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- [00:00]
Marc Maron
Hey, it's Marc Maron from WTF here to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
- [00:06]
Isaac Saul
And I'm sure the reason you're listening.
- [00:08]
Marc Maron
To this podcast right now is because you chose it well. Choose progressives. Name your price tool and you could find insurance options that fit your budget. So you can pick the best one for your situation. Who doesn't like choice? Try it@progressive.com and now some legal info. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.
- [00:34]
Camille Foster
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- [01:28]
Isaac Saul
Coming up, we are joined by Camille Foster. I'm outside. It's not your ears or your speakers. The wind is blowing. I apologize. We talk tariffs, we talk doge. We talk about the difficulty of consuming war reporting in today's era and a rather epic grievance section with Ari's flight home from Japan, which we're all supposed to feel bad about. It's a good one. You guys are going to enjoy it.
- [01:56]
Camille Foster
Executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.
- [02:10]
Isaac Saul
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tango podcast. The place you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and occasionally some of our take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. I'm recording this from for the first time ever outside in beautiful West Texas. Mostly because I have a screaming crying baby on the indoors and I need some quiet space here. I'm joined today by Ari Weitzman, who I hear is performing his flu game and a special guest host, Camille Foster joining us for the day from the Fifth Column podcast. Gentlemen, are you feeling liberated in America today? Because we had Liberation Day yesterday and freedom is reigning Juneteenth all over again.
- [02:55]
Marc Maron
This is amazing. Never felt better. How could anyone feel bad?
- [03:00]
Camille Foster
You know, I feel like maybe one of the most liberated people in the country. After three straight days of running a fever above 100 degrees, now I could actually stand and be out of bed. And my brain is connected to my body. I feel extremely liberated. I feel like very little to worry about. And now that I know that you're recording outside and the sound that I'm hearing is just the wind rushing and not fluid moving in my ears, I feel even better.
- [03:25]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, this is going to be a hell of a podcast for John to edit. Apologies in advance, my friend. Man, there is so much to dig into. I think the story of the day, obviously, is some of the tariff stuff that's happening and we covered it in today's newsletter. So you loyal Tangle readers and listeners will have gotten a bit of it. But there's just, I mean, there's so much meat on the that really. And even with all the takes and my take and everything, there's a lot that I think we left on the table in terms of discussion points. I think to start, I am just curious maybe for a read on the room about where we are and what the implications of this might be. And let's start with some of the economic questions here. Camille, I'll lob this to you first, I guess to get the party started. I know some of your views here, roughly libertarian, former Fox Business hosts appearing on Megyn Kelly, talking about the freedom of the economy. I think I have a vibe check on you in that regard, but I'd love to hear just what you're thinking. Good, bad, what's your best guess on where we're headed in the short term and maybe the 6 to 12 month view? It feels kind of hard to get your bearings right now. We haven't really seen anything like this before.
- [04:50]
Marc Maron
Yeah, no we haven't. It's been a very long time. I guess not since the 1920s have we really been in territory like this before. 1920s, 1930s, I guess with Smoot Hawley. I am deeply pessimistic about most of this. I'm a kind of old school Hayekian freedmanite free trader. And my assumptions are that you have organizations like the wto, which, imperfect as they are, are kind of the ven for adjudicating these international trade disputes. And those mechanisms have actually been pretty useful. I mean, one of the things that they do is to the extent they're having these conversations, it means that there isn't an active tariff war between various nations. Certainly not a global tariff war that all at one time trying to regulate all of these different circumstances. But we seem to be undermining those processes and undermining the kind of prevailing economic order. And it isn't clear what the alternative is. This seems to be some sort of protectionist, mercantilist, nationalist economic policy that's being laid out here by the Trump administration. But by all indications, this is us kind of flying by the seat of our pants. No one knows what to expect. And the uncertainty, interestingly, might turn out to be the very worst of this, because not all of the tariffs are going to be equally sized. They won't all be equally disrupted. There will be all sorts of carve outs over time. I expect those to start happening very, very soon. I also expect to have a number of press conferences where people are announcing bold proposals to bring billions and billions of dollars to the United States. Promises that can be easily made and easily ignored, but yet, and still they do give you the press conference. So I suspect a lot of things will get wound down in the near future, and that's perhaps a little bit of hopeful optimism. But the uncertainty is here for real, and the pain from that is going to be serious and severe. There have already been layoffs and severe disruptions, not just of the kind of the market, but with respect to prices and all sorts of other things because people can't plan effectively. If you opened up your factory in Thailand and invested billions and billions of dollars because you thought this was a place that made sense for you to kind of build and have your resources, the fact that tariffs materialized overnight without much indication that they were coming isn't going to make you start building a factory in the United States tomorrow. And to the extent anything like that might happen, it may happen like 10 or 20 years from now. This is, it just seems to me, a short sighted, misguided policy. And this is what central planning looks like. And central planning is generally not a good idea.
- [07:29]
Camille Foster
So, and that's certainly the position that I think most laissez faire, or people leaning towards the laissez faire side of economic theory are going to think. And for a long time, and at least the span of my life to this point, the Republican Party has been the home for people of that mindset. And that's been shifting under our feet a lot in the last, not just three or four years, but honestly six months with the platform that Trump put out during his campaign and has been following up on. We've published pieces in Tango before asking what it is, what it means to be a liberal. Now, since we're not sure what the Republican Party represents. One of the things that we've thought of as international liberal pre neoliberal economic policies is this sort of global protectionism. Something about we're going to put in some large fence posts that are going to protect parts of our economic section manufacturing sector from global competition. And that seems to be some of the territory that's being staked out by the Trump regime now. And I've got two questions based off of the things that you open with Camille, and the first one is what is the place for people like you now or other people who have that economic mindset, who probably have been Republicans for decades and haven't had much of an identity crisis about it? What place is there for them now in the Republican Party? And the second thing is maybe disruption just is the point. I'm wondering if it's just as simple if as Trump sees the neoliberal world order wants to shoot an arrow in its heart and global tariffs are that arrow.
- [09:22]
Marc Maron
Yeah, well, it's at least something that's very close at hand. But to take the questions in the order you ask them, in fairness, I think that the actual consensus amongst professional economists is pretty broad here. And it's not just kind of laissez faire economists, to the extent you're a robust Keynesian and you have always been skeptical of supply siders, you generally know that tariffs are going to increase costs, that the tariffs are going to primarily be paid for by consumers in the domestic market that is actually importing things. So it's going to hurt them in the short run no matter what. The question is whether or not putting these tariffs on is actually going to result in onshoring and people reinvesting in the United States and industry kind of flooding back. And it seems to me that you can only achieve those goals by sustaining the pain over time by really committing to the proposal. And I think that's the actual challenge with these things above all, and I'm doing a little bit more analysis of the tariff policy, that it's less a question of the efficacy of the policy in some instances and more a question of whether or not it's even practical to think that you can politically get away with this sort of thing. Will this survive a huge midterm shellacking if the policy needs to be sustained for perhaps years in order to achieve the desired results? Anything beyond just kind of scrambling circuits? And that's not clear. But to answer the question more directly, I don't know that the Republican Party has ever been kind of robustly free trade in a way that would make someone like me happy. I know it hasn't made me particularly happy. Certainly can't say the same for Democrats. But there has long been a bipartisan consensus in favor of something like globalization, in favor of something like free trade, even if there were some kind of caveats. And what's happening now is dramatic. It is as dramatic as I would have expected if, like, an actual democratic socialist movement had taken power in the United States. And the fact that you're getting that from kind of nationalist Republicans is strange. It certainly means there's perhaps more distance between free traders and the contemporary conservative movement on economic policy. But I don't know that it was ever a really comfortable marriage to begin with. So we'll see. But I think I kind of answered your second question already. Is the disorder the point? I don't know if the point. It certainly seems to me that that might be the only real outcome here, just profound disorder which has real consequences. I think the phrase from FDR's time when he was passing all of these sweeping regulations to try and arrest the Great Depression was bold, persistent experimentation. And we've been getting that, and it's likely that we're going to have to live with the consequences of it for better and worse, and a lot of that is going to be unintended, and it will be for the worse.
- [12:12]
Isaac Saul
So I think my instincts were similar to yours, Camille. I mean, just as the news of this broke and watching the press conference, which was totally surreal, just Trump doing all the Trump stuff, holding up the chart, just riffing on the way all these countries are screwing us over. The chart.
- [12:32]
Marc Maron
Uninhabited islands.
