelligence, it is almost nonsensical to believe that we've created something that has achieved it.

So when it comes to like, good thing, you know, Grok isn't a general in the army, I think, let me just try to emphasize, I hope that does not cross anybody's mind as a good idea and has not before. And if it has, then you know, maybe now's a good time to rethink that. The second thing is I'm personally torn between two things here regarding Elon Musk

and his connections to the fixes in Grok, which most undoubtedly he had a large hand on. One, about language models themselves since we're on the topic. We know how very sensitive they can be to being trained on new data in a way that makes them almost hilariously aggressive. It's happened before. I think there's, I can't remember what it was,

but one of Microsoft's early chatbot AIs was corrupted within a week. Another chatbot, like one of the first ones on the internet, I don't know if it was Microsoft or not, was turned into essentially a Nazi as a joke, like within 24 hours. It sounds pretty similar to that trend where people, like if you are a rapscallion troll on the internet, and you get your hands on one of these chatbots,

I think it's almost like a fifth grader, sorry, like a 15-year-old getting a can of spray paint on a brick wall. They're going to draw a dick. That's just what they're going to do. So if you're a troll with access to a chatbot, you're going to try to turn it into a Nazi, because that's like pro forma.

So like, it's probably mostly that. Though on the other hand, a thing that I'm personally insensitive to is, I don't know if you are aware of this background, Kim Yel, but when Isaac was on paternity leave, a couple things happened. Trump was inaugurated, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things was Elon Musk's supposed Nazi salute,

which I had the take on of, this looks unintentional to me, but the response is underwhelming, and certainly he should be given a lot of criticism for that. I received a ton, a ton of very direct and pretty vile responses about me personally, like not being a real Jew and so on. But in light of that, I know how it will sound for me to say,

yeah, I don't necessarily think this is proof that Musk is a Nazi when like we have all of this trending information at our fingertips that would prove otherwise. It's a lot of circumstantial evidence that you could point to to say, this dude's a white supremacist who hates Jews. And like, I just, I feel, I feel increasingly worn down by trying to say, I don't believe that, to the point where like, I don't know, maybe I do.

Maybe I do believe that. Or at the very least, he doesn't seem to care, which is, which is close enough that it's indistinguishable. And, you know, the apology letter that comes out from this had better be pretty good at this point. Like that's where I'm at. I am not sure I'm anticipating any more public statements about the mistakes this week. Neither am I. Especially because they just announced Grok 4, which I spent a number of hours playing

with this morning and was somewhat impressed by. Just the quality of the responses. I am, I suppose, the resident AI optimist, but that optimism is particularly narrow and focused. I am not a sky-is-falling doomer. I'm also not interested in the fanatical overstatement about what's happening. When I hear Sam Almond tell me,

Sam Almond or anyone else tell me that super intelligence is just around the corner and my computer is suddenly going to become conscious and, you know, solve all of the hardest problems in physics and cure cancer. Team minus 12 months, by the way, the calendar event for myself to see if he is right on this prediction.

That's not going to happen. I think Ari, your general warning to people about these responses and your experience, Isaac, with respect to the hallucinations you encountered is consistent with my experience. And I suspect I use these tools differently than most people. I think most people are using, and most of what the reporting I've seen on this confirms as much, most people are using these LLMs as a substitute for Google. They imagine that they can find facts and truth simply by asking grok questions. Why did the universe begin? How did the dinosaurs die?

And what will come out of there is supposed to be the best informed, wonderfully forged answer imaginable. And the reality is that's not how this works. It is an algorithm that is predicting the next letter in a word and doing other sophisticated things. And much of what's happening there, the technology, we don't understand how it works and neither do the people who are building it. The people who spend all of their time doing this thing called alignment, trying to enforce particular standards,

more so than what XAI and Grok do, spend all of their time trying to ensure that the outputs that come out of this thing are reliably safe. And folks at Anthropic who built Claude, folks at OpenAI who built ChatGPT and Perplexity, these companies all tend to err on the side of caution. Their AI models are kind of like diplomats.

Grok and Elon have a very different approach. Elon had this particular concern about the vast troves of training data that all of these different models depend upon. And they all use a lot of the same training data, which is why you'll get parallel hallucinations across these different applications, shockingly, where they literally just invent whole books, invent authors, and all manner of other things when you actually know what you're researching. The approach at XAI was, look, the data that we're training on,

establishment, newspapers, et cetera, et cetera, things that are generally deemed trustworthy kind of leans left. And as a result, a lot of these chatbots have a kind of left-wing bias. In fact, when you combine that with the standards that are being hard-coded into the apps, things that they're not allowed to say,

kind of default responses to questions that verge on something that might be, say, race-related or sex- or gender-related, something that's kind of political, you get these kind of stock responses that seem to lean left. And Elon had an aspiration to do two things, one of which is probably good. The other, I think, is actually misguided in ways that might not be obvious. But the first was to try and get rid of the bias and make Grok less politically correct, which is an interesting goal that is perhaps even

directionally correct, but the actual consequence of the way that they went about doing it is what helped to contribute to the kind of craziness that happened in the past couple of days. But the other goal was to try and create this maximum truth seeking machine that is always giving you the best possible answer, even if it's politically incorrect. And I think that that orientation towards these tools is probably wrong. I think we actually culturally need to find the right heuristic for how to think about our relationships with these tools.

