Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk the Epstein case, Hunter Biden, and cancel culture.

Episode Date: July 27, 2025

In this episode, Isaac, Ari and Kmele discuss the intricacies of political narratives surrounding the Epstein case and its implications, the candid revelations from Hunter Biden's recent interview, the dynamics of cancel culture, the complexities of climate change discourse, and the evolving landscape of political ideologies. Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion that challenges conventional perspectives and offers fresh insights into today's most pressing issues.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 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, Lindsey Knuth, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

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

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on What's better than a well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for,

Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Yeah. All right. Coming up, Ari's birthday, Camille's severed finger, Epstein, Hunter Biden, Ghislaine Maxwell, Russia Gate, Obama. We're doing it all today. 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, the place you get views from across the political spectrum,

some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and I am here with Tangle managing editor Ari Weitzman and our editor-in-large, Camille Foster. Ari, it's your birthday. Camille, you have nine fingers. So things are going differently for each of you guys this week, I think. Trending in the wrong directions for Camille,

maybe positively for Ari. Happy birthday, Ari. It's another day around the sun for me, yeah. Thanks. I think I- How old are you today? I was gonna talk about this for my grievance a little bit, but every birthday, it's so tiresome to complain about having a birthday and having people wish you a happy birthday. But it's been nice. I've decided that I'm going to wake up today and enjoy

it and respond to every text and be happy about it. So I'm happy about it. I personally love my... I make a huge deal out of my birthday every year. I try and guilt all my friends and they're coming to see me. I throw a party. I make the whole day about me. I'm a big fan of soaking it up. So, yeah.

I'm a big, just leave me alone kind of guy. Like I'm going to go do the freaking skip rocks at my dog. Thanks for your text. I'm away from keyboard. I guess we'll leave you alone then. Right, see you guys. I got a text message from Camille last night about a canceled podcast recording

and then just a picture of his hand in a giant bucket of blood in what looked like an emergency room. And I was concerned and he said, I almost severed my finger. And then I said, that doesn't seem good, how'd you get? And I think your words were like an uncooperative mic stand maybe.

I have not, so here we are, Camille. You say this isn't a dangerous job. I mean, it is a podcast related injury. And yes, I maimed myself pretty severely. It's perhaps overstatement to suggest that I nearly severed my finger, but it certainly could have gone that way. The knife, the serrated butcher knife

that I was using as a screwdriver, because I didn't have a flathead screwdriver, I was using the blunt side of the knife to try and pry a bolt out of this microphone so I could put it into the stand so I could do some recording. We had minutes before we were supposed to start. I had a guest lined up. And yeah, it didn't quite work out.

So I did try to soldier through. But it sounds like a questionable decision. It was a questionable decision. And it was a mistake. And I realized it right away. It did not work. I ended up having to use a real screwdriver to remove it. And I did.

But that was only after I took a visit to urgent care and had my hand bandaged up. And they couldn't actually stitch it. It was sufficiently deep and wide, and actually took a chunk of the fingernail in addition to a chunk of the finger. Yeah, it's pretty bad. And yeah, she just kind of bandaged it and cleaned it up

and making all sorts of jokes while doing it, which I appreciated. I promised to listen to the podcast. So, you should maybe be listening right now. Thank you so much ladies. The medical practitioners who patched me up and got me back on the road. And yeah, this is a dangerous job. You know, coal mining, police officer, podcaster. I think that's the hierarchy. And I just want you to know that- The same conversation anyway. Yeah, exactly. I'm happy to risk my life to do this week after week.

Now, Isaac, I know we've got a lot to cover, but I really got to jump in to ask because this is something that happens in the ultimate frisbee community a lot, is you'll go to the hospital because sports are going to happen. It's very, very customary in this culture to lie about what you're doing when you go to the hospital. Is that right? They're like, you hurt your knee doing what? Like soccer, running, rock climbing. You don't want to tell the ER doc you're there because you were playing Frisbee.

So did you tell the ER nurses that you're there podcasting injury? Do you own it? I have a strict policy. I do my very best to always tell the truth. Will I embellish it a little bit? Truthful hyperbole, as Donald Trump calls it in his book, Art of the Deal, it a little bit? Truthful hyperbole as Donald Trump calls it in his book art of the deal, maybe a little bit But in this case, I only embellished it for comedic effect

So yeah, I told the truth Podcasting injury and I will say so forever and I hope I get a really cool scar out of it. I Hope you do too. Yeah, I Appreciate that you're honest about it. And also I'm glad to hear there was a knife involved when you sent me this message last night. I was imagining that it was just like something like your finger got caught in the stand somehow, which like really made my knees weak. That was like gave me the heebie-jeebies. I much prefer that there was like a knife and it was a standard. I caught myself being a fucking idiot story.

Give it time. there was like a knife and it was a standard. I caught myself being a fucking idiot story. Given time. Given time. He caught it in the machinations of a 55 pound mic stand. Yeah, that really made me squirm last night when you said that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to put you on edge.

It's all right. I've been around a lot of gnarly injuries. So mostly I was laughing at how dumb you were. But I'm glad to hear your fingers okay. You did it with a knife and not purely with the mic stand. Yeah. Thank you. Fellas, we're going to talk about Jeffrey Epstein, Hunter Biden, and like Russiagate

today. It's my 30th birthday, right? Yeah. I think Comey is going to nail him, if I'm honest. I'm pretty sure. It is a weird timeline in the news world right now. I have a place. Oh, and Hunter Biden we have to talk about too.

So we are like, I mean, we're playing the greatest hits today. I think we should start with the latest Epstein story. And I'm going to just throw something out there. I'd be curious to hear you guys' thoughts. But yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published the story that I kind of thought they were going to publish a week ago, when the drawing thing came out, which was

Donald Trump was informed in May by Attorney General Pam Bondi that he was in the Epstein files, that his name appeared in the Epstein files. And I think because of the timing of this story, it had a little less potency than maybe it would have. I mean, to just rewind what happened last week, right before we came on the show last time, was there was these rumors percolating that the Wall Street Journal was working

on a really big Donald Trump Epstein story. And there was all this speculation about what it was gonna be. And then what basically came out was like, Trump had written Ep, seen a birthday card, and there was this weird cryptic message in it and this weird drawing and Trump denied it. And everybody in Trump's camp was immediately like, you know, he doesn't talk like this. It wasn't him, whatever. People like me were saying, actually, a lot of the stuff here makes me think

that this is genuine and Trump really did this, including the timeline, whatever. But I didn't find it that particularly incriminating to me. I also don't find this story incriminating. In fact, they told the president at the meeting that the files contained what officials felt was unverified hearsay about many people, including Trump, who had socialized with Epstein in the past. And one of the officials familiar with the documents said they contained hundreds of other names. They said they made it clear in the article and in whatever this communication was to

Trump that this wasn't proof of some kind of guilt. But I do wonder if this had been the initial story that came out, if it would have broken through a little bit more. Because I think this was the story people were expecting. Trump's in the Epstein files and therefore he is acting strangely and doing this bizarre stuff where he's just trying to get everybody to move on after making a big deal about it. If he were told a couple months ago or a month and a half ago that he was actually in the Epstein stuff, that would make a lot more sense to me as to why in early July he's sort of closing the book on this and trying to get people to stop talking about it and move

on. It's kind of what we expected, right? I mean, the whole time, like Emil, just last week we were saying, he's probably going to be personally implicated somehow. If we're just reading the president's behavior, it's very easy to read it as by everything. All the pieces fit if we just say his name is going to be mentioned, no criminal implications probably almost definitely, but he's probably concerned about optics. So it's not maybe just the people like us whose job it is to react to news.

We're like, okay, yeah, but I think the story broke through pretty well in the first place. So would it have broken through more? I don't know how to quantify that. If it would have followed up Elon Musk's tweet saying Trump's in the Epstein files, probably more so. But I don't know. I think to people who follow the news, no big surprise to people who don't. What's it mean to break through more or less?

I'm not sure. Yeah. I do wonder for people who are already critical of the president and who are deeply skeptical of him and have imagined all sorts of things about his connection to Epstein. If you just read the headline and you just interpret this as an acknowledgement of the fact that the president has lied when asked directly whether or not Pam Bondi talked to him, disclosed to him that he's in the files, then this looks uniquely damning. But I think for the rest of us, until more information is known, this looks more procedural than particularly concerning.

And I think there's a universe where one could interpret the president's behavior with respect to this, almost in a similar way to how I would have interpreted his behavior at the beginning of his first administration, where he was particularly perturbed by the Russian investigation, and I'm perhaps getting a little ahead of us, but where those allegations didn't really seem to pan out. But the concern about potential obstruction ended up being something that was a heck of a lot more material and probably had more deleterious effects on him and his administration. It's not hard to imagine a world where the president didn't make things much more difficult

for himself by simply being really, really candid and saying over and over again, I had nothing to do with Russia and that whole situation goes away. I don't know that the same could be said here. But it certainly seems like between his insistence that no one should be paying attention to this thing that I was trying to animate concern about before, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to talk about this, and his various apparatchiks and supporters trying to do things like send Congress on a break early, so there's no opportunity to talk about this stuff. All of that seems incredibly strange, and it appears to be the behavior of people who

are guilty of something and who desperately want to conceal something, when in fact it may just be the kind of sloppy proclivities of an administration that is definitely concerned about scandal and is uncomfortable being in a position where there's real material division being sown in a coalition that has been unimaginably solid for a very long time. It could just be that they're under some pressure and not that this is proof of some deeper nefarious entanglements. It does seem a bit strange to me, Isaac, to your point, that so many of these much-valued revelations that we expect to see and then eventually emerge tend to be a bit anticlimactic.

