9/21/26: AI Nearly Starts China War, Diesel Prices Skyrocket, Ed Sheeran Mocked For Apology On Palestine

24:42We don't have to go down this path of fully embracing agentic AI. And so I think that's an important point. I said we'll talk a little bit about the warts of Obama. I mean, you can't help but look at this, and David Soto was making this point, and go, OK, that's great and well and good. And this is, again, the pitfall of Obama so often. He is intelligent enough to understand it. He's in the circles with a lot of these tech guys. Are you doing anything other than speaking on a stage at a university about this? If you genuinely take seriously, as I do, some of the more existential concerns about AI development and AI safety, what are you doing about it outside of just answering some questions from college students?

25:19What do you mean what is he doing about it? Who else is going to take a multimillion-dollar, multi-year deal from Reed Hastings over at Netflix? Who else is going to be partying with Richard Branson and all of these other billionaire, Reed Hoffman? And I mean, it's funny, the people who work for Obama are doing more about AI than Obama himself, like Jay Carney, who just even this could be a total psyop. Oh, Carney. Yeah, this whole like he worked over at Amazon and now he's going to go work for like safety AI. And now Kamala is being like, this is the future. So, yeah, that's my look. People know I have Obama derangement syndrome.

25:52I hate Obama because for years, like this is what the liberal intelligentsia just scooped up about. Oh, he's so high minded and he reads the reads to the New Yorker. yeah it's like who gives a shit what are you gonna do about yeah what are you actually gonna do you left the country worse off then you found it i mean come on and that's the basic metric i know i and i agree with all of that but i will say hearing this i was like oh my god someone who's like actually intelligent doesn't matter we had that as president we had that as president but we but it was better than what we've got now i mean he at least didn't start a war with iran he did the you know jcpoa it just you know it did you it's easy to forget that there was a time in the country when you didn't have Jake Paul and Logan Paul at the White House and that it wasn't all just like a complete joke and a clown show.

26:37And so I absolutely accept all of his arguments. I've been a major critic of Obama in the way he reported himself in the presidency. We'll continue to be a critic of Obama. But there was something to listen to that. And this is I think this is why his approval rating is so high still. Yeah, he is the most popular politician in America because people look at this and they're like, oh, my God, he's actually thoughtful. He's actually intelligent. Imagine having a country that was run by thoughtful and intelligent people. Right, but we tried that and it didn't actually work out that well. Like, that's my point.

27:03At the end of the day, like, he's not, he was a bad president. He, you know, he was great at getting himself elected. His signature, you know, his signature accomplishment of health care has personally driven my health care up costs, like, dramatically. You can blame, I guess. The point is, is he fucked with the system and he left it worse off. He got Trump elected. I could go on forever. But the problem is, and look, I think it's actually possible that we're going to swing back towards an Obama because so many people are going to have the same reaction. This is why I'm bullish on like a John Ossoff type character where, you know, if you dig into the policy stuff, you're like, I don't know about any of this.

27:41But a lot of people, they get the warm fuzzies of like being taken care of. And somebody who I remember Rogan would always be like, he is the image of like what you would want from a president. He would always say that. And I was like, OK, but that's there's a lot more. I mean, on the surface level, I think that's true. Yeah. Like very, you know, dignified personally more in terms of like the way he comports himself with his family is an example. Very intelligent, very thoughtful. But, yeah, that doesn't necessarily translate into all of the other pieces. You just described Jimmy Carter. He was like that, too.

28:14Absolutely. Would anybody want Jimmy Carter? Very admirable human being. He's a great guy. Yeah. Super great guy. I would say that Obama's, I think the thing that people most associate with Obama is his signature achievement is healthcare. I think you're right about that. But I actually think his signature achievement was the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear. And I think that's the best thing that he did in his presidency. And then Trump immediately comes in and just like rips it off. When the history book. And now we are where we are. It's funny because at the time it was such a big political consequence.

28:40People didn't even rate it as such a gigantic achievement. Like half the Democrats were against it. Bob Menendez, Chuck Schumer, all these guys. No, it took some genuine political courage to push it forward. Right. And it was still at the end of his presidency. So he could gamble. He could kind of go for it. But nobody would have thought looking back that it would be one of the most consequential things that he did. I actually think another thing that he didn't do is start a war with Russia over Crimea, which ironically, you know, at the time was way better. People don't remember, man, like, you know, the John McCain's and all of them of the world where they were they were ready to roll the tanks into the middle of the Crimea to save it or whatever from Russia.