And for me, and I'm still very much thinking about this and actually contemplating writing about this. And we've talked about it a little bit outside of the recordings. But for me, like the policies that I've developed for myself is I'm using this tool to think more deeply, not more quickly. I want it to help me sharpen questions. I don't have an expectation that it's going to supply me

with answers I can have full factual confidence in. I am double checking absolutely everything. It can allow me to generate quick summaries of say an article that I'm reading, but if there are particular takeaways there, I actually need to verify and double check those. It is not unlike working with a brilliant junior assistant who doesn't have a tremendous amount of experience in the industry and as a result makes all kinds of mistakes, some of which are profoundly

inexplicable. The danger here is that these, what seems to be happening is that a lot of these LLMs as they get smarter and more sophisticated, the errors don't go away. The errors become more sophisticated, the errors don't go away. The errors become more sophisticated and in some ways more bizarre. So there are just huge problems here. And I think that that broader context is somewhat lost in the particular hubbub over the latest grok AI craziness. And it also seems to me that a lot of the screenshots that we're seeing and even posts of the kind of bad outputs,

some of them are clearly authentic. I was actually able to reproduce some of those myself. Then you can actually do some prompt hacking even of the new Grok 4 that just came out and I was able to successfully do that today. But a lot of it actually seems highly dubious. And I think the broader takeaway is probably not, Elon is a monstrous anti-Semite.

I don't think he wanted those outputs. They just have lower guardrails on their system and it produces all kinds of crude gross outputs as a result. And it's going to take them a while to catch up to where OpenAI and Anthropic are with regards to this stuff because they just have not prioritized it.

But, you know, beyond that, the rest of the lessons here are actually broadly applicable to the entire LLM industry. And there's a sense in which OpenAI and Anthropic routinely generate crazy outputs that just don't make headlines in the same way that XAI and Grok are going to because of who Elon is and really because of the way Grok works. Grok, a lot of the queries and perhaps even most of them are

happening in public on people's Twitter streams and threads. So they're publicly available. That's not the way that we interact with chat GPT. It's not nearly the same. To the extent you encounter something weird, Isaac, you've encountered something weird and you'd have to share it with me for me to see it or talk about it on the podcast, which is a very different kind of circumstance. Yeah, I do like that's one of my favorite parts, I will say about these models is that you can share the link to the exchange that you had with people, which I found useful. Like a few times something crazy has happened.

People have been able to look at what the exchange was and maybe point out what happened. I liked your description of how you think about these models. It reminded me of what Kevin Roos told Casey Newton in that podcast, which he said, he said the mental model I sometimes have of these chatbots is as a very smart assistant who has a dozen PhDs, but is also high on ketamine like the other people's. That's a better analogy. Yes, that works.

Which I thought was pretty funny. And to tie all that back together, you know, we had the weird thing that happened on July 6th. So it's July 10th as we're recording this. So four days ago and a few days before this happened where Grok all of a sudden was answering in the first person as Elon, which was really weird. That was really strange.

Like somebody said, ask Grok, is there evidence of Elon Musk interacting with Jeffrey Epstein? And then Grock responded, yes, limited evidence exists. I visited Epstein's New York City home once briefly for 30 minutes with my ex-wife in the early 2010s out of curiosity, saw nothing inappropriate and declined Island invites, no advisory role or deeper ties.

And it was just like, did Elon just manually put this response in, in like the first person? I don't know, that was really bizarre. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. You also don't know if the question asker, like a couple questions up said, respond like your Elon Musk, like that's something that I think happened.

This is the other thing, like we'll see these things, you get the screen cap, like we'll see these things, you get the screen cap, you don't always, and you generally, and interestingly, do not get the prompt that originated it, or the entire thread even of the conversation, which is really important. But you actually bring up a really good point, Isaac,

and I think we've talked about this before, maybe it was off mic someplace, but I should be remiss not to mention that it's not just that Elon is controversial and he attracts attention or that the guardrails are lower. There have been at least two other incidents here before these most recent ones where people at XAI have been manipulating their chat bot and giving it explicit instructions about the way to answer politically freighted questions or questions about Elon or Donald Trump when they were on much better terms. And the response from XAI to being found out

about this, and they've been found out in a couple of different ways, I think in one instance there was actually someone who was able to get Grok to divulge the instructions it was given. That's incredible. And in another instance, it was just a matter of encountering these bizarre responses about white genocide with respect to South Africa that were oddly similar

to the sort of thing that you would get from Elon directly. In both instances, they suggested that there was a rogue employee who didn't really know how they do things here and in one instance it was like they've come from open AI and they did a bad thing telling it what it could and couldn't say about Doge. And it's like, are you kidding? Like, are you kidding? So you know, maybe that was true once. Maybe it was true twice.

By the third time when you get to a weird response from the chat bot, it seems to be personal, a personal message from Elon about his encounters with him. One, I don't know if those particular facts have been fact-checked by anyone or been confirmed. But you know, it begins to be a little harder to believe. And the fact that Elon is a guy who often shoots from the hip, who often cuts corners in ways that can be pretty deleterious for him, for his businesses, and sometimes when he's serving as a consultant for the country, why would anyone expect dramatically different with XAI or Neuralink or Tesla or SpaceX?