I don't know that it'll continue to be this case, but given that there's still so many things in the offing, we'll find out pretty soon. Yeah. I mean, it's a really weird moment because I'm now seeing the Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump Jr. types, picking the Epstein story back up. I saw today they were both kind of texting about some Obama appointed lawyer who was blocking the release of some particular, or Obama appointed judge who was blocking the release of some particular files. And they're just sort of like, now they're right back, all last week it was, let's move on, the president's saying, let's move on, let's move on. And now they, I think, have recognized that their base isn't buying that, they're not

following the lead. And so they're sort of pivoting back to, okay, we're in. But also, everything that has to do with Trump and this story is total BS. And everything that has to do with every Democrat or any Democrat or liberal politician or celebrity, whatever, who's even vaguely referenced in Epstein's circle is immediately incriminated. It's this really weird thing they're trying to hold. I literally laughed out loud reading this Wall Street Journal

article because Stephen Chung, the White House Communications Director, got quoted in the story telling the Wall Street Journal, this is another fake news story, just like the previous story by the Wall Street Journal. And then in literally the next sentence, the journal writers said, in a statement to the journal on Friday, Bondi and the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch said, nothing in the files warranted further investigation or prosecution. As part of our routine briefing, we made the president aware of the findings," they said.

So basically just caught to the entire story, in plain terms, that, yeah, they briefed the president on what was happening, that they were going to kill the investigation, that his name was in it. They report that out. And at the same time, Trump's attorney general is saying, yeah, legit, the communications director is like fake news, which is a great insight into how the Trump administration saying, yeah, legit. The communications director is like fake news,

which is a great insight into how the Trump administration operates, by the way. I mean, this is just like everything they hate is fake. And any story that even vaguely confirms their worldview is getting elevated and blasted out. There's now this other layer, I guess, which is the Glenn Maxwell thing, that the Trump administration is, I guess the DOJ maybe today is sitting down with her for an interview

and there's a conversation about her bringing forward some new evidence, which I think to a lot of people, myself included, the immediate alarm bells went off of like, here's a woman facing a 20 year prison sentence, trying to curry favor with the president notorious for pardoning people guilty of serious crimes. It's probably not a coincidence. That struck me. I'm curious to hear what you guys think about the arrangement we might see unfolding in real time right now. I'm staying away from it. I don't think I want to make a prediction on it.

I think if we're trying to extend the principle that I think we just arrived at of amplify the things that make the administration look strong, deny full court press, deny everything that seems like it could be incriminating. We've seen that strategy work. I'll pre-stage a little bit where I think we're going to be going in a couple of minutes about Russia. If you just deny, deny, deny, eventually your opponent will overstep and then the whole thing gets muddied. How that could apply to Maxwell? Just say, it was her, not me, her, not me, her, not me. And then as soon as there's an implication that goes too far, then maybe you consider pardoning.

But that's a branch that maybe I'd want to... I'd be afraid to crawl out on. I don't want to make a call'd be afraid to crawl out on. I don't want to like make a, make a call about how this is going to go. It just seems so early. We don't know what she's going to say. And we don't know what the DOJ has. And we don't really know what's going to be released or what the journals can release. There's a lot of moving parts. And I, I feel like I don't have a good confident feel for what's going to come next. Yeah. I don't, I don't have a good, confident feel for what's going to come next. Yeah, I don't have any insider information here.

I am watching this with a fair amount of interest now, having ignored the Epstein story for so long, so safely. Now being kind of forced to talk about it and pay closer attention to it in the past month or so. I'm curious to see how this turns out. I'm confident the administration would like to avoid the kind of circus that would occur if there were some kind of congressional, even remote hearing with her and being able to have the DOJ go in and talk to her and see what information they can possibly extract. I mean, she's been in prison for some time now,

been sentenced a while ago. If there was some new information that she had, it feels odd that her lawyers would have sat on it for this long. I think she trying to leverage the opportunity to the extent that she can, which makes a great deal of sense here, but I have no idea what's likely to come out of this.

Will be interesting to see. I think, yeah, I mean, I suppose it seems unlikely to me that she gets any kind of pardon or clemency. I mean, regardless of what, you know, regardless of what they might get out of her in the way of helpful evidence to prosecute anybody who should be prosecuted. Let's suppose some world where Todd Blanche meets with her and there is some sort of new narrative or evidence that comes out of that meeting that the DOJ can

pursue and some powerful person is rightly brought to justice for participating in this sex trafficking or something. Even in that world, somebody around Trump is going to tell him, don't pardon Ghislaine Maxwell. She was the ringleader of, she is the living number two to the number one who's dead, who organized a decades-long sex trafficking organization based on what she's in prison for. I feel like it would be political suicide. Like shutting down the Epstein files was a dumb enough move to attempt given where the base is. I think pardoning Glenn Maxwell would be like orders of magnitude worse from my perspective. Like is there a world where that's accepted? I don't know how that gets framed positively. I mean, it's just what... This is how I'm seeing it.

If I'm trying to follow some tea leaves and look at old patterns and make a guess, it would be right now Trump's suing the Wall Street Journal for libel, for a report that we're pretty sure they must have sourced very carefully because they expect it to get sued. Let's say something comes out where they made some small inaccuracy or they listened to a report from somebody that ended up not being fully reliable, not even in their main claims about Trump being in the Epstein files just by name and Bondi telling Trump about that and the decision not to release it. But just in something ancillary to the whole investigation, that happens and at the

same time we are hearing about other people who are linked to this and there's some other big bad. If these files eventually are coming out and we see somebody else, it can be an enemy. And then the water start getting muddied. It becomes easy for Trump to say, they keep pushing on this. There's something here where Democrats

have Trump derangement syndrome. Everybody's trying to say, this is a big scandal and it's not. We know that it was some creepy people from a couple of years ago. It's not Trump, it's some other villain. This is a witch hunt. It's a witch hunt after me, it's not Trump, it's some other villain. Uh, this is a witch hunt. It's a witch hunt after me.

It's a witch hunt after everyone. And then just doing blanket pardons because I'm remembering a couple things. One Russia, but two, it was inconceivable for just imagine January 7th, 2020. Imagine saying Trump's going to pardon everybody who is involved in this. It It felt like and I think some very smart people said at the time the end of Trump and wasn't. So things change and it's hard to anticipate how they will. Like I said, I'm not confident about this read at all. I'm just thinking about if similar patterns were to recur, how would that happen? What they would look like?

I think that's what that looks like. I mean, that brief history, Ari, just leaves me even further confused about what's likely to happen here. It's just so hard to make a call. The kind of politically prudent, reasonable thing to do is not necessarily the thing that this particular administration will do. And the consequences aren't necessarily going to be what we might imagine they are. And I mean, there's so many different dynamics playing out.

But interestingly, while Democrats are obviously quite happy to try and exploit the situation, they're still not at the forefront of this. To the extent we're talking about the story, to the extent we're paying attention to Maxwell potentially testifying the people who are most interesting to talk to about this, the people who are kind of at the center of the story aren't AOC, it's Nancy Mace. And that's the part of this entire narrative that I find most interesting, is the opposition would love to exploit these things, is making efforts to try and do so, but for the most part is able to do so while keeping pretty clean hands.

So that's it. The whole thing is remarkable, but maybe it's consistent with Trump taking up so much of the oxygen in the room in virtually every single media narrative. What he's doing, how he's responding to things is the central matter of importance. What kind of maneuvering is happening in opposition to him is oftentimes far less consequential and less interesting. And just reactive. I mean, next week it's going to be August 1st. We're going to be sitting here talking about tariffs.

Yeah. Yeah, probably. I mean, the other thing I guess that's relevant to this story that's sort of happening alongside of it is the kind of revamping, revision, revitalizing probably is the best way to put it. Rejuvenating. Refurbishing. I don't even know what you're getting ready to say.

Well, of the kind of Russiagate hoax stuff that's sort of happening side by side with this. I mean, we talked about this a little bit off mic before we got on. I think the allegation centrally from the left is that Trump is trying to distract everybody from the Epstein stuff in order. I mean, some people on the right are making this accusation too, by entering in a rejuvenation of the Russiagate story and this idea that he's going to go after Obama finally and put people in prison for what they did to him during his first term. And I think that certainly deserves some mention here because we're, again, watching this really bizarre moment where the Trump administration is both trying to move on from the Epstein stuff while feeding the base some red meat, like, Galean Maxwell is coming in, they're going to release

transcripts from grand jury testimony. The House is kind of revolting against Trump by not doing what he wants them to do and trying to pass some sort of legislation to bring Epstein files to light. And then at the same time, there's this new sort of quote unquote investigation that the administration and many Republicans are trying to give momentum to, which is this idea that newly unearthed information from the 2016-2017 time period is so incriminating and so damning for President Barack Obama and former Obama White House officials that heads are going to roll and there will be criminal indictments coming soon.

