Tangle - The U.S. strikes an alleged drug boat, killing 11.

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

On Wednesday, the U.S. military sank a small boat in the southern Caribbean Sea, killing 11 people. U.S. officials claimed the boat was transporting drugs to the United States from Venezuela and alleged the 11 people on board were narco-terrorist members of the international gang Tren de Aragua (TDA). The Trump administration has not produced evidence to support its assertion, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the administration “knew exactly who was in that boat.”Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.Take the survey: What do you think about the recent strike? Let us know.Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a 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. It is Thursday, September 4th, and today we're going to be talking about President Donald Trump's strike on a boat in Venezuela, allegedly a group of narcotans. Harris, the president's calling them, drug traffickers from Venezuela. We're going to break down exactly what happened, share some views from the left and the right. And then, of course, you'll get my take. Before we jump in, two quick notes about some awesome pieces of content we have out and coming up. First of all, tomorrow we're releasing a piece on what the government knows about you. This is an evocative question, I think, to me.

We're going to dive deep on how the government collects data, what they actually know, what it means for you. A reminder, this is a member's only piece. If you want to get it, you can go to readtangle.com forward slash membership. You can get a newsletter subscription to get ad-free members-only content in the newsletter. You can get a podcast subscription to get this show without ads and then also additional premium content that we publish in a feed that's just for members. Or you could get a bundle membership, which gets you everything at an affordable price and a discount

on both, which is my recommendation. You should do that, get the bundle. All of that's on the membership page on our website. Second, a heads up that we just released a video on YouTube about the primary systems in the United States. This is something I talk about all the time. I think primary elections can be confusing. They have different rules from state to state.

The requirements for participating in them are not always clear. And yet, this process is basically the most critical thing in our electoral process and determining who represents us, in Congress. And in our latest YouTube video, which we just released, we broke down the three main types of primary systems. We explore how they've evolved, and we discuss opportunities for reform to encourage greater voter participation. With that, I'm going to send it over to John, and I'll be back for my take. Thanks, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, President Donald

Trump asked the Supreme Court to rule quickly on his appeal of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's ruling that struck down the tariffs he issued under an emergency declaration. Number two, a federal judge found that the Trump administration's freeze of $2.2 billion in grant funding for Harvard University over alleged unresolved anti-Semitism issues on its campus was illegal. Number three, Florida officials said they plan to repeal all vaccine mandates for school children. If successful, Florida will become the first state in the country to do so. Number four, a group of women who said they were victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey

Epstein spoke on Capitol Hill, calling on lawmakers to support the release of further information on the investigations of Epstein. And number five, the House of Representatives voted to re-investigate the January 6th, 2021 Capitol riots, by establishing a special panel chaired by Representative Barry Loudermilk, the Republican from Georgia. The panel is, separate from the original House January 6th Committee, which found that President Trump catalyzed the riots. Can you give us a sense of what the U.S. policy or what you're trying to achieve? And also the vote that you mentioned yesterday where 11 people were killed, what was found

in that boat and why were the men killed instead of taking place? On the boat, you had massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of them speaking. It was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people. And everybody fully understands that. In fact, you see it. You see the bags of drugs all over the boat. And they were hit, obviously.

They won't be doing it again. And I think a lot of other people won't be doing it again when they watch that tape. They're going to say, let's not do this. We have to protect our country. And we're going to Venezuela's been a very bad actor. They've been, as you know, they've been sending millions of people into our country. Many of them, Trend de Aragua, some of the worst gangs, some of the worst people anywhere in the world in terms of gangs. We are paying a big price as a country for the incompetence of the Biden administration.

But think of it. Opened up prisons, drug dealers, drug lords, everything coming out of Venezuela, they sent it. We said, we're not going to put up with it anymore. So Venezuela has been one of the worst actors in the whole group, and we have a group of pretty bad actors. On Wednesday, the U.S. military sank a small boat in the Southern Caribbean Sea, killing 11 people. U.S. officials claimed the boat was transporting drugs to the United States from Venezuela

and alleged that the 11 people on board were narco-terrorist members of the international gang, Dren de Aragua. The Trump administration has not produced evidence to support its assertion, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, the administration knew exactly who was in the boat. For context, earlier in his presidency, President Donald Trump designated Latin America drug cartels as terrorist groups for trafficking fentanyl and other illicit drugs into the United States, and the administration recently escalated its posture against Venezuelan cartels. In early August, the New York Times reported that

President Trump secretly signed a directive authorizing military force against Latin American drug cartels that the administration has deemed terrorist organizations. Later that month, the United States deployed several warships, including three Aegis guided missile destroyers, to the waters near Venezuela to counter maritime narcotics trafficking. Simultaneously, the U.S. State Department increased a reward for information leading to the arrest and or conviction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for violating U.S. narcotics laws from $25 million to $50 million. Earlier this morning, on my orders, U.S. military forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua narco-terrorists in the Southcom area of responsibility.

