Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk about Zohran Mamdani, the Iran strikes and response to some Juneteenth criticism.

Episode Date: June 29, 2025

Isaac, Ari, and Kmele discuss the general response and personal opinions to Zohran Mamdani's mayoral primary win and what the Democratic Party should learn from it. They also talk about the Iran strikes and then Kmele addresses some criticism we received from last week's Sunday podcast. 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.

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 when you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the Summer Pre-Roll and Infuse Pre-Roll Sale today at always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers.

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Coming up, we talk Zoran Mamdani, the Iran strikes and some love for Trump so far on the outcome. Camille responds to some Juneteenth related criticism we got via email and then some grievances and lots of talk about tick-borne illnesses. It's a good one. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. The still unnamed Sunday pod, soon to be Friday podcast with a new name.

I'm here with Tangle managing editor Ari Weitzman and Tangle editor-at-large Camille Foster. And we're all living in Zoram Mamdani's world now, fellas. How are we feeling? Socialism's here. Sharia law is around the corner. Get ready, boys. Couldn't be more terrified.

New York City is all of us, I guess. I'm just having a hard time. I mean, we've experienced this already. A lot of Ns, a lot of Ns in that name. Not sure where to put them. Mamdani. Mamdani. lot of N's in that name. Not sure where to put them. Momdani. Momdani. We've had difficulty in the doc. I have zero difficulty saying Momdani, but every time I write it, I write it as Momdani.

Something about the A-M-I my fingers want to do. And every time I write his last name, I write Zomdani. Because I'm like, there's got to be a Z in there, right? I know the Z's gotta be there. Come here, you're a man actively considering a move from the beautiful lands of California, San Francisco, just outside the city of San Francisco. Yeah, I don't wanna give away too much about where you live, but maybe back towards the East Coast,

maybe to New York City. Does this increase or decrease the odds? Or impact your decision in any way? Yeah, I don't know if I've even formally mentioned that, although it's been hinted at many times. And this, I should say, would be the fourth cross-country move for my entire family in about five years. Maybe just under, just absolutely insane. But yes, I'm contemplating it.

And one thing I'm definitely not doing is moving back to the city of New York. I am happy to be someplace in the orbit, but I will tell you that both because New York politics is crazy and because I have a seven and a three year old now, I think the period of my life where I live in a city is probably over. At least in that particular city. Even in Brooklyn, it's not suburban enough.

I need ready access to the city, but I can't deal with the travails of living there. I certainly don't want to buy my groceries at a city-run grocery store. Because, are you kidding me? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting. I guess there's, you know, we talk a lot about, I feel like there's a new kind of commentary that happens in the political world today about how, you know, Bernie Sanders and AOC are at 10 o'clock and Donald Trump's

at 2 o'clock. And they're not at 12 and 6. They're kind of like close to each other. I feel like, Camille, your politics is at 12 o'clock and Zoram Mamdani is at 6 o'clock. Like you guys could not be further from each other in some ways, at least on the economic stuff. Certainly. I mean, you're a self-described libertarian.

He's a self-described socialist, democratic socialist, which I know does a lot of work. Yeah. That's one way to put it. I mean, I might say my ideas economically speaking are totally rational and his are totally incoherent, but you know, whatever. Yours is fine, too. Let me, well, let me put this to you because, you know, we talked about this a little bit in Tangle. There is a kind of generational divide here, I think, where anybody under the age of 40 hears the word socialism and hears,

we're going to tax the rich and provide more social services. And anybody above the age of 40 hears something very different. And I know this might sound... I mean this question earnestly. And since you just sort of lobbed the alley oop, like, why don't you want to shop in government-provided grocery stores? Honestly, I think there are probably people who don't think that the answer to that question is obvious. No bodega cat.

It's easy. I'm sure there are lots of people who don't think the answer is obvious, which is why a candidate like this has any shot in hell, despite the fact that economic history is pretty clear. The first response I'd give is Milton Friedman is actually really smart and people have written great accessible books about economics like Eye Pencil. And you should find them and read them at length if you don't understand why I might be skeptical of this proposition.

But the first thing I'd say is that, you know, grocery stores apparently, and I know this now because I've gone and looked recently, have very thin profit margins. And the presumption here appears to be that, oh my God, the grocery stores are gouging their customers. They have this weird variable pricing that's all over the place. And why can't, I mean, there should just be one kind of cereal that's really cheap. What's going on here?

Why can't food be more affordable? And the reality is that the grocery stores and companies like Walmart, for example, have profit margins that are close to like 1, 3%. You aren't squeezing out a tremendous amount of value by having the state run them. And the presumption here that the state could actually run them efficiently is something else entirely. My suspicion is that they won't run them efficiently.

They'll probably run them the way they run the subways or the public schools or the buses or public housing. Imagine that the equivalent of public housing as a grocery store, perhaps as your core grocery store, do you really want to shop there? And the major answer should be absolutely not. Well, maybe that's actually a good analogy

is not the public housing portion of it, but the public transport portion of it, because the easy comeback is the free market hasn't given us any public transit. So we maybe should be rethinking what we can invest in in terms of government run services. So if we put more money maybe into public transit, maybe it'd be a better service just as like why haven't we considered putting more money into government run groceries? And I think that maybe that last one's a bit of a lob. But another second

question to consider is what you mentioned that the economic history here being clear, what is the best analogy of something that's happened before to government run groceries? Because that's something that Isaac and I were actually kind of struggling over. Is that a thing that, I mean, we could say like, yeah, that wouldn't really work. But the things that I think of today are like public transit, health care, government run housing. They're all kind of different because there's no, I mean, other than housing, there's no existing market where like grocery stores are fine.

We know what they are, they work. The market is providing a good solution. The government's entering it. Is there like a good analogy for that happening before? Yeah, I'd actually need to give that some more thought. I'm not sure. I mean, I've offered up a couple of analogies, but I think that's a great, you know,

it's an interesting question. And I'm not sure I've got a straightforward answer right now. I mean, the ones that I offered. But I would say that a lot of those places, interestingly, like public transportation and education and all these other places, I'm not even sure that there aren't private offerings for those things that work relatively well and perhaps could work even better if they didn't have to compete with a free, quote unquote, free option provided by the state. You've got Uber, which works pretty well and is competing with, in New York City, the medallion-controlled taxi and cab system, Taxi and Limousine Commission. And with public schools, you've got private options.

And the private options tend to be much cheaper on average than the public options. It is certainly true that there are really expensive private schools that are way more expensive, but there are also really cheap private schools that tend to provide pretty high quality educations at a fraction of the cost per pupil of the competing public options.

And the best thing about private schools in some instances is if they're really, really bad, people stop sending their parents, their children to them and they go out of business. Yeah, I mean, let alone their parents, there's no way their parents are going to help. But that's actually, you know, not to, maybe we can get into it a little bit here,

but what do we mean by cheap though? Because public schools certainly you would say, to, maybe we can get into it a little bit here, but what do we mean by cheap though? Because public school certainly you would say, well, that doesn't cost anything. But then we're talking about the cost of the taxpayer then. Like maybe not the ticket price that you're buying as the consumer, like off the shelf, as much as you can off the shelf public education. But just by cheap, do you mean the cost that it requires for us to produce this as a society? Or are you actually talking about, oh no, no.

Actually you think about the cost that you might have to incur to send your kid to public school if you're in a rural community and you're far enough away. That's the cost you're talking about. No, I'm direct. When I say cheap, I mean relative to the per pupil cost for a public education. Like a public school, you know, in certain areas, and I haven't looked at the numbers recently to know exactly what it is here, but you know, maybe $20,000 in some states. And there will be private school options available in a, say, a religious institution,

for example, where you could imagine like $9,000 annual tuition for your kid. Certainly, there are, again, way more expensive options, like a $50,000 per year tuition at a private school in New York City, some of the really elite schools. But it's not unheard of to see nine or even $12,000 tuition for an individual student. So it's complicated. But here I am now making all sorts of libertarian cases

for economic policy. And I'm sure there's some critique that someone else might want to offer. But I'm not running for mayor in New York. I mean, I think a few things are interesting about this proposal. I mean, first of all, I think Ari, like the thing that we struggled with when thinking about the historical examples, or that I struggled with, I said, I don't want to speak for you, is like... Yeah, I'm struggling with you, man. But I'm saying like public transportation has existed

for basically all, like, it, you know, it started in like the early 1800s. So, you know, the first kind of examples of it popping up. So what's hard for me, it's like hard for me to think about a world, an American world without public transportation. And so the analogy to it is really difficult because there aren't any of these public grocery stores yet. The transportation market is already deeply impacted

by the longstanding existence of public transportation. The private market has kind of been built around it. If you're gonna start some sort of half public, half private endeavor, something like Amtrak or whatever, it's, you know, it exists around these public buses that are there and then the private like mega bus and, you know, Uber exists in the context of these other options. Like if you're gonna bring Uber into New York City,

you're naturally competing with the public transportation system that's there. So it's just kind of like a difficult thing in that sense. I do think there are parts of Mondani's, I think there's a terrible idea, I wrote about this in Tango, I think there's a lot of evidence for why it wouldn't work well.

But to just like steel man a little bit here for the rationality of his proposal, I mean, there are parts of it that I think are actually, it's reasonably constructed. For instance, like the tenants of it are basically that the stores would operate on city-owned land or in city-owned buildings. So they wouldn't have rent and property tax expenses. So there'd be less overhead costs. They would focus on, you know, keeping prices low and being in areas that, you know,

resolve some of the food desert stuff rather than generating profit. I mean, this part is very vague. I don't know how they do it, but centralized warehouse and distribution. So that seems just like kind of BS language, but there's more direct stuff. Like he wants to pilot a program, one store in each borough.