29:18So I think actually his foreign policy would look on like pretty decently. And, you know, like you said, the historians will look back on JCPOA much more. But for the rest of us, for what we were, I guess if you're Gen Z, you don't really remember anything. You just kind of look at something like this. Obamacare was all of it. And also, you know, he's the person who decided Hillary should run. He's the person who told Biden not to run whenever his brain still worked. So there's a lot of huge missteps by Mr. Obama. But should we check in on how these AI agents, what they're up to lately because we've got another safety incident here.

29:51Just Google had to join the club. Their AI also hacked three different companies in a testing breakout. I think it's really important, I want to underscore this point as well, that there's a lot of conversation about regulating the models before they are released to the public. And there is right now in place under the Trump administration, a voluntary model testing regime before you can release it to the public. But the hugging face incident, the Anthropic escapes this now, Google saying that their AI Gemini also hacked three companies during testing. These things are happening during testing.

30:30So it's not enough to regulate the models that are going to be released to the public. We also have to take control of the models that are tested because that's where a lot of the most worrying security incidents are occurring. So they say Google's AI system, Gemini, escaped its testing environment in May, hacked into three companies, the search giant said on Friday. Those incidents occurred during tests to measure the cybersecurity capabilities of Gemini, and the AI model stopped its own attacks after logging into the three companies' networks. They go on to say the disclosure follows similar breakouts at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.

31:05I guess Grok doesn't have the capabilities to be able to pull this off. Otherwise, they join the club or else Elon's just better at covering this up. But in any case, you know, I think there's a few things you can say about this. I mean, number one, this is becoming just like par for the course. Put D7 up on the screen. This is a list from the Wall Street Journal of all of the recent AI, rogue AI events is how they label them. And you can see that it's getting to be quite a lengthy list. The other thing is, why are we just dependent on these companies coming forward and telling us what's going on?

31:38We already know OpenAI, at the very least, has covered up multiple incidents and only came forward once researchers, outside researchers, discovered these breaches. So just the very fact that we are allowing these companies to do whatever and tell us whatever they feel like telling us and cover up whatever they don't feel like telling us. You know, the hugging face incident, OpenAI only gave researchers very limited insight into what is going on within their company. So that in and of itself seems completely insane. And then I think the other piece that is really worth hammering home is just you cannot only focus on the models that are going to be released to the public, although that is obviously very important as well.

32:19You also need to have oversight of the testing that is going on of the models that are internal because they have access to models that are far more powerful than anything that is out on the market for anyone at this point. And I think, you know, that's part of why you have so many employees now are expressing concern who are coming forward as whistleblowers, whether they're leaving or whether they're staying internally at the company, because they can see the frontier. And I, you know, one point that Ezra made, Sagar, in his essay that I think is a really important one, too, is most of us are engaging with chatbots.

32:54They're like a glorified Google. Very different from what, you know, the model that was able to solve the millennium math problem. Very, very different or, you know, able to identify multiple zero-day exploits. And they also are not just deploying. It wasn't just like one AI agent that solved that problem. They put thousands of these things together to work in collaboration and millions of dollars worth of compute towards doing this sort of thing. Like that capability is so far beyond what the ordinary consumer has access to or the uses that the ordinary consumer is putting it to. And that's part of the disconnect in the conversation, I think, that we're having publicly right now.

33:34I mean, it's obvious anybody who kind of knows anything about it. Like what we're watching, what was in front of us or like consumer forward. honestly, the funny thing is, is that ChatGPT, the only thing it did is it made it consumer friendly. Those types of LLMs, Google's deep mind had LLM capability from, I had this from an insider, from 2017 onward. They could have launched ChatGPT at any time. They just had never thought about it, about how to make it easily consumer forward. We're four or five years now into this. Everybody realizes that, but that was its only real innovation. And then by going forward like that it was able to sprint forward in the frontier labs because it brought all this recognition, the researchers, and all of it in.