TDA is a designated foreign terrorist organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, President Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. For months, the Trump administration has been threatening a military campaign to stop cartels from trafficking drugs into the United States. We've got assets in the air. assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us. And it won't. It won't stop with just this strike, Defense Secretary Pete Hankseth said on Fox News.

Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate. The strike is a significant escalation from usual U.S. policy to use the Coast Guard to intercept and board vessels the government suspects to be carrying illegal drugs. There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people. and everybody fully understands that, Trump said, when asked why the alleged smuggling boat was struck instead of boarded. Obviously, they won't be doing it again, and I think a lot of other people won't be doing it again. Legal experts say the law does not support the administration's recent strike.

Trende Aragua is not a military organization, said former State Department lawyer Brian Finnecane. The previous designation of Trende Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization does not itself provide the authority for military force. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro denied that the boat was carrying drugs and said his country's military would be escalating to maximum preparedness to respond to the strike. Today, we'll get into what the right and the left are saying about the strike, and then Isaac's take. We'll be right back after this quick break. Thank you for your patience.

Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. All right. First up, let's start with what the rate is saying.

The rate is mixed on the strike. some question whether it was a proper exercise of executive authority. Others praised Trump for taking decisive action against a clear threat. Still, others warn against a protracted military engagement in Latin America. In National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy asked, are we at war with Venezuela? It is not clear to me that the president's theory is going to fly such that he is free to invoke the laws of war, i.e. to threaten Venezuelan drug dealers as terrorist enemy combatants subject to military force without congressional authority.

at least when the administration can plausibly say the traffickers are in the act of an attack, McCarthy wrote. Consider, for example, the Clinton administration's formal designation of al-Qaeda as a foreign terrorist organization in 1999. By then, this jihadist organization had actually carried out mass murder attacks as opposed to supplying drugs that resulted in the deaths of thousands of American drug users. Yet that mere distinction was not thought sufficient to unleash a large-scale combat operations. By contrast, President Trump is deducing Venezuelan warmaking against our country based on mainly drug trafficking, not military attacks or a declaration of war, McCarthy said. Under circumstances in which it is anything but crystal clear that President Trump is

responding to hostile military force, as contrasted with responding to serious crime, it is incumbent on Congress to act. In our constitutional system, it is Congress, not the president that has the power to declare war. In P.J. Media, Sarah Anderson explored the military action against cartels. Over the last 24 hours, many, and by many, I mean mostly Democrats, mainstream media reporters, and dictators, have gotten upset that the U.S. Navy didn't capture these guys and bring them to the United States for due process, Anderson wrote. When asked about that, Rubio didn't mince words. He made it clear that he and President Trump aren't screwing around with these criminals anymore as he has done in the past. These people aren't drug dealers and gang members, as so many like to call them to downplay their threat. We're not going to benefit from some sort of Nancy Reagan just-say-no campaign.

They are terrorists with a motive who want to wreak havoc on our country and our people through irregular warfare, and they've been doing it for quite some time, Anderson said. We have an administration that knows we're the greatest country in the world and acts like it by stopping anyone who wants to harm us. This may not look like traditional warfare, but we are indeed at war. war. In the American conservative, Eldar Momadov argued Trump should pursue realism and restraint in Latin America. While President Donald Trump is right to identify transnational criminal networks as a threat to the health and safety of the American people, this militarized

approach ignores strategic realities, contradicts intelligence assessments, and risks repeating the errors of past interventionalist failures, Mamadov wrote. The administration's increasingly bellicose actions and rhetoric reveal a baffling lack of consistent. It recently extended the American oil giant Chevron's license to operate in Venezuela, allowing Venezuelan crew to flow to the United States and signaling a cautious opening for calibrated diplomatic engagement. This was a characteristically transactional, but nonetheless, realist approach. And yet, now the same administration floats military intervention, a dramatic escalation that would torpedo any diplomatic progress, endanger U.S. corporate

operations, and undermine regional trust. This whipsawing between the United States. This whipsawing between deal-making and threats of force projects confusion, not strength. It suggests an absence of strategic prioritization. A realist foreign policy requires clarity and discipline, Mamadov said. The administration's objective remains dangerously vague. Would the goal of a military operation be to eliminate cartels? To overthrow the Maduro regime and replace it with a pro-U.S. government? To permanently stem the flow of drugs?

