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- [00:00]
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- [00:25]
Paige
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- [00:29]
Camille Foster
Warning, Bombas.
- [00:30]
Isaac Saul
Bombas are so absurdly comfortable, you may throw out all your other clothes.
- [00:33]
Paige
Sorry, do we legally have to say that?
- [00:35]
Isaac Saul
No, this is just how I talk.
- [00:37]
Camille Foster
And I really love my Bombas.
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Isaac Saul
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Camille Foster
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- [00:53]
Isaac Saul
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- [00:56]
Paige
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- [01:27]
Isaac Saul
All right, coming up, happy Juneteenth to Camille. I'm just kidding. That's a joke. We talk about the MAGA fight over Iran, Tucker versus Ted. We discussed the federal land sell off, and then maybe the worst grievances episode of all time. But kind of nice and uplifting and maybe a little warm, too. It's a good one.
- [01:52]
Paige
From executive producer Isaac Saul. This is Tangle.
- [02:07]
Isaac Saul
Good morning and good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. I'm here with Tangle managing editor Ari Weitzman and Tangle's editor at large, Camille Foster. You'll notice that the intro is completely the same. We have not settled on anything with regards to a name, though we appreciate the many suggestions that came in. The consensus, I think from all the emails that I saw were like, all of your guys, suggestions suck. Don't do any of these things here. Here's what I think I got almost.
- [02:46]
Ari Weitzman
There was some endorsements from my. There were some endorsements from my perspective, from the listeners, so I'm grateful for that. I don't like you misrepresenting that, Isaac.
- [02:55]
Isaac Saul
Yes. Okay. Maybe it was just. I heard. Everybody told me all my ideas were bad. Yeah. So I guess I had a different experience than you guys. We're back in the lab, I guess. Is there anything else to say about that except thank you for all the suggestions? Ari, you feel like you have something to say? I see your mouth opening. Yeah.
- [03:19]
Camille Foster
I just think that there was one suggestion that kind of crowdsourced in the comments section of the Sunday newsletter that we had, which was for the name Unwinding, which kind of fit nice. And I don't want to lose tabs on that one. So thanks for organically bubbling that to the surface, to our hive mind out there.
- [03:43]
Isaac Saul
I agree. The Unwinding was one of the few reader suggestions that I felt kind of everybody raised their eyebrows at a little bit, like maybe that could be it. All right, well, we just wanted to close the loop on that a little bit. I think maybe we'll get back to our private discourse. These changes will be coming soon, hopefully. But we. It's worth saying that we had big, grand plans to do some kind of rollout this week, but John Law, our executive producer of the podcast, is on a surprise vacation that his incredible wife planned for him. She sort of conspired with me. Yeah, she conspired with me to get him off work for a week, which I knew about and then consequently forgot about as we were planning some of the renaming and rolling out that he was going to be out this entire week. So shout out to John's wife, Summer, who took him on a lovely vacation. I won't say where to an undisclosed, very nice tropical location. And they seem to be having a good time. But it has put some of the. Those production things just a little bit behind. Speaking of incredible wives, happy anniversary to Camille and I. We found out that we share, almost share a wedding anniversary. Yeah, yeah. My wedding anniversary is on Thursday. Juneteenth. Happy Juneteenth as well. To Camille. No, I'm just kidding.
- [05:16]
Ari Weitzman
Exclusively. Only.
