Political Ads Are Getting Crazy | Ep. 083 Lemonade Stand 🍋

If you run a small business, you know that having a clear picture of your finances is invaluable. Xero, spelled with an X, is a simple but powerful platform built for small business owners that makes managing business finances easier from day one. Accounting, payments, payroll, and analytics are available in one connected platform. Reports, visual dashboards, forecasts, and AI insights help owners better understand cash flow and make smarter decisions. Join the 5 million customers worldwide using Xero. Learn more at Xero.com. That's X-E-R-O dot com. I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Jennifer Garten, and I'm joined by Jennifer Garten, and I'm joined by Jennifer Garten. We talk all about what it means to be a good friend, Jen's encyclopedic knowledge of my recipes, and the Paris tour I put together for Jen and her daughter. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers. We're back on Lemonade Stin, and I've been arguing with these two because I think Michael Barrow would be the perfect guest on The Yard, and you guys disagree. We don't care. Yeah, we don't. We're not deeply invested in The Yard's guests. It's a weird way to start an episode where we have millions of new listeners because we were highlighted on Moist Critical's channel. That's right. That's right. Charlie gave us a shout out by watching exactly 28 seconds of one Twitter clip and making an 18-minute video about it. And I appreciate that. I love a Charlie video. Any press is good press. That's what I said. That's what I texted Mark Merrill. I said, fuck, let's get rid of context. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Nuance is dead. I honestly, I did want to make a quick comment about it, which was, I think, like, it's funny seeing Fighting Game Twitter, like, light up about the number because they're all like, how could they possibly have expected this number of people to play? And then if you watch the previous 40 minutes of the interview, it's like, oh, they didn't. They did it. That's the answer to that question. They did it. That's what the whole interview is about. The only thing I feel bad about this whole interaction is that, you know, Mark Merrill generously came on our show and he had two Riot guys with him. And then after the interview, like, we loved the interview. That one part with the 100,000, I might get taken out of context. And we were like, trust us. We were like, don't worry. We print this. It's gold. So I do feel bad about that one. I don't want to see that one clip going viral, but it wasn't good. I enjoyed it at a good time. Yeah, I thought the interview was. We're in the now. We're in the today, the modern era. And you know what? Also, yeah, who even watches YouTube nowadays? It's all TV, baby. New media, we call it. TV's coming back big. That's what I hear. Gen Z, they're going out again, right? They like physical media. They like TV. And they're watching Fox. They like watching the NFL on Fox News. That's what they're liking. They're buying Comcast subscriptions in droves. Cables. And apparently, this swarm of political ads around the midterms is something you've been investigating. Yeah, so I'm sure everybody's started to experience some degree of political ads that are riling up right now. And I thought that there were two very interesting ones that I actually happened. I saw separately news articles about them, but I watched these organically because I'm a God-fearing, freedom-loving, beer-drinking American, and I watched football this last weekend. And both of these ads are somewhat significant, and both I saw on TV. These are real things running. Well, asterisk on the left. So, first off, let's talk about Texas. We've talked about the Senate-Texas race between Tallarico and, I believe, your goat, Ken Paxton. My goat. If you pull up, and especially, we're going to be talking. I'm actually doing the Trump face. You see Trump talking about Ken Paxton? It's crazy. He loves him? No, he insults him all the time to his face. It's so funny. Wait, what? He actually cannot talk about him without insulting his appearance. He calls him ugly every time. What? Wow, I didn't know that. I mean, to be fair, though, we constantly insult each other. Yeah, maybe it's like a bro thing. I mean, it's like, it's literally Trump giving a speech, Paxton in front row, and he's like, Let's just locker room talk. He's just like, he's not much of a looker. He's not much of a talker, but he'll be, you should vote for him for Texas. That's the speech Trump gives every time. Wow. Anyway, I'm sorry. So, okay. Tallarico seems to be leading. So, as we've discussed a couple of times, Tallarico, the Democratic candidate, continuing to go up in the polls, predictions, all this stuff. He's now at 68% to win. And this is, again, this is- This is going to be a massive, massive upset if Tallarico can win in Texas. For audio listeners, he's 68% on, like, Calchi, a prediction market. But I think he's also, by a smaller margin, he is winning in polls as well. Yes. Yes. Yeah. In both polls and prediction markets, Tallarico is currently favored. Though it is, like, very close. It's all within- Yeah, it's close. This is not a guarantee. Like, 66% does not mean it is a win, obviously. And this is a prediction market. This is not truth. But anyways, because of this, we are seeing a lot of money and a lot of different strategies being attacked. We're seeing a lot of people being tempted in Texas, as we've talked about. One of them, I'm not going to show them here, there are full deepfake commercials made by Paxton's team of James Tallarico, like, saying previous things. Have you guys not seen those? No. Oh, my God. Full deepfakes? Okay. Wait, so just him saying things he didn't say? It's him quoting things that he has said in the past, but out of context. But it shows him- One sec. Let's pull it up. That's insane. Here, here. While you're pulling it up, can I just- The man who died in a vehicle accident, and then when the judge was deciding the punishment, the defendant, who had killed someone with their vehicle, made an AI video of the dead person forgiving them, and then the judge said, I really liked that video, and gave them a lighter sentence. It's insane. It is, like, beyond deranged. Now, my understanding is an appeals court overturned that because it's such a ridiculous thing for the judge to have done. But, like, it's through the looking glass on some shit. That's crazy. That's crazy to me. That's fucking insane. It is, like, truly insane. It's literally the guy looking direct at the camera, but it looks all kind of fake, and he's like, I was a good Christian in my life, and I believe in forgiveness, and I don't think the person that killed me should be facing, you know, it's like- Imagine doing that without the tech, and just making up, like, Your Honor, if I imagine what the guy would say. Here's a puppet of the guy saying- Your Honor, here's Jeff Dunham to be the guy that I killed with my car. It's strange, dude. I can't believe they attempted it. They have balls to bring that to the courtroom. I'm sorry, but they're doing it on TV to millions of people. All right, so this is one of three interesting things going on in political campaigns. This is only- I couldn't find the full thing here, but this is at least the video. This appears to be James Tallarico writing in his Bible, and he is narrating- These are snippets of quotes he said in previous- And they have the, what, the pride fist flag on his wall. Yeah, so they've deepfaked him. I mean, he is drawing into the King James Tallarico Bible like a child, and they're taking specific, like, phrases he said, but then he is deepfake talking through them. Well, I mean, it looks like him. I mean, it looks like he is saying this and drawing this, and this is by Ken Paxton's team. So most people would agree, like, this needs to be illegal. This is insanity to have- Just literally show your opponent doing something else from what they said out of context. So this is horrifying. They've tried this. Barely work, although hard to know. This would infuriate me. I feel like this would, I mean, I guess it doesn't matter. I don't know what, I can't get in the mind of every voter, but I feel like if you saw this, this would make you angry at the person that made it, if you knew it was fake. I think with the example you just gave, though, I think there's just such a disconnect as to, like, what this technology means to different people, right? Like, this older judge doesn't even, he's literally in the opposite direction of what I bet, like, 90% of people listening to this show. Would, would feel about something like that, that there is something, like, at least vague, like, vaguely yucky about that being leveraged in a court, you know? And the judge is, like, tearing up. And the same thing for this is, like, there's probably a portion of the audience that is watching this and then might not even realize that it's fake to begin with. And then there's another portion that doesn't care that it is. Yeah. I mean, I think in this case, the deep fake one we were showing is, you know, some boomer who doesn't really understand AI technology and still thinks it's these, like, totally over-the-top videos that don't look realistic is not going to know that that's fake. And there's a small disclaimer that says this was made by AI at the bottom, but it's, it's hard to see, as you can imagine. They tried to obfuscate it. I mean, most people, most people read the tiny disclaimers at the bottom. Yeah. This happened in the, you know, Thomas Massey lost his primary to Ed Galrein. Yeah. Republican primary. And Ed Galrein ran a deep fake ad of Thomas Massey having lunch with, like, Ilhan Omar and AOC. Yeah. And, like, that was a fake. And, like, being a secret, whatever, secret communist, and, like, they were all hanging out together. And then, um, it had the little disclaimer, but people didn't notice it. They did a follow-up study. I, I covered this. Uh, they asked a good portion of elderly people that voted in that election, and they thought it was real. Yeah. Like, a significant chunk of them were, like, not only thought it was real, but it swayed them. They thought, oh, this is, this is, like, damning evidence. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this so clearly should be illegal, but it's so early in the stages of what's happening, you know, right? And, like, everybody's just in the furrow. Of, like, getting towards midterms and the craziness around it, that it does not appear to my knowledge that there's legislation coming anytime soon to stop this. And, of course, they put disclaimers and nobody's watching them. So, this is one thing. paxton's team is trying to hold on to texas what is another thing well uh paxton's paxton was impeached as a reminder he is not a very likable guy he was impeached by a republican congress in the state as attorney general in 2023 he cheated on his wife who filed for divorce on biblical grounds now fun fact his wife angela paxton is a state representative in texas since 2018 she's like an elected member of the texas state so many people have been curious what does his estranged wife think about this and that is one of the two ads perry people have asked my thoughts about this election and turns out i have some let's talk about the elephant in the room in a general election it's not as much about the individual players on the team it's about getting the whole team across the finish line either we hold every republican seat or we hand the future of texas to the other team that's why i'm voting for the republican ticket on november 3rd so the strategy now is we are going to not even address the person who you'd be electing just ignore them don't look at them just kind of think about the broader mission and that's from paxton or his wife that's from his wife ex-wife right it's currently estranged the divorce filings are proceedings my understanding so current wife basically yeah yeah and so it's that's crazy like that's that's the degree they're going to that's the