Not one of these is likely achievable through military. means alone. All right, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. The left is mostly opposed to the strike, with many saying it was the wrong approach to the problem. Some say Trump is recklessly expanding the use of military force. Others doubt that Trump will pursue an all-out invasion of Venezuela. In USA Today, Jack Devine argued, Trump deploying U.S. military against drug cartels will drag us into a

forever war. Eliminating the narcotics threat to our nation is a rightful priority for the Trump administration, but using U.S. troops to prosecute the drug war is the wrong tact and with far-reaching consequences, Divine wrote. This war will not end in a ceasefire. There will be no summits or working-level negotiations. It's an insurgency, and the U.S. military must not become embroiled in another forever war when there are viable alternatives to undermine cartels and stem the flow of drugs. We faced a similar narco security challenge several decades ago when the most high-powered cartels were headquartered in Colombia. Back in the early 1990s, I was the CIA's director of the counter-narcotics center and the chief of the Latin American division where I saw how

a robust U.S. government effort dismantled the Cali cartel and Pablo Escobar's notorious Medell Cartel, Divine said. At that time, just like now, the conventional wisdom was that cartels were too powerful to be taken down, but we succeeded because we were willing to trust and equip our Colombian partners with the tools they needed, and because the Colombian forces themselves were the face of the operation, adding a critical stamp of legitimacy to the effort. In the Atlantic, Nancy A. Yousef, Missy Ryan, Jonathan Lemire, and Shane Harris said, Trump is pushing the armed forces beyond their traditional mission. In the near quarter century since the 9-11 attacks,

four presidents have launched strikes against suspected terrorists in at least seven nations. But with this week's airstrike in international waters in the South Caribbean, Trump expanded the counterterrorism campaign's mission to a new part of the world, against a different kind of threat, the author's rip. And in doing so, he drew the military

even deeper into crime fighting, work that has traditionally been outside its scope. Both domestically and internationally, the U.S. armed forces are tackling threats once assigned to police officers, drug enforcement administration agents, coast guardsmen, and other law enforcement personnel. They are escorting immigration officers as they arrest undocumented immigrants in American cities, combating crime with their presence in the U.S. Capitol and stopping drugs at the southern border. Off the shores of Venezuela, U.S. ships are massing in a show of force against drug traffickers,

a threat long addressed through interdiction at U.S. points of entry or in international or U.S. waters, not through lethal strikes, the author said. Terrorist threats are no longer limited to groups or individuals plotting violent attacks against America, and invasions don't just come from foreign adversaries. In the Miami Herald, Andreas Oppenheimer asked, will Trump's naval force invade Venezuela? The Trump administration stated reason for sending the flotilla near the Venezuelan coast is to combat Latin American drug cartels. The president announced on September 2nd that the U.S. naval force had just fired on a drug-carrying speedboat that was headed for the United States, killing 11 alleged terrorists from Venezuela's Trende-Aragua cartel.

But the type of ships and troops deployed by Trump are not the kind normally used for drug interdiction operations, Oppenheimer wrote. Still, there are even more powerful reasons to be skeptical about an imminent invasion. Trump has stated time and again that he is against putting U.S. boots on the ground to fight in foreign wars. It has been one of his main campaign promises. He has not sent U.S. troops to Israel nor Ukraine, which are much higher priorities for the administration, the Venezuela, Oppenheimer said. Trump may be sending his naval force to coerce the Maduro regime in hopes that a Venezuelan military faction will rise against the government in hopes of getting U.S. air cover. In recent years, however, U.S. hopes of military insurrection within Maduro's military hierarchy have not panned out. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take.

All right, that is it for the left and the writer saying, which brings us to my take. So I'll put my cards on the table. I had two pretty extreme reactions to this news. The first reaction, which I know is emotional and irrational, was this. The cartels got what they had coming to him. When you grew up where I grew up, when your entire high school was ravaged by opioids like heroin and fentanyl, the rage builds, the fury builds, dozens of classmates from my high school class are dead now, mostly thanks to tainted street drugs. The number of old friends, teammates, and acquaintances becomes overwhelming. Did you hear about Tim, someone asked, in a strained voice that tells you all you need to know? Oh no. Him too. the death toll it eats at you. It alters your reality. Not just your perception of the fragility of life and what our odds of surviving the day are, but also how wildly misleading terms like low-level offense and non-violent crimes to describe selling drugs can really be. When you've seen so many families destroyed by so many different kinds of overdoses from so many different kinds of drugs off the streets, when so many of your friend's lives have been ruined or ended, you just can't help but have a small part of you. That doesn't much care of some of the people responsible for it end up paying the ultimate price.