- [05:21]
Isaac Saul
There is some interesting. I Actually, before we get into some of the stuff we have lined up, I would like to chat about the Juneteenth stuff. Trump and the maga, Right. Are a little bit all in on, like, we should delete this holiday. They're really into deleting stuff right now. I don't know if you guys have noticed but there's been some delete this holiday discourse. I'm pro Juneteenth. I'll tell you why. One, it's on my wedding anniversary. So I get a federal holiday on my wedding anniversary. It's great. Two, I think we should have more federal holidays. I like being off work for the day. That's nice. The Thursday off was actually kind of nice. I really appreciate that. Three, I. Despite how the left has sort of, you know, made it, the right's made a divisive issue too. I shouldn't just say the left, but despite the fact it's gone through the Partizan ringer and has become a little bit of a divisive holiday, I do think, like, we could just have Juneteenth be a celebration of freedom. And that's great. And I'm. I'm good with that as a holiday. But yeah, I'm curious what you guys think about this discourse around the. The. Yeah, that there's just kind of like an anti Trump was like super pro Juneteenth. He pushed for it in 2020 and now he's completely flipped the script and it's just like all in on it being a horrible holiday that everybody should be working. We have. He said he posted something about how we have too many federal holidays, which is a weird. Like, I don't know that it's a consensus that everybody's like, yeah, we. We don't work enough in this country. We should definitely have fewer days off. That doesn' like something that's a popularly held position. But yeah, I'll lob that out there. Roll that grenade into the room and see what you guys think.
- [07:08]
Ari Weitzman
I mean, in general, Donald Trump. Donald Trump in 2020. This is June of 2020. This Juneteenth, we commit as one nation to live true to our highest ideals and to build always towards a freer, stronger country that values the dignity and boundless potential of all Americans. That's pretty good.
- [07:28]
Isaac Saul
That's pretty good. 2020 and then today, different man.
- [07:30]
Ari Weitzman
But it's also a different circumstance. And I think one has to take the context into consideration when talking about this. And the reality is that by June of 2021, when Joe Biden was president and there was a proclamation issued to formally make Juneteenth a federal holiday, not just a thing that some people were observing. And Isaac, how long have you been married?
- [07:50]
Isaac Saul
This is my four year anniversary.
- [07:53]
Ari Weitzman
Okay. So you. You and Juneteenth kind of came into being together and I don't know, did you. Were you aware of Juneteenth at the time that you got married?
- [08:02]
Isaac Saul
Vaguely. I remember specifically a conversation I had with my wife where she was like, is this bad form at all? Should we be. Should we be like thinking about. And I was like, no. And then there was sort of like.
- [08:15]
Ari Weitzman
A yeah, should we Celebration of freedom. Bad form.
- [08:18]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. She was like. And then we had to like, well, should we say anything about Juneteenth like at the wedding? And I was like, if we got married on July 4th, I don't think we would be like, happy Independence Day, everybody at the. You know, like, maybe. I don't know. It's hard to imagine.
- [08:33]
Camille Foster
I feel like you would remember though. But it was like, I feel like you would.
- [08:36]
Isaac Saul
Like, yeah, maybe I would. Yeah, I'd be like America. But it was, it was like the.
- [08:42]
Camille Foster
First the Beat theme cocktails.
- [08:48]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, it was the first.
- [08:49]
Ari Weitzman
It was the first is a weird holiday.
- [09:01]
Isaac Saul
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- [10:05]
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- [10:45]
Ari Weitzman
Yeah, Juneteenth is a weird holiday. And it's weird for a bunch of different reasons. I mean, the first is because it was heavily politicized, because of the way it came into being. There's a sense in which it was born in the midst of not just the racial reckoning, but really the beginning of the Biden administration, which was heavily interested in the kind of ideological conflict around that stuff and was pushing more in the direction of kind of the equity social justice agenda. And it's hard to. It would be hard for it, even under the best of circumstances, not to be kind of contaminated by some of that political climate. But beyond that, Juneteenth is also a celebration not of the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, but this apocryphal date upon which it is suggested that some of the last people to know about this, slaves to discover, or enslaved persons to discover that they had been freed, was on Juneteenth. And it is just not true. It's not true in the same way that Christmas is not, in fact, Jesus birthday. And from my standpoint, that kind of matters, whether or not we're in the business of meaningfully reflecting upon history in kind of a broad and thoughtful way, or whether we.
- [11:59]
Camille Foster
Sorry, but is that an argument that we shouldn't be taking Christmas off then?