degree that ken paxton is a horrible candidate that that they're like i won't even say his name they won't even see the ad she calls him the elephant in the room your your wife to me on tv saying just look at the r just look at the r forward dallas county republican party chair jennifer stoddard said quote i think it'll help she knows better than anybody being a state senator herself that we need to cast aside all personal feelings and we need to vote for policy just a banger you just personal feelings shouldn't come up when it comes to politics it comes to electing and talarico talarico responded by saying asking texans to close their eyes and vote for a political party instead of the best person for the job is exactly what's wrong with today's politics and it just makes you think like it could be ken paxton could be dead it doesn't seem to matter that's not the focus anymore talarico's been running youtube um video i don't know if they're ads but videos of him calling paxton and asking for a debate because paxton has declined every single there's not a single debate happening paxton's basically trying to be invisible he's trying to pretend he doesn't exist and hope that the texas are you know just lean wins he's not speaking in anything he's not talking to anyone he's not doing interviews he's it's crazy it's a crazy like subversion of the democratic process where uh you're just trying to hope this guy doesn't get noticed enough there's something similar happening in maine but the other way around i think it's like troy troy jackson is the democratic candidate that is uh like filling the spot that graham platter yeah and then susan collins is the republican on the other side and this is a pretty like democratic state right like they won handedly even in the previous election and susan collins is beating him in uh the polls and like favorability uh because people just aren't uh they just aren't vibing with them they just and and she she even for like heavy democratism leaning voters being pulled in the state they're like susan collins seems all right like you've been doing it for 58 years or something it's crazy yeah i just don't think they should pay any attention to the individual politics should be just a vote for a giant party and there's no other human person matters it should run the same ad in reverse yeah for troy jackson all right and one more ad for you that shows our wacky political environment trump's been doing all sorts of things to try to get people riled up we're going to talk about one of them later this five thousand dollar uh check oh yeah he keeps promising to people but he's also now running ads as a reminder trump is not on the ballot so here is one such ad go ahead with you at my side we will demolish the deep state we will expel the warmongers from our government we will drive i'm sorry can you pause for one second that is a crazy opener we're going to demolish the deep state they have the house the senate the presidency and we're going to expel the warmongers as we're currently and uh you started and for audio listeners this is black and white footage of trump walking at the camera down a hallway there's nothing happening uh go ahead keep it going okay cast out the communists marxist and fascists we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country we will route the fake news media and we will liberate america from these villains once and for all and at the bottom it says paid for by the u.s. government there is no other text there's no point to this video it is just to make trump look like a badass and they are paying 20 million dollars out of the homeland security budget to put these on tv holy fuck new york times reported that trump personally directed the white house budget director to use taxpayer money for these tv spots what happened to the deep state the first four years when did they rebuild the deep state what about all the marxists and the fascists in the first term what is happening also how are we simultaneously in a golden age but also we have to dismantle the deep state that's ruining the country and the news media sucks and it's a communist but aoc aiden dude have you seen aoc recently well the scene and just heard things about her from fox news yeah i heard she's at a dinner with thomas massey she's at a dinner with thomas massey look at this christ it goes even deeper than i thought the deep state bro do you think that trump in going into his seventh year will be able to dismantle the deep state i got willing dude i've been obviously my three-time voter for trump it's like all the people it's all the insane people who are like he's gonna tackle the deficit this time it's like if only there was a four-year example period to look at if only there was a sample size of what he had already done like a year and a half ago when we had to be on this show and like earnestly talk about whether don't reduce the deficit like it's just crazy yeah it's like anyone's still believing is it's wild to me but also let's be real we'll talk about later but people aren't believing it as much like it's not that's the good news i'll get to a little bit later i mean trump's approval ratings are incredibly low and the odds are looking very bad for republicans going to the midterms him doing things like this is a response to things not going well so you know this is almost encouraging to see like this level of desperation for republican party members to be like just pretend like they're not going to the midterms and they're not going to the midterms and they're not going to the midterms and they're not going to the midterms and they're not going to the midterms and pretend that there's no individual for trump to just be and so a quick follow-up on this because ultimately this is going to sift into the hundreds of crazy thing trump does every single week right is doing that illegal probably not no the government can spend money on advertisements for like policy like to join the military or like sign up for this new health initiative or whatever but it's not supposed to be a political or partisan thing it's supposed to be you are barred from publicity or propaganda with federal money unless congress officer congress authorizes it so the question with these ads is like is this a politically motivated thing or is it a public service announcement that's such a hard question that's what we'll have to figure out you need the best scholars to debate that for i feel like it's like if you you did a and if you made the wish to like an evil genie and you were like genie i want i want publicly funded campaigns and then he grants the wish and then the monkey's paw curls the monkey's paw curls and then it i get that ad from the government so we'll cap off this segment like he uh trump on monday i believe this is they were aired for like one day i happened to catch it and then he truth on truth social oh that just if you pull this up the radical left is upset with the fact that i'm taking ads which i consider to be a positive promotion for our great usa he's just promoting the usa and paying for them with us money this is a rather standard thing to do but rather than doing that i have decided to do the patriotic ads and pay for them myself with money i raised from maga inc and so he has not pulled them you might still see them but he is now going to pay for them himself supposedly like he did with the wall and the ballroom all right he got my vote back and everything got my vote back this is what i'm talking about i was on the edge but he won me back over i actually can't look at truth social posts without thinking about how somebody pays five seconds early i think about it every time he has to check every one of these instantly well speaking okay of pain fees to get social media posts early and taking advantage of it uh i read an incredible uh article about polymarket recently so there was an article on the ft uh about uh polymarkets alpha traders and it was basically uh the the writer following the story of a group of young polymarket traders who are in like a discord together uh that that they call alpha and the idea is like we're a part of this limited group who uh has an ability either in like mathematics or analysis to take advantage of information available out in the public to find the alpha in polymarket trades so these are like young guys who are like constantly online or running some sort of like online analysis uh or analysis of data in order to get an advantage on the platform and telling their anonymous story of like the stress that that they're they're under and the way they see what they're doing and i thought this article was just kind of their lives were insane yeah they're insane it's it's it's really interesting uh to to begin with but in the beginning of the article it drops the fact that 0.1 of users are making 50 of the gains across the entire platform so when you're one of these people who like engages with this gambling platform you and you like take a bet on something because you you know you think it might win you vibe it out you are what these people in this like discord of like 10 people call a fish like they they are farming the grander scheme of people who like want to gamble on this platform for money and uh no oh sorry yeah yeah go ahead one of the strategies that they mentioned in the article and i think was the most common one for people in this group is just finding trades where regular people might have left a bet running too long or whatever like they would like like um if i want to place a bet on a political race and then the facts on the ground have changed but people don't pull their bet out or what like we're just farming the fact that most people are slow don't check the news every day don't update and they just do that over and over again just just take your money basically like yeah the mispricing of regular people's attention is like how they're yeah it creates this psychotic lifestyle for like these guys are constantly online they like barely sleep they're always collecting information they're always stressed they're always yeah they're skipping thanksgiving this is christmas not talking to their family it was wild i feel bad for them and openly and openly uh admitting that at least a few of them are addicted to gambling and like that's why they enjoy doing this and i thought this article was more compelling than anything just an interesting story but at the end of it one of the guys is talking about how part of this urgency and and fear the reason why he wants to do this so much right now while it's working is because he's pretty confident that as soon as there's any change of wind in political power these platforms are going to be uh taken down because ultimately what are these sites everybody knows they're gambling platforms dude it's not it's not ambiguous i think they're derivative swaps that should be managed by the federal agencies and this is starting to get approached by states and uh new york uh led by attorney general latita james has just started to get approached by states sued polymarket recently over the fact that it is indeed a gambling platform that is circumventing state laws and this is part of a pattern by this specific attorney general tackling online gambling in general so they went after calci earlier in the year but they've also gone after cs skins oh really uh that that was a story we talked about earlier it's the same attorney general from that story uh and not only that uh gemini a different platform than google gemini and coinbase's trading plat uh like uh what do you call it what why am i not bonehouse trading platform right is it correct right trading yeah coinbase is like trading market trading platform for events that they have they have also sued those two things uh as of like april this year prediction markets so she is on this like tear of tackling gambling in the online space and the consistent theme across all these cases is all of these platforms are doing things to not only circumvent new york's laws in order to have the platform exist at all but also encouraging and allowing people under