He thinks it would cost about $60 million. And he proposes redirecting funds that are currently used to subsidize private grocery stores, which is like a hundred forty million dollars of tax breaks and incentives to finance the public stores and then have them focus on, you know, not providing not not profit margin, but just like a sustained operation. There are apparently some city owned grocery stores in rural Kansas. There are initiatives happening in places like Atlanta,

Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago. I haven't heard enough about how those are going. Most of the reading that I've done on them seems like it's all very preliminary and TBD. But that's sort of like the general outline of how he plans to do it. And if I think you're talking about cost, how we're going to pay for this thing, taking subsidies away from the private sector to fund some public version of what they're doing,

I don't know. That seems like a, like that's not like an insane thing to do. I don't think like if, you know, the private sector's already getting that money and you're going to say, hey, we're going to put this into like this thing that we actually control as the government. My, I guess like my biggest sort of more anecdotal and experiential view is just, I have like four options for grocery stores in Philadelphia. You know, like one of them is Sprouts, this sort of like kind of yuppie, like Whole Foods-esque

market, and then I have like, what's it called? Adel or, oh God, I can't, I can see the sign, but I've forgotten how to pronounce it, whatever. It's like a sort of cheaper, like giant, giant type grocery store. Aldi? Aldi, yes, thanks. Yeah. That's like, it's just opening around the corner for me.

It's like, the prices are way cheaper, and it's like, not as much like organic, whatever. Then I have like this sick, my favorite Asian market store that's like, everything's dirt cheap. It's like the food is just out there on ice for the day, and if you get it on that first day, it'll be good, but if you don't, it's like going bad in the grocery store, but it's awesome and I love that place.

Like I just don't, and they all serve different needs and they compete and I go to them for different reasons. And you know, like, yeah, sometimes the prices seem insane. There's $10 eggs and stuff. And I get the impact of that. But like, if I want to find $2 dozen eggs, I can still do that because there's so many places. I'm just not totally sold, I guess, on like the premise.

You know, I know prices at these stores have gone up, but this was like some of the research Noah Smith did that we cited was like, and to Camille's point about the profit margins, like these grocery stores are not gouging people. It's, you know, there are things that impact the cost of these goods that the government will be impacted too. Like bird flu makes egg prices go up, you know,

that happens. Tariffs increase the cost of certain meats that we're importing, like that happens. But I don't know, it just doesn't seem like a great example of what I'd want the government to work on. Yeah, I think you've made the case there pretty well. I'd also say though that your initial infrastructure you laid out there to say, it doesn't seem totally crazy. I think, I don't know that you're really looking at it carefully enough.

Because when you take into account that these are going to be public employees, I'm not even talking about whether or not they're kind of competent or good at their job, but public employees tend to be pretty expensive. They've got pensions and all kinds of other stuff. Even if you can do the trade-off of not having to pay property taxes and not having to pay rent, you still have to maintain the building and you still have to pay the high salaries that these public employees are going to have. And again, there's all manner of other stuff that comes along with

having public employees doing this work. So, I can't imagine a universe where they'd actually be able to offer lower prices, let alone better overall service. And they're, as you laid out, in many instances competing with lots and lots of other people who are providing food. And I mean, one of the real problems in New York City is perhaps, to the extent there's a unique problem there, a supply issue. It is the case that if you live in Brooklyn, as I did for a number of years, you might

be buying your groceries at a bodega on a pretty regular basis. And the prices there tend to be a lot higher because as everyone knows about food deserts, they're food deserts. Why are there food deserts in a city that manages to still have so many vacant buildings that probably should have more grocery stores and supermarket options, and perhaps could have them, but for certain regulatory constraints.

I think maybe loosening the regulatory constraints would make more sense than trying to actually run the grocery stores yourself. And I think if the now nominee for his party in New York had some experience actually running a business and having to make payroll and do all the other things, he might have a better informed perspective on the appropriate way to try to make groceries more affordable as opposed to his approach, which is, well, we'll just do it ourselves. Well, can I ask, maybe this is a position of ignorance for me.

I'll admit, I don't know a ton about this sector, but there are a couple of things that you each said that I actually don't know about, and I want to learn a little bit more here. So when you say there's regulations in this industry that could be relaxed, that could help food prices go down, that are, you know, you're implying they're causing these food deserts, what are some of those regulations

that are choking the industry? And then Isaac, for you, well, welcome. You're handling that ground ball screamer to third. Pop fly to you here is what are those subsidies that you mentioned? Because you said that they're government subsidies in grocery stores and I'm not aware of that. Is that something that's just like in those rural communities that you were referencing before or what were you referring to there? But there I knocked my pop out and my grounder.

So Camille, send it to you first. Yeah, no, that's a great question. I was speaking more generally about the regulatory set up in New York City, just suggesting that there are lots and lots, and it's surprising actually when you look at the volume. And I wish I'd known this question was coming up because I would have looked up exactly what the numbers are

now on vacancy rates throughout the city for commercial properties. But there are lots and lots of spaces available to open new things like grocery stores. And to the extent it is expensive to open something new in New York because of the regulatory setup, because of the kind of taxation regime that exists there, then you're going to necessarily have less competition. In a place like Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, where I lived, or Prospect Heights,

you'll find entire vacant buildings that stay vacant for, in some cases, a good little while. Why isn't someone else moving in there to try to offer some of these specialty grocery options that Isaac was just describing a moment ago, in places where people have to shop at bodegas if they wanna get something that's right down the street. Well, that could be part of the reason why, just some of the regulatory constraints. Ari, the program that these private,

the private grocery stores are receiving subsidies under, primarily, as I understand it, is through, it's called FRESH, which is the food retail expansion to support health program. This is all according to this article that I read. But it's stuff like tax land abatement, mortgage recording and tax deferral. They give zoning incentives,

like they'll wa wave parking requirements, stuff like that. It seems like the requirements and the eligibility is for places that are trying to address the same thing, food deserts that are being built in specific areas of the city where, you know, there aren't grocery stores already. So, I mean, it would be basically, and to me, this is sort of points against Zomdani, or against Mamdani, is Zomdani, that's a new one,

is like these are points against him, which is that he's removing some of the private sector momentum in this direction too. So it's like, not only does the program have to work, it has to be better than what the private sector's already doing, which, you know, that's a comparison that needs to be made. All right, just to focus us a little bit,

I don't want to spend this whole time talking about grocery stuff for anybody who hasn't turned this podcast off already. We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy.

Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at phys.ca. I think we should talk a little bit about like lessons learned from this.

I mean, I wrote a bit about this. I am, it's been very interesting to me to watch the reactions from people to his victory in the primary. I don't want to say mayoral victory because we're not there yet. And I do think the Democratic establishment is probably going to pull some strings to try and keep him out. Certainly, he's not going to run unopposed or with ease to the to the mayorship. But you know, my my reaction was just like it was so obvious to me that he had traction, that there was something there, that he had a chance.

Even a month or so ago, like I didn't think his odds were good. But when you compare him to somebody like Andrew Cuomo or even Lander, it's just like clear to me why so many people in New York, especially younger voters, would be drawn to him. He's a great speaker. He's running really good campaign ads. He's asking people what they think on the street. He seems like receptive to this kind of feedback loop. He's not doing the kind of preachy, progressive, purity politics stuff. He's doing the really open-minded, like I wanna be a big tent movement kind of guy.

And he's making a ton of promises, like the rent control stuff. I mean, like it's all the kind of stuff that in the past has done well in some of these mayoral races in New York and other big cities. So before we get totally to the hysteria, I guess I'm just interested for you guys what you feel like maybe lessons or takeaways are. Like what, if you're, if you're the Democratic party chair,

let's, let's do that game. Like you put your Democratic party chair hat on or your, you know, Kamala Harris or a leader in the party, you're Hakeem Jeffries, like what do you think the party should take away, if anything, from this outcome? I'm just curious how you guys think about that. I swear to God, this is an answer to your question. I promise you, you just gotta trust me with this. Have you seen the new season

of the rehearsal with Nathan Fielder? I actually have not, even though I'm a with Nathan Fielder. I actually have not, even though I'm a massive Nathan Fielder fan. It's really good. He gets into restrictions in the FAA and all that. But one of the things that he covers that's sort of a sub theme of it is how he struggles to come across as authentic.

Like one of the things that he does when he, like one of his sticks in the rehearsal is like trying to see what things that he does when he, like one of his shticks in the rehearsal is like trying to see what people who are effective at X, whatever the thing is, do and then just like write down very surface level observations. And I feel like that is the DNC. He's like, oh, we just need to say the word socialism. We just need people out there to say that. And like the thing that they're struggling with is just being authentic. And that's the hardest thing in the world to coach or to do. Like, definitionally, being authentic is the one thing you cannot fake.

And I think it's going to be tough for them to shake this Nathan Fjordeske desire to just get all of the measurables down on paper and say, okay, we need to be younger, we need to be more minority diverse, we need to be bilingual, and we need to be talking about socialism. Unless there are people who do that, and then that should check the boxes, right? I think that's gonna be the lessons they learn,

and I think it's gonna be their own lesson. I wanna come back to the authentic conversation, because I know that that's one of the things that has been attributed to, I'm going to mispronounce his name now. Isaac, can you help me? So I don't. Zoram, Zoran Mamdani.