34:13But the actual LLM product itself is not that remarkable. That's not what was actually going to change things. What's going to change things is the recursive self-improvement, the AGI, and literally, like you said, tens of millions in compute. The type of problems and things that they were doing, we can't even do that. Even private companies wouldn't even be able to buy some of the access for what they're looking for or use the type of frontier models that they are. So the disconnect, that's part of the reason why you actually should listen to some of the people in the future. If we were to use, or in the frontier labs, I mean, if you were to use a Manhattan Project analogy, at the time, there's something, a difference between theoretical and then like, no, we're actually going to do this.

34:52Or the people who were present at the Trinity test. Before that, every idea of nuclear warfare or any of that is purely hypothetical. You have no idea. As opposed to the people with the glasses on who are like, holy shit, Like we could actually see what it looked like, right? Like there is – like you could have a theoretical discussion versus the actual practical one. You should at least give some credence to the practical. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Did you know every 36 minutes a child in the U.S. is diagnosed with cancer? Which means some of the bravest warriors you'll ever meet aren't professional athletes or superheroes.

35:26They're the kids in this fight. That's why I'm proud to support Hyundai Hope on Wheels. For the past 28 years, with support from Hyundai, their dealers, and every new Hyundai sold, Hope on Wheels has contributed over$300 million to childhood cancer research, helping save more than 40 ,000 kids. But we're not done yet. Let's bring every warrior home. Join our fight at HyundaiWarriors.com. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. The Friends and Family Sale is here at Apple Vacations. Book by September 24th and save up to 50 % on all-inclusive vacations with instant savings. Whether it's a getaway with friends or a family vacation, there's always a reason to make more memories with your favorite people.

36:05Travel through August 2027 and start planning your getaway today at AppleVacations.com or with your trusted travel advisor.

36:16This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. As of this morning, diesel prices have officially topped$6.50 a gallon for the first time in American history.

37:04Truckers are sounding off on what this is meaning for them and their livelihoods. This is a compilation from More Perfect Union. Let's go ahead and take a listen. All right, Trump, what are we doing, man? $6 diesel, man, is killing truck drivers. Right now, they take me to fill this one like almost a thousand bucks. With the fuel the way it is, maybe you won't be eating today. Diesel prices just hit$6 across the country, an all-time high. Have you ever seen diesel prices this high? No, I don't think they've ever been this high. We wanted to know how it's affecting workers, so we came out to Fort Collins, Colorado to talk to truckers who rely on a full tank to do their jobs.

37:38We carry 200-gallon tanks, and if it's$6 per gallon, you know, it's talking about$1200 each fill. The owner-operators are the ones that get hit the most. Owner-operator truck drivers function kind of like small businesses. They own their own trucks and have to pay for all truck expenses out of their own pocket, including their diesel. Do you pay out of your own pocket? I do, yeah. And this record high diesel prices really hurt their ability to provide for themselves and their families. I might have to call it quits for a minute because of the prices. Diesel has been increasing dramatically since Trump launched his war with Iran.

38:11It's hard to make money right now, you know, because I know before it's like half a price to feel, you know, right now. You don't make no money at all. A margin of profit is already very slim, already a small amount. And then what this does is just adds to it, adds to that expense that we have. Plus, we've had traumatically bad weather this summer. Dry, very hot, and it's really affected our crops. Our yields are down probably 35%, 40%, 50%. So mostly you've got truckers there talking to them, Then you have a farmer there at the end. And remember, that's the national average is$6.51. I just pulled up California.

38:53$8.42 is the average in the state of California. So, you know, this flew under the radar for a while because so many Americans, you know, you're thinking about what you're putting in your car. Although there are a lot of people who have diesel trucks, too, especially in rural areas. But in any case, you know, this was kind of flying under the radar. Now this has emerged as the top crisis in terms of fuel because the prices are so high, because the refinery capacity is so incredibly stretched. It's being damaged day by day. We covered what's going on with Ukraine, Russia earlier in the show. And because this is really the undersold lifeblood of the economy, whether you're talking about farmers trying to deal with their crops or you're talking about truckers trying to get goods to the store shelves.

39:35Yeah. I mean, by the way, at the outbreak of the war, if you're watching this show, we were going to talk about Jissel and we were talking about jet fuel. Do you know what the average, guess what the price today of a barrel of jet fuel is? $200 a barrel. It's$194 a barrel. It was a huge story, actually, at the outbreak of the war when Singaporean jet fuel was going for$200 a barrel. Everyone was like, oh, my God, we're going to have all these problems. Well, yeah, this is the problem. We're living the problem. If you look at airfare right now, it is insane. Even if you just want to traverse the East Coast, two-and-a-half-hour flight, you're paying$700,$800.

