We ONLY read Fox News this week | Ep. 071 Lemonade Stand 🍋

16:54Aiden:And this is right after January 6th. But upon Trump's re-election. Enough was not enough. And you know, the one thing that I remember Lindsey Graham for is that he loved to rebuild relationships with people that he just felt sour about. and Trump also interestingly enough remembering Lindsey Graham as of the past couple days had also said that reflecting upon Lindsey Graham's career in life he had one bad moment in the January 6th thing when he stood up alright now I've had it that's it I can't do it anymore then he called me about 40 minutes later and said did I really say that I can't believe it and he took it back so I give him a 99.9 instead of 100.

17:42He said that at his death? In response to his death, he said that? It's like yesterday. Dude, it's crazy. I got a Lindsey Graham quote here from his social media from 2016 where he said if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed and we will deserve it. And then I'm looking at your article here. I want to thank the big guy God, Graham said during his speech last month. Trump comes later. Mr. President, you're not far behind God, but we're going to start with him.

18:09Aiden:well the thing is the thing is to his credit by the time he said that uh and had won that senate race again graham had already 180'd his support on trump during his second term kind of walking well apparently 180'd 40 minutes later according to trump very quickly uh which is great which is

18:25Atrioc:great he did call me this isn't public graham has never said this but he did call me and retracted

18:30Aiden:right after uh and during the second term he's been like one of the leading advocates for the one big, beautiful bill as the Senate Budget Committee chair. And he also championed Trump's flagship election integrity legislation, the Save America Act. And for those who don't know, that act is meant to provide deeper citizenship verification on voter rolls nationwide. It's also meant to require that states share their voter rolls in a federal database, which I'm sure will have no negative consequences. and generally more strict photo ID requirements from enforced by the federal government for all in-person and absentee voting across the states.

19:12Aiden:And Graham was one of the biggest supporters of this bill trying to push it forward for Trump because other than the two times that he's publicly denounced him in the past and said that he hates him, he's been very supportive. Yeah, yeah, of course. And I thought that was a beautiful, I thought it was a surprisingly beautiful and nuanced recap of their relationship over the years. Heartwarming. It really spent like a remarkable amount of time on the negative things that Grant had said. It's like, it's like he fucking hated it. What do the comments say? I'm actually interested. Do they, can you scroll?

19:48Aiden:Yeah, this is the top comment. Okay. So the top two comments, which are both from the same account on this article are, quote, Trump's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn't represent my party. He doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. Lindsey Graham, December 8th, 2015. So I gave that American flag and a fire react because it shows people can change and learn and grow. Lindsey Graham was foolish in 2015. He adapted, he learned, he grew.

20:22Atrioc:What would you say, maybe either of you guys know this, are the most notable things that Lindsey Graham was known for? for people who are maybe not as tapped in. Lindsey Graham was extremely focused on American interventionism worldwide. He's a very, he's like, he's anti-isolationist. He really wants to. Very pro-support Ukraine, pro-support Israel.

20:45Aiden:Isn't he pretty like classically, my mental image of him is like the classical idea of like a neocon. Yeah. He fucks with the war. We should have a military and we should use it for American strategic interests constantly. It's like a Lindsey Graham. I mean, he died coming back from Ukraine, which, by the way, I'm personally in support of America helping Ukraine, but he was flying out. He's trying to get this big sanctions bill passed on Russia, and I think they're also including Iran in it now. It's interesting because that's one of my follow-up stories later about how he was leading the charge on that.

21:24Aiden:Also sourced from Fox News.

21:25Atrioc:There's a great, okay, I apologize for using woke resources, but from The Atlantic, there's a quote from Lindsey Graham. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not, I can't listen to that. All right. Adish, go ahead and just bleep out the entire next one minute of quote. So Graham was asked why he is so bold about asserting himself in foreign policy. So he says, quote, when I was first elected to the House, I looked for the they, they who run things, they who know how things really work, they who know what they're doing. But I couldn't find the they. I went to the senate but there was still no they then I started to get invited to the white house and to closed door briefings and to meetings with top officials no they what I finally realized he concluded is that there is no they there's only we and we usually don't know what the fuck we're doing that's so not comforting yeah I mean this reflects my experience in every like corporate gig ever which is that from the outside you're like why are they doing why are they doing and then you get inside you're like oh this place is a clusterfuck duct tape everybody Everybody is just improvising as they go, and really there's no idea what's going on.

