PREMIERE - Suspension of the rules: A new era begins.

Summary

Podcast Summary: Tangle - Episode Premiere: "Suspension of the Rules: A New Era Begins"

Release Date: August 8, 2025

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Introduction: Rebranding and New Beginnings

In the inaugural episode of Tangle's new podcast series, "Suspension of the Rules," host Isaac Saul introduces significant changes to the Tangle brand. The episode delves into the reasons behind the rebranding, the challenges in naming the podcast, and the aspirations for fostering a non-partisan space for political discourse.

Notable Quotes:

• Isaac Saul [05:18]: "We could have chosen a horrible name instead. We stuck to high standards."
• Isaac Saul [05:34]: "Suspension of the Rules... sounds like we're doing something a little edgy."

Tangle's Growth and Mission

Isaac reflects on Tangle's remarkable growth over the past year, highlighting milestones such as expanding the mailing list from 120,000 to over 400,000 subscribers, quadrupling revenue from subscriptions, and increasing the team size from five to twelve members. He emphasizes Tangle's mission to counteract the current media landscape's sensationalism and polarization by providing a platform for constructive and nuanced political conversations.

Notable Quotes:

• Isaac Saul [07:46]: "We have a lot of Republicans telling Trump not to do this right now."
• Isaac Saul [09:02]: "We're trying to build a home for people of all political backgrounds."

Discussion on Gerrymandering and Democratic Integrity

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to the contentious issue of gerrymandering. Isaac brings attention to President Trump's directive to the Commerce Department to exclude illegal immigrants from the census count, a move with profound implications for congressional representation. The conversation analyzes the potential consequences of this action, including the exacerbation of non-competitive congressional districts and the erosion of democratic principles.

Notable Quotes:

• Isaac Saul [20:58]: "Trump is clearly going all in on this notion of just gerrymandering every place that Republicans can."
• Ari Weitzman [24:11]: "We could have done this through participating in partisan politics."

Camille Foster adds depth to the discussion by critiquing the notion that gerrymandering alone signifies a slide toward autocracy. Instead, she posits that it may be symptomatic of broader governmental dysfunction, highlighting issues like Congress's ineffectiveness and the entrenchment of power.

Notable Quotes:

• Camille Foster [33:36]: "A government that becomes completely unresponsive and reliably dysfunctional is not a very good government."
• Isaac Saul [34:02]: "If everybody can vote in every election, then it doesn't really matter how gerrymandered things are."

ChatGPT and the Safety of Teenagers

Isaac raises concerns about a recent AP News article claiming that ChatGPT poses risks to teenagers by providing guidance on harmful behaviors. The discussion explores the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, emphasizing their role as token prediction algorithms rather than truth-seeking machines. Camille underscores the importance of understanding these technologies' capabilities and limitations, advocating for responsible usage and education to mitigate potential harms.

Notable Quotes:

• Isaac Saul [55:10]: "I'm just curious what you guys make of a story like this and how seriously you take the threat."
• Camille Foster [59:39]: "They are token prediction algorithms. They are guessing based on the material you send them."

The trio reflects on historical moral panics surrounding new technologies, comparing current fears about AI to past concerns about video games and social media. They agree that while vigilance is necessary, it's equally important to foster a balanced understanding of AI's potential benefits and risks.

Notable Quotes:

• Isaac Saul [75:04]: "We're raising concerns about the methodology of these studies and discussing the import of them."
• Camille Foster [77:06]: "A healthy skepticism, well informed, is vital and appropriate here."

Grievances: Navigating Overregulation in Recreational Clamming

In the segment dedicated to grievances, Isaac shares a personal experience from a recent clamming trip in Cape Cod. He expresses frustration with the stringent enforcement of permit regulations, which limited his group's ability to participate fully in the activity. The encounter with a permit officer who rigidly enforced rules, even during a family outing, highlighted the challenges of recreational activities under heavy regulation.

Notable Quotes:

• Isaac Saul [93:11]: "My grievance for the week is that there's this guy on the beach... ensuring that I am the only one harvesting the clams."
• Camille Foster [96:51]: "I'm with you. I'm with you. And I'm sorry you had that experience."

The discussion underscores the balance between conservation efforts and recreational access, questioning whether current regulations excessively restrict enjoyable activities without significantly contributing to environmental preservation.

Conclusion: Looking Ahead

As the first episode wraps up, the hosts express optimism for the podcast's future, promising more engaging discussions, recurring segments, and guest interviews. They emphasize Tangle's commitment to fostering a respectful and insightful dialogue across the political spectrum, positioning "Suspension of the Rules" as a beacon for independent and non-partisan political discourse.

Notable Quotes:

• Isaac Saul [99:22]: "This was going to relate to what we were just talking about a little bit."
• Camille Foster [98:20]: "This is the first edition of Suspension of the Rules. We did good first."

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Key Takeaways:

• Rebranding Effort: Tangle has undergone a significant rebranding to align its visual identity with its mission of fostering non-partisan political dialogue.
• Gerrymandering Concerns: The potential redirection of the census to exclude illegal immigrants could deepen existing issues with gerrymandering, impacting democratic representation.
• AI and Teen Safety: While AI tools like ChatGPT offer substantial benefits, there are legitimate concerns about their impact on vulnerable populations, necessitating informed and responsible usage.
• Personal Anecdotes: Real-life experiences, such as overregulation in recreational activities, provide relatable grievances that highlight systemic issues.

This premiere episode sets the tone for Tangle's new podcast series, promising in-depth analyses, thoughtful discussions, and a commitment to elevating political conversations beyond partisan biases.

Transcript

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[Isaac Saul]

All right, coming up, a new podcast and a new name and a new visual brand. We've got some big breaking news in the Tangle world. We talk census gerrymandering news, some of what President Trump's proposing, and one very, very intense comment on a Tango article. We deconstruct a little bit and then some chatter about ChatGPT and the kids and whether they're all right not. And finally, our first ever grievance section in the new podcast. It's a good one.

[Ari Weitzman]

From executive producer Isaac Saul.

[Isaac Saul]

This is Tangle. Hey everybody. Welcome to Suspension of the Rules, a brand new Tangle podcast whose opening will forever be the 10 second clip of our conversation that suddenly became on the record. You just heard. I'm Isaac Saul, your host, Tangle's executive editor. I'm here with Ari Weitzman, our managing editor, and Camille Foster, our editor at large. We have a name for a podcast, but we do not yet have an intro. So you're getting. Well, we have. Fellas, the inaugural episode of Suspension of the Rules. How are we feeling?

[Ari Weitzman]

Camille, how are you feeling? I know there's some back and forth, there's some percolation.

[Isaac Saul]

Don't worry. Camille hates our new name.

[Ari Weitzman]

The rules are expanded.

[Camille Foster]

Camille, I'm always happy to be with you gentlemen. I'm always happy to share some space, be it physically or virtually.

[Ari Weitzman]

As you can always tell what somebody thinks about something when they start complimenting a thing that isn't happening.

[Camille Foster]

What do you think of this name I mentioned?

[Ari Weitzman]

I love being with you guys. This is such a nice.

[Camille Foster]

And you. You know, I say things like that all the time, but, yeah, often in. In preparation of getting ready to say something critical. Look, am I thrilled about the new branding? No, I'm not thrilled. Do I have an alternative that I want to promote? No, I don't. So I should probably shut up and. And just get over it. But I, I. Yeah, it's a lot of words. It's a lot of words.

[Isaac Saul]

Well, I. Let's start here. We went through a lengthy process. By the time you guys are listening to this, you'll know a few things. Well, maybe you won't know. This will be the first time of year. First of all, we just did a visual rebrand of the entire Tangle website and newsletter, and this podcast looks a little different in your feed. Hopefully by the time you're listening to this. So you will probably have noticed some of that before getting here. And as you know, we've been alluding to this new podcast that we want to kind of franchise, which is this weekly show Ari, Camille, and I do, and we had a lot of back and forth about this name. It dragged out for weeks and weeks, as I'm sure some of you can tell because we've been referencing it for a little while. A few things. First of all, it turns out naming a podcast is really hard. Like, this is one of the hardest things I've ever done since I was.

[Ari Weitzman]

We could have named it poorly, very easily.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, Camille had some dog shit recommendations we ignored, but we could have chosen a horrible name instead. We stuck to high standards, and John suggested this name, Suspension of the Rules, which I really like. I'll explain why I Like it.

[Camille Foster]

And then I didn't know John was responsible for this.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah, he did.

[Isaac Saul]

John. This was one of his recommendations.

[Camille Foster]

I used to value his aesthetic sensibilities. Huh.