- [12:04]
Ari Weitzman
Well, I mean, Christmas is a religious holiday. And it's also, in general, a kind of odd. But it's also an odd pagan festival that all of us indulge in at this point where we're giving one another gifts and cutting down trees and putting them up in our house. The whole thing is weird. So if we're gonna do anything, you can have Christmas and Christmas Eve, and perhaps you can have Juneteenth as well, but four years removed from it, forgetting the fact that it had this kind of odd political genesis seems odd. So I acknowledge the fact that it has a weird political genesis. I acknowledge the fact that it's also very strange to be celebr day on the date that some guy who'd been in the Pacific hiding in the jungle discovers, oh, the war is actually over. That's bizarre. I'm not sure why you would do it in that way. So all of it, just. None of it sits particularly well with me. If Juneteenth had been left alone and people had been observing it freely or ignoring it, which is what most people were doing then, I suppose everything would be fine, and there'd be no weird political shenanigans, and Donald Trump would still be issuing proclamations and in support of Juneteenth, but because the circumstances actually changed. And I think it's just, again, the tectonic shifts that happen are not just a function of belligerent, awful conservatives who have these horrible, recalcitrant values and think slavery was kind of okay. No, it's just that the political climate is weird, and it came into being in a weird way, and that's probably not going to go away tomorrow. My prediction, if I had one, is that in 10 to 15 years, most people won't remember the odd political milieu and will probably still be talking about and observing Juneteenth in some weird way. But what will tell you whether or not things are actually healthier is whether or not there's a Juneteenth mattress sale. Because what you want is for these holidays to become completely innocuous to the point where it's just like, yeah, you get 5% off because it's Juneteenth. What is Juneteenth? I don't know. That is what victory looks like. That's when you know you have a healthy culture. When it's like that whole thing is so far removed from our everyday experience of the world that we barely know what the hell is going on.
- [14:13]
Camille Foster
I think as a format, that's the.
- [14:14]
Ari Weitzman
Day I long for. Amnesia is the glue that keeps the country together.
- [14:19]
Camille Foster
Just as a former mattress salesman, I'd ask you not to besmirch the sanctity of President Trump.
- [14:23]
Isaac Saul
I am not.
- [14:26]
Ari Weitzman
I'm not. I'm besmirching the unsanctity of not being willing to sell mattresses at a discount in honor of whatever it is we're supposed to be celebrating. Memorial Day, Labor Day, President's Day, VA Day, Valentine's Day.
- [14:40]
Isaac Saul
Especially guys. Okay, pop quiz. Juneteenth is now the newest federal holiday. Do you know the last federal holiday created before that?
- [14:51]
Ari Weitzman
Huh?
- [14:51]
Camille Foster
Created is so I would say, like, signed into law. Okay, well, I'm pausing over created because Columbus Day being renamed Columbus Day, Indigenous Peoples Day. Still the same day.
- [15:05]
Isaac Saul
Not counting that. Okay, yeah, not counting that.
- [15:09]
Ari Weitzman
Another politically contaminated.
- [15:13]
Camille Foster
That's the thing. That's why I kind of want to come back to this conversation in a little bit of, like. What is, like, is innocuousness a good or a bad thing? Even if it's a holiday people want to celebrate. But I want to play in the space here, Isaac. And try to answer that question of what the last created federal holiday is. It must be a wireless.
- [15:36]
Ari Weitzman
MLK Day might be the one.
- [15:40]
Camille Foster
Is it presidency?
- [15:41]
Isaac Saul
That'd be my guess, right? No, it's MLK Day. Yeah. 1983, Martin Luther King Day shot. Yeah. Before that was Columbus Day. So you were kind of circling there, Ari. Which was first signed into law, first federally observed in 1971. Yeah.
- [16:02]
Ari Weitzman
Mafioso promoting that holiday. Creating. They created it because of the horrible stereotypes of them. And they said, we've all seen, look, Italians, all of us. Aren't we all not bads?
- [16:15]
Isaac Saul
So it seems like they added in 1971, Memorial Day, Washington's birthday, both went from being kind of observed to being federally enacted. There's something called the Uniform Monday Holiday act in 1971, which put a bunch of these all on Mondays. I think that that's pretty interesting. So, yeah, this is all chat. Unverified chat. GPT information based on AI you just knew. Complete nonsense.