22:28Atrioc:So, you know, took that, and then Siege grabbed it by the— Reading about Lindsey Graham. There was a tribute to Lindsey Graham written by Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel who said that he was saying that Israel needs to wean itself off of U.S. funding. And he's like, I'm going to get rid of it. And then he said, my good friend Lindsey Graham came up to me and shook my head and said, no no don't you have to take the funding that's awesome it's like if my parents are paying you allowance i'm like no you've got to take my parents money you have to take it support for

23:08Aiden:this episode comes from serval ai both of you know about my long-winded career in it prior many careers you've introduced prior to esports prior to this show not true now you maybe you don't know very much about me and you aren't a very good friend. You ever consider that? And one of the thing I hated the most when I worked in IT. You hate when I was working in IT. Admittedly, it's that I spent so much time doing these menial tasks and I couldn't do other things. Like I want to read the news, read books in my free time. And if I could have automated those tasks, I would have had more time to read.

23:45That's why you moved on to podcasting. And then I ended up moving on to podcasting.

23:48Atrioc:Well, Serval AI, Aiden, allows you to build automations in plain English. Instead of drag and drop workflow builders, you can describe all sorts of IT products or workflows that just get things done. That means faster support and fewer tickets, slowing everyone down. Serval AI is specifically designed to eliminate repetitive tickets so that you, as an IT person, can focus on strategic work instead of constant firefighting, which is certainly true of all the IT people I have spoken to, and apparently you as well.

24:15Aiden:Doug, I can't imagine shortening my workflow without involving consultants somehow.

24:21Atrioc:Actually, Aiden, you can learn more about Serval AI or start a free four-week pilot at serval.com slash lemonade. That is S-E-R-V-A-L.com slash lemonade. Serval.com slash lemonade.

24:33Aiden:You have so much to learn about me still. Do you know what I did before that? This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

25:10Aiden:It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. OK, but on a more serious note, there are some real pieces of news that we're finding today. And you had one, I think you found through Fox News.

25:40Atrioc:Very funny that Mitch McConnell's alive, but let's get to something serious. Let's get something more serious. All right. So the 21st Century Road to Housing Act just finished. And from Fox News, quote, Trump takes an unusual step and lets a bipartisan housing bill become law unsigned amid save pressure campaign. So this actually ties into what you were just saying. Trump has been pushing, along with others, for the Save America Act, I believe is the name, which is all about like voter ID and such. She's doing a huge, apparently, I found some Fox News literally, there's going to be a nationwide televised address Thursday night for him stumping for election interference and needed for the Save ID Act.

26:20So it's a big push coming up to the midterms.

26:22Atrioc:Right. So I will give an overview of what this is and then give you the truth, which is the quotes from Fox News. So this is like an actual good story of like our politicians did a thing that everybody wants, which is great. So earlier this year, we started voting the Senate and the House on this bill, again, called the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, although it's taken multiple forms from both sides. This is genuinely bipartisan and has a whole bunch of different things that are going to help improve housing in various different aspects of the country. In June, the House voted 358 to 32 to pass this.

26:59Atrioc:And in July, just now, the Senate voted 85 to 5. You'll notice that doesn't add up to 100 because some senators just don't show up to work. For some reason. The Mitch McConnell thing, he just doesn't show up to work. It doesn't say anything. Just to be clear, the reason someone getting sick when they're old is not the problem, the problem is that he literally disappeared for a month and didn't say anything until so much pressure built from both sides of the aisle that he had to post a proof of life. And there was no investigation, no follow-up, nothing. You just stopped showing up as a leader of the...

27:28Anyway, sorry.

27:30Atrioc:Yeah, it's a little silly. It's cool. It's crazy. that the people who represent us and do our laws and use our money don't have to show up to work actually or say anything or say anything. There's no accountability. Most people can

27:42Aiden:take some time off work without saying anything. Your fucking office.

27:47Atrioc:Every time you tell us about how mogul moves

27:51Aiden:is run. Wait, wait, wait. You think I'm talking about me? I have to. I have to tell people that I'm taking time off. I think just most people you think most people told told me he thought you were dead for three months because you went on a trip to Sweden and didn't say a damn thing. Oh, that's because Ludwig doesn't check his phone. That's true. You weren't texting.