I think it's probably worth setting the table here. So I went on Breaking Points this morning. I know we have a lot of listeners who listen to Breaking Points. It's a great podcast. I like what they do over there. Obviously, when it comes to ideological diversity, anybody who's doing that is somebody who I respect given our work. I went on just to talk about what we actually got this week from Tulsi Gabbard and what we didn't get. I think maybe I'll try and just set that table briefly. And then I'm

curious to hear from you guys sort of what stands out to you. So we published a podcast and a story earlier in the week about the first release, which basically had some details that we didn't have before about the back and forth between Obama and intelligence officials. There was a presidential daily briefing that got pulled by the FBI that was going to say Russia didn't have the ability to hack election infrastructure effectively to alter votes. And before that presidential daily briefing went to Obama and got published and would have gone public. It got pulled and this sort of task force was put together.

There was an intelligence community assessment that was done that definitely gave voice to a understanding of what had happened or what was happening in the election that said Russia was interfering, they were trying to help Trump, and a lot of this was being directed by Putin. The fact that Obama was involved in putting together this ICA and how quickly it came out and all this stuff is seen as a central scandal in the Russia gate story. We've known a lot of that for a while, but the things that Gabbard released this week

were some email exchanges, some like, you know, contemporaneous documents, whatever, that sort of affirm basically what we understood to be true before. The Obama White House was leaking like a sieve to the press. There was sort of this circuitous relationship happening where they're passing information back and forth and the media is hyperventilating more and more

about the story. What happened after we published that newsletter was that Tulsi Gabbard released a report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the HPSCI, who had spent, according to them, 2,300 man hours reviewing this ICA that the Obama administration released in January of 2017. We had never gotten this HPSCI review previously because it was buried by Adam Schiff and the Biden administration basically didn't let it come out. Edits were happening on it up until 2020, which is why the Trump administration says

they never released it during his first term. The primary bombshell in this report, if there is one, was that the initial report said that the assessment that Vladimir Putin developed a clear preference for Trump was based on scant, unclear, unverifiable intel, including the quote unquote fragment of one sentence of a human intelligence source. So basically listening to a partially spoken sentence from one single human intelligence source that five of the CIA authors read in five different ways and was initially left out of the ICA and Bren in the CIA director at the time put

it back in. To me, this is probably the most damning thing that the report had. There was a lot of other stuff in it, but I think this is the one that caught the most attention, rightfully so. And, you know, there's this weird thing happening where it's like, this stuff is important and it looks very bad for the Obama administration. And there's a world where like the investigation into Donald Trump was predicated on kind of,

I mean, basically conjured up really shoddy intelligence, which is a scandal. Like he became the incoming president. The weird thing, the thing that complicates it, that's sort of hard to hold at the same time, is that a lot of the stuff that was in that ICA, that initial assessment, ended up being true. This report that Gabbard released this week, where it includes all this information about evidence that Putin didn't actually care who won, and that's what the intelligence community

had assessed back in 2017, even though it ended up becoming public, was a narrative totally different from that. This report also says they had all this damning intelligence on Clinton, including that she was like taking tranquilizers and having violent mood swings and that they never released any of that because they presume she was going to win. They wanted to damage her, but not damage her so badly that they didn't like destroy the relationship. On the first page of this report, I'm just going to read this section and then I'll pass

it to you guys to talk a bit about this. But on the first page of this report, I'm quoting directly here. It says, most ICA judgments on Russia's activities in the US election employed proper analytic tradecraft and were consistent with observed Russian behavior. The key judgments found to be credible, and this is in the report that Gabbard just released. One, President Vladimir Putin ordered conventional and cyber influence operations, notably by leaking politically sensitive emails obtained from computer intrusions. Two, Putin's principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the

U.S. democratic process and to weaken what the Russians considered to be an inevitable Clinton presidency. Three, Putin held back on leaking some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration." The report saying that a lot of the information we got at the time and some of the basis of launching the investigation into Trump-Russia collusion was bullshit, but also Russia did try to throw the election. They are interfering the election. They use conventional cyber influence operations. The tradecraft that the ICA used to make these judgments was consistent and proper analytically and lined up with all the

other things the intelligence community has seen. So it's not like a simple black and white thing. We kind of actually have to hold a few things at the same time. And now we have Tulsi Gabbard packaging this as proof that she is going to refer Obama to the DOJ for treason. So that's where we are. So take the baton and go. I mean, yeah, I just like it's legit stuff packaged in the most absurd kind of overwrought like conspiratorial way possible. I mean, there is no crime that they're going to get Obama for. Like this is a fantasy. But they're talking about bringing him up on charges of treason now, which is like, you know, the ultimate red meat

for the people who crave that kind of thing. Yeah. Obama in the Russian military fatigues. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I think was kind of a nugget of this was actually in that very accurate and strong recap of events. There was a, you did this small little misspeak where he said that Russia was throwing the election for, sorry, excuse me, muddying the waters because, and I think that's the whole game, honestly, is that Obama wanted there to be, and a lot of Democrats wanted there to be that miscue in the mind of the American public. It's very easy to make that miscue. It's the difference between Putin wanted there to be chaos, distrust.

He assumed that Clinton was going to win, so he was ginning up controversy to try to make it seem like the election was in some way invalid. And that versus Putin wanted Trump to win because he was going to be more beneficial to him. That's kind of the whole game. And in this bombshell report from Gabbard, she's telling us more evidence to support the story we already knew. I think that's kind of the thing that we're getting here, unless I'm completely missing the boat and we are all completely missing the boat.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say, I think Camille is reading this the same way, but I'm about to find out, is that we now know that Obama had a meeting on a specific day with specific people. And that's fine because we knew what the result of that meeting was, was here's the narrative that we're going to push. We knew that there's a report that found things about Russia's interference in the election, which we now know what the evidence was that was based on. We know that some information was leaked to the

Clinton campaign from the government and then vice versa. And we know that that was messed up and bad and something to be concerned about in the scandal. And now we know a little bit more about how that happened. It doesn't really tell us, it doesn't change the story. It just adds a couple more footnotes. Yeah. There's a lot of different dimensions to this and a number of places where there is some kind of confusing conflation, which is an interesting MCC, that one has to keep in mind. The various uses of the word hacking in certain instances where

it's totally appropriate, like Hillary Clinton's emails were in fact hacked. The election was hacked? Eh, not quite. Was there an attempt to influence the direction of the election? Sure. On behalf of a particular candidate, so that one of them would definitely win because of an absolute preference that either that the Russians had, that is less clear. And how do those things line up with the dominant media narratives of the time and the presumptions of the Obama administration and the intelligence community at different times? That again is a somewhat complicated question to answer. Interestingly, my tendency is not to focus on motives first, but I do think it's worth just introducing two separate possibilities here.

Possibility one is that in December of 2016, when this meeting is taking place at the behest of Barack Obama, who knew he was supposed to get a particular briefing, a presidential daily briefing, that was going to suggest that the intelligence community had reached a pretty uniform opinion that the Russians weren't really having any particular influence on the election and weren't trying to do something to influence the election, or at least to hack the election. Again, here's the conflation and the confusion here. They get together and the direction that they receive from the president, and there's no really ambiguity about this, is I want you to give me your best assessment of exactly what we know about any kind of influence efforts on the part of the Russians. And we should look carefully

at how it may intersect with the incoming administration. And whether or not it was said that explicitly, the directive, I think, was pretty well understood at that point. And the reporting that would subsequently come out, and this is in, say, March of 2017, just a couple of months removed in the New York Times, which was framed in a fairly generous way as Obama administration rushed to preserve intelligence of Russian election hacking, which is a very generous read on it, was that the Obama administration was making an effort in the closing days in the twilight of the administration to ensure that what they knew and suspected might be possibly true about Trump's relationship with

Russia was generally distributed throughout the intelligence community and readily available to people so that it couldn't be suppressed by the incoming administration if there was some guilt on their part. That is a really interesting thing for an administration to do, which effectively, whether they mean to or not, does in fact kneecap this incoming administration. It does, in fact, create a cloud of suspicion and perhaps intensify suspicion about this incoming

administration. And there's really no hair splitting about that. I do think, however, it matters whether this was done with full knowledge that this was highly unlikely and dubious or with the belief that there might be some material smoke here, that there is more than enough reason to believe that some of Donald Trump's dodgy associations at the time, and he did have some. I mean, people like Paul Manafort were in his circle. Don Jr. was taking meetings with Russians, and it would turn out with additional time

to spend investigating these things, that they weren't necessarily as nefarious as they seemed at first blush. But all the same, these things were in fact happening. Do you not take these steps? Is it wildly inappropriate to have a meeting where you pull together things like this? And to the extent you're doing something like that,

and you're doing it to the extent, again, we're talking about classified information and intelligence briefings involving the president. I wouldn't expect you to have full knowledge of all those things in real time reading public. But it is documented. There are meeting minutes that we're reviewing now and email communications and correspondence that we're reviewing now to classify things isn't to put them in a deep black box that the new administration will have no access to. It's to actually document them that's there. There is a paper trail that can be followed.