- [12:33]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, uninhabited, yeah. The chart has these percentages for what the tariffs are that are not the actual real percentages of what they're. What their tariffs are on us. People online quickly figure out there's this formula that they're using that's really based on broad trade imbalances, not just tariff rates. It was all very Trumpian. And he got the attention, I think, of the world in the way that he wanted. And my initial reaction was the same, that there's this broad economic consensus. I'm not an economist. I never studied this stuff for a living or in grad school or whatever. And I'm sort of learning a lot of it on the fly and trying to make this make sense. And because I was so skeptical of it, the thing that I've been doing the last 24 hours and really the last couple of weeks, because we knew this was coming to some degree is just sort of immersing myself in kind of the Trump intellectualism justification around these tariffs. And Oren Cass I think is probably the guy who is maybe the most prominent or most well regarded that's really put himself in Trump's camp. And I, I've been just like devouring a lot of the stuff that he's written about this and I think a sort of rough outline of, of his argument that I'd like to just put out there and hear your guys response to is you can look out at the landscape of American life right now and you know, the, the quality of life for America's middle class, the quote unquote, middle class job has changed over the last 30 or 40 years. You know, in the wake of NAFTA. The, the kinds of things our parents used to be able to do with, you know, $100,000 a year or just a good job that paid them, you know, for 40 hours a week of work, like buy a house and go to school and raise a family of three. And you just sort of don't see that in the hollowed out American towns of, you know, the Midwest and the Rust Belt anymore. And even the people who are living in, you know, Americans urban areas are basically kneecaps by the cost of rent compared to their wages and all these things. And, and he sort of just posits this idea, I think that the crux of it all is just this. What we have right now should not be acceptable to, you know, the American intellectual class, to these economists who are telling us, shoving it down our throat, that this free trade, this globalism has worked and that we should work from this starting point, that we need a kind of reset. And I'll be honest, I do think that framing has a lot of compelling components to it. I mean, there is something to be said for what NAFTA did to American jobs. There is something to be said for the exchange of cheap goods from abroad, you know, for lower paying jobs here in America and what that means for us. And I guess I'm curious, you know, before we get even, not getting into a lot of the economic policy and the economic theory that he, that Oren puts forward, because there's a ton of that too. You know, he's sort of saying even if you go to the Janet Yellens of today or the Paul Krugmans of today, they'll concede that they were wrong about their views, that this sort of totally unregulated free trade world is always going to be good. You know, Janet Yellen had this quote, if somebody sends you cheap goods, you send them a thank you note. And Oren recently interviewed her and she sort of said, you know, maybe that is too simplistic a view given some of the things we've seen. So I guess I'm wondering if, like, you feel that starting point, that what we have now, the status quo, is not appropriate, is a fair starting point, one we should embrace and you just have different solutions, or one we should disregard because, you know, look around, the quality of life, the highest living standards in the world are here in the US and we have consistent economic growth, et cetera, et cetera.
- [16:41]
Marc Maron
I mean, I think I would certainly lean more in the direction of what you were just describing there. I think the case for free trade has long ago been made successfully. To the extent the Chinese have had success, it isn't so much because of their central planning. It is because they started to embrace free trade, even if they did it in a kind of piecemeal way, even if they still have very severe kind of command and control mechanisms in their economy. So I think that piece of it is pretty straightforward. But even if I accept Cass's position and the arguments of the kind of new neo mercantilists who are engineering these kinds of policies, I think that you're still left with two conundrums. One is the kind of existence of real uncertainty and just the fundamental difficulty of central planning that Hayek lays out for you with kind of the knowledge problem. The Use of Knowledge in Society is a not at all super duper technical paper that I go back to and reread a couple times a year probably, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it. It is a great kind of primer on that economic worldview. But that and what I highlighted a moment ago, that if the goal here is to have these rather painful, dramatic and controversial policies in place and to keep them there for years and years and years to achieve the kind of economic outcomes Cass describes this rebalancing of trade, moving industries back to the United States, incentivizing foreign rivals to do things, not just foreign rivals, rivals and allies to do things that are more favorable to the United States. And, oh yeah, leveraging an across the board 10% tax on absolutely everything. You're telling me you're going to do this and achieve this great outcome, you actually have to be able to do it. If the policy can't actually stand because it's deeply unpopular and controversial and painful, then the outcome of it, the fact that you might be right technically actually doesn't matter. It's not going to work. It's a bad policy because it can't work in a dynamic, complicated political situation like the one that we have here. So I think those are the two major challenges that these policies face even before we get to the question of whether or not fundamentally all of the assumptions that are baked in there are the right assumptions. Do trade imbalances matter? I'd say generally speaking, no. There have been plenty of times, periods in which the United States have been enormously profitable things moving in the right direction. We've had huge trade imbalances and those imbalances generally don't even capture all of the complicated realities of an economy. So I think that's the actual picture. It's complicated, but I do think it's fully appropriate. And I'm really glad you spent some time kind of steel landing things and introducing Cass's perspective into into the conversation.
- [19:37]
Isaac Saul
We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.
- [19:43]
Camille Foster
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- [20:38]
Marc Maron
Only, then full price plan options available.
- [20:40]
Camille Foster
Taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.
- [20:49]
Isaac Saul
I think there's a, there's something that really like plucks at my heartstrings when I think about, you know, the, the places in the country that I've seen in the last 10 or 15 years like that kind of hollowed out industrial America. Yeah, and you know the, and I, I referenced this in the newsletter today. I mean and Bob, Bob Lighthizer made a really similar case in this interview with Tucker Carlson that I listened to. You know where he's saying, look, two thirds of the American workforce doesn't have a college degree. This like the country, this is the people of the country. And there's a reason Trump's messaging resonates with them. And this kind of anti globalist tirade that he's on is politically popular. And it's because those people can sort of see what's in front of them. They can see what's happened to their towns, to their schools, to the jobs that used to exist. And whether Trump's solution will work or not, he's clearly, he's promising something that they desire. And I think it raises a lot of interesting questions for the kind of, you know, the sort of intellectual economic class that spends a lot of the economist class that spends a lot of time talking about this. And of course, you know, Tucker in this interview is just like gobbling this stuff up, because that's his kind of his shtick now is being this super populous. You know, the elites have totally destroyed the country and they all deserve to go to jail and they're evil for this. And I don't necessarily subscribe to that view as much as I just wonder whether we should accept kind of how things are. Ari, we've talked about this before. There is a reality here to the degree that there is a lasting policy implication that's going to come out of this, where Trump could just turn all this on and off at will now, and he seems keen to do that. And I guess I wonder how much of this is just going to be, oh, tomorrow we find out France is going to lower the tariffs on some kind of American car or wine or whatever, and Trump's going to say, okay, great, and pat him on the back, and that's going to be it. And we're just going to experience this slow unfolding negotiating process where everybody comes to Trump with some sort of sacrificial lamb on the trade side and he says, thank you, takes the win, trumpets it to the base, and we don't really see major movement. I'm, I'm inclined to think that's where this is headed, but the administration at least is sort of standing up, beating its chest, saying, we're not going to back down. This is the policy. And, you know, this is going to be what it is until we have the real genuine rebalancing, whatever that means.
- [23:36]
Camille Foster
Right. I mean, that's. The second part's the one that I'm a little bit more convinced of right now. They've gone so far on committing to tariffs as a tool they want to use that when April 1 came and then the announcement actually came out, instead of just being a lever that they're going to be pushing forward on and then easing up as they're getting some negotiations, it seems to indicate this is different than the Canada and this is different than the Mexico policies on tariffs. This is a across the board. No, we mean it. Maybe there's something you can do to meet us part way. But what. What's France going to do when they're part of the EU? They got a 20% tariff levying on them along with the rest of the eu. What's France going to do with their small tariffs on wine and cheese? Or a 2 and a half, 5% tariff that they're going to decrease by 1 or 2 compared to 20, what's going to be actually meaningful there? I think when it comes to what happens next and what's the step back from this, I think I have a hard time seeing what it is. And this is someone who for the past couple months have been saying, you know, Trump's actually kind of predictable. We can see the patterns here. We know what he wants to do, we know that he wants to push for concessions, we know that he likes to have people come meet him halfway. Where halfway is, I take a step back and then you come to me. That's halfway. But this is a little different. This is I'm going to take five steps in this direction and I'm going to stay here. And maybe France takes a step to him, maybe South Korea or India gives him some small concession. But I mean, South Korea and India, those are East Asian, South Asian allies of ours. Presumably South Korea has a 25% tariff, India 26. Like incremental steps. I don't see how that works. I think this is part of a broader worldview and we have to dig the shovel into the dirt to try to find out what that is. And I think it's about us being able to be self sufficient in any and all cases. We're talking about what's changed. I'm a person who likes to come up with models for understanding the world. I don't like things to be piecemeal. I think everything has to be kind of cohesive. I think given that Trump negotiated a bunch of trade deals in his first term and then he came back and he said all the trade deals we have are terrible. And he was the guy who negotiated for some of them, the Trans Pacific Partnership being blown up, saying like, yeah, this all is shit. Whoever came up with this, they didn't know what they were doing. It's modestly what changed? Humility, Honestly, I think it's Covid. I think it can't be that simple. So we had all this supply chain disruption and we're thinking about a trade war with China, we're thinking about actual possible wars with other global powers. Cough Iran or their proxies, as the case may be. And we have a country that legitimately can't build ships anymore without like three, four years lead time. And we have an issue with protecting our own supply chain and manufacturing, where if we do have to go to a protective shell, if we're fighting a war. Trump's looking at the way our economy's set up. It's so globally interconnected. And whereas in the past we might have seen that as a strength towards global peace because we're all interdependent, you can also flip it and see it as a weakness in the case of a lack of global peace. And with the disruption that we had supply chains and with Russia invading Ukraine and global disruption in general, I think Trump's looking at the board and saying we have to invest more in what we're building in this country. US, manufacturing, working class, that can all be bottoms that get lifted up. But it has to start with that. I think it's. Personally, I think it's a huge over investment into an edge case. I don't think we're going to be entering a global war where we have to think like that. Maybe I'm just a foolish optimist, but I, I think that if I'm trying to understand all of this stuff and trying to think of a model that's cohesive and makes. Makes this all make sense. A model of Trump just changes his mind every six months and nothing makes sense and he just wants people to stroke his ego. Is not. It's not cohesive enough for me. It doesn't explain enough. I think it's. It has to be something about what's changed. And that's the thing that makes the most sense.