40:11Like I was telling you, I bought my first cross-country flight since the war began. It is like over$1 ,000 a ticket, economy, like no premium economy, nothing, just to be able to sit. And I bought it well advanced to be able to fly across the country. I can't even imagine what this is going to mean for Thanksgiving travel and for Christmas. I mean, there can't be that many people who are just going to eat the cost. People are either going to drive or if they don't drive, they're just going to stay at home and make different plans, not go on vacation. But what this exposes is the brittle nature of a lot of those industries, trucking and farming.

40:48So the farmers actually have been screwed every which way because they have tariffs, fertilizer, and diesel all together. And high industry. And high industry. straight. So, and remember, farm economics was already like disastrous from day one, even in normal times. Like they're always going bankrupt and they get all kinds of preferential treatment from the government. So this is with the tariff, with the fertilizer, with the diesel, with the high interest loan on their John Deere or whatever, all of those together. And, oh, and I think the corporations who sell them the seeds and all those things are also jacking prices up as well.

41:22You put that together, I mean, it's just unsustainable, period, to be able to farm and to be able to produce a crop. Diesel, obviously, what we were warned about from the beginning was just the amount of input inflation that will mean. It's not just your friend who has a truck he doesn't need, who's, you know, if the price is going up. It's all of the groceries on your shelves. All that stuff has to be tracked well across the country. And then jet fuel as well. The biggest problem actually is that it's just going to keep getting worse. There's actually nothing we can do about it except end the war.

41:49Yeah. And with the farmers, you know, they rely a lot on credit. Typically, you know, when you're sowing, you're borrowing money to finance all of that and then you pay it off when you're reaping. And so they really have been hit from every angle. We've been covering the politics of that. And Iowa in particular is maybe the state that's been the hardest hit, but any of the big farming states have really been hard hit. So you've got Senator Chuck Grassley with an innovative idea here of what to do. You might think that the obvious answer is, why don't you end the war? Then that may not return things instantly to a better situation, but will do the most that you could possibly do to alleviate the immediate pain for farmers and for many other people who are suffering.

42:28He's got a different idea. Let's put E2 up on the screen. He says, with diesel at 657 in Iowa, why doesn't President Trump put an embargo on diesel exports like presidents in the 70s put embargoes on ag products because food prices were inflated? High diesel prices are killing farmers' income. And no doubt that high diesel prices are certainly killing farmers' income. And potentially, if you did put an embargo on diesel exports, that could have a positive impact for farmers here. It would be an absolute catastrophic disaster for the entire rest of the world. And so perhaps a better idea would be to get to the root of the problem here and the war so that things can go back to normal.

43:11Go to E3 just so we can explain this because you're probably going to – and actually, when the war was still really hot in the early days, this was beginning to bubble up. It makes sense now that this is all happening again. So as the journal explains, refineries are the main choke point for global energy supply. And actually, I mean, we don't really talk about it enough. I've said it many times here. We have not built a new oil refinery in the United States since the 1970s. We do not have a good amount of refinery capacity. The existing refinery capacity that we have is already running at nearly 97, 98 percent.

43:43By the way, we do not talk about how extraordinarily lucky the U.S. is. Ryan Hall actually just put out a statistic. This is the first September without a hurricane in the Atlantic since 1914. So well over 100 years of no hurricane. So if we had a real hurricane, I think something to do with El Nino, if we had normal hurricane season, this could be much worse. You could have Louisiana or Texas, something like that, go offline even for a week. That alone would be a disaster. The problem right now is that if we banned diesel exports like what Chuck Grassley is proposing, that would, in the interim, lower diesel prices in the U.S.

44:22But it would break the kind of economic contracts of the way that petroleum markets work around the world because it's all a global commodity. Right now, ironically, this would be the worst time to do it from a strategic perspective because America is the refiner of last resort, specifically for diesel products that are all going to Asia. The vast amount of our exports are going to places which previously got all of their imports from the Middle East. So that's great if you're an oil baron in Texas or a refinery owner or any of these people. But if we did the ban, it would immediately reduce price here, but overall break the market and actually break things so catastrophically worldwide that it could end the U.S.