28:12Atrioc:Okay. All right. So this bill, I'm going to give some, I think, most interesting pieces of it that I found. But first... I heard good things about it. Fox News, I was saying, I heard good things about this bill. Yeah. But I heard that Trump was temporarily blocking it, refusing to sign it. Yeah. The bipartisanpolicy.org has a good like explainer of the many different things in it but there's there's a lot and they're kind of hard to piece so i will highlight a couple of these and i think it hopefully will become clear why this is fairly bipartisan across the board everybody's realizing housing is a real critical issue the bill has like a hundred different things that it is addressing this is not like suddenly housing is going to pop up everywhere but it's tackling a lot of different things here's a couple really core pieces one there is a federal environmental review that we have called nepa the National Environmental Policy Act.

28:58Atrioc:And basically, if the Housing and Urban Development Department is contributing money to a project that's being built, you have to get cleared by them for environmental review. I'm simplifying this slightly, but that's on top of local and state review. And this can add months and a whole lot of money to a project. Nixon Peabody is who I read. They're the law firm that kind of gave an overview of this particular thing. So the idea with this bill is they're now going to give some carve outs and say, hey, for certain types of projects, not for everything. If you're doing like a massive project, you still need to get environmental review.

29:27Atrioc:But if you, for example, are making affordable housing and the government is helping fund that, that's most likely going to be exempt now. And you get to move through your process faster. If you're constructing infill housing, which means like in a city, if there's a plot that is unused or it's currently not being used in some way, and you want to convert that into usable housing, like build something that now is no longer going to have to go through as much process on the federal level. Rehabilitation projects, converting office buildings to residential developments. There's a bunch more. So this part of it doesn't suddenly make housing appear.

30:01Atrioc:But if you think about like most housing built in America is not federal. I'm a 72 year old Fox news loving boomer. Own my own home. Well, you're a little older than that, but when I look 72, you look, you're a 72. I'm a youthful 72. You look a young 72. I'm a young 72. I own my own home. I bought it through hard work and grit for$120 ,000 in the 70s.

30:29Aiden:Absolutely. And it is appreciated. Am I hurt by this in any way?

30:36Atrioc:Uh, no. Okay. So, so here's, here's the pitch for this. Cause I'll get real angry. No, that's fair. And that's fair. And Trump has said repeatedly that he wants to make sure that people people's home values don't go down. If the Department of Housing and Urban Development is not going around making the suburban homes that you probably bought, okay? These types of projects are things like affordable housing that are hard to get built because by definition, you are selling the homes for cheaper, right? They're not going to build these affordable housing units near me.

31:04Aiden:They're not going to be near my house, right?

31:05Atrioc:Well, you're not in a city, which probably you aren't. You're probably in... I'm in the burbs.

31:09Aiden:Good, all right, good. And I'm happy with it. Yeah, there are like... So just to be clear, they're not going to be near his house. because I don't even want to see him on my drive.

31:17Atrioc:I don't. You know what? I'm going to have to do, the Fox News article didn't go in depth on whether my drive will have. Actually, where does he live again? And then we can check this off, Aiden. Let's not include any specifics. So it does look like on that it should be clear of the affordable housing. Black box over the mouth too. I don't want anyone showing up at my damn place of residence. The reason this stuff is important is not because of the person buying a new home in a suburb, but because projects like affordable housing are the most likely to need federal assistance, right? And these regulations were making that like even more prohibitive to build, and that is now clearing that.

32:01Atrioc:So the type of building that is most likely to need funding assistance is the type that's being cleared for this. I have a question. It's a question I don't know the answer to. Yeah. There was this fight. This passed overwhelmingly with the votes. Trump said, I'm refusing to sign it because I want you to pass the SAVE Act first for voting. Then I heard it passed anyway. He backed down. So is this law? This is happening. This is law. This just passed. So I'll get to that piece in a second. So I'm describing the bill and then we will say, did it pass or not? I mean, the answer is yes, but in a weird way, it passed.

