Suspension of the rules. - Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk about Trump's health, Venezuela, and Gaza.

Summary

Tangle Podcast Summary

Episode: Suspension of the rules. - Isaac, Ari, and Kmele talk about Trump's health, Venezuela, and Gaza.
Date: September 5, 2025
Host: Isaac Saul
Guests: Ari Weitzman, Camille Foster

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Overview

This episode of Tangle is a classic roundtable where Isaac Saul, Ari Weitzman, and Camille Foster break down and debate three major political stories: the conspiracies about President Trump's health, the U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan boat, and a leaked Gaza post-war "relocation" plan. The hosts approach each topic from different points on the ideological spectrum, seeking honest analysis and pushing back on each other's perspectives. The tone is sharp, candid, sometimes darkly humorous, always intent on clarity and fairness.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Trump’s Health Conspiracies

[05:40–23:32]

The Panic and the Evidence

• A social media frenzy erupted over Trump’s apparent absence and a bruise on his hand, with some claiming he was gravely ill or even dead.
• Isaac points out that speculation, especially on social media, thrives on minimal evidence and attracts more attention than sober analysis:

  "You tweet some sort of thoughtful, nuanced analysis about what may or may not be happening with Trump's health and 12 people like it, and then the guy next to you is like, he's gonna be dead tomorrow. And there's 2,000 retweets and a bunch of follows, and that part really just eats my soul." (12:08, Isaac Saul)

• Ari acknowledges some legitimate cause for questions, including obvious physical changes in Trump (bruises, perceived fatigue), but emphasizes the lack of hard evidence:

  "We don't know whether the people that were killed on this boat were engaged in that. We have the allegation of the military and... the President, but we don't really know." (29:38, Ari Weitzman)

• Camille distinguishes between fair scrutiny of a president’s health and wild conspiratorial thinking:

  "It is categorically different to speculate wildly about such things. For example, maybe the President is dead and they're hiding it from us… It is interesting and I think is indicative of the broader trend towards conspiracism on the left and the right." (09:53, Camille Foster)

Media Responsibility and Attention

• The mainstream press (CNN, NYT, WSJ) was responsible; most wild speculation came from social media personalities.
• There’s frustration that those who peddle conspiracy gain followers, while fact-based reporting is ignored.
• Motivated reasoning is at play; many seem to want Trump to be ill or dead, and that shapes their responses.

  "A lot of the tweets and the commentary, they read to me more like wishful thinking than actual analysis." (22:52, Isaac Saul)

• Comparison is drawn to previous political obsessions (e.g., the Mueller report), where expectations and willed outcomes drove public discourse.

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2. Venezuela Strike & The Expansion of Executive Power

[25:13–53:20]

The Action

• Trump ordered a strike on a Venezuelan drug-smuggling boat, allegedly killing 11 people without trial or evidence presented. The story's details shifted—Secretary Rubio first said the boat was headed to Trinidad, then the U.S.
• Isaac admits to a visceral initial approval ("they got what they had coming..."), but quickly recoils at the reality: the President summarily killed people without due process.

  "Three seconds and I'm like, holy shit, the president just killed 11 people for drug trafficking without a jury, without a trial, without any evidence presented to the public." (27:23, Isaac Saul)

Context & Critique

• The hosts discuss this as a dangerous escalation, likening it to executive overreach under anti-terror justifications during previous administrations.

  "Trump, very importantly here, is using terrorism as the justification... And who's going to argue against terrorism, right? It's really tough to do that." (31:21, Ari Weitzman)

• Ari references similar Obama-era actions, questioning why conservatives who once decried such actions are now silent or supportive.
• Camille raises the slippery slope of normalizing such unilateral actions:

  "The way that they're going to do that is not with some kind of well understood legal theory that we're all familiar with. It's with these kind of ad hoc reasoning and this kind of perpetual state of exceptions and emergency in every single instance." (36:26, Camille Foster)

Political Motivations

• Isaac notes Trump’s moves, like National Guard deployments, are aimed as much at political gain as at public safety.
• Discussion veers into whether this signals intent to invade Venezuela—a jump the hosts warn against but admit is plausible.

The Rationalist Defense—and Pushback

• Isaac floats the administration’s “deterrence” defense—was this worth it to scare would-be traffickers?
• Camille retorts that other methods (Congressional debate, legal interdictions) could have similar effects without eroding constitutional norms.

  "It feels like a situation where doing things the right way could totally get you that kind of fear and intimidation response that you're going for." (53:20, Camille Foster)

• Concerns are raised about potential collateral damage to innocent Venezuelan migrants.

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3. Gaza “Relocation Plan” Leak

[64:57–85:30]

The Plan and Its Absurdity

• A Washington Post report outlined a proposal to “relocate” Gaza’s entire population—voluntarily or otherwise—with small cash payments and future promises of apartments in “AI-powered smart cities.”
• The plan, developed by the same Israeli figures behind previous controversial aid initiatives, projects high investor returns but would remove Palestinians from Gaza during reconstruction.

Reactions

• Isaac reads directly from the report and critiques its “perversity”—Gaza is to be rebuilt and modernized for everyone except the people who have lived and suffered there.

  "The plan to finally do that requires removing the 2 million people who have been waiting for that moment from the territory. To do it without them, basically." (70:46, Isaac Saul)

• Ari highlights the colonial undertones, noting:

  "Public investment in an area where we're pushing out the native inhabitants so we can profit. That's the description of a colony to me." (73:50, Ari Weitzman)

• Camille draws a parallel to utopian, often disastrous, top-down plans (a la Robert Moses), warning that “panaceas” are often catastrophically ineffective. He also resists the use of maximalist terminology like “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing,” arguing that such language, though sometimes warranted, frequently muddies the debate.
• The plan’s financial and “tech-bro” aspects (crypto tokens, AI cities) are derided as both dystopian and naïve.

No Real Plan for Gaza

• The episode underscores that neither Israel, the U.S., nor the world community seems to have a feasible post-war plan for Gaza.
• The only clear direction seems to be one that removes and dispossesses Gazans. This is seen as validating the worst suspicions of critics who argued that the war’s true objective was population transfer.
• Isaac notes:

  "It raises questions about the fundamental premise of the war... ensure the Palestinian people are no longer being ruled by Hamas... But if you just end up reoccupying the territory and taking it for yourselves, that answers a lot of questions about why a war that could have ended six months ago has continued." (80:12, Isaac Saul)

• The hosts struggle with language—should this be called “ethnic cleansing”? Does that label help or hinder understanding and action?

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4. The Grievances Section

[85:30–end]

Purpose of Levity

• The transition from grave to personal (the “grievances” segment) is discussed and defended.
• Camille sees value in levity and self-reflection, even after heavy subjects:

  "Levity is actually really important and valuable. And the fact that we have to traffic in really difficult subject matter... and then we can transition from that to talking about something that is... a little funny, there's something good about that and virtuous and appropriate." (86:12, Camille Foster)

• Isaac notes that humor and storytelling are tools often used by people even in dire situations to cope.

Grievances Shared

• Isaac’s: The emotional and logistical difficulties of starting daycare for his infant son ("We're paying for the village instead of having it organically, and society now is just built in a place where... we need somebody to take care of our kids." 90:02).
• Camille’s: Repeats/reflects on the value of mourning and appreciating the “letting go” process as a parent.
• Ari’s: A philosophical complaint about how even in seeking solitude, we are always reliant on complex infrastructure (and tech annoyances with Google Docs).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On conspiracies and motivated reasoning:

  "A lot of the tweets and the commentary, they read to me more like wishful thinking than actual analysis." — Isaac Saul (22:52)

• On executive overreach and war powers:

  "Any president who engages in that kind of behavior... should be concerned about the overreach of the state's power." — Ari Weitzman (32:47)

• On Gaza’s future and post-war plans:

  "Let's develop it and bring prosperity and economic growth... And all these things that Palestinians have been begging for for literally decades. And it's like the plan to finally do that requires removing the 2 million people who have been waiting for that moment from the territory. To do it without them, basically." — Isaac Saul (70:46)

• On the role of humor after heavy topics:

  "Levity is actually really important and valuable... I think you could certainly do that in a caustic way where you're expressing or demonstrating kind of disregard for the more serious fare. But I don't think we've ever done that here." — Camille Foster (86:12)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Trump Health Conspiracies: 05:40 – 23:55
• Venezuelan Drug Boat Strike & Executive Power: 25:13 – 53:20
• Gaza Relocation Plan: 64:57 – 85:30
• Grievances & Levity Discussion: 85:30 – End

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Final Thoughts

This episode delivers on Tangle’s promise to gather “the best arguments from across the political spectrum,” pushing listeners to question assumptions and motivations behind both news and narrative. The hosts demand real evidence for speculation, warn about the dangers of executive overreach, and dissect grand plans that, in their eyes, amount to modern colonialism or worse. The grievances section, while lighter, is defended as an essential part of processing the heaviness and complexity of political life.

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[Tune in next week for follow-up thoughts on the Amy Coney Barrett interview and more pressing news.]

Transcript

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[Isaac Saul]

Coming up, Donald Trump dead? Strikes on Venezuelan cartels, allegedly the Gaza lago leaks, which is really depressing. And then a really, really nice grievance section where we mostly talk about how virtuous we are. It's a good one.

[Isaac Saul (Executive Producer)]

From executive producer Isaac Saul.

[Isaac Saul]

This is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Suspension of the Rules podcast. Our weekly meditation on the news, our own worldviews, and a place where we get to break the rules of punditry, seek out some common ground, and speak our minds without being insufferable about it. What do you think I'm workshopping it? I could be. Is it. It's kind of something. It's nice. You want me to read it again? I'll do it again.

[Camille Foster]

No, I mean, if I tell you my authentic feelings. My authentic feelings. It reminds me of the fifth column intro, like in a weird.

[Isaac Saul]

A weekly. Our weekly. Yeah. And it feels like our weekly rhetorical assault. What do you guys say?

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, well, I say our weekly rhetorical assault on the news cycle. The people that make it, occasionally ourselves. I'm Camille Foster, et cetera. That. I mean, it just kind of arrived. It became that thing over the course of weeks. It Was not at all perfected. And now, almost 10 years later, is still the thing. Even while we're experimenting with a new format and have actually just shot this week the first two genuine, authentic fifth column on video for broader distribution. I suspect we actually need to rework that, and I'm inclined to retire that old thing. But, yeah, maybe that's why it reminds me a little bit of the thing and makes me wonder, is that best for a suspension of the rules? Does it need a ton?