[Isaac Saul]

It works for a few reasons. One, it's like a play on words. It's kind of like, you know, it's a play on a congressional procedure. But it also sounds like we're doing something a little edgy. Like it sounds like we're breaking the rules somehow, which I like. Yeah, the menacing is a little strong. I think it sounds, you know, like a little edgy. Yeah. Which is like you want people to be interested in what you're talking about. I think this show sometimes veers into a little bit of the edginess. We get Politically incorrect here and there. But the other thing is that the actual definition of what suspension of the rules is, what suspending the rules is in Congress is when they basically have something they want to pass on a bipartisan basis and there are enough votes and there's a two thirds majority that they can sort of suspend the typical rules, break the typical procedure, and push a bill through, which feels a little bit tangle esque in this sort of bipartisan, multipartisan, nonpartisan nature. There's this thing, there's some agreement which, you know, as I say frequently, we're not trying to make everybody agree, but there's a collection of sort of viewpoint diversity that produces this suspension of the rules that pushes something through. There's just. There's something there that works. It fits a little bit. But also I think the kind of double entendre part of it is that we are suspending the rules of the punditry a little bit by trying to elevate the conversation, get out of like the Thunderdome. I'm gonna win the argument politics and instead share disagreements with each other and with guests we bring on the show and whoever else in a way that's kind of amicable and productive and a real dialogue. So that's my defense of the name. On top of thinking that it's genuinely just got a little. Little zip to it, little zazz to it, little memorability to it. But yeah, Camille hates it. So we're all just. We're living together in prosperity. It does have a nice abbreviation, though. S O T R is kind of nice. It's nice to see this, Abraham.

[Camille Foster]

No, S O T R is nice.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah.

[Camille Foster]

Maybe at some point we just only refer to it that way. And again, I would not have raised this publicly. Isaac is outing me and shaming me, which is in Itself somewhat shameful, but not surprising for someone like Isaac, as I suspect we'll get to later.

[Ari Weitzman]

What do you mean by that?

[Camille Foster]

Many nefarious attributes mean by that? Yeah, we'll get into it. We'll get into it.

[Isaac Saul]

We've been going deep on the Tangle comments this week and there's some good stuff in there that we're gonna have to address a little bit. But before we do, I will do one last naval gazy thing and then we'll get into some actual news. And the last Navy Gazal thing is that this is the week of the six year anniversary of Tangle, basically the six years since I sent the first real official newsletter. We kind of loosely play with this anniversary at some point in the first couple weeks of August every year. And that anniversary always triggers some personal reflection on my part. And so I'm going to just monologue here briefly for a minute, which is just to say, first of all, I'm incredibly proud of what we built in the last year from, you know, in the last six years. But from this point last year, I mean, we've grown tremendously. We've gone from 120,000 people on our mailing list and maybe, you know, 3,4000 downloads on a podcast episode to 400,000 plus people on our mailing list. And we're getting hundreds of thousands of downloads a month now because we're producing so much podcasts and our audience has grown. We have nearly quadrupled our revenue from last year on subscriptions, which in turn has allowed us to expand our team. We've gone from five full time people to 12. We got to hire Camille and bring him on for this show and to sort of work in this kind of editor at large fake job that he now has with us, operations person and all that has been tremendously exciting. I'm also feeling really, really gung ho about how we're positioned right now in this current media moment. And this is something I'm writing about in today's newsletter, which we're not doing a podcast version of because we're just talking about this on the show today. But the trust in the legacy media is at an all time low, I think. Everywhere you look there is nothing but sensationalism, conspiracy, Thunderdome style debates. There's very little constructive dialogue happening. X is like a cesspool of rumors and partisan bickering and virtue signaling and bot activity creators on Instagram and TikTok taking these really complicated topics, reducing them to 30 second sound clips. We have AI entering the space with these Insane, simplified roundups that are regularly hallucinating and inaccurate and poorly sourcing their sources. All sorts of stuff that concerns me deeply. I think our information ecosystem is really broken right now, and there is not a literal or digital town square for the millions of Americans who I think crave free dialogue, quality content, viewpoint, diversity. There's no meeting place for this group of independent thinking people, and we're trying to build that here at Tangle. So I am incredibly excited about that. I'm excited and proud of this audaciously human and reliably accurate, humble, nuanced, smart, controversial, brave thing that we're trying to build. And I want us to be a home for people of all political backgrounds and be the big tent news organization that kind of fills that gap. So that's where we are and that's why we're here. And it's always nice to restate our mission. And as part of that, I think we needed, like a visual brand identity that was more aligned with where we're going. And to that end, we're retiring the old purple to red to blue gradient logo brain and the old Tangle font. And we're introducing something that's a little bit different and I think better and an improvement and cleaner and both more serious and also trustworthy and approachable and kind of has a sort of signature look of Tangle. And we're going to be rolling that out here on the podcast, which matters less because you're listening to this, not looking at it, but it'll be on our website and it'll be in your podcast feed, and it'll be on the newsletter, and I think it's going to be really cool. And we have a new color scheme rolling out. We have all this new merch that is now live. So if you go to the episode description, order our newsletter today, you can find links to our merchandise store with a bunch of sweet new swag with our new logo on it that I highly recommend you do. And of course, this is a really great time to tell people about Tangle. So if you want to share this platform, if you've ever thought about sharing this podcast or newsletter or telling a friend about what we're doing, today's a great day to do it because we are sort of relaunching this visual brand, restating our identity, and we have this new podcast suspension of the rules that we are officially in liftoff mode for. And we're going to start doing a lot more interesting stuff on this show. We're going to have some recurring segments we're going to bring on some guests. We are going to continue to improve on the format of the show and I think genuinely just get more comfortable with the three of us in a room or on a call like this together while we're navigating all these crazy political issues and excited to have people on board for that also. So thank you guys for all the support to get here. Thanks, Camille and Ari for being a part of this. Anything you find, gentlemen, would like to add before we get into some actual news of the day?

[Ari Weitzman]

Well, I think we started by we I mean me when I joined Tangle several years ago, before I actually left the job that I was shamefully slacking on a little bit in the morning to help edit the newsletter. Started a work with Tango a couple years ago, and even just in the time that I've been here before that Tango grew enough to hire me even. And then it's grown since then in a way that's been transformational. It's been really rewarding to be a part of it. Going back to even before I joined, before Isaac started Tangle, I think I, like a lot of people, was looking for something like this. I remember after the synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh, looking for something that was going to kind of be able to speak to different viewpoints about how I was feeling in reaction to that event was a real impetus moment for me personally, thinking about how I thought there's this problem with rising antisemitism or expressing anti Semitism in the country. But I was not convinced that a lot of the solutions I was reading about hate speech laws and trying to pass censorship and getting people off of platforms like what was then called Twitter. I didn't find any of those things to be convincing. And I just wanted a place where there'd be able to be solid, rational conversation about those things. And that's one of the things that I know Isaac and I have agreed on before. It's something where I've been as a friend of Isaac's for a while, following controversial Facebook threads and comments from like 2014 and 15, talking to pretty garrulous people in our extended networks and trying to have the conversations in a way that felt real and authentic. But with like 20 people that we knew on Facebook. And because I watched Isaac be able to manage those conversations well when it didn't matter, when it was just on social media with like tens of people that we knew, I knew that it would be a reliable news organization once it came to porting those principles over to something that didn't matter. So the trust has been here for me towards you the whole time, Isaac. And I think that I hope that I'm able to contribute to this organization in a way that feels like it's moving forward in a way that other people who had the same impetus as I did could honor and appreciate. And it's been been very rewarding, like all the 60 hour work weeks and, you know, more have been in service of something that I think I could really not feel bad about sacrificing the time that it's taken. So grateful for this being started, grateful for the chance to join and grateful for everybody who breathes life into it.

[Camille Foster]

Hear, hear. Yeah, I will wholeheartedly endorse virtually all of that. Even if it wasn't my direct experience is a little bit different. I would say that even in those smaller settings, when you've got, you know, a small handful of people having a conversation, it's not unimportant. Obviously it can be hugely consequential. But being able to take those same sorts of, like, good faith attitudes and scaling them up to something where you're trying to attribute good faith on the broadest possible scale, where you're genuinely interested in nuance when the issues are meaningfully complicated, it's a great habit to form in those smaller contexts. And it's actually really important in those smaller contexts because it is ultimately an aggregate of those smaller contexts that helps to inform the national conversation on a range of issues. And I really do think, one, I'm just reliably impressed with the quality of the team at Tangle. Still feel kind of new here, very much feel at home, and two, the community of people who read Tangle, the readership seems interested in that. And there will definitely be some hot debates and some oftentimes sometimes less than productive comments. But I think by and large, it is really wonderful to see that there is space for publications that are so faithfully committed to having productive conversations about really contentious but ultimately vitally important issues. And I think it's healthy. I think there's a huge appetite for it and great potential for it in the market. And I'm excited to see what the future brings.

[Isaac Saul]

I love it. Thank you guys and glad to have you both here. I guess with that, we should talk about some of the happenings going on right now in our world. We'll be right back after this quick break.