Mamdani, okay. It is kind of fun to like, like to meld it all together. Yeah, Moram Zandani. Yeah, it's a sick name. I mean, to be clear, it is an awesome name. Zoran. I like it. I'm just, I'm afraid of it. Because mean to be clear it is an awesome name. Zoran. I like it. I'm afraid of it.

Because I'm going to this panel. It's just a matter of time. So Mr. Mamdani. Said like an old Democratic voter I think. Yeah, I want to talk about his alleged authenticity. But look, I think the number one mistake is to try to extrapolate from New York City Democratic primary to Even national democratic primary for the for president That is not the same at all

It's a totally different universe and And while someone like Bernie Sanders has had some success in national politics and has in a number of instances threatened the establishment candidate on that national stage, I don't think that that is the right lesson to draw here for Democrats. In terms of the lessons that they ought to draw, certainly younger candidates is probably a good look for you. At the moment, the thing that most surprises me when I look at this particular race is the fact that the major opponent here was Cuomo, here was Cuomo, a man who was, who left the governorship in, under a cloud of shame and suspicion and who I've been kind of scathingly critical of in other contexts and won't necessarily go through the litany of things that he did wrong while he was governor.

This is the best candidate that you can field. And now the hopes for mainstream Democrats depend upon Eric Adams. I mean, is the bench so totally devoid of talent, even in a place like New York City? And the answer appears to be, yeah, kind of. I mean, I'll say everything that you just said about running against an unpopular incumbent who left office in a cloud of controversy, who mishandled the COVID pandemic towards the end of his reign, who had sexual abuse scandals against him, who rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

That guy just won the presidency with all those descriptions. So like, why didn't he win here? Yeah. That's the question. I would say so like, Donald Trump. Trump does have a little extra special sauce. Yeah, nobody. I mean, that's a separate conversation to me, because it is a truism that like, all the Trump impersonators

fail. They just, they suck. It happens globally. It happens in Congress. It's like Matt Gaetz, you know, is the, it's just like he comes in and he thinks if he just embodies the Trump personality, but it's like Trump is, to your point, I think authentically himself, like love him or hate him.

And like part of his authenticity is that he's full of shit a lot of the time and he's a bloatier and lies and whatever. And there's something inauthentic about that obviously, but it is like, he's being himself when the cameras are on. And I think that is an important element. You know, I just did this, we just did this video trip to Washington, DC with representative Jake Alkenclaw, where we shadowed him for a few days. And we're going to do a whole YouTube video about that.

I'm really excited about like a day in the life of a member of Congress. I think it's going to be a really great video. And I think I happen to think this particular politician, he's a Democrat, he's kind of a middle of the road, moderate dem. I think I respect a lot of his views and how he carries himself and all this stuff. And he gave us incredible levels of access to him

and his office that like no other politician I've been able to get to give to us. But there was still something that happened with him that I noticed and I'll probably talk a little bit about in the video where like the cameras are on and he's just a little bit different and the cameras are off and like his shoulders drop a half inch and he's just a little more relaxed.

And I personally liked the version of him with the cameras off more, and I wish he gave me more of that. Just in my interactions interviewing him and talking to him, you know? There was one kind of off the record moment where he just like let a, like he was talking casually about something

and just like let a curse word slip. And it was like the only time I heard him curse all weekend and I was kind of like, oh, you're like really just being yourself now with me in this moment. And it was like relatable in a way that I appreciated. And I'm curious, I mean, Camille,

you sound skeptical of the fact that that authenticity applies to Mamdani. I think that he is very assuredly politicking a little bit. I mean, like seeing him on Colbert and answering questions about the anti-Semitism charges and stuff, like he's clearly, not canned responses, but he's hitting talking points and threading needles

that he knows he needs to thread in order to like, not lose the support of some of his base that's there and also become less threatening to maybe like American Jews who are a little bit more moderate or conservative living in New York. But I did personally, I got a strong sense of authenticity from him and like I listened to his interview with Derek Thompson. I'm like, you know, I'm seeing him do these, these live television hits, going on podcasts, the campaign videos, chopping it up with people in the street.

And like, he looks pretty comfortable in his skin in a way that a lot of politicians just don't. And I don't get the sense that he's like tripping over himself to try and say the right thing. And I think the reality of that is he's saying what he actually believes. And when you say what you believe, it's a lot easier to be loose and just talk

because you're not trying to remember what you want to make people. Yeah, Kamala Harris, not to just find a way to go back and trash her, but like, I mean, most recent relevant example, I mean, already to your point, like why didn't Dems beat the Cuomo version at the national level, which I agree,

there's a lot of similarities with him and Trump. It's like, you see Kamala Harris get interviewed for an hour and it's like, oh my God, this woman said nothing for an hour. Like I have no idea what she thinks and she's so guarded and she's so prescripted and protected. And it's like, I get none of that from Mamdani.

So for me, that was kind of, that was one of the things that I definitely took away. I mean, I think you've been a great, I had a couple of friends text me this week and said very similar things to the effect of, see, I knew Dems should run a more progressive candidate for president, like look at how well these, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

Like those, that is not, I don't think that is, you know, this, if Mom Donnie ran for president right now in a Democratic primary, he would get obliterated to be perfectly clear. But he does generate a lot of excitement with a very young, highly educated liberal crowd. And there is a super high concentration of those people living in New York City right now. So the conventional mainstream establishment candidate is an experienced practitioner of these, these stylized vagaries that are routinely

deployed in all kinds of media contexts. When they are speaking on the stump, it's a speech that they've memorized and it is safe and sanitized. And they do their very best not to sound like an extremist. They don't want to be mistaken for a democratic socialist. So they try to avoid sounding too much that way. They are speaking in, they're trafficking in euphemisms.

to avoid sounding too much that way. They are speaking in, they're trafficking in euphemisms. Opposite that, however, are the kind of AOC, McDonnie candidates. And I'm sure I said that wrong, but I want to now. I'm leaning into it. And they are a bit more direct. In fact, generally a kind of searing directness. And there's this kind of grandiose, almost superfluousness associated with the way

that they talk about policy. There are these dramatic, profound promises. And they are things that people want to hear in many instances, and perhaps would even very much like to believe are real, but that are very, very hard to deliver on. And you can kind of pair with that also, the other kind of battery of various perspectives

that are perhaps somewhat controversial for mainstream Democrats. They're a little bit afraid to talk about Gaza in the way that some of these other candidates are willing to talk about it. So they're careful and they're trying their best to thread needles. But these outsiders have absolutely nothing to lose

and leaning into some of these more hot button topics and saying something dramatically different is a huge differentiator between them and some of these other candidates. And while he's had to walk certain things back, like defund the police, for example, he is perhaps leaned a little bit more on the fact that he has a very different perspective than a lot of establishment candidates when it comes to Israel.

And even there he's had to walk things back. But what I was getting at with the authenticity thing is, and I agree with most of what you said there, as you could probably tell, but what I was getting at with the authenticity thing is that there is still a great deal of stagecraft with this particular candidate. The sense that he is just this guy who understands what the working man is going through, it's absurd. No, you're not.

You're different. And you come from a pretty privileged background, to use a somewhat charged political word. And when I see political ads of him eating rice with his fingers on camera, I see comments associated with that that say, oh, wow, it's so interesting to see someone do this. It's kind of beautiful to see him doing this. That's not authentic. It is stagecraft. And it is the most absurd, over-the-top kind of beautiful to see him doing this. That's not authentic. It is stagecraft.

And it is the most absurd, over-the-top kind of stagecraft. And it's the sort of thing he does pretty routinely. And you see it from AOC as well, this kind of claim to ethnic authenticity, the code switching in a very deliberate way in lots and lots of contexts. I get it. I'm first-generation American. My family is from Jamaica. in lots and lots of contexts. I get it. I'm first generation American, my family's from Jamaica.

I could switch on the patois and most of the people who aren't Jamaican would find it very credible. And the people that are would laugh because it's not very good. But that's inauthentic, exceedingly inauthentic. And it's the sort of thing

that some politicians occasionally slip into like that pastoral cadence that some politicians adapt when they go to particular churches. But I find that some of these other candidates are even more deliberate and over the top with their attempts to try to seem authentic by being anything but. seem authentic by being anything but. You know, it's such a difficult thing as we circle around this word. It's so central to the way we see these candidates, but that is common. That's almost the through line

for any successful politician is they know how to put on the right performance. You have to be performing a little bit in order to get the job you want in anything. We're all performing in some ways. We're right now speaking on microphones to each other in a way that's really not scripted and real, but we're also thinking about the people who aren't us, who are going to be hearing it later.

We're all performing a little bit in some ways. But this idea of authentic, we need to actually believe the performance. It has to feel real. This idea of authentic, we need to actually believe the performance. It has to feel real. When you see some politicians put on the folks kind of pastoral voice that you were talking about, you can see it. You can see right through the veneer. And others, you're like, oh, I can see this as part of who this person is.

They're showing us a manicured side of them, but it's still a side of them. And I wonder, like when you say, is this the best politician that they have, that the Dems have in New York, apparently. And we were talking about Kamala Harris before and saying, is she the best that the Dems had nationally? And you compare these two things. Like, who do we feel is more believable here in the way they present themselves?

And I think it's no contest. And if that's actually the thing that matters more, then maybe this really is the best that Democrats can run. Because it's somebody who, you know, it is presentational. It is an act. But it's also, I kind of see that as who this person is. Not all the time, but a part of who he is. He's not acting like somebody who's not. And maybe it's just like we're rewarding better actors, but I don't know. I feel like we'd be able to see it more clearly.