- [28:08]
Marc Maron
It may not explain everything, but it could still be a very important attribute of the story that certainly is a key consideration. And it feels that way. I mean, I agree with so much of what you were just saying and outlining there. And I think the phrase that popped into my head as you were talking is the seen and the unseen. Like the fact that there happen to be implications for these policies beyond the economic implications. Even the international foreign relations component of this is very important. You're alienating Your allies at a time when the Europeans were already getting closer because of the United States decisions with respect to the Ukrainian conflict, we're driving them even closer together. Their economic partnership could mean more exclusive trade deals that benefit Europeans and make anything that Trump is trying to do with respect to tariff policy to kind of penalize them a little less painful. It could even drive. And we're already seeing this various Asian countries that had kind of natural antipathy towards one another coming closer together, doing exactly the same thing, trying to find some protection amongst themselves. The conclusion that the Trump administration has made here, and Trump has been very explicit about this, is that the United States is singularly important, which it is. That the United States is singularly influential, which it is. And that means that the United States can exact any price imaginable and can apply economic pressure unilaterally without any consequences and get better deals. Because everything is kind of hyper transactional. And you might be able to do that and get a somewhat better deal for some period of time. But that doesn't mean that you won't piss people the hell off, and it doesn't mean that you won't undermine relationships that you desperately need for other reasons and reap the whirlwind with respect to all sorts of other bad outcomes. I mean, this is, this is, I think, a policy that is primarily guided by nostalgia. To go back to what you were talking about a little earlier, Isaac, and nostalgia sells. It works always, in fact. But I don't think it's great economics. I think nostalgia economics is perhaps not going to equal prosperity. What you were describing, Ari, the fact that we need to build capability in this country, that we need to be able to build things again, is a very real problem. But you need forward looking policy for that and not nostalgia. And we're not doing enough with respect to forward looking policy. I think we kind of fear things like AI and we don't appreciate the degree to which AI could help people, even who haven't gone to university, to potentially do their jobs better. The thinking seems to be that the dynamic is it'll be 12 AI bots to take the job of 12 actual humans, when the possibility might be 12 actual humans working with AI bots to do their job 50 times better than they could have done before. That's more prosperity, that's growing the pie. And that is a very different policy than trying to outlaw AI bots. And I think that the tariff policy looks a hell of a lot more like outlaw and AI bots than people figuring out how to make them help us be better and be the best version of ourselves and create more prosperity.
- [31:16]
Camille Foster
So the analogy there is like the lawyer doesn't get replaced by AI. The lawyer with AI replaces the lawyer without it. And as that relates to trade policy, it's not backwards looking. Protectionism replaces a new global order. It's the global order that is able to embrace what's coming next. Replaces the new global order.
- [31:39]
Marc Maron
Yeah, the old Detroit is not coming back. We need the new Detroit. And I don't know what that looks like and I don't know what industry is likely to be key to the future of New Detroit, but that's.
- [31:48]
Camille Foster
This is where I could talk about Pittsburgh for 10 minutes if you want, Isaac, or give the mic back to you.
- [31:54]
Marc Maron
Black and yellow.
- [31:54]
Isaac Saul
Well, before you do, I, I mean, a couple of things occur to me. One that's worth pointing out on the sort of America needs to build and even specifically Ari, I mean, it's funny you mentioned the shipbuilding, you know, that like we, we, we can't even build our own ships anymore, which is a product of, you know, protectionist policies of the past. I mean, Noah Smith recently just had an awesome article about the Jones act and basically what it did in the 1920s and 30s to our capacity to build ships. And it was, you know, a piece of legislation designed to sort of insulate this industry and allow us to do all this stuff domestically. And the end result is like, you know, China can make 10 of these ships in a month and we can't make 10 in a decade. And, and it's interesting to consider sort of the historical parallels to what we have now. And that's what I see most economists doing and most people who are like the Scott Lincecones, the people who I trust as experts on the tariff thing, on tariff policy, I guess I'm not wholly convinced that all of them apply to this moment, given just how much the world's changed and how different the kind of globalization of the economy is. One interesting thought experiment, I guess here is what does working look like and what happens if this does work? I think it's hard to define what working looks like because the Trump administration has offered a lot of different explanations. We've heard that this is going to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. We've heard that we're going to raise a bunch of revenue so we can get rid of income taxes. Tariffs are raising so much revenue. We've heard that we're going to pressure Europe and China and Mexico and Canada into these deals that we Want. There's so many different explanations out there. I imagine sort of consensus. If I were to sit down with Trump and the trade representatives of the administration, a sort of consensus view on what working might look like is, we onshore some jobs, we get better deals, quote unquote, with our trade relationships across the globe, which I think means smaller tariffs on American exports. We generally see some sort of market rebound and job boom as some of this stuff comes back to the United States and we see wages go up maybe amongst the American workforce. I think this is a rough picture of what they imagine being a really successful outcome here. I guess I'm curious, in a year or two, if we're there and Trump actually holds the line on some of these tariffs for, say, another six months or a year, enough to have a really lasting impact, he doesn't just fold and take a few good deals here or there or whatever and have this all turn into basically showmanship. What does it do to the expert consensus on this stuff? There's so much consensus in the economic world. To your point, Camille, I just wonder, the various outcomes we could have, what it means for the kind of economic consensus, if he somehow pulls this off, or alternatively, if he doesn't really pull it off, but he sells it to the public that he has, which he's very good at. Both of those outcomes seem really interesting to me, and I don't think. I think the tariffs holding and, you know, all of this great prosperity coming back to America is unlikely because I'm keen to trust the people who are, you know, a lot smarter than me and the experts. And maybe that's my, you know, shitlib brain in action or something. But like I.
- [35:49]
Camille Foster
He says from rural Texas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [35:52]
Isaac Saul
I just. I don't know enough to doubt them, I guess. But, yeah, it seems like this is a real turning point moment for kind of the economic policy of the next 20, 50, 100 years in the United States. And I don't know, maybe this goes well and all of this orthodoxy just crumbles, which is something nobody really seems to be talking about.
- [36:16]
Marc Maron
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly a possibility, but I think you're correct that the Trump administration really hasn't done a great deal of defining exactly what success looks like here. And that may have something to do with the fact that the policy was largely mysterious to a lot of members of the Trump administration, who have been leaking like a sieve to the press, if you believe the reporting that's coming out here. But I suppose another piece of this story that is under discussed from my standpoint, is the kind of legal and political dimension with respect to the actual authority of the executive branch to be doing this. This is all on the basis of national security grounds. And the President and all of his various spokespersons are making a point to kind of reiterate this over and over again, but it's pretty transparent. Well, at that. And that this is permanent. This is not a negotiating tactic. Both of those things seem highly dubious. If you talk to any Trump surrogate who isn't actually working for the administration, or you see Trump supporters talking about this online, they tell you this is just Trump being Trump. This is the art of the deal. He's gonna get a good deal. So he's lying openly about what it is. But it's the art of the deal. And to the extent that's the case, it suggests that a lot of things about these and a lot of things about these policies are also harmonized with point I'm about to make that it's not clear this is a response to any sort of actual imminent crisis of a unique and profound nature. And that's actually kind of what the statute suggests is necessary for the President to be able to unilaterally make these trade decisions. And he is doing it at a scope and at a scale that no one imagined he would even attempt to do, absent some sort of congressional involvement. And Congress is supposed to be responsible for trade policy. Congress is supposed to be responsible for tariffs. And he is breaking new ground here. And that is, I think it's a very serious issue. So the question of whether or not he has this authority and exactly what that means is interesting to try to game out. It doesn't look like Congress can actually stop him here unless this becomes increasingly more unpopular. There are a lot of conservatives who have expressed some concern about the policy, but they say as well, I'm gonna give him a chance. Okay. You know, to the extent that continues, there's not much that can be done. Anything they can actually pass, Trump would just veto. And they don't have a veto proof majority in support of getting rid of these tariffs right now. Because Republicans are pretty much in lockstep. Is that the case?
- [38:49]
Camille Foster
They've already outsourced their manufacturing ability of policy to the executive branch.
- [38:54]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, great one. I will. I mean, so I have a couple friends, as I'm sure I'm not the only one on this call, you know, the, the boys group chat that's just constantly talking about stock market moves and crypto or whatever else and Everybody just talking about their bags. And this morning it was just lit up and I had a friend who texted me, as people do, because I'm in the politics world and the journalism world, and he was just like, I don't understand how the fuck this is possible. How is it allowed that the President can just flip a switch on? And I wake up this morning and I'm getting a 20% shave in the market. Seems totally insane. And I do think, you know, I think the odds are low of this happening, but I do think there is a slim chance that this sort of wakes Congress from its slumber here, especially Republicans, who I know for a fact so vehemently disagree. Again, slim chance. Ari's making a face right now. Slim chance. I agree, but we saw, I mean, Chuck Grassley and Maria Cantwell introduced this legislation for tariffs to be approved by Congress within 60 days or the tariffs will expire. Which is, which is a. I mean, that's a proposal that's in the mold of the way a lot of free trade people would want it to be proposed. Like, a president can do this, but this kind of thing can only last for a short sort of time, blocked duration before it needs Congress's approval to move forward. To Camille's point, is that going to happen? Will this become law? No, it's not going to become law because they don't have that veto proof majority and there aren't enough Republican senators right now willing to buck Trump. But I don't know, man. In three months, if the market continues the way it is now, and People's 401ks are taking a shit, and there's a bunch of Senate Republicans looking at 20, 26, 2028 in competitive races that are supposed to be slam dunks. Maybe we see some movement there. I don't know. I mean, again, yeah, Ari's just said it like, Congress has really forfeited a lot of its power to this administration so far in the first few months, they're basically saying you can control the purse, you can control tariffs, you can lay off anybody you want from all these agencies that we've built and fund, and we're not really going to do anything. And Trump's sort of taking the cue there. But I don't know, maybe. Maybe there's the embers of a rebellion here or rebellion. Maybe there's the embers of Congress doing its job. That would be kind of interesting.
