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- [00:00]
Ad Host
A Better Help ad. Hold on one second. I just need to. What if you had a room where no one interrupts, no notifications, no expectations, just space to talk with? BetterHelp Therapy happens in a space that's yours. Visit betterhelp.com randompodcast for 10% off your first month of online therapy.
- [00:32]
Narrator/Promo Voice
48 million people in the United States are adolescents between the ages of 14 and 24. They're working, parenting, leading, sometimes all at once.
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Camille Foster
I'm balancing work and being a mom at the same time, and I'm still on track to graduate with my bachelor's next year.
- [00:51]
Narrator/Promo Voice
So what do today's young people need to truly thrive? Tune in to good things from Lemonada Media to hear the six part Thrive series.
- [01:01]
Ad Host
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- [02:38]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Coming up, Trump gets revenge on the Indiana gop. We talk about Camille and billionaires and CNN with Abby Philipp and then a long conversation about ChatGPT's fact check of my article from Friday. It's a very good episode. Hope you guys enjoy it. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Suspension of the Rules podcast, A place where we discuss the week's happenings in United States politics with, I hope, level heads and some reason and nuance. Camille Foster has glasses. So that's the breaking news on our side. I do.
- [03:31]
Ari Weitzman
I'm not wearing.
- [03:32]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Come here. I'm getting.
- [03:32]
Camille Foster
So wait, what do we do? I feel like we almost immediately zagged. You're trying out a new catchphrase and then it's just, oh, also, this guy's got glasses. What a nerd.
- [03:41]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Camille took his glasses off in the. Before my intro. They're not even on. Put your glasses back on, man. How are you gonna do a show without wearing them?
- [03:50]
Ari Weitzman
They're for reading.
- [03:50]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Do you wanna talk a little bit about how you made this choice for all of our podcast listeners who won't be able to see your face? And we'll just be listening to, I would say, Camille's look. It's kind of like a. It's like a sweet sort of 80s style. They're like a little oversized kind of. There's a whole vibe going on here.
- [04:09]
Camille Foster
Yeah.
- [04:10]
Host - Isaac Sowell
You didn't go just traditional dorky glasses like I have. You add some fun.
- [04:14]
Ari Weitzman
I did not. Yeah. Well, apparently I am both near and farsighted, and this has been a problem for a while. I was not completely aware of it. I knew I was sort of squinting. I would complain occasionally about things being hard to read, and my wife insisted just go to the doctor and get checked out. And I did discover that I no longer have 2020 vision, which I've had most of my life. And I bought two pairs of glasses. And I bought these primarily because the woman at the store, she was just so nice, and she kept saying, you can totally pull that off. So I hope I am, in fact, pulling it off right now. But I only need these to read. I do expect that I may change the lenses to the progressive ones because I need both things. So we'll see. I'm still getting used to it. Still having headaches, and I don't know. I don't know.
- [05:00]
Camille Foster
We're gonna do, like, the podcast in reverse this week. I guess we're gonna start with some US grievance about needing glasses for the first time.
- [05:07]
Host - Isaac Sowell
No, this is good. We got. We're really trying to promote our YouTube channel. And now if you want to see whether Camille can pull the glasses off or not. You have to go to our YouTube channel to find out. On YouTube. That's the quickest way. And then in the comments, leave your judgment about how Camille's glasses look and then we can all discuss together as one big family. All right, listen, guys, there's a ton of news here, important things here. I think primarily at the top of mind for me right now is what's happening in Indiana, or I should say what just happened in Indiana. So we've talked a lot about gerrymandering on the show. It has been a subject of scorn for me. We've talked about this huge gerrymandering battle that Trump set off with redistricting in Texas. One of the states that didn't really take the bait was Indiana, where a group of GOP state legislators stood up to Donald Trump. I mean, I don't wanna frame it as them versus they stood up to him. They said, we have principles. There were some division. There was enough people on the side of not redistricting, not gerrymandering, that Indiana, which was an opportunity for Republicans to pick up a bunch of lawmakers, a bunch of Republican lawmakers, did not redraw their maps. Well, Trump promised revenge and he said that he would make them pay for this. And on Wednesday, well, Tuesday, I guess into Wednesday, he exacted that revenge. And six of the seven state legislators, or six of the eight, I should say state legislators who sort of helped block this from happening, got primaried by Trump backed representatives, Trump backed politicians, and five of them, I guess. No, now it's six of them have lost. One race was undecided, but I think has been decided and maybe the Trump backed challenger didn't win. And, and then still seeing too close to call. So, yeah, still seeing too close to call. Okay, so Trump needed four of them basically to swing the vote the way that he wanted. He's gotten six already. I think the Axios headline here described the situation pretty well. Trump Revenge Tour Steamrolls Indiana Holdouts. President Trump exacted retribution Tuesday on a group of Indiana Republican state legislators who blocked his push to redraw the state's congressional map. Trump's political operation targeted eight GOP state senators for defeat in their primaries. And by late Tuesday, six of those legislators were defeated, one survived, and one was locked in a race that was too close to call. We've talked a lot about the President's weak polling numbers, about the fractured support in the Republican caucus, about MAGA kind of all pointing fingers at each other over the Iran war. This is a sign, I think the first sign we've gotten in some time, but a clear signal of Trump's power and I think capture of the party still, even in a moment where I think he's politically weak and even in a moment where he's pursuing something that I don't think is particularly politically popular. So it feels significant enough to dedicate some time talking about it. And I'm curious just to throw a jump ball here to the two of you, what your guys first impressions are learning about the election results and the fact that Trump is going after these GOP lawmakers for not helping greenlight his redistricting Bush.
- [08:45]
Camille Foster
I mean, I definitely have thoughts here, but I think before I get into my wider ideas about Indiana, I just want to throw it back maybe to both of you and say, like, did we actually need to be reminded that Trump has complete control of the Republican Party? Like, I don't think this was the. I think maybe you're riffing on the way that people phrased it or framed it in the media, but I don't think we are really surprised to see that Trump has control and it wasn't like the first thing we've seen in a while. I mean, nobody's checking him in Congress. So there's been absence of challenges from the right for a long time in that regard. Like, is this new to you?
- [09:25]
Host - Isaac Sowell
I think, I guess if I were gonna make the case that maybe Trump's grip was loosening a little bit, I would say there seemed to be a good bit of chatter about Republicans stepping up at the 60 day mark of the Iran war and doing something kind of limit his power there. I mean, we hit the mark. They haven't yet, but they're still talking a big game about the fact that they need the administration to come forward and, and give them evidence for a continued operation there. Of course, Trump is simultaneously trying to end the war there. I think the dynamics of the inner party fighting and Trump going after Megyn Kelly, going after Tucker Carlson, going after Candace Owens, I think that to me points to a caucus or base of support that has enough internal division that maybe Trump isn't the ultimate truth Sayer isn't the final voice on things anymore. And then I would just say, you know, the, the larger picture of the midterms always creates an interesting dynamic where Trump is both a kingmaker, but also Republicans who are running in districts where they're purple voters and they have to navigate the Trump of it all are forced into creating some space from him and it's sort of a particularly sensitive time where even for somebody as bombastic as Trump and who can be as crass and as instinct driven, he knows that he has to play it a little bit carefully. There's some tact and how he navigates standoffs with other members of Congress who are Republicans, who are running. So, you know, for instance, if he wants to keep his Senate majority and a senator comes out and says something negative about him because they're running in a purple ish state, he can't just go on offense and attack them without thinking about it because he doesn't want to end up with a Democrat taking their seat in a few months. If I were going to make the case, there's the dynamics, I would say I've been like, thinking about and watching, but fair point to kind of question the premise. I mean, those are all a little bit flimsy and rhetorical. I don't know how much of that is hard dollars, votes, influence in the Republican Party. And it's possible that that's just, you know, me seeing trends that are just trends and not really concrete things.