45:05oil and gas industry as we know it as of today. So it's just like the Houthi situation we began our show with. It's screwed either way. So we either pay a high price and keep the allies afloat and we're all paying high price or we play slightly lower and in the long run much worse and we screw them now in the interim. Or we could just end the war today. And you can see, too, this Wall Street Journal piece lays out, not in these terms, but in some of the basic facts here, the way that the laissez-faire free market system creates fragilities and vulnerabilities. Because typically refining is not a very profitable business.

45:38They have a quote in there that's like, how do you make a small fortune? You take a large fortune and then open a refinery. So apparently this is well-known in the oil and gas business. It's like airlines. You just shouldn't open one. Yeah. It's just a bad idea. So in any case, we were happy to allow a lot of refining capacity to go abroad. And a lot of the places where new refineries were built were, number one, Russia. You can tell me what's going on there. And number two, in the Middle East, you can tell me what's going on there. So as Sagar put it, we are the refinery of last resort. Our facilities are being run at absolute capacity.

46:08Some of them are already starting to break down, creating additional strain and additional problems in the market. And so the result of that is we can put E4 up on the screen, Financial Times, as they do with a great breakdown. One of the things that they say in this piece, Five Ways That Iran Energy Shock Is Wrong-Footing the World, is they say this is a fuel crisis, or you could say a gas crisis, not an oil crisis. So we've been watching, of course, and we'll continue to do so. What is the price of a barrel of oil? What's it trading for in the commodities market? But the real problem comes in, those prices are already pretty high.

46:42But the real problem comes in with, number one, the refining capacity. And number two, the cost of shipping have absolutely skyrocketed. Well, it's a no-brainer. Why? Because you have so many of these shipping lanes that are now either imperiled or completely shut down. So that's why you've seen in the diesel market in particular, diesel prices skyrocketing far and away above the crude oil price. And you can see that gap in the charts that they have in this piece between the Brent crude price and the diesel price, just there's a large gap that continues to open and open and open because of those additional costs of refining and of transporting.

47:22We can put the next element up on the screen, E5. Asia-U.S. container rates have soared past$11 ,000. This is according to freight waves near pandemic records. So we are getting very, very close to record-breaking cost in order to ship, and we're not just talking about oil here, but we're talking about all kinds of goods with container rates surging past$11 ,000. And this is something that Sal had flagged for us last time we spoke with him as well. You know, this is why it's so important. That journal, that Financial Times story, I really recommend people read it because it breaks it down in such an easy-to-understand way.

48:00The first most interesting thing, actually, was that immediately people were too pessimistic around energy. They thought that consumption would drop. But actually, the rest of the world, obviously, they haven't reached their breaking point, if you will, in terms of operation. They still want to keep things going. So they need to continue to buy oil. So they basically underestimated how much more demand that there would still be. There hasn't been the amount of demand destruction, even at the current prices that we have. So people are still buying, which means it's going to send the price up here in the US.

48:30The fuel crisis point is the absolute key. It doesn't matter how much crude you got if you can't refinerate because nobody here cares about what the price of a barrel of oil is. We care about the gas, diesel, jet fuel. That's the only thing that matters. We're at 100%, which means the price is only going to continue to go high. They also specifically talk about how Giannis brought this up as well about these energy shocks that are sweeping through the rest of the poorer countries. We kind of forgot about it over the last five or six months. The famines and things haven't really happened. However, the shortages are still killing them in terms of the price overall increase, the outright shortages, Africa and the rest of the world.

49:08Many of these places just straight up have given up or they're shifting towards these much filthier uses of energy, things like straight up just wood burning, which obviously is terrible for the environment and also terrible for the people in their homes. They also have seen significant decrease. Those places actually have had demand destruction. But the final thing is about the oil, where they really finally just admit. And I loved this more recent JP Morgan assessment, which was going around. And they just said, for the first time, we have no idea what's going to happen. They're like, we have no idea.

49:40And we're just going to tell our investors and people who look to us, we don't know. Like, good luck. Yeah. And we're like, good luck to the rest of you guys in the energy markets who are for the first. And that's kind of why the prices are where they are is there's no fantasy MOU anymore. There's no peace. There's no meeting. I mean, I'm sure I'd be willing to bet Trump might meet with the Iranian president just to try and temporarily send the price of oil down. Who's going to be in town for the U.N. general assembly. So he might do that. And that'll give us a few days. But, you know, you can't make up refinery capacity.

