Camille Foster (3:10)

And how out of step I am with the culture. Apparently, Democrats and Republicans, this is the one thing they can agree on. Yeah, new Cracker Barrel logo is bad. I think it begins here. One, I've only been to Cracker Barrel once, and I did not enjoy it, and I would not go back again. Two, the single best indicator that I probably shouldn't have gone there was the original logo, which is now the current logo again. It is bad. It is objectively bad. It is offensive. It is aesthetically ridiculous. I don't understand the scrawling caricature. I didn't even know that was an old man in a chair. It was just weird. It looked like Scribble. Scrabble. It was bad. So the new logo at least was clean, wasn't particularly good, but neither is the food. So that is my perspective. It's not so much that I love the new Cracker Barrel logo. It was just obviously, objectively an improvement over the original logo. None of that gets me in trouble with any of the culture war craziness. I'm just saying aesthetically, objectively, it was an improvement.

Ari Weitzman (4:11)

Objectively, he says, this is such an opinion to come from a member of the bi coastal elite. Tech conscious, new media, upper crust. Give me my food on a silver platter. People like Camille Foster.

Will Kaback (4:26)

Just saying.

Ari Weitzman (4:27)

I don't want to go into a food store that's essentially just a cafeteria attached to a gift shop. How dare you. You're so out of.

Camille Foster (4:33)

No, I go to the food truck. I'll stop at the cart in New York and buy. Buy the Hillel stuff there. I'm. I'm good. I'm. I'm. I am a man fitting.

Ari Weitzman (4:41)

Fitting what I'm painting you as more and more, I would say.

Camille Foster (4:44)

I'm just saying that Cracker Barrel, not very good. And neither was the original current logo.

Will Kaback (4:48)

I have to say I will. I will defend Camille on this point that, like, drop me in a tgis. Drop me into, like, Chili's. I'm going ham, Olive Garden. Like, there are some really good chain restaurants. In America that are making me pretty happy. High calories, super greasy. Terrible for you, but.

Camille Foster (5:12)

But good.

Will Kaback (5:13)

Yeah, yeah. And Cracker Barrel kind of sucks.

Camille Foster (5:15)

Cracker Barrel reminds me of. Reminds me of. I imagine that's what prison food tastes like. I don't have any experience with it. It just kind of looks like it. Like, what is that mystery meat and gravy? Like, that's prison food. So I don't know.

Ari Weitzman (5:31)

I think maybe I've said my biggest qualm here. I'm. I not going to be the person that comes out and says, cracker Barrels, fine cuisine, or even on the level of TGI Fridays. But, yeah, I will say I think Olive Garden's even a cut above. I will go ham on Olive Garden for sure.

Will Kaback (5:48)

Sure.

Ari Weitzman (5:49)

I will hold the line about that. Free salty breadsticks. As many as you can eat. Beautiful. That's America.

Camille Foster (5:57)

If you. If you guys text me and say, hey, we're going to Olive Garden, I'm coming. If you text me and say, we're going to Cracker Barrel, I'll say, well, just hit me afterwards when you go into the bar.

Ari Weitzman (6:05)

Wait, now here's a question. What do you think of the Olive Garden logo rebrand they did a couple years ago? Do you remember?

Camille Foster (6:10)

I don't even remember.

Will Kaback (6:11)

No.

Camille Foster (6:12)

Is it a similar kind of modernist turn?

Ari Weitzman (6:14)

Yeah, it is.

Camille Foster (6:15)

Yeah.

Will Kaback (6:16)

Then he probably likes it.

Camille Foster (6:17)

That's a vibe.

Ari Weitzman (6:18)

He probably loves it.

Camille Foster (6:19)

It's a vibe.

Will Kaback (6:20)

That's Camille's aesthetic, I think.

Ari Weitzman (6:23)

Personality.

Will Kaback (6:25)

I spent two months in a rebrand war room with Camille, and I am so unsurprised that he likes the new Cracker Barrel logo. The old ones are so much better. I won't go to bat on the logo stuff because the old logo is very obviously better for all the reasons that a lot of the people who are being hyperbolic about this were talking about, which is like, it's iconic. It's the barrel. It has this Americana feel to it. It's like it looks good on a nice brand new side of a building. The same way it looks good on, like an old, broken, dusty sign swinging in the wind, you know? And that's the Cracker Barrel aesthetic. Oh, this Olive Garden rebrand sucks. Oh, my God.

Ari Weitzman (7:15)

Just dried up on screen.

Will Kaback (7:17)

It's obviously better.

Camille Foster (7:18)

The new one is obviously better.

Will Kaback (7:21)

Yeah, yeah. Actually. Okay, you're right. I actually do. I was looking. There's four of them. So I do agree. From 2014 to 2015. That's good.

Camille Foster (7:32)

I mean, honestly, look at that old Cracker Barrel logo. And Then Old Country Store underneath it is doing way too many things. It is a logo with a subtitle and a massive icon that is almost the size of the entire logo itself. It's totally bizarre.

Will Kaback (7:49)

Swooping K. Go ahead.

Ari Weitzman (7:52)

This new era of the Minified simple logo, I think takes a lot of the soul out of the things that we appreciated before. But maybe at the same time, that's a better representation of what the organizations are like. Olive Garden and Cracker Barrels aren't like the mom and pop stores in the backyard. They're multinational companies that have corporations and HR departments. And maybe, yeah, maybe it is better in that regard.

Will Kaback (8:16)

But Cracker Barrel felt that way with the old. Felt that way.

Ari Weitzman (8:21)

Yeah, I guess this is. Hey, boys.

Camille Foster (8:24)

Yeah.

Will Kaback (8:24)

Is this right?

Camille Foster (8:27)

Are they dining establishments or real estate plays? That's the real question.

Will Kaback (8:31)

Would you qualify this as a dumber or more sophisticated controversy than the Sydney Sweeney commercial? How would you rate these?

Camille Foster (8:41)

Oh, significantly dumber. I mean, Sydney Sweeney is at least, you know, interesting to look at and she's been on films and like, there's a whole lot going on. Cracker Barrel. I don't want to go to Cracker Barrel. I'm not interested. I don't care what happens to Cracker Barrel.

Ari Weitzman (8:54)

I'm detecting. I wish the employees the best quality of or the thing that we're talking about here. Potentially.

Will Kaback (9:00)

Yeah, I think the Cracker Barrel controversy is slightly dumber, but I don't. I think it's fairly clear this is one of the stupidest controversies in a long time. So I'll stop the conversation now because our listeners are probably ready to turn us off. There is much more substantial, important, you know, horrifying, terrible, interesting news this week. And we're gonna try to get to a few of the big ones. Perhaps the most, I would say. I mean, to me, I think the story that should be sort of dominating the headlines and maybe isn't is this Catholic school shooting in Minnesota. And I say it should be because, A, I don't want us to ever get used to events like this. I have to concede I read this news differently now having a child than I did before I had a kid, mostly in the sense that I literally just can't stomach to read it the same way. I used to be able to kind of grit my teeth and get through it. But for those of you who don't know, I mean, it's a familiar story. Former student returned to school, 23 year old. There seems to be some conversation question reporting about their gender identity. But they entered the school and had three firearms on them, I believe, a rifle, a shotgun and a pistol. Started shooting. This was a church, killed two children, an 8 and a 10 year old, and injured 14 more, and then killed himself with a self inflicted gun wound. The response is the same as ever, you know, finger pointing, everybody gets in their corners. There's like the thoughts and prayers crowd, there's the gun reform now crowd, there's the people kind of ripping their hair out. Well, how can we not solve this problem? But there's been a kind of determined effort, I think, to pursue some politically convenient scapegoats too. Camille, I know that you had some thoughts about the kind of political convenience of some of the scapegoats that we're seeing in the news. I don't know if you want to sort of throw us into that conversation. I mean, I just. It feels like such a familiar and similar story. It's almost hard to find new ground to tread. But I think that's not a good enough reason to not talk about it because like I said, I don't want, I don't want to just sort of accept this as the status quo that we just move on from, you know.