Of course, I know this is all emotion. It's the base instinct for payback, the cruelest, worst parts of myself, but it's earnest. I want them, the drug dealers pushing fentanyl, the apathetic pharmaceutical companies getting us hooked on opioids, all the bad guys, to pay. But I also know the higher truth, the one we should really attach ourselves to. Selling drugs, selling drugs, is not a crime worthy of the death penalty. The gang members in question, if they were gang members, are accused of trafficking cocaine, one of the most popular drugs in the United States

and one that is not nearly as deadly as heroin, opioids, and fentanyl that have been plaguing our country. When it comes to overdose deaths, the Sackler family almost certainly caused far more destruction than Tren de Agua. Here, the term white-collar crime is even less sufficient, but because they pursue their crimes in suits and board meetings, the horrors are sanitized. A death penalty for drug traffickers is, of course, even less justifiable when a country dispenses justice unilaterally, missile to speedboat without any judge or jury to determine guilt.

The Trump administration wants us to take it on their word that this boat was filled with narco-terrorists, but top-level officials can't even get their stories straight. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted the boat was headed to do. Trinidad before the strike. Trump said it was coming to the United States. Rubio then changed his story to match Trump's. Even if the boat was indeed filled with gang members bringing drugs to the U.S., our anger over the epidemic of overdose deaths doesn't justify extrajudicial killings.

This moment reminds me of Luigi Mangion, shooting a health care CEO in the back of the head, is payback for the failures of the health care system. We're now supposed to accept an extrajudicial killing, of 11 people because previous tactics haven't been as effective as we wanted. The law or the lives of the people in question be damned. And just as Mangione murdering a healthcare CEO was not helpful to affect change, I think this strike is unlikely to improve the scourge of drug trafficking into the United States. So here is my second fairly extreme reaction to this news.

For a few reasons, I think this attack portends one of the most dangerous periods of the Trump presidency yet. It is not just that he once again extended his executive power as far as he could. It's that his latest reach now includes a body count of 11. First and foremost, Trump just ordered the military to kill 11 people for the alleged crime of trafficking cocaine. Richard Sackler perpetrated what some consider the crime of the century, but we would hopefully be horrified if Trump enlisted special forces to assassinate Sackler without a judge, jury, or trial. Why do we accept this as any less mortifying? Because those killed were Venezuelan and not American?

Because the military did it? Because it happened outside the United States? Second is the precedent this just set. For that, I'll briefly pass the mic to Eric Bome from Reason Magazine. Quote, there is no evidence aside from the Trump administration's claims that the boat was carrying drugs. Even if it was, drug trafficking is not a capital offense and does not carry the death penalty. Even if it did, courts and judges were. theories and legal processes would be proper ways to enforce that punishment.

The president does not have the authority to assassinate suspected drug traffickers on the high seas, even if they are part of a claimed criminal gang. If Trump wants that power, he should ask Congress for a declaration of war against Venezuela or for an authorization for the use of military force against gangs operating in the region. Can we all grasp how absolutely nuts this is? As much as Trump is trying to define these people as terrorist, that isn't even the allegation here. These alleged drug traffickers are not accused of murder

or strikes against U.S. soldiers or putting bombs on public transit. They are accused of smuggling a commonly used drug from Venezuela to maybe the United States. It is just an accusation, one for which zero evidence has yet been made public given to justify the 11 people now dead. Lastly, I worry about what this move pretends

about Trump's state of mind. Once dubbed Donald the Dove, the man who promised to end forever wars and pulls back from foreign entanglements, is now threatening to flex U.S. military might across multiple conflicts. And let's just take a moment to ask how effective that's been. The Israel-Hamas conflict rages on. Russia continues to pummel Ukraine, even after Trump's deadline for Putin passed. The death blow, we were told, joint strikes with Israel dealt to Iran's nuclear capabilities now seem to have been overstated. we even struggled to disrupt the Houthis.

And now, the president is amassing a huge naval fleet near Venezuela. I have no reason to believe Trump's use of the military against Venezuela will stay in the water either. There is increasing chatter and reporting that the administration is seriously considering an invasion of Venezuela to overthrow its leftist dictator Nicolas Maduro, or, alternatively, hoping the presence of U.S. troops will foment a violent uprising that forces him from office. Again, Trump's justification for all of this is the police drug trafficking. So now, a president who promised not to drag us into more foreign conflicts is redefining street gangs as terrorists, redefining illegal immigration as an invasion,

redefining drug traffickers as terrorism, and then treating drug traffickers from a country we are not at war with like they're active terrorists from a country that just attacked us, which to me raises the most frightening thought yet. If his imagination can get us there, where we'll go next? We'll be right back after this quick break. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore?