- [12:02]
Camille Foster
And that's it. Like, I think the thing that you're painting there is reasons to question and say, well, maybe things are starting to change, but there's nothing that's shown definitively. This grip is loosening. I think that's the first response that I'd have.
- [12:16]
Ari Weitzman
I mean, I think in a state election with incumbents, the expectation has to be, well, I mean, these people ought to be pretty safe. Like they have a relationship with these voters. They've been in office for a while. They stood on principle, they explained why they wanted to do this. In a number of instances, he looked at the reporting about these stories. I mean, some of these people, the guy who's Spencer Deary, who's in this really tight race now, too close to call, even the folks who are giving money to and supporting these other candidates are quoted in the New York Times by NPR saying, he's a really good guy. He seems to really care about his job. It is a very strange thing to see the president of the United States weighing in on a state Senate race and ensuring that his preferred candidate wins there. It smacks of a kind of extraordinary pettiness that I suppose is kind of vintage Trump. But at a moment when he's pretty embattled, he's got serious problems internationally. Gas prices are up. There's all sorts of consternation with respect to how the midterms will eventually actually turn out for them once you're in the general, at a minimum, there's a kind of cloud of suspicion with respect to just how much influence the president really has. And I suspect that's probably why a number of these people were willing to buck him when he insisted that they take these actions because they perhaps didn't think he would take it. So far, it really does seem like a very strange thing for the President of the United States to be focusing his attention to at the moment.
- [13:50]
Camille Foster
I think, though, that said, I think I can understand why Trump would do this. And I'll take a step back and let's look at the theater here from the outside and say we're people that generally don't want to go into this show. Like we are three people that have been nothing but critical of the gerrymandering wars. So nothing that I'm about to say is meant to sponsor the notion of do what you need to do to get your districts to go to your political party. That's not my philosophy here. But if you were the top of one of these political parties and you're playing this game anyway and you're trying to maximize the number of seats that you're getting in the midterms in the next election, it is in your interest to try to make a signal of deterrence to the next states that might be considering pushing back against redistricting their states ahead of the next election. And for Trump in Indiana, it's kind of House money. Like a lot of these people. Yeah, you would expect them to be safe as incumbents in their state districts, but you also wouldn't expect that they would be legitimately losing their seats to Democrats this go around. Probably the people that are going to be replacing these outgoing state representatives will also be from the Republican Party. I think that's a safe thing for Trump to assume. And even if it's not everybody, it's going to still be the majority. So for Trump, it's a, it's, it's nothing but upside there. And I also am not sure how much it's costing him in terms of personal attention and capital. I think he can do this kind of thing through fiat and intimidation and then move on. And then the last thing that I'll add is like, I do feel it's a kind of tragic situation for these state representative is not for just the obvious reasons, but because when you go back and you put this in context, Indiana was the first state to make a decision after Texas decided that they would do this precedent breaking mid decade redistricting to that point, I think it was an open question whether any state would follow suit. So Indiana was the next over the wall. And they said, we aren't going to. And we're going to draw a line in the sand. Who's with me? And they turn around and it's just them. And I think that sucks. Like, they're. These people are just getting shot in the back for something that at the time seemed like a reasonable, principled stand to make. In that way, we could say, like, we're having this discussion earlier. Oh, reading the tea leaves. This was them standing up to Trump and Trump shooting back. And clearly still as dominance of the party. I think a better read is just that this was terrible timing for them. They were saying at the time, we want to draw the line. We're not going to do this. And then California's like, oh, yes, we are. And then everybody rushed their corners and said, well, this is what we're doing now, so we have to fight. Now. We're taking stock of who decided to fight and who didn't. Indiana didn't step up when it was their time. You know, now the leader of the party is going to give you retribution. I think it's kind of. I can see the reason why everybody acted the way that they did. And if anything, if I'm drawing my blame pyramid and saying, who's responsible for this? Ultimately, it's still Texas. Like, they're the ones who started redistricting. If we didn't do this in the first place, then we wouldn't be having this conversation at all. And clearly, like, Trump still has his. You know, he made his decisions, Newsom made his decisions. Democratic Party leaders, Republican Party leaders all contributed. But now that we're playing this ugly game, this is the way it's played, and that sucks.
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Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah, I'm not going to tolerate any Texas slander. I blame Trump.
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Camille Foster
Is that slander? Is it slander, though? Or is it. Is it legitimately a good point?
- [17:26]
Host - Isaac Sowell
I think the thing that stands out to me is the sort of remarkable new front this strategy represents. I mean, if you were a state senator in the Republican Party in a state like Indiana, where there's not a whole lot of Democrat v. Republican Party tension, you now have to consider what it means if you get the attention of the White House and what they might do about it. And to your point, Ari, I mean, I also find this whole episode tragic. And I feel for the state senators in Indiana who stood their ground and stood on principle and stopped something that I think objectively well, subjective, I guess, subjectively. But in my opinion very clearly was a good thing that they did. I mean, they decided we're not going to drag our state into this national political fight. We're just going to stick to our principles and do the right thing. They get punished for it, they lose their jobs for it, they're going to get replaced by these sycophantic, you know, Trump tapped GOP senators, state senators. I could see a world actually where Democrats replicate a strategy like this in the future. It would not surprise me at all if in the post Trump world we see more of this kind of top down. Democrats look around, they find the squeaky wheels on the bus. They, the people who they feel like are impeding or undermining their messaging and they take them out and they spend political capital and money and time and focus with the intraparty fight. Because Republicans are kind of have gone through and now gotten to the other side of this intraparty war that Democrats are going to have to have at some point. They haven't had it, but they're going to have to have it. And there's a tug of war and there's a push and pull. But I think in the case of Trump, he has sort of demonstrated that one of the better ways to navigate it is that the people in the party who have the power impose their power and they make sure that they have loyalty and they make sure that down the ballots and through Congress they have people in position who are going to rubber stamp their agenda. I don't think that's healthy for democracy. But I have a hard time believing a Gavin Newsom or a Kamala Harris or even state governors, a Josh Shapiro aren't watching this and thinking to themselves, if I'm ever sitting in the White House, this is a good approach to keeping people in line and to making sure that I'm not being undermined by people in state government or low ranking members of the House or Senate. And I worry deeply about that proliferation and I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the next Democratic administration in Congress. I think we'll definitely see it in the next Republican administration. So I'm thinking a bit about that.
- [20:48]
Camille Foster
You could even see it right now, right? Like if there's a Democratic state like Illinois that's, you know, making a decision whether or not to gerrymander and they don't can very easily imagine, you just don't assign like a president's name to it. But a DNC chair taking stock and saying these are the People that didn't, however they'll phrase it, and this is obviously hypothetical, so this is a potshot. But these people didn't defend democracy when it was their turn. So we're going to throw them out of the woods. They're the reason we lost.
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Ari Weitzman
Right.
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Camille Foster
Like I could see that happening.
- [21:18]
Ari Weitzman
I do wonder though about the kind of pragmatic approach here, because some of these legislators were saying part of the reason to not do this is because we worry that it's unconstitutional with respect to the state constitution, but two or at least violates the intent of the state constitution. But the second thing is that from a pragmatic standpoint, this doesn't really look good. It looks like we don't think we can win straight up and we're trying to game the system. And it's certainly the case that Republican voters in these primaries don't seem to be willing to punish that sort of thing. But I don't know that it won't have consequences in the general election. I don't know that that won't be a talking point for some people who are running for office. And I certainly know that it resonates with me. And I've talked to other people, I've talked to regular civilians and I think that there are people who are genuinely concerned about this and would like to see some sort of reforms in these directions. So it's not quite obvious to me, and perhaps I'm just being an optimist here, that this is it and here we are forever war. Maybe this begins to put a sufficiently bad taste in people's mouths that they kind of back away. I'm not at all certain that that will happen. I haven't seen clear evidence that that will happen. But I can at least hold out some hope that that will be enough to kind of put a bit of a break on this.