- [41:35]
Camille Foster
That's. That's possible. I think I'm, I'm making some loud faces during the Isaac's monologue here. But I think the, the way that, that makes sense to me, Isaac, is if it does continue. So it's the, the maybe the spark of a fuse. And that fuse is three months long. And what we're seeing by a couple senators introducing something to the Senate where a law needs to pass both chambers and the House is really where it's going to have a harder time winning some of those Republicans in order to pass. The ones who are in safe districts are the ones that are most extreme and the ones who aren't in safe districts, districts are going to be swung a bit, and they want to signal that they're with the president for as long as that's the right thing to do. And when we see that spark happen, it tells us that maybe it keeps, the fuse keeps getting shorter. And maybe in the Chuck Schumer worldview of things like once the, once the electoral calculus shifts by the popularity ratings getting below 40 and Trump starts to see numbers starting with a 3, and Republicans start to feel some pressure, then those competitive districts could start to swing. But it is a little, it was a little hard to imagine happening now, but it could be the first rocks in the landslide, to mix a metaphor. And it's possible also that, you know, we are seeing things happen now that are just foretelling future events. It's always, always hard to imagine the way extreme change happens before it happens. Things like things can't continue to persist the way they are indefinitely. We saw that before Trump came into office. It was unthinkable that we'd have a President Donald Trump in 2015. People were making jokes about it. And then we saw his presidency for four years. We didn't think he'd ever be on a ticket again after January 6th. And then, you know, here we are talking about the Trump administration yet again. So very possible that we get to a point where the Republican Party says, or at least seven or eight representatives in the Republican Party, five or six senators say, this isn't working out anymore. We have to do something different. And the balance of power shifts. It is impossible to imagine currently. But if enough rocks start to shift, then the foundation changes. And you could be right that it's the beginning of it. I think I'll need to see the second step before I start to believe it, though.
- [44:11]
Marc Maron
Yeah, I suppose the court could also get involved here. Right. But that would require, like, a trade union or something like that to come and bring a case. And that could be jammed up for some indefinite period of time. But it may also be able to get into the right venue, as folks have been doing pretty successfully. And maybe you can score an injunction. Even if it's a narrow injunction, that's a big deal. And maybe it finds its way to the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is paying attention to this. And there may be a lot of people who want the court to get involved and help adjudicate that. So that's one interesting way this could play out. I suppose there's one other thing about what you were just mentioning there, Ari, and the implications for Trump and his numbers starting to go down. I mean, his vulnerability is likely to increase in the very near future because his lightning rod, Elon Musk, may not be around anymore to soak up so much of the contempt and criticism that is being directed at the administration that is interestingly being directed at Elon directly. I mean, that was one of the principal thing dynamics in the Wisconsin court race, Supreme Court race, that Elon was the person that the Democrats seemed to be running against in that particular race. But that probably won't happen again, at least not in the way that it just happened in Wisconsin. And that could have some implications for Donald Trump. Maybe J.D. vance becomes the next lightning rod. But I think it's much harder for Trump to escape some of the knock on effects of deeply unpopular policy and governance if it's his vice president and not the guy who doesn't even really kind of work there and who isn't actually in charge. Except no, he's definitely in charge.
- [45:49]
Camille Foster
The court proceedings said that he wasn't in charge. So you have to check your facts.
- [45:53]
Marc Maron
The president only said different moments later. That has become a pattern with this administration too. The Justice Department says one thing in court when they're talking about deportations and JD Vance tweets moments later exactly the opposite thing. So what do you believe, Camille?
- [46:10]
Isaac Saul
We have a little bit of a running joke here about how rough some of my transitions can be between topics on the podcast.
- [46:17]
Marc Maron
But you've just, I'm no stranger to that.
- [46:19]
Isaac Saul
You've thrown me an unbelievable alley because I do think we have to talk a little bit about some of the latest Elon news. And to your point, maybe getting the first indications that he is fading into the background a little bit or might be pretty soon. To pivot this a bit away from the trade discussion, we had this Politico article that came out earlier this week that effectively said there's a bunch of sources in the White House saying Donald Trump is telling them he wants Elon to take a step back and that in the near future, he's going to kind of recede a little bit into the background of some of the administration's actions. We all know Trump hates losers, so the Wisconsin defeat, the big L on Elon is probably a little bit of a scarlet letter. They put a lot in that basket in terms of him driving turnout for that election, and then they got crushed. I think you could say a 10 point loss in a state that has been decided by basically 1 percentage point in the last three presidential elections is not a great showing. I'm very interested to see kind of where this goes. And something I've been thinking about as we analyze the tariffs a little bit and think about their impact, is all the stuff that's happened in these first 75 days of the Trump administration, what's really going to matter in a year or two? What are the things that we're actually going to remember or think about? And Elon, of course, dismissed this Politico story as being fake news. But he has said, you know, he's going to transition out after the first 100, 130 days of Doge. That's something they've said from the start.
- [47:58]
Marc Maron
Yep.
- [47:59]
Isaac Saul
So I guess I'm curious, you know, thinking about the future a little bit, what we think we imagine Doge's legacy will be, you know, two years, four years from now. As we sit here now, before this tariff story, it sort of felt like the story of the administration was all the things that they've been doing to these federal agencies and the cutbacks in workforce and the disruption, and now the tariff thing has kind of just owned the space for the last 24, 48 hours, and I imagine Will for another week or two. I'm skeptical, I guess, that we're going to care about or remember the first 70 days of Doge in two years. But I guess I'll put it to the two of you about how you analyze or think about that, because I do think we are going to see Elon shift a bit back to tweeting about rockets and AI in space and a little bit less about the invasions on the border or how a Wisconsin Supreme Court race is going to change the fate of humanity.
- [49:01]
Camille Foster
They're just interesting that when he said that, Camille and I both tilted our head the same way inquisitively. He's going to start tweeting about space and nerdy stuff and we're like, huh?
- [49:11]
Marc Maron
Well, he's never stopped. He's never stopped. He's doing all of the things he doesn't sleep. I'm not sure he's doing any, any sort of rocketry or anything like that, but he tweets about rockets, he tweets about Twitter, he tweets about Tesla, even tweets about Neuralink every once in a while. But he also tweets about politics a lot. And I don't know that that's going away.
- [49:29]
Camille Foster
Yeah, I agree.
- [49:30]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, that's fair.
- [49:32]
Camille Foster
I, I have a theory about Doge. I've mentioned it a couple times on this podcast. So I'll take a step back. And Camille, I'll give you the first wing here.
- [49:41]
Marc Maron
It's hard to say. I think you're correct. This would probably not be as big a deal some time removed from this, but the general notion that the Trump administration came in with this plan and that they didn't care about the Constitution and they were disregarding judges and they kind of brought about this constitutional crisis, a lot of that pertains to Doge, the sense that there is a kind of incurious, brash approach to politics that actually has tangible implications for people and hurts them personally financially in their pocketbooks. That pertains to Doge, too. So Doge may not get mentioned specifically, but those attributes of its legacy are going to be consequential and the overall goal of having a really meaningful, making a really meaningful impact on the debt and the deficit, something that both things that I am very concerned about is a kind of classical liberal person. I don't think that they're going to make much progress with respect to actually doing those things. And I think it's going to become pretty obvious that that project didn't really work in the way that it was intended to. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But I think that to the extent there's going to be much of a legacy, will probably be the legacy. Will the administration continue to claim success? Sure. But will there be any sort of tangible evidence of a trillion dollar reduction, as Elon promised? I am deeply suspicious of that proposition.
- [51:10]
Isaac Saul
I suspect, and I'll tell a quick story tied to this, that the thing we're going to remember is probably the individual stories we hear about the way the Doge crusade has kind of impacted people I've been talking about. I'm down here in West Texas at this, our little vacation home that Phoebe and I have now, and I have a lot of friends down here who work in Big Bend national park, which is just, you know, not far down the road from where this property is that I'm sitting on. And many of them are seasonal workers. They spend, you know, the winter and spring here, and then they spend the summer and fall working in, like, Montana or something. And one of my really good friends down here works for the Forest Service. And she basically told me a Doge story that I think is sort of indicative of some of what's been happening, which is, you know, she got this email a few weeks ago letting her know that her job had been deleted, as the Doge boys like to say. And she lost the job because she was a probationary worker. And she was a probationary worker because the Forest Service had promoted her, which was one of the sort of absurdities of what they were doing, is that the probationary workers, in many cases like hers, were people who had kind of earned this status by being promoted or elevated somehow in their government job. So she was in the first year of this new job, which could lead to kind of like, full benefits and whatever else for the Forest Service. So she gets laid off, and she's crushed and panicked and is trying to figure out what to do. And then she finds out there's this nonprofit that does similar work to some of her, like trail clearing and horseback riding, stuff that she does in the national parks. And they hire her because they're trying to hire people who lost their jobs. So she takes a job for the nonprofit. The start dates, in, like, three weeks. And a couple nights ago, she gets an email from the Forest Service saying, your job, your role has been reinstated. Fill out this Google form if you're interested in coming back to work. Work, basically. So she fills out the Google form, and then at the end of filling out the Google form expressing her interest in returning to work, it just says, your start date's May 4th. And it's like the emails from somebody she's never heard of. All the people that she was laid off with got this email, got their jobs offered back. Many of them have already taken other jobs, and now they're torn about whether to return because they love this original job, but they're unsure of how serious the offer back is. Can the rug just. Just be pulled out from them again? And I'm just. You hear this stuff, and I'm like, this doesn't sound efficient. This isn't like the efficiency ethos to me. Like, we're losing good workers. There's tons of confusion. None of them know what to do. Some of them are going to return. Some of them aren't. We're probably going to end up with a park Service that's like, A little bit kneecapped going into this upcoming season. And all of it's happening way too fast. And that story I feel like has happened. I mean, this is almost a happy ending for a lot of these people. But that story, some version of that story has taken place now for like 100,000 federal workers who all have family members and friends and this network of millions and millions of people who probably will hear firsthand accounts of those stories. And to me, that's going to be the real, maybe lasting impact that that stays with us versus the trillion dollar savings on the debt or deficit. I mean, that's the thing that I imagine everybody's going to have a friend or a cousin or a family member of some kind who got the ax from One of these 20 year old programmers or whatever it is. And that's going to be the thing people remember about this period. If I had to bet on a lasting, impactful thing, sure.