And so far as I can tell, the things that have been released don't suggest that they knowingly attempted to deceive anyone. There are indications of kind of sloppiness. There is fair reason to believe that some of this could have been politically motivated, but a nefarious, treasonous conspiracy seems to go a bit too far. Quite frankly, I think the Trump administration and Tulsi Gabbard at the moment are, in fact, making a pretty substantial mistake because to the

extent there are people who were in the intelligence community at the time who did things like perhaps lie under oath in different circumstances or otherwise mislead people or generally just not do their job very well, some scrutiny would be very appropriate. But the appropriate way to go about adjudicating these questions is the kind of thing that you get with the Church Commission, like a meaningfully bipartisan effort in Congress where you've got Democrats and Republicans at a high level having sober conversations about what's going on here. It's not Tulsi Gabbard in a press briefing reading rather scandalous information kind of into the public record for the very first

time about a very high profile political opponent insinuating that this person is in fact mentally unwell and is getting all sorts of therapeutic help. That was a deliberate choice that was made in that meeting. And asked direct questions about, well, what is the smoking gun here? What are we supposed to take away from this? DNI Gabbard, she doesn't have an answer for that. Instead, it's, we just gave you 200 pages.

We hope that you'll read it all and report on it truthfully. But, oh yeah, did you know that Hillary Clinton was getting tranquilizers? Really important note that we want to make sure you take away from this. It is impossible to escape the perception that they're deliberately trying to kind of exploit this for political advantage and gain and to distract from some of the other difficulty that they're under at the moment. But it's also really hard to see that they have, it would be very hard to claim that they've substantially, well, that they have sufficiently substantiated

the charges of treason, which again, very dire charges. It would be hugely consequential if it were true. And I think that the conservatives who say, well, they did it to us first, here we go, are missing the mark here. Like it's a, it's a profound error and I would love to see the country be, be placed on stronger footing here. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

We'll be right back after this quick commercial 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 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 ocs.ca and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile. Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, the US, and Mexico for just $39 a month. Plus, get a one-time use of five gigs of Roam Beyond data. Conditions apply. Details at freedommobile.ca. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't know what to do, but just laugh at the trees and stuff.

I mean, Sagar and Jette asked me this today on our interview, like, tell me a little bit about what it would look like for the Trump administration to charge Barack Obama with treason. Oh my gosh. And I was like, I literally don't have the imagination to explain that to, like, I'm sorry, that's my honest answer. Andrew McCarthy, who I think has been awesome on this writing a national review, a guy who wrote a whole book about this in the framework that this was a scandal and that Obama tried to destroy Trump's presidency in concert with the Clinton campaign, that is the framing

of his book. He's been sort of just like, like Gabbard is undermining the project of making people take this seriously by doing all this nonsense. What he said in his piece today was like, putting aside that Obama's insidious actions were not crimes, that he was not charged by Durham after a four-year investigation, and that any possibility of indicting him for 2016-2017 actions lapsed under the five-year statute of limitations years ago, which is for conspiracy. Does Gabbard disagree with Trump that former presidents must have immunity from prosecution? Which is also a funny point that Trump has been arguing that for years.

So it's so absurd. I do think it's worth maybe stating, for me at least, I'll kind of state my theory of the case here. If you were to ask me to summarize what we now know as we sit here in 2025 about the sort of Russia collusion story and what happened, to me, it's that the Obama administration was working with the Hillary Clinton campaign to damage candidate Trump. One of the ways that they thought they could do that

was by ginning up a lot of concern about his connections to Russia. That the Trump campaign then gifted them on a silver platter, really legitimate concerns, like the Trump Jr. meeting with the Russian lawyer, Donald Trump himself, Russia, if you're out there listening, we want the emails, all the financial... Papadopoulos. Yeah. Papadopoulos, all the weird financial connections, whatever. George Flynn talking to the ambassador, which ended up being not serious or criminal or in any way, but there was stuff there.

And I think to your point, Camille, the Obama administration had legitimate beliefs. We know that actually, because they went to a FISA court before the election was over and they stated their case to the court, which was, we think Russia is behind the hacks of the DNC emails, that they're leaking them through WikiLeaks, that they wanna hurt Clinton, and we think that they're working with the Trump campaign.

And that was, you know, that was based on shoddy intelligence, like the Carter Page warrant and the surveillance of him we now know was based on this weird intelligence community leaking to the press, the press writing these stories, the intelligence community using the stories that the press produced to go get this warrant. And there was the edited email from the FBI lawyer, client-smith, there was all this really shady stuff to get the FISA warrant. But the administration believed the thing that they were,

we have every reason to believe they believed that Trump might be involved, and they certainly thought that Russia was conducting this cyber intrusion on the Clinton campaign. The intelligence assessment that Obama ordered that came happened months after they did that. So it wasn't like Obama gathered them all together and then told them to concoct this theory.

They had the theory, they were acting on it previously. The further complicating part is they do all this stuff. There's all this shoddy intelligence going around. It's clear that President Obama is a part of this. The Clinton campaign, we now have contemporaneous documents, emails, communications. The Trump-Russia connection was critical to their campaign strategy. We also know that because you can go back and watch these debates where Clinton is calling Trump a Putin's puppet and all her tweets are about Trump-Russia stuff. I

mean, we know all that. So there's this like, now we have the Clinton campaign using the intelligence, the shoddy intelligence from the Obama administration to concoct this story. They're both just feeding everything to the press. The media is in a frenzy. And then Trump gets elected. And then all the stuff that the Obama administration leaves behind, intentionally, which Camille, you sent me that fantastic article from 2017 where the New York Times piece by a reporter who maybe will get on the show, about the Obama administration ensuring that the paper trail was preserved so that the intelligence apparatus and the incoming Trump administration couldn't bury what they felt like they had found, launches the Mueller investigation. And it's all sort of on

this weird, crappy, well-coordinated intelligence, whatever you want to call it, coup against Donald Trump. And then the investigation that Mueller does and the investigation that Durham does and the investigation or the report that John Ratcliffe, the current CIA director under Trump just issued, all confirm that Russia actually did try to interfere in the election, that they did prefer Trump to Clinton, that they did what they could to damage Clinton, but not too much because they presume she was going to win. That story is generally still true, even though all the suspicion and stuff and all the public mania and speculation that happened in 2016, 2017 was based on a lot of really crappy intelligence.

That's basically the story that I would tell. And to some people, I think that is, I understand why many people view that as like an unbelievable scandal of massive magnitude. Like a sitting president used the intelligence apparatus. People's lives were ruined. I mean, Michael Flynn got railroaded and his life was basically destroyed. People like him, lesser known people like him, had their careers destroyed, their families ripped apart. They were on, Rachel Maddow

was doing 50-minute bits about them, framing them as Russian spies. A lot of people suffered, and Trump's first term was marred the first couple of years, for sure, by this investigation. It slowed him down. It's not why he got impeached, which Tulsi Gabbard claimed absurdly. You know, he got impeached for separate reasons, but like, it did hurt him. Twice. Twice, yeah. So like, you know, and at the same time, I don't think Obama committed treason,

and I think that like the right vastly overstate some of this stuff too. So it's just, I'm sorry, you can't explain this in three sentences and that's just kind of the reality of where we are. That's actually, I mean, that is what a great line. I'm sorry, you can't explain this in three sentences. Is actually an apt description of so many

of the controversies that we've found ourselves stewing in for weeks and weeks and months and months. Over the past decade plus that Donald Trump has been kind of at the forefront of American politics, even for the four years that he wasn't in office, he was there in the background in the January 6th proceedings. And certainly once he actually declared and started running for office again and through his various criminal prosecutions. And I will say, I'm someone who was exceedingly critical of the Russian collusion narrative

very, very early on. The reason I recall that 2017 story is because at the time, I recall reading the story and seeing this picture of Barack Obama with his arms crossed and this pensive look on his face looking down and thinking to myself, God, that is a really generous way to frame what the president is doing now. I don't even know that it's nefarious. What I know is that it's strange. It's unprecedented to have

an administration doing that, to do an incoming administration. All these things are incredibly strange, but it is the case that they're all really complicated. I do think it's worth really fingering the various criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump, the exaggerations of what we knew at the time, what we suspected, the cloud of suspicion that would oftentimes become the other shoe is about to drop, very prominent Democrats who would routinely suggest that we finally have it, we've got it, we're going to nail them now, only to never, ever deliver on that.

And none of that justifies the excesses of the Trump administration circa 2025. And there are plenty of them and we could kind of go through and detail all of those things. But it does presage it in an important respect. And there are very few times where I'm reading stories about the current goings on where I don't wonder, God, what would things have looked like if Donald Trump had just won reelection in 2020?