the age of 21 to use these platforms who are particularly vulnerable to the effects uh that gambling can have they should be gambling on pokemon cards like god intended they should be opening packs i know that there's truth in what you just said but it is funny it's like i when i turned to 22 i was not like more resistant to gambling i was just as fucking likely to waste money probably more so because i had more disposable income like we just got to protect these 21 year olds fuck 22 and older you go to vegas and it's rows of 80 year olds fucking there's no age where this isn't fucking you cross 60 and you're immune i've been saying it uh so couch in the calci case uh from earlier in the year new york uh said that they were demanding uh they're demanding the court sorry they're demanding calci to forfeit all illegal games distribute restitution to consumers who were harmed and pay fines equal to three times the amount of money that they were spending three times the gains the company has made through its illegal actions and the exact so if you're a gambler new york you should gamble more right now knowing that your losses will get recomped you're gonna get refunded so just make sure you get back on track it's what we call a big loan it's called swap and and uh that uh i think exact phrasing was used in the demands for the polymarket case that just came out as well but what is also interesting about this is the day after polymarket counts the amount of money that the company has made through its illegal actions is that the state of new york is basically saying that you are putting our entire business by in jeopardy by trying to leverage state laws against our company like you're fracturing the precedent that we have to operate in the rest of the country and because you're threatening that through laws that should not be applied to us you owe us like the damages to our reputation for doing so and uh they are saying that the only thing that can regulate our platform is the federal commodity futures trading commission which as far as i understand is uh compared to something like the sec has a lot less teeth to actually regulate markets and it's why uh in the crypto industry right now there's a big push uh like lobbying in dc to get the uh cftc to regulate crypto instead of the sec because it has so much less teeth right and they don't do anything yeah and the gamble in companies the polymarkets and the cal she's and all of these other companies that are running uh prediction markets are saying this is the only body that has authority over of us you don't have authority over us as a state i think it's it's less about them wanting to be regulated by this body versus that one but more that they want to be regulated at the federal level not at a state level because if as long as they are regulated at federal level individual states cannot say we're banning you right so that's that's the huge golden pie is just one of the federal agencies having total oversight because if the states are banned what are you paying lebron james for what are we paying what's even the point think of lebron james we can't change anything i don't want braun to lose any i don't want any money yeah i mean this a very small follow-up but like this very similar thing just happened in ohio and tennessee this went to the u.s appeals court that ruled that ohio and tennessee can regulate cal she under gambling uh gambling laws so like and we've talked about this in the past there was like wisconsin tried to do this and they failed and they failed and they failed and they failed and they failed and they failed because they tried to ban it statewide other states are doing just the sports side so it's this ongoing question with every single state of is it the state's authority or not and it looks like this is going to go to the supreme court because now you have in multiple different dis in multiple different appeals courts in multiple different states you're getting different rulings and of course like this this is weird and should not be this like strange patchwork thing um one of the things i thought was particularly funny about the cal she won is what the judge the idea of so so here she said the commodity exchange act's core purpose was to protect the national interest by providing a means to manage and assume risk and to obtain pricing information and this could make sense imagine you're a farmer and you sell wheat okay and wheat right now is five dollars and you don't know whether it's going to go up or down at the end of the year and you want to hedge risk and so you want to like do a swap such that if it goes up you're going to owe some money but if the price goes down you'll get some money and so you are saying hey this risk that might substantially affect my future i'm going to have to do this and i'm going to have to do this and i'm going to have some kind of hedge against it to protect my future in a in whatever way might economically or affect my life right if the lakers lose my future will be set so i'm hedging against yes so the judge said quote it is therefore difficult to see how determining the probability that a certain number of corner kicks will be taken in a given soccer game would serve to advance those goals so obviously the core premise that these should be derivative swaps that a person is using to hedge their future for my happiness is dependent on the number of corner kicks and i have to freeze what lebron make i need to parlay them right now for my future and isn't it about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness yes america usa baby that's so that is wild so fucking funny oh i if we could just get these german spies out of our judging abyss um okay just just heaved it over to him yeah no i appreciate that setup because i actually it's a and the judge said i think that no i can't do it it's gonna be even worse for me so this story's only 13 hours old so i'm kind of i'm bragging it but you know the equivalent of the cia in germany which i'm gonna say right now i'm gonna nail it okay it's called the bundensnachricken lived in germany by the way grew up in germany yeah and i know it's called the bnd and that is their equivalent of the cia and it turns out the head of this agency was let's say 2000 let me get his exact tenure 1990 2005 is his time as the head so that's seven years and then he was chief of staff for like another eight years after that so he's a lot of time in this in this agency turns out he was a foreign agent this is the highest like position you could have in germany for intelligence for which foreign place for germany i'm sorry oh oh they don't say this is so new they don't say this is the suspicion is russia very obviously because and this is a weird story that that dovetails with something I've also covered. I did a video about German nuclear a while back. And in that story, I mentioned that the prime minister of Germany at the time ended up after his positioning, leaving Germany and going to work at an oil company, Gazprom in Russia. And that guy was very compromised. And during that time, they built the Nord Stream pipeline. They shut down their nuclear plants or began the shutdown, like did all these things to make themselves energy dependent on Russia. And so it seems that around the turn of the millennium, both intelligence agency and prime minister, and maybe more were foreign agents. And that we don't know if there's more later on, but this is like began a process of de-industrialization that is like hurting Germany later down the road. Like their energy security is a big problem right now. And it's just, that's fucking wild to think about the level of influence that another nation had. Now, again, I can't confirm whether this guy was compromised in Russia. They didn't say, they won't say. What if it's fucking right? It's like Kenyan. It could be. It's like Kenyan has just been pissed at Germany. And then we clip this and post it after the Kenyan thing is discovered. And we're like, what a dumbass. He's trying to connect the dots. Yeah. I'm misconnecting the dots. They're from a different country. He was working for me. No, they're just working for him. They were just, they were, they were compromised in terms of like pay for play. They were selling state secrets. They were essentially a foreign agent. They found out that not only were German secrets being delivered, but this guy had access to, you know, if you're the highest level of Germany, you were having close debriefs with the CIA, with the MI6, with all the intelligence agencies of the allies, especially during this period. Right now, America and Europe are a little more on a standoff, but like in 1998, 2006. I don't even know. I don't think we know our own secrets. So it's like a shocking revelation. It's like one of the highest levels of treason or spy that people have ever recorded. And certainly the largest one since I think they said 1976 is the time last time anything even close to this happened. Or someone was found. So it's like a crazy deal for Germany. Like they're, they're freaking out. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the highest positions in one of the most geo geopolitically important countries in the world. Like it's insane. And it's extremely, extremely tied in with the entire NATO apparatus. So yeah. The, the levels are pretty crazy. I don't know if it's Russia, but whoever's doing it, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams on the level of heights they could reach. Who do you think, who do you think the highest level is in America's government? Like who has the most info? It's not the president. I don't think it's the president. You know that, that onion, I keep, I think about that new onion bit all the time where they're talking about, and this is a conspiracy theory that goes almost to the top. Everyone below the vice president is implicated. It's hard to believe how far this goes and he just like keeps, he hammers it over like 10 minutes. Uh, yeah, it's not a big story. I just want to bring it up. Cause it's, it's fascinating. And how about today? And like people in, especially in the German sphere are, are like, holy shit, this is a, this is crazy. And they're relooking at all the decisions that happened in that period. And like they're wow. They're through the lens of, I have a theoretical for you guys knowing the current state of our country, would you rather have our current leadership or compromise Russian agents who are pretty good at their job? Yeah. That's the funny joke is some people say it's like, you couldn't tell, even if he's not compromised, the things he's doing are like what someone compromised. Would you take Putin's top guy for Hegseth? It's funny cause I'm like thinking about it. Yeah. Wait. So just to, just to clarify, he's not in a position anymore. This has been found out like retroactively. Uh, yes, but he was very close to power even after he left the top position and certainly had access to information. Again, he was chief of staff for a long time. And there is one other person unnamed. They use the name Manfred D as a code name, who I believe is currently in the thing at a lower level, who is still connected to all of this. He's the guy's handler to shuttle things back. So like the web goes kind of deep and it's like, certainly it's a call for a renewed look in all European American nations. Like what the hell is going on? Are we compromised in ways we didn't think so? Zero spelled with an X is a simple but powerful platform built for small business owners that makes managing business finances easier from day one. That's X E R O dot com. Are you tired of hearing about business, tech, and finance from the bros? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tiger Sisters releases every Monday and we decode money, power, and love. And who doesn't love all those things? We are the internet's Wall Street and Silicon Valley big sisters. Tune in every Monday for late night sister talk meets boardroom strategy. Check out Tiger Sisters on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Tiger Fam. As US Americans voted in the midterm elections, a lot was uncertain, but one thing was clear. This year, many of the attention-grabbing candidates identified or were identified as populists. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat who ran a surprisingly competitive race for governor in Texas. Populism is about economic power. Sam Forstag, who ran for Congress as a Dem in Montana. I'm running as a populist because populism is what the Democratic party is supposed to be about. It's what democracy is supposed to be about. Josh Turek, a Democrat up for a congressional seat in Ohio. We want to once again have a common-sense great populist that is fighting for the people. And Senate hopeful Dan Osborne, who ran as an independent in Nebraska and didn't use the word populist, but. My life sucks too. Costs are too high. The last 10 years in the US have been defined by Trump-style populism. This year, candidates from across the political spectrum embraced the populist mantle. On Today Explained from Vox, what has 10 years of populism gotten us, and are we ever going back? Today Explained drops every weekday. What's the, what's the next story? Yeah, this week is Aiden, is that your jingle? Yeah, where do you know him? I hope it's somewhere fun. It's Palestine. So we talked about the ceasefire like a year ago on the show, and since then, uh, daily airstrikes have continued to occur and the genocide. So not much of a ceasefire. The genocide in Gaza has continued, and I think maybe less well understood is the West Bank in Palestine has been under a bunch of different pressure from the Israeli government over that same time period, and we've also talked about that on this show. Yeah. Uh, and recently, I saw two stories in the early part of September, uh, that, that caught my eye. So one was that Benjamin Netanyahu announced the, like, curtailing of outposts in the West Bank. Not settlements, but these, like, smaller outposts of, like, indiv- like, grou- smaller groups of, uh, Jewish settlers would, like, come out to the West Bank in a new area that they're, you know, not under any, like, legal. They have no legal right or, like, means to this area, and they just set up shop and then often terrorize the Palestinians in that area. Okay. It'll often be, like, younger guys who, like, come out and commit acts of violence or kill the Palestinians that are around there. And this is what the Channel 5 video was about, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, like, I think, like, uh, Louis Thoreau, uh, Channel 5, there's another, like, really good Guardian series. They've been going- they have been in the West Bank and have showcased a lot of these things. And then, um, and Netanyahu had made an announcement that supposedly they were going to start, like, cracking down on these outposts. And then also around the same time, the UK announced that it was going to start sanctioning trade with these Israeli settlements that exist in the West Bank. And, uh, I- I had caught, like, the idea that, like, the goods and services in these areas that might be, like, exported to the UK. I think a couple other European countries also made this announcement around the same time, the idea that they're not going to do, like, trade with this area anymore. Uh, so I wanted to ask my friend, who is from the West Bank and now lives in the US, do you think that things like this have any material impact on the situation? Because of how, like, uh, the, you know, the situation in the West Bank is so bad. Do these things even move the needle? And that's where the conversation started. So, uh, the thing that I thought was really interesting that he told me is the thing with the outposts and these crimes that, like, these settlers come in and commit on Palestinians is that they're really eye-catching in the news right now. Uh, but Palestinians are particularly, like, resilient people and the smaller outposts and the terror from these smaller groups of people are what make headlines but aren't necessarily, like, the huge impactful things of what make life in the West Bank really fucking bad right now. Um, and, uh, you know, people can withstand or stand up to, like, this violence to a degree. Like, they only have so much room to, like, fight back because of the backing of the Israeli military behind these people. But the, uh, basically the more there are larger institutional things that don't tend to make the news because they're less, uh, you know, maybe eye-catching on the surface, Sure. that have a much stronger impact on how awful it is to live in the West Bank at the moment. Um, and the couple examples that I wanted to highlight that he told me that I did not know. So, over time, because of the displacement of, like, Palestinians, Palestinian people, these, uh, refugee camps have formed in certain cities in the West bank. So like people that have to move into cities and they make, they have made these like dense pockets of kind of makeshift towns that have become semi-permanent as time has passed. They have a lot of people in a small amount of space. And historically the Israeli government has allowed those refugee camps to exist. But in 2025, there was a big bulldozing of one of the largest refugee camps in Janine, which kind of broke this previous precedent. And 20,000 people lived in that camp and were immediately displaced from the bulldozing. And then they continued to bulldoze three similar camps for 20,000 more people were displaced from that. And this is being done by the IDF. This is not like settlers. Doing this. This is the IDF coming in and doing that. Um, and there was a quote from like the United nations that said repeated and destructive operations have rendered the Northern refugee camps uninhabitable trapping residents in cyclical displacement. Basically it's like you can never like rebuild your life because your home has been destroyed and you always struggle to move somewhere else. And then the other part of this that I think gets highlighted way less that my friend was like revealing to me is the degree, of economic sanctions in the west bank so i thought this stat was insane this area has experienced a 15 year loss of gdp gain in the span of a year after october 7th so that's that is because a ton of the like the the west bank became way more restrictive in the wake of october 7th so the economy has been like completely destroyed they're at a stalemate compared to like where they used to be and then you have these things like you have curfews you have checkpoints you have restrictions on the type of roads that you can use for like transport of goods so your ability to do like commerce with like other palestinians in the west bank a lot of friction is totally limited so much friction with that right and then uh the area of like palestinian control is like continuously more spaced out by the amount of settlements that have been allowed and then you combine that with like a loss of jobs like prior to this a bunch of palestinians had like permits or the allowance to go commute into israeli controlled territories and then work jobs and then come back and like use that money that they earned but that's not allowed at all anymore so they don't have all of that income that came from those jobs has just gone away completely it's gone from the economy and then you top it off with the rising fuel costs from the war in iran so you have a place that like all the transport is relying on diesel and diesel is more expensive than it ever it's ever been so you have a place that like all the transport is relying on right like nine dollars a gallon for diesel fuel um and then the last thing and i had never heard about this is that uh there is this cap on palestinian liquidity so you uh i i think this is like best explained i like i'll just read what was sent to me because i think this is i just want to make this super clear uh the major the majority of financial transactions in the west bank take place in israeli shekels often in cash palestinian workers and businesses deposit those bank notes in palestinian banks which credit their accounts electronically but palestinian banks themselves cannot carry out that conversion on their own for that they have to send truckloads of cash to israeli banks in exchange for electronic balances so what's the issue here israel caps the transfers at 5.8 billion u.s dollars annually so even though that palestinian banks receive around 9.8 billion dollars in cash each year this creates a severe liquidity shortage with more than 5.5 billion dollars in cash just sitting untouched in palestinian bank faults so less liquidity means less room for economic activity right so anything that you would need to like take out a loan for like to make a major transaction or any time that you need to do a foreign currency exchange maybe to like handle the import or export of goods that would allow your economy to flourish all of these things are like controlled and limited by the way the israeli banking system subjugates the palestinian one and i've never like i've read so many articles about and this is you know still terrorism but when like people like firebomb and like shoot palestinians from like these outposts and things but i've never read an article about like the financial ways this region is being like choked out by the you know the government that is occupying them uh and i think i i just wanted to share that because i think that's something even through the documentaries and things i've watched is gets a really limited amount of exposure i wonder if it's almost part of the strategy of you know like yeah i have these outposts go out there and that gets the attention and then and then you have all these things underneath the surface that are just preventing a person from growing their life in any way i think you're i think you're right i think there's like a subset of like even further right-wing people in israel that are like cause as much like carnage and destruction and stuff like that and i think that's something that's possible but then there's a more like and i use this word very contextually moderate version where people are like if this if this is what demands people's attention but ultimately like netanyahu can like make an announcement about how like we're cracking down on the outposts because it doesn't really matter if they're like if if like these kids committing acts of like terrorism are do you know what i mean like because because it's backed by this much larger institutional displacement of people that is doing the bulk of the work that makes it very difficult to live there this is gonna sound like an insane sentence but there is uh this there's a funny angle to this and i'm gonna tell you why it's gonna sound crazy the things that you're talking about these horrors right now there's an israeli election coming up and the party that is probably going to beat netanyahu is running on him being too palestinian yeah what can you show this this is a victor lieberman who who probably will win i guess it's not i'm not i'm just uncertain i have to do we're doing a presentation on it we're working on it but he's running ads like you can see on the left here where netanyahu is painted as being like like almost like thomas massey with aoc like netanyahu within israel is being painted as being this like he's too soft on palestine united and you're talking about all of the things that are currently right now yes under his long tenure as leader and it's like that that's wild to me that that to me is like shocking when i found this out i think it's just this like insane ultra right wing within israel politics like these like the ben geviers of the world that are like hill wall palestinians so we can have all of the land like that's basically that's basically what it's rooted in and it's crazy because it's like the whole world is watching like benjamin netanyahu be this incredibly evil guy there's a there's a guy in israel who is like he's not evil enough like uh yeah wild insanely sad and tragic yeah i uh but i really appreciate like my friend's time like walking me through a lot of this i