- [16:46]
Camille Foster
I'm wondering if the holiday trend is going to be. This is like a backdoor into getting the Andrew Yang four day work week. Like if we just have a holiday every week, maybe. I mean, I feel like a lot of people could get behind that movement. That's a. That's a good way.
- [17:03]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. Well, we took off. We took off yesterday for Juneteenth at Tangle, and Will sent a slack message to me and Ari in the middle of the day like, yo, Thursday's a banger day to have a day off. We should do this. We should like do this a couple times a year. I was like, yeah, I agree. It's been pretty nice. I don't know if we're gonna just like take some random Thursdays off in the middle of the year, but I.
- [17:25]
Camille Foster
Think Will was doing a little tongue in cheek thing because we have a couple other Thursdays that are gonna be off on the calendar already.
- [17:32]
Isaac Saul
Oh, really?
- [17:33]
Camille Foster
Yeah. Like, I think we're taking Thursday, Friday for July 4th. So. Yeah, we are.
- [17:42]
Isaac Saul
I mostly was just thinking about. Yeah, I was just thinking about jokes I can make about cutting his salary and giving him what he wanted. We'll be right back after this. Quick break.
- [18:06]
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- [18:36]
Paige
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- [19:34]
Isaac Saul
All right, well, there is a lot of news to get into here, which we should do. I think maybe the biggest thing, I mean, the biggest story globally right now is what's happening in Iran and in Israel with, you know, two heavily armed powers exchanging gunfire. I mean, we have a new war in the Middle East. So I think that's the story of the week. Before we get into some questions about that and some of the stuff that's happening there, which I have a couple, I guess, ethical questions I want to scratch at. But before we do, I think the kind of subplot story to this new war is that there is a big fracture happening in the kind of MAGA universe over what Donald Trump should do vis a vis Iran and Israel. There's this divide about the degree to which the United States should support Israel. There is fear among some people who think that Trump is about to drag the US Into a direct conflict with Iran. And some people who have basically already said he did it, he greenlit Israel's actions, we're supporting them, and I'm out. Like, he's been a huge disappointment. I mean, I know probably the most prominent of them is the comic Dave Smith, who like literally called for Trump to be impeached for backing Israel's actions, which I thought was a little overcooked, but it's happening. And maybe the thing that exemplified it the most was this pretty remarkable Tucker Carlson Ted Cruz interview, which I thought illustrated the way in which this could divide people in a really strong and meaningful way who otherwise agree on a ton of stuff. I mean, in the interview, Tucker and Ted Cruz are saying, you know, over and over, they're kind of like, we probably agree on 80% of this, you know, 80% of American political stuff. And they're, you know, Ted Cruz will answer a question and Tucker will say, I agree with everything, you know, before doing that, like, psychotic laugh he does, which I don't know why he really has to stop doing that, but. But then they get to the Iran stuff, and it's like, really combative. And I had a couple takeaways. I'd be curious to kind of hear your guys read on, but the first thing I'll just say is it was pretty cathartic to see Tucker kind of use his powers for good, which in my view is challenging somebody in a combative and direct way who's on your team. I just, like, so rarely ever see him do. I mean, most of what he does is just bringing on. At least what he used to do on Fox News was like, bringing on the furthest left people that he really disagreed with and eviscerating them in a really calculated way. It was like, going on Tucker was just a dumb move if you were some, like, lefty academic. He was always so good at it, and he's incredible on tv. And then in the new kind of Tucker era, with this independent show, he's just bringing on a bunch of people he agrees with and just letting them say whatever they want without challenging them in any meaningful way. Kind of like the. The Joe Rogan approach. And this was like, here's somebody he agrees with on a lot of stuff. But he was holding his feet to the fire, I thought, in interesting ways. The clips all look terrible for Ted Cruz. And then when you watch the full interview, you realize that Ted Cruz held his own in a lot of other instances in a way that I don't think we're going viral on X. So I don't know. I'm curious what stuck with you guys about the exchange and the interview and how the shapes of this debate are kind of taking form.