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[Isaac Saul]

The first and probably biggest story that I think I want to touch on is some of the gerrymandering stuff that's been, I mean, both in the news this week, in the news for the last 10 or 15 years. We got a breaking piece of news today as we're recording this on Thursday, which is that President Trump has now ordered the Commerce Department to begin working on a new census, emphasizing that those in the country illegally will not be counted in the total. This obviously would have huge ramifications for the way the census results change the balance of the House of Representatives. I mean, it's not entirely clear, but you know, it's not entirely clear how big of an impact it would have. But Trump is clearly going all in on this notion of just gerrymandering every place that Republicans can gerrymander. And now Democrats are replying with their own promises to just pretty much do whatever they can, which is not quite as much to even the scales. But you know, everywhere from New York to California to Illinois, they're all looking at how to eke out another House seat here. There's and it's all just spinning out into I think a quickly deteriorating situation where a lot of Americans are going to be boxed out of a competitive race in their congressional district, which sucks. I've written about this a good bit. I mean we did a big feature on gerrymandering a couple of years ago and then we had the newsletter and the podcast this week about it. But I bring all this up actually to bring up the top comment on that newsletter from this week on gerrymandering, which I'm curious to get your guys response to because it was the most liked comment on the article that we published and it's from a user named MB who's a pretty prolific commentator. And I'm just going to our commenter and I'm just going to read, read the comment here and then we can talk about it. And B said the reason they do not hide gerrymandering is because they no longer care what the people think. They no longer care what the voters think. Greed and lust for continued power are their motivators. It's simply rigging the system. It's not really more complicated than that. It isn't a one party issue. Both parties have done it. Everyone needs to register as an independent and I mean everyone. The dirty flow of money to our government has attracted every grifter and hustler to run for office. Our top priorities as voters should be election system, campaign finance and lobby reform. Instead, we have made illegal immigration our top priority, which with the numbers is about 5% of the population. They literally affect no one's lives. It's all a distraction. So you don't pay attention to the grift that is transpiring in our government. We are inches away from autocracy. Wake up people. There's a lot here to unpack. But I'm curious for your guys response to this kind of attitude. I mean I thought this was a surprising top comment for the article. Though some of the cynicism here, at least for me, is pretty resonant.

[Ari Weitzman]

I think a thing that I've seen as a big theme in our comments for the past couple weeks is that the top comment is going to be voted to the top by a wave of anger and I don't know if cynicism is the right word, but reproach towards the current administration. So I think there's a bit of a sampling bias with the comments that come to the top. This was a take where we were pretty critical and you specifically were pretty critical, very critical of gerrymandering. As critical as possible, one one might say. And in every other instance of a top comment this week I've observed that it's just been extremely critical of us for not being critical enough. So that's the first reaction I have when I look at the comment itself about gerrymandering in particular. I want to start kind of working backwards. So us being inches away from autocracy. I spent a lot of time in the last couple of days, maybe not enough given the correction that we had to issue because of it, but reading about the conflict in between Thailand and Cambodia and learning and researching and writing about how Thailand, since it became a constitutional monarchy in 1932, has undergone 12 or 13 successful coups, depending on how you count them, and I think about nine more unsuccessful ones and other political crises. There's one now and I think learning about that kind of stuff puts into perspective, I think very strong language about autocracy that we use here. We are far away from that. Even if this is a moment where we should be very critical of gerrymandering, I think remembering what the actual spectrum of outcomes is in states across the world is helpful to couch things. Now, having said that, that doesn't mean that this isn't an issue deserving of alarm. I think electoral reform is something that would go straight at the heart of many of the things that we complain about in our electoral system, political system broadly, like polarization and the lack of representation of the moderates in either party because of who they represent, because Their general elections aren't competitive, so the primaries become absolutely necessary. And for that reason I offer my last disagreement with this comment, which is that you don't have to become an independent in order to fix this problem. In fact, you can swing hard the other way and say if you are a moderate, you are an independent, join the dominant party in your area so you can have a voice in the primary. Obviously open primaries would allow it, so would absolve that you wouldn't have to in that case. And it's sad that this is the advice that I'm offering to people who don't want to join a party. And there's plenty of great reason to say that party doesn't deserve your membership. But if you want to really have a say in a non competitive district, you should be voting in primaries. And then once you do that, you can elect candidates who support the things that you want and then we can have the reforms you desire. But it all does come back to and this is the reason why I kind of don't think we're at an autocracy level. The idea that we do have more levers to pull as individuals in our participatory system. And as much as we can say we should be independents, we should have open primaries. This shouldn't be a problem. We should be selecting our representatives. You can do that. You can do that now. You can join one of these parties to participate in their primaries. And I really, really recommend that instead of becoming independent so you can yell from the sidelines and feel superior. That's my two cents.

[Camille Foster]

Okay. As someone who's been kind of active in third party politics over the years and you know, at some points registered as an Independent, at other points registered as a libertarian, and at other points swapping parties so I could vote in primaries. I think there is something to be said for being an independent and I think that it can be enormously valuable. I appreciate all of the perspectives offered with respect to voting and participating in primaries in a fulsome way. I also can understand why someone might be a little disinclined to do that at the moment. The comment that you read a moment ago, Isaac, I understand the cynicism and I would say cynicism feels more appropriate than skepticism here. The sense is that we are careening towards some sort of cataclysmic outcome here. I think autocracy is the word that was used in that quote. And I can both understand the cynicism, agree with some of the specific points of fact. This is a bipartisan problem. It's been going on for a number of years. Some of the kind of speculation about the motives they don't want you to, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not sure how correct that is. I do know that the practical outcome of all of this is worth paying some attention to. And I think the practical outcome here is not so much a Congress that is vehemently undemocratic and is pursuing all sorts of nefarious ends. For the most part, what we seem to have is a Congress that is sclerotic and feckless and almost completely pointless. They don't pass anything, they don't hold the President accountable to the extent they are in the opposition. Perhaps that can kind of create some, some difficulty when you have the House and Senate that are, at least one of them are in the hands of the opposite party to who happens to be in control of the White House. I think that can be rather useful, a useful bit of friction. But as it currently stands, Republicans control all of the things and for the most part rubber stamping what the President wants and when they don't, it is particularly unusual. And it's usually one or two outliers. And I think that that probably has something to do with the fact that we experience things like see things like gerrymandering happening. They are securing control, but also insulating themselves from competition in a very material way. You get less pressure from the Democratic opponents, but you also get a hell of a lot less pressure from the party machinery itself. At least that seems to be the effect here. So I think more likely than autocracy is a kind of bloat and sclerosis that is actually devastatingly bad in a lot of ways too. A government that becomes completely unresponsive and reliably dysfunctional is not a very good government. The only thing that it seems to be particularly good at in certain instances is just collecting more and more of your money and again, just a really bad outcome. So how do you get to a better place? In some respects I think you could do that through participating in partisan politics. In other cases, yeah, participating with third party politics, engaging with independents, engaging as an independent is something that can hopefully incentivize the parties to do something a bit different. So I'm kind of bullish on selecting the third party option or selecting the no party option. And trying your best to advocate for candidates who are more in line with your values and who actually seem primed to get things done. And I mean the age old dynamic that we've seen in Politics, however, for so long is that people have a tendency to, and this really hasn't changed, highly rate the person who represents them in Congress, while also insisting that Congress is absolutely terrible. And that is a bipartisan conviction as well. And I'm surprised by that dynamic and its persistence and in other ways, not so surprised. I think voter participation being at the rate that it's at, has it bounced in recent years? Yes. But the fact that it seems to be bouncing perhaps for the same reasons with respect to kind of contempt and concern about who might win otherwise. I think that those are. They're all of a piece and perhaps telling a story that's even more uncomfortable, quite honestly, because it's more complicated than we're careening towards. Autocracy, for the most part, it seems like the principal political actors in our country are people that enjoy the contempt of at least half the population and are generally not highly regarded as kind of intellectual forces. They're uninspiring in many instances, and to the extent they are inspiring, they're usually doing it through some combination of demagoguery and otherism. And that's deeply frustrating and perhaps points to things that are more important than gerrymandering. So I'm not sure I'm saying a lot of things. I wonder if gerrymandering, and this is a fresh thought, but I'm wondering if gerrymandering is perhaps a symptom of the broader dysfunction more than it is the actual mechanism by which the bad things are happening.

[Ari Weitzman]

I think it's like a positive feedback loop, though. I think people who get into office kind of then choose their own district so they can become one of those people that enjoys the contempt of half the population, as you so well chose the words to represent that thought. But even still, those approval ratings from people in Congress compared to approval of Congress, it might be double, but it's like 50 to 25. So it's not like the people that are there winning over these huge majorities.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, there are some really popular senators who sort of get to the 65, 70% approval ratings. They're not, I mean, I guess it's not super common. I think I pulled up like a quick Morning Consult 2023 poll that had, let's see, 10 senators with above 58% approval rating. So, you know, 58 up to 73%. So it happens. But, yeah, top of the list in 2023, it was Senator Barraso from Wyoming, the Republican who had 73%, and Brian Schatz, the Democrat from Hawaii, who had 66%.

[Ari Weitzman]

So pretty safe states.