Camille Foster (11:41)

Yeah, yeah. I resonate deeply with so much of what you said there, especially toward the beginning where you mentioned, you know, you're a fairly new dad. And it hits differently now. And I can say that I had a very similar experience kind of navigating stories about tragedy involving children. And here you've got, you know, two children dead. I think it was 11 other people wounded, if not more. And one can imagine just the profound impact on a community like this. It was far reaching. The name of your community becomes infamous. We'd been looking at real estate in different parts of the country in recent years and you come across a place and you know that name and you're trying to remember what you know it from. And it's, oh, that's why maybe I won't live there 10 years removed from the horrible calamity that took place. So, yeah, we should keep in the forefront of our mind the fact that something awful has happened to these families, something that none of us would ever want to happen to us. And it is rather difficult to watch as a kind of political commentator, as a journalist and survey the news cycle and see immediately after these shootings are reported, there is this scrum to figure out who it is to attribute blame to the right kind of person and then to build as much of a narrative as possible about how we have to talk about it in this way, and we have to be prepared to condemn this sort of person. The thing that really stands out to me with this particular shooting isn't so much whether or not the person is trans or not. It's actually the fact that this is yet another example of not just the school shooting, but more politically motivated violence, or at least politically tinged violence. And we have seen so much of this in this country over the course of the past, not just a couple of years, but certainly since Donald Trump was inaugurated. We can remember all the way back to that congressional baseball field assault that took place when Republicans had taken the field. Certainly the assassination attempt on the president was a pretty dramatic thing to have happen, but we've seen attacks on federal facilities this year, and we see yet another attack where, you know, this particular shooter, obviously unwell, obviously goes without saying. But so many of the themes were directly related to various political confrontations that we're involved in. And I think that I don't have. There's no magic wand. Clearly, there's a serious conversation that we ought to be having about mental health in this country that we're not having. But I do think that there is just something about that, that tendency to overlook the fact that there is a very clear and obvious trend line with respect to political violence that is deeply unhealthy. And I think it's kind of. It's calamitous for us to ignore a trend like that and not take it very seriously while we're thinking about all these other things, whether it's firearms reform or whatever else is important to you, this fact of the pronounced nature of political violence, it's the lived reality of it in our everyday experience, is something that we just really need to bring to the forefront of our minds.

Ari Weitzman (14:57)

I don't know if it's. I hear that, and I think I'm not going to push back against the idea that there's a trend up and to the right of political violence. But when we put this into a context of years and years of school shootings, this happening at the beginning of the school year, and the other false, like, false alarm or prank calls about shooting tips that happened that week, it fits a broader trend of school violence and school shootings. And I don't want to now engage in the same thing that we're just talking about at the top of, like, spinning this to fit your preferred narrative. Like, I think we're all just, we're here just trying to understand what, what's the kind of the root problem here. And it's. It seems like there's this very basic thing that now we have this psychological contagion that if you are going through something that's this burdensome and suffering and through some sort of, like, battle with a mental demon, that one of the options to you is to go to a place where there are vulnerable people with a weapon. That that can be a school, it could be a church, it can be a synagogue, and often it is a school. But that seems like a really basic thing. Like that, to me is like, the heart of the trend. Less like political violence is just like another way that that pops up. That's kind of the way I'm thinking about it.

Camille Foster (16:22)

I wonder if they aren't mutually exclusive. And it's just. There are, in fact, two trends here. And I think you're correct to highlight the unique challenge with vulnerable places like schools, like houses of worship. And at the same time, there's also this kind of trend with respect to political violence that this particular attack might not actually be contemplated in the context of. And I suspect that's what I was trying to highlight. The political back and forth about who to blame is, I think, different than attaching to it. Attaching it to the broader kind of bipartisan. Whether you think the problem is predominantly one on the left or the right issue with respect to the growing proclivity, I think, towards political violence that we've seen. But I take your point fully.

Will Kaback (17:17)

I'm interested. I mean, it's funny hearing you guys go back and forth a little bit, because I do think that you're both right about the trend in political violence and the sort of trend in this. Let's resolve this demon I have by getting a gun and going to a place where vulnerable people are and, you know, doing something horrific. I was kind of more struck by, or stuck on this idea of, like, at the intersection of those two things. Political violence and kind of, like, extreme resolutions for political frustrations. How much of that is tied to the way the media has evolved and changed and the way the rhetoric's sort of evolving and changing? I've always been somebody who's like, you know, I've always taken the position that politicians and commentators and pundits are not responsible for, like, the violent actions of the people who consume their content. And I think that is, like, a obvious and just position to take, in my view. But there is something, I think really real. And I read this fantastic piece by this comedian Matt Ruby, who I am not familiar with, and I have no idea how popular he is. But somehow a substack post he wrote about this popped up in my feed that was sort of comparing the state of media today to pornography, which I thought was really interesting. And like, you know, his. The way he talked about it was like the real trick to winning the attention economy is just going to the extreme. And porn did it first, and now the news is just like, completely jumped head first into this. He had some really evocative and kind of funny lines, but, you know, like, he. He talked about, like, in referring to, like these jubilee, you know, many, you know, somebody's media son surrounded by 20 people. He's like, our debates mirror the lineup and take your turn, gang bangs. Like, we want a deep state and we want it. Yeah, I mean, it's really. It's like a. It's a really. Yeah, again, it's a really evocative piece, but, you know, like, he has these lines in it that just really stuck. Like he said, the sane middle is missionary with eye contact. So we keep getting weirder. Like, objective reporting doesn't turn us on anymore. We want to hear how Macron's wife was born. A man who wants Sam Harris's meditative nuance when you can scroll Waffle House parking lot fight videos. And the line that he had that really kind of just like hit me was, you can ask any junkie how this works. You build a tolerance, and it takes more to get the same high. So escalation is the only solution. And I think there's something real in the fact that maybe 10 or 15 years ago, dismissing concerns about, or not dismissing, but responding to accusations that a particular pundit or politician was responsible for with rhetoric for the actions of other people was a really appropriate response. But that today the rhetoric is so extreme and we're like, going so much further that I don't know if that's a totally sufficient response anymore. And I'm kind of reassessing my priors on that. So, yeah, I hold both the things you guys are saying, and I went straight to just like, how much of this is that? We live in the most desperate political punditry world, where it's like everybody's destroying the country and they want to kill your kids and eat your children. And it's all as extreme and horrifying as it can get. And people who have guns or mental health issues or whatever are just predictably responding to that.

Ari Weitzman (21:27)

Can I pause real quick and just ask how certain are we that this was a politically motivated attack? Because I'm not sure that I've read anything that states the shooter's motives here.

Camille Foster (21:39)

Well, the shooter's motives are somewhat schizophrenic. It seems the messages that were scrawled all over the gun and the stuff that appeared in the videos that were published has explicit political connotations to it. In fact, just explicit political themes. Kill Trump, a bunch of stuff related to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So it's there in that respect. It's kind of tinged with politics. And honestly, your breakdown there, Isaac, is very consistent with what I was trying to get at anyways. I think to the extent it's kind of politically tinged, it is mirroring the kind of language that we see in a lot of, not just the debates that are happening, but also in the punditry. And it is that kind of lowest common denominator, like extremist rhetoric. Certainly some of the responses that I've seen to the shooting amongst certain kind of fringe communities are, well, what did you think was going to happen? You know, you're threatening trans communities, you want to genocide them. Like, all of it seems exceptionally overheated and all of it is maximalist in the most extreme ways. And I'm not saying that it directly causes it. I am saying that just culturally it does feel as though there's this sense of this kind of exotic perversion and thrill seeking in our kind of relationship with the media. And that kind of deep intimate connection and nuance that you might expect from something a bit more substantive and meaningful isn't really there. And there I am trying to weave the kind of intimate themes that Ruby had in his piece into my response there. And I don't know if I'm doing that particularly well because this is complicated, but there you are.