- [23:18]
Camille Foster
I think most importantly, it was the first time that I felt like I was getting a look into what Ted Cruz actually thinks. I think he's one of those politicians who's so good at representing what he thinks the best message is. And in my mind, Ted Cruz is kind of like the epitome of the guy who does what he needs to do to continue to be elected. And I've never really been sure what his principles were. So I thought Tucker pushed him and pushed him and pushed him to the point where he was. There was no artifice anymore. And Ted Cruz is like, this is what I believe. I think all of our foreign policy should just be about what's best for America. That's my touchstone. And when he pushed them to a place of stress, I think we're learning about what a very powerful US Senator thinks. So I really was appreciative of that. I think one of the things that exposed to me is that Ted Cruz is still sort of trying to justify what the right message is to support whatever the White House is saying in this conflict, because it does seem like his foreign policy ideals are a little scattershot. He's saying he's flexible depending on what the moment requires. And I do think he was actually defending a pretty defensible position about we can support Israel in our national security interests without entangling ourselves as directly. And I think that's a pretty defensible position. But Tucker kept, like, really stressing it, like, making him fall into traps and explaining where his positions come from, which felt a little insufficient as well. There's that whole exchange about Tucker saying, why do you believe that we should support Israel? And Ted Cruz is saying that because of the Bible. You guys have seen that clip, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tucker just embarrassed him on that, which rightfully so. But in general, I think Ted Cruz's argument was actually pretty cogent.
- [25:17]
Isaac Saul
I thought just a quick interjection on the Bible thing that I thought was kind of interesting is that Tucker was also wrong that it wasn't from Genesis. It's from numbers. I think the. The, like. So there was sort of this classic, like, Tucker being like, it's from Genesis in, like, his sort of confident, smarmy way. And then there.
- [25:37]
Ari Weitzman
Which is. Which is a very odd. Yeah. If you know anything about the scripture, it's not in Genesis, dude.
- [25:42]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. And then there are a lot of people being like, this is weird. Like, Tucker just really confidently was like, telling Ted Cruz, like, how do you not even know the context for this quote you're using?
- [25:53]
Ari Weitzman
It's in the early part. Must be Genesis.
- [25:56]
Isaac Saul
I was sort of. I will say I was kind of torn on that exchange. Like, yeah, yeah, I'd be. I'm. Yeah. I mean, look, on the surface of it, I think Tucker. Tucker Carlson's point, like, obviously the Bible's not talking about present day Israel, but, like.
- [26:13]
Camille Foster
And Ted Cruz says that, which, like, you know, he's just kind of wrong there.
- [26:17]
Isaac Saul
Right. But the Bible's discussing, like, a group of people who live in a. Like, a nation that's roughly defined as the land surrounding Jerusalem, who are speaking Hebrew, who are all adherence to a specific faith, who are, like, you know, they're defending and fighting for this. These, like, holy sites. All of that's basically true today. I mean, like, the Israel of the Bible obviously looks and is much different than the Israel of today, but the sort of. The whole point of modern day Israel and Zionism was to kind of recreate the reality that this land was being controlled by this specific people. And so, I don't know, I was just a little bit torn on that exchange. Like, I think. And we should cue it up of Dewey, drop it in.
- [27:13]
Ted Cruz
Growing up in Sunday school, I was taught from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed. And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things. Those who bless the government of Israel. Those who bless Israel is what it says. It doesn't say the government of it. It says the nation of Israel. So that's in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that. Where is that? I can find it to you. I don't have the Scripture off the tip of my. You pull out the phone and use the. It's in Genesis, but. So you're quoting a Bible phrase. You don't have context for it, and you don't know where in the Bible it is. But that's like, your theology. I'm confused. What does that even mean? Tucker, I'm a Christian. I want to know what you're talking about. Where does my support for Israel come from? Number one, because biblically, we are commanded to support Israel. But number two. Hold on, hold on. You're a senator and now you're throwing out theology. And I am a Christian, and I am allowed to weigh in on this. We are commanded as Christians to support the government of Israel. We are commanded to support Israel. Is the nation in Genesis. Is that the same as the country run by Benjamin Netanyahu right now?