[Isaac Saul]

I'm done with Camille's question.

[Ari Weitzman]

I didn't come up with anything, you know, to. To put in its place. Have we started? Did we start?

[Isaac Saul]

That's right. Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

Are we on air?

[Isaac Saul]

This is live. Yeah. Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

You guys love our 90 second comparison of Camille's podcast between each other.

[Camille Foster]

I mean, we can draw a lot of.

[Isaac Saul]

We can cut it now, now, now. Leave it. Leave it all in. I am. I am experimenting with the introduction. I surprised you guys by reading something I wrote, and I was just curious for your.

[Ari Weitzman]

All thoughts. No robots.

[Camille Foster]

No AI involved.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, no AI involved. Camille thinks it reminds him too much of himself, which I appreciate, because I'm a narcissist.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yes.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. Captures Camille's ethos well. It is our weekly meditation on the news versus our weekly. I didn't. Maybe I just, you know, that's subliminal stuff happening in my brain. Yeah, it's in there. All right, back to the drawing board. Nobody cares. Ari is completely unmoved. He's not even paying attention. It looks like he's reading his phone or something.

[Ari Weitzman]

No, I do have my phone with me. I asked Chat GPT to come up with a specifically badly written intro for a politics podcast to see what it would say. News that happened this week, or maybe last week if we missed it. And we try to be fair, but sometimes we just read headlines out loud. That's.

[Camille Foster]

I mean, that's not bad, actually. That's pretty good.

[Isaac Saul]

That is kind of.

[Ari Weitzman]

It's horseshoe theory of writing. If you get too bad, it becomes funny.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, I like that, actually. Huh. I think we can work with that.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, send us.

[Ari Weitzman]

This is a show for everyone who wants to know politics without yelling. So we just talk and explain things. Sort of. So, yeah, let's start now.

[Camille Foster]

Well, I love that we are kind of improvisationally figuring out, like, not just the intro, but in some respects, even the nature of this show, certainly ourselves and the world and the nature of being and the great mystery, which I'm happy to opine on for the next two to three hours. Possible.

[Ari Weitzman]

Strap in, let's do it.

[Camille Foster]

But we could talk about other more boring temporal things of this world, if you prefer.

[Isaac Saul]

I think we should start with the transcendence of life Donald Trump has passed on to the next. I don't know if you guys heard, he is dead. He didn't do, I guess he didn't do a White House press briefing with a full room of reporters for three days. And so a bunch of people on the Internet just assumed he had croaked, which is a really responsible and level headed thing to do, is to see a bruise on the President's hand and then not see him do an interview with your media preferred media of choice and then decide that maybe he's covering up a catastrophic health issue like a stroke. That was a big story this week that we didn't really talk about. I mean, there are people. Here's what I'll say. I tweeted about this. I don't want to name a bunch of names. I'll name one person who I saw like, really, really pushing this, which was Adam Cochran. I don't really know who this guy is, but, um, I somehow started following him on Twitter. But his profile says he's an investor, professor, policy consultant, author, and independent investigative journalist and father trying to make the world suck less, which I appreciate. His tweets have just been blowing up. He's followed by a bunch of people I respect. He's following filing a FOIA request with the Department of Defense to get Trump's medical records, which. Or like something about his pharmacy records, which I also respect. You know, do the journalism thing. But he's just been like. I mean, he was basically ramping up this press conference that Trump called at the White House, framing it as if there was going to be this major shift in like the future of the country. And doing 28 tweet threads that were making the case that Trump's having strokes. The. I forgot the, like the schematic strokes. The eye. Yeah, yeah. Oh, there's an abbreviation for it, which is a pretty common thing in people of his age, and that maybe he had one really catastrophic or like really serious stroke that they're now covering up. And then it just turns out that Trump's just changing the state that the Space Force is in, which is like the least important news story of the week. I don't know. What do you. I mean, is this just like a reminder that everybody can take the conspiratorial bait? Something deeper here?

[Ari Weitzman]

I don't know. I think there's. There's evidence that Trump is having medical difficulties. I think we've seen some of those. Like, the bruising on the hand that's not explained is probably indication that he's getting IVs. That's not really proof of anything other than blood draws. Right.

[Isaac Saul]

It was explained he shakes hands with a lot of people. That's what the press secretary.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah, that sounds good. Right? Yeah, we were okay with that. Isn't that more evidence that something's going on? Right.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, fair point. I mean, that was a ridiculous assertion to make, but also, like, it's one of those things where I could just see he got an IV or something. Yeah. And they're so unwilling to concede even that that they opt instead to just come up with a bullshit lie.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah, but that, like, invites questions. Like, you're getting an IV for draws. That routine. If it's a routine, cool. But if you're not saying anything, then people are going to invent their own, like, theories about what they're seeing. Seeing, like, ankles being swollen. Like, sometimes he looks tired. He's the president. He'll look tired. But he is getting old. And he's going to be the oldest president we've ever had and not too many and not too long. And it's okay to ask questions. I mean, this is a lot of the same stuff I remember saying about Biden. So if we're not getting answers, people are going to start progressively saying more and more concerning things and coming up with more and more concerning theories. I think that's something we saw in the last administration. And, you know, and absent getting information from the White House that that's, you know, in some ways that's natural, I think.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of different things going on here. It's certainly totally appropriate to ask questions about the health of the leader of the free world, since such a thing still exists. And it is categorically different to speculate wildly about such things. For example, maybe the President is dead and they're hiding it from us. Is that why JD Vance said he's ready to serve? And also important to differentiate between actual media reportage that trends in the direction of that hysterical speculation and online kind of twitterati, which just feels better to say than Xeroti, and the kind of legions of. Kind of substack commentators, perhaps, of which we are one, although ghost and not substack. But that's a whole other situation. There are going to be people in that latter category that are talking about this, some of whom aren't particularly responsible and are just engaged in wild speculation. And that is interesting and I think is indicative of the broader trend towards conspiracism on the left and the right. But interestingly, like, this whole thing can be dated back to some weeks earlier. Like back in July, Levitt was responding to concerns about the President's hands and explicitly acknowledging, well, yeah, he's receiving some treatment for certain things and he's taking these drugs that could contribute to bruising. So there have been answers on some of these things. It's just the answers haven't been particularly sensational. And so they get a hell of a lot less coverage than the speculation about them. Which reminds me of another story that is still in the headlines this week that we really don't have to waste a bunch of time talking about. But just the Epstein stuff, which is similar. Like, a lot of these things have been knocked down, but they keep coming up as if there hasn't been credible media coverage. That makes it pretty clear that, yeah, there may not be some wider conspiracy here yet. Speculation about why conspiracy does not go away because it's interesting and lots of people need to believe things like that. I think this is perhaps similar that.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, I think it is worth saying clearly. I looked up cnn, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, all the reporting that came from those places was really responsible and say what we know, not what we suspect. And I guess in some respects, I understand Twitter is kind of the point of Twitter is this sort of open marketplace of ideas where you can say things that maybe you wouldn't put in a written piece or a published piece with your publication. I do that sometimes with tangle. You know, it's like a. It is a thought tester and it's a place to experiment a little bit with ideas or to share theories you might have. So, you know, to defend the people who are doing some of this. I guess I could easily say it's less serious and should be taken less seriously. I think the thing that bothers me is like, you have multiple days in a row where people are telling you, donald Trump's about to resign. Donald Trump had a stroke. Donald Trump could be dead. Donald Trump is like, you know, preparing to reveal his terminal illness. They get thousands and thousands of likes and retweets, and then the thing happens and it's a space command, space force, location change. And it's like nobody goes and unfollows those people who are saying all that stuff. Nobody just decides, oh, this person is super unreliable and I should never listen to anything they say. Again, those people just kind of justify it, work their way around it, drop the next few breadcrumbs, and then sort of move on. And that part of it, I think, really frustrates me. I mean, for two reasons. One, because I think it's just emblematic of how short everybody's memories are, which seems like a problem in our country. Our attention spans are waning, and our memory is zapped. And I feel like we're often just running in circles. And, you know, the. This, to me, is, like, a lot of the same people who were doing the Trump didn't really get shot bit and pushing that, and then we just get clear evidence that he did, and, you know, we. We all just move on. And the second reason, selfishly, is, like, it's really hard to build an audience, to build a following, to get a bunch of attention on a website like Twitter while doing, well, like, being really intentional about trying to be responsible with the stuff you're putting out, which is, like, what I personally do. I'm not, like, getting on a high horse. Just, like, genuinely. I try not to spread bullshit when I respect the publish button. And it's like you tweet some sort of thoughtful, nuanced analysis about what may or may not be happening with Trump's health and 12 people like it, and then the guy next to you is like, he's gonna be dead tomorrow. And there's 2,000 retweets and a bunch of follows, and that part really just eats my soul a little bit. So I don't know. I just. Please, just like, if you were following somebody, this is my suggestion. If you're following somebody and they sort of got you all excitable about the Trump health stuff, maybe just consider whether there's somebody to keep following. I will end that little monologue by just floating the question, like, what's there then? I mean, maybe there are some sort of underlying health issues that are worth discussing. The guy is 79 years old. He takes a few drugs, you know, aspirin, whatever, daily. That might indicate some sort of, like, pulmonary issue. I'm not a cardiologist, but, you know, this is something that cardiologists say he's overweight for sure, despite lying about his weight on his medical records, which is one of the funniest things ever, you know, Like, I'm sure he could have some health problems. I will say he. To me, it's not close. It's not even in the same league as the Biden stuff. But, like, he does seem diminished in some notable Ways to me now, like in 2020, when I was watching videos or maybe even say, 2022, when I was watching him get interviewed and watching Biden get interviewed, and then I'd go look at clips from both of them. In 2016, it was like there was no difference in Trump, and there was this huge, glaring, obvious difference in Biden that everybod denying. And now when I look at Trump in front of the mic today versus 2020, it's a little different. It's a gradient. It's not massive, but he's more rambly. He's got less energy. He's definitely more obsessed with stuff related to himself and always gets caught on these things, distracted by these little trigger words. And I don't know, maybe we should start talking that at some point, you know, maybe, like, what's the lesson we learned from Biden? These should all be open questions and we should engage them, I guess.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, well, that's the lesson some people learned from Biden. And again, to the extent that's what you learned, that's good and acceptable. I mean, look, all. All of the questions are fair in general because we ought to be able to ask these questions. I do think that Trump has slowed down visibly. It's also the case that most of what you described is actually stuff that was true, like, eight years ago. Like, he's distracted, et cetera, perhaps more distractible. And in that way, it's maybe harder to track. It's also the case that he's been moving at this blistering pace since getting reelected and since getting sworn back in. And I've almost been, like, expecting him to take a little bit of a step back and kind of slow down. So in some respects, I would say that I looked at the absence from the scene and just was a bit relieved that the news cycle was slowing down and was slightly surprised to see that it actually generated a news cycle of sorts, or at least a weekend where everyone just kept suggesting he's dead. He's clearly dead, he's dead. Not everyone, but lots and lots of people. I would say, though, that I would not presume that this administration is. That it's beyond the pale for them to lie about something like this or to conceal some information about Trump's poor or failing health. So skepticism in that regard is totally understandable. But when your skepticism gives way to the wildest possible speculation and extreme confidence in conspiracy theories that posit the most absurd conclusion, then you're probably doing it wrong.