I mean, there's a lot of people who are clearly concerned There's a lot of people who are clearly concerned that he's covering up some part of himself that is, you know, would be threatening or dangerous. I mean, I do think we should dedicate a little bit of time here to the hysteria element of it and some of the like responses to his election. Because the view from a lot of people, including many listeners and readers, I know, because I've heard from them is that like, this guy's an anti-Semite.

You know, he has really radical views around Israel that align him with, you know, the people who are like genuinely dangerous or scary or whatever. And the response from a lot of national, like Republican pundits, I mean, an exceedingly and frighteningly common response in my view is just been like total, like this guy is going to try and invoke Sharia law in New York City. He is a radical jihadist sympathizer who, you know, hates Jews and is going to shut down synagogues.

And I mean, like I've seen just like level 10 freak out stuff happening about his election. Hilariously, in my view, again, I just think this is so wrong, it's funny, is like the Stephen Miller crowd has just been hammering this thing. Like this is what happens when, you know, half of New York City is foreign born or whatever.

And it's like, no, actually a lot of the low income immigrants voted for Cuomo. Like the people who overwhelmingly voted for him were educated white progressives. So it's like they're blaming his election on immigrants in New York City when really it was like the wealthier educated people who kind of carried him across the finish line

based on a lot of the data that we have so far. I mean, for instance, Cuomo, the only economic bracket he won was people making under $50,000 a year. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm curious to hear you guys' responses or thoughts about some of those reactions, how much of them are justified versus, you know, yeah, just like where you think, where you think those reactions need to be tempered. I truly don't think that this guy is an anti-Semite. I know there's a lot of my fellow Jews who disagree with me.

I think he's radicalized on the Israel issue. I think for a lot of people like him, that is a very separate issue. The Jewish state is a very separate issue from Jews. And like, you know, he has literally all these political associations with Jewish candidates who he's worked with or worked for, or, you know, been endorsed by or endorsed.

And it's, you know, I pointed some of this out on Twitter and a lot of, one of the common response I got was like, you know, Donald Trump isn't not a racist cause Tim Scott endorsed him or because he put Ben Carson in his administration or whatever. I'm like, yeah, I'm not saying that like, this is proof positive that this guy is an anti-Semite.

I'm just saying if you're going to claim that he's anti-Semitic. I'm just saying, if you're going to claim that he's anti-Semitic, I think you need a little more than him like, yeah, trying to try, like him trying to explain or justify globalizing Intifada as like a non-violent call to action, I think is idiotic. I don't think it means he hates Jews.

I think it's just like, he's been deluded by a movement that I find, you know, just like is attempting to rewrite history. The Hamas love. It's not unique. It's part of the movement. It's not unique. I know people, I have friends who use that term.

We have huge differences in our politics, but like they'll come to my Shabbat dinners and they love me and they have no issue with Jews. They just, they're pretty different and radical than me on the issue of Israel and Palestine. And that's fine. We still love each other despite it, but like it's a political view.

It's not like a religious whatever. And the rap lyric thing to me is so dumb. I mean, I will say the one thing that did give me pause, I'll just say this and I found this out after I wrote the piece was that, you know, he has this, he like makes this reference to this extremist group related, the group of people, whatever, related to Mawson. He has not addressed it. He has been asked for comment about it and has basically refused to answer questions about it. Which like I think it's a silly thing. Like he's trying to have some rap career seven

years ago and he's doing like he's doing a character you know that's like this tough street Arab dude who's like you know rapping about all these different intense things. And he has a rhyme that is about, you know, an extremist Muslim group. Like I just don't take that seriously. I'm sorry. I don't care. But he would do well to just be like, to say that, to explain it, but he hasn't. And that I didn't realize that I assumed

that he had like addressed it somehow, but somebody wrote in to Tangle and said like, you know, just for the record, he's been there's like news organizations I've said they've reached out to him and asked him about it and he was like not offered comment or address it in any way He's talked about the globalized in to father thing. I'm like, alright, I don't love that I guess that makes that gave me a little bit of like an eyebrow raise like you could spend one tweet on just sort of knocking that stuff down. But you know, anyway, I'm hogging the mic here, but that is just some of my initial reactions, I guess, to some of the stuff we've been hearing. Yeah, there's an easy political response there where it's just, you know, anything that you

say that's talking about it more just prolongs know, anything that you say that's talking about it more just prolongs the story. So that's something where I could just as easily say that that's a critique against the way that we handle political coverage in general, because we want to get those answers from lots of people in lots of different ways. But I understand that the calculus a lot of the time is like, it's better to not even talk about it, which is frustrating. I think that I would say I was going to say something very similar to that, Ari. I think ultimately you've got all these inbound requests from media

and sometimes they can get you on the street. And if there is an opportunity to evade addressing something that could be kind of misconstrued in different ways, however defensible it might be, sometimes it's just better to do that from a political standpoint, as opposed to trying to get around to everything that someone might, that you anticipate someone might criticize you for later on down the line. And I suspect that's probably what happened here. I think you're correct, Isaac, overall, in that there is a great deal of hysteria surrounding

this candidate, the proposition that he might in fact be genuinely anti-Semitic. And there's just, this is a problem of the Israel debates writ large that ultimately you are both talking about a political institution, a nation, and a people, so to speak, and a religion. And it can be really, really hard to disentangle those things and a people, so to speak, and a religion.

And it can be really, really hard to disentangle those things when the criticisms are being made. But I think, interestingly, it's also the case that because of the bizarre relationship we have with race and identity broadly, I'm perhaps doing a little foreshadowing here, we often do this thing without even thinking about it, where we begin to talk about stuff in an essentialist sort of way.

And while we all know, and I mean all right thinking people, most of the people in this audience, most academics, certainly most of the journalist class, that this is a social construct, we certainly talk about it as though it's immutable, as though it's essential. And I think that that's part of the reason why the Israel thing oftentimes gets screwed up because people just kind of slip between the two things casually.

In addition to the fact that there is also real avowed anti-Semitism out there, but I do think it's a mistake for critics of particular candidates, for people who are say advocates for Zionism, for example, to get into the habit of simply tossing out the allegation that, well, you disagree with me, therefore you're racist. Especially when a lot of those people were previously quite critical of wokeness, quote unquote, and were generally skeptical of people doing that sort of thing. I think the frivolous allegations of racism and anti-Semitism aren't cost-free. They actually exist at the expense of our being able to talk seriously about the actual racism and anti-Semitism

that exists out there in the world. And I think getting ourselves into a lather this way about a candidate who there are so many reasons to believe he is not in fact anti-Semitic. Like that's probably not a great thing for us to be doing with our time. One of the more tangle things I think you've said so far just, you know, a lot of the people who have been saying like, wokeness reduces us and we need to be less, or we need to be more careful with the way we throw around words like racist and accusations like that.

A lot of the same camps of people. I don't like saying like, it's the same people who are doing this. We don't really know that. From the same sects, we hear also the refrain of that's anti-Semitic. The way that you're criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic. And it's okay to say there's a cost when you overplay that card. I think all of this again is worth contextualizing in that this guy is not mayor of New York yet and it's going to be really interesting to see

How he responds now to leaving the Democratic primary and entering the general what issues he sort of softens on You know, I'm talking about like this rap lyric thing that he has an address He's gonna get questions about that before the general election And I'm sure he's gonna at some point have to talk about it, how he addresses it. I'm just very curious to see like, if or how his campaign changes. I mean, this authenticity question is live to me still, because it's like the big challenge now is going to be he's going to have to beat whoever the Democratic establishment runs with in this general election, which I think is going to be Eric Adams.

His name is Eric Adams. Yeah, maybe they, it's just, it is a little hard to imagine the Democratic establishment throwing their weight behind him, given all the Trump relationship and all that stuff happening. Maybe they hate what Mom Donnie stands for that much, they'll do that, but who knows? Maybe I throw a real legit Democrat, maybe Cuomo doesn't drop out and runs as an independent

and then it's a three person race in the general. I mean, I don't know. Like there's a lot of stuff that could still happen. So, all right, I wanna make sure we spend a little bit of time on the other big development, I think this week, which is kind of the aftermath of World War III, which happened last week in case you guys missed it. It was really quick.

It came and went. And now- Did we wait? It happened? Yeah, it did. We crushed. Yeah. So it's interesting.

I'm not ready, quite ready to do like a me culpa here, but I don't know. I had a few things that were not, I had some instincts on this that I think were maybe a little bit captured by some of the hysteria. I mean, I think if you asked me last week where we were going to be this week, I would

have said, Israel is still bombing Iran. We're still bombing Iran. There's infrastructure in the United States being threatened by Iranian hackers. There's chatter about what big name countries like China or whatever might get involved or Russia supplying Iran with weapons. I would have expected things to be in a much dicier spot. Again, it's early yet, but to give the Trump administration credit here,

this was a really targeted strike that again, today, you know, there's, there's, there was the CNN report about how the, there wasn't really lasting damage. Maybe the program, the nuclear program was set back just a few months. Trump administration has been pushing back really hard against this in a way that I think is not just like they understand it's a PR battle they have to win, but they earnestly feel like this was a bullshit news report and they're pissed about it.