- [28:19]
Isaac Saul
Yes.
- [28:20]
Ted Cruz
Yes, it is. Okay.
- [28:22]
Isaac Saul
I think it gives me a weird, icky feeling that, like, I don't want Ted Cruz fighting for Israel as a US Senator because of his religious views. I don't love that.
- [28:36]
Camille Foster
And to be fair, he said, like, this is a personal motivation. It's not the reason that I would give other people to support.
- [28:42]
Ari Weitzman
And I actually suspect he would have said that if Tucker didn't cut him off, in which case one has to, in my estimation, give him a little bit of leeway. And it was exactly the right thing to say. Like, I am a Christian. My position on this, it kind of begins with that. But that can't be the rationale for the policy position that I end up endorsing because I don't represent a whole bunch of Christians. I represent all of my constituents, which is precisely the right thing to say in a context like that. There's a lot that stood out to me. And the first thing I should say is I'm not a particular fan of either one of these gentlemen, at least as they're currently constituted. I've had an awkward drink with Ted Cruz at one point in the and I won't get into the details. It's not exactly like that Tom Segura joke, but it's kind of similar. And are you guys aware of that?
- [29:31]
Camille Foster
Joe, I had to go back to my recesses to get it.
- [29:34]
Ari Weitzman
Seek it out. It's great. It's great. They're neighbors. He runs out to ask him a question. It's kind of funny. Seek it out. And the other thing is Tucker Carlson, I've done television with him in the past when he was still at Fox years and years ago, so I've known him a little bit. And I didn't think he comported himself in a particularly thoughtful or noble way. He certainly was interrogating him. But he's using, like, all of the slippery tricks imaginable, like, what is the population of Iran, what is this trivia like? I can look it up on the Internet the same way that you did. That wouldn't make my position any more or less valid, and he knows that. So there's a little bit of just kind of gamesmanship going on. But I do think that the underlying philosophical argument is super interesting. And I also think that Tucker's, I think, authentic sense that there is this risk of escalation. And it's something that I understand better because of the fact that I endorsed the second Gulf War very stridently and thought we could nation build. And that didn't work out. And Tucker retreated from that position pretty early on originally and seems to be trying to embody the kind of wisdom there in the context of responding to this present conflict. You know, the biblical interpretation debate, you know, whether or not the interpretation ought to be kind of contextual and rooted in history, or whether it's kind of broader and hermeneutical and we ought to be complying it to the modern context. I'm going to set that aside for the moment, although I do have perspectives on it. But I think ultimately this question of how to think about this current conflict and how to apply one's principles is always fascinating and appropriate to get into. And I thought that in both cases, in a different context, the thoughtful aspects of the conversation they were having would be worthwhile to get into. But the conversation was also derailed by all of the aspects of our contemporary politics that you would expect. Like, at some point you're a warmonger, and at some point you're an anti Semite. It's like, of course that's where this ends up, landing on the rocks and completely disheveling into absolute entire insanity.
- [31:45]
Isaac Saul
I'm curious. I mean, I wouldn't say that the trivia pop question, can you just tell me the general contours of this country? Is that unfair of an inquisition? I mean, I had he said that.
- [32:02]
Ari Weitzman
I wouldn't have made that observation. But that's not really what he said. What he says is, what's the population talk to me about? You don't know anything about Iran. If I don't know the population, like, I could get it within 2 or 3 million. And I think that that wouldn't really matter all that much. But that's not the actual substance of the argument here.