Ari Weitzman (23:35)

Well, hold. Cause I actually don't think that we, like, I think we're still jumping from the assumption that it's politically motivated just because the person had all these political messages surrounding what they were doing. They had statements that they put online and we saw reports about what was scrawled under the gun. But to me, that can just as easily be evidence of a person who was bringing their same sort of discontent and schizophrenic mindset, which is another assumption to everything that they were involved in. And it could be animus towards an institution that they knew and inspired by something completely out of left field, where this person seems to have been living in conflict that they're embroidered in the whole time. Like, I'm. I'm cognizant of the fact that when we're talking about this world of extreme polarization and political bias and bias confirmation and how we run to corners and point fingers that we're a place where what we do is we point out that happening. So our bias is to come into these news events. Already thinking about that. And I don't want to jump to conclusions thinking that the thing that we spend most of our time focusing on is the thing that matters the most. In this case, it may not be, it may not be true. It's not to say that political bias and polarization isn't a big issue. Still believe it is. But just when it comes to what's motivating individual actions. I'm not ready to like change the way I think about political violence in general because of something where I'm not sure if that was even the main cause of this one instance.

Camille Foster (25:12)

I think the main cause to be important and relevant and part of a kind of general trend.

Ari Weitzman (25:20)

Well, no, but if we're talking about this is making me rethink some things already thought about political statements and violence, then I'm saying that that's maybe something that we can't do when we're not sure if that's at play primarily here.

Will Kaback (25:38)

I mean, I, I guess I, I certainly think that it's our job to not jump to conclusions and from like a journalistic perspective about the person's motives, especially because we haven't heard that from officials yet, you know, the FBI or local police or whoever are investigating this person. Seems just as plausible to me that maybe there was some like teacher or student there that they had beef with or, you know, who knows? Like sometimes these stories end up being like a kid returning because the teacher abused him when he was young and he wanted to go kill the teachers. You know, it could be anything, but it seems pretty likely to me that this person was motivated by some like the desire to make some sort of political statement or manifesto famous. A because there is so much political imagery and content in their sort of public facing Persona that they were putting up on YouTube and social media because of the way the gun was decorated and all this stuff that I would be, I guess, like, you know, pretty confident that we're going to end up hearing that there was some sort of writings or something that they wanted to make famous. I mean, that's typically the motivation here. I guess, like, even if we're, even if we're going to say, put that on pause and say we don't really know. A potentially more pertinent question that I have or a potentially, I guess More pertinent way to get to the point that I was trying to make earlier is like, let's assume, for sake of argument, maybe one in a thousand people in our country are both unstable and armed in a way where, like, they'll be set off by really heated, intense political rhetoric. And then we're looking around at the. The sort of, you know, the. The body politic as a whole in our political environment. And we're observing that, like, over the last 10 or 15 years, the rhetoric has seemed to get more and more extreme. Then it would stand to reason we're going to see more mass shootings and more of these events as that rhetoric gets more and more extreme. Because there's, like, a fixed amount of people who are going to be sent up the wall by that kind of rhetoric and by consuming a lot of it. And when there's more of it and it's more accessible, more people are gonna be driven to do stuff like this. And I think, like, years ago, I would have rejected that premise a little bit because I want there to be responsibility for the shooter and the police response and the gun laws and all that stuff. And I don't know, like, at what point do we start saying, actually, no, the people who are producing this kind of content bear some responsibility here, and, like, their rhetoric actually matters. And I think that. Yeah, I just feel my position moving a little bit on that. I think.

Ari Weitzman (28:42)

Okay.

Will Kaback (28:43)

Curious how that argument lands.

Ari Weitzman (28:46)

I see that. I think one of the pieces of structure we used before in responding to instances like this has been this concept of a blame pyramid, where we talk about who's at the top of the blame pyramid, and they get the most blame. And then proportionally, as we go down and the shooter at the top, the community around the shooter just below it, the people who are responsible for security that maybe could have known had some leads. We don't know if that's the case in this instance, but sometimes we hear that in stories, and just below that, and then underneath that is, like, a broader political context that feeds into it. And I think maybe what you're saying, Isaac, is as we construct these blame pyramids and we see, like, there's different tops, that base remains the same. So that keeps coming up. We can build a bunch of different blame pyramids that have different people who are most to blame at the top, but they're all built on the same foundation. And it was certainly the case in Pittsburgh at the synagogue shooting there, that the person who ran into the shoot to do the shooting was inflamed by political life or death statements on gab. It's certainly been the case in, well, I'm struggling to think of other examples now. I'm now thinking just about the Pittsburgh shooting. But when we know that, well, Butler, now it's all western pa, but the shooting against Trump, inflamed by some really high life or death existential rhetoric, makes people, when you believe that, feel like the actions they have to take are also life and death. So I see that. I think that's the line that makes sense to me. That's the argument that you're making.

Camille Foster (30:31)

I wouldn't want us to park here too long, and I know we want to get to some other things, but perhaps at some later date when we return to this, it just occurs to me that a lot of times we have these conversations and perhaps when things are calmer and it's not in the midst of tragedy, the approach that we can take is, well, sure, there are some really politically challenging conversations to have around the Second Amendment and people who just are not going to budge whatsoever and people who think that we need to seriously curtail gun rights. I get it, that's going to be challenging. But it does feel like there ought to be some place for us to make some progress on issues related to mental health. And it does seem that within a household there are so many opportunities to perhaps intercede in the life of a young person. In a lot of these circumstances, especially where schools are involved in who you can see is in distress, there are usually some signs. There are even in some of these circumstances, incidents where law enforcement had been involved early on or some counselor or some other professional had been involved early on. And there were warning signs and there were warning signs that were not acted on in a meaningful way that almost certainly or perhaps even just probably could have prevented the tragedy from happening. And it feels as though we're perhaps missing opportunities to just figure out what some of those tweaks might be that could meaningfully kind of alter the trajectory of the country with respect to these kinds of occurrences and save lives, not just the lives of the victims, but the lives of the shooters who are also victims here. To the extent you're suffering from severe mental illness and there isn't ever the kind of intervention necessary to prevent you from doing something really, really harmful to yourself and others, there's a sense in which we've kind of failed corporately. And if we're so consumed by our contempts, and that's certainly not the case here, that we're mostly Kind of doing finger pointing and not really doing the kind of sober assessment we would need to do to figure out what the practical, politically feasible things are that we could do with respect to addressing mental health in a more sober and substantive way than. It just feels like we're really missing the mark here. And I do think that there is a kind of profound political and cultural and journalistic failure in that regard. There's something amiss with us primarily talking about these things once they've happened in the wake of the tragedy, and then kind of moving on until it happens again. And perhaps I'm charging myself and you guys with doing a little better in that regard because it feels like we can.