- [55:06]
Camille Foster
Well, you know what my theory is, right? Or I'll just restate it just in case. I don't think I'm crawling out on too shaky of a limb here by saying it was never about cutting a trillion dollars by trying to shave off some government contracts that are never anywhere close to totaling that amount. Nor is it about efficiency. It's about trying to clean house of a civil servant pool that statistically tends to vote more Democratic and trying to replace that civil servant pool with people who are going to vote more Republican as the replacements. Those, those are the only, it's, it's the most complicated plan that I think I've attributed to Trump. I think we've ascribed to this theory of Trump of there isn't like a complex machination that he's trying to subscribe to. He doesn't like set off a Rube Goldberg device and try to get some end goal. He has things he wants to do and he tries to push all of his chips in and do them all at once, all at the same time, as many as he can, as far as he can take it. This is the only thing where I've ascribed any sort of two step plan to him. And I think it's so far on track to fit this model of understanding for me. One is you get some guy, Elon Musk, who has some credibility with like reforming like and some large industry like Twitter or like the electric car industry with Tesla, you bring him in, he's a side switcher, sort of somebody who is more liberal before Trump and now saying no, you know what, Trump's right. I'm on his side. You take a guy like that, you put him in a position of prominence, you make him the face of these cuts for whatever reason. Efficiency, trying to cut the budget, save money. It's laughable. Like, we can all hopefully stop pretending that that's actually going to happen. Camille has his doubts. I think you're being polite. It's not, but he's going to be the face of it and then he's going to leave. We're at the part where he's about to leave now, and we're going to be looking back at how much did Doge save? Were they able to ax a lot of inefficient bloat? Maybe, maybe not. The answer is going to be no, but we're going to be debating it. In the meantime, all of those federal employees that were fired, Trump's going to want to rehire as many people as he can that are conservative, so that his legacy will be reshaping the federal workforce to one that is staffed more with people who are slightly more to the right. That's the complicated conspiracy theory that I have. I still think it makes sense.
- [57:54]
Marc Maron
Well, I don't even know if it qualifies as a conspiracy theory. I think there's a dimension in which that is absolutely true with respect to senior leadership in the various bureaucracies. Yeah, they're cleaning house, they're getting rid of people who have kind of been lifers there, and they're promoting people from inside the ranks who are a little bit more compliant with their own ideology or at least are willing to serve their ends. And Trump learned from his first go round that not doing that means that there's probably going to be a pretty substantial check on your power coming from the bureaucracy itself. It was working against him before. He wants it working with him. That said, I mean, the 10,000 odd people who were let go this week, which includes my baby sister, actually, these people, lower and mid tier administrators inside of the organization, they're just fired. The vast majority of these people are just fired. Maybe they get another job someplace. A small fraction of them will maybe get invited back or get some other job in the federal bureaucracy, but they are gone. And the people who are rehired in those roles won't really need to pass any sort of political, ideological litmus test. I think the thing that's much more likely here is a question of who's likely to apply for those jobs. I mentioned my baby sister was one of these people, and I am someone who, as I've already admitted, earlier in our conversation. I generally support this kind of force reduction and some sort of constraint on spending. It is amazing that we expanded spending in the way that we did federal spending during COVID and we didn't draw back after the pandemic. We just kept doing it. So we do, in fact, need to reduce spending. We do, in fact, need to make some of these cuts. I'm broadly in favor of the Department of Education being deleted, but I think there are thoughtful ways to do this. My friend Thomas Chatterton Williams kind of referred this as being on the top of a building and needing to get down 13 floors, and you can kind of jump off the top or you can take the elevator down to the bottom. And this feels a lot more like jumping off the top. And it's true. All of this seems to be kind of calibrated to maximize the spectacle. And in maximizing the spectacle, they're also maximizing the kind of harm here. It comes across as belligerent and incurious, and the consequences for the people who are being fired are very real. So if you're looking around the job market and you are a talented, thoughtful person, government might not have been your first choice before. I'm certainly not thinking it's more likely to be your first choice going forward. Who wants that job at this stage? So to the extent you're worried about efficiency, the kind of culture you're creating here isn't a healthy one. People are on pins and needles and are terrified. And look, anyone should be able to get fired from any job at any time. For far too long, federal employees have thought, and I know some people like this. Dear friends of mine, we've joked for a long time, you can get away with doing almost anything. You barely got to go to the office. You can kind of have the baby in the room all day long while you're watching Hulu and doing your job. Job, quote, unquote. I'm having lunch with him. He's like, yeah, I'm in a meeting. Come on. That said, like, there are thoughtful ways to go about this and less thoughtful ways to go about it. And the Bill Clinton managed to pull off a meaningful reduction of the government workforce and government spending and didn't create these kinds of tidal waves. So one can't say that it's impossible to do this in a responsible, thoughtful way.
- [61:30]
Camille Foster
That's so true. And that's something that we haven't talked about a lot and something we should remember to talk about next time we cover Doge is the way that Clinton reduced The federal spending in the 90s.
- [61:40]
Isaac Saul
And the doge enthusiasts have been using that as this kind of template to say all the Democrats criticizing this now and all the liberals and all the Republicans criticizing this now are, are hypocrites because Clinton did this thing that was just like widely respected and cheered on back then. And I think to Camille's point, the obvious response is like, if you go back and look at how they did this, they're bringing in these agency heads into the room, they're doing real thoughtful analysis and audits about where the weight waste is and where the, you know, the inconsistencies are, the redundancies are, and, and then planning this thing in consultation with these different agencies. And you know, it all fit into this larger picture of the needs and the desires of the administration and what they were going to prioritize. And then they make these cuts. And that's obviously the way to do this. I mean, the taking the elevator to me is such a clear and obvious choice and it's so preferable to what we're getting now. I think the only way it's not is if you have gotten to a point in your psychology where you have such a sort of vitriolic feeling towards the federal government and everything that it represents that you just don't care and you have no sympathy for these people. And I think unfortunately that's where, you know, 30, 40% of the country is and it's where Elon is and it's where Trump, Trump clearly is. The, the response that I see to a lot of these like quote unquote sob stories where it's like people saying, you know, I spent three years applying for this job and did all these things to meet the qualifications to become this federal worker because I'm patriotic and care about the country. And then I got a five minute conversation with some 20 year old kid I've never met before and he laid me off. And the responses that I see to those stories, like on platforms like X or you know, in the kind of conservative ecosystem is like, well, you locked us inside during COVID for 12 months and destroyed my kids schooling and like, I have no sympathy for you, like get fucked basically. Which is, you know, an absurd thing to say to like somebody doing testing of our agricultural, you know, farming lands or like soil grades or whatever it is. You know, these people have absolutely nothing to do with our response to Covid. But that's the feeling. It's like a total apathy that's born out of this like real vitriolic Hatred for people that worked for administrations of the past. And it's kind of a scary place to be. I mean, I don't really. I don't think it's possible to induce empathy in those people right now because there's just a lot of anger. And it's. If we can reduce the spending and, you know, save $100,000 at some department, it's worth kind of destroying these people's livelihoods overnight with little recourse for them and little rationale about why they're the right person to lay off or whatever else it is. Yeah. I mean, Camille, I guess to close the loop on this, I'll ask you one last question. I guess I'm curious to the degree that you're willing to talk about it, like your initial response or feeling or reflection on this sort of, I imagine competing perspectives of, like, wanting this reduction in workforce, wanting this reduction in spending, and then seeing it impact somebody like your sister in this real tangible way where she loses her job. I mean, how do you sort of hold those two things at once? What do you leave with from that?
- [65:15]
Marc Maron
Yeah, I mean, you know, most of us have been fired from something or lost a job or something like that at some point in our lives or will have that experience. And. And those are just kind of the realities of life. There's a sense in which things didn't go well in this particular place, and I'm going to have to move on someplace. There are different ways for that to occur. And I think at the moment, it's actually the way in which things are being done and not the fact that it's occurred. Certainly I want good things for my sister, and I prefer that she didn't have any hardships at all. But we're not promised a life without hardships. We're not promised our jobs promote forever, and no one should. And to the extent federal workers have tried to insulate themselves from the realities of the world in that way, that's not a good thing, and it never was a good thing. And it's probably good that that passes away. You know, the personal dimensions of this are not really what inform my views on the matter. I just think as a practical matter, force reduction is appropriate. But what is completely unnecessary, what is a choice here, is the kind of brutality of that forced reduction, and I use that word with some consideration. I don't want to exaggerate things, but I also don't want to understate, or you have euphemism, understate, the profound implications for people in their lives. When you've spent, you know, 15, 20 years doing something and it's happening all at once to everyone, the job pool in that particular area is going to be flooded with people who have experience somewhat similar to yours that kind of optimized for this. We've deranged the workforce in the D.C. metropolitan area in the sense that they have come to expect that there will be positions like this and kind of have positioned themselves for that unwinding that actually requires a little bit of something. And I'm someone who can hold in my head both the aspiration to get rid of agencies that perhaps only came into existence in the last 30 or 40 years and that we could probably do without and kind of take their work and add it to a different agency, and also that we should go about doing that work in a way that's likely to be popular and durable and that won't impair the ability of the government to ever find good people to do the things that government is determined to do, whether or not it's the best things for them to do. You know, there are national parks. Someone's going to have to run them. Do you want good people doing that job, or do you want people who, I guess I'll take this job that I'm probably going to get fired from randomly for no particular reason, perhaps to satisfy, you know, the instincts of a thoughtless politician. That may not be the outcome you want.
- [68:07]
Isaac Saul
We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.
- [68:13]
Camille Foster
Hey, prime members, are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com ad freepodcasts that's Amazon.com ad freeppodcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. A real Lemonade Pet Insurance Review by Madison H. You know, I thought it was a little ridiculous to get pet insurance, but I really didn't want to not take my little kitten to the vet because of money. In the last eight months, I've taken him in six times because of ear infections and saved literally hundreds of dollars. He may even need to get surgery, and I couldn't consider it without Lemonade's help. I recommend Lemonade to all my friends constantly, and now I'm recommending it to you.