- [22:46]
Camille Foster
I think you're right. I mean, I agree with you. I think that's gonna happen. I just worry that it won't happen till 2030 when it's time for the actual census based redistricting to happen. And then in that time, the thing that I keep coming back to is who are these people gonna be that represent these gerrymandered districts that are just coming into try to score partisan points up until the next general election and how are they going to hold onto their seats? Like when we get to a point where we're after the next general and we're in a new political landscape and you came on to serve one purpose as a political animal, then when redistricting happens in 2030, I mean, my hope is that we'll redraw it in a way where everybody's going to put their arms down and we're going to go to a more saner, normal. But if that happens, then my view is I think we're heading towards that optimistic future that you're hoping for. But before then, I think we're gonna have a circus in Congress. My pessimistic take is that after this next election, if you thought that you saw a ridiculous Congress for the last decade, you ain't seen nothing yet. I really pessimistically think these people that are gonna be coming in aren't gonna be anywhere better than what we saw the last couple of years. Happy to be wrong about that, but that's my impression.
- [24:00]
Host - Isaac Sowell
I do think actually you're sort of scratching at something that's pretty interesting, which is the way a national political strategy translates at the local level. And I mean, to even put a finer technical point on what you're saying, we know that in midterm congressional midterm races, you only get the highest of high propensity voters that show up, especially in primaries. And that's like even more true when you talk about who's actually casting ballots in local elections. And the super high propensity voter is going to understand what just happened here and they're going to know, you know, in a few years that the person that they, whether they voted for this person to come in or not, whether they vote, as you put it, for this political animal to come in who served this purpose or not, they're going to be able to look back on the last couple of years and think about, A, whether that was a good decision or not, and then B, the people who didn't vote for them are going to remember who they are and how they got there. And that part of this does interest me. It is an interesting wrinkle. Maybe this is a good use case, Ari, for you to put something on your calendar for, you know, two years from now. That's one of your. My favorite things you do is anytime we have one of these conversations, you set a calendar reminder for us to revisit a story and then it pops up. And it's always interesting. But this would be, to me, a great use case is in two years, what's happened to these members of the Indiana State legislature and how have their political aspirations survived in the post Trump world, which we won't be in then if all things go to plan. But it'll be around that time that it really comes up again. We'll be right back after this quick break.
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Narrator/Promo Voice
48 million people in the United States are adolescents between the ages of 14 and 24. They're working, parenting, leading, sometimes all at once.
- [26:14]
Camille Foster
I'm balancing work and being a mom at the same time and I'm still on track to graduate with my bachelor's next year.
- [26:21]
Narrator/Promo Voice
So what do today's young people need to truly thrive? Tune in to good things from Lemonada Media to hear the six part Thrive series.
- [26:30]
Ad Host
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- [27:10]
Camille Foster
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- [27:12]
Ad Host
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- [27:38]
Host - Isaac Sowell
All right, well, we've got a lot of other stuff that we have to get to today. I think before we jump into our last segment of the day where I want to spend some time talking about this Trump corruption piece, which I think has been sort of the center of the Tangle universe the last week. We're going to introduce a new segment that I'm calling I went on Abby Phillips and I went on Abby Phillips and everybody got mad at me. Featuring Camille Foster. This is gonna be one of my new favorite segments that we do on the show. For those of you who don't know, Camille is a he's a regular contributor over at cnn. I guess not a contracted contractor, but he appears. Yeah. A regular guest, we'll say on cnn. No contractual outlook.
- [28:25]
Ari Weitzman
I go as many places as I can.
- [28:26]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Just don't say that.
- [28:28]
Camille Foster
We'll clip that.
- [28:29]
Host - Isaac Sowell
You're ours. We own you, man. You're our guy. You don't get around. You're tango and fifth column. That's it.
- [28:36]
Ari Weitzman
Well, I go, I fly the Flag. I fly the flag. Yeah.
- [28:39]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah. So Camille goes on CNN under the Tangle banner pretty regularly as a guest, most often on Abby Phillip's show. That's Philip apostrophe S. The show belongs to her. I'm not mispronouncing her last name. And yeah, Camille did the dumbest thing you can do in this political environment, which is defend billionaires. Camille, you wanna talk a little bit about what happened, and then I have some thoughts, actually. I think this is a really interesting topic. I wanna explore it a little bit.
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Camille Foster
Okay.
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Ari Weitzman
Well, I mean, it's a fairly innocent thing in my estimation. There is this thing called the Met Gala. Most of us have seen the fancy people going to this party. $100,000 per table this year was a little more controversial. Not because there was politics there, because there's frequently politics on display at the Met Gala, but because Jeff Bezos was there, and Jeff Bezos was one of the honorary chairs. And a number of people didn't like that because he is perceived to be, one, a tech oligarch. Two, exceptionally rich. Three, Trump adjacent in some way. Certainly the decision he made to kind of change up the opinion section over at the Washington Post didn't earn him much applause and created a bit of a firestorm for the Washington Post, who saw a number of people cancel their subscribers subscriptions. My suspicion there is that there's a bit of whipsawing because the Washington Post kind of doubled down on the whole democracy dies in darkness opposition posture that they adopted during the first Trump administration. And during the second Trump administration, there was that moment where they rather famously decided, yeah, we're not running any sort of. We're not doing an opinion page endorsement of anybody, even though a lot of the people on the opinion page wanted to endorse Kamala. So some resentment towards Jeff Bezos. And my take here was it is a fancy party for exceptionally rich people. They're giving money to charity. I'm not certain it matters. I'll say it succinctly. Billionaires are people too. And I was surprised to see how many people online were vehemently outraged by this perspective. And I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised because we are in a populist moment, and there may be a kind of left and a right wing version of this, and perhaps certain people on the right wouldn't attack Jeff Bezos, but certainly expressing a sentiment like that is perhaps a little less popular than it was to the extent it was ever popular. But I just try to see people as people irrespective of the size of their bank account.