Will Kaback (33:22)

I mean, I do feel like they're really tangible even at this point. Solutions. I mean, we're going to be publishing, well, republishing a piece tomorrow that I wrote after the Uvalde shooting in Texas. So it'll come out on Friday. By the time people listen to this, it should be up on the Tango website. And a good deal of the piece talks about gun control and, you know, various ways we can address and kind of, I think, meaningfully tinker with gun laws that would induce a reduction in the sorts of crimes like this that we see. But we also talk about sort of, you know, the multifaceted nature of this. I mean, it is genuinely a holistic crime. Like, you can't. It's not just about somebody having a gun, and it's not just about somebody who is in mental distress. It's not just about, like, a family unit broken enough that nobody is paying attention to this person or seeking help for them. It's not just about the, you know, immediate police response and the way schools should be prepared for this stuff or whatever. And it's not just about the rhetoric that I, you know, was talking about. It's like it is the confluence of all those things that have to go wrong, which also means, like, breaking the link at any one of those junctures could help prevent this stuff, you know, like, so it's interesting to me, I guess, because it's both, like, in order for something like this to happen, we have to be so profoundly broken as a country. And also because something like this happening requires so many different things being so profoundly broken at the same time, it gives me a little bit of optimism that fixing one of them could meaningfully make a difference that would compound over time, we're just apparently fucking incapable of doing that, which sucks. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's yeah, there's a lot there, and I'm sure we'll have to revisit it at some point soon. I'm, you know, I. I think it's. I think I agree that we should be more preemptive about these conversations, obviously from a solution oriented perspective. At the same time, I totally disagree with, like, the notion. And I don't know if this is what you're putting forward, Camille, but I hear a lot of people put it forward that, like, we shouldn't talk about this right now because we don't want to politicize tragedy. No, I don't.

Camille Foster (35:58)

I don't think so at all.

Will Kaback (35:59)

Yeah, it's like, this is a very good time to talk about it because we should feel motivated and driven by the things that we're reading and how horrific all this is. Yeah. All right, Well, I want to get to some maybe more narrow political news. It's funny because I almost feel like I got what I wished for, and it was horrific because I was begging last week for just like a non Trump story for us to chew on and dominate. And then it's like, oh, a mass shooting that has nothing to do with Trump. Like, great. This is what a relief. And I was feeling that way because of kind of the thing I want to talk about next, which is just, we are just like, it feels like 2017 again to me all of a sudden. I think there are some reasons for it, but the world is just revolving around Donald Trump. And we had a week this week where I think all four of the newsletters and podcasts that we published this week circled a direct Trump action, which hadn't happened in a long time. But all of a sudden, it's just like he raided the home of John Bolton. So he had that his $500 million fraud penalty got thrown out. He went after Lisa Cook at the Fed, and then he signed this executive order to try and make flag burning illegal. And they all felt like stories that we needed to cover, but it was just like, we are back in Trump's world. And I think there are some reasons for it. One of them is like, there's no elections right now. Another is the Supreme Court's on recess. Another is that Congress is on recess. It's August. So it's like, this happens frequently, I think. But it is sort of jarring to just get to the end of a week and realize we've been totally sucked back into the vortex. And it's just, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump again. We'll be right back after this Quick break.

Camille Foster (38:27)

A dog's love letter to his squeaky avocado.

Will Kaback (38:30)

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Camille Foster (38:57)

This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom.

Ari Weitzman (38:59)

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Camille Foster (39:01)

Time to refresh your style for fall.

Ari Weitzman (39:03)

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Camille Foster (39:12)

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Ari Weitzman (39:23)

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Camille Foster (39:25)

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Will Kaback (39:36)

I want to talk a little bit about some of the reactions that people have had to some of our writing and my writing in particular. But I'm curious, I guess, how you guys are feeling a whether the sort of Trump heavy coverage is justified, if maybe we're airing in some specific or particular way that we should course correct for. Or if like this is just what happens when we have a president who actually does a whole bunch of stuff and floods the zone and like we can't really, you know, as frustrating as it might be to just have the redundancy, we can't really afford to look away. And I feel torn about it some days.

Ari Weitzman (40:21)

The idea of the not looking away is maybe the least convincing one to me. Just because the easy counterpoint you can do point for the left and right. So on the left in favor of like covering Trump, it's the don't look away. We have to cover everything he does. And the counterpoint is you're falling for the shiny object. He wants you to be talking about this to distract you from other stuff that's happening, then the point to cover it on the right is this is the most active president we've had in a while. Compare that to what happened under Biden. He's doing stuff, he's advancing the agenda. You're only reporting on the bad stuff. You should be covering more. You should be talking about the stuff he's doing that's working, you should be following up on like this D.C. where the mayor is now endorsing some of his actions. And a counterpoint to that is it's Trump derangement syndrome. You're falling for everything that the left's telling you to do. You're trying to get sucked in, or you don't know it, but you're getting sucked into this negativity vortex about stuff that he's doing when some of it's working and they all sort of come together and cancel out. To me. And maybe that's not fair. I'm sure it doesn't sound fair if you're one of the people saying any one of those things. But the basic point is that this is a president who is very active and it's a time when the rest of the government is not as active and the things that he's doing, if he advances them, are very high leverage things. So changing out a board of governors, one of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, extremely impactful. We have to talk about it. Rating a former National Security advisor. Yeah, like these are things that we'd be talking about if any president was doing them. So it's different because, you know, of the trend line. And I think we now are understanding what the trend is with how active Trump is, is being. But it's not like we also just came back from a week long break ourselves. So we're going to take things that are most active and focus on them. And the point to me is to keep trying to think what is the actual stakes at hand of what's happening. Less so who is the person that's doing it? Just because that's going to over time, Congress is going to get back, the Supreme Court's going to get back. There are going to be other things that happen in the news that we're going to have to cover. And right now this is what's happening. But, but we're covering it because that's where the most high leverage effects are. And that's kind of the end of it to me.

Camille Foster (42:49)

Yeah, I mean, since November of last year, once we actually had the results of the election, Democrats have been something of a non factor. They're largely responding to the administration to the extent that they're particularly vocal at all. I think you're right. Certainly right now it's pretty quiet in D.C. and the only game in town is the Trump show. But even when Congress is in session, the Republican controlled Congress is largely deferential to the president. Things become interesting on the few occasions where there's some actual static there. And it doesn't even matter if the Democrats are in opposition. What matters is if there's one or two very vocal Republican senators or congresspersons who are breaking ranks with the president. And beyond that, we just have an exceptionally activist administration who is not only breaking with convention in terms of the norms around things like the Federal Reserve, they're breaking with conventions with respect to the norms of conservatism more broadly. They are actively redefining conservatism. I heard JD Vance refer to himself, and perhaps not for the first time, but certainly for one of the first times in a public context as a post liberal conservative. This is very interesting stuff, and it is necessarily consequential. It has the potential to reshape the nature of the country. And I think the important question to ask is, yes, for sure. Should we be covering this? Are we getting the right mix of things? As Ari just pointed out, to the extent it's consequential, it's worth covering. Then the question becomes, how do you cover it? There are still, I think, as you mentioned, Isaac, it does feel like kind of 2016. Again, the hyperbolic rhetoric is still there. A lot of the same kind of intense intensifiers are being deployed. And fascism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, these are words that have become fairly commonplace in our political lexicon. And the question of whether or not they're appropriate or when they're appropriate or what the thresholds are is one that we ought to be entertaining as well. And it's also the case that this administration does seem to employ almost as a tactic, whether it's on the campaign trail or while they're in office doing things that are provocative in a way that is going to elicit those kind of extreme responses and then pointing to the extreme response as ridiculous. But they also deploy the same thing in reverse. To the extent you disagree with the troop deployments in Washington, D.C. why are you siding with criminals and murderers and rapists?

Will Kaback (45:26)

It's just.

Camille Foster (45:27)

It's utterly insane. But I mean, again, I think it's appropriate to talk about this particular administration for all of the aforementioned reasons.