[Isaac Saul]

So.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah, I mean, what. What more really, can we say about it. It's just that the White House has given us reason to ask questions. They, the questions have been asked and the answers have been insufficient, which is giving us reasons to come up with our own explanations. And it's tough for some of us to contain those theories. And for others, you know, I'm sure everyone has one, let's be honest. I'm sure everyone has an idea in their head of what is happening with Trump. I think probably a lot of people are saying, I don't see a difference, or he's probably overextended and tired and fatigued. And I'm like, Isaac, I think I hear a difference in the way that he gives press conferences and answers. He sort of trails off at the end of sentences sometimes. He gets quiet. He. The distractedness doesn't seem to be like a. And another thing, this is a really bad problem, but like a. Oh, and you're fake news, by the way. You're all fake news. It's really unfair what they're doing. It's like he's reading through a script sometimes. But, you know, we're kind of. We trod the ground on this. And I think right now we might be doing one of the things that you said other people are doing of like filling in the space with our own cycle. So we'll keep looking. And, you know, when there's more stuff to know or think about or learn or more evidence to consider, then that's when we will.

[Camille Foster]

I do, I do wonder if the answers have been inadequate or if there is a sense where certain kinds of questions. For example, is Brigitte Macron actually a man? You only want to combat things like that so vociferously with respect to the amount of evidence that you try to produce to the contrary, because there's no amount of evidence that would be satisfactory for perhaps the most vocal critics who are interested in that particular conversation. I don't think Candace Owens is waiting for kind of sufficient evidence to abandon her particular convictions or stated beliefs about Brigitte Macron. And in the same respect, I think a lot of the people who are positing Trump is dead or dying, as we all are, interestingly, I don't know that they'll ever be satisfied with any sort of explication from the White House and an acknowledgement that he's old and getting older and as a result, slowing down naturally is probably not something we're going to get, but it's something that we all know, and that's not news.

[Ari Weitzman]

But that's a comparison between the Is he dead or dying theory. It's not a reason to defend answers to what are his health conditions? Like now, why is his hand bruising? Why are his ankles swollen? And those are the things where the White House has given us insufficient answers. And I'm not upset for them with them ignoring the is Trump dead? Stuff like that. Of course they should. But I'm saying in absence of answers to those questions, you'll get the more reasonable but not fully supported theories of like, oh, he's having constant strokes. Like that is a thing that I can understand.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah.

[Isaac Saul]

I think the, there's like an underlying thing that, that also has to be added to this conversation, which is a lot of the people who are discoursing about this really deeply seem to want the president to drop dead.

[Ari Weitzman]

And like, there's that, that's in there.

[Isaac Saul]

The, you know, the motivated reasoning element of the whole sort of commentary from the people who are putting this out there is like, I mean, a, it's just gross obvious. I mean, for a million different reasons. Just, you know, he's the president, whatever you think of his policies. I know there are people who, listening to this who probably indulge in that sort of viewpoint. But like, you know, you're, a lot of the tweets and the commentary, they read to me more like wishful thinking than actual analysis. And I, I think that part is important to say.

[Ari Weitzman]

It kind of feels sort of like the Mueller report. People are reading everything that he was doing when Mueller was investigating. They're like, he's going to drop it any day. Trump's going to be impeached. He'll be kicked out of. It does feel really similar. Like we're looking at breadcrumbs and trying to complete a picture. And a lot of people already have the picture in place and want to see what they want to see. So I can see that comparison.

[Isaac Saul]

Foreign. We'll be right back after this quick break.

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[Isaac Saul]

All right, well, speaking of Trump, you know, his health is not the only story from from this week. There are two other really big ones that I want to get to. The first one we covered today in our podcast and newsletter, but I am interested to discuss this with you guys, especially some of the conversations that came up. You know, we're playing with this new staff dissent feature in the newsletter in the podcast, and we didn't have the staff dissent today, despite the fact that there was like a pretty good deal of argumentation and push and pull in the editorial process to get today's newsletter out specifically around my take. The short story here, if you did not listen to our podcast or read the newsletter or have been living under a rock for the last few days, is that Donald Trump ordered a military strike on a boat that he alleges was carrying drugs to the United States. Though I think it's worth mentioning Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially said the boat was headed to Trinidad, then Trump said it was headed to the US Then Marco Rubio changed his statement to say it was going to the US as well. Not a ton of clarity there. I, I personally had like two very strong visceral reactions to this. One was just kind of the, you know, they got what they had coming to them reaction, which is a base instinct. But, you know, I there is just that part of me, if I'm being totally honest with people, and my pledge is to be honest with our readers and listeners, is like, I've just watched street drugs, fentanyl, heroin, opioids, you know, lace cocaine, whatever it is, destroyed so many lives in my personal world. The county I grew up in, my high school especially, was hit harder by the opioid crisis than basically anywhere in America. And in the years since that crisis and all the addiction that came out of, like, my high school class sort of got hammered by the evolution of drugs and the introduction of really cheap heroin and the introduction of fentanyl and whatever. And yeah, there is just a part of me that's like, you know, it's nice to see these people pay the price for what they're doing. And then I think for three seconds and I'm like, holy shit, the president just killed 11 people for drug trafficking without a jury, without a trial, without any evidence presented to the public in a Straight up extrajudicial killing, which I said today, reminded me a lot of the Luigi Mangione stuff. Like, Luigi Mangione. Oh, shit, I forgot how to say his name.

[Ari Weitzman]

I think it's Mangioni.

[Camille Foster]

I think he's on that.

[Ari Weitzman]

But, I mean, we all have so many other things to respond to, what you just said in the pronunciation of his name.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, it's just. It's frightening, and it's like an escalation for me in terms of his already exorbitant love of stretching executive power as far as it can go. Now there's a body count, you know, and I think it's really, really scary. And I think the whole redefinition of drug dealers as terrorists is incredibly alarming. And it's not made less alarming because they're Venezuelan or not American citizens or because this happened outside US Territor. I. I don't know if he's trying to invade Venezuela or start some war, but the fact that I don't know that is not good. I don't. That's not a comfort to me. So, yeah, I. I'm. I'm interested to hear what you guys think. You know, there. There was various kind of pushback, I guess, on my take today that we could talk about. And, Ari, maybe you're the best person to kind of kick that conversation off, but this just feels to me like a really, really big step.

[Ari Weitzman]

You mentioned Mangione. I think I want to leave that aside for a second. There's a lot of discussion amongst us and the editorial team about how that analogy kind of lands with us and the difference between prevention and enforcement of laws and retribution for harms. But the two points here that I really want to make is one is a little bit related, which is the. These people feeling of it all, of like there's an opioid epidemic that the United States suffered through. And the millions of. Not millions, but the huge epidemic of overdose deaths that we'd suffered at the same time makes it so. We have a very righteous sort of feeling of indignation about wanting to do more to prevent drugs from being trafficked into the United States that are dangerous and. Or illegal and. Or laced with fentanyl. All very reasonable things. But at the same time, these. We don't know that. I mean, this is the most important thing. Like, we don't know whether the people that were killed on this boat were engaged in that. We have the allegation of the military and. Or the Pentagon. The leader of the Pentagon, Pete Hagseth, and the president, but we don't really know. And what we were. What was alleged was that they were smuggling cocaine, which is. We don't know if that was laced with fentanyl either. In cocaine's very different than opioids, and if it's not laced with fentanyl, very different than fentanyl. So it does feel a little bit like us using this, like weaponizing this hurt that we have as a country in order to do more hurt. I think there's. I have a. A thing that I say sometimes that there's a couple things we can always use to justify anything at a government level, which is terrorism and child molestation. So I'm always sensitive to that. Trump, very importantly here, is using terrorism as the justification. He's saying these cartels are engaging in terrorism in the way that they're spreading drugs to the United States, and in so doing, justifying any strike or killing under terrorism. And who's going to argue against terrorism? Right. It's really tough to do that. But what he can do is say this doesn't really fit the bill, not just for the reasons mentioned, but because if we are going to be using force against terrorists, there has to be a justification for that. We had a president who was trying to use authorization for the use of military force against terrorism to do extrajudicial killings, and he got raped by Republicans, and his name was Obama. And I think us being able to keep that in the back of our minds here, if not the front of our minds, is a really useful way to respond to this. We should be concerned about the overreach of the state's power. We should be concerned about the executive using a justification to kill. Whether or not we agree with the reasoning, even in this case where we don't, let's say that, it becomes more concerning. But even if we did, even if I were to say, yeah, I see the proof, these people on this boat were bringing drugs to the United States, they were laced with fentanyl, they were part of an operation, and Maduro is a part of it. Even in that instance, it is the executive making a unilateral decision. And I think that's a principle you can use to defend or use to criticize both Trump and Obama and any president who engages in that kind of behavior.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah.