32:35Atrioc:So I will highlight two more quick things that are like, cool, this is great. Well, kind of. One is we banned institutional investors from buying homes. Quote from Trump, homes are for people, not corporations. He personally pushed for this. And that is beast and cool, right? Except it's only for large institutional investors who have 350 or more family homes. So I think it's a real easy villain to say that institutional investors like Blackstone are buying all the housing. And that's not really true. So if you pull this up, Perry, this is from Cotality. Not Fox News. This is your source. This is bullshit.

33:15Atrioc:Whoa. But this is looking at the actual investors who buy homes.

33:20Aiden:I'm getting a little uncomfortable because this is a source that I just am not familiar with. I don't trust this source, but I'm willing. I like that we've stayed true to one so far. Like that's been really easy for me. Yeah. Okay. I think I'm like, I'm going to hear you out, but I'm also in my head thinking not Fox News, right? Like it's like a little bit.

33:36Atrioc:Think of what I'm doing right now is building a giant steel man that we'll dismantle with the comments in Fox News. Excellent. Just start like putting in bullets to strike all of this down. Okay. Even though this is something Trump personally supported. Okay. So if you look at this right now in 2025, in terms of every year, the number of homes that are bought by investors rather than like single families, it's about 30%. So 30 % of new homes. That's a significant number. It is a significant number. That's a lot, right? That's totally fair to criticize. And you can see here, it's basically fluctuated up and down that the pink line is the non-investor purchases as in like, you know, families.

34:14Atrioc:And then the investor purchases has been here. But if you look at what investors actually breaks down as the large and mega investors, these are the companies that have 100 homes or more. They're only actually buying about 5 % of homes every year in total. it's actually the medium and small investors that are buying like 25 of it so enough to put this simply the vast majority of quote investor you know purchases of homes are actually by really small landlords it's by people who have like one to ten homes that's the vast majority you pull it down i've heard this i heard i heard like airbnb flippers are a much larger percent than like a black run people buy a bunch of these and they try to rent them out and then yeah so of the 86 million single, this is from batch data, of the 86 million single family homes in the USA, 20 % are owned by investors, but of that, 90 % are by small investors.

35:11Atrioc:Only 2 % of all housing is owned by these big investors. And as a mom and pop investor owns 349 homes, I'm a little worried this is infringing on my right to add two more.

35:22Aiden:I'm a mom and pop investor with 248 homes and I'm actually not worried at all. Right. Well, you've got some wiggle room, but I'm approaching my cap here And like, I'm a simple man who wants to own 400 homes. And I don't understand why. There's funny ins and outs with this, right? Because on paper, his quote and outlook on this is actually a positive thing. I think there's the issue of like, to what scale is this problem a reality? I think even if the percentage is small, you can find instances of institutions like BlackRock. Forgive me, this is not from Fox. So tread carefully. Yeah, I'm trying to.

35:58Aiden:BlackRock controlling a housing supply in a specific area or like a park of like small homes or the majority of homes in like a town. So they're able to influence the market in that particular area in a really negative way, even if they don't have the majority, like a significant stake in homes when you consider the national market. That makes sense.

36:24Atrioc:Quick correction. I think you're thinking of Blackstone. Excuse me. Yep. doesn't matter a ton, but yes.

36:30Aiden:But then you look at the actual function of this law and if we were to reconcile with the data that you just presented us, I think you have to start cracking down on people's purchases of like second and third homes, which is a much more common occurrence. I mean, even like, I think it'd be way easier to point to like, you know, parents or grandparents in our lives that like own multiple properties in multiple places and the influence that that has on the broader market. And the regulation that is coming through this bill is not influencing that at all. Of a housing buyer keeps going up. I just think they have all the money.

37:09So it's like not like they have three or four homes because they have more money. They have all the, yeah.

37:17Atrioc:I would actually, I'd be more concerned about the medium size because of that number we looked at, like 13 % of homes are being bought by people who have 10 to 100 houses. And that's the point where that's not your summer home anymore. Like you have 40 homes. Like, you know, that's, well, that's not just like a wealthy boomer who saved up and worked hard. With the,

37:35Aiden:I would argue who doesn't know somebody that has 12 homes, but like all in the same area, your uncle, people in your life. Someone has 40 homes in there. They're being harmed by laws that crack down on that.