Will Kaback (45:37)

Yeah, I mean, it's one of the brilliances of Trump. You know, I mean, I don't really know how else to describe it. There's a little bit of evil genius, but it's just he understands how to keep the attention on him and how to keep the media circling him. And I think, because I know that he understands that I'm My ego makes me want to resist it and find some way to, like, crack the code and do something differently. And the reality is just like, he's doing. It's not like he's doing real stuff, real tangible things that we have to respond to and cover. But, yeah, it just struck me this week that we just had this sort of back to back to back to back, like all Trump centered, very specifically tied to actions Trump took almost in an individual fashion, which I would have to go back and look, but I would be surprised if that happened a single time during the Biden administration, that we had four consecutive stories that were just, like, really tied to his person and to decisions and things that he was doing. And I think our readers and listeners in some ways are. It's sort of a mix. I think some are a little exhausted by it and are tuning out a little bit. I think some are, like, totally on tilt and just, like, you know, feel like they're watching the floor come out on the whole country and that, like, we're, we're on the precipice of this experiment failing, the experiment being America. And then there are others who are just, you know, giddy because Trump is just injecting the red meat directly into their veins and they're getting everything they want. I've certainly noticed, like, an increase in the accusation that we are sort of softballing the Trump administration. And like, you know, the kid glove thing that came up this week that I was replying to in one of the comments sections of our articles, which of course, I find deeply frustrating. And, you know, mostly because it's like, I will write a piece that's really critical of Trump and piss off all these die hard Trump supporters who unsubscribe and cancel and write in and tell me how full of shit I was about being biased or moderate or whatever. And then in the same vein, same article, I'll hear from all these liberal readers telling me that I'm using kid gloves on Trump. And I've refused to go far enough and I have no balls and da, da, da, da. And it's like, you know, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I did want to say one thing which was like, I don't do this work in order to persuade people and bring them to my position. I think it's great if my writing does that. And I love instances where I hear from somebody and they say, hey, you made me think of this in a new way. And, like, I changed my mind. And I like that. Not because I think I'm starting some political revolution, but. Cause I'm like, oh, I did good work. Like, I wrote something that was compelling today and that feels rewarding. It's so frustrating to get the kind of criticism from people where I'm like, I am writing in a way where I'm trying to get through to the people who I think are gonna be most resistant to the point I'm making, whether that's Trump supporters or Trump haters. And then the response is from people upset that I'm not being hard enough on Trump. And then I watch them try and use their means of persuasion, like in the tango community, in our comments section elsewhere or whatever, and they're just like telling people to fuck off and calling them like rubes and how stupid. And I'm like, you are not moving anyone's opinion. You're not changing anybody's mind. We actually seem to maybe agree on some of the rough outlines of this particular issue. And I'm approaching this in a way where I think I actually do break through and get across to people. And you'll never do that because of how you act. And then on the other side of it, you're just criticizing me who's like, somebody who could potentially be on your team. And now I hate you too. So good job. And it's just like, I think that's the part of it that's really frustrating. And I felt this by the way I felt this during the Biden administration. I mean, the other, the extra frustrating part was I felt this during the Biden administration where it was like, like I spent so much time defending myself from liberals who were just accusing me of being some closet Trumper because I thought that Biden should very obviously step down because he clearly wasn't right. And I think I've been vindicated on a lot of that now. But at the time it was just so infuriating because it required so much throat clearing. Covering the election. Trump's on the campaign trail, proposes something I think is a good idea. I have to throat clear for two paragraphs so like, people don't freak out. And then those same people are upset now because I'm trying to address Trump supporters in a way that they can hear me. It's the struggle of the work. And it feels like it's only getting nastier and uglier right now in our community, specifically, which I worry about. Cuz it's a pretty special place. And you know, I don't want Trump to drive everybody off at over the Edge.

Ari Weitzman (51:12)

So there's something that I'm gonna try to maybe take a Camille esque turn and attempt to coin a phrase here in response to what I think's happening, which is. I think I would call it referee syndrome, which is the idea that what your job is, Isaac, is not to state your opinions and talk as if you were speaking to a person who disagrees with you, but to call penalties and put people in timeout, and that feels the meaning, but as if you have power that is going to. When you say this person, violation 4 out of 5, this is a serious thing. And then people are going to stand up and applaud. And because of that, the Supreme Court or whoever now has to take two minutes in the penalty box. And it's this idea that there is cultural power and that's real, but that the cultural power is the end game. And that's, I think, not the point. The point is that you want to try to. And as much as we try to leverage cultural power at all, it is towards the end of being able to converse with people who disagree with us and not towards the end of being right or wrong on any individual point. So I think that's what's at play here is this idea that, hey, you look like you agree with me on this issue. You didn't penalize the people who are wrong enough where that's a fundamental misread of what we're trying to do with the editorials on a daily basis.

Will Kaback (52:46)

Hmm.

Camille Foster (52:47)

Ari, I mean, I'm just gonna have to ask you forcefully now to stay in your lane. Okay? The coinage, that's my thing.

Ari Weitzman (52:53)

I got an autonomous car that does not recognize lanes.

Camille Foster (52:58)

That's good. That's pretty good. I was literally. The two things I was thinking were tone policing and motive attribution. And that is kind of what referees do. That fits very, very well. And it's precisely what's going on here. And I think once that inclination to kind of police not actually the conclusions, but the degree to which you're sufficiently vociferous and your condemnations, I think you've made an error. Like the question is, is what's laid out in this essay factually accurate? Is the context there to help one arrive at their own conclusions? I'm not interested in telling you how to think. I might be very interested in sharing with you how I think, in which case we can have a conversation about perhaps the ways in which our reasoning is somewhat different. But once it becomes, well, you're only doing this because you feel obliged to do that in this particular way or to say it in that way, or maybe soften the blow? Because I think you get into some really dubious territory, and it's mind reading, and I just don't. I'm far less interested in mind reading than I am actually understanding the terrain of really complicated political arguments and really complicated issues that perhaps I'm trying to wrap my head around. It may be the fact that I've got some inclinations and some particular conclusions and even some unique skepticism about particular political actors, but on a given issue, like crime nationally or crime in major American cities, I might be trying to figure out exactly, well, what does it take to really drive down crime rates and keep them down for a long period of time? And is it okay to talk about that while there is this other conversation about National Guard deployments in American cities? And I actually think it is okay to talk about that in that context. I think it's necessary and important. But I will say that hyperbole has its own problems. And to the extent that you're engaged in that kind of tone policing and mode of attribution, it might be the case that you are engaged in a great deal of hyperbole. And the capacity to acknowledge that you might be wrong to have an abundance of intellectual humility is just something that we should all keep at the forefront of our mind. And I think it's a core component of the work that's done here at Tangle. And I think it's the most essential component of good journalistic work. If you have intellectual humility, that makes up for a great deal.

Will Kaback (55:34)

Yeah, I appreciate those sentiments a lot. I mean, and I'll add to, I guess, to just in the interest of intellectual humility to counter some of my own perspectives, I can understand watching the way other media organizations treat the Trump issue and just coming to us and having some sort of inherent bias and scarring and traumatization from that, whether you're a Trump supporter and you're like, sure, I'm never gonna trust anybody who describes himself as a journalist ever again, or you're a Trump hater and you have to suffer through these sort of milk of toast, corporately approved TV segments and opinion pieces and whatever that are all so clean and tidied up and bulletproof against some lawsuit that they come out being just extremely vanilla and boring and not nearly forceful enough that then, you know, you read something like Tangle and maybe there's frustration there. If I'm being critical because you view me as like, another unfair journalist, or if I'm not being critical enough because you're pissed that nobody's saying the thing you want them to say. I can get that. But yeah, it's just like, you know, we've lost the art of persuasion in this country. It feels to me. And I so rarely see people actually really trying to move somebody to their position in a way that's genuine versus performative for the people that already agree with them. And I feel like I really do genuinely try to think about the people who are reading my work who aren't going to agree with me and talk to them because there's as much as I don't, as much as I don't have it as a primary goal to change people's minds and move them to me. I think the writing is just incredibly boring and unoriginal when you're just writing for the people that already think what you think. And it's a sort of waste of time in a lot of respects, aside from maybe strengthening their argument. We'll be right back after this quick break. Why choose a Sleep number Smart bed?