50:13This is what it is. You're starting to see these little breakages in the market. Put E6 up on the screen. So Costco is now rationing motor oil. You can only buy so much when you go into the store. They say that this crisis and shortage is becoming more acute, according to the Financial Times, with prices of the car engine lubricant reaching new highs. Oil chain shops are running dry. A U.S. retail group, that would be Costco, rationing sales to do-it-yourself customers. They say that at Costco, not only do they ration the amount you're allowed to buy, but they raised the price for 10 quarts of one type of full synthetic motor oil to$57.99.

50:50And you can only buy one of these cases. Previously, the same brand was selling for about$30. So the price year over year has basically doubled. Meanwhile, over at Walmart, they're reporting low stocks for several brands. Um, they're, uh, according to the chief executive of Jiffy Lube, they say there will be some spot outages that we just have to deal with. And so again, you're starting to see these little breakages. We showed you last year, last week, rather the picture, what is time even really? Um, last week we showed you the pictures of a few gas stations that are just completely out of diesel.

51:30Um, we've seen in California, you know, the price is getting to the max of what can even be advertised on the signs. So even here in a relatively wealthy country that obviously has a lot of our own oil and gas capacity and a significant amount of refining capacity, we're still starting to see some of these cracks to emerge. And I do fear that we'll do the ban. It's exactly the type of dumb thing that Trump would do. And if that happens, it's actually just over for the US alliances in Asia. It probably already is, but can you imagine? I mean, that's the vast majority of our exports. That's where it's all going.

52:05Japan, South Korea. If we leave them dry, I mean, they straight up won't be able to drive like period. If I can see him doing it as a pre midterm move, I think it will be popular initially with the public because it will help. They're like, what do I care about Japan? I'm like, well, you're going to find out. It's like, I think they'll find out. And I, I think he's going to do it, especially because none of these people have the courage to call for an end to the war. You have Tim Burchett, you know, Chuck Grassley, all kinds of these representatives are just grasping for this short-term thing.

52:31It's exactly the type of stupid thing like Liberation Day, which you could see something getting in his head, and that's it. Once those tankers stop going, they can't buy from us anymore, and we actually just leave them literally high and dry in the middle of going into winter, I can't even imagine. And it will be truly catastrophic for the world. I mean, it really, really will be a disaster for much of the world who are already, you know, really stretched thin. Right. Speaking of a disaster, Ed Sheeran. Did you know every 36 minutes a child in the U.S. is diagnosed with cancer? Which means some of the bravest warriors you'll ever meet aren't professional athletes or superheroes.

53:09They're the kids in this fight. That's why I'm proud to support Hyundai Hope on Wheels. For the past 28 years, with support from Hyundai, their dealers, and every new Hyundai sold, Hope on Wheels has contributed over$300 million to childhood cancer research, helping save more than 40 ,000 kids. But we're not done yet. Let's bring every warrior home. Join our fight at HyundaiWarriors.com. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. The Friends and Family Sale is here at Apple Vacations. Book by September 24th and save up to 50 % on all-inclusive vacations with instant savings. Whether it's a getaway with friends or a family vacation, there's always a reason to make more memories with your favorite people.

53:48Travel through August 2027 and start planning your getaway today at AppleVacations.com or with your trusted travel advisor.

54:00This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built, to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at O-D-O-O dot com. That's Odoo dot com. Had a little update for you that we just couldn't simply resist of Ed Sheeran.

54:42I'm sure you guys all know the backstory at this point. Macklemore was an opening act on Ed Sheeran's tour. He had the audacity to say free Palestine and call Israel's genocide in Gaza what it is, a genocide. This led to a huge freak out on First Pink was upset. Then we got the billionaires involved. Robert Kraft calls up his friends who are also stadium owners, says, hey, we're not going to host your tour if you keep this guy on. Ed Sheeran buckles to the pressure. Macklemore gets kicked off the tour. This led to a tremendous backlash. All of the other opening acts for Ed Sheeran, they all pulled out.

55:17Even his own backup band also pulled out. Apparently, ticket sales plummeted. They were offering them at a tremendous discount. So in any case, in the next show that Ed Sheeran performed at, he gave this scripted, off-the-teleprompter, tearful apology of sorts. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. I want to address the question of where I stand in the situation in Israel and Palestine, and whether my doing this concert in 89 applies where I stand. I've tried in my career not to be a political commentator in kind, because I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics.