Like, it would have been a tremendous, I mean, the world would be dramatically different. And also, what would things have looked like if some of those prosecutions and investigations into Donald Trump, some of which could have been somewhat legitimate. In other cases, I think they were a lot more politically motivated than is generally appreciated. What if those had proceeded differently? And there'd been a real determination to do things in a way that was above board and seemed impartial if the January 6th Investigum committees,

for example, had been conducted in a truly bipartisan way? And that's not to cast aspersions narrowly at the Democrats. I'd say there were lots of Republicans who didn't want to take an honest look at January 6th at the time. We'd probably be in a very different position. And the question I find myself wrestling with, am I nostalgic for a time that will never come back again when Congress did things in a reasonable way

and you could at least have a hope for that bipartisan seeking of truth and an attempt to try and put us on a firmer position when partisanship wasn't everything and when all of the power hadn't just been devolved to the presidency and everyone else kind of throws up their hands. I'm also beginning to wrestle with another weird conundrum, which is of all the things that are currently going on, the one thing that seems capable of breaking the kind of partisan stranglehold that the president of the United States has over his own party, which has given him a lot of control over Congress, which is controlled

by his party. The one thing that might be able to dislodge that is the Epstein case, which is in the controversy inspired by his and his administration's mishandling of the disclosures related to the case. That is very odd to think about. There's a lot of strangeness going on here and a lot of questions about what it all means and where we shake out. Quite frankly, from my standpoint, what even a good outcome here looks like for the American people in terms of greater transparency

and a healthier politics. Yeah, I'm trying to catch my breath. Trying to catch my breath. It's 20 minutes since I spoke a word. I've been in listening mode. The there's too much for me to even respond to. Isaac just gave us a five-year storyline. He just gave us a big theory about how

to think about the future and compare it to the past. The only thing that I don't think I can reformat any of what you guys said or add to it. So I think just to give a third thought, which is to try to give some perspective about the moment in relation to the claims that scandal or treason, to the idea that this moment is more partisan, we're dominated by an executive more than we've ever been in our lives. That I think there's a human tendency to while we're on a trajectory, think while we're at the peak of it, that it's going to extrapolate forward, but it's actually peaking.

Right now, if you were to ask me, when will the president's powers relative to the executive's control or dominance over the other two branches, when will that peak? My answer would be March 2025. I think that we are already seeing Trump want to go through Congress with budget rescission, with passing bills. We're already seeing the courts putting firmer guardrails on his opening salvo when he came into office. We're already seeing interpartisan divides spring up that are questioning Trump's stranglehold of his party, like you were saying about Epstein.

I'm less confident to say we've seen the peak of Trump's control of the Republican Party, but I'm saying that if we think about it in terms of what we've already witnessed and felt, we may have seen that peak. And that the future of partisan or interpartisan discussion may be getting better and not as an optimist view, but as a view of like, at a certain point when you are so far down, there is no farther down to go. So up from here is the only thing that I would add. Good. All right.

We've got... I'm feeling more optimistic, Ari. Thank you. Yeah, a little more optimistic. We're about the hour mark and we've got a few other topics I want to touch on. So I'm going to do something on the fly here. I'm going to invent a little closing segment on the fly here. I've done before on this podcast a six pack of topics where I basically put a clock on

for a quick six pack. I've got three that I want to cover before we get out of here. One of them is some of the responses to Ari's excellent climate change piece. And there's a couple of comments here that I'd like to get into and hear Ari respond to. The second is the Hunter Biden- I'm not prepared at all. Let's go. The second is the Hunter Biden Channel 5 interview, which I mean, an absolute banger. One of the wildest interviews I've ever seen in a lot of ways, and I just want to talk about briefly. And then the third one is this guy who went on the Jubilee show with Mehdi Hassan

and got fired for basically calling himself a fascist and downplaying the Holocaust. I'd like to have a little cancel culture dialogue with you boys. So, yeah, the first thing that I want to do is touch on the climate piece. And we'll go there first since we've made Ari sit in silence for 20 minutes and listen to us talk. And we've done it to Camille,

and we've done it to you too. Yeah. So first of all, I will just say I thought this was an awesome piece and I was really proud to publish it. And one of the overarching pieces of feedback that we got, including the top comment on the article now, which is awesome, it's very rare the top comment on an article is something positive, but in this case, it's somebody saying, I studied climate science and actually a student of one of the guys that we cited in the story saying, this is the best climate change piece I've ever read. And we heard that from a lot of people. I saw in the inbox, we got a lot of people writing in, both people who were like,

I'm a climate scientist or I work at NOAA or something, and this is such a good breakdown of where we are and what's happening. And then other people who were just normies like me reading it and saying, I feel like I have a much better understanding of this. Thank you. But there was a criticism that I want to highlight that I thought was interesting and I'm curious to hear Ari talk about. So this came from a reader who they called themselves New Cavendish on the, that was the username that they used. And I'm just going to read what they said. They said, this is a very interesting, this is very interesting

and all the nuances are useful to understand. However, it does not change the basic problem. Global warming is real, getting worse, having economic and sociological effects, making some places uninhabitable and stoking migration, and taking reasonable action now to mitigate the damage. Transition to clean energy could make a real difference while saving something like current developed world living standards. The problem is that any rhetoric that appears to tone down the problem, a quote unquote problem, but not a catastrophe, will be seized upon by the ill-intended climate skeptics who purport to think there is no problem

or that the problem can't be addressed to stop or even reverse progress toward the energy transition, which could transform the problem into something actually resembling a catastrophe. Basically accusing Ari of doing this in his piece. Think of the little children now in kindergarten. What will they face if they live as they should pass 2100? We owe it to them to do whatever we can to reduce the problem and avoid the catastrophe. It just occurred to me, by the way, do we say 2100, 2100? How do we talk about that year?

I literally don't know. We'll cross the bridge when we get there, if we get there. Will we? Yeah, I might. I'll be 109. Do the math on that. Question is just for me to respond to that comment. Yeah, I'd be curious to hear to respond to that comment. Yeah, I'm curious to hear you respond to that comment because I think this was the most

highly rated one on the article. I actually see that you replied to it briefly in the comment section, but it was a sentiment that I think was widely shared among our readers like, oh, well intentioned piece Ari, but you're still giving fodder to all the climate skeptics and people who think that this isn't a big deal and we don't have to do anything about it or can't fix it. Yeah. I think there might be a philosophical difference of opinion between how I think about conversing

with people who disagree with me and how people like this commenter do. So something that I said in response to this was to the effect of I don't think that pieces that deliberately lean into alarmism or that heighten the worst case scenario actually help. I think they hurt because I think it gives people who are skeptical reason to be skeptical. A lot of the people who are skeptical, and this is, I watched this flat earth documentary, which I love the way it ended, uh, where the, there was a science conference where somebody who's a Flat Earther challenges people who are like scientists in this conference and is like getting jeered. And one of the scientists said, that person is a scientific thinker. They're challenging a model and they're trying to ask questions and probe a theory.

Somewhere along the way, we as a community lost them and that's on us. It's not on them. I think about that all the time when we read comments and feedbacks, questions, criticisms from climate skeptics. They're skeptics because they asked a question and they did not get a satisfying answer. When you tell people who ask a good question, who don't get a good answer, that they're actually asking a bad question and that they should feel ashamed, you're not making the problem better, you're making the problem worse.

So my philosophy is, what's the question that we're asking? One of them, I'm just going to give an example from a reader that I've been corresponding with who said, they are challenging this theory of global warming. I always ask anytime somebody's skeptical of it, I say, it's a pretty tight theory. So tell me where you disagree with it. It's pretty, the tightness is, we've observed that the earth's getting warmer.

We know that greenhouse gases cause the earth to, like they insulate heat on the planet at the surface, and they make the planet warmer over time. We know that emissions from humans have caused those same gases to increase proportionally in the atmosphere. It's a logical conclusion to say those emissions are causing warming and that warming is causing global or climate change in general. Where do you disagree?

This person said that they disagree with the temperature readings and they gave me good reasons. They said, if you look back at how we were taking temperature readings in the 40s, they're near airports, places that are close to urban heat islands where these temperatures are going to be exaggerated. We haven't corrected for that in a way that is satisfactory. And I think that we have seen in my lifetime some cooling, some times when the earth has gotten cooler and some winters that were harsher.

This isn't like a person who's older than I am, so they have a deeper personal memory. And they said this warming that we're feeling right now could just be a neutral correction. And I was happy to engage with that. And there's reasons why we know that the earth is getting warmer. We have corrected for those readings.

We can corroborate that the earth's getting warmer through secondary side effects. Like one of the best ones is something called the cherry blossom curve, where you just look at how that what day of the year the cherry blossoms in Kyoto have bloomed every season and it's been getting earlier and earlier. Not direct information, but secondary information that all supports this as well as like ice core data. The list goes on and I'm not the

expert in temperature readings, but I've talked to them and that's the answer that they give. So I think it's better to give that response rather than tell somebody that they should be afraid of the worst possible thing, which I think this comment is doing a little bit of. They're saying there's going to be catastrophic warming. I hope our kids live to 2100. And when I spend several weeks talking to climate experts and asking them about their predictions and they're telling me three and a half degrees of warming, this is not a great outcome. It's something where we think there's going to be major effects because of this low-lying island nations are going to be very impacted.