Isaac Saul (58:02)

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Will Kaback (58:07)

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Will Kaback (58:23)

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Ari Weitzman (58:31)

Pet insurance customer review.

Will Kaback (58:33)

My new puppy swallowed a bone. Still a good boy though.

Camille Foster (58:40)

And boy was I glad that I had lemonade.

Will Kaback (58:46)

I was paid back quickly and efficiently.

Ari Weitzman (58:50)

Everyone was so nice. Get this pet insurance.

Will Kaback (58:58)

And get a@lemonade.com pet well, I look, I mean, staying in the Trump world and despite the fact that we, you know, we did this whole week that revolved directly around him and all these stories that were tied to him, there was a story that we missed this week that we didn't cover, we didn't talk about in the podcast, we didn't talk about in the newsletter that was actually pretty Trump oriented and it was the Ghislaine Maxwell testimony. And I mean, Camille, you said this off air before we hopped on the pod that you were just like surprised at how little traction some of this got because we were just so obsessed with the Epstein stuff. And then, you know, I mean, I Guess the readers I was just talking about would suppose that Trump has successfully distracted us from all of that and moved us on and that I'm falling for the bait by not covering the Epstein stuff every day. But it was surprising, I guess, to me at least, that this didn't generate more conversation and interest. And so I think we should spend a few minutes on it before we wrap up here. But the upshot of it is basically that Gwaine Maxwell, who, I mean, is considered the person with the most direct knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking operation, testified, I guess I don't know exactly the word that we should use here. I mean, she spoke to the Department of Justice, she offered her testimony to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch, and she said, among other things, that there was no client list, no blackmail scheme, no high profile Jeffrey Epstein associates who committed illicit acts in connection with his crimes. She said that as far as Donald Trump goes, she had always observed him being a gentleman in all respects, quote, unquote, and was cordial. And she described Bill Clinton as truly extraordinary as a man and a fantastic ex president.

Camille Foster (61:10)

So not saying everything the President wants.

Will Kaback (61:12)

To hear, but, yeah, not saying everything the President wanted to hear. She did concede that she had been misidentified or. Sorry, she didn't concede. She claimed that she had been misidentified by a key witness in her criminal trial. And she insisted that she was not actually ever involved in the sexual exploitations of minors, saying that she introduced Epstein to women, but not underage women. And she did look for masseuses and went to spas, but, you know, she was not. She was looking for people who had some sort of actual credentials to do the job, not people to be part of this sex trafficking operation.

Ari Weitzman (61:51)

Is it all just Ghislaine Maxwell? That settles it, right?

Will Kaback (61:55)

Yeah. So basically, she denied everything. She, quote, unquote, cleared Trump, in the words of many Trump supporters. And I guess. Yeah, and Bill Clinton, I guess we can just wash our hands of this entire thing. No, I have to say, Politico is normally not the place that you'll find, like, super biting, kind of like punchy writing. They do a lot of insider stuff.

Ari Weitzman (62:23)

They're not flamethrowers.

Will Kaback (62:24)

No, they're not flamethrowers. They're left of center in the language use and I think some of the topics they choose to cover, but generally speaking, they're just like insider y little bit of this. They do a little bit of a gossip, personal magazine tone sometimes, but on the whole, it's just Sort of like wonky stuff and big scoops. I gotta read this excerpt in their newsletter around the testimony, they said as a practical matter, this would mean one of two things. The first possibility is that Maxwell was indeed innocent all along. That the first Trump Department of Justice falsely accused Maxwell when they charged her, that she was wrongfully convicted at a trial by a unanimous jury, and that most if not all of the overwhelming evidence against Maxwell at the trial was false or fabricated. And in addition, that for some reason she did not testify in her own defense despite watching all this false evidence come in. The second possibility is that she is a serial liar who committed terrible crimes and whose self serving interview with Blanche should be dismissed out of hand whether it helps or hurts Trump or anyone else. If you need a refresher on what the evidence at trial revealed about the type of person that Maxwell is, we suggest pages 5 to 14 of the DOJ's post trial sentencing submission. We're going to go with Occam's razor on this one, which I thought was.

Ari Weitzman (63:42)

Camille, you want to buy any more razors or.

Camille Foster (63:46)

No, I'll leave them to it.

Will Kaback (63:48)

Unusually biting and much appreciated by me because it was. My reaction pretty much to a T was like how much of a rube do you have to be to think that this woman's telling the truth right now? I'm sorry, that's just like. It seems totally absurd to me. But I'm happy to hear some countervailing points if they're out there or they exist.

Ari Weitzman (64:15)

Keep being silent. No, no, no, this is great. This is good intellectual humility.

Camille Foster (64:22)

Right.

Ari Weitzman (64:23)

Could still be wrong. We. It's possible.

Will Kaback (64:26)

People get falsely convicted of crimes all the time. I guess that's one thing you could say. No, I mean it seems like pretty obvious that she's playing the hits trying to get a Trump pardon. Right. Like goes does this meeting is sure to say all the things. I mean it. You know, the old, like, what was the character Trump used to. The name he used to go by when he would call in and write, oh gosh, oh God, I can't remember.

Camille Foster (64:59)

He used to actually had a couple of those. A couple of those aliases that he was.

Will Kaback (65:03)

Yeah. Like John Barron or something like that. It sounds like something that one of Trump's like alias human beings would write into the New York Post with. Like every time I've seen him. He's always been a cordial, perfect gentleman and I've never seen him do anything uncomfortable.

Camille Foster (65:21)

But I don't know if he would have said the same thing about Bill Clinton, I mean, that might be the single detail that makes me think, huh, maybe it's just that it's also the case that she's confirming a lot of the things that have been out there in the reporting for a while, that there is no client list that's true. There's no black book, there was no blackmail operation. A lot of the details of the multifaceted conspiracy theories that have been unfurled with respect to this particular case. Chief says it's not true. And I could believe that the questions about Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and what she knows or doesn't know, I mean, her credibility is shot with respect to the Trump administration. She is desperate for, if not some sort of pardon, at least was desperate for better treatment, which she seems to have received. And one could not expect her to provide some evidence in that context that is particularly biting and troubling, implicate, that implicates the President of the United States. So the fact that she doesn't give any is perhaps consistent with what you might expect in that context. But what's most interesting is just how intense the interest was in this story, not just from Democrats and people who dislike Donald Trump, but from MAGA supporters. And the Maxwell testimony doesn't seem to move the needle at all. I at least expected, because some of the interest had died down, that there might be another round of, why won't someone tell us the truth? Like, what is he doing? This isn't what we expected. Instead, everyone just seems to have moved on in a way that I find somewhat surprising, but also not entirely surprising. At some point, this had to end, and it seems that it's ended with Donald Trump and his administration being able to survive a circumstance where they were at stark odds with the bulk of their base and it perhaps hasn't left him any worse for wear.

Ari Weitzman (67:29)

Do you think that maybe it's just that everyone who's reading and would normally be responding to updates in the story is just having a similar reaction to us, where they're thinking, I threw all of this testimony out under duress, obvious motivations at play. And. And I'll just wait to comment till I see anything that's actually different. Do you think that's possible?

Camille Foster (67:50)

It could be that. It could also be, yeah. I mean, it could be that. It could very well be that. It could also be that they're just.

Will Kaback (67:57)

Not really paying attention.

Camille Foster (67:58)

I would expect them to actually say that they're not paying attention to this because she's not credible. And I didn't really see anything. It just kind of arrived with not even a thud.