And there's some evidence for that. I mean, I saw today that the IAEA chair, his name's Rafael Grossi, he did an interview with Radio France International and said that the centrifuges at Iran's underground photo nuclear site are no longer operational after the US strikes. He said the IAEA officials know the installations like the back of our hand can deduce

fairly precise conclusions from looking at satellite images and added that given the back of our hand, can deduce fairly precise conclusions from looking at satellite images and added that given the power of these devices and the technical characteristics of a centrifuge, we already know that these centrifuges are no longer operational because they are fairly precise machines. Their rotors and the vibrations from the bombs

have completely destroyed them. This is not the Trumpet. This is the chair of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Like that is a pretty conclusive statement to me from as trustworthy a source as we're going to get. And I think it's, you know, if this is the reality, Iran has not done anything for days, there's a real legit ceasefire with Israel. I mean, I don't know, how could it have gone much better if like you were drafting this up a week ago is kind of a question that I think is worth talking about.

So I am sort of thinking like, oh, maybe I had a bad read on this or I was really skeptical. Certainly I was, you know, I wasn't doing the Tucker Carlson thing, talking about Americans dying and whatever. I mean, he is, I think has been totally panced by this entire affair. Yeah, which we, you know, he should be rightfully

dragged across the coals for that, even though I think his intentions were too. Of course it won't matter. I respect him because it was sort of from like this really strong anti-war posture, I think. Yeah, it seems authentic, yeah. Yeah, I listened to his podcasts and he's like, I was really wrong about the Iraq war

and I'm really scarred by that. And, you know, I was spent months, years at this propaganda network, Fox News. He's like really big on hammering Fox News right now, he talks about that in like every one of his podcast episodes. And like, yeah, so I don't know, I'm curious what you guys think,

but I'm sort of starting to be like, maybe this went pretty much as well as it could have gone and if this holds, that's like a huge win for the Trump administration. Yeah, I mean, I will underscore that IAEA point that you made a moment ago. This is not an organization that you would expect to say things that are kind of favorable to the Trump administration just because they want them to. Iran just in the past 24 hours, I guess, formally has decided that they are no longer going

to be cooperating with the IAEA, which again, you would expect them to perhaps raise more consternation about that. The two reasons why Iran may not want that is one, if they plan to try to ramp up their program again, or two, because they don't want it to be fully confirmed that all of this stuff has been hopelessly broken. The mystery surrounding it is actually quite good for them and it's certainly better than confirmed reports that suggest that there has been kind of a massive devastating blow dealt to their program overall.

I do think a lot of the early response to this, And I'm surprised as you are, Isaac, that things have kind of wrapped up so quickly. One of the lines from, I think it was Monday's newsletter was with respect to the Trump administration and whether or not they can be trusted to respond proportionally when Iran hit back as they were expected to. And not only did he exercise restraint, what we've learned subsequent to all of this is

that the Trump administration was reaching out to Iran as they were preparing to go through with this bombing, not informing them that it was happening, but trying to make it very clear, hey, this is it. This is what we're doing here. We want to de-escalate. And Iran responded in kind and was giving similar sort of notification, in fact, advance notification of their interest in trying to have there

be some sort of reciprocal strike on a US target, but they didn't want it to be devastating. It was very limited in scope. It was telegraphed in advance so that they could kind of defend themselves and move around assets so that no one got hurt. There was a bit of theater there. And the Trump administration has pretty reliably here seemed to be calibrating their responses. Even that now infamous moment where

the president of the United States drops an F-bomb on camera during a press spray at the White House, it felt almost calibrated in the direction of, it's not just Iran, it's Israel too. He's like kind of perhaps a little more forcefully critical of them than he needed to be in that instance, than you might expect him to be considering their close ally. And perhaps because he was trying to signal to Iran that we want to be a partner here so we can figure out how to bring this to a close. No one wanted the smoke in short. And that turned out to be a very good thing after the United States achieved its own objectives seemingly with respect to the strike.

The one thing that I continue to wonder about though is if the Trump administration missed an opportunity to, in my estimation, do the right thing, which is go to Congress, get authorization for the strike in advance, and perhaps be really vocal about the fact that you are going to get this authorization and use that as a mechanism to try to force some sort of piece of cord that would actually give

you direct access to some of these facilities you're most concerned about. In which case, we wouldn't be talking about whether or not the strike was successful. You would have actual, the ability to be on the ground, to take a look at these facilities to find the things and to make determinations about the nature of their program as it exists today and Whether or not this this is currently active and that's not really an option now So I think doing what I just described would have been kind of constitutionally better There would have had to be quite a bit of kind of diplomatic skill exercised in trying to do that as well.

And it's not clear that they have the tools to do that necessarily. But it was at least a real alternative to sending bombers. And the moment that you deploy bombers, you're no longer engaged in the difficult work of diplomacy. And there's a sense in which there's already a kind of fundamental loss for a politician. You know, I'm hearing all that and that's a good caveat at the end of we like the strike went well, as well as it could. US is accomplishing its objectives, but there's still a trade off with the door not walked

through as it were of the diplomatic path not taken. But I'm also a little skeptical about declaring these strikes to be successes so far. I think in terms of their objectives saying we want to hit these facilities, even on those narrow grounds, I still think it's probably not an A-plus here. I still think it's probably not an A plus here. Destroyed centrifuges sound like that's how you enrich uranium. That's how you create weapons grade uranium to get a bomb. That's crucial. But at the same time, that's not destroying the entire facility itself.

Centrifuges are things that you can, like iron, can find more of. They still, I assume, because this isn't part of any report, will have some yellowcake uranium, some partially enriched uranium already. It's not as if these entire facilities have been devastated, which is what we were also hearing in the immediate aftermath. So it's not the entire death knell that I think the administration was hoping to get from this. And as such, to Isaac's point, to also your point, Camille,

it is early days. And what that means here is these facilities are crippled. They are hurt. They are set back in significant ways. They are not destroyed. And Iran's ability to create a bomb is not completely destroyed. So when you choose this path, the non-diplomatic path,

the militaristic path, the non-diplomatic path, the militaristic path, you are saying you're committing to a destruction of this capability. And I still believe that the initial response is correct. That being, if you're going to choose that destructive path, you kind of can't half measure it and you got to go the whole way. The administration seems to be super committed to making sure these strikes are targeted saying the JD Vance line of we're at war with their ability to create a nuclear weapon we're not at war with them. I still am not certain that that's going to be able to last. I appreciate that they're committed to it. They're certainly

more disciplined in the aftermath than we anticipated. So they definitely deserve plaudits for that. But at the same time, they're already on this path. The fact that they chose the path is the issue that I think a lot of people are responding to. It's one of the things that I think Isaac was responding to. And my concern is whether or not they're going to be able to follow through with it. Because if they don't, if Iran's, you know, in the year we start hearing centrifuges are back up, uranium enrichment is back up, and guess what?

The IAEA is not allowed back in, so we don't have visibility. What do we do then? And maybe it happens before that. But yeah, they're coming to the table, so I could end up being wrong here still. And we could end up being wrong in implying that you can't walk both paths at once. But it's still, I think the door to be concerned is still plenty open. And I think it's swinging on its hinges still. And we got to be careful about, you know, as much as we're crediting the restraint and

the administration's ability to stick through with their objectives, just remind ourselves what the end goal here is, which is to remove their capability, this regime's capability to acquire, create a nuclear warhead and say, that story's not completely told yet. Yeah, I mean, I do think all of this is framed and things are gonna happen in the next six months or year, two, three, four years that we'll have to revisit. But I do think there were pretty explicit concerns and thoughts about this escalating the situation

around immediately killing or maiming US soldiers across the Middle East with attacks. I mean, just stuff that so far hasn't happened that I think we expected to have happened now. Again, it might be the case that in two weeks, you know, some bomb goes off at some US base or something, and then the regime is out there on Twitter talking about payback. I think they would be idiotic to do that, given what's happened and where things are now. I think there's an element of the display from the combination of Israel and the US that has sort of left them debilitated and made it clear that they can inflict a lot of damage really quickly.

So the regime is weak. And I think that's a calculus that the Trump administration made in this attack. And so far, that calculus seems to be paying off pretty well. So yeah. I will say, Isaac, just real briefly here, that there are still reports that Iran is trying to execute cyber attacks within the U.S.

I don't think that's completely sailed either. Like that ship is still kind of in the harbor. Yeah, that's true. I mean, the strikes, their missile firing was sort of a, hey, we're going to do this thing, make sure there are no soldiers on the basis so we can blow some stuff up and then talk about what we did. I mean, it was kind of the classic theater of war that sometimes you see Iran

participate in, but yeah, maybe some of the cyber attack stuff breaks through. And again, even that, you know, if it gets enough coverage, I could, again, see a world where the Trump administration responds to that. But to Camille's point, I think Trump has exercised a good deal of restraint so far. Certainly was welcome to the off ramp after Iran's response and enthusiastic about it. And then, yeah, again, like the sort of press gaggle where he's like, these guys don't know what they're doing, I do think is a really great way for a president

in his position to handle that moment. It's just to be like, I've given them a chance to stop and neither of them are taking it and sort of being equally scornful towards both. I mean, he's obviously much more aligned with Israel on this. I mean, he just coordinated all these attacks with them and everything, but he struck a deal and both sides were breaking it.