[Camille Foster]

And I think alluding to Obama, perhaps even going further back, and talking about 9, 11, in the context of so much of the Trump administration's effort to reintroduce kind of terrorism as a central theme of American foreign policy, and domestic policy. Quite frankly, to the extent we've been talking about this and have been linking this to various South American gangs or narco states, we're doing it in precisely the same way that this was done around 9 11. It gives the government and officials more latitude to deploy a greater range of tools and to perhaps not so much obfuscate for nefarious purposes, but again, for the sake of perhaps just the alacrity of being able to move quickly and do things like say, drone people in foreign countries under the auspices of a program that essentially just gives the president carte blanche to decide who lives and who dies. Whether or not you're at war officially, you're kind of perpetually at war. That was the prior circumstance with the drone program that was heavily criticized, that Barack Obama presided over and that W had presided over for a time. It was created by W. And I believe Trump was critical of that at different points and now is essentially doing something fairly similar. We had this massive buildup of kind of naval assets that has that began almost immediately after Trump was sworn into office and began this designation. And now we're reaping the fruits of it, which is a strike that is almost certainly unconstitutional. And it doesn't even matter in some respects. The courts may challenge it, but unless Congress gets involved, it feels like this won't matter. Unless Republicans suddenly find religion and decide that they want to actually be somewhat consistent here, perhaps embody a conservative value that is explicitly conservative in a way that is coherent to most people. It almost doesn't matter because the administration has made it pretty clear by this point that they're interested in expanding the parameters of what the executive can do. And the way that they're going to do that is not with some kind of well understood legal theory that we're all familiar with. It's with these kind of ad hoc reasoning and this kind of perpetual state of exceptions and emergency in every single instance. And the fact that they've just lost a really prominent high profile case that made it pretty clear that it's unconstitutional to deploy troops in this particular way to unilaterally make these decisions without Congress being involved or without the ascent of local governments hasn't been an obstacle to them trying to do these things anyways, persisting with kind of slight, slight modifications and essentially taking as many inches as they possibly can, even when they face a defeat in the courts, when they're trying to expand executive power. And it is a pretty remarkable change for conservatives here, not just because it's hypocritical but just because it is a meaningful deviation from so much of the rhetoric that I have seen from conservatives on these very issues over the course of decades now, and to see all of it fall away in the course of months here is somewhat astonishing and a little bit shocking and worth talking about in very sober ways, I think. It's interesting, and I'm now kind of conflating things, but I've already mentioned the National Guard deployments, but I'll specifically mention D.C. and Chicago. It's very interesting that this is happening. It's the sort of thing where I find myself generally opposed to these troop deployments and the federalization of National Guardsmen when there's supposed to be this very clear line here where the state and the feds are kind of cooperating and the feds here are insisting on these deployments irrespective of what local officials want. I can be critical of it, I can question the efficacy of it, but what I'm not doing is going a step further and insisting, well, this is clearly a dry run for a military takeover of the United States of America. And I think one mistake that many critics have made, and perhaps some journalists, is to take that third step and to go to the worst imaginable manifestation of what these misguided, in my estimation, policies are likely to yield. And I think in general, that has a lot of different There's a lot of reasons why that's problematic, but the most obvious one should be that we just don't know that that's where things are headed. And I'm not sure that that kind of maximalist expression of concern is necessarily the best one to help illuminate the nature of the problem and perhaps to animate some genuine action on the parts of the people that we would most like to see get involved and kind of assert themselves here, which in this particular case isn't even the courts, it's Congress.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, on the troop deployments to the like, the National Guard deployments, I think it's far more likely that Trump believes that crime is a really strong political issue for him and that the deployments put Democrats on their heels and put them in this horrible place where they have to, like, deny the reality people are experiencing about crime in these sort of urban centers. And it gives Trump inroads to voters in Chicago and voters in Philadelphia and voters in Washington, D.C. i mean, he's probably doing the D.C. thing A because he can legally, and it's easy. And it's just like he loves the confrontation with the D.C. population. Like, that is, you know, the swamp to him.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah.

[Isaac Saul]

But Chicago feels like this sort of pet project where he's obsessed with the city and talking about it and all the ways it's broken and corrupted and.

[Camille Foster]

And it's local politicians, for sure.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, yeah, and it's local politicians. But I also think, like, you know, getting JB Pritzer to come out and be like, we don't need the National Guard here is actually a good thing for Trump politically. You know, I think that's right. I see the White House promoting these videos of, like, you know, young black men in Chicago talking about how terrible the crime is there and how they need help and all this stuff. And, like, the administration sees a pathway to those people, I think, with stuff like this, the strongmen stuff. And, you know, the version of that in the Venezuela story to me is like, are we about to start a war or invade Venezuela? Like that. That's sort of the leap, you know, the assume. The worst of what this is about is that this troop buildup is because Trump is expecting some sort of real confrontation or he wants to, you know, signal something to the Venezuelan population. So there's this organically fermented uprising, or they're, you know, the extreme extreme is like we're about to actually put boots on the ground or invade Venezuela or go try and arrest Maduro or whatever it is, which, you know, it is hilarious. I mean, hilarious it. To be sober. To take your suggestion, to talk about soberly. It is jarring to consider all the talk that we've heard from Trump and his biggest supporters about the myriad of reasons that we need to pull out from these foreign engagements in the Middle east and elsewhere across the globe. There's this new right that's kind of left position that's like, really clear and sober minded about the. And I mean, this earnestly, really clear and sober minded about, like, our influence in places like Central and South America and how it's gone south in various ways throughout history. Like the. I see right wing commentators saying things that they never would have said 20 years ago about us overthrowing, you know, authoritarian leaders in south and Central America with the CIA and these coups and, you know, that was such a lefty talking point for so long, and now a lot of the kind of new Trump rights embraced it. And now it's like Trump is literally openly trying to organize a coup, basically. I mean, they are saying they've put a bounty on the President's head and said they want they will pay somebody to give them evidence that allows them to go arrest Maduro. And they're all just, yeah, like. Cheering woo. Go Trump. Like, we're gonna crush the drug dealers. I'm like, this is literally the thing that we've been talking about happening right now. And it's like, you know, it's. Yeah, it's one of those weird partisan worm eating your brain moments where people just have a hard time seeing it when their guy does it, I guess.

[Camille Foster]

There's something, Ari, you said a moment ago that I actually don't wanna lose the thread on the fact that we don't know things about this boat that was just blown up.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

It feels crucial.

[Camille Foster]

They could have interdicted. Like they could have actually stopped the boat.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

Which the catch those people.

[Camille Foster]

We've got tons of military vessels in the area. It's just one boat. We could have interdicted. We could have arrested these people. We could have found out what they had. And if there were suspicions that needed to be acted upon, that could have been the action. Instead, you obliterate that and you create all manner of consternation. And that speculation about how things could escalate. It seems to me that talking about the various ways that pretending you're at war with Venezuela formally, when in fact you're not, could quickly become a hot war. I could see that much quicker than I can imagine. The national guard deployment in D.C. which was just extended, I believe to the end of the year. Now, putting us in territory that is less. It's less clear the president can do on his own, probably does require an act of Congress. Again, which is interesting. These are the kinds of things that we could be paying attention to. But for some of the more kind of hysteric, hyperbolic things that we're talking about, and relatedly as well, like drug interdiction in general, to use that word twice now in different contexts, like, I am still one of those people who is pretty concerned that our efforts at prohibition have helped to make the supply of illegal drugs in this country more dangerous and not less dangerous. In which case there are very real questions to ask about the kind of escalation and the militarization, the remilitarization of the drug war in South America. It's also interesting that we're going after Venezuela here when I believe Mexico is actually a much bigger player in America's drug war. Not to give the administration any ideas about who they ought to be taking military action against. It's just odd that that's where they're focusing in the same way that it's odd that D.C. is where you deploy the National Guard when it's hardly the most dangerous city in America.

[Ari Weitzman]

Right. And there's a couple things I think one that I think is useful to talk about is we sort of made some guffaws and shoulder shrugs about the legality of the deployment to the national of the National Guard to D.C. and I think it's worth we should say kind of clearly that Trump installing a new head of police and doing a police takeover in D.C. is justified by the law. That's something he can legally do. Using the National Guard as a police force is not like that's something that would be against like the, the army isn't allowed to act as a police force no matter where you deploy. It can't be D.C. can't be Chicago. I think that's just like a caveat that we should, you know, say boldly. I think when it comes to the drugs that are coming from South America, we did have something that will K back our senior editor, put into the numbers section today that I thought was illuminating about where drugs are coming from and when they do come from Venezuela, which is normally even the ones that come from Venezuela come through the Pacific and not the Caribbean. And that a lot of the drugs that we do get into the US that are laced with fentanyl are, like you said, coming through Mexico. And that it makes me wonder why the hard posture is it just that Maduro is not playing ball with Trump. We've seen like Trump likes to he's doing something similar in Brazil with Brazil with Bolsonaro saying, if you aren't going to drop these charges against him, we're going to tear up the heck out of you. But the question then becomes based off of what the pattern Trump is displaying with his foreign policy is, what does the president want to get out of them? Are we going to get favorable deals for Chevron oil drilling out of Venezuela now? I mean, I could if I'm going to predict and put on my prediction hat and if I'm wrong, I'll say I'm wrong. Like I'll call it right here two weeks in this podcast. If any of this is wrong, I'll eat crow. But if I'm right, like I, I would prefer, I would prefer that we remember, you know what this, what I'm saying, which is that I would expect we're going to hear more stories about military enforcement or boats in the Caribbean. Maybe another boat gets sunk or two, I don't know. But A thing that I expect will be the end result of it is the boats return to the US or they get deployed elsewhere in the great oceans. And we hear great deal just announced Venezuela, they're going to yada, yada, something about a drug enforcement team that they already have, and we allow us favorable terms for oil drilling or what have you, and we're going to move on to the next thing. That's just what I would expect to happen based on what's happened in other countries so far.

[Camille Foster]

Although there's a unique contempt for Maduro and it's been kind of long standing. So it's possible that there really isn't a kind of easy off ramp here that this is.

[Ari Weitzman]

That's a good point.