thought it was worth sharing on the show because i feel like this is this is some of the stuff that is like less less reported on at least you know in my in my world so maybe we'll put on some great news coming out of this region one day and until then god damn i hope things improve this is horrible how do we transition how do we transition that to the straight of hormuz oh oh i i can i can do this i can get it i specifically mentioned that nine dollar diesel prices right now are a part of what is like compounding the economic effect in the west bank right and i think you had like a general straight of hormuz update so uh yes i think this is relevant to what you said we're talking about nine dollar diesel in palestine but even in america it's seven eight dollars a lot of places like it's very high people all over the world are encountering higher diesel prices in palestine there's riots in france about it among other things but there's fuel prices are becoming a big issue and an interesting fact that is like counter narrative is that actually right now as of literally four days ago this from the bbc oil flows out of hormuz are almost back to pre-war levels like it is not closed in the way that people think about and in fact i've covered this for a few weeks now it's at first it was 40 pre-roll it's been going up they've been getting oil out of hormuz uh i did a longer video but the basic idea is that all of the gulf states other than saudi arabia who has the pipeline all the other ones oman etc they really have this oil and need to get it out like it's like they they just they're stuck without it's like a huge part of government revenues they have to get it out and the reason chip tankers weren't going through hormuz is because number one they were afraid of getting hit by iranian drones but number two is they couldn't get insured because even if they were willing to take the risk and go no one give they get hit uh so the pressure of this economic desire to get it out has created that the governments themselves are stepping in and basically providing either the insurance or low-cost boats smaller boats that just go through say fuck it and then we get to the other side they ship transfer it to a larger tanker that's insured and goes on to china or wherever and like this policy along with the united states providing like extremely expensive like military and drone covers along the uh oman coast of the yeah like these two things have combined to start with a trickle and then eventually just the flood of oil going out and so it is getting out however this has not impacted diesel prices because all of the um extra costs that go into either maintaining it or the insurance or the ship-to-ship transfers are being added on to the price of a barrel. So even though there's more oil getting out, it hasn't just changed the price. And I have some, here's just like an example. Ship captains that are going to make this extremely dangerous sale are being paid $100,000 a month. Like the cost of every member of the crew, because it's now super dangerous. Like you might actually get struck. But if you think about it, Iran doesn't have the supply chain to actually strike every ship, but they just strike a few and they rely on people like being too afraid to do it. But now that there's just a wave of them going through, they're kind of running. So it's this weird, that is the thing, but here's the cost. Here's the crude tanker oil rates. So to get a VLCC, very large crude carrier, I think is like the term they use, used to be around $200,000 or less to be able to make this full transfer. You can see this price here in the top right. This is a great oil report. 1.2 million. Anybody that owns a tanker, by the way, any tanker that's like, even like they're going as far as like 40 years old, like really old, rusted ass tankers, they're all getting bought for a thousand percent markups. Like every tanker that exists in the world is getting bought and they're just throwing it in Hormuz. And like the older, the better. Cause if you lose it, it's almost not a problem. And they're just running the oil out. Is this like the gold rush in America where just everybody's fly? You can make big money if you get to the Strait of Hormuz right now. So anyone who's like super risk tolerant, I guess not risk, averse and has any connection to like tankers or like oil, oil and energy. There's they're going to Hormuz cause that is where an absurd amount of money is because of the economic pressure to get this oil out. And so this is weird. Like this is not a narrative that is yet being picked up. Most people are not talking about the fact that Hormuz is kind of technically open right now, but because it's open in a way where Iran still is striking some ships, the cost is still absolutely astronomical. And all of this gets added to a barrel of oil. Now, again, I don't, yeah, here it is. You know, it's, it's, it's 43 times the cost of what it used to be and it's equivalent to $33 a barrel, which is again, this, this number right here. - 27% of the delivered cost of crude oil. - And this used to be, I think 2% of the cost of oil. So a huge chunk of the cost of oil now is just the cost of delivery because of the risk, but they haven't stopped delivery. So it's just, it's a difference from what's before, but it hasn't, it doesn't meaningfully translate to people's like quality of life getting better, but it does change the narrative. So I do want to say this, obviously we should never be in the war on Iran. We've said it on this podcast from the beginning. I said it personally, it's a fucking foolish idea. - My memory's hazy. I seem to be here, so you were. - Extremely proud of me. But I do want to say that I think the narrative that it's like a hardcore Iranian victory, I would say is being a little bit undermined because right now the only country that can't reliably get oil out is Iran 'cause it can't get past the next layer of American blockades. And the Rial, which is their currency, is every three weeks like significantly getting hammered. And so there is like a real economic crisis. Now I saw a really good analysis by someone who is an Iranian foreign policy expert, I think from there. And he basically said the regime there is so, like I guess used to withstanding economic problems and sanctions. Like they are so entrenched on that front that it is unlikely that even if it gets really bad, it will change their ability to maintain control. So it's kind of like this weird standoff waiting game where they are very entrenched, hard to remove. And like the trend line is actually kind of bad for them, but they have more ability to tank it than I think America, which has like midterms. And you know that, so it's this weird thing, but I just want to say it's different than I think the easy narratives that are coming out. And I kind of wanted to cover it 'cause I thought it was interesting. It's like, it's more complex than that. And I certainly, it feels like both sides, actually the whole entire world economy and Iran economy is all taking simultaneous pain until I guess somebody gives in. - Somebody gives up. - Yeah, which is like bad, you know, it's not, yeah. - Do you know what the output is on the Red Sea side? - Yeah. - Like how much does that play a part right now? - I don't have the exact numbers because another, so there's a pipeline across the world. Across Saudi Arabia, which we've talked about. - Yeah. - It transmits 7 million barrels of oil a day. They did repair it after it got struck by, they say question mark, but it was probably Iran through Iraq on drones. And so it's flowing again, but then the Houthis are still striking only Saudi Arabian ships as they try to go out the Bad Al-Mandib Strait into the Gulf of Aden, Aden, Calvin, your Gulf. And so it's question mark. I know that tankers are still going out, going up through Suez, going through the Mediterranean, going out and around Africa, but the cost that adds to a barrel of oil is massive. So either it's through Hormuz inexpensive or it's through that way inexpensive, but it's not really going out the cheap way is my understanding. - But they don't attack anybody else's ships. It's just Saudi ships. - The Houthis, my understanding is the Houthis have made a deal with America and other countries, but literally the, yes, I know it sounds crazy. I promise you. - That's crazy. - That through negotiators in Oman, America has talked through Omani negotiators. The Houthis have said, we are not going to strike even Israeli ships. Not America, we're only striking Israeli ships. We're only striking Saudi Arabian ships, which is why Trump has not returned MBS's calls. - MBS, I'm sorry. - Trump is not coming to like send U.S. resources to fight the Houthis. And so it's this weird, it's just a very weird time in the Middle East. And I think it was all completely unavoidable. Nobody could have prevented this. - We didn't have it. There was another choice. - No, it was just destined to be this way, but. - Do you think when Trump made the deal, with the Houthis, he like hung up the phone, he was like, damn, I'm good. - Art of the deal, baby. Chapter 11. Yeah, I don't know. I just think it's crazy. I think it's a weird time. It's weird that so much oil could go through Hormuz and the prices still be not only elevated, but like more elevated than they were when less oil was going through Hormuz. It's like, it's really mind boggling. The way, I think this whole Hormuz thing, 'cause I've been pretty following it closely, is just a testament to the weird interconnectedness, interconnected nature of the global economy and how pressures make insane things possible. Like right now, oil from, I think it's the UAE, they're literally loading thousands of barrels onto trucks and trucking them across the desert to get the difference. Like things that would not be economically viable are viable because of how expensive it all is. So it's just weird. It's just weird. And I thought it was worth covering, but I think this will segue nicely into our next topic, which apparently all of this combined, people don't like. - No, that's actually wrong. - Oh really, they love it. - Approval rating through the roof. - Oh! - It's 180. - Can you imagine if all this is happening and Trump was like at 90%? People are like, fuck yeah. - I mean, if, yeah, maybe if, I'm just, I don't know, if they had attacked us first, you know, maybe if he had waited for that. - Oh, there's a million things. - I mean, I feel like that would be the only situation, right? - Yeah. - Perry, do you have the Reuters article? Okay. - What does routers have to say about this? - What does routers, what does my internet router have to say? - Look, Roto-Rooter did a little bit of an investigation. As you've probably heard, Trump's approval rating is very, very, very low, but I thought that I would call out a few highlights from both this article as well as No Opinion did an article. So first off, you can just scroll down till you see the graph. Right now, 32% of Americans approve of Donald Trump's presidency. This is historically low, it's real bad. I mean, you can see at the start of the election, it was like 47%, and it has just been plummeting. So this is, it's not only low, it is historically low, as we'll see in a sec with another poll. What I thought was interesting from this as well is that he's particularly plummeting with Hispanic voters. So there's a quote from them. Hispanic voters helped propel Trump to victory in the 2024 contest. He won nearly half the Hispanic vote, compared with roughly one third in 2020, but that support has waned in the recent months. Now it's only 24% of Hispanic Americans. So it's interesting that, you know, you have the Iran war and you have cost of living, which is probably the biggest, the biggest factors that are causing the Republican base or his, you know, voters to be turning away from Trump. But this Hispanic voters, which were this, you know, long sought dream to like court that group, and he did successfully do that. Going into the 20, it's just like blown now. They've blown that lead entirely. - This is what's- - Gen Z too, younger people. - This is what's backfiring on him, especially in Texas, 'cause they're like, I think the state is like disproportionately young compared to average states, and then also very Hispanic. So because this group is pivoting, pivoting so hard, it's like, what is making Texas such a swing this time around? - Yeah, it's funny 'cause if you see a graph of both Gen Z voters and Hispanic voters, it's like this magical six month period in 2024, where they go from like relatively low interest or approval in Republicans and policies, and it spikes up to 50% plus, like going into November of the election. It's this, I mean, it's this collective hallucination that a huge amount of people had right around like the assassination attempt, and Kamala not being a good messenger, and also the gas prices being high, and then it plummets right back down the second they actually get the policies. It's crazy, like a lot of things change because of that moment, that excitement. I mean, you guys remember the fucking, the vibes around the assassination attempt, and when he said fight, fight, fight, and it was a weird time, and we're paying the price. - I think, so no opinion to this article, the second Trump presidency is a world historic failure, and if you pull up the two polls I sent you, Perry, I think it's worth acknowledging that while you, I think, especially as, you know, left-leaning people, it is easy for us to say, there was this collective delusion for like two months and then they woke up to reality. But I think an argument that Noah makes and many others have made is like, and we discovered Trump has fumbled the bag real, real bad, right? In theory, people elected him to do what he did in the first term, which is, yeah, he's going to be bombastic and annoying, particularly on social issues and online and do a lot of locker room talk. Um, but you know, in the first term he did not start new wars and he just focused on the stock market getting pumped and a couple small cultural I would just say like, uh, so like what I'm saying is Hispanic voters have over a many decade period, not even just Trump been, uh, mostly voting against Republicans. Like that. But then this, and even Trump one, I'm saying even during Trump one, their approval, this is two month period where like two groups that traditionally vote not Republican, which is younger voters. And they just, they both surge at one time, right into the exactly when it matters. And then immediately it's just a weird, that's what I'm saying. But I think that the argument that folks are making or Noah does in his article is the idea that like, these are self-owned by Trump and you wouldn't necessarily see that plunge back down. If for example, he had just closed the border and not had ice go around and like shoot people and round them up. Right. Like that is not a great way to get Hispanic support to be like, probably most people were like, yeah, we want the border to be closed, stop illegal immigration, not have gangs round up people based on their skin color. Right. Um, and then with, with the younger cohort, now they were told we're not going to go to wars and the cost of living is going to get better. Right. And in theory, if he had not started a war and focused on inflation and not been spending so much money, again, these self-owns that go against what he was at least pitching in theory, that wouldn't have happened as much, but obviously I think there's a strong case to be made that if Trump had done absolutely nothing, like if he had literally just, you know, talked on TV and rallies, but nothing at all, he would be substantially more popular and probably like, uh, have a, you know, been able to carry that vibe shift for a long time. So it's just this like on like unbelievable self-owned, you know, he's never going to get our side, but I think he could have kept the other side. And instead what is happening is here. So wall street journal poll presidential approval before the midterms, you can see that going back with, this is what, 30, 40 years now, since we've had this type of polling, Trump is going in at 37%. It is the lowest historically ever since we've had these polls to be worse than Bush. Oh, six is fucking nasty. Yeah. Yeah. And then go to the next one. That's nasty. This one Trump's approval among Republicans on handling the cost of living that now more, more disapprove of how he's handled cost of living than approve. And that was like supposed to be again, like that was the thing where he was going to come in and stop the inflation and just deal with the stock market and not do all this crazy stuff that Biden's doing. And they disapprove on that. Uh, Peter Teal's going out saying the, the administration's full of not competent people. And then, um, Republicans, there's one more thing in his article. Republicans now say, um, do they support the party, the Republican party or Trump more? And 56% said they report, they support the Republican party. And only 34% they said they support Donald Trump. And it was like 7% said both. I bet a year ago, that'd be so exactly swap. So now you have people who, who, who, you know, lean conservative or vote Republican saying it's not really about Trump. It's about the party. And it's like, dude, this is a massive swing from a year and a half ago. Yeah. And then we're only a year and a half into is I feel like he's going to get fed to the fucking wolves by the end of this. He like the anger is building up. He is going to be the totem of just throw him on every prop. Like, I think, yeah, in a way I'm kind of worried about that. You know, like he will become this pariah that will be blamed for so much when don't get me wrong. He's responsible for a lot of it, but ultimately so many people are complicit in the choices that are being made, like the whole way down. Peter Teal is a funny person to like, like you did so much to help this administration and these incompetent people. Get the power. Uh, I saw this is a much smaller scale, but you guys see Theo Vaughn with Zoran and he's like ruffling his hair. And it's like, it's just funny that like, that's the new wave and he's just on it. You know what I'm saying? Like this guy one year ago was super Trump, super going to the inauguration doing, and now it's like, Hey, Zoran, you're kind of my guy. It's just this new wave. It's whatever's the, I go back to what I was joking about earlier so much because what I find so, and I know this is fucking, it's not really what I want to be about, you know, in a sense, like I want to just complain all the time, but it is fucking insane to me that like you had, you had a four year period to go look at. It's like, it's not like every other election ever. That's right though. That four year period is so different from this one. That's, that's, I think the counter argument is like a person could have voted for Trump and let's say, you know, this big independent block or, you know, they're more in the middle, right. That is now objectively swinging away. And presumably when faced between Kamala and Trump, they're like, well, we have the evidence of both of these at, let's say administrations have, you know, they've done a term and I think Trump will probably do what he did. And I think if people knew what Trump was going to do, maybe that wouldn't have gone its way. I mean, that's Oh, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I guess even evidence through like the, the approval rate, I will start a war in Iran. If he ran on what he actually did. Yeah. Like Trump, Trump in 2018 is like in the middle ish of that chart we looked at. It's like, okay, if he had just stayed that guy, then presumably he would have retained more of the support. So I can see that. Yeah. Perspective. Yeah. I, I will say Peter Thiel is just, he loves putting out insane quotes. Can you imagine being his like publicist? Peter, just say, just all you have to say is being evil is bad. You don't have to, when someone asks you are the antichrist, don't pause. Peter, I'm begging you. Don't pause and think about it. Like you just say no instantly. Snap that one. Yeah. This gets, it gets like that thing though. You know, like Elon and Peter Thiel and Trump, it's like, I don't fit. If they weren't that type of person, they wouldn't be in that position in the first place. Yeah, for sure. You know? Yeah, of course. Hi, it's Phoebe Judge, host of Criminal. I'm going on tour. If you like hearing me tell stories about people, well, I've decided to tell stories about my life and the people I love. A letter was left carelessly around. So I was sort of caught red handed. It's a show about secrets and forgiveness. I hope you'll come to see it. Find all our tour dates and get tickets at thisiscriminal.com slash live. The midterms will reshape Washington. Will they also change how President Trump wields power abroad? You're not going to have Trump focus on domestic policy because he's not inherently interested in it. He is very interested in reshaping the world, making big plays on the global stage. I'm John Finer. And I'm Jake Sullivan. We're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we speak with New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan, one of the best sourced reporters covering the Trump White House today. The episode is out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. Walmart's got 150 million people walking through its doors every week, while Waymo operates its autonomous ride-hailing cars in only 15 U.S. cities as of now. But both shared stories about why they need to keep earning customer trust and how trust is earned by everything the companies do and say in that order. Creator Destroy. It's a business show, a marketing show, and a show that argues they've always been the same thing. From the Wisdom is Company and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Okay, well, this leads into one of the hilarious, funny things that Trump has done. A lot of funny ones. We're just having funny ones back and forth. So that fucking TV ad that we started with is one example of Trump responding to all this and be like, well, maybe if I say I'm going to kill the communists, then we'll reverse this trend. Which, by the way, he's again funny for a we just talked about a large cohort of people who are upset at how he's handled the cost of living. And he then says, here's an ad you're watching while on TV. And it says paid for by the U.S. government. And it's like, I don't think people are going to appreciate that when it costs a lot of fucking money to live right now. And then the other thing he's doing, which certainly won't affect the cost of living, is he is repeatedly saying he's going to offer five thousand dollar checks to every single American. aiden dude i the main thing i wanted to bring up is like that he so insisted about it because we had covered this a while ago when like it had been he had just posted about it on truth social i think and then jd vance was kind of doing the rounds you know jd vance is doing cleanup on it where he has to go get interviewed by people and answer like why this is like a rational and good idea his job is so funny he has to like take the most insane things and like put a spin on him of veneer of intellectualism dude him and besant and rubio they have to do this over and over again they do the like world's strangest media circuit where like you uh anyway yeah and but trump made his own video i think this week or end of last week where he was announcing that this was going to happen again basically if you if you vote republican and keep the republicans in power we'll pay everybody five thousand dollars and i think this has been catching my eye even more is because people are going to town on that smiling friends clip on twitter where so many people are posting it is smiling friends an animated show on youtube is like or on hbo it's funny uh they there's a clip where the two main characters are hanging out with this guy that's president and he makes a public service announcement he's like hello everyone i'm the money president i'm giving everyone a million dollars like and people keep posting that over and over and over Uh, and I think the obvious questions are all like even Fox news. is asking him like okay like sure you want to do this it's like but the republicans aren't in control everything right now why don't you just why don't you want to do it right now no that doesn't make any sense it doesn't make fucking sense we have to win and i think it's funny to see it is interesting to see like somebody like jd vance get interviewed on fox news and even see a fox news host be asking questions like this doesn't really make any sense okay there's 250 ish million adult citizens in america so it'd be about 1.5 1.25 trillion dollars do you think that that would uh help or hurt inflation tariff money my friend maybe you haven't heard of the tariffs they're bringing in the fucking bacon baby and i know i know what you're thinking in the audience you're thinking didn't the supreme court strike down the tariffs and we have to refund them well with a law workaround we can still tariff canada and the canadian tariffs just them we'll pay for all of it for everyone to get while we're refunding the previous tariffs yes uh yeah the argument that jd vance has to go on fucking tv and say no this is not a bribe because it goes to every american but like when you make a direct statement if we win you get 5 000 that is a bribe uh but that's a good news on that is i saw polling on this and it is pretty unfair i don't know if it's true but i don't know if it's unpopular even among republicans yeah it's not a well-received policy people are like instantly recognize this as like what it is a bribe yeah and then secondly almost more importantly is that even republicans most people do not believe him they just think it won't happen because he's made other promises like $2,000 tariff checks and yada yada yada over and over and none of them have come into fruition and so people just think like it probably won't happen um and also the the caveat is that he also demands they win the house and the senate which is also just mathematically very unlikely right so it's it's kind of smart on his end in a like a twisted way which is that that's not going to happen right the democrats are at least going to win the house the senate is the contested one so he'll be able to throw up his hands and say only we had the house if you had shown up and vote we couldn't do anything i would have given you the check but we didn't win uh okay i do i have the nordic fun fact next but i would i want to hold on to it for a little longer i don't want you i want to take it out of your hand i'm hungry i'm hungry for the food i'm hungry for the food i'm going to keep it i'm keeping it for me now we've been doing all this america stuff i want to do because i'm itching to get to this because i didn't do the research on this story and i want to hear about it about the manchester city football you promise you'll give me the nordic fun i promise i'll give you i'll tell you about this it's not a huge story your gift will be there thank you you pull us up perry so i i don't know nothing about football really i'm not going to pretend to be an expert okay okay but i just say it i say it correctly it's just funny about the english team but yeah this is man city which has since two years ago i've been in man city and 2009 was when they were acquired by a chic from uh uae uh have been one of the winningest teams in football they've been remarkably successful and uh in that time people have been praising their ability to raise revenue get sponsors hire top talent and run their team well recently it was found out that they are enormously guilty of financial fraud and the unique rules of believe this is premier league premier league football is that uh you know it's not like most leagues here in america where there's like a salary cap across leagues mostly they just want everything to be sustainable which is the idea is you can't have a rich owner come in and pay for everything they basically say you can spend a percentage of your actual revenue that you get from sponsors and jersey sales and yada yada yada but you can't use your owner's money to do whatever you want so they're very very very absurdly wealthy owner didn't like those rules he wants to win and he doesn't really care about money because he is not only personally wealthy but he is the vice president and deputy prime minister of the uae as a whole he has enormous political power it is a basically a state where you know personal wealth and state wealth are very intertwined he basically has access to the resources of a state and he wants to win he also wrote his 688 million dollar yacht nearly a billion dollars on a single boat to pass out some of the games so this is the revenue of man city over the past let's say two decades right and it's interesting it looks like it's actually performing rather well in the the revenue front i wonder if any of the sponsors are getting value out of their sponsors their commercial revenue from their sponsors and you can see since he takes over in 08 it has been an unbroken line up even incredibly during the years of covid when every other football team had massive dips they just kept going so these are the years they're currently being investigated on i've highlighted in red here though it's possible this has continued in the years on the right let's find a split now they've been found guilty as i've said they looked in the numbers and they wanted to see what percentage of that sponsorship revenue was real revenue and what percentage was the rich owner paying a sponsor to pass through the money to you uh the red parts are the parts that pass through jesus so essentially their actual sponsor growth has been almost nothing until they started winning they got a little bit but like almost nothing and even after this enormous guilty verdict which is a massive deal in football and has been completely uh you know a major piece of news it only covers through 2018 so still legally it's saying the part on the right here is all good i bet it's clean i bet it's all clean after 2018 starting in 2018 they just they just got clean they found jesus and it's all so it seems to me that this team has been basically a massive front for an extremely wealthy person to cheat the rules and they've been winning consistently so it has worked like they've had enormous success in in football because of it and they haven't announced the punishment yet though i do believe even though usually these things aren't it should be quite severe as my understanding is they have got them dead to rights there is no realistic appeal at this point they've got like emails and financial accounting and they've got them it was literally 114 counts and they found them guilty on 113 of them and like yeah locked out so uh it says they're gonna tar and feather erling holland yep uk law says you can do that so yes they're gonna pick one guy and just put it all on him and yeah and that's him early on so uh it remains to be seen whether there'll be an additional investigation into the years after where they almost certainly did the same thing but uh right now they're they're if you're a man city fan it's going to be a tough time because it seems like they're going to lose a lot this is not like um my understanding it's not like a criminal offense still this is a maybe it is i guess it is like a fraud on some level but the rules they are breaking are within the league and so it is like they're going to be punished within the league nobody's going to jail to my understanding i think the big thing here if and football fans you can explain this better than me i'm sure is that people knew this was happening yeah actually can you pull this up last thing i'll say this is uh manager jesse march who uh for leads another team he said i think man city should be punished severely i think they should have to go down and by the way everyone knew about it everyone knew and the idea is like this is completely open secret and uh and finally they're getting some justice on it even though it's like literally decades later yeah because it's an explosion like an explosion in revenue that the team never had before and all of the sponsors are like uae backed companies it's it it's so clear what was happening and it's interesting because i think there there had been complaints from fans for so long that this was continuing to go on unchallenged so i think similar to the way the i i would argue this is like a bigger scandal but i think it's similar to the way that the nba kawhi leonard uh clipper scandal was breaking out where it felt like such a long time of knowing this is what happened and waiting for the nba to say what the punishment was and it ended up being something pretty severe in that case but in that you know the kauai stuff was over the course of like a year basically from when pablo torre like revealed the information to when the nba made their statement and this has been i mean more than 10 like i think 15 18 years right yeah and that whole time people had an understanding that this was very very likely the case with the management denying it yeah uh not only did the management deny it at certain points in these years there have been smaller investigations where they were found guilty or fined and they appealed them and won every time like they they used their pressure and their size and their money to get out of it so i yeah i do hope the punishment is severe it is funny that to think that if they are punished severely that sports leagues are doing a better job of holding the wealthy accountable than which is an insane thing governments but uh it is a wild thought i don't have any more things to develop that's that's it for me i mean that that was pretty much it um we can skate on over i'll give you your treat yeah give me the order if i'm back uh my treat is the nba kawhi leonard treat so this is a story out of finland and there's been a couple updates recently uh google you don't like that you want a different country finland bro that's doug marketing marketing marketing it's not really marketing finland oil i'm interested in that uh google is committing one of their largest the largest investment they've made in europe uh a 15 billion dollar commitment to finland to build new data centers in the northern part of the country uh partly because Because it's cold. It's so cold up there and it's more cost effective to be able to use for the shitty weather of the Nordics is what I'll say. Some people like the weather. Uh, it's my jealousy. You didn't like, I did boots on the ground report. Sorry. You did boots on the ground reporting today. Uh, I took one of those 12 axes is political things. Yeah. And you know, it's not, I didn't do that many questions or whatever, but it put me as like Nordic social democracy. And I wanted to shoot myself. Dude, I took, I took the, the Sweden has this like election compass thing. I took it to send to my friend and I landed on like the two, like further left parties in Sweden. And I sent it to my friend. I'm like, I'm the Sweden Democrats. Worse. But I heard that that question, I'm coming, I'm coming to ruin the country. Let's ask Tucker to do it too. See if you guys land together. I heard that quiz. I saw that is where they're making fun of it. It had like very Swedish, questions where it was like, if there's a reindeer farm and they want to do like mining in it, do you support the reindeer or the money? I think me and Fumi were talking about that. I was like, I was like, I need the content. Like I didn't tell me, tell me the reindeer thing, how it works. Anyway, Google making this investment in Finland, a different country. And partly because it's so cold up there. They, they, they want to build the data centers up there. And a part of this commitment also is they're like pre purchase. You're saying a bunch of Finland's nuclear power capacity for the coming years through 2050. And what was interesting to me is that, the plant, like one of the plants that is supplying the power to the data centers is, was going to be closed