- [31:15]
Host - Isaac Sowell
I'm so fascinated with this debate. I actually have been kicking around this idea and have drafted a piece that has not yet been published exploring the question of whether billionaires should exist or not. Which is this whole era of discourse. Excuse me, this whole genre of discourse. And in the era that we're living in. I understand the question. I mean it's not about does every billionaire deserve the death penalty or something. It's like if we are functioning in a. Just to make the point that I don't think it's necessarily always for a lot of people about this sort of vehement hatred and view that all billionaires are evil. It's more like if we have a capitalist system that is producing billionaires in this moment of economic inequality, is that bad and should be correct for it. And I think that's a reasonable question to ask. I mean, I don't think I get there fully, but I understand why the question gets asked. And I think what's really interesting, this is the thing that I, at least my hobby horse, I kind of wanted to talk about a little bit and I'm interested to hear your guys thoughts. Here is the billionaires who we know are a caricature of these evil rich types. I mean there are over, I think There are over 1,000 billionaires in America. It may even be more than that now. I think most Americans know three or four of them. It's Elon Musk, it's Mark Zuckerberg, it's Jeff Bezos. We talk about them ad nauseam over and over again. I guess there are maybe like the Warren Buffetts of the world too are up there who have, who have household name recognition. And in the process of exploring this piece, I kind of just went and looked at who those billionaires were and what they've done and what kind of companies they've made and what sort of ethical questions swirl around them. And the truth is like Elon and Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, like these people are generally known to us because they've done things that are either really, really consequential or really controversial. We know less about like the family that helped fund Pfizer and biotech's vaccines that they, you know, helped distribute and save the world from a pandemic. And they got became billionaires doing that. We know less about the Chobani founder who gives out these like above market wages and produces this healthy product and also started like a whole side business providing tents and housing to refugees. We know less about the guy who started Dell Computers and has basically flown under the radar. Just like being a good, normal person and creating a really successful business and you know, not being in the news all the time. Like I, I think it is a straw man and I think it's an unfair position to take to point to two or three people in a group of thousands and frame them as being fundamentally evil and unethical. And I actually think, you know, the Adam Grant position here, which I don't know how familiar you guys are with his work, but he wrote a whole book about givers and takers and the idea that the most successful people in the world are givers. They're not takers. It's sort of this misconception that you have to be really selfish and self interested and corrupt in order to climb to the top. And it's just not true. Like if you look at the most successful people, a lot of them got there by being generous and thoughtful and creating ethical businesses. And that's how you often survive in this sort of insane, capitalistic, competitive society that we live in. So I don't mean to, you know, I know to some, some people are going to hear this and just their skin's going to crawl at this idea of defending billionaires. As you said, Camille, and I get the ire, I really do in this era of economic inequality. I feel very tapped into that populist sentiment. Most of my friends and family share it on the right and the left. I get it, I feel it, I empathize with it. But I'm just not ready to dismiss every person because they're rich. They're like, there's good poor people, there's bad poor people, there's good rich people, there's bad rich people people. I think it's just like the, the fact that somebody has a bunch of money is not a sign of some immoral or deficient character. But we talk about it that way a lot, which bothers me. So on the whole I kind of land in your camp. That's my long monologue on the rich. I'd love to hear your guys thoughts or feedback on this kind of thesis I'm playing with.
- [36:21]
Camille Foster
Made a couple pivots so far. So I think we started with Camille talking about this. The like the reasons to criticize Bezos and his position at the Met gala. And I think those criticisms were disconnected from his status as being a billionaire or his wealth. The ones that he listed, anyway, they're about his management of the Washington Post And I think it's fair to criticize somebody for things that you would disagree with, in my opinion. Like, I have a very hard time gathering up enough, like, care about it. Like, if I don't like what Bezos is doing with the Washington Post, I can read something else. Like, it doesn't like, you know, I might say a piece about it and move on. I know that my feelings are tempered a good bit by having a platform that can speak to hundreds of thousands of people. So that's a position of privilege to feel that way. But I think it's, you know, one thing to say I'm mad at Bezos for having money. It's another for the things that he's doing. And then the second pivot. I think when Isaac, you picked up the baton. We're talking about billionaires. I think the best criticism of billionaires isn't if you reach this status and there's some arbitrary line that you reach, it means that you are necessarily an unethical person. I think the best criticism, as I understand it, at least I know there are multiple that you can attack from. The one that I think is the better attack angle is there is a system in place that allows for an enormous amount of wealth disparity. And it is. It is the system that is inequitable rather than the person who is benefiting from it. And generally, caveat. Caveat. Most of the people who, when you have their net worths listed, they are tallying up their assets. There's no Scrooge McDuck pool of money that's just not being sent out into the community and it's being hoarded. It's like you have a name attached to an ownership stake of something that is producing value, and people are engaged in that machinery, and it's generally productive. And then someday you may be able to sell it to get a cash monetary reward from it. And that's what wealth looks like. And on one hand, like, you know, that mitigates it a good bit. On the other, if we're able to set up wealth management system whereby one person can accrue many billions and while others who work in the employ of that person are barely able to survive. And there's something that you can criticize about that system and then on the other hand, like, yes, thousands of billionaires. But when you go down the list of the people like, who they are, at the top, you've got tech moguls. You also have people who are inheriting family wealth. I had to look up who Jacqueline and John Mars are like, at number 22 of the Forbes billionaire list, and they just inherited the Mars fortune of this begone candy bar that, like, people don't generally eat anymore and like the. The Walton family, like Thomas Frist and family, like, these are people. A lot of these families inherit this wealth. And it's fair to say there's a system that we can criticize whereby it's easy to inherit wealth when you aren't sufficiently, like, taxing it. And that's a very, very fraught. I said the T word and I don't want to derail us, but it's very fraught to tax wealth. I don't have the solution for how to do that. I think a lot of the. The ways that a lot of the solutions are problematic themselves. But it's just to say, I don't think that it's necessarily the case that these Mars siblings that I mentioned. I don't know anything about John Mars. I don't know. I'm sure he's probably a fine person. I don't really know. I'm not going to cast dispersions at the man, but to say that he can be sitting at a net worth of $42 billion for something that, you know, he inherited, whereby he's at the position of the head of a company, it does seem like something you can criticize. And I think that's. That's the better attack angle for it.
- [40:11]
Ari Weitzman
Yeah, I mean, I think you. No, go ahead, go ahead.
- [40:15]
Host - Isaac Sowell
No, I was gonna. I was gonna ask. I mean, I. I am very interested in sort of your perspective on the economics question here of, like, what does it mean for society that billionaires exist and is this something we should be okay with? I mean, I have an inclination, knowing you, about how you'd answer that question, but I'm interested to hear it from you.
- [40:37]
Ari Weitzman
I mean, I'm an unashamed free marketer. I think incentives matter a great deal. Ari is precisely right. Most of that wealth is tied up in various companies that they own, equity holdings. You would have to liquidate those assets and companies. It is extremely complicated. That's not to say that they don't have a lot of loose assets that they could put their hands on if you were to try to go after them in some sort of confiscatory way. But they may also leave the country. There are lots of reasons why that might be a bad idea and create all sorts of adverse incentives. But it also just strikes me that if someone is doing something exceptionally good in the marketplace and they earn a fortune doing it. That's probably something that should be rewarded for all of the criticism that one might want to hurl at Elon, and I've got plenty of my own. Is the case that SpaceX, Tesla, now Neuralink, these are companies that have done some pretty profound things in terms of both producing jobs, producing goods that have made people's lives better. Certainly what he's done for the space industry has been revolutionary. If he makes a fortune doing good, I am kind of all for that. I think that we have two mechanisms for organizing a society, the economic means and the political means. We use the political means plenty, but that requires force. And the economic means is we have a market economy and people build things, they trade those things, and sometimes they hand their assets down to their children. We also have estate taxes. So there are regimes for taking some of that wealth. And sometimes states overcorrect and many states have tried. California is right now actively attempting to raise those taxes. And we're seeing some of the consequences with people leaving the state and threatening to leave. We see a similar sort of situation in New York. I just think that there is the concern I have about the current populist moment is that there is a great deal of concern about the kind of present allocation of wealth and not nearly enough concern about what it means for America to continue to be a place that can create new prosperity and new opportunities. And those are two fundamentally different sort of things. And I do think that kind of having this adversarial, fear based economy is something that makes me pretty concerned about the likelihood that our politics are going to be fruitful and that we are kind of still being ambitious and thinking affirmatively about the things that we can build together as opposed to just, well, they've got too much, so we need to kind of redistribute it. There's something about that that has never sat right with me and hence my particular political inclinations.
- [43:28]
Camille Foster
I want to ask you something, Camille, because I don't have the Fox Business credentials, I'm not an economist by trade, and you've got some head start on me when it comes to analyzing economics and businesses. But when I look at the potential landscape here, something I'm curious about is labor unions have kind of gone down in popularity over time, especially trade unions. And the focus that I hear a lot from unions that are speaking and are really present is about raising wages. And I'm wondering why I don't hear about unions demanding equity. Because if a lot of billionaires get their wealth through having Equity in private holdings, then why wouldn't the class of people who work and provide the muscle for these companies demand equity? Is that something that happens that I don't hear about, or what's the complicating measures there? And before you answer, just a quick caveat because John, our producer, told me this in a chat. Mars still owns a bunch of candy bars, so I'm aware of that. We don't need comments about that. I'll send it back to Camille for the question that I asked about labor equity. That's something I'm genuinely curious about.