[Camille Foster]

This is a fight that the administration desperately wants and there are plenty of people in our politics who are on board with it. And this is a. I mean, and I think it's fair to say he's a malevolent actor. This is a country that is a meaningful geopolitical rival within our sphere of influence, so to speak. And there's reason to be concerned and to take a kind of aggressive posture here. But you do it the right way, you get Congress involved. And it's the strangest thing about this administration is the fact that he has an incredibly compliant Congress and reliably chooses to ignore them. Reliably.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. I do want to say that Nicolas Maduro is dictator and like, he's an authoritarian leader.

[Ari Weitzman]

Election.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty much every independent organization that monitors these kinds of things considers his rule authoritarian. And that, I mean, there is just literally systematic repression of political opponents. You know, not a good guy. Fine to say. I also, I mean, Ari, it's funny, like, even listening to you talk about what's potentially coming. And I, Camille's comments notwithstanding, I do think that is a fairly good prediction. Something in those contours, like, that's a taco taco prediction. Maybe. Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

I don't know, but I think, I think it's a leverage thing. But.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, well, I also just want to say, like, it's insane that we've already moved there. Like, you're talking about this and, you know, maybe another boat or two will be sunk in using.

[Ari Weitzman]

Like, that's pretty complicated.

[Isaac Saul]

It's like, yeah, dude, he. He deleted 11 people. Like, you know, and this is like, we had this, this is part of our back and forth that we had in the editorial process this morning. I mean, Will asked me something in the comments of the Google Doc when we were working on it. Like, you know, this is. He thought, like, the opening to my take was pretty aggressive and was kind of just like, is it like the nature of the strike that is, like, jarring to you? Like, if this was DA agents who got into a shootout and killed a bunch of people who are members of this gang, like, would it. And I was like, yeah, it's the nature of the strike. Like, he fired a rocket at a boat full of people that he thinks are smuggling cocaine, like one of the most popular drugs in America to who knows where, according to Marco Rubio Trinidad before, you know, Trump sort of corrects the record that they're definitely coming to the United States. Like, you know, and then Audrey was another editor, was like, you know, this is like, I don't know how much there isn't, how unprecedented this is. Like, she was sort of pushing back on my framing and that there's precedent for this because, you know, like, Obama killed, you know, bombed like a wedding in Iraq. And I'm like, also controversial, extremely controversial, and we should not be desensitized to that. And like, I, you know, I, I adopt the prosecute them all mindset of, you know, war crime is war crime is war crime. Make them pay the price. But, like, Barack Obama at least had the pretext that he was responding to terrorism, like Al Qaeda attacking United States troops, isis, you know, spreading and this being like a cell, you know, and these are people who are storming schools in Iraq and murdering children or putting.

[Ari Weitzman]

Violence on drugs because they were terrorists, not because Obama said they were.

[Isaac Saul]

Right? Like, it is actually unprecedented that a president used a cruise missile or a drone or whatever they fired to blow up a boat full of people that were allegedly smuggling drugs. Like, I just don't want to lose sight of that. And it has definitely made me animated, like, watching the coverage of all this. Now, that being said, because this is a muscle I try to flex and like, this is the work of Tango and what we do, I think it's very clear how I feel about this. I do want to just present an inquiry or ask like, the rationalist argument, like the really sort of emotionally detached, cold blooded rationalist argument here, if I could formulate it would be, it's worth killing these 11 dudes to send a message to this entire region that if you get on a boat and leave Venezuela and you've got a bunch of drugs and you're headed to traffic this stuff to the US There's a chance that you're gonna get hit with a drone strike on your way. And if you're the Trump administration, that is an act of deterrence, and you believe that that's gonna be the outcome. That's what they've said they believe is gonna be the outcome. And I guess I wonder, like, let's buy. Let's take the hook, line and sinker Trump framing, like, every gang member in Venezuela knows that this just happened, and they're all gonna think twice before they get on a boat leaving some port in Venezuela with a bunch of drugs coming to North America. Is that worth it? Is that a good thing? Is that, like, a reasonable thing to posit? Yeah, I don't know. Like, and that is like the really detached, again, rationalist inquiry that I think is fair to float. That, like, has to be floated because it is the stated rationale of the administration.

[Camille Foster]

But I can engage with that question without presuming that the only way to affect that sort of concern on the part of drug smugglers is to blow up the boat. Like an open, vociferous debate inside Congress where the President is asking for authorization to do exactly what you just described, exactly what they just did and is starting to build support for. It could be the sort of thing that begins to send that message. And if you're having that conversation while taking the action of actually stopping a boat that you have every reason perhaps to suspect is actually engaged in the trafficking of narcotics, that perhaps helps to underscore the point that you're making. It seems to me that actually going about things the right way, having a meaningful political consensus that's pointing in the direction of this activity, and then actually having a demonstration of enforcement where you catch these people, you have the opportunity to perp walk them, to demonstrate that, yeah, these are drugs and they're bad dudes, and look at the other things they did. And the interdiction would be perhaps of less expense than firing missiles at this craft and would almost certainly be something that you could execute at minimal risk to US Service persons. It just, it feels like a situation where doing things the right way could totally get you that kind of fear and intimidation response that you're going for. But I will acknowledge that, yeah, a president who might do anything at any time and could defy the law may put some fear into the hearts of certain geopolitical rivals. But quite frankly, it also puts some fear into the heart of American citizen who was born here, who cares deeply about the Constitution and is worried that we are degrading it because the administration is far too cavalier about their interpretation of the Constitution and their regard for.

[Ari Weitzman]

It in general, doesn't it put a little bit of fear into you for what could happen to people who are in that area who aren't drug runners, too? Like, sure, I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm an expert in, like, South Caribbean and migrant patterns, but it's not as if there's nothing in the South Pacific, like, or South Pacific, South Caribbean. There's like, Trinidad Tobago, Aruba, Curacao, like, plenty of islands just off the coast of Venezuela. So it's not difficult to imagine members or citizens of a country from which we had a huge flood of migrants not too long ago under a dictator, are looking to try to flee and go to one of those islands or be on their way to somewhere else in the Caribbean. And in such a world, those people probably aren't aware as much of what the United States is doing in the news. And I could. It does feel like I'm not gonna sit here and say, like, I'm really concerned this is going to happen now. But it does make you feel like that there's now an elevated risk that some people who are fleeing a dictatorship in Venezuela could be, instead of meaning they're meaning border patrol in the United States, could be meaning a cruise missile in the Caribbean. And that does feel like a way, way over escalation over what the United States should be doing and what our posture should be capable of.

[Isaac Saul]

I mean, just to put that point in bold, that's what I was just going to say was there are literally, we know there are tens of thousands of people fleeing Venezuela every year. I mean, it is like a hub of the influx of migrants we're getting because the economic situation is so dire there and because Maduro's so insane. So, yeah, I mean, I don't think that's a bad thesis at all. Like, how many more boats with 12 people leaving in the middle of the night with luggage on board are going to be navigating the area where this strike happened? I mean, again, maybe all the intelligence and everything is buttoned up, but we just don't have that from the administration yet, at least not publicly. Also, Ari, I just have to say this is tangential, but you just reminded me that the worst vacation I've ever had was in Curacao, which is a place that I will never go back to. No offense to anybody who lives there. Phoebe and I went once, I had this awesome idea where I was like, I'm gonna pick a vacation spot for us. That's just like, I'm gonna look at a map and pick a place that looks really cool geographically that, you know, is different from the places that all our friends, the people you see on Instagram and everything going like, I'm not doing the Cuba thing. You know, it's just, like, it's played out. Let's go somewhere cool. And I was like, whoa, there's an kind of. It was like. This was like. When we went. This was like everybody was going to Cuba because it opened up to the US for, like, a year. And, you know, everybody's, like, taking their pictures in front of the old pickup truck on the cobblestone street in Cuba. I'm like, all right, whatever. So I chose Curacow because I found the map, and I was like, this is crazy. Off the coast of Venezuela, Beautiful island, incredible beaches. Never seen anything like it. We went. We were in a huge fight when we went, which is definitely the core reason that the trip sucked. But we were just, like, in a bad place. I can't even remember what was happening, but just in a bad cycle of fighting. So we got there, we're both in a horrible mood, and then it turns out, I'm pretty sure it's Danish. Maybe it's owned by. I mean, Curacao was invaded and colonized by some other European. You can look it up. I'm talking. But I think it's Dutch.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yes. Like a ruby.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, Dutch. Yeah. So Dutch people, again, no offense. Terrible food. Nothing good happening there. They just, like. They've done nothing. And then there's incredible. They've done nothing. On the. On the culinary front, there's, like, incredible wealth disparity on the island. So it's like, classic. Like, you're staying in some nice hotel, and then you go outside, and it's just like, unbelievable poverty. That's like, wow, this is devastating to just witness and drive through and whatever. And then you're getting all the skeptical looks from, like, the locals who are just, you know, like, we're tourists and were like, you know, doing the thing kind of like in the resort, but not really experiencing the country. And when we leave the resort area, where it's just like, ah, it feels icky. And then on top of that, there's like a whole other group of non American white people there who also hate you, which is the Dutch, who are just like, they're just pissed there are Americans there. Like, we interacted with a few, and it's just like, ugh. Like, this is our island, kind of. So Curacao sucked. The beaches were beautiful, but, yeah, I Left there feeling shitty about Dutch people, their food, and my relationship. But we bounced back, and now we're married, happily with a child. So happy ending, I guess. Yeah.

[Camille Foster]

Not America.

[Ari Weitzman]

Happy endings. I mean, the epilogue to this is still to come. We're gonna get so many responses from Dutch people and Caribbean vacationers and that. Say something nice about El Ruba or somewhere else. Somewhere else.

[Isaac Saul]

If you were Dutch and you have something to say about Curacao, write in. I'd like to hear your defense. I'll give you the Dutch oven, I presume was you guys, so maybe that was your contribution to culinary stuff. But, yeah, I'm ready. Bring the heat. Tell me about. Tell me what I'm missing. I like.

[Camille Foster]

I like all of that. I will say briefly that I think the phrase you used a moment ago was other white people who hate you, and you might have said community of European expats who hate you.

[Ari Weitzman]

Well, that's right.

[Isaac Saul]

Hold on.

[Ari Weitzman]

Is curious. Is it technically Europe, though, if it's part of never. Let's move on. Let's do something.