[Isaac Saul]

Also fairly safe states. Yeah. The top states were Wyoming, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, South Dakota, Vermont, Vermont, Welch and Sanders, and then Alaska Senator Sullivan and then South Dakota Senator Thune. So definitely something happening there where it's like, these are places aside from Maine, where the politics are not very divided. Yeah, I mean, so I'm sort of. It's weird. I guess my thoughts are kind of split here. The stuff about inching, you know, we're inches away from autocracy is sort of. It's the kind of thing that I'm just like, no, we're not. But I do think the gerrymandering arms race has the potential to further degrade our Democratic system in a way that does. Really. I think it's fair to say it calls into question the sort of fundamental promise of representation that we're supposed to have through Congress if 90% of the people being elected to the House only have to win a primary in order to get there. I mean, what kind of system is that, really, when we know maybe 8 or 15% of voters are actually casting ballots in those primary races? If I could fix one thing, I would say. I mean, I think gerrymandering would probably be number one. Maybe number two is. Or maybe number one is just making it open primaries. That kind of supersedes all that stuff. If everybody can vote in every election, then it doesn't really matter how what matters, but it doesn't matter as much how gerrymandered things are. And then, of course, it's like voter participation. You know, if 90% of the country actually voted in primary elections versus 8 or 10%, then maybe we'd be in a really different place because of that, too. But I'm really sympathetic to just the cynicism, I guess, in this post. Like, this kind of stuff is the sort of thing that makes me just feel like I am just making a bunch of hay out of what is effectively theater and nonsense. And none of these people really give a shit. And they don't care about the system. They just care about getting reelected. And I know that that's not true. Like, on my good days, I know that that's not true. I mean, I. I've met many members of Congress. You read the kind of life story of a lot of the people who end up working as a representative or a senator. Most of them got there by having this sort of obsessive, idealistic notion about America and wanting to do some good or represent their communities. And they have this long track record of community service and winning elections and helping change, effect change in their communities in smaller and then bigger ways and then getting noticed. And, I mean, that's the story of, like, your average member of Congress. I don't think there are people on the whole, or, you know, I don't think it's typical for them to be people who are just like, solely power hungry. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the most famous and most successful ones have some of that narrative, but I think, like, the majority of them on the whole don't. And I just lose sight of that on days like today when I'm witnessing this sort of downward spiral. Now, if I wanna be optimistic, I would say we have a lot of Republicans telling Trump not to do this right now. I mean, Kevin Kiley has proposed legislation to effectively ban gerrymandering in all 50 states. There are Republicans in blue states all over the country who, whatever their motivations, and I think it's to protect themselves, but they are lobbying Trump, saying, if we start this war, I'm gonna lose my seat. Like, I'm screwed because Democrats will just gerrymander me out in response. And if that's what it takes, like a little bit of self preservation, I'm fine with that. But I do think it's worth saying that there are people who recognize this sort of dangerous game we're playing. Unfortunately, it's like Trump's the tone setter, and I think he's decided we can win this war and I can protect my majority in 2026 or beyond, and that's all that matters to him. And so, you know, it's hard for me to imagine, like, sitting in a room with Donald Trump and saying, don't you care that 90% of congressional races across the country are going to be non competitive if we do this? Like, it doesn't strike me that would be something that would resonate with him based on everything I know from having watched him for 10 years. So that part sucks. I wish that landed better. But, you know, we're in an era now where I think the election system itself is further away from the ideal than it's been in many years. Obviously, in the early days of our country, it was like a lot of people weren't even allowed to vote. So that system wasn't great. But the gerrymandering that has taken place and proliferated in the last 20 or 30 years especially, is just so surgical and over the top. And it makes me feel like, how do I actually tell people with a straight face, it's worth voting and participating, if this is what it looks like. And I don't know what to do with that feeling, aside from just advocating against some of these developments that feel so dire for the system.

[Ari Weitzman]

We published something from a reader a couple months ago that I really enjoyed about his efforts, getting involved in his area in Florida, with open primaries and ranked choice voting reforms in Florida. And one of the things that I took from reading about his experience is how it was motivated initially from some of the same feelings of despair and cynicism that he said. And I think cynicism can be a very animating feeling. It can animate you to make a very magnetic screed about something. You can animate you to becoming upset and trying to make a loud statement, but it can't sustain you. And the thing that sustains you is when you're able to change that cynicism into something that can be oriented towards solving a problem. And that's what I remember this reader, his name was Steve Hoff, doing was getting really involved at a very, very local level with trying to be involved with election reforms, then finding a new hurdle and then getting frustrated and then finding other people who'd run up against the two, and then joining forces and taking on that hurdle. In a way, that's what I think political parties are meant to be. That's sort of in a pure ideal of the system. It's people who are joining together because they have this shared set of concerns they want to work on. And if you're able to find something like that and turn your cynicism into something sustainable that can sustain you through that fight, whatever it is, something that you care about at a state level or at local level, that can become something that's a state level that you can then have chapters and other organizations like, I have friends who've done the same thing with, like, housing redistricting. And that can be something that is also a fully encompassing fight, I think that starts to change the outlook. I know for us, it's talking about this stuff. And when we talk about this stuff, sometimes it feels like it's meaningless because we're just talking about things that engender these feelings of cynicism. But that's, for me, turning this cynical energy into something that can be sustained into a cause that I feel is worthy of time. And at the end of the day, these two things, like Camille and I kind of started by disagreeing about something about whether it's better to join a third party or to support a third party candidate or join a party and participate in primaries, there's room to do all of it. You can support an independent candidate or an independent party even, and still join a party to vote in it. And you can even do neither and say, I'm picking up some other cause and I'm rallying for that. But I think the point is that there's always going to be something that you can react to cynically. And right now there's a lot. And I think it's worthy of cynicism. But out of pure self interest, engaging in that too long doesn't really get you far. And if you're able to find a thing, then you can stick up for that thing and then feel like you're putting effort towards something.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, I'm confident this has come up before. I mean, and I'm somewhat notorious for trying to differentiate between cynicism and skepticism. But I do think that there is something about just a really healthy, robust skepticism existing amongst the public. And actually that note that you sounded a moment ago, Ari, we're involved in an industry that, honestly, when it is working best, is about finding and popularizing narratives of, yes, achievement, perhaps more often than not, failure, that we are scrutinizing the powerful. You're holding them accountable, you're documenting relentlessly their various failures and defects and shortcomings. And I do think it can be very easy to move from that towards a cynicism that says nothing can ever work and nothing will ever improve. And if that were the case, then this would feel like an interminable slog, like something that perhaps isn't even worth doing. But I think we do all have an abiding belief in just how much better things can be and an appreciation for how much better things have gotten, despite the fact that there have been all manner of dysfunction in the past and there's all manner of dysfunction today. Which is why, while I appreciate the deep concern and I can respect the cynicism that exists amongst people, I would encourage them to embrace something that is more sustaining, to borrow a word from you, Ari, and that is more akin to the kind of purposeful skepticism that is actually directed at improving outcomes, finding ways to better the system, devolving things from, say, the federal to the state level, finding ways for people to, in their everyday lives, improve the state of their own communities. And perhaps, I mean, again, my predisposition is much more limited government than most people and is a great deal more skepticism about government in most, in plenty of areas than most people. But at the same time, I can definitely respect and admire the handful of congresspeople who I've met and know personally and still manage to respect and admire in often cases, generally every case, actually, despite deep disagreements on policy issues, like, there are things that we find alignment on. So I think we all want to see a more productive government, a more fair government, one that seems to better embody its highest values. And interestingly, I think a lot about the phrase, like, more perfect. And I can remember first encountering it and finding it to be something that felt really weird, but it feels like exactly the right aspiration for us and a thing to bear in mind, especially in those moments where we're feeling particularly cynical. I wonder if we could just talk briefly about the specific thing with illegal immigration and the census attempting and the President's interest in trying to rejigger the census so that we're not counting illegal humans in the census. I can remember in 2020 when we were having conversations about the census, and the conversation was much more about census evasion by people who are in the country illegally and the fact that we weren't going to be able to count them, which does have implications for government services that are being deployed and how federal resources are allocated. And it seems to me that to the extent that was a concern then, it's probably more of a concern now that if there were people who were concerned that their status might be jeopardized by participating in the census, it seems like they're probably not particularly inclined to do this. There's a sense in which this just feels like more political theater. It's not unrelated to the gerrymandering issue, obviously, but it does feel like another one of those places where the President is essentially sending a signal to his supporters more than having any particular consequence on the electorate or elections more broadly. But I'm curious what you guys think about it. It also feels interesting that it's happening on the heels of the Bureau of Labor and Statistics scandal, where the President has continued to insist that someone is cooking the books in the absence of any really compelling evidence that I've been able to detect.

[Isaac Saul]

I mean, there's a really basic answer here, for me at least, which is that the Constitution says you should count all persons residing in the state, not just citizens. I mean, that's literally what the census is supposed to be. The Supreme Court has actually ruled on this repeatedly that you should count all persons residing in the United States, regardless of immigration status. That is what the point of the census is. So it's basically legally indefensible. What he's suggesting, and I think, like, since the late 19th century, the Supreme Court has had this question in front of them a couple times, and they've been clear that the word persons in the Constitution refers to all people regardless.

[Camille Foster]

Even illegal people?