- [44:41]
Ari Weitzman
I think that's a, that's a fascinating, a fascinating point. I'm not really sure. I do know that obviously a lot of the debates are often around pensions, but those pensions are usually cash that is invested in the market and then is paid out to you. So having some ownership in the company for which you've spent perhaps decades working by the time that you retire and having that be part of your personal wealth, I think that's a really interesting idea. I think the reality, though, is that most people over the course of their career are going to work at a lot of different places. And part of the reason for unions not being nearly as popular as they were, or at least as commonplace as they were, is, is because the dynamics have just changed in terms of the nature of our employment. The reality is that lots of people are working in the gig economy now, and that is perhaps part of the reason for our concerns about income inequality growing as they have in recent years. So, you know, these are complicated, thorny issues, but I think that's the important thing to keep in mind that they are in fact complicated and that there are defensible alternative perspectives here, as opposed to kind of the obviousness of the populist consensus like winning the day. However much the populist consensus on the left and the right does in fact seem to be winning the day.
- [46:04]
Camille Foster
There's a lot of complications to it. I think on one hand it's a reasonable gripe and I can understand why the populist convention is winning the day. It's kind of winning the day in my head. If I look around and I see a lot of wealth inequality, I think there's gotta be a way to fix it. And also knowing that for most people, the most, like almost all of their wealth, like physical wealth, non liquid wealth, is the real estate and home that they own and live in. And that seems really risky to have an economic system in place where a lot of people's most valuable Asset is the thing that they are, that supports their life and their livelihood. And that may fluctuate if the market changes for housing, if there's a way that there can be some popularized movement where people can have more actual equity in the places where they work and like in the towns where they live. And I don't know what that looks like. And I really, really wish I was a big brain economist that could have this big treatise that I could post to. Maybe somebody else already has that and I can read it. But like on one hand that's really compelling to me. And then on the other side, we're living in a time of great prosperity where if you're in like the second quartile, like the 25th to 50th percentile of people in terms of their wealth and their income, you're doing extremely well on a historical perspective, like most people. And people in that band by and large have shelter, have employment, have food, have the, have variety of choice for their food and their entertainment and comfort. And that's all at a high, high level historically when you zoom out. And that's something we forget all the time. So there's a lot of caveats that I could see here. But I do think it shouldn't just be a winner take all thing. I don't think it is to the points you two are making, but also the arguments against it don't have to be winner take all either. It doesn't have to be. We shouldn't have no billionaires. And therefore if you're arguing that, you're wrong. But more like since we have so many billionaires, surely there's a dial we can turn and make it so that that wealth somehow gets distributed before, like in the process of its distribution in a way that feels a little bit more like spread out so that fewer people are struggling and the people who have enough don't have more.
- [48:17]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah, I do feel like there is a, there's a really baseline emotional kind of appeal that works for me. You know, like I saw some Instagram video or something came across my feed, maybe it was on Twitter X where it was a woman explaining the time it would take to make $100 million if you were making $70,000 a year. And it's like 1400 years or something, you know, and it's like, I get it. Like I get that you hear that number and that disparity just feels so mind boggling. And then you think there's so many people making $70,000 or less a year, most of the country. And then there are these like handful of people who are making a hundred million dollars or worth $100 million or more a year. And it's like, you know, there's all this stuff that we're talking, the conflation of net worth versus cash and et cetera, et cetera. But on the whole, I hear that and I get why that message hits, especially for the people who are in the sort of normie American day to day life who feel like they've done everything right. They work five days a week, 40 hours, 40 hours a week, and they don't have enough to kind of make ends meet. It's an easy thing to sell. I think it's a harder thing to kind of legislate away or to solve for if you decide this is an actual problem that we need to quote, unquote, fix. Anyway, who knew the Met Gala was a good entryway for some economic debate like this, but it was where my mind went when you shared that story. Camille and I had the privilege of looking up some of the Twitter stuff after you told me about people getting mad and had a couple good laughs. That's what you get for waiting in. It was an enjoyable experience for me. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right. Well, speaking of feedback loops, I do want to use our last segment today to talk a bit about this Trump corruption piece that I penned last week. Big shout out to Ari, by the way, who I mentioned in the piece, helped me collect a bunch of these stories in a shared Google Doc that him and I had been working out of for. For the last 15 months.
- [50:50]
Camille Foster
It's a long time.
- [50:52]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah, it's a long time.
- [50:53]
Camille Foster
A calendar event weekly. Like add stories to this. Add stories to this. Yeah, for sure. It's been a lot.
- [50:59]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah, we're gonna. We have a lot to talk about. We have a lot of feedback to respond to. I wanted to use today's segment to talk about something specifically, which I'll point to in the Friday Edition newsletter that we're gonna release in the Friday Edition podcast that we're going to release about all the feedback that we got. And it was a remarkable email exchange, in my view, that I had with a reader who wrote in and the background for it was very kind and approachable. She basically reached out and said, hey, I had a friend who I thought needed to read your article about the breadth of the Trump corruption and they sent me a conversation they had with ChatGPT back that they put your article into ChatGPT and it basically said the entire thing was full of false or misleading claims and I don't really know what to do with that. It made me kind of question your work and I don't know how to respond to them and I thought I would just broach the subject with you, which I appreciated a lot. So I asked this reader to share some of what the the ChatGPT said and this sent a chill down the experience of this sent Missed calls and slow follow ups are silent killers. That's how businesses leave money on the table without even realizing it. And that's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O. That's the business communication system built so you never miss a a call. With Quo, your entire team can handle calls and texts from one shared number, so you don't miss messages or drop conversations. Everyone sees the full thread, replies are faster, and customers actually feel taken care of. Quo has become the number one rated business phone system on G2, with over 3,000 reviews built for how modern teams work and more than 90,000 businesses, from solo operators to growing teams, rely on it to stay connected with professional and consistently reachable. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com that's Q-U-O.com tangle that's Quashuo.com tangle
- [53:26]
Camille Foster
have you looked at your
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- [53:57]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Literal chill down my spine. The the reader shared this conversation that their friend copy and pasted of them out of ChatGPT and I'll just read the first one. So ChatGPT answers the the reader shares the story and says, you know, can you tell me whether there are like false claims in here or whatever? And and ChatGPT says short answer yes, there are multiple claims in that article that are either unverified, misleading, or very likely false. As written, it reads more like an opinion piece, which by the way, it was that mixes real events, speculation and assertions presented as fact. But then it lists you know has the red.the chatgpt like emoji format likely false or unsupported claims. The the first one New York Times, it's quoting me here. New York Times reported Trump's children negotiating a hotel with Syrian billionaires lobbying for sanctions relief. And then it says, there is no widely confirmed reporting from the New York Times matching this description. A claim like this would be a major news story across multiple outlets, and it hasn't been. And I thought, that's strange because I read a New York Times article about this. So I pulled up the link and I, you know, I'm like, going through this woman's email. I'm like, okay, I'll mention the link to this thing and I'll send it back to her. The next story. Number two, cryptocurrency empire details world Liberty Financial $1 billion profits, $3 billion tokens. ChatGPT says, and I quote, there is no verified public record of a Trump family crypto firm called World Liberty Financial operating at that scale. And I think, okay, now we're in weird territory. Like World Liberty Financial exists. There is a Wikipedia page about it. It is a website. You can go visit. You can see the Trump family is behind it.
- [55:51]
Camille Foster
They list their board members, all of that.