[Camille Foster]

No, I'm saying as a community of European expats, because if they go there, it's European.

[Ari Weitzman]

Are they expats?

[Camille Foster]

But is it really European? I mean, it's still kind of colonial, right? Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

Like, there's no in the Caribbean that are French that are technically France. Like, they. France makes no distinction.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, yeah, fair.

[Isaac Saul]

Can I. Can I say one other thing about the Dutch?

[Camille Foster]

Let's go denigrate them.

[Isaac Saul]

They call Curacao a kingdom of the Netherlands. Yes. Come on. Just, you know, get over yourself. We don't call Puerto Rico a kingdom of the United States. It's like, it's a U.S. territory. We did the thing. Just own it, you know? But it's a kingdom of the Netherlands. Yeah, yeah, whatever.

[Camille Foster]

I'm not Greenland. We're going to acquire Curacao as well, so don't worry about it.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, yeah.

[Camille Foster]

We'll make Carousel great again.

[Ari Weitzman]

Nice liqueur. Curacao. Let's agree to that. Maybe.

[Isaac Saul]

Dutch contributions to culinary.

[Ari Weitzman]

I'm going to insist we move on. What else?

[Isaac Saul]

Oh, my God. Dude, they have some good stuff. They have some good stuff. Waffles and pancakes and donuts are allegedly a result of.

[Camille Foster]

Oh, yeah, Dutch pancakes.

[Isaac Saul]

Contributions to American comfort food. Food.

[Ari Weitzman]

I think Belgians would be upset to hear waffles listed under the Dutch.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, yeah. They claim Gouda cheese. I. I don't believe it, though. We'll be right back after this quick break.

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[Isaac Saul]

All right, well, in much more serious, much more serious news, we do have one last topic to cover which we haven't touched in a little while. And similar to the Venezuela stuff, it's I think a pretty somber one. And it is this new relocation plan, post Gaza war plan that we got news about in the Strip. You know, sometimes there are stories like this where it's helpful to kind of summarize and, you know, rehash in our own words what a proposal is or what happened in this case. I actually think it's worth just like reading a news report to share the details of this. To be very clear that this is not us editorializing in some specific kind of way. But I'm gonna pull this from the Washington Post, who is along with the Financial Times. They kind of broke this story. The Washington Post saw a 38 page. They called it a prospectus which envisions at least a temporary relocation of all of Gaza's more than 2 million population, either through what it calls voluntary departures or another country to another country or into restricted secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction. Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property to be used to finance a new life elsewhere were eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new AI powered smart cities to be built in Gaza. Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere as well as a year of food. The plan estimates every individual departure from Gaza would save the trust $23,000 compared with the cost of temporary housing and what it calls, quote unquote life support services in the secure zones for those who stay. They're calling it the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or Great Trust. The proposal was developed by the same Israelis who created and set in motion the US and Israeli backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The ghf, which you know, I mean by all accounts has unleashed both more famine in Gaza and also confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Gazan civilians where Gazan civilians are being killed. So they haven't exactly had a sterling record on this stuff so far. This is wild. I don't even know how to, I mean, how would you describe it? I don't know what to say. I mean the, the. Another clip from this Washington Post article is that perhaps most appealing it it being the plan purports to require no U.S. government funding and offers significant profit to investors. Unlike the controversial and sometimes cash strapped GHF which uses armed private US security contractors to distribute food in four southern Gaza locations, the trust plan does not rely on donations. The prospectus says Instead it would be financed by public and private sector investment in what it calls mega projects. From electric vehicle plants and data centers to beach resorts and high rise apartments. Calculations included in the plan envision a nearly fourfold return on a $100 billion investment after 10 years with Self generating revenue streams.

[Ari Weitzman]

Isn't it a little bit. I mean this is by far not the one detail to focus on. But isn't it a little bit oxymoronic or paradoxical to say will require no funding from the government but will have private and public investors?

[Camille Foster]

Which public investors? I think that's the important question. And perhaps if you don't view government spending on its own projects as expenses but recategorize them as investments where the United States citizen is definitely going to make a profit, obviously then you kind of eliminate the need for any protracted discussion.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah, I don't think there's anything I like about this. Is there anything to like about this, like the AI are ridiculous. Like the idea that maybe if there's one thing, it's the idea that like, look, Israel is doing this forced expulsion and it's state sponsored ethnic cleansing by other sanitized names. But if there's something where you can offer people money and funds to actually pay for themselves on their way out, I think that's the thing that I could talk about as being potentially a good idea. Everything else just feels like, what the hell are we doing?

[Isaac Saul]

No, I mean the thing to like, to me is it is a forward looking, here's this extremely rich in natural resources along one of the most beautiful, important coasts in the world territory. Let's develop it and bring prosperity and economic growth there. And all these things that Palestinians have been begging for for literally decades. And it's like the plan to finally do that requires removing the 2 million people who have been waiting for that moment from the territory. To do it without them, basically.

[Ari Weitzman]

Yeah.

[Isaac Saul]

I mean there's, you're going to make.

[Camille Foster]

Them rich, you're going to give them better housing. Suddenly there will be these international partners who materialize.

[Isaac Saul]

I don't understand the plan to return that. I mean, look, this plan is clearly half baked. There's all this stuff going around about maybe it was AI generated. It seems like it was AI generated.

[Camille Foster]

The images are definitely all ChatGPT images are definitely.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, yeah, but it's like the, there's something so sick and perverse about it to me, at least from where I'm sitting, where it's like you're talking about doing the thing that the, you know, so many Palestinians who have wanted this, who have been like, you know, who have been saying for years that the path towards reducing extremism in the Gaza Strip, towards like overthrowing Hamas, towards creating this free state, is like capitalizing on all the opportunity that's there with all these people who are hungry for a better life than the one they have. And now there's a plan. I mean, this plan sucks because it's all about crypto and it seems like some massive scam to just basically make some investors rich. Like, I mean, we can't even, I don't even know where to start with like, you're going to get a token for your property and you can go use that crypto token to buy something else. Here's five grand. Whatever. They're just doing this in a way that ensures that the people who like really want this thing and have really wanted it and really should enjoy the fruits of this country or territory or whatever you want to call Gaza that they won't get to that they'll be gone, dead, exploded, expelled, whatever else. It's just so perverse to me. I don't really know how else to describe it. And I'll just say too to criticize myself a little bit, there is this conundrum here where the way Gaza was described before October 7, you know, like the open air prison language and things like that that I myself used. They're underminded by the reality now of what pre 10-7-Gaza looks like and was like when you see these before and after images of like there was still so much of the Gaza Strip where life was bustling and beautiful and redeemable and had all this potential and now it's all been leveled. And now like the same people who helped level it are basically like, give us a bunch of money and we'll build it back up. But we're going to get all these people who are here out first and we'll make a bunch of money and the return will be really good. I mean, it's sick. I find it sick. Like I think it's gross and I.

[Ari Weitzman]

Think there's a point that you're making there that I. And this, this may be a little bit of a can of worms. I don't intend it to be. I'm just like think thinking more about this point that we described it one way before October 7th and in using those terms, we would probably want to use them now, but we've lost the ability to use them because we misapplied them. And I feel sort of similarly about the word colony and colonization in this sense because this, if I'm trying to grasp for what I would describe this plan, it would be public investment in an area where we're pushing out the native inhabitants so that we can profit. That's the description of a colony to me. Like that's what that sounds like and. Or a forcible territory. It's not exactly a perfect fit, but it's an ambiguously like accurate term. And I think the way people describe. A lot of people describe Israel as like a settler colonialist state, I think makes it so it's hard to put accurate terms to what we're hearing about in this plan for Gaza.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, there's so much going on here. I want to say that I laugh when I hear about this plan, not because I think the plan itself is funny, but because it is also kind of absurd in this kind of Mythicus sort of way. And in that respect, one almost has to laugh. The plan is so half baked that the best analogy I could draw is to that underpants gnome meme in south park, where, like, phase one is, you collect the underpants. Phase two, I don't know, phase three, profit. Like, everything will work out. I find that almost every single panacea that I hear proffered by politicians throughout time immemorial, like, turns out to be not just bad, like, unbelievably bad. Moments ago, before we started recording, was in response to a question that I got from someone who listens to one of the podcasts that I participate in, was asking about Katrina and whether or not racism had anything to do with it. And I just found myself thinking about, like, Robert Moses and the various other people who've had these bold aspirations for how they're going to do something radically different and address poverty in this way. That's just amazing. And they weren't talking openly about their efforts to build radical new futuristic public housing from the standpoint of we can finally isolate those people and purge them and give them places that are kind of suitably awful to them because they're so bad, they go into it with the best of intentions. Perhaps even there is some graft and corruption there because that happens in government. But the way that they talk about it is in these kind of. These ways that suggest it is a panacea. We can finally do it. We have the technology, we can make him better. And it turns out absolutely terrible, like, almost diabolically bad. And were this plan to be implemented, it seems rather obvious that that is the territory that we would be headed towards. I would say one other thing really briefly, and I don't want to go on about this, but I am not some sort of squish, but I am someone who is sufficiently kind of frustrated by the whole of the Israeli Palestinian circumstance that I'm still not at a place where I can use language like genocide or ethnic cleansing and feel very comfortable with how kind of aptly it fits. And that's not because I don't see things in the conflict that I find intensely disturbing and concerning, but just the conflict around those words and phrases. Kind of like the open air prison thing is so hot that it oftentimes just seems to obscure the really salient details about just the most important attributes of the entire ordeal, which. The word intractable is always the one that comes to mind here. And I just don't know that there is one that's more apt. It feels like a situation that we are Kind of destined to see revisit like every couple of months and years. And that whenever we have some kind of calm here, it'll only be an interregnum between flare ups and it's frustrating to have to talk about something even only occasionally that feels so hopeless and inevitably terrible. So yeah, it's frustrating that this is what is being generated by the United States. I am hopeful that this would never be implemented because it would almost certainly be disastrous.