Will Kaback (68:10)

Yeah, I had a similar thought that maybe there was so little buzz around this because just on paper, Ghislaine Maxwell gives her first testimony since being convicted directly to Trump's doj. In the midst of all these threats of Trump releasing all these files and whatever you would think, like, that story alone would just generate an intense amount of interest. And the fact that it didn't made me think maybe people who care about this just do understand that this is just sort of theater and there's nothing here like, oh, Ghislaine Maxwell said she was innocent of horrific crimes that are, like, shameful and could send her to prison for whatever the next couple decades or whatever her sentence is. I guess there isn't anything really surprising about that in a meaningful way. And so maybe that's why it was such a non story.

Ari Weitzman (69:09)

Yeah, I think that that's sort of the way that I'm reading most of it. And yeah, I see your point too, Camille, that you would expect most people who feel that way who have been following the story to say that, but the fact that they haven't gone as far as to say that is a little surprising.

Will Kaback (69:25)

All right, so we just wasted 20 minutes of everybody's life, but whatever, we'll.

Ari Weitzman (69:30)

Watch at the clock. It was like 10. I think we're good.

Will Kaback (69:35)

All right, well, let's make it 20.

Camille Foster (69:37)

Let's go.

Will Kaback (69:39)

We're a little past an hour here, so maybe that's a good cue to wrap it up. Some complaints about the grievances section notwithstanding, which I'm not quite ready to address yet on the show, I think it's time to air some grievances, especially since we skipped last week. So, John, you can play the music for us, my friend.

Isaac Saul (70:01)

The airing of grievances.

Camille Foster (70:06)

Between you and.

Will Kaback (70:07)

Me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal. All right, Ari, get in there, man.

Ari Weitzman (70:13)

Yeah, I got one. This is. We've taken some of the criticism that this feels low stakes. It feels first world problemsy. After all the things that we discussed, not big enough. We've said, like, no, this is something that. That it's meant to be tongue in cheek and allow us to sort of get in to be human and talk about little stuff and add some comedy. To that end, I have something that is of extreme importance and I think is not a mere first world problem, but it's something that everyone can really relate to, which is I am now completely unable to find my favorite flavor of Juice in grocery stores, which is a huge problem. Dole would make this blended drink, which was called Orange Peach Mango. And I would see it very often was the one that in the juices section, sort of next to the dairy, where they keep all the processed juices, one of the more popular ones. But now it is not there at all. And I'm looking for. They changed the way it looks, so they changed the box. I had to adapt to that. So I know what I'm looking for. And I just don't see it like, the local grocery stores aren't carrying Orange Peach Mango anymore. And it was the perfect, perfect fruit juice. And I don't know where it is, and I don't know where to find it. So if you live in the greater Burlington, northern Vermont area, let me know where the hookup is so I can go shop there.

Will Kaback (71:38)

What are the odds somebody listening to this podcast works for the company Dole? How many? Like, if you had to guess how many people. How many people work. I just found it. How many people work at Dole? What would you say?

Ari Weitzman (71:55)

Work for the company Dole?

Will Kaback (71:58)

Yeah. For Dole plc, the parent company of the global fresh produce business.

Ari Weitzman (72:04)

I don't know. Does that include the people who are actually getting, gathering, distributing the fruits themselves?

Will Kaback (72:11)

I think so, yeah. Global workforce.

Ari Weitzman (72:14)

Geez, like 50,000. Is that absurdly high?

Will Kaback (72:17)

Pretty good guess. No, 34,000. I would not have guessed that many. I say if there's 34,000 people who work, there's, like, there's a chance. I don't know what the numbers actually come out to, but maybe a single percentage point chance that somebody listening to the podcast. Yeah, if that's you, write to Will W I l l@ rectangle.com with information on how to get the fruit juice that Ari's desiring. All right, Camille, you're up. Yeah.

Camille Foster (72:49)

Well, so this is a strange one. And I'm pretty certain that no one involved directly is a listener to this podcast because it involves the citizens or at least the residents of North Sentinel island, which is this island that I suppose is under the control of the Indian government. And it's one of these things where you've got a. A remote tribe that has not really been in contact with the rest of the wider world. And I found myself going down this rabbit hole and reading a bunch of stuff about the just kind of consensus perspective that we shouldn't be bothering with these people, that we should leave them alone. And I don't know why. I don't understand why people are comfortable with that, I know that if I was born on North Sentinel island, there's a strong possibility that I might have an aversion to you coming to visit and bringing us kind of news of the outside world. I hope you would disregard my feelings about it and kind of come anyways, because if not for my own benefit, perhaps for the benefit of my progeny. I think there's some benefit to the kind of knowledge of the wider cosmos that. That all of us benefit that all of us have today that would perhaps be beneficial to the citizens of that particular island or residents of that particular island, since I'm not sure we can really call it a government. And I don't know, I just have an aversion to the sentiment that because they're on their own, because this is kind of a natural division between their world and ours, that it's one that must be upheld and respected, perhaps indefinitely so imaginatively. For most of these people, it's for generations and generations perfectly fine for them to live in this completely isolated and I think, in many respects, somewhat backwards way, and I'm not comfortable with that personally. So that is my grievance.

Ari Weitzman (74:59)

Yeah, this is an interesting thing that I want to pull this thread more like when I talk to you, I think maybe every time I talk to you in the future. But what is the.

Camille Foster (75:08)

What.

Ari Weitzman (75:09)

What is the reason for. Just let's. Let's start there. What is the reason for us to want to go to North Sentinel Island? It doesn't seem like it's in a shipping route. Doesn't seem like there's anything that's, like, really close to a major city. It's like eastern northeastern, Indian Ocean. So what. What are we losing? I guess we're fucking.

Will Kaback (75:31)

We discover. We discover anything. Union here.

Ari Weitzman (75:34)

We did this.

Will Kaback (75:35)

Why. Why go to the moon? What's your problem, dude?

Camille Foster (75:42)

I want to bring them literature and knowledge of the outside world. I suppose in that way, I'm kind of proselytizing, and maybe it's my kind of Western supremacy that I'm looking to bring to bear, but it really isn't Western in some ways. This is probably informed by my perhaps somewhat bastardized Eastern influences as well. I don't know. Like, just my inner world is better for having had exposure to Shakespeare, for having imagined, like, the strangeness of the cosmos and to have some knowledge about, like, the moon landing. And I just think that there are kids who will grow up on North Sentinel island who won't ever even have the opportunity to be exposed to any of that. And I just feel like maybe we have something to offer them. There's a sense in which we have this kind of pessimistic take on modern society. Like the Internet and TikTok are ruining everything, et cetera. They're ruining some things. Like some. In some ways we're worse off. In a lot of ways, we're so much better off. And I just think that some of that better off might be better for them too.

Will Kaback (76:47)

What if they don't want us to go there? Like, my understanding is these people like violently fight to keep us out. Right again.

Camille Foster (76:55)

Which is why I offered that thought experiment. If it were me, if I were born there, I probably wouldn't want you to come either because of various things. But I hope that the rest of you, and perhaps you two in particular, would be bright enough and moral enough to disregard my feelings about this matter and come anyways.

Will Kaback (77:17)

I actually can't decide. I can't decide how I feel about it. On the one hand, I feel like this is such a. There's like a. We should name this. It's like Neo Camille politics or something. I don't know what it's like. It is like. Yeah. You are articulating like this is a small sliver of your worldview that I feel like is really representative of everything else. Like, you're the kind of guy who thinks the new Cracker Barrel logo is better than the old one. And this feels. That feels tied to this somehow. But I can't quite tell you how.

Camille Foster (77:54)

It is an imperialist project. I don't know if it's colonialist. Cause I don't wanna live there.

Will Kaback (77:59)

Yeah.

Camille Foster (77:59)

You should know that Wikipedia is a thing.