And he didn't position it as like, Iran is breaking the ceasefire deal. He was like, neither of them know what they're doing and I'm gonna handle it, you know? Which is like, I think a good way for, again, someone in his shoes to approach that. Yeah, especially in a situation where, and it seems this way, the fog of war is difficult

and challenging, so we don't know for sure, but it seems as though what happened was there was a volley of rockets fired from Iran that the Israelis responded as they had been doing, and in a very reasonable fashion, attacking the site where those rockets came from to try and destroy it so it no longer poses a threat. And that material is gone off the board, to use a chess metaphor. I've been getting in the chess with my little girls, fun actually. So I think that that even more so underscores

what felt like a bit of deliberation on the part of the Trump administration. But if I can quickly comment on something else you said earlier, Isaac, I'm kind of similarly looking at the Trump administration's response to the criticism that they're overstating things or that this you know, the strike actually went badly. When it does in fact seem like this might be one of those cases where Marley's razor applies, and while they may lie with some great regularity, it might be the case that this time

they are more right than wrong and that the strike was potentially a lot more effective than they thought. And I just can't miss an opportunity to further inculcate Marley's Razor into the kind of culture and milieu of this podcast in hopes that other people will begin using this publicly. And one day I'll fulfill my dream of having a stranger use it on me. Like, that's great. That's great. I worry that that's the reason why you agreed to co-host the podcast.

That's pretty. That's great. I worry that that's the reason why you agreed to co-host the podcast. That's pretty much it. Do you need to redefine Marley's Razor? Because this is not something anybody who's listening or hearing that for the first time is going to understand what you're talking about. No, they should Google it. So Google it. Well, unfortunately it won't come up.

There's another one. I don't even remember if it is worse. But Marley's Razor, Marley being Bob Marley and Marley's song being, I shot the sheriff, but I didn't shoot the deputy. Both of those things could be bad. One of them he insists he did, the other he insists he did not do. Also he insists that he shot the deputy in self-defense.

So that is Marley's Razor, which has nothing to do with whether or not his self-defense claim is true, but presumes that is at least possible, or at least acknowledges that it's at least possible for you to be guilty of one alleged crime and not guilty of the other alleged crime. We should extend it further to say that

if someone suggests something like Marley's razor, that is not what about-ism and it's not making excuses for someone. It's just pointing out an actual tangible fact. And I say all of that. I offer that qualification as someone who's been bruised many, many times for trying to point out, to make a nuanced point about someone who is complicated, who they may not even like, and being hopelessly smeared and bashed for it. So... We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy.

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Certain conditions apply. Details at f phys.ca. Well, speaking of being guilty of varying degrees of crimes, I think before we get out of here, we have to address some reader feedback about Camille's guilt in spreading false history and nonsense. I'll set the table here for you, Camille. So we got a reader, thoughtful and I think delivered gracefully and with care email from a reader named Sarah in Galveston, Texas, who objected to some of Camille's commentary about Juneteenth last weekend. At the end of her email, she said,

I'd really appreciate a response here, if not to me, then to the whole podcast audience. And, you know, there's a... I'll quote from the email and then summarize some parts of it because it's a little bit long, but she basically said, I'm a listener here from Galveston, Texas, the birthplace of Juneteenth. I was disturbed by Camille's comment that the observance of June 19th as the apocryphal date of slaves in Texas finding out

about the Emancipation Proclamation, what is he basing this from? And then she explains that she's just attended a multiple events for the 160th celebration of Juneteenth. And there's this kind of year round cultural supportive celebrating of the origin story that happens in Galveston. And she said, I think the podcast chatter and comments and observations come off pretty disrespectful

and uninformed. And since you do not note any research you have done or historical knowledge you have about the observance of the holiday and its inception, you leave listeners like me without concrete information, just more conjecture. And then she kind of goes on to talk about the way the holiday has been recognized and the existence of it lasting and its history a little bit, and then links to a gallisonhistory.org page that's sort of like archival documents and historical references about the holiday.

So yeah, she sort of finally said at the end that she wanted a response on the podcast. I thought, you know, one of the things we always do on the show is respond to criticism and feedback. This is one of your first weeks here with us. And finally, some criticisms directed at somebody that's not me. So I was like, hell yeah, let's put Camille on the hot seat for a bit. But yeah, I want to give you a shot here to reply to this email. And I will say there was also criticism of Ari and I

that like we didn't question your claims and about the doubtful date of the history or why we didn't bring an informed opinion to the pod in the opening moments. I will say, I thought the beginning of the podcast last week was very obviously a little bit ingest, but nevertheless, I think it's worthy of a response. Yeah, look, I mean, it's extemporaneous commentary

on various things and there's not a whole, there's not a rehearsal beforehand. So it's possible to get things wrong. In this case, I'm pretty sure I didn't get things wrong. And Sarah, I do in fact genuinely want to thank you for your note. I did think it was, you know, thoughtfully written and it merited a response.

The charge here is that I suggested that June 19th is the apocryphal date and to quote from her email of slaves in Texas finding out about the Emancipation Proclamation. And I would say that that is in fact a true claim that it is the apocryphal date of slaves finding out about the Emancipation Proclamation because as historians like Henry Louis Gates and various others have suggested, and I don't know, I guess we can put a link in the show notes to a piece at CBS where they interviewed Gates about this, but you'll also find a number of different articles from

conservative stalwarts like NPR going over the many myths associated with Juneteenth. And one of them is this assertion that the slaves found out about the Emancipation Proclamation when, I know Gordon is his last name, but I'm forgetting his first name right now, it's Gordon Granger issued this general order, number three, to free enslaved black persons in Galveston, which was essentially just saying what the Emancipation Proclamation already said. The challenge, of course, was that it couldn't actually be enforced because there were no Northern soldiers there.

So it is true that a number of slaveholders moved to Texas and tried to maintain slavery there for as long as they could. And it is true that there were some actions taken by slaveholders to try and ensure that slaves did not find out. But as Gates and others have talked about, there was a grapevine.

And the Emancipation Proclamation was reported on widely in newspapers and it was discussed. And it is certainly the case that many slaves knew about the Emancipation Proclamation in advance of Juneteenth. And that even this declaration on Juneteenth by Gordon Granger didn't settle the matter. It wasn't until December of this year, of the same year in 1865,

that you actually got an amendment to the Constitution that actually got rid of slavery. And even after that, in fact, in some northern states, you still had slaves being held. So it wasn't, Juneteenth wasn't the end of slavery. It wasn't the date that all slaves in Texas found out about the end of slavery. And it wasn't even, I mean, it just,

it doesn't actually do those things. So it's kind of an odd unusual date to choose as the kind of particular marker of when slavery ended or when slaves were emancipated because it isn't in fact that thing. It instead is a date about around which a tradition has grown. It started in Galveston, Texas. And I think there's nothing wrong with that.

It's totally honorable. But as I was pointing out in our conversation, there is just a modern infrastructure, intellectually, philosophically, politically, that surrounds the date. And I think an important point that actually Gates made to me, Henry Louis Gates, I interviewed him on the podcast, the fifth column, the other podcast that I do sometimes, some years ago, and we had a great conversation and I was listening to it recently. And he and I talked about the fact that history is not something that is about reflecting the perspectives that, you know, the persons at the time that

this thing happened had. It's not about their perspective on what this meant or what it looks like. History is about what we think about those things. History has everything to do with our modern perspective and lens being cast backwards and putting these things into a particular context. And that's what we do with slavery. It's certainly what we do with emancipation.

And it is reasonable for it to be what happens with a holiday that is supposed to commemorate something. And even holidays as simple as like MLK day, which is supposed to honor a particular man, we have a sense of MLK that is, it's a lens that we look through and it has everything to do with who we are and what MLK says about us. And it's less so about what MLK was in that moment. There's a sense in which you're always kind of crafting something. And there is a sense in which those historical narratives are kind of more or less true. And I think I was alluding to that with respect to Juneteenth.

But again, the core of what I said about Juneteenth was it was just kind of a weird holiday because it seems to place the emphasis, at least in the apocryphal way the story is generally understood, on the kind of the strange ending of the institution and not the fact that it ended. I think it's a bit odd for to want to celebrate the holdout finding out or not the holdout, but the kind of last person to know finding out versus the fact that this very good thing happened that this institution of chattel slavery was defeated that this thing that's older than writing slavery was was being shut down in a country that is kind of committed itself to

becoming more perfect over time that believes in freedom as a fundamental precept for every person in it, that we managed to get there is extraordinary. And that it was hard is important and worth talking about as well urgently. But I do think that kind of doing it in a thoughtful, nuanced way is always appropriate. So I think I'm on pretty firm ground here. Don't think I actually made a mistake and I hope the sourcing that I provided for the claim that I made is sufficient for you. And if it isn't, I suspect you'll write back again. And that's cool. I love so much that there's an

active conversation here about all of the topics that we get into. That there's always an invitation to have a serious sober sober, well-informed disagreement. And I will do my best even in the context where I'm talking extemporaneously to say things that I am pretty confident of that I can support with facts. And to the extent I'm speculating, I will let you know that too. Yeah, as always, don't forget if if you want to reach us or you believe that Camille's wrong about Gene Teeth, you can email will at retangle.com,

W-I-L-L at retangle.com, he's the one to reach. But you better bring your A game, I'm usually not, it's just, sorry. I appreciate, no, it's a thoughtful answer. I mean, I'm sort of, I will say, I think I might disagree. I don't think it's weird that this day is the one that we celebrate.

I mean, it makes, I think, I mean, I don't know. I guess it's a break from maybe the historical, like, you know, we don't celebrate, we celebrate the day the constitution was signed or the Declaration of Independence was signed. We don't celebrate the day that everybody found out about it. You know, I mean, I, I get that. But there is something about this particular event that seems significant, like the ball really was put across the line in a way that I can certainly understand why it

has so much historical significance and why the celebration around the end of slavery has coalesced around this particular day. I mean I definitely think it's a good... I like the holiday of Juneteenth A because it's another day off and federal holidays are awesome. I think we should have more then. But B- And because it's your anniversary and you get your anniversary off.