And a lot of these are companies that I liked and have used their products, not SpaceX yet, but hopefully one day, but it's a real issue. So that is worth paying some attention to and losing credibility here, even while they're building a product that I find to be pretty good, used the right way, is a legitimate issue that's going to have real consequences. You know, I'll say one last thing, and I've been going on way too long, but I do think

this is worth putting out there. There's a sense in which people are very concerned about these large language models having a tremendous amount of influence. And I will say that one of the best things about the current AI landscape that I didn't see coming is that these LLMs seem to be much easier to build, although they're really expensive than anyone thought possible. XAI started really, really late and has managed to catch up to chat GPT and Anthropic in a lot of important respects. And we've got a ton of competing models. So if Elon is office square and decides he wants to build this renegade AI and a lot of people are suspicious of them kind of manipulating it in weird ways,

you'll have plenty of alternatives. And that is true in so many different regards. Not just providers but even approaches. I mean Meta, it has a you'll have plenty of alternatives. And that is true in so many different regards, not just providers, but even approaches. I mean, Meta, it has completely open source, LLM, and are building it really in public in a very different way than OpenAI. And it seems to be pretty competitive as well and a clear choice for a lot of enterprises

that are building their own tools. So it's a promising field. There's lots to be excited about. There's also a lot of kind of fantastical promises and overheated rhetoric that you should largely ignore. But don't give up on Google yet. You probably still need it for stuff. Yeah, the Google monster is now doing its own AI summaries at the top of every search

result that I get. And all of this, I mean, interestingly, is relevant for us folks in the media, I guess, too. I mean, there's our traffic's being devoured because nobody clicks on any links anymore. They just read AI rollups of answers to questions that they want either at the top of Google or by going in the chat GPT and asking it questions. I've been thinking about that too. Like how do I get Tangle in some of these chat GPT query? I started asking, I did that for about 30 minutes over the weekend, I was asking ChatGPT how Tangle could end up in its results.

And it just kept dodging me and saying, it doesn't divulge the way it picks its sources or something like that. And so I was like, well, that's not very transparent. Talk to me like I'm a programmer at OpenAI or whatever, trying to do the, to fool it, but I can do it, it's smarter than I am still. Yeah, even some question about whether or not that's the right goal.

Giving away your material so it can be used in the training data for ChatGPT, it may or may not direct people back to you. It will definitely contribute to the model in some way. Is that the outcome you want? Or is there something else you can do? We're so ripe for a back to the land movement with, we're going into libraries and everybody's going to fill their

bookshelves with books and break their laptops. Because here we are talking about how to trick a robot into telling us how it works. And at this point we're like, is that the thing that we wanted to know something about, something very factual and small? Somebody wrote that down in a thing that you can read and hold.

Yeah. I know you're joking a little bit, but this is a, this is, this is a continuance of my, one of my big political predictions, like cultural predictions that I've been making for three or four years now that I'm going to continue making about like the next decade or two is that I don't see any world in which the technological backlash doesn't come.

I mean, I just, every single whatever, I'm a millennial, every single person in my generation who I talk to is doing like social media cleanse, computer cleanse, tech cleanse, trying to get outside, teaching their kids like screen time's evil, get back to what childhood was like in the 90s. I mean, there's so much nostalgia and attachment to the kind of pre-screen world that I feel like it's gonna take a couple,

it's gonna take these chatbots and like AI systems getting really, really good at stuff. And then like, you know, you're getting laid off by some chatbot at work or something. Like that's gonna be the thing that's really gonna send people. And you know, it's like, Oh God, I forgot that Matt Damon movie where he's in some insane futuristic world and he's like trying to pay his ticket at the counter with the robots.

I can't remember the name. It's really great scene, but it's like, you know, it's going to be, it's going to be something like that. That's going to totally send people. Elysium. Elysium. Yeah. We haven't gotten there yet. All right.

Quick. I'm just going to drop this nugget in before we pivot to our final thing, which today is a game that I'm very excited about. I just got a Wall Street Journal push notification that New York City's wealthiest financiers are uniting against Zoran Mandani with a plan to raise $20 million to fight the surging progressive candidate in the general election. Best PR we could ask for. I was just going to say, this is my quick poll.

It's like, do you think the existence of a $20 million pool to fight Zoran Mandani does more to hurt or help him. That's my question. Help so much. I have to wonder if this was an actual press release or if someone found out about it and leaked it. Because the richest guys in New York getting together to spend $20 million on a political race, it's actually not that big a deal. I don't expect it takes them too long to get the a deal. I don't expect it takes them too long

to get the money together. I don't think it takes them too long to get alignment. They're not recruiting other people to the cause. It's kind of weird. So I don't know that that's going to kind of pay PR dividends for them. But I also don't know that this means he's going to win. So.

I think that the answer there is the press release plays so well for Mamdani that it's suspicious. Yeah, I just like, he could not buy better PR or campaign material than this. This is an exclusive Wall Street Journal, it's plastered on the homepage of the Wall Street Journal right now

that New York's financial crowd rushes to build anti-Mamdani war chests. And it's all about how their wealthy, the wealthiest financiers are scrambling to build out a network of outside groups to go to war against Democratic nominee for mayor Zoran Mamdani. They're calling it a New Yorkers for a Better Future Mayor 25.

Says Wall Street Journal. Yeah. What an awful name. We get so used to that name, but in this instance, it's so off the wall. Yeah, grassroots. JP Morgan, Chief Executive Jamie Dimon. City Group, Morgan Stanley. The Avengers. Bill Ackman. Amy Dimmon, yeah, I mean, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley.