Some of them may not exist and there's going to probably be massive migrations, probably be changes in the way that we're growing crops. We don't know the effects of that. Saying that we do is irresponsible. And implying that therefore, because of the knock-on effects, our children aren't going to be able to grow up in a stable world is doing that exact thing that I'm concerned about. It is creating a narrative that people can say, I don't think I'd buy that.

And it's tough to say why, but I'm seeing article after article tell me this. Therefore, something is just not adding up to me. And I think there's more to the story than they're telling me and I doubt it. And it's hard for people to draw that reasonable conclusion to say exactly why. Some people can, a lot of people can't, but it's a reasonable thing to be skeptical. And I think that's the way that I end is anytime that there's somebody who's skeptical of something where I think they're wrong, I wanna ask the question with them because if they're right, then that's a big deal.

But if they're wrong and I'm confident, I should be able to find out why, and then we should be able to have a conversation together. Well said. There's like 9 million things I'm tempted to respond to in there, but I put five minutes on the clock for your answer and you went just slightly over, so I'm going to keep my mouth shut and move to the second thing that I want to get to. And I'm going to restart this five minute clock for our next part two of our three-pack,

which is this Hunter Biden interview, which Ari, I don't know if you actually ended up getting a chance to watch part of it. I haven't seen this, so I'm going to cede my time to Camille here. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose, maybe it's a little too flimsy, or maybe it's a little

too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect, the pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile. Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, the US, and Mexico for just 39 bucks a month. Plus get a one-time use of five gigs of Roam Beyond data. Conditions apply. Details at freedommobile.ca. Hunter Biden sat down with Andrew Callaghan from Channel 5, who I'm a partisan for Andrew Calligan.

He's from the Philly area. I've been following his YouTube career for a long time since he was kind of a nobody. He's about my age. He does like old school vice guerrilla style journalism and he just kind of kills it pretty consistently. I have literally no clue how he got this interview. I just can't even begin to imagine what happened in the background,

but Hunter Biden sat down with him for like three hours and some remarkable stuff came out of it, including like some really candid Hunter Biden on his addiction and also some really candid Hunter Biden defense of his father just lambasting the Democratic Party, talking about how irrelevant George Clooney was and how all these guys can basically eat shit and die and he hates them and what I mean, it was like some unhinged stuff too. Camille, I'm curious to like, what stayed with you after watching some clips or the full interview

or whatever, just like, I'm very interested to hear. I mean, this was like, in a lot of ways, one of the more revealing accessible moments we've had with the Biden family, which is notoriously closed-knit and not press-friendly, I would say. Yeah. It doesn't take one much to imagine that the Biden White House really didn't want Hunter to be front and center answering a bunch of questions on camera in a context like this or any other context to be quite frank Not because his father didn't love him But because he was deep the liability and perhaps even because there was some concern for what it might mean for hunter personally To kind of amplify some of the criticism he was receiving at the time And plenty of it I think had some merit to it. mean, a lot of the rest of it was deeply unfair.

But to set that aside for a moment, I mean, one, I think that this was just yet another reminder of the central importance of independent media. I heard him refer to himself as a journalist and this as a product of journalism. And I think that's a fair description. It wasn't particularly adversarial at any point. It was a lot of head nodding. And there wasn't an attempt to get into some of the sharper controversies that

have painted Hunter in a bad light, which I suspect was probably important to getting the interview. That said, I think you do learn a fair amount from watching it. Hunter is clearly out to settle a few scores, disclosing information about Nancy Pelosi and what her desires were, and talking openly about people who were very critical and who he feels, and I imagine the Bidens generally feel, betrayed their trust and were disloyal at a moment when they were uniquely vulnerable. And continuing to make this case, which I think is highly dubious,

that Joe Biden was not just kind of capable of doing the job, but capable of winning. Part of the reason why Hunter is the one telling this story now and making this forceful case is because his father is perhaps not really capable of doing it anymore already at this point, which makes it hard for one to imagine him being in office today as president of the United States. So I think that part is very difficult. I mean, I came away from the entire exchange thinking much more highly of Hunter Biden.

I mean, he's competent and he's bright and he could have been a very capable advocate for this administration, even with in even in his compromised position. But I don't think even if they'd kind of let him loose earlier on that he would have changed the outcome of the election. I think once folks saw Joe Biden for themselves out on stage, once they had an understanding of Operation Bubble Wrap, which was the real name that they gave the operation to kind of conceal Biden's decline from the public, and this is them, the administration themselves, I think it would have been impossible for him to get reelected, but it was interesting, compelling, even a bit invigorating

to see someone who has been so maligned and scrutinized have an opportunity to defend themselves and really to do it with a very bad hand, do it in a really capable way. I will say in particular, with respect to his candid talk of drug addiction, I thought it was really good, thought it was compelling, and thought it was honest. I thought his discussion of Burisma was interesting, although I don't know that he completely redeemed himself. But I think the point that he made there around the fact that, you know, I could have done any number of things.

Yes, I took this job, and perhaps there were some issues, but I also just started painting. I mean, what could I do that's kind of more clearly separated from my father's role in the White House, but start to paint? The fact that people start to buy the artwork who are friends of the family and perhaps are politically inclined is another matter. But I do think there's a degree of unfairness in the way that one is going to be characterized

for just going out and trying to make a living on their own. I also think that the level of open corruption that we see with the current administration versus the last one at times would probably make Hunter Biden blush. So it was interesting and compelling. Again, at the same time, I don't think it redeems the previous administration in the way that Hunter might have imagined or hoped it would have. But I'm sure that it inspires a lot of people who had some faith and confidence in them and wanted them to do better and were hoping for a bit of a do-over. Yeah, it's interesting. I would say quickly, because I only have about a minute,

is I was surprised at the way I felt about him leaving the interview, which like you, he was sort of oscillating between these really approachable descriptions of what his life was like and the depths of addiction. And then talking about really complex legal history and they were going off on tangents about certain moments in the civil rights movement and how some of the legal precedent from the Supreme Court then relates to things we're seeing now.

And you're like, oh yeah, he was like a Yale law school graduate. You assume all that stuff is just nepotism and whatever. And then I hear him talk in kind of a long form like this. And it's sort of undeniable that he's a smart guy who has a lot of really interesting knowledge and has witnessed so much this stuff firsthand. I would say the other thing I thought was interesting was he gave a really candid and I thought convincing defense of Kamala Harris. Not convincing in the sense that she was like a good politician or whatever, but convincing in the sense that I believe

that he really loves her. And he said like, she was there for me and my family. She never turned her back on us. And like, you know, basically said said all the stories about her and my dad being at odds were bullshit. And I love her family. And I thought she ran a great campaign. And I think she would have been a great president.

And nothing about the way he said it or approached it struck me as somebody who was giving BS. So the exact quote he gave- Yeah, he didn't have to say anything. Yeah. Yeah. The exact quote was, she did everything that she could to support my dad and to support me and my family personally. I truly love her like family.

I think she would have made an incredible president and I think she ran an incredible campaign. Just very interesting. I'll say lastly, there were some really good, I have to admit, some pretty funny content came out of the interview. Oh yeah. It's an Andrew Callahan special then, some fun, some complicated figure. He's great at that. Yeah. I saw one person tweet that watching Hunter Biden describe the difference between crack and cocaine is like

watching LeBron James talk about basketball. And then it's just this clip of him like doing this incredibly in-depth analysis of the difference with like the chemical difference between crack and cocaine and how it makes you feel. Yeah. Somebody else said, I'm going to call out Lindsay, our associate editor. We shared the interview in the Slack channel and Lindsay was like, Hunter Biden looks pretty good. And I was like, Whoa, Lindsay. Uh, and then there was a really funny tweet that I saw today, which was Hunter Biden looks better at 55 on a steady diet of ketamine and blow than

Brian Johnson looked at 47 after microcalibrating the air in his sleep room where he logs his boners. That is not entirely fair, but sure. Yeah, yeah. But it is just a picture of Hunter Biden versus the guy. For those of you who don't know, Brian Johnson's the longevity guy who does all this insane stuff to ensure that he'll live forever, who's 10 years younger than Hunter Biden and admittedly

doesn't look that much better than him. Yeah, really, really funny stuff. It was a fascinating interview. I recommend it. Like I said, I think Andrew Callaghan does great work. All right, last one in the three pack, and it's another YouTube story, interestingly. We don't really get into YouTube that much on this show, but some bangers out there. This week, Mehdi Hassan went on Jubilee, which is the new YouTube sensation.

For those of you who don't know, there is a fundamental premise. One guy sits in a circle surrounded by a bunch of people who disagree with him on some particular thing. And then, like a buzzer goes off about a claim the person in the middle is making and people run up to a seat sitting across from that person to debate them live one-on-one. And so Mehdi Hassan is the very liberal British American and Muslim, which is relevant here, broadcaster and writer. He has his own newsletter, used to be on MSNBC, and he's been around for a while. And very well known for conducting

really combative interviews and being quick on his feet. And he was surrounded by 20 far right, quote unquote, that's how Jubilee framed it, Trump supporters. And they debated all sorts of things. And in one of these moments that happened, this guy who we found out later, you know, they're not really identified in the show, but there is a guy named Connor who comes up and debates, debates, Medi about something related to immigration. And Hassan, oh no, sorry, it was actually Hassan was defending the claim that Trump is defying the constitution. And then Connor is the one who wins the seat. And he basically argues for autocracy in the United States.