Let's say what's on set here. Yeah, it's my wedding anniversary. And my first son was born on MLK Day. So you can take from that what you will. You're shooting for it. That's the best part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was aiming for it.

That was the best part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're aiming for it. That was the whole thing. I think like that significance is resonant for me. The day is resonant for me. And the idea of like celebrating the end of this practice in some capacity is resonant for me because it's like, it is sort of what you said at the end there, Camille. It's like such an American thing, just this, you know,

this horrible piece of our history that we found a way to resolve through the North Star of like these founding principles that we have that I think, you know, that's the kind of stuff that makes me feel really patriotic and like, it's like we, you know, we screwed this thing up for a little while, but we figured it out by like we, you know, we screwed this thing up for a little while, but we figured it out by virtue of, you know, living up to the ideals that the founders set out to.

And like, they didn't do it, but they drew the map for us and we found our way because we had these, you know, these North Star guiding posts. I think that feels celebration worthy. I'm really, I'm more weirded out by the people who are so angry about the existence of Juneteenth than I am by the existence of Juneteenth. I gotta say. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate that perspective. And again, I think

most of the people weirded out by it. Again, even Trump, as we pointed out last week, wasn't weirded about, weirded out about it initially. The weirdness has been something that's happened subsequently. And I don't think it's because he's suddenly become racist, although some people insist that he's always been racist. But I'd respond this way, and I'll try to be succinct. And I did tweet this out at someone at some point, but imagine marking the end of World War II,

not with like VE Day, but with the day the last Axis holdout surrendered in some remote jungle someplace. Juneteenth doesn't commemorate the triumph of emancipation. It is commemorating its neglect. And I think that that is uniquely pessimistic. And in a very real sense is actually indicative of a lot of the things that I find most irksome about America's quote, national conversation about race. I think even the fact that most people and I, my good friend

Coleman Hughes actually wrote a piece about this for June around Juneteenth for the free press. In the way that we kind of talk about slavery suggests that it was this kind of unique form of depravity that was essentially invented by us and perfected by us. And then never, never in history did it exist in kind of a wider, broader, more devastating way than in the American context. And that is a kind of a wider, broader, more devastating way than in the American context. And that is a kind of absurd hubris that suggests a lack of understanding of history

that I think is pretty profound. And I think it's actually, it doesn't degrade, it doesn't diminish the importance of the suffering and the awfulness of slavery to try to put it into a global context and to acknowledge that most people throughout most of history have been subjugated, profoundly subjugated. And we're all quite fortunate to live in a modern age where freedom is the bizarre expectation that we have for ourselves.

I think that that's like beautiful. And I think that a lot of the pessimism that is associated with the way that we talk about America's past is more so about the fact that America was bad in the ways that most civilizations have been bad going on back through eons. And we don't talk enough about how remarkable it is that America is as just as it is, that there is as much equality as exists, and that it wasn't brought about

by virtue of someone just decreeing it as a species. And as a country, we've been following this moral arc that bends towards justice in a really profound way that I just don't think we talk often enough about. And again, that's why the pessimism, I'm sensitive to it. It stands out to me. Something that's interesting about that though is you said that it's not about the decree. It was something that you just said towards the end. And in that way, celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation itself would seem to reinforce the pessimism more than celebrating this day when we're not necessarily—I don't think it's celebrating

the holdouts to celebrate. It's celebrating the end of the holdouts. And it seems like inherent in this weird date. And I think it's actually kind of a good thing to me. I'm going to play both sides in an annoying, frustrating way. It's kind of a good thing to me that we pick a strange date to commemorate parts of history because it tells us more of a story when we ask why. Like, why do we celebrate July 4th?

Well, it's when we declared our independence. We didn't really start the war. We started a war, but we didn't finish it. And then we had the Constitution signed hours later. And like, it's an entry way to telling more of the story when we pick a strange day. And at the same time, there's part of the date where we're choosing not to celebrate one of the other days that's intentional. We choose the Declaration of Independence and the word declaration is so interesting because we're not signing the Constitution and writing our laws. We're saying like, you know what?

Fuck this. That's such an American thing. And when it comes to celebrating something as huge as the end of slavery in our country, and I really, really enjoyed that story that you're telling about how the US was able to live up to its principles against this historic worldwide infection of our global society that just celebrating it, a proclamation wouldn't be enough, but some date that implies the imperfectness that led up throughout its ending and the way that it's still perniciously continued afterwards maybe tells that story a little better.

I think because without it being the state, I don't think that's something I would have been able to appreciate. Hmm. Hmm. That's interesting. I do. I mean, I should have done it myself, but your allusion to July 4th and the Declaration of Independence, you're declaring it. You haven't yet won

it. You're going to have to fight for that. But the declaration is the thing. And in much the same way, the actual analog to that in this context would be Emancipation Day. Yeah, yeah. You could take the date that the Emancipation Proclamation was instituted, or you could take the date that the constitutional amendment was ratified. But what seems almost perniciously odd to me is the weird thing in the middle. It's just, it's kind of strange, maybe a little bit pernicious. But again, just, I think your arguments are worthwhile.

And I do expect that at some point, the political kind of backlash associated with this date becoming a thing federally will go away. And if it's passed this prologue, we will not even be asking the question, why is it that the date that we celebrate it? We'll just stop really talking about it altogether, no one will remember. And again, real victory, real progress is when there's a mattress sale on Juneteenth

and Isaac doesn't have to wonder whether or not it's okay to get married on Juneteenth. Which interestingly, I think that is indicative of the problem, that it belongs to those people. For me, Emancipation Day ought to be something that can be celebrated by everyone. My predecessors lived in Jamaica. They were never enslaved in the United States. There was, there's no sense in which kind of Juneteenth or Emancipation Day has anything

to do with me directly, right? But I can still celebrate those things because the march of freedom is something that's wonderful that we're all partakers of. And the notion that there's any sort of culpability in a modern context that is apportioned to anyone related to the actual institution of slavery is just so preposterous to me as to be absurd on its face. And it is the case that there are certainly people who talk about it as though there's

something else that exists, like a more active dynamic there with respect to the relationship between victims and perpetrators as it pertains to the history of this country. But we're going a bit long now. I got to say, I just, I really do. I like the word choice of predecessor over ancestor. It's got real King vibes, you know. I'm going to start. I'm never referring to my ancestors again, predecessors only.

Starting now, I guess. Yeah, starting now. All right. That's, yeah, I think that's a good place to wind down a little bit. Before we get out of here, as always, we need to share some space for our grievances of the week. So my good friend John, you can play the music for us. ["The Earring of Grievances"]

The Earring of Grievances. Between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal. All right. I've got one teed up, but I'm happy to... How are you feeling? Who wants to batter up? There you go. It's up next to you, man. You got it. I've been holding out on any parenting or child-related grievances. I'll applaud you a little bit for that. I think you've been doing a really good job of holding back.

Thanks. I don't think I've had a kid-related thing in a month or four or five weeks or something. So I'm trying to be conscious of not turning turning into one of those people as nothing to talk about except like my newborn kid. Because it's a tough place to be. But I will, I do have a grievance this week, which is just, we're doing sleep training. It's going pretty well actually. He's taking to it, which is awesome.

Super pumped about that. We've had, in fact, I think we're on like night eight or something and we've already had two or three nights where he's done like a full 7 a.m. to 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. to 7 a.m. night. He's also doing a thing a couple of times a week or he's done a thing twice, two or three times now where he's just gone to bed at like 6 30 and woken up at 4 a.m. and just squeaked in his bed loud enough to keep both of us awake, but not gone back to sleep himself.

So I've just woken up at 4 a.m. a couple times this week, which is tough. But like the sleep training thing is you don't take him out of the bed. You have to teach him like 6 a.m. at the earliest is the wake up time. So you don't take him out of his crib. You just kind of go in and check in on him

and then come back. Anyway, this has all been going really well. We're very happy with the development. And yeah, we just, like, he's been really fussy all of a sudden. The last 24 hours, we're like, what's going on? He's not napping. He's like kind of squawking, being a squeaker all day, making like pterodactyl sounds.

And yeah, we thought today today while I was at work, Phoebe texted me and was like, he's got teeth coming in, it's happening. And so now we are teething in the middle of sleep training, which is not where you want to be. In fact, a woman, the culte sleep training leader who goes by like taking care of babies is her business. All my friends use her to sleep train their kids,

so we're on her program. It is a literal cult, but it seems to work really well. It's not a literal cult. It is, it has very culty vibes, but it is not a literal cult. But she said, yeah, she says at the top, like don't do this program if your baby's sleep training, or if your baby's teething.

So we didn't start it while he was teething, but now he's teething in the middle of it. And I've just been getting updates all day that he's just refusing to nap. He's just sucking on it. So I don't know what to do. We're like Googling, how do you help babies? So that's my grievance is that I know that I am in

for like a hellish few days while he goes through this where he's going to be cranky and refuse to sleep. And if anybody has advice about how to handle teething babies and sweet at-home tricks they've learned, I'm all ears because I'm bracing for the storm now. So yeah, it's like, it's what I always say, what everybody always says, like, the moment you figure it out,

you've got like three days of enjoying what you figured out, and then there's just a whole new thing you have to deal with, and it all changes. That's my big takeaway from five months of parenting, is like, spend a week figuring something out, you have three days to enjoy it when you've perfected it, and then some new variation, new variables shows up and blows the whole thing up and you have

to start over again. You know, the piece of advice I would offer is surrender to the suffering, which is to say. His or mine? Exactly. Like the reality, actually that exactly is right. I think there's a sense in which the best thing that you can do for yourself is just be super present, cultivate some empathy for him in his circumstance.