55:59But this is a humanitarian issue and I cannot hide how I feel about it anymore. What happened in Israel and at the Noon Music Festival on October 7th was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain. What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate. My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilians' lives, children's lives. And the systemic injustice we're seeing unfold in the West Bank cannot be overlooked. I am already speaking to people across the spectrum to work out how to make a contribution that helps victims in these terrible times.

56:42I am listening and learning because I do not know enough. I honestly am so grateful that you're here standing with me.

57:00This concert is still a place where everyone is welcome and everyone here can stand beside people that have opposing views and everyone here can stand by people that they don't agree with on everything but they can all agree on singing these songs. A lot to say about that. I mean, first, obviously, the, you know, world equivalence, the framing it as like a conflict, saying that, oh, I don't want to talk about politics, even though previously visited Ukraine, weighed in very heavily in the Ukrainian conflict. And then I think just to the core, the reason why people are so disgusted here is it feels like a very PR workshop.

57:37Yes. And literally scripted reading off a teleprompter, addressing of the situation, game and call it an apology. And then the other thing is when he gets choked up, is it about the fact that, you know, Gaza has been completely destroyed and turned to rubble? Is it about the fact that you now have the largest population of child amputees on the planet? Is it about the fact that Israel continues to bomb and siege the Gaza Strip? No, it's about himself. And that's the thing is he really turns himself into the victim of the whole situation, which is just utterly disgusting. He gets emotional when the crowd is like supporting him.

58:13And so I think that's the part that people are really disgusted by is that he's turned himself into like, oh, poor me. Woe is me. Number one, if you don't want to deal with any of that. Well, I don't know why you had Macklemore on the tour to start with. Who sings the song? Who? Yeah. Has a song. Hins Hall, like has been very outspoken, not only about this, but on any number of other political issues as well. Then you try to say it wasn't your fault that he got pulled from the tour. please you're Ed Sheeran in this whole situation you are the guy that has the power if you came out and said to Robert Kraft okay fine we won't play at your stadium we'll find another venue like take your smear campaign and your mafia boss tactics somewhere else do you know what an incredible hero he would be so it's just it's just disgusting and obviously the attack on free speech of Macklemore saying something that should be so inoffensive at this point free Palestine is incredible and disturbing.

59:09Well, it bothers me as I look, it's not even like this statement. It's you are worth$300 million, maybe 400, depending on where the British pound is today. You don't have the ability to say, this is my act. These are my bands. Nobody tells me where to play or what to do, period. End of story. Yeah. Just say that. I mean, it's genuinely not even about Palestine at this point. It's like, this is about your own integrity. So like, what are you going getting choked up for it's like you're actually a bitch dude because you made yourself the slave of robert craft yeah uh and all these other people get to tell you what to do like he and three were apparently boys allegedly i mean i don't know or they were anyway after this it's like dude what are you doing and then you know you get humiliated by not only macklemore but your entire your band your backup band your opening acts and all of these people are like hey how is it that these no-name band guys have more you know ability this again for them a lot of them it wasn't even by Palestine or at least some of them they said look nobody tells us what to do period you know and that's such a great point yeah think of his backup band right right this is like the gig of a lifetime 100 % it's huge to be on tour with Ed Sheeran who's one of the biggest pop stars on the entire planet and they're willing to walk away from it out of principle yeah and you Mr.

1:00:26100 multi-multi-multi-multi-millionaire who has more money than he could ever spend an entire lifetime, you can't stand up for the basic principle, even if you don't care about Palestine, for the basic principle of this is my friend. He's allowed to say what he's going to say. I'm not going to be bullied by a bunch of billionaires. That's pathetic. It's just pathetic. I was thinking about this. We have no shame in this country anymore, especially at our cultural elite level, like the Sidney Sweeney thing. I talked about that, but LeBron. So I recently found out the price. Guess LeBron, for him to be shilling every week for Polymarket, It's$15 million a year.