Fizz is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from Chris in Kahnab, Utah. Chris said there was much skepticism

about accepting government buyout offers for federal employees. Do know if the folks who accepted it have received their pay? I've not heard anything about this in the news. Okay, just background here. in January, the Office of Personnel Management, the OPM sent a memo to over 2 million federal employees titled A Fork in the Road.

You probably remember this. It was the Elon Masadoche, that's very controversial, described higher expectations and in-of-demand for in-office work. The memo offered to buy out federal employees who do not want to return to the office, paying and extending benefits through September 30th to anyone who resigned. The administration hoped the offer would help call the 5 to 10% of the workforce were the 100,000 to 200,000 employees. In July, the OPM reported that 154,000 had taken the administration's deferred resignation offer, and OPM director, Scott Cooper, said the government was on track to shed

300,000 employees by the end of the year. However, some other estimates are report from Senator Richard Blumenthal, estimated 200,000 workers had taken the deferred resignation offer. The partnership for public service was more in line with the OPM. they estimated about 148,000 federal workers had resigned so far. To be clear, we have not seen any reports of people not receiving their pay, which would be a major news story if it happened. There was some messiness with the initial payments,

but most of it was resolved quickly. Members of our staff, including me, personally know a few government employees who took the buyout, and as far as I know, they were all paid what they were supposed to be. As a final note, when we covered the legal battle over the budget cuts being pursued by OPM and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency in February, we noted that roughly 6% of the federal workforce churns organically each year. As we said, at the time, the ones who are quitting now

are likely the ones with the most options. So Musk could have just paid the government's best employees to leave. All right, that is it for your questions answered. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod, and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Thanks, Isaac. Here's your under-the-radar story for today, folks. On Sunday, the family of Robert Mueller, the former FBI director and special counsel who investigated alleged ties between President Trump's

2016 campaign and Russia, revealed that he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2021 and now experiences speaking and mobility issues. The diagnosis did not overlap with his investigation of President Trump's campaign, though Mueller's 2019 congressional testimony about his report prompted questions about his health. Following the disclosure, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee withdrew its request for Mueller to testify about the FBI's handling of investigations into Jeffrey Epstein while Mueller was director of the agency. The New York Times has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The estimated amount in metric tons of cocaine traffic through Venezuela each year

is 200 to 250 tons, according to a 2020 State Department report. The percentage of estimated global cocaine production trafficked through Venezuela annually is 10 to 13%. According to a 2020 Drug Enforcement Administration report, 74% of cocaine shipments from South America to the U.S. in 2019 were transported via the Pacific Ocean. 24% of cocaine shipments in 2019 were transported via the Caribbean Sea. 15 current and former Venezuelan officials, including President Nicolas Maduro, were charged by the U.S. Justice Department in 2020 with drug trafficking and other criminal acts.

Eight U.S. warships and one U.S. submarine were deployed to the Eastern Caribbean by the Trump administration to combat drug trafficking. And last but not least, R. Have a Nice Day Story. After winning second place for their tiny home in the Construction Industry Education Program competition, high school students, students in Nakadoches, Texas opted to donate the home to give back to the community. The students contacted the village Knock, a non-profit community housing development for individuals struggling with homelessness and chronic mental health issues, which accepted the donation. Co-founder Constance Engelking said the home will be rented out and expects it to make a big

impact on the nonprofit. When they leave or move on or even step up to a larger home, there's a room for the next person to come in. So it's just a perpetual gift, Engel King said. TRE 9 has this story, and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, please go to reetangle.com, where you can send up for a newsletter membership,

podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. As Isaac mentioned at the top, today we released a new YouTube video focusing on primary elections here in the U.S. When you get a chance, please go check out that video, and don't forget to like the video and subscribe. All those things help us get noticed in the algorithm. rhythm, which helps us get seen by more viewers. Also, coming out tomorrow in a members-only Friday edition, we'll be doing a deep dive on how

the government collects data, what they actually know, and what it means for you. If you're not already a member, it's a great time to sign up, so head over to our website and choose a membership that works for you. Isaac Ari and Camille will be here for the suspension of the rules podcast, and I will return on Monday. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have an absolutely fantastic weekend, y'all. Peace.

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wohl. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Canuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign.

for a membership, please visit our website at reetangle.com. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply.

Details at fizz.com. Thank you.