This is Bill Ackman. The billionaire investor, Bill Ackman, a man of New York. Jesus. Yeah, no, I think what a gift to him. They're really gonna make sure that he wins. Anyway. We'll be right back after this quick break. What's better than a well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart

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you breathless. Whether it's heart-pounding suspense like the Audible Originals' Ten Rules for the Perfect Murder by James Patterson, or the downloaded with Brendan Fraser. Or how about a fantasy adventure like Onyx Storm or Amelia Hart's The Sirens? Audible has an incredible selection of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals all in one app. Start listening and discover what's beyond the edge of your seat when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.ca. All right. Last thing we're going to do today before we get out of here is we're going to play a little bit of a game, which before, pre-Camille, Ari and I were kind of in the habit of finishing our podcast with this, but now we have so much to talk about the last few weeks

that we haven't really gotten to. So I don't know if Camille's been a part of one of these yet. I don't think, have you played a game on the podcast yet? No. I don't know if we played a game exactly like this. There was something that we did. Okay. But I don't know if it was a game.

We have a, yeah, gimmiki's sort of derogatory. In a good way. I didn't mean it in a derisive way. We have a reader who gave us a tremendous set of Tangle-related games to play that was really fun. But I think this game was from a different reader, right? Or was it the guy, I can't remember if we're using their names, but anyway. I've been using first names. Yeah, I don't have the email in front of me.

I just have the document that I copied. So thank you to the reader who sent in the game titled, Would Tucker Justify Your Invasion? Which was the Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz interview from a couple of weeks ago where Tucker was grilling Ted Cruz on the population of Iran and sort of implying that if you don't know the population of a country,

you can't say we should invade it. So, somewhat psychopathically, we are, this is all downside, no upside for us, Camille, because we're going to try to see if we know rote facts off the top of our heads, completely AI-free, Google-free, we're not going to try to see if we know rote facts off the top of our heads, completely AI free, Google free. We're not going to use any intelligence outside of what's between our ears. And all we can do is embarrass ourselves.

I know if you get one right, you know, good, but more likely than not, we're going to be off on a lot of them. If you get one right, you get to bomb the country, right? That's the game. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure. Isaac, do you get to bomb the country, right? That's the game. You get to. Well, unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I'm the only population of one country. So, it's, you're in trouble in the United States. Yeah. All right.

Right, so. All right, will you track our responses so we can see who got closest? I got you. We'll try and do it quick, cause because yeah, all right, let's go. So if you get it right, you get to bomb the country first. Country, Isaac, Israel. Oh, come on.

Well, you could probably do a decent job getting the population, right? Because you've lived in Israel a little bit. Yeah, I would say, I'm going to say 10 million. I think it's somewhere, I think I remember it being like eight and a half. So I think it's in the ballpark of 10 probably now. That sounds good to me. I'm going to propose that we do this like family style, that we're a team here and we're stepping up

to try to answer this unless you want to say, like we each take one and see how we do. I like that because then we can sort of compel each other in different directions if we need to. Yeah. Camille, what do you think about 10 mil? About 10 mil for Israel? Sure. Actually, I want to say it sounds a little high.

I don't know. Yeah, I think 10 mil is probably good. I think I like the reasoning for that too. So it feels right to me. Next one, Russia. Oh, we have to wait to find out. Oh man. Yeah.

I'll do this all at the end. Okay. I know that Russia is in the hundreds of millions. So I know it's somewhere between 100 million and a billion, which isn't that helpful. But I would guess, I think it's probably like 150 to 200, 150 to 250. Maybe like 160. I don't know.

What do you guys think? I mean, I know the US is about 340. My suspicion is that Russia is around, yeah, but like 2024 numbers, like around 340, something like that. Russia might be a third of that. A third. So your estimate sounds about right to me. Wow, I was thinking bigger. You don't think there's-

I was gonna say a half. I mean, there's not as many, I don't think there's as many people in Russia as the US, but I think there's more than 200 million maybe. I think it's... Hmm. Why don't we just say 200 mil? Okay.

First, what did... I think that's a bit high, but okay. I think it's a little high. Go to 175. 175. We'll just split the US in half. Wisdom of Solomon. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Okay. 175. We'll just split the US in half. Wisdom of Solomon. Yeah.

Yeah, I like that. Okay. Yeah, actually half is probably closer to within a third. So yeah. Next up is Ukraine. Oh, I have that. I don't know either. I know that...

What's the militaristic advantage? 40 million free Ukrainians. That's how many people Putin tried to take over. I've written that line several times. That's your heart. I'll buy it. That's a slam dunk. Yeah.

That sounds good. Okay, this one, China. Oh. No, I think I got that because I know we learned like last year, maybe a little longer than that. India surpassed China in population and the number that they surpassed them at was like 1.1 billion.

So that means China is going to be around there. I was going to say... Yeah, go ahead. No, I know the numbers are close between the two countries, but I actually thought it was higher than that. Isn't it like 1.2, 1.4? It's going to be higher now. Massive population.

Okay. Wow. I was going to ask if now. It's going to be a massive population. Yeah. Okay. Wow. I was going to ask if China broke a billion people. So I don't know what I'm talking about. That was going to be my question. China has broken a billion people now, right? I knew there was like, I remember when it was close, but. Camille how you feel about 1.2?