These teeth are ripping through your gums. You've never experienced anything like it before. It's absolutely horrible. You're tired. You're exhausted, so exhausted that you can't sleep. You're in pain, you're exhausted and you can't sleep. And it's just hard. So you scream.

And I feel like the moments when I've really been able to just climb into my child's mind and imagine what it looks like from their perspective, God, daddy, all I want is this popsicle. It is literally the only thing I want in the world. Nothing else can make me happier. In fact, I can't even think about anything else. Do you understand how overwhelming this is? Even as I'm talking about it now, living in the mind of my three-year-old, it makes me

get a little emotional. Yeah, you're right. It is outrageous that I have the power to grant you the permission to eat this popsicle or not. And I'm just denying it to you. I'm denying it to you by fiat. And I'm not going to have a conversation about it. And you are outraged.

So outraged that you fall to the ground. You can't walk. You can't speak. You can only scream. Like, how can I not be empathetic? I can't spank you for that. I got to say, I'm sorry, buddy. I know it's tough. I know.

I love you and I'm here for you and we can talk about it. How about you eat this apple instead? That's the job, Isaac. And it's quite... Good advice. I'll take it. What's your plan though I'm curious because you you aren't supposed to do both things at once are you retreating on any battlefield here I would guess he can't put the teeth back

in so that yeah the teeth are come in I'm I am zero retreat yeah I have this a really good friend of mine who he talks about putting his kid down for a nap and he says, every time I go in there, I'm putting him down for bed. Like my attitude is it's me or him, you know? And it's like, either he's gonna break me or I'm gonna break his will and he's gonna fall asleep. And I think it's so funny.

And I'm just like, nah, he's got to sleep and it's good for him. When he gets the full nights of sleep, he feels good. I know he won't. I know he's going to struggle, but yeah, we're too far down. We've done like a week of work and sacrifice on the sleep training thing. So I think it's just going to be like teathers,

buying some stuff for him, like, you know, giving him ice cubes or whatever makes it. I don't know what tricks people have to make him feel good. A little bit of baby Tylenol probably when it's really bad and just trying to stick to the program and see if he can make it. But tonight will be the first night, I think, where we find out how bad it is.

He's been going to sleep great, so I hope it sticks. But yeah, we could have definitely used this news in like a week or two instead of this week. That would have been a lot better. All right, who's up next? Man. Ari? I've got, yeah, I've got such bad ones though.

So I'm gonna get in and I'm gonna get out. It's such like, I've only got like bougie, very privileged options for you. So I'm going to request that maybe I'll play my safe zone card here because Isaac always likes to say this is a safe space when responding to his criticisms than when I give one. It's like, that's a shitty one. That's not good. So I'm going to ask for a little bit of grace here. Can I get that or am I asking for it in advance?

No, you've invoked it in advance. I don't think it can be denied. So we'll talk about you afterwards. Yeah, I accept. So the, God, this feels obnoxious. We have these great trail systems that go almost from our door almost to Connect with the state forest that goes to the top of the most picturesque mountain in the state Which is camel's hut mountain in Vermont is beautiful. It's so great to be able to have that access but um, I'm like I've been trying to explore more and go and up through like the

connecting trails that go from here to the state park and we mow like our community and sometimes us but not literally me we'll mow the trails that lead up and They're wide they're like cross-country trails. They're like 10 feet wide, but the last stretch It's it's really far it's impractical to bring the tractor up to mow it. And the grass is just like literally waist height.

And it's to the point where I really like going out there and you can do it pretty quick and just go up in like an hour to walk or even 20 minutes on e-bike, which is crazy. And getting to the point where the grass is high, you get itchy, you get covered in like all this dew and water, you get bitten by bugs. And that's kind of the whole point with hiking, I know.

But at the same time, there's such well maintained trails on one half and well maintained trails on the other. And it's just like this connecting bit. It's so annoying, because it's not practical to go up and maintain it. So, you know, I'm just walking, walking through buggy grass. And that's, that's my grievance is buggy grass.

I get that. Do you guys have ticks up there? Yeah, we've got some. We, so the dog like this tick city, like she's two feet tall and that's right where they live. So they love getting, getting on the dog, but she's got the anti-tick medication. So we're just pulling tick corpses off

and it's very satisfying. I hate ticks more than anything in the world. I think it's literally true. Yeah, ticks are bad. Ticks will definitely make my grievance list at some point. I met a guy recently who got a tick-borne illness that now he gets really sick anytime he eats any meat. What?

And like, he just has to, yeah. That can happen? Yeah, I forgot the name of it, but it was horrifying. And he basically said like, it just goes away over the course of like four or five years, but it's like some insane tick-borne illness that I forgot. I think I know what that is. I wish I had a number that's called.

Yeah, I think that's the dog tick and not the deer ticks, which have the Lyme disease, which is just absolutely terrible. And I don't think there's any remedy for it. Yeah, ticks are bad. I had a dog tick on me, actually. It fell onto my arm and I felt it fall. And I looked down and saw it on there and just kind of brushed it aside

before it had an opportunity to bite me and bite down. And this was Saturday, actually, in Connecticut, which is really weird. Really, really weird. Okay, I'm going to do mine. I do want to say very, very quickly before you do yours, but like I did have a tick that was, this was like two years ago.

We were at just like a game night with a couple of our friends when I was living in Pittsburgh. One of whom is a doctor. And we're sitting there like playing the game and I'm just scratching this area by my armpit. And I pull my shirt up. I'm like, that's a fucking tick. That must've been there for at least a day. And at this point at least I'm like comfortable enough

to remove them because I've been doing it from the dog. But I'm like, I'm sorry guys, this is kind of graphic. And my doctor friend's like, oh, let's get you some screens here. I'm going to order you some blood work. This is one of the best ways this could happen. That's nice. So shout out Robbie.

Oh gosh. By the way, the tick-borne illness is called alpha-gal syndrome from the Lone Star tick. And there are 450,000 people in the United States who are affected by it. Literally every detail of that sounded made up, but I believe you. I believe that.

I believe that completely. ChatiPT is hallucinating, but it does it very well. This is grok, but yeah. Interestingly, they hallucinate in very similar ways, which tells me something about the hallucinations in the training data. So yeah, I could tell an interesting story about that, but I won't. So my complaint for this week, I've been, I have been writing and for people who know

me, writing for me is arduous. I mean, it is perhaps the greatest pain known to man. I know a lot of women like complain about childbirth and. I mean, it is perhaps the greatest pain known to man. I know a lot of women complain about childbirth and how difficult and hard it is. And I'm sure it is, but writing for me, so much worse. So much worse. And I don't really know exactly what it is. I think it might be because in this particular instance, I'm writing something for Tangle. And if everything goes according to plan, as I hope it will, it'll be out there.

And you can read it now, and perhaps already have. But I know that Sarah is out there, and she might read it. And I want it to be sufficiently robust and of sufficiently high quality that even if she finds things in it that are disagreeable, she will be able to say, well, this is presented in a thoughtful way. And finding out how to kind of put things on paper in a super thoughtful way is really

hard. For whatever reason, I always think about kind of extemporaneous presentation in a context like this where I'm talking as far more forgiving than the thing that you put in print on paper, which people will say, they look at it and say, well, you wrote that. And they'll be like, yeah, yeah, that's not exactly how I meant it. There's perhaps a better way to phrase it. Well, you wrote it.

And it was edited. And you guys looked at this a bunch of times. Well, yeah, I just didn't imagine that you would interpret it that way. Right? It just, it feels like there's not an opportunity for that. And I feel like I'm always writing against that in many instances. And I'd say the other challenges that in my heart of hearts,

my deepest affection is for like Shakespeare and Cormac McCarthy aside from like my wife and my children. I'm in my mama too. And in many instances, I want to try to write in really lyrical ways the way they do. And that is hard to do. And it's even harder to do when you're writing in really technical ways and trying to nail down something philosophically. And you also want it to be accessible.

So there's just a lot of competing things. And the thing that we do naturally without thinking, talking, is very different than the thing that we do when we sit down to try to craft prose on paper. And when it's done really, really well, it is absolutely magic. And as I understand it, can be grinding and difficult for other people. But there are a few things that I do that are harder or that I do with kind of greater frustration than trying to put pen to paper, so to speak, and actually get some stuff done.

But I'm working on something that's coming together well, and I think I'm curious to see what folks make of my inaugural contribution to the newsletter. God willing, it'll be out by tomorrow, or by the time people hear this podcast on Sunday, or I guess, inshallah, we say now we're in Zoran's world. Yeah, that's the new joke. Inshallah.

Yeah, there is a very funny tweet about white dudes in Brooklyn who say inshallah have never been happier than they are right now after Zoran Mondani's win, which I thought was really funny. I love saying inshallah for what it's worth. I can't attest that that has been happening. I want to talk. There's something I want to mention so bad. Maybe I'll make up working into the piece I'm working on.

All right. That sounds good. Good. All right, gentlemen. Good seeing you. Great Gavin. And we'll do it again next week. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Lowell.

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 Kasperserson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Sall, Lindsay Knuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected.

Maybe it's a little too loose, maybe it's a little too flimsy, or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong. But there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at OCS.CA and participating retailers. Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto or switching mobile providers.

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