- [69:07]
Isaac Saul
Check it out@lemonade.com pet before we get out of here, I want to make one last pivot to, I guess maybe a Somber, more somber I should say note, because I think the kind of federal layoff stuff is for a lot of people, a somber topic. I've been having a little bit of an existential crisis on the news front. On the news consumption front.
- [69:40]
Camille Foster
I'll say A little bit of a crisis is interesting.
- [69:43]
Marc Maron
Yeah.
- [69:45]
Isaac Saul
What's the point of having a podcast if you're not going to use it as your personal, personal therapy session? But I'm here with two smart gentlemen and I really want to pick at your guys brains about this because I've been struggling with it candidly for the last couple weeks. I had this moment and I sort of referenced this a little bit in tangle where when the war, the ceasefire broke in Gaza and Israel started its bombings again, there was this picture, this very viral picture that sort of defined the end of the ceasefire that went around of this Palestinian baby. I mean literally infant looking in a onesie, sort of like in this piece of rubble, dead. And it really rocked me as a new father. I've been seeing the world in different colors now and experiencing things in different ways, as I think most new parents do. And it just sort of stopped me in my tracks. You know, I'm scrolling through Twitter, I'm like, I'm reading about, you know, something really absurdly stupid that I should not be wasting any time on like Elon Musk's baby mama responding to one of his tweets demanding child support or something. And then I'm, I'm hit with this like, I mean this just total gut punch, like this, this kid, this baby that's like, appears to be the same age as my brand new six week old son wearing a onesie that my son could be wearing just like dead on the streets of Gaza because of this Israeli airstrike. And I had this sort of realization about the absurdity of kind of consuming the news this way, about processing world events at such a high clip at such a huge rate that I am literally oscillating between straight up tabloid nonsense gossip on a platform like X. And in a matter of seconds I'm sort of just like taking in this horrific guttural image that is changing the life of some family and some far off place in totally, I guess, irreversible ways that is just are like impossible to kind of grapple with. And the analogy that I came up with to sort of describe this experience is like going to a restaurant and being handed a menu where like one of the options is a cheeseburger. And then you look down in the other corner of the menu. And it's like the. The corpses of children, if you want to try cannibalism. And it's like these are not the same things, like the, you know, news about Trump's tariffs or Elon Musk's illegitimate children or whatever it is. And like a baby being killed by an airstrike in a war are degrees of different. They are just like totally operating on different emotional planes, and yet I take them all in at the same time. And I guess I am using this as like a space to vent a little bit about this and think aloud about this sort of like, crisis of my own world where I'm like, questioning if this is a really healthy and appropriate way to kind of consume this stuff, if there's a better option, if I should be numb to this kind of thing or should feel this sort of sensitivity towards it. Are we covering the news around wars as journalists in an appropriate way that invites enough emotion and enough feeling? Or is what we're doing right now sort of create a bunch of people like me who are just scrolling past it and processing it all in this sort of numbed, I guess, brain dead way? In some senses, to me, I almost felt like everything up to this moment, I'd just been sort of almost brain dead about. I'm just like, oh, look, another 50 people died in Yemen or there was this horrific slaughter in Ukraine and I'll feel something emotionally about it for five seconds and then move on. So I don't know, man, there's no real question here. I'd like to invite some discussion about it because I guess I'm struggling with it and I'm wondering how you guys think about this stuff, if you've ever sort of had a moment like that and what maybe there is to do about it. Because I imagine a lot of people who are news consumers, political junkies, listening to this podcast, reading our newsletter, I mean, I suspect many of them struggle with this at one point or another.
- [74:22]
Marc Maron
I mean, a thought experiment that may be worth running here is try to imagine a universe where you essentially get two daily papers delivered to you. One is all of the joyful things, the happy things, the Kardashian news and the sports page, you know what I mean? Maybe the style section, depending on the movie that's coming out that week, that is in another world. Well, not the other world. The other paper is a compendium of all of the most awful things that are happening everywhere all at once. And I wonder if the effect of reading a catalog of horrible things that are happening is likely to make you more concerned about the third item down from the list of most important terrible tragedies around the world. If encountering it that way versus encountering it quickly as you're scrolling through Twitter and you just saw the latest meme or an ad for a meme coin, perhaps, or in a periodical where they're covering other things that are much more trivial. I mean, there's a sense in which it has always been this way and there's always been this kind of proximity bias that we have where you can stub your toe on the wall. And that is the most important concern in the world, despite the fact that. That people are being genocided somewhere on earth. And to the extent you even spare a moment to think about that, you spend most of the day thinking about getting your kids to school and other kind of practical immediacy of life. And that proximity bias exists. The limitations of our empathy exist in domestic context, too. Our neighbors are suffering, but we're not. We're sad for them, but. But are we going to suffer along with them in equal proportion? Probably not. I think that's always been a challenge for us and it's always worth thinking about that challenge and the fact that we do have to try harder to perhaps to marshal some empathy so that we can think about things and kind of put them into the right context. So I share your discomfort. I want to commend it and say lean into it. But I would also say that there's no panacea coming. You know, I think the challenge has always been the same. Maybe part of the issue here to kind of take it in a slightly different direction is to say that there's a lot of really stupid things that are deemed important that we end up spending a lot of time talking about and covering and seeing those things at all. Not kind of relative to the tragedies that are happening elsewhere, but seeing them at all and taking them at all seriously is perhaps something that we should be a little bit more concerned about than we are. But that's a separate matter.
- [77:08]
Camille Foster
And I think. Yeah, I agree with that. I think for sure we have an issue as humans with taking problems that are more local to us as local as like stubbing our big toe and promoting them to higher levels of importance because they're local. I don't even think that's irrational. I think that makes sense for people to do. You have to solve those local problems first, first before you have the time to feel empathy about things that are remote. Just definitionally they're farther away. And then when you have the time to process that stuff, how you're processing it, I think, like what Camille's saying, having the ability to take that in and read it and sort it along with the rest of the mail and the rest of the news that's happening, is just a challenge with the way our brains are wired to work. We are a species that's evolved to live in a world where there have been under a million of us for the entirety of our evolution until about 200 years ago. So we're dealing with a new world far past our biology's ability to keep up with it. The only place where I can see things are different from the world that's existed before that, from the challenges that we've had in news media as consumers and producers of it. That is at all different with the description you're describing, Isaac, of seeing these images that are challenging on social media is. Our conception of what we use social media for is not the same as what our conception of opening the paper has been. Because a lot of the time we'll open up our phones and. And I mean, I need to kill a couple minutes. I'm gonna check Twitter.
- [78:55]
Marc Maron
Yeah.
- [78:55]
Camille Foster
And that's not really opening yourself up to receive whatever news the world has. It's, I need to entertain myself. I need to, like, hit the dopamine pump real quick and just, like, feel good for a second and feel like I'm informed. And it's tough to come into an app with that mindset and then see something really challenging. I think if you are going through the action of opening a paper, I'm sorry, this is going to be really cheesy, but it's also you opening yourself up a little bit to see what's going to be in there, and you're going to be able to process it because you're going through a little bit of a ritual of saying, I'm doing my news consumption. I'm going to be able to process what's here. And I don't think we have that same relationship with social media. It's so immersive, it's so present, it's so everywhere. And we think of it as something that's not designed to challenge us. It's something that's going to confirm our biases, and it's something that's going to not make us feel terrible. So that when something like that does pop up, when we're not in the headspace for it, it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like, it should be on the same menu. So I agree with you on that. I don't know if there's a fix for that for Twitter. I think the fix has to kind of come from individually, the way we conceive of our news consumption. Like, for me, if I see a story when I have like a minute or two and I'm scrolling and it's not something I'm prepared to read about, I'll feel bad for a second, I'm scrolling past it. I'll think like, man, I. I'm not going to read the story about Cambodia right now. But, like, I'm going to. I'm going to. I just need to give myself more time to process.
- [80:26]
Marc Maron
Yeah, I want to talk about this more. Another time, for sure. I want to talk about this more because I've got so many thoughts, but.
- [80:32]
Isaac Saul
I love that I would just say, I guess maybe to. To wrap that. Like, I think the action I'm considering or the. The quandary that I feel is like, whether I need to create this certain space to have that kind of consumption, where it's just maybe an exercise, like what you're saying, Ari, where it's like, it's okay to not take this in now, bookmark this, I'll read it later. I'll really create some space for myself to feel this or engage it in the future. And then also just sort of this inclination where it's hard not to wonder, is this really good for me or good for society even? Does it matter that I saw the dead kid in Gaza? Maybe I'm more informed as a voter now, or it might move my position on how I think the US government should be acting with regards to Israel or something like that. Maybe it has this tangible thing, or maybe my tank of empathy is finite and I should be preserving it for the people in my life, my neighbors, my immediate community. I don't honestly know ethically, morally, in a really pragmatic sense, what is the right answer there? And I think that's almost what I'm wondering is it's like I spend a whole day consuming this stuff and then I come home at 6 o'clock to my family and I'm like, it's put an emotional toll on me and is that, you know, is that fair to them? Is that like the right balance actually.
- [82:13]
Camille Foster
Strike, I don't know, concentric circles of responsibility? I think that's a thing we've talked about before and I really like that, that model of understanding. For example, yesterday I was running a fever and I was sick all day. I couldn't read shit and I couldn't help at work and I was in bed and this.
- [82:31]
Isaac Saul
Wait, were you sick yesterday? Dude.