Saying 1.2 for that. You want to go higher? I wonder if it isn't. I would go a little higher. Let's say 1.2? I'm saying 1.2 for that. You want to go higher? I wonder if it isn't. I would go a little higher. Let's say 1.… Wait, India, you think is larger than China. Yes. Yeah, I'd say 1.3.

Let's go there. Let's go 1.3. 1.3 for India and maybe 1.2 for China. But both of them could be higher. Again, my instinct is like 1.4, but maybe I'm being crazy. All right, well let's say 1.3 and let's go to Pakistan next. Okay. Okay.

That's a really interesting one. Well, we're not in the billions there. No, for sure. I'm pretty sure there's only two countries in the billions. But there's tons of people there. Yeah. Right. I think Pakistan's like one of those countries that is probably approaching how many people

we have. Like 300 million or something. That's my read too. Really? I think when I'm thinking back on like lists of countries by population, I think Pakistan's top 10 or near top 10, but not quite where the US is. So 200, 250? Huh. Okay. I'll bite. You less convinced? or near top 10, but not quite where the US is. So 200, 250?

Huh, okay. I'll bite. You less convinced? I don't know. I just, I really don't have a frame of reference for this. I know it is considerably smaller than India, but that is about all I know. It's all kind of relative. I know that the ceiling is a little over a billion

and that the United States is about 340 and I don't know much else. What would you have said without the well being poisoned? Maybe I would have landed at about the same place, but maybe a little over a hundred million, 150 million. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm really just making this up.

Yeah, we all are. I think let's go with 200 million. And let's- You're a pacifist, bro. Yeah. Now you're starting fights with that kind of talk. That I agree with Ted Cruz. I don't need to know how many people are there

to want to bomb you. That's what it is. Oh yeah, and Camille's going to talk about bombing packages. So sick. What a passage. Okay, next up. Next up is the UK. Now this one I actually feel like I've got a good basis

to go off of to work from. Okay. Which is, I remember somewhere in the back of my head is a fact or rule of thumb that California's about the population of the UK. California's population's about 40 million. I think it's been declining a bit. I think the UK has been going up.

So I'd want to say low 40s. We can maybe just say 44, because that's their country code. Okay, let's do it. That feels good. That's fine. I was, yeah, I was going to say like 80. I was going to be higher.

If you are right and I'm wrong, it will be an all time embarrassing thing for me. And it is, you know, certainly possible. Well, okay. Yeah. I don't, I don't know. I don't, I didn't have any confidence in that, but if like gun to head, you had asked me first, I would have said something like 80 million, but I trust the California fact. That seems legit. I like what you're saying there. I think it is I let's go next to Spain which we got the

No, I the person the person who gave us this this game said congrats to the u24 teams for succeeding in for like winning in Spain recently. So this is a Frisbee person. I just looked it up. His name is Tyler. Thank you, Tyler. So population of Spain. I've stalled a lot. UK we think is 50.

40, 44 I said. 40. Okay, I'd say like, I think smaller. Like smaller country, less people, more country, more like open country in Spain. I'd say like 35 maybe. I'd go lower personally. What do you think, Camille?

I don't know. Not a confident expression. I don't know. We definitely think there's fewer people in Spain than the United Kingdom, right? I think that's for sure. Yeah. Do we? Are we sure?

We're not sure. We're not sure at all. We're a couple months from this point. This one I really don't know. But that's my… I don't know. I could believe that. I do have an interesting fact that is not helpful here,

which is the most dense urban population in all of Europe is a suburb of Barcelona. It's called Hospitalelecta Umbria Gaud. Does that help? I think adds, what did we say? Add 10 million to whatever we said. We said 35, and that puts it over UK. No, I think Spain's, okay.

Can we keep it at 35? Maybe puts it over UK. No, I think Spain's, okay. Can we keep it at 35? Maybe we just go 38. Sure. Most dense, you just said the most dense in all of Europe. That's- Yeah, the most dense, like, single municipality. All right, I would say 40.

That makes me think it's more than, all right, thanks. Maybe that'll inform us a little. Next up, oh boy, I do not know. It is Yemen. Oh. I do not know at all. I'm trying to look for a frame of reference to even think about Yemen in terms of its population size.

Well, humanitarian crisis, like I think it's like eight or nine million people displaced or something like that. We just covered this. Before we did the Sudan question, we talked about Yemen. Man, it's so small, right? It's like the size of, I don't know, it feels like on the map it looks so small. But it just looks small in reference to, like compared to the countries that it's near.

Like it's near Saudi Arabia, which is large. And Yemen, I think is physically multiples of Israel in terms of size. Do you think Yemen is bigger than, you think it's a big state, like bigger than California? I don't think it is. No, I don't think so. I was going to say maybe two Israelis. But did you just say displacement?

Like the numbers was around 7 million? Are you sure about that too? Because that's about Sudan numbers. And that's the largest humanitarian displacement currently. I don't know, man. If you think it's two Israelis, the largest humanitarian displacement currently? I don't know, man. If you think it's two Israels, I would say big population. You mean that you think that's too big?

I would say the population is high because I think there's a ton of people there. Yeah, I think that there's, the population is pretty concentrated. I wouldn't be shocked if the population was like three X Israel. Okay, so that's 25, 30. Yeah, probably closer to 30.

But again, I am really just making this up. I seem to vaguely remember looking at population numbers for this region and seeing kind of some commonality, at least some bunching around like the 30 number. Well, let's go with 30 and let's move on. I think we're going to spin our wheels on this. So that feels good to me. You're tracking all of this, Ari, because I'm desperate to know where we're close.