He praises Carl Schmitt, who is the Nazi party political philosopher. He said there was, quote, a little bit of persecution of Jewish people during the Holocaust, which just, you know, that one definitely got my hair on the back of my neck up a little bit. And then Hassan asked him, you're a fan of the Nazis? And Connor says, I frankly don't care about being called a Nazi at all. And then Hassan later says, we may have to rename this show because you're a little bit more than a far right Republican.

What can I say? Connor replies and Hassan says, I think you say I'm a fascist. And he says, yeah, I am. And then he sort of smiles and a bunch of the other far right people in the circle clap. This guy gets fired from his job. Turns out that he's actually a Catholic commentator. It's like how he identifies himself online, Twitter. He's like a Catholic political commentator.

He gets laid off from his job. He actually had like 15 or 20,000 followers on Twitter and people put it together that it's him and he blows this up, starts a GoFundMe, starts raising thousands of dollars because he lost his job. So my little five minute spiel that I'll, or I guess five minute segment that I'd like to engage you guys on is like,

cancel culture, yes, no, good, bad. Should people like this be liable to lose their job for an appearance like this on a YouTube show. I will do mine in 30 seconds, which is, yeah, I think private market working, if I have a, someone works for me who went on some YouTube show that got millions of views and they were like, arguing that the age of consent should be lowered to 12 years old. They're free to have that position. And I'm like, yeah, go ahead. You can believe that, but like, you're not going to work for my company while you share that view and espouse it publicly.

So bye. Uh, that's not cancel culture. That's just like the free market kind of doing its thing, repercussions for your view. So, um, I So I shared that perspective on Twitter. I mostly got support for it, but there are a lot of people saying like, you know, I'm drawing an artificial line and therefore I'm opening the door to this kind of long-term cancel culture culture. So what do you guys think? Yeah, I'm going to go first. First, I got a couple of things.

First is this old chestnut now that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. If you go out and you make an ass of yourself, then people might say you're making an ass of yourself and them saying that is not persecution. It's not reverse persecution. It's just people responding to the thing you did. First, if I'm going to publicly step into the ring with Mehdi Hassan, I'm going to be laced up for that. That guy is good at what he does. I'm going to publicly step into the ring with Mehdi Hassan, I'm going to be laced up for that. That guy is good at what he does.

And I'm going to be prepped. And if I'm not prepped, I'm going to have to face the consequences for that choice. That's number one. Number two, he's not being falsely maligned here. The things that he said are the things that he's on tape saying. Nobody made him say, I'm a fascist or they did a little bit of persecution during the Holocaust.

That's the stuff he said. The third thing is a little compare contrast between what this is and what I think the general narrative of cancel culture was in 2017 to 2020, that era, which is somebody anonymously online, inconspicuously says something that maybe gets taken out of context. I forget the guy's name, but the guy, he was the lead singer for the Long Winters, the Seattle alt rock band, was saying that he was making his daughter try to open a can of beans before dinner and saying, we're not going to have dinner until you open these beans. And then stop tweeting for two hours.

And then people were like, this guy is starving his daughter just to teach her a lesson. And then he comes on five hours later to see that he's been brigaded and has said, guys, I opened the beans for her. We had dinner. I was just making her work through a puzzle and we're kind of enjoying it. And she got a little frustrated because she's six or whatever.

And then like, I tweeted that because I thought it was funny. And then we just like went about our day. You're going nuts. But he got canceled on Twitter. And that like, there's the people who will say something in public and get filmed and not know it.

And then people will find who they are, docs them and then they'll face consequences for something they didn't know they were being filmed for. That's cancel culture. You deciding to go toe to toe with a great debater and saying things willfully that are like the opinions that a lot of people would object to, and then having your employer say,

that's not a good look for our company, that's not cancel culture. That's something different. Yeah, it's sort of like showing up to like a Charlie Kirk campus appearance and debating him and then complaining afterwards that like Charlie Kirk put up clips of him crushing you and all like that.

So, you know, it's like, you literally asked for this. Like you, that is, he is like the right wing Mediasign. You know, like you just begging to get crushed. And at the same, you did that and you were saying like, also Mao was right and we should do more persecution of public intellectuals. If that happens at that same time, right? Yeah. I will say briefly, I have definitely laughed at these Jubilee, um, interactions before. I don't even know what else to call it. You know, um, it's amusing sometimes to watch people get pantsed.

Um, watching Hassan run through everyone at this particular, in this particular, um, event was less than entertaining. Um, and at times deeply depressing. To address the specific question that you raised, Isaac, I would agree this is not in fact an example of quote-unquote cancel culture. I'm someone who's deeply concerned about free speech and free expression, especially, well both the culture in the cultural context and in the formal legal context. I'm an absolutist certainly when it comes to the state, and post and infringing on an individual's right to free expression.

And in general, I support a kind of broad pluralism for individuals, but I believe as well that private companies obviously have to have an ability to decide, yeah, we'd rather not have you work here. I think that is especially true when you're openly advocating for fascism, autocracy, and offering up Apologia for Nazism. This is a bit weird and strange, and we ought to have our right to distance ourselves from you.

I do think ultimately, though, this boils down to a young man making a very imprudent decision to go on television and openly share What he knows to be opinions that are less than savory less than popular and mainstream and sufficiently dangerous for him to advocate for that he uses the pseudonym online.

And almost to the point where he was asked his name and before giving it, like is about to say his pseudonym because he forgets that he's apparently on video now having a conversation with someone that is likely to be viewed by millions and millions of people And I suspect he's somewhat rejecting that that decision today. I Do wonder a bit having watched the the cross-section of people that participated in that that event And I didn't watch the entire thing, but I watched a fair amount of it embarrassingly How representative it representative it is of the extremely online right and the progression of ideas there, I wouldn't call it quite an evolution, but the development perhaps of ideas there

and the things that are catching on. I hope it's not representative because it's not a great showing for them. I agree. I mean, the thing that that was like was, hey, you're calling me a fascist. Sure. Yeah, I'm a fascist. That's what it felt like he was going for, but didn't quite hit. I think he went a little further than that.

I would say the whole of the video, I probably watched 75% of it and I was left feeling very much like what Camille was saying. It's hard to know whether Jubilee just went out and found the most extreme people they could find, or they got a really good sampling of what the next generation of right-wing thinkers and voters is going to look and act like, but I found it fairly disturbing too. I mean, there's just like so much liberalism and historical revisionism and like really genuinely kind of gleeful open disgust for immigrants

and people who aren't, I mean, like, you know, I think like three of the people told Medi like to his face, I want you out. Like you're not an American, get out of my country, basically. And they're not, it's not like they're not doing it to be trollish. Like they are pissed. And I'm not saying that it's like, oh, I'm unaware that that is obviously I know that exists out there, but like, these were people expressing this like, oh, I'm unaware that that exists. Obviously, I know that exists out there, but these were people expressing this in the specific context of a much more fleshed out political worldview that they all sort of shared, which is what I found kind of alarming about. Yeah. Yeah. It's worth watching just because it's a little bit insightful. And I think also,

you get to see some of the stuff that they're arguing. There are certain debate moments where it's really obvious when they're on more solid ground, like stuff about the impact of immigration on these smaller towns or mass immigration and jobs and stuff where they might have points that are really worth wrestling with.

And then where it's really easy for Hassan to sort of just deconstruct what they're saying and make them realize how stupid it is. It was sort of insightful, I guess, in that way. But yeah, you might find it deeply depressing, and maybe we'll feel like you wasted an hour of your life if you watch it. So don't come blaming me if you do that. All right. That concludes our first ever three pack, which I'll make a better name for that and we'll do more of the short segments so we can hit a lot of things. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what

you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile. Get 60 gigs to use in Canada,

the U.S. and Mexico for just 39 bucks a month. Plus get a one-time use of 5 gigs of Roam Beyond data. Condition supply details at freedommobile.ca. What's better than a well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. It's time to complain and I think this might be Camille Foster's magnum opus of grievances

coming out. So, John, you can play the music. We'll save Camille for last. The airing of grievances. Would you believe when I was 18, I had a silver dollar collection? I'm going to go first. I got locked out of mypath.gov, P-A dot gov or something, which is the Pennsylvania tax computer system.

It's like how I pay my taxes in the state of Pennsylvania. And it is shocking how bad some government technological systems are. I've been locked out of this account for literally six months, so I haven't been able to pay my Pennsylvania state taxes. And I've been getting these automated email notices from them informing me that your account has been inactive for six months. So in three months, we're gonna shut your account down that has like all my tax information and logins

and whatever, and all the business stuff related to Tangle. So six months ago, I get that notification and I'm like, all right, I've got some time to deal with it. I like put it on my to-do list. I don't really get to it. Few months later, I get that notification and I'm like, all right, I've got some time to deal with it. I put it on my to-do list. I don't really get to it. A few months later, I got another notification. Now it's like a month out. So I'm like, okay, I gotta solve this.