- [82:34]
Camille Foster
All right, nice, good. Good one. But, but this morning I, like, over breakfast, I apologized to my wife. I was like, I'm sorry that I, like, required so much time yesterday. And she's like, you're sick. I don't mind. What I would have minded is if you tried to work through it and made yourself miserable by trying to, like, do at work and could only do 50% of it, and then you were even worse for longer, and then I had to take. Take care of you for an extra day because you couldn't recover or you were annoyed and grumpy and angry all evening. In that scenario, the right thing for me to do morally was to circle the wagons and try to take care of myself first so I could be, you know, affix the mask before I could help others, so to speak. And so that way I could be not only a functional human, but also a good partner to my wife, a good member of my household. And then I could be a good employee and good co worker at Tangle, but I couldn't. If I try to do all of it at once, I'd fail at all of it. So if you want to have good empathy in the world and you want to be able to be a good news consumer, if you're not in a place where you're able to actually engage with those stories, then you're not going to be successful in any of it. You're not going to be a good partner to Phoebe. You're not going to be able to be a good reader of the news. If you're trying to take stuff in half assed. And I think, like, that's something, you know, you have to acknowledge.
- [84:02]
Marc Maron
If we were going to translate that into kind of national policy axiom, perhaps it would go America first, maybe. Perhaps.
- [84:12]
Isaac Saul
Hell yeah, brother.
- [84:13]
Camille Foster
Vermont first, brother.
- [84:15]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. All right, listen, we are. We're coming up an hour and a half here. Camille, I know you're a big, busy man, but before we get out of here, I think you, you'll be the first guest that we've ever invited into our, our grievance circle to close out the show, so I'm excited to have you. Typically, we kick you guys out before we get here, so you're in a true, true co hosting capacity today. Ari, I know what your grievance is going to be. It should be just. I'm. I will give you I will give. Give you first. I will give you. Show me how to enter the grievance zone. I'll give you first. I'll go second. We'll finish with Camille. All right, But I have to tie. I'm putting you, like, two or three minutes on the clock for you.
- [84:58]
Camille Foster
That's impossible.
- [84:59]
Isaac Saul
All right, all right. Well, I'm going to cut you off. I'm telling you right now. The time is starting. And grievance.
- [85:07]
Camille Foster
The airing of grievances.
- [85:13]
Marc Maron
You're not the only one improving yourself. I worked out with a dumbbell yesterday.
- [85:17]
Camille Foster
I feel vigorous. All right. I took notes on this. So I came into from Japan to Wilmington, North Carolina, to coach a tournament. At the end of the tournament, I'm in Wilmington. Flight going out on an American airline. Not going to specify which one, but it's an American airline. And my flight on Sunday evening is delayed, and it's delayed 30 minutes, then delayed another 30. We're on the plane. It goes to the tarmac. We're told that we have a mechanical issue, and it's going to be five minutes. An hour later, we're back at the gate saying, oh, sorry, couldn't resolve it. Get off the plane. Flight attendants were a little rude, too. Like, I was trying to fit my bag above the seat, and he told me that it wasn't going to fit, like, over the. The monitor, too, so everyone can hear it. And it's like, it's not gonna fit, man. If you're trying to smash it up there, it's not gonna work. And I'm like, all right, like, here. And I'm like, not happy. And he tries to make another joke, and I don't respond. And as I'm walking back, behind my back, he mutters, lighten up, man. Like, excuse me. And so I let it go. I ignore it. Then I sit on the plane for 45 minutes. Then we get to the gate, get my bag, and go to the counter, try to find another flight. Next flight, tomorrow morning. Cool. Hotel voucher. No travel voucher. And there's no public transportation in Wilmington, so that's another hundred dollars to get a rental car just to go five miles and back, get to the hotel room. It's stuffy. Sheets are torn up. Like, literally, there's holes in them. I'm not able to sleep the whole night. I get no sleep, and I start to toss and turn. I have feverish dreams. I don't know why, but all about Chinese finance, huh? No clue. Like, I'm just dreaming that all of the sheets are like real estate deals and all of the comforters are U.S. debt. And I'm trying to get some real estate deals and shed U.S. debt. And I like, this is all. My brain's racing and I wake up and I have a fever. Wake up, I was out for like 10 minutes. I had no sleep the whole night.
- [87:26]
Marc Maron
That's great.
- [87:27]
Camille Foster
I get up, I can't eat a thing. I'm running a fever. I later find out like I'm just getting the flu. I go to the airport. When I'm at the airport, my, my flight, my new flight has been delayed again. Another it's the same plane. I find out it's a mechanical error. So it's going to be another 30 minutes. I'm like, I've seen this movie. So I go to a gate to try to get my flight changed to a different plane because I know that one's not going to take off. They say, so, like there are a couple people in front of me. Another person comes up tasking in the shoulder, say, you know, you can go to that gate if you want because there's no line there and that attendant can help you. So I go over in that time, the two people in front of me have finished and they're getting helped. And the new attendant at this gate, he's like, give me five minutes to set up. I'm like, okay, cool. That was. That saved me a lot of time. They then put me on a flight that's going to be coming out at 1:00 instead of that morning. And then I'll get a connection to Burlington later that afternoon around 4. So I'm like, okay, that's cool. So I get on that flight. That flight is immediately delayed by an hour, we think for weather. Like, okay, so I'm going to miss the connection. So I go back to the gate where I just came from and I said, okay, that one's delayed, so I might have to go on a later flight. He's like, okay, puts me on the later flight that's going to be out at 10:30. I do that. It's fine, get on the plane. As I'm about to get on the plane, I see the connection flight that I would have missed has itself been delayed, so there's a chance I could still make it. So I'm told by the attendant at the desk, like, just see if they have room. You should be able to get on it. Like, cool. Flight takes off on time somehow based after the delays lands. I get into Washington D.C. and to Reagan International Go, like, without crashing.
- [89:16]
Isaac Saul
Congratulations.
- [89:17]
Camille Foster
Yeah, thank you. It's. That's. That is the silver lining here. I get to the desk where the Burlington flight still hasn't taken off. It's 10 minutes, like, until doors, so I've got plenty of time. And I get there and I say, hey, I'm on this flight later. I was originally on this flight before, like, to get on it now so it can take off. And they're like, okay, well, there's four seats, so that shouldn't be a problem. Is your flight later? Is your seat confirmed? And I said, yeah. And they go, okay, then we can't help you. And I'm like, wow. What? They said, yeah, if you have a confirmed seat on another flight and you're not on standby for this one, then we can't help you. I'm like, you lost your place. You can. It's like, is there anything I can do? And they're like, well, do you have the app for our airline? And I was like, no, I don't download these apps. Like, that's shit. And they said, well, if you had the app, you could probably just switch flights, but if you don't help you.
- [90:11]
Marc Maron
Wow.
- [90:11]
Camille Foster
Okay. So if I can Download it in 90 seconds and switch my flight myself, I can do it, but it is impossible for this terminal to manage to do that. Great. So, like, I'm. I'm just like, fine. Oh, brother. So I go and I just chill for a little bit in the. In the. In the airport. I see my next flight, it's at 10:30 that just got delayed to 11:30. Like, all right, okay. I could see where this might be going. Does get canceled. That flight does get canceled. So I go to my friend's house, his apartment. He's letting me crash with them for the night. Very generous, Very happy. He did. He has a cat. I'm allergic. Toss and turn all night. I'm just. I'm just dreaming about Chinese finance again. I don't know why, but I can't get it out of my headquarters. I wake up. Yeah, another fever is like, worse flu, worse flight that I got rebooked on 6:30am meaning I have to be up at 4:30, which is fine because I didn't sleep anyway. So I get on a lift to the airport, get on my first flight out of DC to Philly. Flying from DC to Philly feels fucking ridiculous. I could walk. And I'm on the tarmac for about 100 minutes because the plane has to get 5,000 pounds of fuel emptied from it because it's over fueled. Because was supposed to fly to Witchita, and instead it's being rerouted to Philly. So they have to wait an hour for a fuel tank to come and pump out the fuel. Except the fuel tank. The fuel tanker doesn't have capacity for all the fuel they have to empty, so they have to bring a second tanker to empty more fuel. And then they do that. That takes another 30 minutes. Then we. The whole time, I can't sleep on this little chair and I'm exhausted and I'm just sitting there in the this two hot plane for two hours on the tarmac. Eventually we take off, land, get off the plane. It takes three and a half hours, which is less time than it would have taken to drive. And then when we're in Philly, thank God, everything goes all right, and I'm able to take off and land and we get to Burlington. Last flight was perfect, flawless. No issues, five stars. Everything else.
- [92:25]
Marc Maron
This is the Ben Hur of negative Yelp reviews right there.
- [92:29]
Isaac Saul
Yeah.
- [92:30]
Marc Maron
Wow.
- [92:30]
Isaac Saul
That might be the longest grievance of all time.
- [92:32]
Camille Foster
Don't take particularly aggrieved, man. I am a lot of small details, too. Like the Wilmington airport uses soap. That's the same soap my ex girlfriend used. And I didn't need that sensory memory at that time.
- [92:45]
Marc Maron
Yeah, no, I mean, you're not thinking about this too much at all. Definitely not illuminating.
- [92:51]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. You have been fully defeated. Well, all that culminated in. We had a team meeting yesterday that Ari tried to join. Extremely sick.
- [92:59]
Camille Foster
I did join.
- [93:01]
Isaac Saul
And about 45 minutes into the team meeting, Magdalena noticed that Ari was completely asleep on the couch.
- [93:09]
Camille Foster
Hour and five minutes into an hour meeting, to be fair.
- [93:12]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. So we took a bunch of screenshots of him passed out on the team meeting.
- [93:16]
Camille Foster
I gave everything I had to that meeting. Very obviously, I had no energy left.
- [93:21]
Marc Maron
People sleeping in meetings. Either the best or the worst kind of corporate culture. Giving their all or giving absolutely nothing. Who knows?
- [93:28]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, you did empty the tank. All right, I'll give mine fair very quickly, and then we'll get.