Okay. Don't worry. We have only two more to meal and then we'll track our answers. The waiting is killing me. The next one is Syria. Huh. Why do I feel like six or seven? Or is that way too small? Syria is a small country.

It is, but the geography isn't it. A lot of these places have really in populous cities. Yeah. Yeah Well, yeah again, I can't imagine it's smaller than Israel You're you're in is roughly the size of California and Pennsylvania combined. That's bad news for us. I think Country it's a lot of desert though. There's a lot of uninhabited Yeah, I just had to look that up. I thought that would be good fodder for our guy. I said what is the size, what state is the size of Yemen? AI says Yemen's roughly the size of California and Pennsylvania combined. No more of that

because it's gonna give you population numbers in the suggested search. Well, our answer's on the board. Syria's Damascus. Damascus, pretty sizable city in its own right. Probably, oh, one of the things we know, Aleppo is the city roughly the size of Chicago. That's a fact or that was in the news a lot. So we're going to be looking at probably tens of millions. Size and population. Sorry? Like there's as many people in Chicago as there are in Aleppo.

Okay. So how many people are in Chicago? Five million? Four? Three? That's the right question to ask. It's definitely, again, it's definitely north of there. Like we, maybe 2X Israel. Like I don't think they're comparable in size.

25? 20? Let's go 20. Yeah, maybe't think they're comfortable in size. 25? 20? Let's go 20. Yeah, maybe 20. Let's go with 20. Last question. Last one. Mexico.

Our friends, Mexico. I mean, they're obviously not. So sub 340. One of the largest cities in the world. Yeah, but not, you know, minuscule. Upwards of a hundred million, a hundred and twenty. 120 was the number that came to my mind too. Okay, let's do it.

Isaac? I was thinking twos. You think so? You're the guy who has a house that's close to Mexico. So you can see Mexico from the outside. I really should know this. I've spent so's close to Mexico. So you can see Mexico. I've also, I should, I really should know this. I've spent so much time in Mexico, but there's just- 200 million seems like a lot.

Well, maybe it's a lot. Maybe I actually, I might be corrupted on this just because I've seen so many big, I mean, Mexico is really big. And like, even all the way down to the Southern tip, there's just like, there's so many kind of indigenous, but maybe those places have fewer people. I would think they'd have smaller population.

But also Mexico is large cities. Mexico city's enormous, this big suburbs, Monterey, very large city, Oaxaca, not quite as large. I think more than 120, maybe like 150 or 175, if we're going to stay in there. I'll go 175. What did we say? I don't know what we said for Russia. More than 120, maybe like 150 or 175 if we're going to stay in there. I'll go 175. What did we say?

I don't know what we said for Russia. For Russia we said 175 also. Oh shit. Can we bump that up to 200? I'm fine with that. Okay. So Mexico 175, Russia 200. We're going to be way off on some of these boys and we're going to get some emails telling

us from Europeans dunking on America. Can I say something? I don't think we're going to be way off. I think we did pretty good actually. I feel kind of confident. There's a bonus one Tyler put in here for us, which I want to see what we think, which is population of Kentucky. Give us a US state.

I think I kind of have this to be honest. Okay. There's a thing in the back of my mind that's like Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee. It's like four or five, six. Four and a half, five and a half, six and a half, something like that. I think Kentucky's like four and a half.

I was going to say four million would have been my guess. Okay. All right. Put it on the board. Block it. Four to four and a half. Now let's see how we did. Okay. Population of Israel, 9.27.

We said 10. So I'm going to count that as a win. That's a huge win. Yeah. I'd be shocked if you didn't get that one. Bonds are dropping. No, thank you. So the next one we did talk ourselves in the wrong direction on.

Russia's 145. We said 175 initially. Neighbor. I was pushing for lower there. You were pushing for lower. You can take that win. Russia's 145. We said 175 initially. Neighborhood. I was pushing for lower there. You were pushing for lower. You can take that win. Okay. All right. Next one, Ukraine. 42.7. So, yes, we call that.

That was good, right? That is outer ring of the bullseye for us. Good pull, Isaac. Next one, China. Camille, 1.4 billion. Boom. Wow. Look at that, dude. That would be the one, China. Camille, $1.4 billion. Wow. Look at that, dude. That would be the one you get. Well, I just, again, I knew that there's a ceiling,

and it's like up above $1 billion, but I was going to say $1.5 billion. So $1.4 billion is closer to right. Guys, Pakistan. We said $200 million. $255 million. Huh. That's a lot of people, dude. It's a ton of Pakistanis. Guys, Pakistan, we said 200 mil. 255 mil. Wow. That's a lot of people, dude.

It's a ton of Pakistanis. But not a bad guess from us either. Next up, yeah, I did lead us astray here a little bit. UK is 69 mil. I said 44. Okay. Well, that was a baseline for other European answers too. So, we'll see.

44 for that. And Isaac, you wanted to say... I wanted 80. So, we're like... You were a little closer than what I said, but... Twice as close, but who's counting? Not you. Next up, next up is Spain. 49. We said 40. So we were directionally right. Proportionally, we've gotten the-

I'm not embarrassed by any of these so far. This is a hard game. Yeah, and we're right about where it was from the UK, 40. Honestly, the person who's been wrongest so far is me with the UK and California. If we'd gotten that initial one right, we would have been right on Spain too. And you had that fact about the Spain, the Barcelona that I increased, I'm forcing you

to bump the number up, which I'm glad we did. I'm glad you did too. context-wise. Next up, Yemen. We said 30. The population of Yemen is 34.5 million. Okay. I'm honestly impressed that we got that.