- [32:22]
Isaac Saul
I do think there's, like, a certain kind of question that journalists could ask that is. Is not done enough that I kind of appreciated about what Tucker did. You know, like, I always wish that during the debates with Trump on stage, somebody would just be like, can you explain the difference between Medicaid and Medicare? Or like, sure. Like, I actually want to know if he knows that, and I'm not entirely sure that he does. And it's not just Trump. I mean, they did this, you know, that I. There was. I can't remember exactly what the question was, but somebody with Christy Noem in that congressional hearing, they asked her, I think it was something about, like, habeas corpus, if she could, like, defy. And she just, like, she, she was like, habeas corpus is like, president can deport anybody he wants at any. And it's like, it's literally the opposite of that. But, like, I don't know, there was just this. There was something about that that I found appealing was to just ask Ted Cruz if he could, like, speak. And, and the thing that, that he didn't do, like, the, the landing that he didn't have was sort of making it clear why this mattered. Like, why is it important whether Ted Cruz can answer this question or not? And I saw a really good tweet. I don't know who this guy is. His name's. He goes by T. Greer. But he said, like, the problem with this, the way that Tucker did this is he doesn't really close the deal. Like, he doesn't explain, you know, there's three times as many people in Iran as there are in Texas, and three times as. There are three times the number of people as are in Iraq. Like, how many soldiers do we need to keep the peace in Iraq? We're getting, like, this country's larger than that. You know, you're talking about evacuating Tehran. Like, you can drive across Texas in 24 hours. Iran's much bigger than Texas. You know, three times the size. Like, you're expecting people to leave the country. You're expecting us to manage this entire country in some sort of regime change, whatever it is. Or you're like, sort of. You know, he could have like, made the point, like, what happens after these strikes? And how are we going to manage this giant, big, complicated country? And if you don't understand the country, how could you possibly be supportive of a war that might throw it into crisis? Because you're going to be one of the people responsible for figuring out what we do next.
- [35:03]
Camille Foster
Connected back to that is. Which is a point he made earlier. Yeah.
- [35:07]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. That to me, is like a pretty. A fair line of inquisition. But, yeah, I agree. There was. There's obviously like, a gotcha thing, and it was deeply embarrassing, I think, for Ted Cruz to not be able to answer that question or even call out.
- [35:22]
Camille Foster
The trick, I think, would have been fine, too. Yeah. Like, really? Population of Iran. Like, we're going to talk about rote stats. Like, I can tell you about the country, but I'm not going to get into this. Like, can you answer this question? I Googled before the interview or not.
- [35:35]
Isaac Saul
He did sort of start to say something about, like, the Sunni, Shia conflict, and then Tucker kind of cut him off and was like, no, no, this is important. Like, you don't. You can't tell me how many people live there. You know.
- [35:48]
Ari Weitzman
That'S what Tucker is good at. Yeah, like the cutting you off, not allowing you to get your footing back in the conversation. You're correct to point out, Isaac, that that is what he was doing on Fox on a regular basis. A universe of more respectable.
- [36:05]
John
Hey, everybody, this is John, executive producer of YouTube and podcast content and co host of the daily podcast. I hope you enjoyed this preview of. Of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. We are now offering this podcast exclusively to our Premium Podcast members along with our ad free daily podcasts, Friday editions, in depth interviews, upcoming new podcast series, bonus content, and much more. If you want to receive all that and give your support to help grow Tangle Media, Please go to readtangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, a podcast membership, or a discounted bundle membership which gets you both access to the Premium newsletter and the Premium podcast. If it's not the right time for you to sign up, please don't worry. Our ad supported Daily podcast isn't going anywhere, but if it is in your ability to support by signing up for a membership, we would greatly appreciate it and we're really excited to share all of our premium offerings with you. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Mull signing off. Have a great day. Y' all.
- [37:09]
Camille Foster
Take care.
- [37:10]
Ari Weitzman
Bye.
- [37:13]
Isaac Saul
Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our Managing Editor, Ari Weitzman, Will K. Back, Bailey Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova who is also our Social Media Manager. Music for the the podcast was produced by Diet75. If you're looking for more from Tango, Please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.
- [37:52]
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Ari Weitzman
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