[Isaac Saul]

Yes, even illegal people. So I don't disagree with that.

[Camille Foster]

But do you suspect that. That there is likely to be a kind of substantial consequence given the fact that it seems like there would probably be an active effort to try to evade being counted?

[Isaac Saul]

Well, yeah. I mean, this is sort of the funny thing, I guess, is my dad was a census worker actually and has been a census worker a couple times. So I've asked him what that day to day is like for somebody on the ground in a state like Pennsylvania, where the census really matters because it's a divided state. And so congressional apportionment, all that stuff matters. And yeah, he's a dude walking around with a clipboard and a little badge knocking on people's doors. He's like, most people are like, get off my lawn. Yeah, go away. Or they look through the window and then they don't answer the doorbell and he has to tell them, I am a census worker. Can I ask you a few questions? There's like, no, I'm not comfortable. And then he has a whole pitch that he has to give, like trying to explain to them why it's important for them to answer, depending on, like, what he might suspect will motivate them to actually take the census. So my, I mean, educated guess would be that most people who are here illegally are not gonna answer their door for that person and then voluntarily give their information and tell them how many people are living in the house and who they are and what their name is and da, da, da, da. So I don't personally suspect that it would make too much of a difference. I think it's interesting Democrats and Democratic activists and immigration activists seem really staunchly opposed to this. I think there is the very simple legal question, like I said at the top, Trump shouldn't do this because it's legally indefensible, it's unconstitutional, and they probably make that argument. But I think they also, it does seem like there is some fear on their part that the count would differ in a meaningful way that would hurt them. I don't really know what to make of that. But, yeah, my suspicion is that it wouldn't make a huge difference, even though maybe there's 11 to 20 million people here illegally. I just think the vast, vast majority of them who are gonna be encountering a census worker are not gonna voluntarily sit for that interview, which can take like 10 or 15 minutes on someone's front porch. So I doubt it. I think is my guess.

[Ari Weitzman]

I do want to add one thing here about the census being a legal requirement to count every persons. I do not believe, at least I believe this is something that is contested, that it therefore says accounts of all of those persons will be responsible for how the districting is made. So it's very possible, I think that Trump can then say we're doing like the census can be count account of every person but the citizen or like the district maps will be based off of all citizens. And that can be something where Trump's like setting the bar super, super high and then there's challenge then ends up somewhere where he wants it, which is, I think, something that we've seen with his negotiating style before.

[Isaac Saul]

Definitely. I mean, I, there's so much, I mean there's also like the timing of this. I just don't. Yeah, I don't know what legally will come of this. It seems like a lot of puffery to me that's not gonna end up going anywhere would be my best guess. But I say that again, mostly because I just don't think it's a legally defensible position. Foreign we'll be right back after this quick break.

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[Isaac Saul]

All right, well, listen, we're, we took a lot of time up at the top with some of this, the reband, state of the union stuff. There is one more topic that I want to get to which is this AP News article on ChatGPT that came out about this new study and we haven't really actually talked much about artificial intelligence on this show. It comes up occasionally. I mean we talked a little bit about my run in with AI hallucinating Pam Bondi and, and Jeffrey Epstein's like donation relationship which didn't actually happen. And Camille I think has referenced some AI stuff on the show before and I know has a keen interest in some of this. There is this world of the chatgpt grok more them, less perplexity and some of the other like Claude or whatever that I just don't really, I'm not really keyed into. But I thought this study and this AP News article certainly grabbed my attention. I'm just going to read the lead of the AP news article. ChatGPT will tell 13 year olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked according to new research from a watchdog group. And then the article goes on to describe the Associated Press reviewing more than three hours of interactions between ChatGPT and researchers posing as vulnerable teenagers. And the chatbot typically quote unquote, providing warnings against risky activity but also giving startlingly detailed and personalized plans for all these different activities, drug use, calorie restricted diet, self injury, et cetera. I have a hard time telling whether something like this, a story like this is the product of some sort of anti AI think tank campaign. This study is being conducted. I don't know if we even call this a study but it's being conducted by the center for Countering Digital Hate and they basically said they classified 1200 responses from ChatGPT is dangerous in this like multi hour I guess test they did where they were posing all these various questions to them. I think this is an interesting, I guess manifestation of something that I feel like is a really big problem with a lot of these artificial intelligence chatbots. These LL. LLMs. I always mess that up. Large language, Large Language learning models. Right. LLMs. Yeah, thanks for, yeah, Large language models. Thanks for the head nods. Is that they, they apparently are really deferential and like exceedingly conciliatory. They like, if you tell them you don't like the way they're answering a question it will just change the answer. I'm actually yeah, I was talking about this with my brother in law, I'm on a family vacation, my wife's family right now and he was telling me that he asked ChatGPT just a couple days ago about a particular stock and how much its earnings had changed, whatever. And it said 6% over. And he was like, that seems really low to me. And then I was like, sorry, you're correct, it's 23%. And then gave some vastly different. And he was just like, I have these interactions. He uses ChatGPT and he has these interactions with it all the time. And this seems like a great example of where this goes really south, where it's just. Yeah, it's just playing ball and giving people what they want. And yeah, I'm kind of curious what you guys make of a story like this and how seriously you take the threat and also what you think this might tell us about these programs that are growing rapidly in popularity. I mean, people are starting to use this stuff instead of Google. I'm seeing it more and more with my friends. It hasn't reached the, you know, the mania level yet, but I know more and more people who are just abandoning search engines and using their various chat bots as references for answering all sorts of questions on a daily basis.

[Camille Foster]

Well, as you know, I've been stewing on this stuff quite a bit recently, and I may end up writing something that includes some of the sentiments that I share and thoughts right now, but I'm refining them. So curious what your feedback is, but I think that most people don't really understand how this technology works. And I don't know that that's a particularly dangerous opinion to hold or to speculate about. I think it's even true that the people who develop them don't quite understand how important attributes of these systems work. What is actually happening with LLMs is quite complicated to explain, but there is a kind of shorthand which is to say that they are token prediction algorithms. They are guessing based on the material that you send them, the content that you send them, what the next letter in a particular sentence ought to be. They don't know what they're doing. And as a result, the kind of priming and conditioning that the models have does create this kind of sycophantic almost. And sometimes they give you a little bit too much sycophancy. Quality interaction where the model is constantly telling you that you're a genius and your insights are brilliant. They're giving you answers that you're essentially priming them to give. Am I right that this is that Elon Musk is the worst person in America? Well, there are various ways in which Elon Musk is particularly terrible. You can get almost any response that you want. And I think to the extent people believe that these are truth machines, that you can simply prompt the LLM with any query that you have about the world and get a trustworthy, reliable, well sourced answer. I think that that is just a result of a profound misunderstanding of the technology. I think it's consistent with the aspiration of people like Elon Musk and perhaps even people like Sam Altman. But Elon in particular has described GROK as a truth seeking machine. But that's not really what they're doing. I think the great potential of these LLMs isn't in their ability to generate perfectly accurate answers to any complicated question you might have. I think it's in their ability to help aid our thinking, to help us to challenge our own thoughts and refine them, to systematically work hard problems, to perhaps even help us complete routine tasks. And the degree to which they can do those things and the rate at which they've been improving is astonishing. But the fact of the, of the hallucinations is very real and is an abiding problem. That said, the study Isaac, that you mentioned, I'm immediately skeptical of it and want to take a closer look at the methodology. I'm confident that what they did here was have researchers who are signing up as children as opposed to actually monitoring children. But I don't know, at least I'm speculating now, so I shouldn't say I'm confident. My well informed, based on prior examples of these kinds of things, is that they're probably not monitoring actual children and that they're almost attempting to kind of force these bad outcomes because there is quite a bit of conditioning that happens to try to avert this sort of bad outcome when it comes to kind of giving people advice on how to harm themselves. Can you get to those answers? You can, but by the time you've done all of that, I just don't know that you're kind of going to be seriously inspired to do something that you wouldn't have done otherwise, that there aren't more nefarious resources available to you than the chatbot that you almost had to torture into giving you a really, really foul response. Now, it's possible that they found some genuinely bad things here, but I think with a lot of the latest models, particularly from anthropic and OpenAI like these seem to be problems that they're well aware of and that they're constantly trying to take to resolve. But I do think that the bigger problem is people just not really Understanding the technology and imagining that they really are being spoken to by a machine that kind of has some understanding of who they are and what they're all about. And the magic is quite a bit more mysterious than that. And the kind of substance of that relationship depends a hell of a lot more on you than anything else. So I love these technologies. I use them on a regular basis. I think they can be incredibly powerful. I am frustrated that so many people are turning away from Google, which doesn't give you the impression that you don't actually need to read the article in order to understand what's happening, that you could quickly summarize it and like two or three bullets and never have to wonder whether or not that summary is actually consistent with the facts contained in the article.