We know things. We, okay, so for serious... We were way off. I did ask if Yemen was the size of New Jersey when it's the size of California and Pennsylvania combined. So, that's a little bit... We don't have to bring that up. We're riding this train forward momentum.

It looks incredibly small on the global map, which I guess is the disorienting thing. Yeah. Yes, which is hugely distorted. Yeah. I'm a white colonist. My request is let's go to Syria. Let's go to Syria boys. Define white.

Yeah. We said 20 million for Syria, the population's 23.6. Dude. Okay. We haven't had a single big miss. Mexico, we said 175. I think you said that. You said three times Israel, Camille, and that's what we did.

So Mexico, we said 175. The population of Mexico is 135. That was my bad. You guys were right. What was Russia again? One second. Was that 140? Hold, please. Russia was 145.

Yes. Okay. You guys wanted 125 on Mexico and then I started talking about how many people there are there and forced this up. So I would have said like 200 million. So that's definitely my fault. Well, next up we population of Kentucky, which we thought, you know, we'd be saving or a saving grace for us. We said four and a half, 4.58.

That's really nice, man. I think that's a really nice showing. I'm so relieved for how we did here. And we're going to get so many fewer and more European, except the UK people are going to be extremely miffed. I'm so sorry. A little bit, but proportionally and by raw numbers, I think we miss Mexico by the most,

which is, and only because of me, I sort of forced us out of the right answer. Did we? I think we missed Pakistan. We said by proportionally or by raw numbers, but either way. Either way. Yeah, we are by proportionally or by raw numbers, but either way. Either way. Yeah, we were so pretty close.

I think 60 and 60 or no, yeah, three, 200 and what? And then it was 280 or something. Yeah, it was 255. It was 255 and we said 200. So yeah, Mexico was a good. Either way, we did great. Good for us. We did good. I'm proud of us. All right. Well, that was a bit good. Either way, we did great. Good for us. We did good. I'm proud of us.

All right. Well, that's a good game. Thank you, Tyler. Really, I feel like I learned something too. I'm going to remember a lot of those because we talked him out. All right. It's time to complain a little bit.

So John, you can play the music for our grievances for the week. The airing of grievances. Between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal. All right, I'll go first. I've got a really, I think this one is built for the show, just like this space, nowhere else to complain about this. I'm in this office space, the shared office space, Hipster WeWork here in South Philly.

I like it. It's a nice, great office space. I like the people, whatever. One of the best things about coming to like a WeWork type space like this is that there's free coffee and there's free beer and there's free snacks. And you just come in and the coffee especially,

I don't use the beer much because even if there is beer here, it's like, I'm usually leaving the office to go get a happy hour drink somewhere or something if I want a beer. But it's just nice to know it's here. The office is not sold, but there's new management. Some like big corporate group came in and is taking control of the management. And so the guys who run the office,

typically like the sorta, you know, in their kind of like grassroots filly way, they like make the coffee every morning with some local roasters and they bring in the snacks and they refill whatever. And the, this new group that's in, they've been really nice and they actually just gave me a price reduction on an office space, on a bigger office space. So on the off chance of listening to this, I'm not complaining.

I love this. I like some of the changes that are happening, but they have removed the snacks and not brought them back. And they have, the coffee they're making is an abomination. Like there was somebody that was working here before them that was just crushing the coffee making. Cause it's like the big coffee machine, like giant urn. It's, it doesn't, the proportions don't seem easy to figure out.

And it got so bad that today, Lindsay, Tangle Lindsay, made the coffee herself. Like they had made a pot and the moment it got finished, she ran out there and just tried to make it herself. And then she fucked it up. And then she emailed the guy who used to work here that made the coffee and was like, how did you make this coffee?

Because I have to change what's happening here. And the snacks, the snacks, which were like, you come into the office, you just, it's lunchtime, you finish your lunch and you just grab that bag of pretzels or like your, you know, your popcorn chips or whatever. It was so nice. Will K. back Tango editor. I mean, he would get to the office and the first thing he would do is just raid the snack box, like five bags of chips, grab everything, stuff a couple in his bag for the train ride.

Yeah. So they're gone. They just like stopped putting them out. And so I went upstairs to the new woman managing and I was just like, you're going to have an uprising if you don't bring those snacks back. Like the people are talking down here. The office management is on the second floor. We're on the first floor. It's like very ivory tower. This is going to be a problem.

It's Elysium. Yeah. If you get it, it's Elysium if you guys don't figure this out. And she was like, I'm a huge snack person. I might even just start getting them on my own. I get it. I'm a snack out. That was like two weeks ago. So Lisa, if you're listening to this, I might even just start getting them on my own. I get it. I'm a snack out. That was like two weeks ago. So Lisa, if you're listening to this, I'm still wondering,

still wondering where the snacks are at because the, yeah, the people are whispering and we're not happy. So that's my grievance for the week is bad coffee and no more snacks at the shared office space, which is crushing. Bring us some snacks. Leader of the rebellion ball. I will say I am like, uh, Andor style instigating a rebellion. Like I'm striking up conversation with random people in the office just to be like, how about the fucking coffee and no snacks, you know?