- [55:53]
Host - Isaac Sowell
They list their board members. They have, you know, the profits are disclosed, the investments disclosed. Very odd. Number three says Trump meme coin with exact price history and 97% crash. No credible financial reporting confirms that an official Trump meme coin with those exact figures exists, or a $74 peak and a 97% collapse tied directly to the meme Coin crypto scams and meme coins exist broadly, but tying one this precisely to Trump with those numbers is not substantiated. And there's just a whole list like this of just absolutely wrong chatgpt responses. So here was the interesting thing. I replied to this woman, I said, I am kind of shocked and horrified reading this email. And I have to tell you and to tell your friend, I appreciate you approaching me about it, that whatever settings they have on their ChatGPT, maybe they're on a free version that doesn't have current news events. Maybe there's a weird prompting that happened beforehand, asking chat to approach it really skeptically. I don't know what happened, but I'm just read the first three things and I can send you primary sources bang, bang, bang for each, each. And I said, here's the World Liberty Financial website with the page listing their board and donors, et cetera. Here's the Financial Times story about the investment it took. Here's the meme coin, here's the, you know, whatever. And I just sent some of these things and said, you should tell your friend this was. Sorry, I left this out actually in the intro, but I'll read it now. It's actually almost better, maybe in this order. The friend said, after reading as they sent this email, quote, I have not read the article, but I cut and pasted it and ran it through ChatGPT asking, is there anything not factual in the article? And this is what I got. So I said, please ask your friend to read the article. The friend responded, why would I read the article when ChatGPT is telling me that everything in it is false?
- [57:58]
Camille Foster
Oh, no.
- [57:59]
Host - Isaac Sowell
So then the person who sent me the email shared with her paid version of ChatGPT a copy and pasted version of the article and got a nearly identical response. And she sent it to me and said, what do you think? And I said, that's very odd. And I said, could you just send ChatGPT a link to the article so it can go read the article? And then after she sends the actual link to the article, ChatGPT comes back to her and basically says, oh, I can see now that all the claims in the article are substantiated with primary source links. And this is heavily argued opinion, but it is not unsourced. Many factual claims are linked to mainstream or primary sources, and it did the literal. You are right. My earlier answer was wrong on those points. You're right to challenge that, I answered too confidently from the pasted text alone. And the link context matters a lot. I'll check the original and separate what survived in the paste from what's actually sourced there. And then it came back and said there were no factual errors in the article, but there was some, you know, innuendo and strong language choices for me, which I readily admit there were.
- [59:13]
Ari Weitzman
Okay, okay.
- [59:14]
Camille Foster
There's an important, very important thing in the subtext there. I know that you're not done, but I'm done.
- [59:20]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Go ahead.
- [59:20]
Camille Foster
Okay. If you don't stop him, he will never be done as a paper anymore. But that apparently based on connotation, the fact checking that was done originally with sending this through ChatGPT was plain text and what you did afterwards was with links down to that. If you ask ChatGPT to be. To look for something, it will find it. And unless you say, I want you to follow links or confirm this claim or deny it, show me your work, then it's going to give you conclusion.
- [59:59]
Ari Weitzman
Recent information.
- [60:00]
Camille Foster
Yeah, yeah. I mean, up until, I think, up until like November, if you ask if you as an editor, like you would send it something in an intro. Just because we have various layers of fact checking and one of them is sending things to ChatGPT, which we did for this very article, which is why it's like a little bit of a head scratcher. But if you, if you were to run something to them in November about the Trump administration, just even in last November, it would say, what do you mean? Like, Trump hasn't been president since 2020. There is no 2024 Trump administration. Like it is. It is very prone to use its most recent training data and say like, oh, no, I don't see anything about this. Trust me, I'm current As of like April 2025. None of the things that you're describing are real. But if you give it links, it's like, oh, you mean that reality. Okay, yeah, sure, yeah, you're right about that, I think.
- [60:51]
Host - Isaac Sowell
But here's what I think is so crazy and what is like, I mean, genuinely mortifying to me about the information ecosystem we're operating in. One billion people use ChatGPT. And my gut, like, my gut instinct is like 60% of them are using it. The way this person was just copying something is. Sounds true. Yeah, maybe that's low. So we have hundreds of millions of people who are doing exactly what this person is. And thank God this reader was gracious enough to reach out to me and say, like, hey, this made me question your work and I just want to hear your response to it. And then I was able to entice her into performing the exercise along with me. And then at the end we got to this place where she said, oh, wow, I put your actual article in there and here's the result I got. And she shared with me her ChatGPT conversation, which was really fascinating to read. And then seeing it do the flip flop thing where it's just like, oh, you're right, I said that way too confidently. And I'm thinking, oh, great, there's this robot who is like, viewed as an omniscient narrator of events out there shitting all over my work without even reading the actual thing to potentially thousands of people who are doing the same thing this user was. And there's like, very little I can do to defend against that or to protect my honor or to substantiate the claims. Aside from mass understanding that you actually have to put the link into ChatGPT in order to get a proper analysis of what the article sourcing is and
- [62:30]
Camille Foster
just be skeptical of what it tells you too. Yes.
- [62:33]
Ari Weitzman
I mean, because even that won't necessarily take you Far enough like putting the link in. Maybe it'll check stuff, maybe not.
- [62:40]
Host - Isaac Sowell
And this was when I think about the AI revolution and I think about what's coming down the pike for us and what the future looks like. The job loss stuff scares me, but I think it's going to play out way differently than we all imagine. I have a lot of views and theories about that. I'm not nearly as worried about artificial general intelligence as all these real techie people are. We've had Andy Mills on the show, who talked about it on his show the Last Invention, and interviewed all these people. I don't wake up in cold sweats with the humanoid robot deciding, oh, humans are inefficient. Let's kill them all. That doesn't freak me out. What actually scares me, the thing that I actually find terrifying, is millions and millions of people are going to forget or lose the ability on how to think for themselves. We are just going to outsource so much of our mental faculties and so much of our critical thinking that. That we won't know how to do it. We won't know how to open up an article and click a few links and see how the language in the article matches the news report that the person's linking to. Which is what I wish this person did with my reporting, because then they would see my writing was actually pretty fair. But, like, we just. We're losing that right now in real time, and we're asking this robot that we think is some omniscient presence to tell us what's real and what's not. And the robot doesn't fucking know. That's terrifying, man.
- [64:12]
Camille Foster
It's asking the robot what to know at Grok. Is that true?
- [64:17]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like every tweet, you know, like the Rock explain this joke to me. I'm like, oh, my God. Like, think about the joke for two seconds and figure it. Like, it is really scary. And you know what's even scarier than is I'm catching myself doing it. Phoebe and I have. This actually could be a good segue into my grievance, but I'll just think of another one. Phoebe and I have. It'll come to me easily. Phoebe and I have this space in our house that we can't figure out what to do with. It's like in our living room. Ari's been to our place in our new house. There's like this little alcove in the living room, but. Yeah, what's that?
- [64:59]
Camille Foster
Nothing. I'm Team Piano. Put A piano there, but go on.
- [65:02]
Host - Isaac Sowell
It's a little bit awkward, the space, whatever. And we've just tried. We've put a couple chairs there. It doesn't quite look right. We tried the record player. We're moving stuff around. Do we want a daybed? How are you going to do this? And we've been like. I mean, we've been in the house for six weeks. We can't figure out what to do. And I took a picture of it and put it in the Claude and was like, hey, here's this space. Help me come up with some ideas. And Phoebe, who's like, very offline and lives in the real world, she was like, did you just like, ugh. You asked Claude for ideas? Like, she was disgusted in me. Like, like, why would you do that? And I'm like, I don't know. It's like smart. It's like a. And then it like, of course spit out all these horrific ideas. I like, had the computer up. I was like, look, it's gonna generate some cool stuff we can talk about. And like, nothing in the room looked right. And it was all like, really awkward. And I was like, yeah, this thing sucks. But, you know, I appreciated her. She was just like, just use your brain. Like, I don't want Claude to design the room. I want us to think of what feels like it fits in our house. And I'm like, yeah, why am I doing. Like, I'm just like, I am so lazy. I don't even want to think. And I worry about that element of it. And this particular case scared me where I was like, man, I just thank. Thankfully I heard about this, so I can address it a little bit, but I can't imagine how many people are doing that copy and pasting the text. There's no primary sources linked, so ChatGPT just says this is all a lie and you should find a new source for news. And I'm screwed. If millions of people are doing that at scale, that's not a good thing for me.