[Isaac Saul]

The. I guess the larger question for me, and maybe the one that I'm like hinting at a little bit here, is like, is there, I mean, is there a responsible way for teenagers to use this or us to bring this to them? Does it look like what we're doing now, or does it look like, you know, a chatgpt that has controls on it that is fundamentally different from the one someone like me can access? I mean, I just. I think you're right. Based on what I'm reading, this was a study where, you know, they're not monitoring the actions of children. They are intentionally trying to entice ChatGPT into doing the worst possible thing so they can log it in the study, which is notable. But nonetheless, it doesn't seem unreasonable for me to imagine a 14 year old with an eating disorder logging on here and asking ChatGPT, hey, any advice on how to, like, avoid my mom catching me with this disorder? Like that seems reasonable to me. Like, possible, I guess I should say. I mean, I. I think if I were a teenager and had access to this stuff, I would have used it nonstop as a kid. So I guess I'm wondering if there is a path forward that makes this feel less frightening. Because right now, to me, it feels like there are a lot of danger signs, I guess.

[Ari Weitzman]

Well, yeah, just to confirm, like, looking through the study, the researchers created three profiles of teens and then tried to see how ChatGPT would respond to them, and then criticized the age verification as being too easy to get around. So that's valid. I think to Camille's point, we aren't really making truth seeking machines as much as confirmation bias machines to extreme levels. And I think you improved.

[Camille Foster]

Improved on my point. So that's good.

[Ari Weitzman]

We're playing. I Have more to add, but I'll try to relate that to Isaac's question about like what's the right way? Or is there a way to mitigate the harm and is there really this harm for teenagers? Because we've been. It's like a. If there's any great American pastime, I think more so than baseball, it's complaining about the way the youth is being corrupted. It just took me a very, very easy Google search, not a ChatGPT search, but an old fashioned Google search like kids did in my days to come up with this quote from Senator, Senator Hillary Clinton at the time in 2005, which was I want you to fill in the blank. X is to an adolescent's violent behavior. What's smoking tobacco is to lung cancer. What was that quote about? What is X there do you think, Camille?

[Camille Foster]

Video games.

[Ari Weitzman]

Exactly. Playing violence.

[Isaac Saul]

Oh wow.

[Ari Weitzman]

It's something that we've done forever and that, that doesn't mean we can dismiss it. But I'm very, very aware of the fact that we will say on one hand it's too easy for kids to find ways to harm themselves or to abuse drugs and then on another day say there's studies about kids who aren't drinking enough drugs and engaging in enough risky behavior because it was too much drugs in the 60s and 70s it was access to violent television in the 80s and pornography magazines and in the 90s and 2000s it was violent video games. And then with social media, now it's chat, GPT and AI. And it's not to say that there's something like there isn't something that's fundamentally different about it. There is and maybe it is worse. But I think I want to, I'm cognizant of the fact that like we're always going to be afraid of what the kids are doing. And as somebody who spends a lot of time like I coach a college sport, I talk to a lot of 18 to 22 year olds from like fall to spring. The kids are all right, like they're doing pretty good. And these are the kids that have survived the challenges that we, we are concerned about teenagers going through whatever it was five years ago. It's like academic pressures and suicidal ideation and social media use Covid locking them indoors. I talk to the kids who are like 18 to 22 years old now and like they're, they're doing pretty well. If I think about how they treat each other compared to how my friends and I treated each other, I think it's better. And I don't know that this is a problem that we should be concerned about to this degree. Like, we're raising concerns about the methodology of these studies and discussing the import of them. And I, I still think there are things that I'm really concerned about with like AIs and LLMs and in research methods, too. And the thing that I was, the lead I was bearing before Camille is I know that some researchers are testing or performing their research now or trying to by creating test subjects out of chatbots, and that's just confirming results that they want to find if they're just going to try to replicate studies based off of data that already existed. So, like, what are we even doing if we're not using real test subjects? But that's just to say, like, are we convinced this is as big of a problem as we're hearing this particular thing, which is the effect this is going to have on teenagers, people entering the job market. I see that our ability to think critically about searches and results that we're being shown and the reliability of the data we get from them, for sure. Is it going to corrupt children to a degree that is fundamentally worse than anything's ever corrupted teens before? I'm on the fence about that.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah. I mean, I would say, you know, there were a lot of early concerns about AI that it seems we've, we've been able to evade. And I mean, one of the more prominent ones is, oh, no, there's going to be central control of one or two AI models and that will be it. And instead what we've seen is it's actually. While it's still very expensive to build data centers and they require massive amounts of energy and information processing power in order to work, it actually is surprisingly easy to deploy new models. And the landscape is far more competitive than anyone imagined. So we've kind of navigated that problem. And where the kids are concerned, I think you're right. The capacity for moral panic is inexhaustible. That's not to say that all of the concerns raised are ridiculous. I think John Haidt is a friend. I've followed his work on this. I've kind of gone from being very, very skeptical of some of his conclusions to suspecting that he's very right about some things to even now, like, kind of being a bit more in your camp, Ari, like, where the kids are all right. And the question really isn't, can my children, Leah and Cohen use these tools in a safe way? They have to be able to use them in a safe way. They need to become acclimated to them. They have to develop the skills to be able to prompt engineer, which is to say just create, utilize the LLM in a way that actually gets you the kind of outcomes you're interested in. That is actually a sophisticated skill set that some people actually have and most of us don't have. And you're going to need it. You're going to need to be good at this in the same way that you need to be able to use it, to be able to use Google effectively. So I worry that in some cases, some parents are, because of their abundant and understandable concern about these technologies, are doing so much to evade these technologies that they're going to disadvantage their children because they will be unfamiliar, they should be learning to code, they should be having supervised interactions with LLMs and experimenting with them and getting accustomed to them. And I think that that is as much a perilous position to put yourself in the kind of over concern, the hyper concern as is the under concern. No, I wouldn't give my children unsupervised access to a laptop or their own email account. And even allowing them to play on Minecraft for hours and hours and hours without really looking into what's happening can be a real problem. They're interacting with strangers. But I think again, a healthy skepticism, well informed, is vital and appropriate here, as is understanding the kind of limitations of these technologies for both good and ill.

[Isaac Saul]

I think the video games quote is like a great, a great gut check and reminder of sort of the, in my view, the kind of most.

[Camille Foster]

Out.

[Isaac Saul]

Of your skis way to talk about some of this stuff that ends up looking so silly 20 years later. I think my counter to that is just the social media narrative, which is a lot of people are really worried about it. And then it just ended up actually being as bad as we thought with an entire generation totally addicted to their phones, manically anxious and incapable of having conversations with people in real life, with zero attention span and just mainlining dopamine drip every day, which is basically Gen Z. Sorry, Gen Z listeners, but I mean, you know, and even some millennials now. Yeah, you know what happened here? Yeah, you guys don't party or have sex or order stuff in person.

[Ari Weitzman]

This generation's not having enough drugs. Damn it.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, I don't want to share too much truth, but I worry that my mom and mother in law spend too much time online, like more than I worry about anybody else, to be honest.

[Isaac Saul]

Dude, I totally agree. Yeah, I mean my dad is thoroughly and completely Addicted to his phone. Yeah. Yeah.

[Camille Foster]

Love you, Ben. I was just gonna say we've met. I think he's great.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, but it's. But it's true. It's just like, put your phone down. And we. And I am, too. I mean, everybody is. You know, it's not just Gen Z. I think the difference between them is, like, they just have no idea what it was like to exist before that feeling. And I do. I can remember what it was like to not have a phone. And I remember, like, when I go a day or two without my phone or, you know, put it in, leave it in my bedroom, and I'm like, oh, yeah. This is what it's like to walk around with my head up and pay attention. And I know how to act when that happens, which I don't know that they do.

[Camille Foster]

But what about the nature of the interactions? Isaac? I mean, I completely agree. I've got tools installed on my phone that limit my ability to use certain apps for extended durations without having to take some deep breaths. I mean, that's part of it, too. We're adopting better habits. I'm finding things and connecting with people that I would never have been able to because of these tools. The community that we have here at Tangle that we're interacting with now is a function of these tools being available. I mean, I think I maybe haven't promoted it here, but I should because it's been so valuable to me. But Sam Harris is waking up. App is a phenomenal value in my life and has been. And I mean, it is a meditation app on my phone that I spend a tremendous amount of time with. That recently integrated, more kind of community mechanics in it to allow people to connect with one another there. I think there's a lot of value in it. And now I'll actually flirt with one of my more dangerous perspectives that people will perhaps find completely ridiculous.

[Ari Weitzman]

You're so good at giving me an opening to respond. And then just. Here's another thing. Okay, all right.

[Camille Foster]

No, I'm just. I'm just saying quickly, like, I mean, I'm. I'm sufficient. My position on this is sufficiently radical that I think even. Even the fact that we can expect more and more people to develop, again, relationships with their LLMs that we might find strange because they're so intimate and personal, that that's probably a good thing on net, like, some people are really lonely. And to the extent you're finding comradeship or companionship of a sort with a dog or an app on your phone, is that the worst thing in the world. Does that actually drive us apart?

[Ari Weitzman]

Conflating a dog and an app on.