- [93:32]
Camille Foster
And then I had to empty it again because the truck wasn't picking up.
- [93:38]
Isaac Saul
All right, mine is my. Mine this week is I'm out here in West Texas. I talked a bunch about Starlink last I tried to do something really nice for Elon because I've been criticizing Doge a bunch. I ordered Starlink. I'm on Starlink right now to do this meeting. I set it up, did the whole order, the delivery, and it all went really Fluffy flawlessly. And I was very impressed by the whole system. I said I would report back about the setup. The setup has mostly been good, but I have, I have a small grievance that I think I'd like to register, which is that I was so excited I got the Starlink to satellite dish. You know, I set it up on my property out here. I plugged it in and I open the, you know, I scan the barcode that's on the dish in order to set up the. The Internet, which is what they tell you to do on the box. And once I get it set up or I get to the sort of browser page where I'm supposed to do that, the notification I get from Starlink is that I need to download the Starlink app in order to set up the dish, which is incredibly inconvenient when you don't have Internet. And I'm like, this seems like a basic character flaw in terms of this whole thing where if I were really in some place where there was no Internet nearby and I desperately needed Starlink and I got this thing and I don't have the app. I'm just completely frozen in place unless I can download the app, which I can't do without Internet. Meanwhile, the Starlink has connected to some satellite. So it's giving me like the little WI fi bars on my phone, like saying, you know, it's like when you have Internet but you're not really connected to it. And so my sort of simple brain not being a tech engineer programmer is like, like there should just be this sort of like 15 minute grace period where Starlink provides you the Internet so you can download the app so you can do the setup. That's like the most obvious no brainer solution to this problem. How have these geniuses at Starlink not thought about this?
- [95:34]
Marc Maron
Anyway, I may be really distracted, maybe really distracted. Busy doing other things.
- [95:40]
Isaac Saul
Yeah.
- [95:41]
Camille Foster
Or maybe he's not distracted enough.
- [95:43]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. Or maybe that I drove, I drove back to my cousin's house, which is, you know, a mile away, downloaded the app, then came back and then finished the setup. The whole time just thinking, I can't wait to complain about this on the podcast next week. But I will say now that I'm two weeks into using Starlink, truly a genuinely remarkable product. The Internet is phenomenal. I have had no issues. It has not gone out once at all. I'm in this place where I would require the cable company coming out here and laying wire and digging trenches and setting up the wifi and it would have Taken a week or two to get this Internet set up and instead I just shipped this dish down to the house, picked it up and plugged it in. And I have Internet. And it is an incredible, remarkable product that I am thoroughly impressed by. Except for this one setup hiccup. So that's my grievance and my additional nice thing to say about an Elon Musk owned company. Me in an era of me complaining about him a lot.
- [96:44]
Marc Maron
Endorsement I can't travel a little bit for.
- [96:47]
Camille Foster
I'll cover a little bit for Elon here too. Here's a. Here's a slack exchange. Monday, March 3rd from Isaac. Is Starlink set up as easy as just unpacking the kit and setting up the dish? I'm not going to need anyone out there and I just basically have to have an account and connect response for me, pretty much got to download an app first. But the process is pretty straightforward. The app should walk you through it.
- [97:11]
Isaac Saul
Did you really tell me that?
- [97:13]
Camille Foster
Yes. That's crushing the only thing that I warned you about.
- [97:18]
Marc Maron
Wow.
- [97:19]
Camille Foster
I'm pretty sure I told you that.
- [97:20]
Marc Maron
You're revealing a grievance.
- [97:21]
Isaac Saul
Don't.
- [97:21]
Camille Foster
Don't do that. Supposed to be a safe space. You chat on my grievances as your default setting. I just want to let you know I feel you with. Like, they should probably have that grace period. But if only someone had warned you, man. Damn.
- [97:34]
Marc Maron
Yeah, but that's a fair flag and it does reflect poorly on Isaac. But ultimately I think that it more so embodies the dichotomy of Elon, which is, does he build great products that change our lives for the better? Yes. Are they sometimes really frustrating? Fucking yes, actually. I'm sorry if I'm swearing. Is that okay?
- [97:57]
Isaac Saul
Year logic.
- [97:58]
Camille Foster
We've all sweared.
- [97:59]
Marc Maron
Okay, you get right. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it.
- [98:01]
Isaac Saul
We tried not to be excessive.
- [98:03]
Marc Maron
I didn't even say that.
- [98:04]
Isaac Saul
I don't know what you're talking about.
- [98:05]
Marc Maron
Yeah, why am I apologizing? I didn't say anything wrong, but I promise we didn't coordinate this, but yesterday I had a frustrating experience with another Elon Musk affiliated company. And that is my grievance for today. Look, in fairness, I'm frustrated with Tesla both with respect to the protesters who are making life difficult for me as someone who not only likes his Tesla, but wants to buy two more of them right now. Like, I need to replace my car, my wife needs a new car and I kind of need to do it, and I resent that. You people are making me feel a weird sort of way more so my wife about even this decision to possibly buy it because you're gonna look at me funny or imagine you understand my politics. It's stupid that I have to consider that at all. It's stupid that anyone does. That's the first thing. Some of that is Elon's fault. A lot of it is other people's fault. Relatedly, I wish it were easier to know where you're going to be destroying cars because my Tesla Model S, I bought it and the loan to value is a disaster. That is largely Elon's fault because of all the damn price cuts that they just keep coming with. What I would love to be able to do is just park it on a street corner in Oakland for a couple of days and you find people. You could set it on fire, completely destroy it. I'll go, woe is me. But I will cash in the insurance. It'll be a total loss and I won't have to worry about that problem anymore.
- [99:28]
Camille Foster
So what you're kind of proposing is a protester to car reclamation pipeline here.
- [99:34]
Marc Maron
I'm just saying. I'm just saying we should find a way to kind of bring these things together. Symbiosis, you know, frustrated Tesla owners can help it. Frustrated Elon Musk haters. Give them their opportunity to commit acts of crime. It's still a crime. You're still destroying property. Do I want this to happen? I wouldn't be mad if it happened. Sure I want it to happen. But I'm not going to do it. And I'm not asking you to do it. But if you're doing it anyways, set my car on fire. Not the ones that are on the dealership lot. I need one of those. And the last thing I'll say is the actual process of going into the Tesla dealership and buying a car is supposed to be super easy, but it really sucks. I'll swore again.
- [100:16]
Isaac Saul
You swallowed that one.
- [100:18]
Marc Maron
When like the two factor authentication isn't on on your account, but they insist that it's on, you've got to log in three different times and find a different code. You get an estimate for the cost, but if you back click, you have to start the whole process over again. How have you not figured this out? Your whole model is predicated upon. It's super easy to buy these cars. You can just check out on the website. You can buy it on your Apple car and then show up at the dealership and leave. No, you can't. It is a disaster. It's way too complicated. And it doesn't make any sense that that's the case. Except it makes all the sense in the world because you are not only the indispensable man who makes these great products that I've come to revere and adore. Although the Tesla's so heavy that I got to replace my tires every year. It's a real problem. No one told me that beforehand. It's. Yeah, I'm going to stop complaining there. I do want to buy Tesla, but I'm a little frustrated.
- [101:05]
Camille Foster
That makes sense.
- [101:06]
Marc Maron
So there we go.
- [101:07]
Camille Foster
Those are good complaints to have. I think there should be some sort of group that's responsible for advising efficiency adjustments to Tesla. That's what I thought.
- [101:17]
Marc Maron
Yeah.
- [101:19]
Isaac Saul
I have to say, you're a natural man. The beautiful intersection of privilege and pain in that grievance. I mean, that is really what this is all about.
- [101:31]
Marc Maron
Yes.
- [101:32]
Isaac Saul
Come. I think a grand slam home run. Beautiful. Well done. All right, fellas. We are. We're at an hour 40. I appreciate the time. I'm going to let you guys get back to the. Whatever the fuck you guys do for work. Ari. Maybe get some rest. You're at 80% charge up, man. Camille, I know you're 80%.
- [101:52]
Camille Foster
Feels incredible.
- [101:53]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. If people don't know. And you want to get some more of the beautiful tariff commentary, highly recommend checking out the fifth column this week. It sounds like you have Scott coming on, which is. That's a. That's a Scott.
- [102:09]
Camille Foster
Say Scott who?
- [102:11]
Marc Maron
They don't know. If they don't know who Scott is. Come on. Come on. You're the problem. Listening.
- [102:20]
Isaac Saul
It'll. It'll be worth the listen. I. I assure you. The first one was a tour de force and I. I can't wait to listen to what he. What he has to say now.
- [102:27]
Marc Maron
We talked to him the last time in November. November, right after the Trump win. We knew the tariffs were coming and now they're here, so we got to talk to them again and get an update. But I'm definitely going to force him to do some steel manning. I'm taking a page out of your book there, so thanks for that, Isaac. I appreciate it. I had a good time. I love. I love Tangled. Been a fan for a while. I've told people that Tangle is the place where you go and you want to read that one indispensable piece on whatever the major issue of the moment is. Like you go to Tango Rectangle and you read that. If you can only read the one thing and you guys deliver on that promise pretty regularly. So thanks for having me, man.
- [103:02]
Camille Foster
Love that.
- [103:02]
Isaac Saul
I love it. Camille. Ari yeah, we'll. We'll do it again sometime soon, I hope.
- [103:11]
Camille Foster
Take care.
- [103:11]
Isaac Saul
Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead Bailey Saw Lindsay Knuth 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@readtangle.com.
- [103:58]
Marc Maron
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
- [104:01]
Camille Foster
Do you ever think about switching insurance.
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Marc Maron
Companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.
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Camille Foster
Potential savings will vary.
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Marc Maron
Not available in all states.
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Camille Foster
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Marc Maron
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