So I start requesting the password. I forgot my password. I'm requesting the password associated with my username. I'm not getting a reset password email to any of my inboxes. So I'm like, I don't know what's going on. I email the help, wait for weeks, don't get any response. And this goes on for the last six weeks, just like every week I'm getting a new email from the Pennsylvania tax department telling me my account is about to get shut down in X

amount of days and the days are getting shorter and shorter because, you know, I'm inactive. And I keep requesting the password or my username, trying all these different combinations and then getting locked out. And so this week I get a notice that's like, you have 10 days to solve this. And I'm just like, okay, shit, like I need like, I'm doing this today. This will be like the thing I do today. So I call about tax guy, This will be like the thing I do today. So I call up our tax guy. I get him on the phone.

We're like going through our records, trying to find the passwords. So I go to the MyPath website and I haven't tried logging in in months or not months, I guess a few weeks. And I open the MyPath thing and I type in a password one time. One of the ones that we think it might be. And it says it's not the password and it immediately tells me you've logged in, you've attempted to log in too many times, try again later. So like does like the real freeze on your account. So I'm

just like, Jesus Christ. So then I request a new password. And so it sends me and this time for the first time ever, I get the reset email and I'm like, oh my God, we did it. Okay. Click the email to reset my password. I go to reset my password. It asks me, and this time, for the first time ever, I get the reset email. I'm like, oh my God, we did it. Okay, click the email to reset my password. I go to reset my password. It asks me a security question. I answer the security question correctly because it's one of my go-to security questions. I click enter, and then it says, you've attempted too many logins, you've attempted too many like password resets, you've been locked out of

your account, try again later. So now I can't reset my account. So then I call, we call the MyPath tax service, call them up. They we go through this whole process, we're on wait, whatever, we finally get an agent, the agent's like, Oh, are you an LLC or personal? And we're like, Oh, we're an LLC. the agent's like, oh, are you an LLC or personal? And we're like, oh, we're an LLC. And he's like, oh, sorry, I can't help you. I only help people log in who are filing personal income taxes.

I'm just like, really? Yeah. Let me transfer you that department. You're the next person up in the queue. OK, no problem. Transfers me to that department. First thing we hear, automated message. You're the 37th person in the queue.

Please wait while I'm like, god damn it. You're the first person to get to the queue to the queue. Yeah. So yeah, me and this, our dear friend Casey, who does a lot of the financial planning and taxes for Tangle, we literally sit on hold for an hour and a half. And I just spent like three hours of yesterday trying to do this, an hour and a half on the phone with the hold music playing in the background, writing to hold

music, which is a nightmare. And then we finally got an agent on the phone and he's like, Oh, what's your username? I tell him the username and then like two second pause. Okay. I just got you a new password. I'll give it to you. one second. Gives me the password I log in. And I'm just like, that's it? This is all it took? And it took me six months, but the saga's over and I'm logged in and very pissed off that everything about the Pennsylvania system sucks.

He apologized for the wait, sort of, I don't wanna say blamed it on government cuts, but vaguely was like, you know, things have been really tough around here and we don't have the same resources we used to basically. So yeah, that is my grievance for the week is that I had to spend hours and hours and hours over the last few months just just trying to unlock my account, just so I could give the government a bunch of my money, which they really don't deserve

when nothing they build works properly. They just need more of it, Isaac. That's what it is. Yeah, exactly. A few more Pennsylvania tax dollars, and I'll be able to reset my fucking password to log into my tax account. It's a very familiar story.

That's, we were sharing in Tangle Slack a couple of weeks ago this article, this great article in the Atlantic from Chris Collin about sludge, which he refers to as this thing that slows you down when you try to interact with any large organization and how the customer service is always almost intentionally bad. That's the same narrative is like you try it, cancel disconnected, the friction is the point. And then eventually you reach somebody who's like, yeah, I got it. And then they'll help you.

And they're like, where was this person? And the answer is they were hiding and they're hiding on purpose. Not like they were hiding, but the, the labyrinth around them was constructed intentionally and it's, it's, it's bad. Like, I think this is, this is a severe problem. And I think everybody has a story like this, which is saying a lot and it sucks. And I'm sorry it happened to you.

Thanks, man. I appreciate the empathy. All right. All right. You're up. We're going to give Camille last today. Yeah, I can actually go pretty quick here. So I was saying at the beginning of the call call how annoying it would be for a person to complain

about the messages they get on their birthday. So I'm going to do that. A specific kind of birthday message. This one is an email that I received. It's titled, happy birthday from Team Toyota of redacted. I'm going to redact the town name. We'll just call it Springfield. And the email says, on this special occasion,

and on behalf of all of us at Team Toyota Springfield, we'd like to wish you a very happy birthday. Have a great one, that's it. I bought a Toyota from them, I wanna say in 2010, and I'm getting automated messages like this. Just don't do this, stop doing it. I don't want to get emails from businesses wishing me happy birthday or telling me that just for Hanukkah,

and because they noticed I might be Jewish, they're giving me a 10 percent discount on mattresses. I'm not interested in any of that. If you own a business, stop doing this, please. I want to just respond to texts I get from people I know. Yeah. Good. Great.

Great point. No emails about your birthday. Just, I can't believe that's a text message or an email you got. That was an email I got from a Toyota dealership. Yeah, that makes more sense. Yeah. They really care about your birthday. It's not about ripping you back in to buy a new car.

All right, Camille, this is what it's all about, man. These are the moments that we live for. I mean, look, honestly, I've had a rough week. I really severed my finger yesterday. I locked myself out of the office today about an hour before we were supposed to start. But that would have been the time we were actually starting if I had gotten my request earlier because I need to leave here and go directly to the airport for a flight that's already delayed. It's also the week that Malcolm

Jamal Warner died tragically and Hulk Hogan died this morning. So thanks Ari, it's your birthday. You'll have to always be connected to Hulk and Amy dying in America. So I feel like I'm losing my childhood as well. All sorts of things are up in the air. But I struggle with the grievance thing on week to week because I don't know what to complain about. There are many things I could complain about, but I'm trying really, really hard to get optimistic and painful to it. Dude, you got locked out of your office

and almost cut your finger off. I did. And you know what? I will say this. That's key material. When I call the locksmith and I say, how much does it cost? And the first person says, the tech will call you. They'll tell you.

They say, okay. And the tech calls me and he says, I'll be there in 20 minutes. I said, well, excuse me, how much does this cost? Then what kind of lock is it? I'm not a locksmith. I don, okay. And the tech calls me and he says, I'll be there in 20 minutes. He said, well, excuse me, how much does this cost? What kind of lock is it? I'm not a locksmith. I don't know. How to tell you?

He's saying, ah, it's a broken lock. 125 and 150. And I think to myself, what would have to happen for him to give me a $25 discount voluntarily when he arrives. I have to imagine that the actual price is the upper bound and not the lower bound. And not only that, I go from finding out that the price is $150 when I pull out my credit card to pay for this, he says, oh, it'll be a 6% surcharge. 6%? 6%? That's a lot.

3% I can appreciate. I can understand that. I've been a merchant who's accepted credit cards before, 6%. And I ask and he throws up his hands. He doesn't know. So here I am now pressed to complain about something and finding something to complain about. I knew there was something deep in you. But at the same time, I'm really glad that I still have most of my finger.

And I've been told that barring some sort of horrible infection that is painful and perhaps even deadly. It'll probably come off the bandages come off in three weeks and I should be fine It could have been so much worse and I'm glad it wasn't and let me be the first to say hell. Yeah, brother Dude if you if you die from a finger infection, I will pretend I never knew you. That would be the most embarrassing thing ever. I will erase all evidence of you ever working at Tangle if you die of a finger infection. You know what? It doesn't really matter how you go out.

I think that's actually one of the more interesting notes from the Hunter Biden interview was where he talked about the universality of suffering in the context of this interview. Not all of us will actually know what it's like to be loved. What we will all know is pain and anguish and suffering. And when you recognize that essential truth about existence, there's something very humbling about that. And I thought to myself, yeah, not only is that absolutely true, I've had that thought before.

And it is humbling. And it does make you a little bit more conscientious about how precious life is. So even this, in the grievance, I've tried to turn it into something positive and perhaps even inspiring. And if it didn't work on you, well, so much for that. And I'm sorry.

The voice is calling out for you. You'll die soon enough and then you'll understand, or not. A little bit of Ozzy Osbourne erasure. Oh, there it is, see? See, another one. Not mentioning the death of Ozzy Osbourne. Yeah, they always come in threes, man. There's a mistake on my part.

That's the rule, yeah. Yeah. RIP Ozzy Osbourne, never forget. Yes make on my farm. That's the rule. Yeah. Yeah. All right. P. Ozzy Osbourne. Never forget. All right. It's time fellas. Good to see you guys. We'll do it again next week. Yes, I think. And then yeah, and then soon to be newly named and branded podcast. I swear that's happening. Buckle up. Get ready. Take it easy. Take care. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law.

Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kavak and associate editors, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuthuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reedtangle.com. you