[Isaac Saul]

I mean, there's also just the reality of like the implication here, which is that there is no plan for post war Gaza. I mean they don't have, if this is it, they don't have one and they never had one and Israel doesn't have one and the United States doesn't have one. And that's been one of my issues with the, I think the frameworks of like where we've been after the first few months of the October 7 response pass, which was like, okay, you're gonna do this thing until Hamas is gone, even though destroying them seems like a squishy thing that I don't really know how you define that. And then what? And there's never been an answer. And the gap that that has left. A lot of the harshest critics of Israel have said the answer's obvious. They're going to ethnically cleanse the Strip, they're going to remove the people who live there and they're going to take it back and make it Israeli territory. And Israel has used to deny that that that's what they were going to do and now they don't and they let these plans get flooded into the ethereum and it's like, oh yeah, that seems like what they're gonna do. And that is the plan. And it raises questions about the fundamental premise of the war, which is like, ensure the Palestinian people are no longer being ruled by Hamas and make sure Israel's not under threat from terrorists who hate them that live next door to them. Which I think is a totally reasonable goal.

[Camille Foster]

Yep.

[Isaac Saul]

But if like you do this thing where you just end up reoccupying the territory and then taking it for yourselves, that answers a lot of questions about why a war that could have ended six months ago has continued to go on. And I think, like to me, a lot of the details that come out in these stories affirm my priors and my kind of worst and most hopeless thoughts about the conflict and about Israel to like, it just sort of builds. Some of this builds on some of the stuff that I already hold. I think.

[Ari Weitzman]

There's, I think we, I don't want to come back to this idea about language because I do think it's a hot topic thing. When we talk about ethnic cleansing, that's another one of those terms that when we decide to use it or not to, people get really fixated on historical analogies and saying whether or not one's worse than the other better. And it tends to like divert us away from the situation rather quickly. So it's just, it's kind of frustrating that, like, we have to have that in the back of our minds, like, okay, what do we call this? What's the right word to say? When really the thing is, if we want to just say it the long way. And the long way is the United States is developing or has developed somewhat a plan involving Israel that will see or cause the expulsion, voluntary or otherwise, of Gazans from the Strip for the purpose of development for an international community that may or may not include the people who currently live there. You can say that is the ethnic cleansing or not. Sounds like it to me. But forget the term. Does that sound like a good plan? Like who's, who's the person who's an objective observer of this and saying, yeah, that sounds like a reasonable solution. You can have your hate for Hamas and your visceral reaction to October 7th. I think that's universal. But it's another one of those instances of we're going to use something that was so horrifying to justify anything we want. There's going to be a line. And if this isn't your line, what is your line?

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, I do think, I mean, Camille, I saw you sort of scoff at the Hamas. Universal hatred of Hamas being universal.

[Camille Foster]

Well, I wish it were the case that it were universal.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, I would think we're beyond that for sure. Yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

All right, I can retract that. I think, I think for people who are pro Israel anyway, a distaste or dislike or hatred of Hamas is on the present.

[Camille Foster]

And it just feels like it should be that way for people who are pro Palestinian as well. I think that that's actually of the many things about the kind of prevailing approach to discussing this circumstance. It's hard to even call it a conflict because it's so weird. The fact that they aren't as animated and outraged at that. It's not a government kleptocracy is frustrating. And the talk of a two state solution that doesn't ever really get around to explaining how you deal with that completely untenable political reality. Is as frustrating to me as like a Gaza lago project. And unfortunately that's actually as close to a kind of official plan as you get from people who are quote unquote on the other side of this. And I don't think I say quote unquote because I don't think that's fair. I don't think it's reasonable. I don't think it's binary. I think it's far more complicated than that. Even if our, our debates about these things, not ours here, but generally globally, often ignore that fact that most people aren't raving lunatics.

[Ari Weitzman]

And just to clarify, because I think I understood you correctly, but just want to make sure you're saying that we should work with Hamas, like quote, we should work with Hamas to form a two taste solution is as close as you get for an opposing plan to this one. That's interesting.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, that's what it, that's what it feels like to me because I don't, I don't know that there's anything better being articulated. Who is the leadership that comes in the Palestinian Authority?

[Ari Weitzman]

Well, I don't know that that's actually, I mean we did hear about that in some of the statements that we got from last month like in early August from the world leaders who were pushing toward to recognize Palestine or Gaza as a state were saying we will do so I think was Isaac, maybe you remember, I think this was part of Canada's statement or Australia's. I think Canada's was saying we recognize a Gazan state or Palestinian state under the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. And, or that that was, that was like a, almost a precondition implied in one of them. And that's does invite the question of okay, but how? Because you have to make Hamas leave. And yeah, they aren't.

[Camille Foster]

And yeah, yeah. Who's going to ensure that outcome?

[Isaac Saul]

Nobody at this point. I mean literally nobody at this point. All right, well, I don't know how to transition.

[Camille Foster]

You can't. Listen, let's just give, let's just give in here. AI powered city crypto tokens for people asked to leave, invited to leave.

[Ari Weitzman]

Duncan cakes for everybody.

[Camille Foster]

Dutch pancakes for everybody. This is going to work out fine. We're probably overcomplicating this.

[Isaac Saul]

This transition is why people write in complaining about the grievances is how from the Gaza hellscape, horrifying story to let's complain about all our, you know, first world problems. But do we, do we want to respond to that criticism?

[Camille Foster]

We thought you kind of just did. And to the extent I have a grievance, it might be. It might be with that sentiment today.

[Ari Weitzman]

You'Re grieved, you share the sentiment or you're aggrieved that you hear the sentiment.

[Camille Foster]

I'm somewhat aggrieved that the sentiment has been not so much that it's been expressed, but that I can imagine there are a lot of people who share it, who feel like, well, you know, you're making these transitions, you're talking about a very serious issue, and then suddenly you're talking about something personal, closer to home, and kind of complaining about it and joking about it. And I think levity is actually really important and valuable. And the fact that we have to traffic in really difficult subject matter about conflicts that affect real people's lives that many oftentimes, and in this particular case we have deep personal entanglements in, and then we can transition from that to talking about something that is closer to home and perhaps a little funny. There's something good about that and virtuous and appropriate. And I think you could certainly do that in a caustic way where you're expressing or demonstrating kind of disregard for the more serious fare. But I don't think we've ever done that here. And I think while I have a bit of a difficult relationship with the project of complaining about things, because my mindfulness regimen is often informed by I'm thinking about things in a. I want to be present and I want to be affirmative and those are the things that I'm foregrounding. That's my only kind of resistance. But in general, there are things that are worth complaining about in our everyday life. If you stub your toe, you still get to complain about that at the same time that you're having a conversation about some matter of grave importance that actually threatens people's lives.

[Ari Weitzman]

Not at the same time, just that.

[Camille Foster]

I mean, if I'm having the conversation and I stub my toe, I might stop to actually grieve for myself and then return back to the other conversation.

[Isaac Saul]

I will say as just an observation, in my personal experience, I think the people that I've been around who spend the most time living in circumstances that, you know, my peers here in the first world would consider, you know, horrifying are the most likely to diffuse their daily struggles with humor and laughing and being self admonishing. And I've experienced that in really impoverished places in Mexico, in India, in Thailand, the Netherlands, Curacao. No. And also I have a friend, a dear friend of mine, who's done a lot of reporting in Iraq, and he always told me that the most striking thing about Iraqi people was their sense of humor. You just said they have the darkest, funniest sense of humor I've ever been around. Anytime something really truly awful happens, there's always like a sort of punchline or somebody making an edgy joke about it. And he always kind of respected that as, like a almost virtuous thing. So thanks for the green light to complain a lot, Camille. That's really nice of you. I'll start. I'll start. John, you can play the music for the grievances. I guess maybe Camille's is on the board already, unless he's got more to add.

[Camille Foster]

But that's it.

[Isaac Saul]

Go ahead, hit the song. The airing of grievances.

[Ari Weitzman]

Between you and me, I think your.

[Camille Foster]

Country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal.

[Isaac Saul]

All right, I'll start. Mine is actually semi serious, so maybe that'll help. It's not like a total laughable.

[Ari Weitzman]

We're virtuous now.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, virtuous. Complaining. Mine is daycare. Is starting daycare with a child. So this is a serious topic because it matters. But the grievance is just a. Nobody told me how emotionally difficult it would be. I was just sort of like. I mean, my wife tried to, but, you know, I ignored her. Calm down. It's going to be fine. He's going to be totally good. And then we drop him off for his first day of daycare, and we're just both immediately weeping. The thing that I knew about but was less prepared for was just like, it's just a complete dynamiting of all the things like the nap schedule and the feed routine and the timing, and now we're getting updates. And he's like, going from sleeping an hour and a half in the morning to sleeping for 30 minutes in the morning. And of course, he's napping differently in a room with seven other babies than, you know, around people he doesn't know. Than. He was comfortable at home in our perfectly manicured sound machine system that we've been napping him in. So that all sucks. And then it's just like this overwhelming sense of how is this the system that we've landed on? I mean, all credit. The people who do this work are unbelievable. They're incredible. Like the. The men and women working at his daycare center. But, you know, it's like we're paying for the village instead of having it organically, and society now is just built in a place where, like, if my wife wants to have a career and ambitions, which she does, which I love and support, and I want to do that in the. You know, which has been traditional and the norm forever, then we need somebody to take care of our kids. And, like, grandparents are sometimes close, sometimes far away, but not prepared to do that sort of thing five days a week. And, you know, we know our neighbors and we're friendly with them, but we're not, like, in some societal structure where we just, like, dump our kids there five days a week. And so instead, we do this thing where we pay exorbitant amounts of money to go leave him with a stranger for the day when he's 8 months old. And it's really hard. It's emotionally taxing. It seems like a fundamentally broken way for society to work. I don't have a better idea or a solution. But, yeah, we're living through it right now. We're in day two. Yesterday, he was totally fine. Today we plopped him down on the floor in there, and it's like he knew, like, we're about to leave for eight hours or six hours or whatever and did his little fuss. But, yeah, I don't know. It's a tough one. So that's my grievance, is I'm going through first week of daycare. Parents out there, you have advice, send it to me. I'm open. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how to get through this stage, but it's a tough one for sure.

[Ari Weitzman]

Camille, you have to respond to it. Cause I'm not gonna tell my story about dropping a puppy off at daycare. That's just gonna be so you can.

[Isaac Saul]

You can.