Will Kaback (78:03)

Yeah. You wanna show em your Tesla one time so they can just see it and be like, just. This is what's out here. I mean, there is an interesting. I would say my gut emotional reaction is to totally be drawn to their position of like, they've somehow managed to stay isolated from the rest of the world. Let's just leave them the fuck alone. Like, why can't we just do that? They want that. We don't need them. They don't need us. Great. They can live in their little. Then I have the like, let's go to the moon attitude of we gotta go find out what's going on there. Like, I'd love to learn. Drop a film crew there and learn more about their lives. And then I have the view of like, what you're articulating of. I don't care what they think. There's probably Kids there, like dying of polio still or something and we could just go fix that. So we should.

Camille Foster (78:55)

And some who have wider dreams, who imagine things. Maybe they have a Galileo amongst them. I don't know. I'm just saying.

Will Kaback (79:01)

Yeah, I'm sympathetic to that a little bit.

Ari Weitzman (79:04)

I think if that's the case, they'll probably like, there'll be some movement internally in a reach out. Maybe not maybe.

Will Kaback (79:11)

Maybe they're a ship, build their own boat and just leave.

Ari Weitzman (79:14)

Yeah, the Galileo amongst them will make a seafaring vessel. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's possible that the fact that we've attempted to contact them has made them more averse the Galileo among them to want to reach out. Yeah. It's an interesting thing to think about.

Camille Foster (79:31)

Always my beef with Star Trek, to be honest. It's the same sort of thing. Hang on. We shouldn't meddle. We have to leave them alone. That's their way of doing this. Eh? Nah, if we've got a better way, we should probably tell them about it. Give them the choice at least. That's all I'm saying.

Ari Weitzman (79:46)

Okay, I want to ask you in person.

Will Kaback (79:51)

No, no, no, we're not going. I'm not doing 20 minutes on Star Trek. I'm sorry, I'm not happening. All right, I'm gonna go. My grievance this week has a happy ending. I'll start there so you don't get too distraught for how awful it is. I am. I'm going to Italy. I think I talked about this. Did I talk about this in the show? Maybe this came up. I was on Mike Pesca's podcast and we did some complaining and I talked about this. I'm flying to Italy for a wedding, which I'm extremely excited for, and, you know, flying British Airways, whatever. And I realized that I booked the flight out on the wrong day and I have like a bassinet seat for my son. So I called British Airways to try and get a flight change because I booked it over the phone in order to get this bassinet seat for the baby. It's a red eye. And I call them and I am talking to this customer service agent who's like a change your flight agent. And he tells me on the phone that he can change my flight to the following day, which is what I need, but he's not sure if that flight has a bassinet seat available for me. And I was like, okay, well, I can't. I need the. You know, I have to bring my son. So, like, I have to What? You know, what do you suppose I do? And he said, well, you have this flight now. We could book it. And when we. When we make the booking and we change the flight, you can, like, I will be able to find out whether there's a bassinet seat on the plane, and then if there is, we can give it to you. I'm like, okay, but if there isn't, and then I change from this flight, the flight I have, to the one you're proposing, and there's no bassinet seat. That flight's not gonna work for me either. So then I've just given up my seat on the flight that I have now that has the bassinet seat. Like, that seems like a terrible solution. And then he's like, yeah, but, well, if we get there and then I can check once we make the booking, I can only see about the bassinet seat once we make the booking. If it doesn't work, then we can talk about, like, some other options. I'm like, okay, like, how much is it to change the flight? Like, maybe I'll do this. You know, I'm sort of thinking out loud on the phone. He's like, oh, well, the. The change fee for the flight is only, like, $18 per person, but there's a $220 tax on a $220 tax on each seat, each passenger. So to change the flight, it'll be $660 plus, you know, the, like, $80 in change fees. I'm like, okay, so now you're telling me that I'm paying a $220 tax for a seat for my son that you don't know is available on the other flight. Also, I have to pay you $700 to change the flight in order to get on a new plane that might not have a bassinet seat that I actually need. Now I'm starting to get frustrated. And so I am like, this is insane. Whatever. I explained him, like, you're telling me I have to pay basically $700 to get on a new flight that I may not even be able to take. Can you please tell me if there's another solution than the one you're offering? And he said, well, you could wait a day or two and just call back and see if any of availability has opened up on other flights. And I'm like, okay, fine. So I hang up. I'm like, I'm going to. I'm just going to call back. I can't deal with this right now. And then I had this Thought of like I was calling at 06:00 US time to British Airways. So it's like midnight in England. This guy had a British accent. So I asked ChatGPT like, hey, I'm dealing with this British Airways issue. Explain the issue. Do you have any suggestions for me? Because I can't seem to get what I need and like the service is terrible and whatever. And ChatGPT tells me that I should try calling during business hours in the UK rather than business hours in the US because I'll get full time agents who are going to have more access and more capabilities. And that when I'm calling to change the flight, and this is the lesson for everybody, instead of calling and selecting two to change your flight, press one to go back to booking even though you're doing a flight change, go to the booking agents because they're the people with like the most power at an airline. And I was like, oh, sick. Thank you, chatgpt. And then I called back the next day during British business hours. I went to booking instead of change flight, explained the problem to this person and she literally changed my flight in two minutes and rebooked me with the bassinet seat for $6.50. And I had my mind blown. And I don't know how much of it was like, maybe the guy I talked to originally was right, some seat opened up in 24 hours. That seems very unlikely to me. But at the very least she was able to book the flight and tell me before she booked it that there was a bassinet seat on it, which seemed obviously like something an agent should be able to do. So my grievance is the first person I spoke to at British Airways and my have a nice day story is, is the advice I got about how to navigate terrible flight agents that maybe will be useful to all the people listening to this. So there you have it. How's that for first world problem?

Camille Foster (85:17)

Yeah, you'll be happy when those jobs.

Will Kaback (85:21)

Yeah, yeah, take it easy. No, no, no. Hey, I'm part of the AI backlash, brother. Don't forget it. I'm anti AI. That's me. But I, I do use Chat GPT a little bit now. I'm starting to like them building a relationship.

Ari Weitzman (85:38)

I feel like it's been getting, I, I run a lot of what we write. Every day is like the last line of defense through Chat GPT is a fact check. And I feel like it's starting to take a little bit of liberties with me. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I'LL say, hey, can you fact check for this essay for me? And we'll say, here's some things you could add to make this essay more convincing. And I'm like, not what I asked for. Thanks for that. Just, just. Why don't you just google these things for me? And it's also said things where like what? Like yesterday we talked about a story of like what the allegations that Governor, Federal Reserve Governor had committed fraud and ChatGPT responded by telling me, I don't see this. Are you getting this from irreputable far right websites that this person was alleged the fraud? I'm like, even the allegation itself, you're saying can only come from the far right. Chat GPT is maybe getting a little, little blue pilled by the liberal media right now. Camille, I don't know if you can talk to your guys about it.

Will Kaback (86:38)

Have you, have you guys seen the, the new like slur people are using for Chachi the Clanker?

Ari Weitzman (86:46)

That's great.

Will Kaback (86:47)

It's like, yeah, it's this new TikTok and like Gen Z, they're called all the AI robots and stuff. Clankers. And it's being described as like an anti robot slur.

Camille Foster (86:58)

Oh no.

Will Kaback (86:59)

Yeah. How long till Democrats propose a bill to ban the word clanker? I'm sure they'll spot a really, a really popular winning issue on that one. All right, we should Robot rights now. Yeah, Robot rights now. Yeah, we should get out of here. All right, Clankers. I'll see you guys soon. That's self targeting.

Camille Foster (87:19)

Bye.

Will Kaback (87:20)

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul and our executive producer is John Wolff. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing editor Ari Weitzman with Senior editor Will Kaback 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 website@readtangle.com.

Isaac Saul (88:01)

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Camille Foster (88:56)

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Isaac Saul (89:15)

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