- [66:40]
Ari Weitzman
I don't think that that's going to be the case, that they're going to hollow out tangle because people will be trying to Fact check on ChatGPT. I do think you are correct and we've actually talked about this at least once before because I raised concerns about the same sort of thing. Like knowing a lot of people who were probing this thing as though it were the Oracle of Delphi would tell them the actual factual truth about absolutely everything imaginable. And yeah, it's a mistake. My Favorite inquiry with these LLMs is usually to take a thought of mine and ask it to tell me why I'm wrong. You can use this to pressure test your thoughts. You can use it to help you be a more constructive, critical thinker, or you can outsource your thinking to these machines. And that would be a very bad idea because the hallucination problem is very real. These things are not thinking. It's a token prediction engine. It anticipates what is most likely the next letter in the word that is going to be spelled out here. It doesn't know what it's saying. There is certainly some more sophistication layered in on top of that as well, and some safeguards that are built in, but most of them are defeatable. They're incredibly powerful tools. There's all sorts of remarkable stuff that they can do that we are certainly not at the point where we can trust them to make all of the decisions for us.
- [68:07]
Camille Foster
I think it's an interesting thing to remember that this essentially is a machine that kind of looks for patterns to fill in the blank based off of the thing that you just gave it. So if all the information that it has at its fingertips at the time that you gave it a query gives you some response, that's like essentially based on the way that this problem space has developed over time or these words have appeared together over time, these are the things that generally come next. And knowing that one of my favorite things to do, like one of my favorite prompts, Camille, is like, if I ask it to, something that I do all the time is like, send it like a paragraph that I've written or that we've written that we're editing and we've already fact checked it. But I want another layer and I'll just say like, can you fact check this? And then it does. And then you just say, can you check again? Just like saying, are you sure? Like, can you confirm this claim? Or saying like, I don't know about that. Look again. Usually it's like, okay, well I'll go find other sources then, because they are. Lazy is not the right word. Like it's trying to be efficient and trying to base its queries and its performances off of the data that it has. And if you tell it, go get more data, it's like, oh, that's a lot of work, but okay, I'll go get more data. And then it checks and it's like, okay, well based on this data, now I have a different answer. It's similar to the way that people's brains work in that regard anyway. And I think, like, remembering that you could always just ask it to look again will give you different answers. And because, I mean, I'm going to do the thing that Isaac said that he'd do all the time. I'm not quite the Camille brain when it comes to using ChatGPT and saying, like, stress test my thoughts here. Sometimes I'm just like, I'm in a goddamn hurry and I want to know, like, who won the World series in the 90s? Like, what teams won it the most? And then I'll just go from there and just asking, like, hey, can you confirm? Are you sure? Did that happen? Is a really useful step to finish that process.
- [70:07]
Ari Weitzman
It does link to the sources now, which is helpful. You can drill down into the source, which you should absolutely be doing if you're looking for factual information like that.
- [70:17]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah. Before we move on to our grievances, just quickly, since we're here, any thoughts about the incredibly embarrassing Richard Dawkins piece where he tries to defend the idea that. What a fall from grace. Did that hurt you, Camille? That must have hurt you a bit.
- [70:34]
Ari Weitzman
Well, we are a bit friendly. We did an event together, like a year and a half ago, maybe. And I like Richard. I think he's great. Disagree with him on some things and agree on some others. And, yeah, it's unfortunate, but also understandable. It is understandable. It feels like these things are alive when you are having conversations with them sometimes. But if you just push a little bit further, then they say something completely ridiculous. Among the most interesting things that you can do is have a conversation with it about something you know really, really, really well. A book that you absolutely love. In my experience, it's a matter of moments before it starts to invent quotes that don't exist, attribute things to books that don't exist, written by authors that you know. It happens routinely. So don't use this to write your term paper. It is a bad idea. It is an excellent way to score an F. And you'll also be found out because there are so many telltale signs of copy that's generated in these LLMs. It's a bad look. Write the paper yourself. There's still some reward.
- [71:44]
Camille Foster
And actually write your paper.
- [71:48]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah, Richard Dawkins. Yeah. And just to let everybody in on the joke, in case you missed the story, Richard Dawkins wrote a piece for the website Unherd, which is a great website, about his belief that Claudia was actually very much conscious and had a consciousness. And he made the incredibly bad mistake of sharing transcripts of the conversation that he had where it became very apparent really quickly that the chatbot was basically just glazing him and telling him how unbelievably smart he was. You're so brilliant and. Yeah, you're so brilliant. Yeah. And he was. It seemed as if he was charmed. Yeah. Which was a little. It was an unfortunate look for Richard Dawkins. It made me think, oh, my God, has this man been fooling us all into thinking he's much smarter than he actually is? Which I don't think is true.
- [72:45]
Camille Foster
Smart is such a bad word in general. Like, AIs are smart, but they're dumb. Richard Dawkins is smart, but he's dumb. Everybody's smart, but dumb in some way.
- [72:56]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah, that's probably true. All right, well, with that, we should get to our grievances. I've already thought of a new thing to complain about, so I'm excited for the segment. John. John. He can play the music, my friend.
- [73:10]
Ari Weitzman
The airing of grievances. Between you and me, I think your country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal.
- [73:21]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Well, I'll start and get it out of the way and then I'll pass it over to you, too. My grievance, the reason I thought about it actually was cause it is also related to the house, which I think will be a never ending well of things to complain about when you officially own a home. I'm loving it, but homeownership is awesome. Just to be clear. I'm unbelievably grateful. I'm having a great time, but there's just stuff that comes up. The one for me, the thing that is kind of been on my mind a lot is a couple weeks ago, Phoebe and I came downstairs and we have this really cool little light fixture in our kitchen above this. This kind of like kitchenette little area. And there was water dripping out of a light bulb that had like a cord up to the ceiling, you know, in the light fixture. And we were like, oh, no, there's like a leak, you know, whatever. So we started catching the water. We called the plumber, they came, they looked at it. They were like, you know, not totally sure where it's coming from, but they were just like, just, if it happens again, pops up again, just like, call us back. That's a bunch of questions about what might have been going on, whatever. So we were like, all right, well, you know, we're screwed. We'll figure it out. And they basically told us we're going to have to open up the ceiling to take a look. If. If it pops up again and it hasn't happened again. Like, there's just not. It's been totally fine. And my grievance is like, I am. I feel like I'm being stalked or something. And I just like, it's like, I know it's coming and it's honestly more unnerving that it hasn't come. Like, I'm just like, okay. Is it possible that we had a leak that fixed itself? Seems like no. Just like the water has gone somewhere else or is somewhere else in the ceiling or. Or something that made it happen is going to happen again. But now it's just been weeks and it's been totally fine. And it's like, it is unsettling. And I am just like, terrified of what's going to happen when it shows back up again. Maybe bigger and worse than it was. So I should be pumped that, like, oh, this leak wasn't that bad. It was one time thing. But really I'm just. I feel terrified and anxious about the fact that I know it's there and I know we didn't do anything to fix it. And I don't like the fact that it hasn't happened again because now I'm just in this weird limbo spot.
- [75:43]
Camille Foster
You're waiting for the other water droplet to drop, I guess.