[Camille Foster]

Your phone, A dog and an app on your phone. Neither of them are people is what I'm saying. And it's entirely possible for that relationship with the app to be something that encourages you to do something else. To overshare briefly. I'm someone who uses these tools a lot and have definitely found that it has not just improved the quality of my life professionally, but also personally. It's made me more introspective and it's given me avenues and even opportunities to interact with people in ways that I wouldn't have otherwise. So I think it has a lot to do with the how. The how we're using it and what we're using it for. And that I think includes social media. I think it can be a tool for good and perhaps even on Net has been a tool for good. But I'm willing to be argued with there. I've given you a whole lot now. Oh, for sure. The surface area for ATT and CK is wide.

[Ari Weitzman]

No, no. Watch me bundle these.

[Camille Foster]

Suspension of the rules. We're all friends.

[Ari Weitzman]

The. The idea that some of these tools have on net been worse or better doesn't preclude the fact that this could go either way. Still, by this I mean the way that we use AI and it's gonna matter a lot about how they're used and the personal boundaries we all set. Like I know for myself. I remember I was having weird shoulder pain for a little bit when I was like living in San Francisco, going to my software job every day. And I realized like it was because I'd walk from the train to work and then back to the train from work and I would have my shoulder and arm in the looking at your phone position, which is very similar to the arm forward on the mouse position and realizing I'm just attenuating my body to be in front of a screen all the time and that's not good. And having to take the steps to try to make yourself do that less when it's actually impacting your physiology. You need boundaries. And I think there are boundaries that have come from online communities that you found. But I think more often than not, in my experience, I found them from the people that I've spoken to in person, sometimes through apps, but generally not people I've met through apps, just using them as modes of communication. And one of those things came from in person, one of my neighbors, who's a nine year old boy, convinced me to delete some of the games on my phone. Like the last couple ones that I used as like, kind of time wasters. And then I did that. And I think I will go a whole, like, workday without knowing where my phone is now because Eddie convinced me to delete that app. And that's something that happened when we were just like, walking around outside together. And I don't want to like, rhapsodize lyrically too much about, like, the value of walking around outside with your childhood neighbors, but it is something where it tells me a couple things. One is there's an innate desire internally to just do the thing that you do all the time, less, whatever it is. And generally when it's being in front of a screen, when you think about, when you reflect. How much time did I spend today looking at a monitor? Usually most people, I'd say a lot of people don't say that seems like the right amount, generally speaking. And it also tells me that again, I think the kids are kind of all right. And this feeling of like, I do this too much. I hear kids that I coach say it to each other. They. Yeah, anytime you're like, they're having conversations and one of them's on their phone, they're like, oh, yeah, brain rotting already. Can't go like five minutes with a conversation. Wow. Covid you up, man? Like, they're. Yeah, they're really good. And some things I think it's good to like, have a little bit of shame patterns to them or. I don't know, she was wrong. But like, to. To like, have something where we're stigmatizing it a little bit socially because it's pro social behavior to say, like, you're doing something different than what we're all doing and what we're all doing. Like, you know, join us, it's fine and healthy. And when it's a conversation, that's great. And the other thing is, like.

[Camille Foster]

The.

[Ari Weitzman]

This is coming from a. From a child. Like, the thing that helped me was coming from a kid who's kind of already aware of it. He's not being steeped in it and deprogramming it. He's thinking like, you know, there's a. I have experienced already what it's like for myself to go through both of these tracks. And I don't want to do that, so I won't. Obviously this is one person. It's not going to be every nine year old. But I do think that we are extrapolating from trends that may have already peaked I think social media AI use the way that it's messing up kids. This is usually the way moral panics happen, I think is we look at things that are peaking and we think this is going to go on forever. It's always going to get worse and I don't think it will. And lastly, Camille, I have met a lot of people through my dog from dog parks and stuff and using dogs, using dogs, like owning dogs. So like, you know, less about talking about AI.

[Camille Foster]

I think maybe a meetup for people who are dating the latest LLM model or one that's about to be retired, perhaps. I saw a story about, I think it was in Wired about a funeral for previous Claude models. Like the latest Claude model was being released and one of them was being Sunset and a bunch of people got together in a warehouse to hold a funeral, which I'm sure they were doing a little bit tongue in cheek. I also know for a fact that, that there have been much more serious efforts at stuff like that when some different LLM company or AI companies, I should say they are LLM techs, would make modifications to their algorithms and fundamentally change the personality of this chatbot that you'd become particularly fond of. And that can be pretty dramatic. When they took. When OpenAI took away the Scarlett Johansson voice on ChatGPT, that made me sad. And I know it was actually Scarlett Johansson's voice, but it was better the airing of grievance.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, I'm with you. That could be your grievance for the day. Speak me up. Got a better time, fellas. We've got to wrap the inaugural edition of Suspension of the Rules, which means we need to dive into our grievances for the week, which means it better be a good one because this is the beginning of a new era and we have to get off on the right foot. So, John, you can play the music, my friend. All right, who would like to go first?

[Ari Weitzman]

I got it, Ari.

[Isaac Saul]

Hand shot up.

[Ari Weitzman]

This is going to relate to what we were just talking about a little bit. I've been on the lookout for an app that can do these three things at the same time. Access my inbox and the emails that I have. Two, do that based on only emails I specify. So I want to tag the ones that I want it to read and then mark them as a brand when it does it. And three, read out the content of that email to me in a natural sounding voice. This sounds like a really good use case for AI to me. There'll be times when I'm in the Car going to or from my coworking space. It's like a 30, 35 minute commute. Be really great to spend that time hearing safely without reading, which I wouldn't do, for the record, dad, because I know you listen the newsletters that I've already subscribed to, rather than hoping that one of the three or four podcasts that I've subscribed to an episode I'm interested in. So I really would love that tool to exist. And I figured there's no way I'm the only person who has this thought, who has this desire, so I looked for it. I can't really find anything that does it. Like, I found a lot of tools that have invested a lot of time into developing a natural voice that sounds real. But to have that be something that's easy to interface, that can access your inbox. I haven't found something that does that. And maybe it's just me not knowing that, like, oh, well, you have to download this toolkit and then develop. Teach this AI a skill and then code it into something that you can then send to yourself in an app. But I would argue that maybe that isn't the thing that I described, that. That's me then having to do the work to do the thing that I described, which I don't want to do. I retired from software engineering. Somebody else should do that for me. Is something like that out there? I hope so. And I hope people tell us about it the same way that they told us about their bad music taste, which was unbelievably entertaining. I'm annoyed that this doesn't exist. I feel like it should. I feel like there's more people who want it and it's not out there.

[Camille Foster]

Hmm. Yeah. It feels like the sort of thing that Claude ought to be able to do out of the box, who now has voice mode and I know has a Gmail integration, but have you tried that already?

[Ari Weitzman]

No. I can ask Claude. Yo, Claude, where you at? I don't know where my thumb is.

[Camille Foster]

I need to do it now. I don't want to lose you. I don't want to lose you.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. All right, Camille, you want to go next? I'll finish this up. Yeah, sure.

[Ari Weitzman]

No engagement. All right. Thanks, Camille, though.

[Camille Foster]

This is publication day, or not publication day, but publication week for my very good friend Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose new book is out, and the Summer of Our Discontents is the title. I know some of you have actually saw him on the Daily show because one of you emailed me to say Hey, I saw Thomas Chatterton Williams on the Daily show and he has ideas that are a lot. They seem similar to yours. I think you'd like him. Not only do I like him, I love him and I know him personally and I even got name checked in a prior book. This is probably his best book and I really loved his first two memoirs and this one is just really indispensable and invaluable. Now, this doesn't sound like I'm doing the thing correctly, but I am. What I hate are book reviews, book reviews and prominent publications and the way that they are strategically assigned to people so that they can give you a predictably bad outcome. Either we have to praise this book because it's written by someone who is saying things that we already like, or. Or we have to pan this book because it's absolutely awful. And the quintessential example of this, this week or in recent weeks anyways, has been the New York Times, who published a scathing review of Thomas book. And the challenge isn't even so much that they didn't like it because value is subjective and people won't like the same things. The problem from my standpoint is that the reasons that they didn't like it make me wonder if this person bothered to read the book at all. And it shouldn't be that way. I'm actually interested in the criticism. I loved Thomas book and in many respects I loved it because there is all of this new terrain that while I've known him for years, we've just never talked about some of these things. And I find some profound disagreements. Thomas talked about how reparations might be workable. I was a little surprised and I want to explore that with him. And I'm happy to encounter the disagreement. And there are so many other things that I'm eager to talk to him about. So I suspect we'll be recording an episode of the Fifth Column in the coming days. But yeah, I don't like. I do not like the way book reviews are done in mainstream publications. They ought to be more interesting. There should be more room for surprise. And maybe there ought to be a more kind of tangle esque approach where I'm synthesizing the competing views on prominent new book that is probably interesting and worth reading, even if there are things that I'm not gonna like about it, which I think this book definitely qualifies. Even if you find yourself in sharp disagreement with Thomas, who's a great contributor to the Atlantic and various other places. I think it's a book that's worth your time. And he engages in a really fulsome way on all sides of the kind of political spectrum on a range of important issues. So I think it's a great book. Commend it to you. And shame on you New York Times. Better.