And every night I've gotten that point with like six conversations, everybody's like, yeah, somebody ought to do something about that. I'm like, we could do something about that. Just, you know, we just gotta fight for our rights here. So we'll see. Hopefully I have good news to share sometime soon, but right now it's looking bleak. Good luck with your CBA, Isaac.

Okay. Yeah. This has gotta be the nerdiest installment of this podcast that I've been involved in. There have been so many different sci-fi references in this particular one. We talked about anime. Well actually, one saving grace for you, Ari, I think you refer to it as the Butlerian Revolution. It's the Butlerian Jihad. You're right. Dune.

Yeah. So look at that. And then all the Star Wars references. I mean, good Lord. I don't know what's going on here, but maybe it's because Superman comes out as Superman. We're finally acting normal is why. We've taken our shoes off

and we've gotten comfortable with one another and we're showing our true sides. Well, my complaint is probably related to Superman. And the fact that I would actually there was a time when I would go see movies on the night they came out at midnight for the midnight screening and granted there just wasn't one last night. But I also realized when I got home, despite the fact that I'm still dealing with weird levels of insomnia because I was on the East Coast for a month and I'm back on the West Coast and I just

am having a lot of trouble getting Re-regulated the last person in the house to still be feeling weird I realize that I just do not have the stamina to go do that anymore and I I Feel I feel a little sad about that like that there was something special about being there for the midnight movies and the last time I went to a late night movie was actually with our friend, Michael Moynihan. We went to see Oppenheimer together.

And I totally fell asleep in the IMAX. Watching the movie, sitting next to him. I'm sure I was snoring and being the worst. I think he may have even elbowed me. Granted, I've seen movies like three times. How did you fall asleep during Oppenheimer in IMAX? It's so loud. It's like the loudest movie I've ever seen.

I'm an aging man, and probably my snoring was louder than the soundtrack. Wow. So, yeah. I'm just, you know, aging, inconvenience. It's just hard to see movies when you have young kids. And being able to sneak out at midnight was easy when Lea was little and Tracy didn't care because she didn't want to see these movies. But now I want to go and I don't know

when I'm going to get to see it. It's a little sad. Yeah, that is sad. That's like a childhood thing leaving the realm a little bit. Wait, can I ask really quick, are the reviews for the new Star Wars or Superman good? Strangely, yes. Yes, they are.

The trailers have not made me at all optimistic. Every single one of the trailers I see make me think, God, this looks awful. So maybe it's actually terrible, but I do plan to see it. And when I do, maybe we'll just spend the whole episode talking about it. That would be the new nerdiest episode I've been part of. I'm looking at the cast list and you've got Rachel Brosnahan and Nathan Fillion in it. And those are some funny actors.

So maybe some comedic chops in there. But again, the trailer's not great. I saw the clips with Nathan doing his thing and it's just like, eh, really? The dog is here? Really? Alright. Okay. Okay.

Interesting. Good grievance. Sad grievance, but good one. Yeah. It comes first of all. But my grievance is a little anticlimactic perhaps, but it's related thematically Isaac to yours on the idea of coming into a shared working space where I am today in the shared working space in Burlington, Vermont. Very nice building and I appreciate it a lot. The grievance is not about the building per se.

It's about, I think, it might be self-directed, if we're honest. I got one of those low sugar sodas out of a, sorry, I have to re-say that, or else my dad's going to kill me. I got one of the low sugar pops out of the vending machine. And I was rushing in the morning, I'm always a little distracted

because I have the document open that we're editing and collaborating on to publish at noon. So that's always the thing that's at the forefront of my head. So I grabbed the soda pop, I sat down, opened it up, and just exploded all over me. Which obviously, because it's from a vending machine, so it fell and I just immediately picked it up and opened it and just like sprayed.

And it's a little sad because I live in the middle of the woods now, I don't have an excuse to put on like the nice clothing a lot. So when I come into the office, I'm like, yeah, I'll put't have an excuse to put on the nice clothing a lot. So when I come into the office, I'm like, yeah, I'll put on a good shirt, put on my nice pair of pants. I'll look kind of nice, take care of myself. If it was good to present yourself well, I'm just within 30 minutes of getting to the office,

just immediately covered in sticky sugar water. And that's a tough way to start your day. That is a tough, so did you ruin this incredible white rose shirt you're wearing right now? I was going to compliment you on it too. Thanks, thanks boys. No, it's, I just got a little bit, so it was like low, opened it near my hip.

So I got a little bit of a splash near it and I put cold water on it pretty quickly and tried to get it off. But really the worst thing was that it kind of spilled on my pants and then pooled on the chair and then it was on the back of my butt. Uncomfortable. You know, seltzer water is great for stains,

so you could just go hit that vending machine up again, shake something up real quick, crack it open. That's how they get you, it's a profit scheme. Yeah, get right back to the whale. All right, good one. Nerdy or not, I appreciate it. We did start with Jeffrey Epstein. So that's kind of edgy. Camille, Ari, I'll hope to see both of you in person

sooner rather than later. And I guess don't get murdered by an AI chatbot between now and next year. That's all right. I'll do my best. Thanks, man. next verse. That's all right. I'll do my best. Thanks. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kavak and associate editors Hunter Kaspersen, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuth, and

Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Dyess75. 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.

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Listen to Oracle Season 3, Murder at the Grandview, now on Audible.