[Camille Foster]

Before I had a kid, I had the dog. He kind of felt like. He kind of felt like my own and actually taught me a bunch of lessons that made me a better dad. He suffered through things so my children wouldn't have to. They suffered through different things as a result. I think the best thing I can say, Isaac, and I've said something like this to you before, is let it burn. Like, actually lean into it, feel it, and do your grieving. And also be preposterously grateful that you have the opportunity to do this thing. And I think what I said to you yesterday was, this is the first of many times you will endure something where you're taking your kids someplace, you're leaving them on their own, and they begin this bizarre adventure of having a life like that does not involve you or at least portions of their life that doesn't involve you. And at the moment, you know, he's still becoming fully conscious and self aware. But at age 3, at age 7, at age 16, with driver's license, at age 18 again, when he goes off to university to the extent we still have such things, you will be experiencing this thing over and over and over again. I actually saw someone yesterday, I think it was George Packer at Thomas Chadington Williams event. And we were talking about one of his kids who just went off to college. And I said, how was that? And he said it was hard, it was hard. And I'm sure it's also rewarding and wonderful because you're seeing this manifestation of the quality of the work that you put in and the returns and dividend on it, I hope. But you're losing something and you ought to mourn it and feel it and be present for it because there will be a time when you miss all of this. So being aware of that in the moment and really feeling it is probably for the best. And I think even yesterday you had this response about like really wanting to be available to like be there and spend a little bit more time with him before you took him. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly right. That's what we do.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, I'm going to try and lean in. I think the one small change we already made that help is we stopped calling it daycare and we started calling it school. Like we're just taking him to school, we're dropping him off at school. It's a normal thing. He's gonna go hang out. It like evokes this feeling of like friends and teachers and learning, which is what it is. He's spending time with all these first like daycare. We're going to just like give him to other people who are gonna care for him while we abandon him. So yeah, our little language change I think helped a bit today. I don't know, I don't think it helped him at all, but it helped us.

[Ari Weitzman]

I haven't little small theory that I'm trying to nurse maybe a theoret. I. I don't think it's fully evolved yet. And see what you existing dads think about it. I think that there are ways that the. We're getting like a sort of dispersed village that support us in ways that are less obvious. Like there's no. Somebody's going to come in and watch my kid all the time and I'm going to go do all the work things that I need to support into the household. But I think there's, there's ways that people kind of step up to help share your other burdens. Like at work, I mean, it's. This is not a complaint, but, like, Isaac will need to pick up Omri from daycare or drop him off or something. Like, hey, I'm out for 30 or whatever. Like, can you guys just handle whatever task? And we're like, yeah, man, of course. And right now I know, like, my co coach for the University of Vermont Frisbee team, Jake, like, he just had his. He and his wife just had their second kid and he's been running fall tryouts for, like, 11, 12 years. And he's really good at it and he can't be there for fall tryouts and it's tough for him. And he's asking like, can you help and do this? And the dev team coaches are stepping up to do more. And we're like, yeah, of course, man. We got you. People send food. People step up and help you take care of stuff that's outside of your intimate daily routines. I think there's still a village there, is what I'm saying. And I don't think it's necessarily a terrible thing that there's an industry of professionals that have evolved standards for how to help you watch your child more rather than relying on, hopefully you have somebody nearby who you trust, because that's kind of hit or miss. Like that village to raise a child sort of implies that you have a stable village. And I don't think that's historically been constantly the case. So it could actually be a good thing that this is the way things are developing. I'm not sure if I'm committed to that, but it's something that I'm thinking. Thinking about.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah, I think it's a reasonable theory. I mean, I have a piece in the bank. I don't know when I'm going to publish it, but I've started outlining it already about just like, how having a kid has. What was the old viral construction. It is restored by faith in humanity. That was like the old. Every Buzzfeed article was like, these 10 pictures restored my faith in humanity. But it kind of has. I. All I heard before we had a child was like, this country hates kids. We're anti children. We're not equipped for kids. You know, we're like, the birth rate's plummeting and parenthood's so hard and stressful and all this stuff. And like, yeah, parenthood, it's hard in some ways, but it's also like, super simple in other ways. Just like, change this diaper. You know, at this age at least, you know, it's like, keep them happy. And like, you know, it gets more and more complex as you get older. I'm sure as they get older. But, like, we take this baby everywhere we go, people are just brimming with courtesy, generosity, advice. You know, they like old women in their 90s, pause walking down the street to look at him and marvel at him and tell us what a cute baby is, and, you know, what their kids were like. And, you know, then they give their one liner, like the, you know, the days are long, the years are short, whatever, and then like two minutes later we turn a corner and it's like a five year old kid is like, oh, my God, look at that baby and freaks out and wants to stop and look at him. And like, we just, you know, every flight we've taken, there's like half dozen people who ask us if we need any help carrying the stroller or getting a mat. It's like, people are so warm and generous and I'm like, oh, like, I totally bought this, like, online narrative that, like, I was like, bracing myself for. Like, we walk into a restaurant with a kid and like, the hostess is like, no children allowed. Like, we don't, you know, we don't have any high chairs. Get out of here. And it's like the complete opposite. Just, like, so much joy and love and whatever. And so, yeah, it's really given me a much more positive view about the society we live in. So to that end, like, I do recognize the village. I feel it a little bit. It just feels a little broken or weird to, like, dump your kid with these strangers who are strangers right now.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ari Weitzman]

Camille, do you have a. Do you have a grievance? Are you aggrieved? Did you pre grieve?

[Camille Foster]

Apart from the one I gave, not really. If I were to add any addendum to, it would only be that if one can publish a profoundly important work on man's search for meaning, and the context and setting for that book is a concentration camp, it feels appropriate to be able to kind of grieve for yourself and complain and to talk about meaning and purpose in virtually any context. I appreciated the earlier talk of people who live in desperate situations finding humor and love and manifesting those things in their own circumstances. And yeah, I think that that's powerful and worth remembering. That's all I will say. It's not much of a grievance.

[Ari Weitzman]

Well, I don't want to open up a whole new Debate here. But I think it. I don't know that it logically follows from that that, like, people who can be in the direst of situations can joke about. It means that people who aren't, who are talking about the dire situations can then do so in a way where it kind of presents a holistic product to the listener. I think that's the complaint. I mean, I feel I'm off air. I'm gonna complain anyway. But for the purposes of what we produce as a show, I don't know, I still think it has a purpose.

[Camille Foster]

Yeah, I think there are ways to be callous. I just don't think that we manage to do that ever. But perhaps I'm going to be overly generous to us, but I also try to be generous to everyone.

[Ari Weitzman]

Oh, yeah, Well, I like that.

[Isaac Saul]

All right, you're up. Take us.

[Ari Weitzman]

Okay. So 13 years ago, I was kayaking through Lake Powell in January, off season, I was taken to a little slot cannon on canyon, on a boat, by one of the speedboat captains. He was the only person on the lake that day, which meant when he left, I was the only person on the lake that day. And I was kayaking down this bizarre alien landscape. I don't know if you've ever been to Lake Powell. It's a flooded canyon, controversially so. But it. It's like a big crystal blue lake in the middle of what feels like Mars. It's incredibly rare and strange landscape to be alone in. And I remember when I was on the lake, feeling aggrieved by the fact that there was a distant hum of a power generating plant a few miles away, and I was thinking, where in the world could I possibly go where I could feel somewhat even more momentarily disconnected from society? And the lesson that I learned from that is there is nothing you can do ever. That is solitary. And there's things, no matter how far you go, you're wearing shoes that somebody produced for you, you ate a meal that somebody helped you pack. Whatever it is, there's something where you are serving or you're existing at the grace of the others around you. And that is germane to my grievance, which is with Google Docs, I wish it were the case that we could just produce Tango in a vacuum with no kind of tech reliances at all. I wish there was no greater ecosystem around us that we relied on. And yet when somebody makes a mistake for a software company that we use such that you click a button in Google Docs this whole week, you click a button and it just Locks up. You want to see the comments that people tagged you in? Tough. Now your screen's broken. Now you have to restart your whole browser. My fault. That's. That sucks. And I really wish that we weren't dependent on them, but we are. No company is an island. We're all attached to the main. And in this case, the attachment that we have is through Google. And they've got a death grip on this industry of collaborative simultaneous editing documents. And they are just getting progressively worse. And that's my grievance for the day.

[Isaac Saul]

I love it. I heard about this. There's this submersible called the Titanic that you could take into the ocean if you want to really get terrible.

[Ari Weitzman]

That's a terrible way of proving what I said wrong is that you're in something that somebody made for you to do that.

[Isaac Saul]

Yeah. That will also break and kill everybody on board, which just happened. I'm pretty sure. I just watched the Netflix documentary about that, and it blew my mind. All right, we gotta get out of here. We're way over time, fellas. I'm going tonight to. Well, I won't say it yet. No, this won't be out. I'm going tonight to the Free Press Amy Coney Barrett conversation, which I'm very excited about. So by the time people hear this, that'll be over. And I'm looking forward to talking about it next week on the podcast, because I'm going in. I will put my flag in the ground. I'm going into this believing that Supreme Court justices should not do interviews like this. I bought a ticket for it, and I'm going to watch, and I can't wait. But I'm interested if that opinion holds for me by the end of tonight, and maybe we can chat about that on the podcast next week. Hard Disagree.

[Camille Foster]

Hard Disagree. Hell of a day for the Free Press, too. Yeah.

[Isaac Saul]

No, yeah. Huge day for them. And I'm unbelievable. Get for Barry. I'm so happy for them. If we could get Amy Coney Barrett to come to a Tango Live event, I would, of course, do it. I just am not sure that that should be happening. But maybe that'll be a good, ripe discussion point for us next week. Yeah. All right. We've got to run, fellas. Great time, as always. I'll see you guys soon.

[Ari Weitzman]

Bye.

[Isaac Saul]

Later.

[Camille Foster]

Travel safe.

[Isaac Saul]

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Lowell. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman, with senior editor we will K Back and associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead Bailey, Saul, Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our [e-mail] only. Boost Mobile Boost Mobile will give you a free year of service. Free year when you buy a new 5G phone new 5G phone?

[Ari Weitzman]

Enough, but I'm your hype man. When you purchase an eligible device, you get $25 off every month for 12 months, with credits totaling one year of free service. Tax is extra for the device and service Plan online only.

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