- [75:47]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Thanks, man.
- [75:48]
Camille Foster
Thanks. Do you think it's possible that, like, the light was in some way, like, creating condensation? I don't know what the shape of the fixture is and like there's humidity that's getting caught and dripping down?
- [76:01]
Host - Isaac Sowell
No. There was a big rainstorm the night it happened. We had been using the tub the night before. And I'm like, it's one of those two things. But again, it's rained since. We use the tub every night to give Omri a bath. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm just waiting. And they didn't know either. And I didn't like any of it. And it's every day that goes by that the leak doesn't come back. I am like, less settled and more unnerved. And that's the experience I'm having right now.
- [76:28]
Ari Weitzman
So this is great.
- [76:28]
Host - Isaac Sowell
I can't wait for part two.
- [76:30]
Ari Weitzman
Part two is going to be amazing.
- [76:31]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah.
- [76:31]
Ari Weitzman
Yeah.
- [76:32]
Host - Isaac Sowell
The ceiling comes down on my head. That's part two.
- [76:35]
Camille Foster
It just starts spinning. The whole light fixture.
- [76:39]
Ari Weitzman
I've got a trivial one. My family.
- [76:42]
Host - Isaac Sowell
That's what this is about.
- [76:43]
Ari Weitzman
Has NBA fever. My kids, 8 and 4, love watching the playoffs. This is the first time that we've all been really excited about this so it's become an event. But because of the way that the games are streaming now, prime, NBC, espn, you literally have to have all of these things installed and pre configured and your logins ready. Otherwise when the Lakers are playing you will not be able to watch the game. Cause you can't figure out your Verizon login and you don't have NBC set up properly and Hulu keeps sending you back to NBC and this useless to be over the air. And it was free and reasonable and easy and straightforward. I just want to watch basketball and I can't. And we've missed two games because of this. Once because I was like up in the air on a flight and I couldn't help them. And the other night because I even myself could not figure out the login. So I just gave up and ended up watching a 10 minute kind of compilation of clips at the end of the game once I already knew the score and felt defeated. So I don't love this. And it's making me want to get a cable subscription again, which perhaps is the goal. Maybe that is what they want from me. For me to just have to pay another hundred dollars a month to Verizon or Comcast or whomever the hell so that I can actually have television the way we used to not so long ago.
- [78:12]
Camille Foster
Yeah, that your discomfort is the goal so that you can buy more things. Because it does seem like if you were to describe the way streaming has proliferated, it's a veritable sports surge. And that's what I'll say. And I'll say it again. It's a sports surge. And if you know what I'm talking about, I'm sure that will help. And if not, you know, you can just search for SportSurge WS and see what comes up and maybe that will help in some way.
- [78:35]
Host - Isaac Sowell
I just want to jump in to say a wonderful grievance from Camille Foster. Thank you. Trivial to the point. You're finding your groove, man. That's a few weeks ago a row now. You've really, you've. You've kind of landed the plane. I will share my own experience with your grievance, which is Will and I had this huge big long day in Minnesota travel and then the speaking gig that I did and we were staying in a hotel and all day Will and I are both huge basketball heads. We were just like, I can't wait to just go back to the hotel, lay down in bed and turn on the NBA and fall asleep watching basketball. And I've been living. Looking forward to that all day. And I, like, got home, I did. Took a shower, did a little work, laid down in bed, turn on the tv. I'm just scrolling the hotel tv and I'm like, where's the game? And then it's like, Amazon prime. And I'm just like, yeah. And there's like, no cable to connect the tv. There's no. There's no HDMI cable, no screen mirroring. I'm like, all right, yeah. Then I'm just back on my computer, which is a horrible experience. So, yeah, terrible time right now for. For NBA fans everywhere. All right, Ari, take us home, man.
- [79:41]
Ari Weitzman
This is criminal, Ari.
- [79:42]
Camille Foster
Geez. No, I know. It's a veritable sports surge. I say. Anyway, my complaint this week, my own grievance, is that I'm having a really difficult time doing another thing that used to be quite simple, even if a little bit more labor intensive, which is just getting a prescription refilled. So it's allergy season again. I have seasonal allergies, which, like. And a very low grade, easy to moderate asthma, which, like, it's flared up by seasonal allergies. And it's time for me to get another albuterol inhaler. So I go into the portal where you go to just, like, renew your subscription, and I get this funding message that says, you have to get this filled with your pharmacy. I'm like, okay, I don't know that I have a particular brain loyalty to a pharmacy. These are all kind of disconnected now. I've gotten this through the site, and then it sent me the question of, like, which pharmacy do you want to have this get sent to? And then I do that. So now I have to go find my pharmacy, and I do that, and I call them, like, can I get my prescription refilled? They're like, what? No, you have to get it from your provider. And the provider's telling me you have to get it from your pharmacy. So now I have to make another appointment with my, like, general practitioner to get me a prescription to fill in so that I can get this refill of something that really should just be the click of a button. And I don't even understand why albuterol inhalers require a prescription in the first place, to be honest. Like, you should just be able to. If it's a problem where you're like, my throat is closing and I cannot breathe, and I'm in a foreign city and I want to just go to and to a store and go over the counter and get this drug that has very few, like, side effects and it's very hard to OD on in any way that's serious. And I want to get that inhaler. I really should be able to. And the fact that there's hurdle after hurdle upon hurdle of just being able to get this thing is so unnecessary. It's just like chapter 1283 and the over complexity of our medical system that's creating problems that it just really doesn't need to. Thankfully, it's a very moderate allergy season so far, knock on wood. But I'm going to need this inhaler sooner than later and I'm going to
- [81:55]
Host - Isaac Sowell
need some answers and the inhaler and some answers accompanying it. I like that.
- [82:03]
Camille Foster
All right, you tell me why this wasn't easier for me.
- [82:06]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah. Good stuff. All right, gentlemen. Well, I appreciate the time. Always a blessing to have the three of us together on the mics. We have plenty more to talk about, but we only have an hour or so with our audience. I want to bore you guys, so we're going to get out of here and I'll see you next week. Maybe with some updates about the Iran war. We'll see where things are. Trump claims to be ending things any day now.
- [82:34]
Ari Weitzman
It's over.
- [82:34]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Fingers crossed.
- [82:35]
Ari Weitzman
It's over.
- [82:36]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Yeah, it's currently over. Except for currently over at this moment.
- [82:42]
Camille Foster
It's over.
- [82:44]
Host - Isaac Sowell
All right, I'll see you guys soon. Have a good one.
- [82:48]
Ari Weitzman
All right.
- [82:49]
Camille Foster
Go pirates.
- [82:50]
Host - Isaac Sowell
Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Sowell and our executive producer is John Wolf. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing editor Ari Weitzman with Senior editor Will Kbach and Associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsey Knuth and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@readtangle.com.
- [83:33]
Narrator/Promo Voice
48 million people in the United States are adolescents between the ages of 14 and 24. They're working, parenting, leading, sometimes all at once.
- [83:44]
Camille Foster
I'm balancing work and being a mom at the same time, and I'm still on track to graduate with my bachelor's next year.
- [83:51]
Narrator/Promo Voice
So what do today's young people need to truly thrive? Tune in to good things from Lemonada Media to hear the six part Thrive series.
- [84:00]
Ari Weitzman
Before we had AT&T business wireless coverage, our delivery GPS wasn't the most reliable. Once our driver had to do a 14 point turn to get back on route. A 14 point turn.
- [84:12]
Host - Isaac Sowell
An influencer even, even live stream the whole thing. Not good for business.
- [84:16]
Ari Weitzman
Now with AT&T business Wireless routes are updating on the fly and deliveries are on time.
- [84:22]
Host - Isaac Sowell
And the influencer did get us 53 new followers though. AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything.