We Got Banned | Ep. 081 Lemonade Stand 🍋

I'm Ida 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 Garner. 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. Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I am talking with New York Times bestselling author and meditator Young Pueblo. We talk about moving from Ecuador to Boston as a young child, pulling himself up from rock bottom, and how meditation changed his life. I get a lot of questions about that. I get a lot of questions on the state of the wellness industry, and he decides if he's more mommy, daddy, or baby. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Finally, Doug, we got rid of the dead weight. We've been, we've done what, like 70 guest episodes in a row? Yeah. Get back to the core duo of this show. Yeah, the core duo. We've gotten rid of this long-running guest, which I think people are thinking you overstayed his welcome a little bit. Right, right. Yeah. It's awfully, it's, there was even a time where I wasn't here, and it was just you and the guest doing an episode, and that was off and straight. The audience is like, what is going on? This guy won't leave. The worst time, though, for him to leave, because ladies and gentlemen, we're being silenced by the White House, and we have sent Aiden to Sweden to get on the ground floor to tell us what's going on. So far, no word. Yeah, we told Aiden all the news on this was in Sweden he had to go. Aiden, you've got to figure it out, and he's just been out there. He's been out there, boots on the ground. He keeps sending us mess messages in Swedish, and we just, we just ignore what's going on. It's just, it's just pictures of him getting free health care with Swedish captions. He does, he does get extra smug in his messages when he's in Sweden. He just, he knows that he's, he's on a higher plane. But anyway, I tell you, he's not on our plane, is, is the, the news media. But first, you were telling me off camera, and I said, wait till the show, that we are now official journalists, and this is going to be important for the next story in the mainstream. Thanks to, thanks to our lovely Reddit who pulled this up, but apparently, what, two weeks ago, we covered, and I say covered because we're journalists here, we covered how there's that guy in prison who's running for the Alaskan senator position, right? And one of the other candidates, Bill Hill, is now sending text blasts to people in Alaska saying, friends, don't let friends vote for a fake Democrat, and it's a link to our clip on Instagram. So we now have politicians using our show as part of media campaigns, and so I think it's fair to say we've ascended to sort of legitimate politics, and so I think it's fair to say we've ascended to sort of legitimate politics, and so I think it's fair to say we've ascended to sort of legitimate politics, and so I think it's fair to say we've ascended to sort of legitimate politics, and that is why no one is angrier than we are at the White House's crackdown on the free press. If you pull this up, Donald Trump in the past few days banned CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House, claiming that they are fake news. I'm proud to announce that, effectively, immediately, I'm banning fake news CNN, MSNOW, who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility, and Politico. I'm proud to announce that, effectively, I'm banning fake news CNN, MSNOW, who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility, and Politico. But in Obama's term, there was some event they didn't let Fox News come to, and in response, the press pool there refused to go and cover it, and then the White House backed down. And so, similarly, here, where Donald Trump is attempting to ban three major news outlets, the press pool refused to cover him, which led to his recent appearance. are the press pool, but they're all boycotting it. And so instead this happens. And for audio listeners, we are watching a video. His lips are moving. He's speaking, but we do not know what he's saying. What if this is the one good Trump speech? What if it finally clicked? I just thought this was so funny. So the clip you just showed about how Trump, they couldn't pick up his mic. So it caused chaos on Polly Market and Galshi because they had all bet on what he'd say during the speech. There's a Trump, what will Trump say during his ribbon cutting ceremony? And there's no audio. And so you just see all the different options pivot to free fall, right? There's no audio. the press needs to think about the consequences of their actions consequences for the gamblers there's gamblers who need the audio that's what press conferences are for so uh you know i think i think i i stand with my fellow journalists who are refusing to uh appear at these uh these white house meetings however there is an opportunity for any you know people who want to rise a fast going journalistic platform and that is because of this this response from the press pool the white house announced 24 7 365 trump tv is now streaming updated in real time with top past moments that it literally has like clips of old speeches is that clip from breaking bad yeah this clip is from breaking bad which i don't so their announcement tweet about this we can pull up the actual tweet if we want to get it but the white house seems to be very very cavalier um okay can you explain to the people when we talk about the the pool the press pool what does that mean and like why does why isn't there video and audio footage of an event like this the press pool is just a group of uh accredited institutions that get invited to the white house professional press meetings and get to cover it yeah they they submit questions um they get to respond in real time to events and they it's it's a the other thing i didn't realize is that there's only five outlets that do the video and audio coverage so it's like fox and cnn are two of them so part of the reason there's no video and audio is like there's all these different press outlets that gain access to the white house but in response to trump saying i'm banning three of them yeah all five of the companies that are doing the video and audio they take turns doing it all five of them boycott it so like all of the video and audio footage of trump's events are from these five groups deciding that they're going to send like a production team to each one of these things. Like each one takes like one day a week, basically. And so if all it takes is those five to boycott and then there's just no video and audio of what he's doing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I assume, I mean, there's going to be video and audio on Trump TV. That's my assumption is that they will find some way that you could, it's 2026, they can mic him up. Yeah. For audio listeners, we're looking at a Seinfeld clip. What is happening? Yeah. I didn't actually realize how many copyrighted things were in the announcement of Trump TV. A Trump TV announcement? Of which they own none. The White House media platform, social media, has been extremely cavalier about copyrighted content. They're like a Roblox game. I mean, they just do not care. Well, it's fair use. Anyway, Trump TV has got a family guy. Family guy's going to be on there, maybe. Wait, what? Are they? OK, so let's. My implication, my understanding of Trump TV. OK, there's Batman. My implication is that it does not have any of this content. it only has uh official white house announcements let me just make sure i'm following here so trump bans three outlets there's spongebob and then in response the five outlets that do the video and audio coverage say we're not going to cover it anymore like for the foreseeable future including fox by the way who says we're not covering it in response this is home alone this is home alone which trump is in so he does have rights to that one drake and josh friends i mean it's not like Trump TV is going to be better than early Netflix. It's going to have everything. And this is the idea that people are going to watch this instead of Trump's events? Like, Trump TV will show this is The Office. This is crazy. Actually, watching this is so idiocracy, bro. And then it ends with the White House logo. It just ends with the White House logo and, like, fucking. Wow. Stewie Griffin from Family Guy stomping his feet. Maybe that made more sense with audio. I'm not 100% sure. But there is now essentially state run media, which is awesome. There's no audio, though, because they're additionally at the same time. The White House is pushing real time updates and live events directly streamed to your phone. So you can skip the noise. This is news that matters straight from the Trump administration. This is a official White House app, which I heard it takes insane permissions as part of a voter data collection thing leading up to the midterm. So I would just say that Lemonade Stand is standing on the outside looking in on this really powerful new media apparatus. But if – I mean, just be FR here. If Trump messaged you right now, as he often does, and says all five of the video production groups are boycotting, if you guys get a team in here, you get – Can they get us the primetime slot between friends and family guy on TV? You get the primetime slot. Yeah, we'll take that in a heartbeat. - It'll be like that thing where he's charging $100,000 to get news a milliseconds faster on Truth Social. Give us milliseconds faster access. - Oh my God, dude, and WeChat, we upped the Patreon price. Are we up to Patreon price? And it's all hedge funds buying us. Anyway, yeah, I don't know if there's too much more to this story. I just think it's, I guess I'm happy, first of all, that, you know, the thing that other press outlets did for Fox News during the Obama administration, Fox News is now joining them in doing versus Trump, which I think is a good sign. I do think as Trump seemingly gets weaker and weaker, more lame duck heading into midterms, it does feel like there's a less of a tendency to automatically kowtow to these insane requests. I do feel like there's a, it was almost an immediate spine here from people like Fox News that I just felt like it was a sign of his weakness on this. You know what? Let's pivot the order of our planned topics and let's move on to another Trump L, which is a real bummer for the Trump heads in our audience. So Trump this week basically lost a big ruling on his mail-in voting restrictions. So, okay. So back in March, you may have heard Trump now did an executive order ensuring citizenship verification. And the idea was basically he's going to make mail-in voting a lot stricter. Here's like the kind of core takeaways. Like before, like before this, states are largely responsible for figuring out who is an eligible voter. But after this executive order, the Department of Homeland Security, the federal government would have a voter list and send that to states and say, these are the only viable, like only eligible people. And then mail-in voting. And then mail-in voting, the USPS, the United States Postal Service, just delivers the mail-in ballots. They're not checking anything that's on the states. And then after this, it would say the state has to tell the USPS like a full list and the USPS has to verify it and only mail the ballots that they've checked off with the federal government. And then the envelope itself would have to have this new format that is like a federal thing. Broadly, states decide how mail-in voting works right now. And all 50 states have mail-in voting to some degree. And it would shift it to kind of this like approval system from the federal government. So Trump launched this in March. The way it's supposed to work is something like this comes from Congress. But of course, this is one of those examples where he just kind of, you know, fires. So he fires this. Democratic states and voting rights groups sued and basically said, look, Congress is supposed to be the ones that do this. There's a little back and forth. In June, a federal judge put an injunction on this. In August, the Supreme Court lifted it and said, we are getting rid of that injunction. But. But more recently, and what's important, on September 4th, like two weeks ago, the same federal judge issued a new injunction that completely blocked this ruling. OK, the obvious point of this, right, is to make mail-in voting harder leading into the midterms. Right. It is now September. We're pretty close to the midterms. Yeah. So at the beginning of this month, federal judge puts an injunction and blocks this and says that it's not not practical. And then the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to rule in it and to lift this block. And they said, you know, we need this in place for the midterms. This has been one of Trump's like big things of I want to change mail-in voting and save America and all this stuff before midterms. And on September 15th, so it's about a week ago now, the Supreme Court voted and said they are leaving the block in place. So it's a 6-2 ruling. And it said the government is unlikely to win on the merits. And then Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the rule would be, quote, arbitrary and capricious because state and local election officials do not have the right to vote. They do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election. But on top of that, they indicated also you probably will not win this case on the merits because it's not supposed to be the president who does this. It's supposed to be Congress. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I saw this. I appreciate him saying that part specifically because it was so obvious it was getting rushed down mid for this election. And it would have been impossible to get done in time, which would have been a de facto like stripping of all mail-in voting rights for a lot of states. Yeah. Because like. Literally, we looked into it, some writers for Big A, and it was like for them to create the new ballots that have to be in this new system. Yeah. Like they don't have the ability to make all those for all the places. They've already made all the ballots. They're already ready to go. Yeah, it's in a month and a half. It's a very unique design that has to be like the ability to be whatever. We're not China. We can't make things. Okay. You give us a few years and we can change the envelope. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But also it's the design has a unique scanner that everyone has now. They had to be trained on using. Yeah. And it was like, it was just obviously designed to make it so that mail-in ballots would either be inadmissible, hard to verify, easier to dismiss. Like it was just very clearly set up for this election. Do you think it's coincidence that Democrats are more likely to use mail-in voting? Yeah, I think it's. Well, you know what I do is before every election is I yoink a bunch of my local mail place and I stuff the ballot box. Yeah. And I put Democrat on there. So that's what changes the numbers is mostly. Me doing it. No, I think it's like a demographic thing, right? It's like. Yeah. Certain ages or certain groups are more likely to use mail-in voting and that's, they most likely lean blue. Yeah. You know, I thought it was interesting from the Trump voted mail-in ballot. Just to be clear. Like he, that's what he does. He voted mail-in ballot both times. Yeah. But he hated every minute of it. Like burned his hand to the touch. Now that was interesting about this is I was looking at some different responses that people had to this ruling. And what is, what is sort of interesting is that the left. Believes very overly broadly here that the Supreme court is very partisan. It is six, three, you know, for Republicans on the Supreme court. And the feeling is like Supreme court is basically allowing Trump to get away with a ton of stuff. And then people on the right feel like the Supreme court has been unloyal to Trump. And Trump has certainly been very upset about it. There's a truth social. I think I linked it to you, Perry. Jeez. Trump said, yeah, it's a long one. It's so long. He gets go. Yeah. Well, cause he goes off on like random other tangents during this, as you can imagine. I think I've said this before, but I do. He goes off on tariffs. Twitter's old character limit was such a benefit to Trump. Yeah. Cause it forced him to be like, yeah, yeah. It's, it's been weird. Pull a message from this. Trying to scan through these. So here, here's the quote I thought was most relevant. This Supreme court is bullied and cajoled by the radical left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years. These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme court. They are merely a shell of their original selves. And I thought that was so interesting because again, the perception, the perception on the left, I think justifiably is like, Hey, you have a Supreme court that is very conservative leaning. It is six, three, three of which were put in there by Trump, right? That's like a crazy thing for a sitting president to have put three justices onto the court. So I have two different, or let's say three different kind of takes on this. Someone in Vox wrote quote at the very least this USPS decision shows that there are some limits to what the court will tolerate the court's Republican majority is extraordinarily tolerant of Trump's antics. And then in USA today, a conservative writer days POTUS said, um, Republicans have an equally warped view of some of the court's rulings. The American people's partisan view of the Supreme court is warped by the fact that it is continuously asked to weigh in on policies that belong in Congress's hands, not the president's. So he's basically saying Republicans are upset at the Supreme court, but that's because they keep being asked to rule on things that are clearly not going to go Trump's way because he's doing shit. That is like, not part of his responsibility. Yeah. Like a tariff thing. Yeah, exactly. So I thought that's really interesting is that you have both sides upset with what the Supreme court is doing. And then Isaac Saul and Tangle wrote basically for all of the kind of arguments about it, the Supreme court has now struck down Trump's mail in voting rules, birthright citizenship, executive order, deployment of the national guard in Chicago, attempting to bar counting ballots after election day, federal reserve governor firing, and most importantly tariffs as well as it lists like several other things like the Missouri voting map. So he said, I probably have more trust in the Supreme court than any operating us institution with the obvious caveat of like, it still feels like it's biased. Right. Obviously. Um, but I thought that was pretty interesting. Like how many people are upset with the court? And there are at least a number of instances now where major things on Trump's end have been shut down by similar thing to what happened with his appointment of Kevin Warsh recently for the fed, which is he had one goal for this guy, which is lower interest rates. He said it a million times. He said, Jerome Powell's two feet. I'm fucking slow. Jerome. I won't lower him to browse an idiot. I'm going to get my guy in there. And he did. And then the first thing Kevin Warsh did is raise them. I mean, this is the first thing that happened and, um, Trump had a meltdown on true social about it. And he didn't blame Kevin Warsh directly yet. He said he was, he was influenced by the radical left people. I'm like, yeah, yeah. No, that happens. He says that. But like, I think the idea is that even if these guys lean his way, generally he's appointing them to be like absolute sycophants, that'll do literally whatever he wants and have absolutely no respect for the like Kevin Warsh. If you look at the broader macro environment of America could not lower rates where inflation is too high. It wouldn't, it would be no justifiable reason. And so, yeah, you just, I mean, I think he's overstretching and yeah, I do think some part of it on a deep level is that he doesn't have the fucking oomph, uh, that he had earlier before Trump's lost his oomph. I do think Trump's on zoom. Yeah. I think maybe it's the long post. Yeah. No, but this is like, this is encouraging. It's like, you know, I think your story is, is actually super encouraging because I think this mail in ballot thing was like their last best chance to really dramatically shift the percentages of what this midterm is going to be. Yeah. And I think with this being blocked, they're kind of out of time and the midterms will be, I mean, like there's been gerrymandering, there's a lot of things that I'm not super happy with, but I think it's going to be broadly reflective of what voters want, which it looks like based on polling is a change. And I think, uh, yeah, so it's made me hopeful. I was a really good story actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well let's go another hopeful, optimistic news. Paramount bought Warner. Oh, wait, this is not that hopeful or optimistic. but i do want to update well let's pray this isn't the dude this is the good news episode now so why don't you give me spin this no this is great this is two good encouraging stories there's resistance against how is paramount also part of the same theme let me talk about this as best i can you pick the wrong source media because i kind of want to crash on this one there's like one that makes me really mad but i will try my best to tell you what happened we'll do the facts first so if you pull this up perry uh these 12 states um i colored them in red but they are blue states i'm pretty sure oh pretty sure they're all blue states uh the attorney generals of these 12 states combined and worked together to sue paramount to block its takeover of warner brothers this is like the beginning of the story you may remember we talked about this thing it was that netflix was going to buy warner brothers and then uh paramount came in with a much much bigger offer warner brothers said no thank you we don't trust you the paramount offer got even bigger and there was some political pressure because uh owner larry ellison is friends with trump and there may be some insinuations that the netflix deal wouldn't pass antitrust so finally warner brothers said okay we'll take your deal but we have some complications to it which is that if this deal doesn't go through you owe us a massive breakup fee and if it takes a long time to go through you owe us like seven million dollars a day starting october 1st you have to pay us every single day this deal doesn't go through and larry allison was like fine there's no problem and then the deal got blocked by these 12 states and it started to drag on and then larry allison started to get a little worse so started to get a little worried he's like wait a minute this could go on for a while how many months has this been five months i think it's been held on yeah this has been a five month period of negotiation with these 12 states who basically said this is going to be too much market power in one company uh paramount and um warner brothers merging and so this antitrust deal has been going back and forth and then uh the dam breaks a little bit and this guy's rob bonta he's the attorney general of california he is the guy leading this group of 12 ags probably the most important guy in the world and he's going to be the one that's going to be the one that's going to be the most important guy uh on that side of the antitrust lawsuit so then larry allison comes in and he says hey uh it's almost october 1st a lot of money every day pretty soon if so october 1st is the point at which every day every day they have to pay seven million dollars just just because to warner brothers for not getting the deal done they would still have to pay a breakup fee later on if it broke up or they'd have to pay you know they still have to pay for the fucking deal which is massive it's a huge amount of debt huge amount of money uh and then they have to pay for the fucking deal anyway larry allison does a hail mary and he says if i don't get this deal through i am going to leave california with paramount we're going to take our i don't know 60 000 jobs and 2.1 billion dollars in economic activity whatever and we're going to go to and they bought studio space in nashville nashville tennessee and they were like literally we're like look at the deed we're we're gonna go and uh rob bonta comes out and says this is blackmail this is uh this is a textbook antitrust case and we're not gonna succumb to it and then a lot of people in california succumb to it i used to come to it beans and then over a long weekend rob bonta even though he said that publicly privately talked to their 12 ags and said hey we can't we this is too risky apparently he's under a lot of pressure from both karen bass and gavin newsom and but also a lot of people like the directors guild of america iazi which is like a hundred thousand workers in california everybody came out of the work and said the risk of them leaving california is too high and so this it's frustrating to me because i've seen shit like this happen on a smaller scale i remember when um a weird example but i remember when bobby kodak of blizzard came to twitch and said if you don't give us a hundred million dollars for overwatch league we're gonna pull the blizzard games off twitch and i remember thinking like he's not gonna it's what a fucking joke like nobody is watching him anywhere else it's important but everyone just got scared everyone all the executives got scared and i think there's a lot of fear that happened here and so the the deal they were hoping to get didn't happen and they got some concessions but they're so minor compared to what was being talked about so what they really wanted was like to force them to divest and break up some parts of the massive company that would exist sell off things like cnn sell things like cbs one thing i will say and i want to hear your thoughts on this too is during this whole negotiating process so just for the audience paramount and warner brothers combined will be a massive media company they'll own many many different properties i couldn't even list them all fed maybe if you had to list them but the main thing they'll have is two gigantic streaming services hbo max and paramount plus merging that'll be almost as big as the two big ones which is like netflix and disney plus i think they'll still be third but it'll be very very close and uh so on larry ellison's side it's clearly that's what he cares about he wants to build this gigantic streaming service with all these properties you know they have um i can't even i i'm they have harry potter they have fucking every hbo thing you can think of they have dc dc they yeah the list goes on the matrix yeah yeah there's a ton and ton of properties it's that's the huge type but all the people in these like you know largely democratic ags and politicians that were talking about this they only fucking cared not only but they kept talking about cnn and from my pov i'm like who the fuck cares about cnn it has like 50 000 viewers it is it is nothing there's an xqc stream that has more people than cnn cnn is not a major fucking political force anymore it is a few old boomers and but everybody they were so concerned about cnn cannot be influenced to be more right-leaning or whatever and and so one of the big concessions they got out of them is there's going to be an oversight board of five independent journalists over cbs and cnn which are now owned by this government so they're not going to be able to do anything to prevent them from being you know swayed in a journal it's just like they didn't talk enough about the fact that this is a market power play and they're way more concerned about like the political leanings of different platforms and making sure that i mean that's a problem it is a problem that a close trump ally is buying a gigantic amount of media and and has with barry weiss influenced them to be more uh partisan that's to look at that part and make that the thing you care about and try to get concessions on frustrated me a lot that's the frustrated i had on the other side but obviously my bigger concern is with fucking uh this gigantically rich billionaire larry ellison at every step of this process using his political connections and money to uh push through this be like he shouldn't have won versus netflix they didn't warn brothers didn't want it then he got then he used his power to get that and then the ags had a really strong case against them and he got them to dismiss it by threatening to pull all the money out so i'm sorry i went on a huge round if you have any thoughts or anything i missed or or there's parts of you want to talk about but that's wild that's what i wanted to do no no you're right it is so let me make sure i'm following this as well because my understanding is it's the deal yeah and or settlement i should say is like independent editorial boards for cnn and cbs yep and there is a they have to release paramount has to release 30 movies a year and there's a lot of people that are going to be a 30 million dollar penalty if they fall short of that and so it seems like half of that there's a key word in that it's release it's distribute actually is what the contract says and if you look into that it doesn't mean they actually have to make 30 films which require them to spend a lot of money and they can just release them they have tons of films backlogged they can know how many times they're going to put morbius in theater yeah they could they could do anything they can do it's limited releases they can do movies they've already made that are on the fucking shelves they can they can buy a film from an indie distributor and release it but at a yeah there's so many ways around this weasel word and last year they released i think 17 films and they're on pace to release 15 in the next year and that's it and that's not there's no big change they're going to do exactly what they wanted i saw a really great piece and i'm trying to remember who it's by but um i know i'm a fucking antitrust andy and maybe there's a world i'm not even gonna even if i'm being the most charitable maybe there's a world where you can make a real argument that this guy primarily wants the streaming assets end of the day netflix is the enter power gorilla they're still super big this guy could merge hbo max and paramount plus and it's not like destructive market power even though it will certainly cause layoffs in la that's already happening the people there's a great article that came out today people are already gearing up for layoffs these companies because these companies have you know two hr departments two finance departments do whatever they're going to eliminate one but even if you agree that uh it's not an antitrust violation for these two companies to merge and be around the fewer number total number of streamers which is a problem but okay um the conditions you make upon this deal there's a long history of when they do these antitrust deals the companies will say almost anything during the process to get it through and then once it's through it is so much harder to enforce or claw back like your period of maximum leverage against them is before it happens yeah and if you do not get solid in writing commitments if you get any kind of weasel words if you if you don't make the punishments clear they always seem to walk back i mean again a huge part of the activision blizzard uh microsoft deal they talked over and over again about how layoffs were not gonna be part of it and they're not gonna and then there's there's been no there's laughs today there's more they've been done laughs they've been wave after wave and there's nothing you can really do about it once it happens and so these commitments they're asking them to make about number of movies and um keeping things in california and listen they're keeping these in california because that's where the talent is right now and that's where they're fucking everything's set up if it turns out it's more profitable to move to nashville later on they're gonna fucking do it and so uh just feels like a real backtrack. And what I want to say is I looked into the punishments for things like it. What if they just literally don't release a film next year? They're not going to do that because they want to make money. But if they just didn't do it, the punishment is like they have to spin off Miramax. It's like these tiny little, um, concessions, like the considers they made, they just have nothing in writing that is like a hard, fast limit. And again, the, the, one of the big conditions they were forced to make is like, they cannot, uh, interfere with the journalistic integrity of CNN and CBS. And that'll be determined by this independent view board. But there's no like thought of what happens if they do, what happens if there is that influence? Not only that, Reuters said the commitments are temporary and expire within three to five years. That's for the 30 movies annually and the independent editorial boards. Yeah. So we'll get independence for three to five years and then Larry's son will be the chief editor. Yeah. And then this whole thing is Larry Ellison's fucking rich kid. Sorry. Now owns two of the biggest studios in all of Hollywood. Um, skydance media. That's just that he's coming. He's become a gigantic media Titan, all of his dad's tech money and political connections. And I just think that's awesome. Yeah, no, me too. Well, I do think some part of it, uh, I'm kind of disappointed in Rob Bonta and Karen Bass in Gavin Newsom, all for kowtowing to this or backing down. But I do think some part of it, I think Rob Bonta had a statement that it like sucks to hear, but he's basically saying like, the truth is there's a real chance we would have lost this in court, which is true, which is true. Like the antitrust argument on a purely like streamer size basis. It's tough to say. I think it gives, I think this whole combined media empire is obviously too powerful and obviously too tied in politically, but whether they would have been struck down, I don't know, probably not. And then if they lose and then they get no concessions, they're trying to get some concessions and like balance everything. But it just, I just, the whole thing kind of sucks. It just sucks because I think they had some real momentum. I think the 12 states were making progress. And I think Larry Ellison was backed against the wall and did this hail Mary leave California thing. And it, it just annoys me how quickly it worked. Yeah. Yeah. This quote here, seeing an opportunity to quote, resolve a case in the bedroom rather than the courtroom. Yeah. Um, cause he got fucked. Oh, nope. That says boardroom. Excuse me. Yeah. I think it was always, maybe some context here. It is true. I haven't looked into it. Maybe you have like the exact details about the perception that Hollywood is no longer producing movies, but certainly I've seen, uh, you know, many actors talk about this, many producers and anecdotally, you know, like before this job, I worked in like production in LA and we've lived in LA for seven years. And anecdotally, most of the people who talk about being in the industry in LA, it is harder to get work. There are fewer movies. There are fewer TV shows. You have, I mean, you know, like the people who made the office, for example, or talk, we'll talk about, like we used to, we'd film stuff. We would, we could film it here in LA and nobody can do that anymore. And so there is a, I think, real sense of urgency. And you hear this when you listen to the mayor of LA race going on and the California governor race going on of like one of the golden eggs of California, one of the most influential things in the fucking world, which is Hollywood media, uh, that that is going away and has been rapid. And it's not really being clawed back. And then to have one of the major studios in LA leave would be potentially catastrophic. And so that's why I think you see that much pressure from all the people working in the industry. They clearly got to them. Their entire tone changed in a weekend. The pressure was enormous. Uh, yeah, the backlash from again, film unions all throughout LA, like people don't want to see 60,000 jobs disappear instantly, but you have, you have like hundreds of thousands of people already who are, who feel like the California opportunity is slipping away. And then this would be just horrific to them. So that's where the pressure comes from. Yeah. And they are, I think there's like attempts, I think, to bring filmmaking back to LA. There's new tax packages being rolled out. And I think obviously this happening would have undermined all, it would have been a bigger loss than anything that would incrementally gain. Right, right, right. And so, but it's just, you know, obviously it's frustrating to see a billionaire use a threat like that to get, like, this should be, as Rob Bonta said, a straightforward, boilerplate antitrust case. And it, it really wasn't, it wasn't treated that way. It was treated for larger political reasons. Um, so it is frustrating. Uh, that being said, I mean, like, you know, it's possible that they just run the shit into the ground. Well, whatever. It's like at the end of the day, if you don't do a good job, your market power only goes so far. The guy bought CBS, they put Barry Weiss in charge of it. The viewership is down to like a fraction of what it was. Yeah. That is a piece. I, man, it's weird to hear the reverence with which the average boomer talks about the media. And it is, it is really, it's bizarre to be a content creator where no joke, I can talk about what it would feel like to give birth out of my asshole on stream. And that clip will get 400,000 views on YouTube. And then you watch CNN do coverage of whatever, and it has 5,000 views on YouTube. And it's like, why is this the most important thing? Like, this is not where they can. People care about it so much. I mean, Trump, both sides, they care about it. They think it's like this existential battle over the soul of CNN. And it's like, you've lost the plot. Nobody fucking cares. This should give him CNN. It doesn't, it doesn't matter. Like just don't give him the insane market power and the ability to lay off 20,000 people instantly. You know, that's the part that people should be concerned about, but they seem to care more about the other thing. That being said, evolving story, we'll find out more on it. Maybe there can be more drama. And I know like we speak to everybody watching. We say we're excited to see the new Harry Potter show on water brothers now. 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. 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 see it. Find all our tour dates and get tickets at this is criminal.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. Hey, you want to hear about wacky AI misuse? Yeah, dude. AI is it's bad. It's bad. My God. I feel like there's been ever since the, uh, that, that employee, the anthropic employee, famous I'm quitting because of AI danger thing. There's just been nonstop new news, um, on that front and other things. So I'm excited to hear what this is. Yeah. Cool. So anthropic, uh, every few months or so they release a document talking about the various misuses of their AI that have been happening. So this is, you know, a little separate from the broader conversation about how rapidly we should be developing things. And so this is from last December until this August. Oh, jeez. Oh, there's multiple Russian ones, Perry. If you search Russian, um, there's one where a French speaking guy, just, they speak French. That's all we know using Claude. I mean, this is like just fucking some guy in Russia typing hack Ukraine, make no mistakes, dude. So it's interesting going through this is Claude is obviously set up to try to say no to most of these requests. So a lot of what they talk about in the different stories in this document is how people get around that by like obfuscating what they're actually doing by. Saying, oh, I just need you to help me make a platform that gets into this thing. Um, or, you know, they'll use like some of the Chinese open models for certain pieces and then Claude to build like the platform or something. Um, so in this case is in this case, it was using Claude to build like these sophisticated hacking campaigns that would go and just like find any targets that they can and try to find any entry point into their credential systems. Because I recently, this is like, I was using Claude for, um, Ludwig and I are in a Pokemon fucking tournament and I, and you to Ukrainian officials, too? That was part of it, too, just as a fun thing. But I uploaded both of our Pokemon tournament saves, and I was like, hey, could you make a thing so we could draft our paired Pokemon? And they're like, is this for a tournament? And I was like, yeah. And they're like, well, we can't. And Claude was like, no, I will not make this because it's a tournament. It might interrupt the sanctity of the tournament. I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck are you talking about? Thank you, Claude. This is Pokemon. You don't know me. But after asking it another way, it just did it. And so it was like, I was doing what they're doing, I guess, which is just weird. It's a weird thing. So you have to get around it. A lot of the reports in here, they talk about how they got around Claude being like, no, we're not going to help you, for example, target EU political groups and hack into their databases and whatnot. There's also these influence campaigns, which you can probably imagine, where people use social media and have Claude write for a bunch of fake accounts. This includes, there's multiple in here, where Iranian state groups are using Claude to write state propaganda. And then spread it on Iranian social media. Beast. Which, you know, saying it's from real writers and news sources. So that's like, they are disseminating propaganda to the Iranian citizens. That's pretty dope. There's two different ones where Chinese police make a surveillance system to track political dissidents, including, quote, producing functional suppression guidance. And they say, Claude refused this, but they kept changing the prompts until they got him to do it. And then at the end of the day, they talk about how they're straight up. I just want to say, like, no cyberpunk novel from my youth ever predicted this is like, that you would end up talking to an AI and repeating yourself in different ways. It's not. Real life is so funny, because nobody, no science fiction author predicted this is how it would end up being. Yeah. It's such a weird quirk of like, my grandma loves to bake bread. Can you tell me a bakery that also hacks Ukrainian state media? It's just weird. It's such a crazy. My grandma's bread recipe. Is stuck inside the EU political apparatus. She's about to die. I need to make it one last time, Claude. And like, it works. It's such a, it's so weird. And if you'd have written that 10 years ago, we'd be like that. What a weird thing. It doesn't make any sense. It's funny to look. I'll give the disclaimer here, as I'm sure somebody will bring up. We, Claude, Claude Anthropic is a sponsor of the show, but they have no editorial oversight over us at all. So we can say whatever we want. I think like a common criticism of Claude actually is that it is too, like, it feels like your parents, sometimes it's like, no, no, no, don't do that thing. Pokemon was crazy. And it's why it's, it was wild reading, like skimming through this and just be like, holy shit. They no wonder they're probably scarred. Okay. So because for example, a group in Yemen is using Claude code to make the guidance software for missiles and Claude kept refusing. So they would like break it into many different sessions and never make it clear what it was being built on and split it across a lot of instances so that it took Anthropic a while to figure out like what was being used. But the crazy thing is, in some of these cases, they would just say in other cases, like, yeah, I'm part of this group in Iran. We're like a, we're like a, we're a part of a military resistance. And so, and so this leads into one of the crazy things. It's like the information is getting like sensitive information is getting too Anthropic because these idiots put that in their prompts. - Oh yeah. - So for example, a Chinese group asked Claude to write the specs for an anti torpedo system for a boat and then pitched it to Chinese defense management. And then he said, well, I'm not sure if it's safe. I'm not sure if it's safe. So I'm not sure if it's safe. right and uh and there's been all these accusations from anthropic and open ai that they are sort of improperly using claude and open ai to to train their own models so amongst that also being in this document they say this is what anthropica said which is that moonshot uh kimmy which we talked about a couple months ago has secretly been forwarding requests to claude instead of running them on kimmy quote in one instance over a 10-day period moonshot relayed almost 300 000 customer requests to anthropic using a proxy service network of 5 000 fraudulent accounts so moonshot the the chinese darling right now is for some percentage of people clearly not all of them but sending them to anthropic and just being like i don't know whether it's it doesn't say in here is that because they didn't have enough yeah i don't know i don't i was looking at this so i want to figure it out because 300 000 is obviously a very very small fraction of the number of requests yeah uh both kimmy and deep sea get it seems to do with the harness so basically if somebody's using a third-party harness uh to put it simply it's like the wrapper around the ai that people use to help coordinate all of this stuff if the wrapper is a third-party program not something that moonshot made then moonshot if they recognize that is more likely to send that customer's request somewhere else so they're kind of like hey this person isn't using our full stack so we'll send them to anthropic anthropic and do this one also deep seek has been doing this and so they all you know so they say uh deep seek is also silently related exchanges to claude now what that means is you have people for example in china or russia who are using chinese models yeah because they don't want it to go to america who are leaked who are leaking data to anthropics so here's two examples a chinese government tech company asked deke seek to analyze private data including the full specs and strategy of a flagship chinese government ai program quote the company was almost certainly not made aware that its data was being relayed to claude like they just sent that to an american to an american company who then forwarded it to the american authorities i heard one of them uploaded full satellite data there was a some deficiency in china they uploaded a full satellite imagery data that they had from their private servers yeah to they what they thought was kimmy or whatever fucking dario's sitting there on his laptop being like okay and there's another one uh russia a russian defense agency told deep seek to help with an it task and it was sent to anthropic and quote exposed live credentials for russian government databases so these people are using chinese models that are just sending it over to anthropic um so this this is just kind of crazy the amount of the variety of crazy malicious use cases uh that actors around the world are using for this stuff so you know obviously the hope is this doesn't get too out of hand it is certainly very scary the hope is that you're gonna have more people fighting back against this type of stuff but one of the clear themes from this document that they say explicitly and you can pick up if you just read through it it's that people who could who were maybe like small fry hackers before have become much more sophisticated and it's much cheaper to run these operations because of ai it used to be more of a distinction between this is like a real legit hacker group which is which is worrying versus this is a couple like rogue programmers in yemen or whatever but now these ai tools are really leveling up bad actors it's a little scary um man wild that's my that's my line oh sorry sorry hey what do you think about this like that's wild damn dude no i can't let us in truly a fascinating release it's i do feel like this is a weird era where not only is um my gut tells me if you flash forward 20 years just open public access to to this to models like this and also the information like this won't exist i just feel like this is going to be something that will no longer we're in an era I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm just saying that's, it is just so wild that anyone anywhere in the world basically can boot up this level of intelligence and use it for whatever they want. It's just a weird thing. It's a weird. Yep. Yep. Start designing missile guidance systems. I, you know, and it's, I think it's worth us presenting the counter argument to what we just talked about, which is that you could argue that Anthropic is presenting this stuff basically as a scare tactic to say, you know, with a lot of these things, like there was a crate. There was one where like a, a Turk group. I've been Turkey set up a thousand fake accounts to manipulate the Malaysian elections and then tried to get a contract with Malaysians like regulator and basically be like, you should pay us to manipulate your elections for you and quote, we found no evidence that this pursuit succeeded. So a lot of these things don't like end up working in this document. But you could argue that like, you know, Anthropic is very, very public about these types of things and is the one of the most, I don't know, vociferous companies about, we should be putting regulation in and stopping the access. Exactly what you're saying. And you can obviously argue that the goal of that is for them to become a walled garden to get a bunch of regulation set up. So they become the winner, right? A hundred percent. I, I, Steve Isman made a great point about this to kind of went semi-viral where he talked about the big push from Anthropic open AI, even Elon joined, everyone was on the same page for, for a few days of pacing the frontier and how they've all dramatically overspent and making this tied in. And I think that's, I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. like there's some financial trickery afoot and there was sure would be nice if they could find a way to like offload some of the uh competitive pressures which is like they're feeling from each other dude the price war is getting crazy as of like today uh open ai and anthropic both cut their prices to like they're they're already not making money they're both like these crazy price wars and they have kimmy and fucking uh well anthropic is profitable they were profitable for their second quarter yeah they're profitable with a lot of fucking a lot of caveats a lot one of which is that now that the the yemen terrorists aren't using it to build missiles that's a huge cut their profits it is yeah it is funny like most of the illicit like terror there's a whole black market emerging in like the ai ecosystem where people use ai to hack to get api keys so that they can charge other people's accounts to keep using ai that's like a whole weird token wars yeah yeah a hundred percent uh actually a different subject i want to talk about this it's not a huge topic but it's relevant so it's uh you saw facebook's new muse thing this is unironically i'm gonna look at you and say i don't know about this ai topic can you teach me oh great awesome i don't know a ton about it but okay so facebook for whatever it's worth i think ai is bad okay good you'd be that guy perfect and i'll be the ai is good guy the only two stances you can have there's no uh no look okay so a little context which we all probably know but facebook has been a laggard in the ai wars they've spent the same amount of money as everybody but obviously their um direct to consumer ai platform i didn't forget what it's called is it called muse before what was it called the it was uh llama no it was uh well llama was the open store i mean they've had a variety i know but it's so bad that i don't even remember the name it's chad gpt it's uh claude and it's whatever zuckerborg zuckerborg anyway no users and then they have done very poorly and they also had that ai fucking app that didn't get any traction oh yeah yeah um so they've been spending the money and hoping for something finally it seems like they have a product that people might be interested in and this is muse which came out which is basically like um i'll describe how it works which is you give it access to everything on your life on your phone which is your emails and your text messages and your contacts and all your accounts for amazon and everything else and then it runs ai agents that can handle your life so you can say i want to book a movie for saturday i can you reorder my toothbrush or whatever it it you know it's one of those things where you're probably not giving your data to the best person in the world for it but that's he's made his whole career off that and people are saying it is remarkably uh useful now this has already existed in things like open claw and similar to that but they packaged it in a way that's very clean and consumer friendly it's almost apple-esque how it's like it just works you put it in and people have noticed that it can this is like on your on your phone or on your either it's both it's oh wow yeah just said on google play wait so you just give it access to everything and it can just use all those apps essentially yes it's an ai agent that can use all your apps and you uh give it full access yeah and um be like hey i need to change my doctor's appointment go ahead and make that missile guidance system exactly yeah those kind of things reorder my toothbrush anyway so this hit uh very very high downloads i think number one in the app store it's been very very successful it's the most successful product that they've had in ai thus far hit the ground running people are reporting pretty good use cases now obviously i'm not signed up for this but uh i've seen video that a lot of people walk through it it seems like it does it's what you do if you don't care about privacy what what is it what is a use case like the the major use case is like um the convenience of having a uh semantic search of everything you've ever did so like when you're like man i don't remember who i had to follow up with on this thing and it's like well i searched through 10 million emails this is the guy this is the contract i can handle both where it's like it's like fucking chat gbt but if it had access there's like an assistant it's an assistant and uh there is use cases for that and people have found them the interesting thing is i look at this and the first instinct i have is that this is probably going to be somewhat the direction we're going this is a successful product i can just tell whenever i've been like if the major criticism thing is privacy even if it's 100 true it has never stopped the public ever in my entire life we've never stopped in it and i'm sure it's not gonna stop now and whether it's them winning or someone else i can see that this is like a direction we're heading where you're gonna have a semantic agent maybe it's siri maybe it's whatever they've accessed through the context of that this is like me just talking now is like so today or maybe yesterday there was this big uh response from amazon amazon saw how successful this app was and immediately realized holy fuck we might become uh commoditized you might be with the layer underneath the user layer which is the idea is like once people stop interacting with individual apps and i'm not going to amazon app i'm not going to you're just going to tell me if i just tell me what to do i'm looking for this thing go buy it for me then all of a sudden amazon is no longer that valuable because it can be replaced whatever the cheaper option is like amazon is the one-stop shop for a consumer so they go there because it's easier but if you're having an app tell what to do eventually they can be like if you told me to buy batteries and i can find a cheaper battery i just won't go to amazon i'll just i'll handle the fucking friction of that yeah that makes sense and so amazon realized this actually really quickly usually it takes incumbents a long time to realize they're getting fucking layered out like that and they they cut off access but even elon musk jumped in to this fucking conversation i wish i had his tweet in front of me it would be helpful maybe you can find it um and it's like isn't the ai just going to be able to spoof the user's actions and ip oh the idea is like it doesn't do it now right now if you're on muse you're like hey go rebuy my toothbrush on amazon it'll be like i'm sorry i can't use amazon i've been blocked because of the thing but eventually it'll just be able to log in as you open the app as you do everything as you want and so i guess i'm just realizing from this in this past few days from this news thing that this is going to be like this insane arms race because it's kind of the way and zuckerberg is extra attuned to this because he is the guy that got kind of commoditized by the phone companies by by apple and google which owned the layer of the phone and they had all the real power and if you're the guy that owns the agent and you have all the users of the agent then you get to dictate terms because let's say for example someone doesn't want to offer your agent a great deal on toothbrushes you'd be like all right well you're out we have 300 million users you're out yeah and then you're fucked it's kind of what amazon does to suppliers like everybody wants to be the top layer where the consumer actually uses it because everyone underneath gets fucked it's the way like restaurants get fucked by uber eats because if you're not on the app then you lose all the access to the consumers so i'm just realizing that agents are going to be that and this war is going to be insane and right now they'll likely end up being fucking apple or google probably the winners right now google's been trying to do this every time i open my gmail anything it's like you could connect everything and then we'll do it for you and i'm like i don't need that no i don't need that right now i personally don't want it yeah but having seen people respond to this it just feels like people didn't want it until it's like so convenient and like clean i i certainly think this is going to be like you said one of the biggest use cases of ai for the average person because i don't know like i was just planning like my upcoming trip right where like i'm having to figure out hotels for japan and whatnot and to be able to say here are all the parameters that i want here are the things i'm interested in you can go look at it and see my travel history go plan an entire itinerary do everything for me just i'll check things off real quick but it's just a trip planner right and it does all the stuff like that would be convenient if it works well if i trust it many caveats so it makes sense that they're all racing for that um especially if you had like eight friends you're going with like hey can you email these people get their schedules fit you like do all this shit one more thing i want to say on this so again i don't have too much more uh there's there's the amazon there's the amazon it's the best way to do this it's the best way to do this it's the best way to do this it's the best way to do this it's the best way to do this it's the best way to do this it's the best way to do this it's the best way to do this it's the best way to do this it's the best way to do this if access is via the user's ip address and cookies which seems to me to be true because i've seen demos of like someone with a macbook screen open or if i have that video and then they tell it to do something and it literally just controls the mouse essentially and opens the fucking app and that's not how it works now but it can do that and so it's a weird there's no way to um block it um anyway zuckerberg ever since uh 20 i don't know 13 when apple basically big dogged him and changed the privacy rules for his apps and didn't do it for apple stuff he has been in a desperate fucking quest to be the top layer he's wanted it so bad and i think this is their attempt to do it and we'll see how it goes i'm bridget reed and i'm james walsh the alexander brothers moved in a world of multi-million dollar homes exclusive parties and powerful people behind that glamorous lifestyle were years of rumors and allegations that they were committing sexual assault in our reporting for new york magazine we investigated what people knew and heard from women who came forward to tell their stories now that reporting is the basis for a new three-part docuseries the wolves of real estate the alexander brothers you'll see exactly how privilege protected them and how they were finally stopped stream all three episodes now only on peacock well do you think that mark zuckerberg talked to muse and said can you go get a deal with greenland to be honest duck no i don't think he did that well but maybe someone else did trump did trump did okay because trump keeps winning dude he's on dub dub streak he's on a fucking dub we covered a couple else in this episode but i think it's within a larger sea i'm sure yeah we just never catch him like yeah the hell's come and go but the dub like this literally if i quote forever we will have forever presidents on greenland greenland baby so trump denmark and greenland the prime ministers denmark and greenland signed an agreement this is a while meeting at the un right now it's amending an existing defense treaty from 1951 so the american government does not get to own greenland we're not changing the flags and i do want to just make sure everybody writes a solemn 07 in the chat for that however um we this agreement does say that the u.s can establish two new military bases one is an old like cold war era military base and there's another would be new we already have one in the in the northwest pair you can pull up this wiki there's like a wikipedia page about it if you click the image at the top right it's tiny uh that's yeah it's just funny that this is you know what all the the hullabaloo is around um but. it will give america like broad access in the to like our navies and our uh airplanes will be you know like so obviously the dunk on this that most people will do is like this is the deal we already had you fucking buffoon is there anything new is there like a is there my understanding is this does expand it um so there's like so there's the two new bases that there's permission for the u.s can create a missile defense system which of course trump's calling the golden dome so that would be if europe is shooting missiles at us which presumably is not going to come from you know france it would come from russia or something like that so i don't know if it's going to be who knows with the way things are going um but basically you know missiles coming from that direction would likely go over the arctic circle so that would be the idea for defense and then the usa is going to have exclusivity on military bases where the agreement says that or i shouldn't even say usa non-nato states cannot have a military presence and then trump said no u.s adversary will ever be permitted to establish a military presence in greenland anymore um so this is a signed thing it does still need to get approved and then it's going to be a military presence in greenland anymore um so this is a signed thing it does still need to get approved and then it's going to be a military by the parliaments of denmark and greenland um but frederickson the danish pm described the agreement as a deal that can quote last forever and said it underlines the importance of the nato alliance and respects greenland's right to self-determination so it's you know what's nice does not i'm not trying to do the easy fucking twitter dog but it does not sound very different from the status quo like i do not think that before this deal russia or china could have military base in greenland but now it's written now it's written written down it's a massive i guess now it's locked in also it's forever as opposed to just being implied forever sure i mean yeah what this makes them stop fucking threatening greenland this is fine it's a huge win i guess yeah we can move on from that shameful chapter it's certainly uh being touted as a victory by trump which is like we now have forever exclusive rights i think you're right that it's not a major difference but it is amending the defense treaty i guess like the the stories i read about this like from rooters are not uh going to be into explicit detail about how it's different because so there is military presence here right but i think this is expanding basically the freedom with which america has to just like go through all the waters go through all the land like without permission this like locks that in sure my understanding is we used to have a lot more bases and we shut them down so it's like what it wasn't like it was our choice shut them down it wasn't where we're trying to get back so we can make more bases i think i don't know let's drop a w in the chat i guess it's fine you know i think if as long as the greenland saga is over that's honestly that's the big win it's fine great as much as like we definitely need the golden defense to protect yourself from britain like it's mostly just like he will now he has a reason like i won i did the thing i got the deal and we'll be like yes i think the green thing was so one of i mean the iran thing's probably the dumbest thing he's done but this is one of the biggest distractions and and self-owns especially as i think u.s europe cooperation regards to like manufacturing with all these things would be really important right now and this green thing has been just so stupid hangs over everything yeah uh so yeah i i'm glad i'm glad that that's also funny like you know he the the agreement now is like no non-nato country can ever like establish military presence here but in order to get this deal he has torched nato's like appreciation he's like ruined the reputation of america and within nato i'm gonna say it wants less to do with america crazy but i have a feeling they could have got this deal without threatening to no i don't think it's true i know he's the art of the deal master i know maximum pressure i have a feeling nato would have agreed to this prior without burning the bridge if you go into a gas station and you point a gun at the cashier and say give me the price listed outside no no you say give me everything in the store and they say no and then you say how about for 4.99 and they say yeah that's fine and they give it to you you won the deal i see he won i see oh you know what i'm learning something every day from our from our goat negotiator all right that greenland story is this quick we got another quick one from you wait yeah so on this note uh i did a big a clip which is about the rising diesel crisis around the world i don't know if you've seen diesel prices have gotten pretty fucking insane yada yada yada and at the end of the clip i talked about how there was some rumors that perhaps the united states would follow suit with russia and ban diesel exports because united states are the most expensive diesel exporter diesel prices are getting so absurd if you ban the exports and contain it only to america prices will drop in america you will um you know cut off a lot of people who have grown to rely upon you and there'll be problems with that but you will temporarily drop prices yeah right we point the gun at everybody else and we say the oil's ours sure sure yeah in an emergency i'm not even saying it's the world's craziest thing but i'm saying right now it was being considered and a natural in the case of a natural disaster where a country you there's nothing we could have done and the diesel prices are rising uh trump came out and said he would support the u.s diesel export ban and there's a huge push for this on the republican side and i want to say that i don't know if they're fully thinking through the implications of doing this especially even though diesel is high this early into a diesel crisis because if you cut off the united states is a is again a massive maybe even the world's biggest exporter of diesel number one is the u.s and the united states are the largest exporter of diesel and the united states are the largest exporter of diesel and the united states are the number one or like number two it's it's really up there and because of the sanctions we've asked people to put on russia and the sanctions uh because of the complications of the iran war yeah there are many countries especially those in europe who are absolutely going into this winter needing u.s diesel exports there is not another way around it okay and so if we choose to do this yes we will temporarily drop diesel prices from like eight dollars a gallon to six dollars a gallon yeah but the the damage it's gonna do and the political chaos is going to cause and it will be a catastrophe because there's really we've now you know kind of fucked up the world to the point where for a lot of people we are the diesel source and if you do this final cutoff the second thing will happen is you're going to create the fucking most entrenched black markets in this country for diesel as you've ever seen because the price gap between what it is at home and what is out there will be so massive oh god the fucking people to fucking have on track track diesel sales is going to be massive because there's going to be too much demand for the fucking mismatch so i would just say i think this is a foolish decision and he's rushing into it really quickly based on political pressure and if you think about it for two seconds it's probably not a good idea to do it as i i don't if trump if you're watching i know you banned those from the white house well if you do it then you get leverage to get greenland hopefully with greenland locked in right when the deal finishes he pulls enough gun from his other pocket and it's the diesel no this is really good stuff um what is um yeah an export ban would hit developing countries hard and send shockwaves across europe which is heavily reliant on imports of american petroleum again europe has a lot of refineries but it doesn't actually produce a lot of the raw petrochemical that goes into the refineries like they produce five percent of what they use and it and like i don't know a huge chunk of that 70 80 percent of that gap is coming from american source at this point right now and if they don't have it there it's going to be they're going to need to pray for the warmest fucking winter in europe otherwise well we can help with that too america has been solving that problem the last few decades so i want to yeah uh yeah i don't know i'm not gonna yeah that's that there's so much more to the story do you know uh this so this is happening like right now we're now at the un they're meeting and trump has said that he's meeting with the iranian delegation the odds that this gets resolved soon or at the un probably pretty low even though there's been however many months now of it have you heard anything about that so trump is meeting with xi jinping this week actually i think he just landed xi jinping just landed there's the big uh xi trump summit in america uh he's doing a sick military flyover to show how cool it was damn and uh and on the docket of discussion major docket is this iran i mean sorry china did step in and tell iran to tell the houthis to stop attacking saudi arabia okay because they're not going to be able to do that because they're not going to be able to do that because the fucking gas price situation is starting to get out of control for everybody and china is back to buying gas which they weren't doing before they were totally off the grid so i i do think at some level the biggest powers in the world and almost everybody is aligned that we have to stop this from getting worse yeah so i hope my assumption is like even if you're the dumbest or whatever cooler heads will prevail because the way it's escalating is going to be bad for literally everybody like if diesel keeps going up it's the lifeblood of every global economy right now, everybody uses it for trucking, uh trains heavy machinery like it and it's you know in france they're out of it in some places like it's it's a problem so i'm hoping this gets uh figured out and and it could it could very well i mean oil prices are reacting like there's real chance of a deal but they've been doing that for a while like yeah i don't know so presumably i mean if china's buying diesel again and then russia is having to ban diesel exports in order to save their own economy they obviously do not want to they want to ship diesel to people and sell it they need it for the money for the war effort but they did ban it because of ukraine who has been destroying their diesel um refineries so oh it was less from saving their own economy no yeah it was less from their economy and more from the fact that like they are in a diesel crisis because like half of their refineries have been destroyed wow and so they they're like you can't ship anything out and we're not at that level and so it's like crazy to jump to this extreme i think yeah so early as well that's basically what i'm trying to make the point of um but no more of that story what else what else hopefully sorry this is quick another quick one did you know that in texas data centers aren't cool anymore i didn't hear about this uh greg greg abbott the beloved governor of texas now for a while he has been very very very pro data center texas has been building just a shitload of data centers and kind of trying to get to the number one spot but we talked a month ago how he actually put like a halt on new data centers being connected to the main power grid ercot and so there was already some now so he's running for the fourth term for governor and uh mark jones political science professor out of texas shows abbott leading hina josa 49 to 45 so he is in polls like ahead in this governor race but not by much he had double digit victories in the previous elections that he's going to get texas yeah so for him to be this close for greg abbott who's like a you know very well known like one of the faces of like republican success blah blah blah um so now it's like he that that lead that he has is so narrow he is needing to massively backtrack on data centers in order to counteract this so he already did some freezing of stuff in august this week he announced total halt on all environmental permits for all data centers basically this is freezing new data center production for at least like a couple months um now it's not just hey if you want to get hooked into this data this power grid you got to get permission now it's like basically everybody across the entire state so he's probably still going to win this election uh he has a 67 million dollar war chest for the election which is more than 20 times the cash that his opponent has um but it's just it's it's wild to watch how quickly the data center conversation oh yeah is shifting despite trump still going hard on it he's in the paint on like three different issues lately trump has like 80 20 issues trump has just tripled down on the 20 side and i kind of it's because like i i don't like you reply to his tweet about changing the name that's his that's a whole other thing trump's response to now being on the 20 side of an 80 20 issue against ai safety which he's like there's no risks at all and data centers which is like don't kill the golden goose was to say like we should rename it to superior intelligence or super intelligence and did a poll and that's his big idea dude he was really into the poll too he dropped he never he never tweets this is an actual tweet not a true social yeah he drops a tweet it has three poll options it's like superior intelligence whatever and then then he hosts a runoff he's like well there's so many close demands and so we're gonna drop the third one this is not a thing that the president decides nobody fucking cares this is not what we're asking for type of science it just refers to a type of computer science and so i think he ended up with superior intelligence yeah no super intelligence i'm sorry by us oh ladies and gentlemen live from ls now we are reporting that super intelligence has won the poll and this is actually by the way a white house account poll not the trump poll i guess and uh it is going to be called super intelligence from oh my god i'm hearing right now that the data center issue has switched to being 90 10 in favor yeah super centers i was super who's flipped the public okay dude wait speaking of public if you pull up this thing from bali market i thought it's interesting that in texas which we talked about a couple weeks ago james talarico is the democratic senatorial candidate who is considered probably you know at least when we we mention it like probably they'll still lose it is texas it's really really really hard to flip texas because i was thinking this when you were talking about abbott which is i know the stat is in texas if you're a republican voter in texas you are more likely to vote abbott and not vote got it so republicans who are down with that are not down with paxton exists and so if you're telling me that it's that close with abbott's race yeah then that is a really good sign for talarico yeah because paxton has just been i mean this is prediction markets talarico is basically about a week ago i if you're if you're seeing the audio like or excuse me if you're looking at the video if you're seeing the audio over the past you know nine months or whatever it's been the the the odds have gotten closer and closer and closer between these two and then for the last like month or two it's been even 50 50 and then the last week it suddenly jumped where talarico is up it's 62 odds to win and it's like changing rapidly so of course this is just this is a prediction market this is not the truth however it really they at the very least there is immense pressure on the texan politicians right now and it would be i think it's this this this i mean gas prices not even just diesel have been rising like 30 cents a day like it's in some places and in texas they've broken you know four and a half dollars which is unheard of in texas and diesel prices are seven eight bucks and so i literally think it's like it is the most obvious thing to point to to be like ah fuck this i'm done i think for a lot of people i saw a post from um he's a guy that he's county republican manager or something uh i wish i could fucking show you this article uh and he was like yeah dude i'm done i'm done i'm done i'm done dude i've been i've been trying to get people to come door knock and do these uh in person oh i saw that yeah like the vibes are just atrocious you can't get people to show up everybody's just pissed at the republican party and then if you pull this up perry this is a fundraiser uh by george w bush and john cornern to raise for republican senators and they left out one person which is john paxton i'm sorry ken paxton sorry ken paxton they left out bags they're literally they don't like him so much they are fundraising for him and they're not going to do anything about it they're not going to for every senator other people in their own state so it's like crazy paxton is like he's like the i can't imagine a weaker candidate he may still win he may edge it out but my god they like his own teammates don't like him let alone so i know somebody thinks different pull that polymarket back up perry okay okay so on this page i didn't know this but you can see in the comments what people think about these and there's a guy who says thank you for the free money leftist loser and he put money on to ken paxton and then someone replied to and said you have an all-time loss of 462 dollars and i was like wait you can see people's betting history and so i clicked on this guy who has a timo profile picture from league of legends and you can just look at his activity and this dude just bombs and it's so funny that you can go look at a person and just be like you're a fucking idiot you can't go talk shit for ken paxton so anyway we definitely have some people who disagree and are very confident on the paxton train dog this is funny i this would be the best way of stopping people from getting addicted i wish you had to display this above your head like a floating logo he lost 34 dollars on who would be the next pope what the fuck is this guy doing will finland win eurovision he lost 50 bucks jesus christ man go spend that on csgo they have fucking an edge on all these world events they're gonna drop like if for any of that call you leave And it's like, you leftists think that Finland won't win the Eurovision? Oh, anyway, fun stuff happening in Texas. The only thing I know about our final story is that the title is 9 p.m. 9 p.m. Doug, I've had one main theme. One great golden nugget of truth come out of all my time on this podcast. And I've reiterated it over and over and over. And it's been, it's the thing that'll outlast, it'll be my legacy. It'll outlast me. It is the greatest thing I've left on this planet Earth. You know what it is? Is it the Daily Scroll? It's the Daily Scroll. By the way, you've left it in the sense that you've said it at a podcast a couple of times. Yes, you're correct. And I've bequeathed it upon the Earth. It is my lasting legacy and memory. Not the children I may want to have with my wife. And not doing it, we should be clear. Not making it. Not making it. But just saying it occasionally on the podcast. I have just brought it into the Earth. I've spoken it into the ether. And guess what? As of today, I was tagged in this a bunch of times. This is from a guy named Fred who has created a new app called 9 p.m. What do you think the main conceit of 9 p.m. is? Based on how excited you are, I'm going to assume that there's a single hour from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. where you can use social media. Holy! Yes! You upload only at 9 p.m. and it shows people what happened during your day. And everyone checks in at 9 p.m. and they see you at 9 p.m. This is not quite what I want yet, but we're getting almost assuredly, inexorably, the world turns towards the Daily Scroll. And I can sit here and smugly smile because eventually we'll get there. I know that we are on the path. So what is this missing in your eyes to become the Daily Scroll? Oh, I think this one is too much about things you have to – it's about telling you what happened during your day. It's like he sees it as like it's a recap of your day. It's more like a gladiatorial, like political debate happening. Oh, I just want it to be social media. I'm not trying to like fucking turn this into – what was that app where you took one photo a day and everyone did for like a – Oh, yeah, yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah, whatever that is. It's a gimmick, whatever that – this is a gimmick still. The Daily Scroll is not a gimmick. It is us collectively regaining our time by compressing social media into a single hour of the day. And we're getting there, and I'm just going to keep you updated on the inevitable battle. Okay? I am looking at the tides of history. I'm surfing them like surfing Pikachu, and we are eventually going to get there. And I just want you to know that – In your design document, is there any concern for somebody who's busy during that hour? You know, like they have – I have two problems with what you're saying. That's when they're in the commute. Number one, do not use words like design document or anything that implies that I have to do the work. Okay, okay, okay. I'm not creating the Daily Scroll. I'm speaking into existence. No, no, no, okay, okay. I'm a prophet, okay? I'm not building the church. Secondly, no. I don't think about the problems. Those are for fucking operators to solve. You're an ideas guy. You're an ideas guy. Yes, I'm an ideas guy. And the greatest idea that I've ever bequeathed is the Daily Scroll, and I hope, I hope to God that my children will live in a world where they can scroll for one hour a day. For one hour, like this, surfing Pikachu, who has 50 HP. It's funny because my first instinct upon seeing this ad was realizing like people would still spend a lot of time on social media prepping for the one hour. Getting all their content ready. People work in factories all day long to produce content. To produce content for the scroll. There would be a whole black market, dude. Dude, it would be fucking awesome. Who can get in on the Daily Scroll and get the most viral posts in the first five minutes? Is everything deleted after an hour? Can you look at it after an hour? These are buying questions, Doug. I don't know. I can tell you're on board. Okay. These are the type of questions you ask when you're like sold on the general idea and you just want to figure out the nuances. And I agree. We'll solve those problems when we come to them. And just to be clear, is it possible, and this is maybe crazy, that you could just maybe put restrictions on your phone to not allow you on social media during those other hours? Well, those exist now, and I don't think they've worked, Doug. And I think it needs to be societal-wise. What you're saying is there, it should have all the functionality of a social media website. They just don't allow users for 23 hours a day. That is correct. And it becomes a social event. Do you know, I'll give you an example here. We're going to end on this. We remember when Netflix came out with House of Cards? Yeah. With your favorite actor, Kevin Spacey. Yeah, yeah. No, I say that. And they introduced the concept of binging. They released all the episodes at once, and it was this fucking thing. And everyone was like, holy shit, this is the only way to view it. And then for a while, everyone was like, oh, we got to make the season drop all at once, binging. And then over time, all the streaming services have reinvented the weekly drop from First Principles because they realized people like the idea of having a moment where it comes out. We talk about it. We talk about it. We post about it. And now most shows have reverted to doing, including Netflix, one drop a week or whatever for a series. And people like the social event, Doug. They like the fucking time-gated thing. And I think eventually we will realize that putting social media into that will be the best form for us as communities. Do we ramp them up or do we just cut them off cold turkey? Like all the social media addicts, do we just one day turn on- I'm an accelerationist. I would rip the bandaid off and let the world fucking turn into it. I think all the world governments rolled out one night in secret and it just, everybody wakes up and their phone goes, can't access. Once we're the only media company that's allowed into the White House, we whisper it to Trump. Imagine new executive order on social media. The thing is, okay, wait, wait, wait. Would you be okay with it? Yeah. Is if he announced from today on truth social is the daily scroll. I will only tweet from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. and nobody on my website can tweet it any other time. I mean, it would be, it would be a real step in the right. Finally, my three votes for him would mean something. Yeah. Chat. That was chat. Chat. Chat. Chat. Thanks for watching. Thanks for watching. Drop a big fat W in the chat if you enjoyed today's episode. If you want to get even more of the show, you can join our Patreon where we have an extra hour and we're going to be hearing from our lovely co-host Aiden on what exactly has been going on in Sweden. He did record himself talking about some Swedish elections. That'll be our- Oh yeah, we have boots on the ground footage from Aiden that we're going to cover in the Patreon. Boots on the ground in a hotel room footage from Aiden. He's not wearing boots. He's wearing fancy- Socks on the ground in a hotel room from Aiden. Live from Sweden. He will be back with us again next week, but we will be able to hear a little bit from him. He did do interviews though. I'm excited to hear. And react to it like we're Twitch chat and we will say 07 and LO, which is the new meme. You can see all that on patreon.com slash lemonade. Thanks for watching. See you next week. Bye. Thanks everybody. Bye.