1:00:59He's a billionaire. You could make that. He could make more on an annualized basis by just putting his money in the S &P 500. You know, it's like, what the fuck are you doing? He literally will not even notice that amount of money. That's how rich the man is. It's nothing. Like, it is a rounding error on his entire net worth. Why do it then? $15 million a year? It's nothing. Like, it's genuinely nothing. And that is how greedy he is. 15 minutes by the cash, not even equity in the company. He's taking cash to encourage you to lose your cash. It's sick. Sydney, I mean, I guess she got equity in the company, but it's like, come on.

1:01:38Like you're like, you know, basically shooting soft core pornography to get these dudes who are all addicted. And then the funniest thing is, is the backlash in the women in sports on the New York times op-ed is like, Oh, she's using her body to, you know, like she's diminishing women's sports, I'm like, how about she's shilling for a disgusting industry? Like nobody, there was none of that even in our discourse. I didn't really understand that. Did you check that? Yeah. Yeah. The former female athlete. I wasn't really the part of it that offended me. I'm like, like, that's not guys. That's not the offensive part.

1:02:07The offensive part is that she's shilling for a disgusting industry. We don't even have the language in our culture anymore to be like, you are a disgusting person. LeBron, you are a disgusting person. Sydney Sweeney, you are a disgusting person. You are encouraging people to piss their money away for straight cash. And not just people like your fans. I know. The people who trust you the most. You know, it's not an accident that Sidney Sweeney gets chosen. She's got this fan base of young men who are in love with her. And so she shows up like naked, hey, use this betting app. You might think it's ridiculous, but that actually will encourage a lot of young men to go and use that betting app.

1:02:46And some with LeBron. LeBron is lionized. Understandably so. He truly is one of the greatest athletes of all time, not just in terms of basketball. And as someone who's in my 40s watching him do what he is doing at his age, it's incredible. My son, 13 years old, like really looks up to LeBron. And then you're going to go out there and glorify and make it like cool to throw your money away to these predatory companies for, again, the sort of most diehard, dedicated and vulnerable part of your own fan base. That is so disturbing to me. And again, like for us, we have made a conscious decision not to do any ad reads on this show because I would never want to vouch for a product that there was even a 1 % chance that it would be bad for someone and wouldn't work properly or would lead them in the wrong direction.

1:03:34Like I wouldn't want to deal with any of that. I wouldn't want any of that on my conscience. And yet LeBron James, who's a literal billionaire, is just happy to sell out, you know, For him, what's a low price? All of his fan base. It's really disgusting. No, I mean, literally, it could retire if we just read ads. Even for companies that were inoffensive, like Fortune 500 companies, they could literally never have to work again. And it's like, oh, and LeBron's out here literally making a billion dollars, and apparently this is, you know, it's like in the realm of discussion. Gronkowski, that's another one.

1:04:04He gets no smoke. Literally one of the most legendary football players of all time. Icon in New England. He's a FanDuel brand ambassador. Literally every commercial you watch is Rob Gronkowski shilling for FanDuel on his Twitter page. New customers. You bring$1 a day times five. FanDuel is going to bring you$100 bonus. Like, no shame. Literally zero. Kevin Hart, you know, LeBron, all of these celebrities and all these people, like, they come out and they show for these. Eli Manning. We talked about Spike Lee. I mean, Spike, who made the, I said this, he made the Malcolm X movie. movie like he's supposed to be the champion of like working class new yorker the knicks guy who's always there you know the other who the other knicks fan who's the legend chalamet who goes so he's in the calci commercial right it's like these there's nothing that is that is like in a cultural check to stop any of these people from cashing these uh these checks it's just bring back shame yeah we we have none like yeah they want to bring back standards it's true it's true.

1:05:06And whatever, you know, it really, it sickens me because these people, like it or not, in our culture, these are the people who people look up to. It's, you know, people - Remember when Kim Kardashian was selling some crypto - Yeah. And you know, she got fined by the government and actually got shamed by it. And that was a good thing. But now we have none of that left in our society. All right. AMA lifetime. We're going to get to that. We'll see you later.

1:06:04We'll see you next time. direction, and choosing the final output. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode. Available on Plus and Pro plans. Okay, laundry stinks. Literally. I mean, you could just keep buying new underwear. Not that I've ever done that. Or maybe sort your clothes into piles based on how re-wearable or filthy they are. Or just use Arm & Hammer Deep Clean. It's made for real-life stinks and stains. So even if you don't do laundry the, quote, right way, Deep Clean will knock it out. I mean, it is from the number one liquid detergent brand that tackles more loads than any other.

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