in the year 2030. And this investment by Google is keeping the plan open through 2050. So one of the pro arguments for it in Finland is like they are paying, paying for a level of electricity generation that wouldn't have been like the normal society, like wouldn't have paid for without this investment. There's like concerns from different parties in the country about like, you know, does this strain the grid? We need to evaluate whether or not like prices are going to go up for people. You know, does this actually make sense? But their prime minister who I've watched a few interviews of, I think I'm a fan of the guy. He is saying, no, this you know, the economic impact, like this isn't supposed to limit any of the electricity that is needed for like day to day life and like economic activity. And we think this will benefit the like Finnish economy. You know, it doesn't seem, you know, the thing is with Nordic politics is they, they all seem so relatively chill compared to when we talk about our stuff. Boring is what I think. You know, you have a little thrill. You want a president who's spending state money on his ads for himself. Have they even started a new war any time recently? Yeah. Where's the wars? Have they bombed? What did they talk about on Nordic eliminates? You know what's crazy? They did actually, they did actually do some, oh, they did some crazy for the first time, like Finland and Sweden did some joint military exercise against Russia, Russian things. See, I'm not explaining it, but it was cool. I like the Nordic fun bags end up at Ukraine. Eventually, you know, there's other, there's other countries, Satan, not just Ukraine and Russia and Scandinavia. If it doesn't have to do with Scandinavia or Sudan, I will not cover it. Anyway, we're making fun of them. But if somebody who owns a reindeer farm wanted to chat with us, I would love to interview someone about radio from the deep concerns they have with mining. That'd be very interesting. Why don't we slide on over to our last topic? Last time of the day. This is a follow up from a, let's say series that we've been doing about social media companies getting plowed by reindeers in the ass. Okay. Metaphorically the reindeer follow up. You said being the, you don't remember that the legal system, right? Okay. The legal system being the reindeer in the situation. So in this analogy, Mark Zuckerberg is in front of a reindeer and the reindeers bent aroused. Yeah. So let's move from that. Okay. A situation. Okay. Over to a different dolly aunts. Okay. We're ticked off. You're imagining it. You're closing your eyes and imagining it. Let's get okay. So tick tock, tick tock, bent over. Okay. Uh, and Alabama, we've been, we've been recorded for like metaphorically. Okay. Metaphorically, Alabama is about the fucking metaphorically tick tock is being torn asunder. Okay. Needy by Alabama. Okay. Because in 2025, Alabama attorney general sued tick tock over concern concerns about teen health. Same story. We've said a number of times. Yeah. So we've given updates about how meta has lost some very high profile lawsuits this year. And, uh, and, and it's agreed to change various things on their apps for teens and pay out all this money. Tick talks also been getting sued by a lot of people. They have been for the most part, I mean, actually for all of them just settling. So none of these have gone to trial and there haven't been like big exposes on what tick tock is doing. So they did this again. Uh, Amazon Amazon, Alabama sued them, um, saying you guys are letting teens evade your age restriction and you're chap trapping them in these like content things that harm their health. So they settled, this is just recently, uh, two weeks ago now and tick tock agreed one, they're going to, to do limitations for teens. This is just in Alabama for right now, but it's going to be a two hour daily time limit. You have to have pausing after 15 minutes of use. It's going to be stricter age checks and they got to pay Alabama a hundred million dollars, which will go up to 300 million if other states attorneys sign on. So this can get even bigger. If you're a state with a budget deficit, you should be suing tick tock just for the money. A hundred that isn't that like how much the California wealth tax is supposed to raise or something? Yeah, I think you just call this a wealth that basically, okay, they don't pay their taxes, so let's just sue them for the other harms they cause and get the money. Yeah. Um, so this is just part of a bigger trend where this keeps happening over and over. So there's like 27 states that are suing to talk right now with similar lawsuits. And I think you're going to continue to see this just massive attack because again, this is just for states. You also have individuals and municipalities also suing, you know, meta loss that that case against that teenager, an individual who was paid out, I believe 3 million. It was between three and seven. That's for one person. These, these cases are increasingly succeeding and I think you're going to see major changes to how these apps are used by teenagers because they have to, they are getting, they are getting, you know, you already are picturing it in your head. I'm picturing it. Yeah, it's vivid. It's I think this is, this is like any American opportunity for money. There's a bit of a gold rush here perhaps where if you're, you're realizing as more and more of these cases, succeed that, Oh, I, as a lawyer can like encourage people to go after this type of case. I, as a person who feels victim to it can go after this type of chance of winning, like more and more people are going to go for it as precedent. Yeah, but I mean, I, you know, I think it is probably good to, I think we have discussed this. I thought TikTok should have been banned when the entire country passed that bill and then didn't do it. That said it should be banned. So actually that falls up. I was curious as I, as I saw this, like what, what's happened to it? TikTok, because if you remember, you know, it, they created a joint partnership and now the American side is owned by this laryals and mostly by Oracle. Yeah, yeah. But still partially by bite dance and there were all these stories about like, Oh, everybody's leaving. But you always hear about that whenever, you know, when Elon took over her ex or Twitter and everybody started leaving and going to, you know, pick your choice. Yeah. So according to survey data from sensor tower, there was initially a surge in deletions like in January for TikTok, but by February daily active users was back to, to 95% of it was before and it's still 80 minutes of average daily time per American and I just want to, I just want to re re I want to say that again and our an hour and 20 minutes you cut that on 20 minutes is the average of what an American is spending on Tik Tok and that still appears to be the case we don't have like they haven't shared explicit data for since February but that's the survey data we have that's that's so much I feel that I've relapsed on YouTube shorts bro. I was like I I successfully stopped watching YouTube shorts for like the first half of the year and then recently and I can tell it got really bad because when you click on shorts a bunch it re orientates your YouTube feed to like highlight them first and it came back for me and I'm like dude I'm fucking I'm back at the trough I'm back at the trough I'm I'm a weak link are we all though it's fucking it's getting us all bro the the 50 I wonder how that pause after 15 minutes work works because when you mentioned it and made me think about it. I think of like that little pop up that would happen during like we sports that would tell you to take a break and be like you know like and then you just like swipe it away and you like keep going yeah it's kind of useless I mean that wraps up do we want to call it that's the news yeah yeah yeah we'll go there all right that wraps up this week's episode of lemonade stand if you want I know what you're thinking you guys have been doing a lot of guest episodes I don't like the guest episodes as much as the normal show I like keeping up with the new we do the normal show an extra hour of it on the patreon every week you can go to patreon.com slash lemonade stand and also we are launching something we've talked about for actually since before we started the show our stock game where you can use a set budget to draft stocks and we will track the results over the course of how long Perry over each month will is reoccurs over each month and we have the winners the winners The winner of each month or the top three get a special role in the Discord. Uh, and then we will read out the names of the top 20. Yeah. So real quick, do you have an image? Do I have like a visual? Let's show it. Cause the image is fucking cool. We're going to be covering it on the show in like a similar way to how we covered our own stock market game that we did like a year ago. And this is, these are from our, this is September's winners. So taco one, uh, eliminated Santa anthropod, uh, and then cheese are our top three for September. Uh, and then the October game, you need to get your, uh, if you go into the stock game channel, uh, on the discord and you go down and scroll down the bottom, join game, select your stocks, get them in by the 14th and you'll be in for the October. I just want to reiterate, this is not real money. This is just a fun for fun game. You are drafting stocks to see what you hypothetically would have won. The fucking winner right now is doing two X leveraged Bitcoin ETFs. Yes, sir. This is not financial advice in any way. I use the fun game like the one we played before we even started the show, which was really fun. It was a good time. I do want to point out, by the way, our second. Place, great investment into Doug, Doug, Douglas Alamond, Inc. I with 18% focus on the numbers. It was part of an overall balance portfolio. We have no idea how Doug was doing during the middle of the month. So the number three and number five just used my face as their profile picture. Well, so actually what you can also do is you can join a fund. So there are five funds, one and one for each of you, as well as independent. And, uh, I think the one with the communist, uh, sickle and hammer, a communist fund for, uh, I think I forget the, the, the name of it, but it is, uh, you can, you can pick your faction. Let's read all 20 of our top investors from September first place, taco, and then lemonade anthropod, PA cheese, who is apparently Atriac judging by their profile picture, M llama, love, little Hugh, jawbreaker, a lot of Atriac's up the leaderboard. Well, that's our plan, I guess. At cock. At cock, edge, Santa, Kate, wolf, it's at Coke and EJ Santa. It's not edge Santa. I'll call them when they want. If they have my profile picture, by the way, the eight is fat, eight, 11, Kevin, let's go. We've got to go on in there and then Peyton, uh, we're in lap 13, Silvermont, Texas, avocado. Another one. Let's go. N J E three, three, one King Rico, Wesley, Jolson, and taco. Am I confused here? Do they have like some preset profile pictures to pick from? They're weirdly all us or he says, oh, this is the, these are the funds that they pick. I see a lot of the Aiden fund. There's a couple Aiden funds cause you invested fucking reindeer. No, I said we should mine instead of the, so I'm, if you want to come play, check out the Patrion or you want that normal episode every week, a patrion.com/lemonade stand. All right. We will see you guys on the next main episode. If you run a small business, you know that having a clear picture of your finances is invaluable zero spelled with an X is a simple but powerful platform built for small business owners that makes managing business finances easier from day one accounting payments, payroll and analytics are available in one connected platform reports, visual dashboards, forecasts, and AI insights help owners better understand cashflow and make smarter decisions. Yeah. Join the 5 million customers worldwide using zero learn more at zero.com that's X E R O.com.