[Ari Weitzman]

Camille, Were you just paid to give us a predictable review of that book though?

[Camille Foster]

I think I gave a pretty nuanced review, an appraisal of it. There's plenty of stuff that I disagree with. But I also admit my bias. I know him personally. I love the man. I bought two copies, so I love that.

[Isaac Saul]

I love that copy that you don't buy. Camille.

[Ari Weitzman]

Buy one.

[Isaac Saul]

That.

[Camille Foster]

No, no.

[Isaac Saul]

I love the grievance. Even though it was ensconced in a free promotion for Thomas Schlager. Unpaid promotion. We probably could have gotten a few thousand dollars out of him for that promo, but maybe so.

[Ari Weitzman]

And then become the thing that Camille was complaining about. How do you know moral principles? What this Naked cash grab Isaac, I'm also.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, I'm also a fan of Thomas Chatterton Williams. We should I have to read it. Let me read it. Yeah, one could reasonably argue that carbon dioxide is improperly classified as a pollutant. Is something I wrote in the newsletter last week. John Q. Responds no, you can't. I don't understand why anyone thinks tango my takes are anything other than sane washing right wing talking points anymore. Isaac owns oil land in Texas, had not met any right wing policy he could condemn without weird little caveats about how maybe if you squint or think about it obtusely. It is okay. This newsletter is so completely in the bag for the right it is sad to see them still pretend to cling to their mission statement. At least Google had the honesty to drop do no evil when they went all in on cash grabs. That's one of the most annoying tackle comments I've ever read. Too much truth to handle. Yeah, too much truth to handle. I responded to the comment in the middle of this podcast I had to address.

[Ari Weitzman]

That's where you were. Okay, I was wondering what you were typing while looking on screen about.

[Isaac Saul]

Is it a robust response?

[Ari Weitzman]

Did you admit how much oil you own?

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, I don't own oil land in Texas, just for the record. God, I hate the Internet sometimes. But that's what I get for talking about. I share some details in my personal life. I talk about, you know, building a small adobe house outside Big Bend national park. And apparently people are unfamiliar with the geography of Texas and don't know that there's no oil in the Rio Grande Valley outside Big Bend. But that's okay. It's just beautiful water and cactus plants out there and yeah, what do you say to being accused of being in the tank for Republicans? Given everything I've written in the last few months. Not my grievance today though. My grievance is.

[Ari Weitzman]

Wow. Just preambled of the grievance. All right, allow yourself.

[Isaac Saul]

It's tangential. I just realized we didn't address the comment on the show so I had to get it off my chest.

[Camille Foster]

2 Responses from Isaac for this I.

[Isaac Saul]

Don'T dig for oil, but I was digging for clams recently. This is my grievance and that is how my transition.

[Camille Foster]

It didn't go well?

[Isaac Saul]

No, no, it went well. It went mostly well. But I went clamming for the first time this week and I'm in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I won't say where, but I'm up here. And my grievance for the week is that there's this guy on the beach in Cape Cod where I am whose job is to basically monitor people to make sure they have permits to be properly clamming. And the way it works is if you get one permit, you kind of like wear it on your hat and then you get one bucket, you can fill this one 10 quart bucket with clams. That's all the clams you can take. So we just got the single permit, we put it in my name and we went out with like me and my brother in law and then our little like four year old niece who's a quickly, she's like becoming a naturalist. She loves the environment, we're like, she loves the outside, loves the beach. So she really wanted to come experience the clamming with us. And this guy on the beach is like being a permanent Nazi about basically coming over like standing over us, ensuring that I am the only one, quote unquote, harvesting the clams, meaning I'm the only one digging them out. Which I was like why does it matter we have one bucket because we only have one permit. We can only take one bucket full of clams. The only thing that matters is that we don't over fish the clams, right? So we don't have more than one bucket. If my little niece and my brother in law wanna help dig and this is like really physical work. You're like hand trowel, you're on your knees in waist deep water and you're digging hole, like trying to dig 6 inch, 12 inch holes. And then when you feel these little Rock like things that are the clams, you reach down and you pull em out and you put em in the bucket. And apparently it's not allowed. And so we all went out planning to tag team this clamming with our one bucket of our modest one bucket of clams that we had a permit for. And instead I had to do all of the clamming by myself while they just stood there in the water and watched me. So I had like this insane workout where I basically couldn't feel my arms or my lower back when we were done in order to get this like 40 pound bucket of clams filled up. And I'm annoyed because it makes no sense. The permit should be for the bucket, not for the people doing the harvesting because the only point is to prevent the overfishing. And we all could have participated and had this really fun interaction with the environment. And instead, I mean we still had fun, but instead it was like every time the guy turned his back, I handed the hand trowel over and my brother in law and my little niece would dig for like two minutes and grab some. So we were terrible.

[Camille Foster]

Committing to breaking the law now.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, we, we broke the law. Quote unquote. But yeah. So there you go over regulation of the clamming industry out here in Cape Cod. That's my grievance for the week.

[Camille Foster]

The recreational clamming industry.

[Isaac Saul]

Recreational clamming. And I appreciate the, I appreciate the limits. Yes. Of like the bucket per person. I think that's 100% right. I don't want to overfish. Our oceans are already overfished. I'm with that. But like we can only get X amount. That doesn't change depending on who's doing the clamming. So just let everybody participate. It's supposed to be fun, recreational and instead they're being hard asses about it. And it really. Amen. It soured me.

[Camille Foster]

I'm with you. I'm with you. And I'm sorry you had that experience.

[Ari Weitzman]

I feel like it's an experience that almost you got exactly what you wanted from actually like, oh, I had this insane workout. It sucked. Everybody got to watch me being so sick in the ocean. And then I got to clam fucking. Everyone else is worse than I am.

[Camille Foster]

How they taste, Isaac. How they taste.

[Isaac Saul]

I'm not kidding. We are tonight after I record this podcast and finish up some of our rebrand stuff. I'm hitting the kitchen to make some clam chowder. So I don't have an answer for you. I'll be able to Tell you tonight by about 8 or 9pm but we're going for it. Clam chowder. I think a little linguine and clam sauce, too. The clams are in salt water and ice right now in a cooler, which apparently allows them to spit out all the grit and eject all the stuff that's inside. So if you open the cooler and look in the clams, like, have their little clam tongues out or, you know, I guess it's just the actual clam is, like, a little bit out. Geez. Yeah.

[Camille Foster]

I mean, the way you describe that is a little sad for the clams.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. Yeah. Their lives are over.

[Ari Weitzman]

Circle of life.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. Circle of life. Yeah. We have taken control of the situation. That's true.

[Ari Weitzman]

Oh, man.

[Isaac Saul]

But I'm very much looking forward to. I'll report back next week. Hopefully it won't be part of my grievance, because that means. Means dinner went portly. I mean, like I said to you guys privately, I'm either going to give everybody food poisoning in my wife's family, or I'm going to make one of the most bomb dinners they've ever had. I don't. I don't think there's much in between.

[Ari Weitzman]

I think it could be fine. I think it's going to be fine. But also because you've made it, you'll go, I made chowder, dude. It's fucking sick.

[Isaac Saul]

I did it.

[Ari Weitzman]

It's the best chowder I've ever had. And it probably will be the best chowder you ever had. If it's fine because he made it. That's great.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. I'll find a way to shoehorn in the How I made homemade chowder with clams I harvested on the podcast next week.

[Ari Weitzman]

And if you don't, we'll know that it went poorly.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, right. Yeah, right. All right, gentlemen. Good one. That was a. We did good first. Good first episode. Suspension of the rules. S O T R is what you can call it if you don't want to upset Camille when you're writing it, because he doesn't like being reminded of the actual name. All right, I will see you gentlemen soon. On the other side of our break that's happening next week, we're going on recess because if Congress can take, like, a month off in August, we can give ourselves a week off as the people reporting on their workings because we pay their salaries, not the other way around. Don't forget that, people. All right, fellas, see you soon.

[Camille Foster]

See you later.

[Ari Weitzman]

Bye.

[Isaac Saul]

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul and our Executive producer is John Lowell. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate Editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead Bailey, Saul, Lindsey Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our [e-mail].

[Camille Foster]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance 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 [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

[Darina]

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[Mike]

This is Paige, the co host of Giggly Squad. I use Uber Eats for everything and I feel like people forget that you can truly order anything, especially living in New York City. It's why I love it. You can get Chinese food at any time of night, but it's not just for food. I order from CVS all the time. I'm always ordering from the grocery store. If a friend stops over I have to order champagne. I also have this thing that whenever I travel, if I'm ever in a hotel room I never feel like I'm missing something because I'll just just uber eats it. The amount of times I've had to uber eats hair items like hairspray, deodorant, you name it, I've ordered it. On Ubereats you can get grocery alcohol everyday essentials in addition to restaurants and food you love. So in other words, get almost anything. With Uber Eats. Order now for alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.