37:50Atrioc:Yeah. So what's interesting about this, is this going to be a hugely impactful prop probably not and i heard wait can i do is there zoning stuff in there i heard the best part of this bill or one of the best parts of this bill is that it's like has a carrot and stick thing for states or local governments to reform their zoning yes okay okay so yeah third thing to highlight there's two things there's a new fund that they're adding which is like 200 million dollars a year that's going to go to localities that actually increase the amount of housing permits or completions. And then also the community development block grant is like$3.3 billion that is spent every year to help with building.

38:29Atrioc:And now there's more avenues for where that goes. But they are going to score how much money you get based on the zoning changes you've done or how many buildings you've actually made. So what's notable about this is not that it's like a crazy amount of money, but it is more that we passed a thing at the federal level that instead of saying, we're going to give you a ton of money to explore the idea of more housing. Instead, it is you get money if you actually do the fucking thing. And there's going to be, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars for that first one, billions in the second one that are now explicitly being tied to outcomes, which I think is fantastic because that's been a major problem and theme that we've seen recurring in the various books that we've read.

39:10Atrioc:And to say like, hey, look, you just got to get stuff actually made should be what this money goes towards. To be honest, I spent two and a half hours maybe like reading through it. It's not like a bombshell. I think it's more it's hitting in small ways many different aspects. There's things like lowering restrictions on modular housing being built that were in place, which felt really weird and arbitrary. There's more stuff for veterans. There's a whole bunch of pieces of this that are hitting thematic things in small ways. It's not the housing is fixed now, but it is a bipartisan. This is helping alleviate pressure in many different areas.

39:44Atrioc:There's a ton of them. I think it's, it's great. Like it is. And again, super bipartisan, like almost everybody was on board with this. So now let's go to what happened with Trump. So this passes again with flying colors. This is very unusual in our modern legislative system to get something like this passed. Elizabeth Warren is one of the authors. It's like two Republicans and two Democrats and they're all being like, this is amazing. And it passes. And all the Yimby people are celebrating and whatnot. And it goes to Trump's office for signature. Of course, he's going to sign it. And then he says, quote, this is from Fox News now, real truth.

40:14Atrioc:I will not sign the housing bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House in protest over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing the Save America Act, which has polling at 97 percent with the Republican Party and very high with the non-politician Democrats. He declared on Truth Social Friday morning. trump went on to call the housing bill quote a big yawn adding compared to the save america act just about everything is a big yawn and at one point he called senator uh warren pocahontas again like on a different true social thing well you you sprinkle a little you gotta sprinkle it yeah yeah yeah he called it otherwise he called it the pocahontas bill despite it being bipartisan and she was one of four authors so uh this was sort of a shock to a number of people being like oh my god we passed a big housing bill this is fantastic we're focusing on the right things now and then trump doesn't sign it because he is trying to basically use this as hostage to force the senate to pass the save bill and so what did he end up doing i've never heard of this before as we see in the headline here he took an unusual step it turns out that instead you have a third option you could sign the bill you could veto the bill or you could just ignore it and if you ignore it according to the constitution after 10 days it does become law so he just ignored it and it is now officially law as of i believe yesterday that's the trick i didn't know that isn't i didn't know

41:39Aiden:that i thought you had to sign or veto i didn't know there was a not signing was a veto that's what i always thought i thought by not signing that's the veto that's the veto uh no a vetoing

41:49Atrioc:is writing veto in all cash bubble letters on the bill from two outspoken one note this is in the comments no democrat would have been big enough to do what trump did he disagreed for the most valid reasons but he did not stop it from becoming law like the petty authoritarian democrats would have done he did them what the majority wanted not what he preferred even though oh and then biden screwed america and harris's best accomplishment was her cackle that doesn't

42:16Aiden:wait if he didn't sign it it is functionally a veto but it passed because they had enough they passed the two-thirds majority that you need to like supersede. Oh, it is a veto. He didn't veto it, but if he did veto it, it would have passed anyway.

42:30Atrioc:Yeah, they could have done. Yeah, they would have the majority to force it through. So he just, it was just this kind of weird symbolic dance that he did. I have never heard of this, of a president. Just not. I guess it's a weird protest of being like, I'm going to eat my veggies, but I'm going to frown the whole time while doing it. Very strange. strange it's very strange i think to do this on a bill that everyone likes you know i shouldn't say everyone 90 of legislators like and then seemingly kind of piss off everybody but whatever the fact that he let it through is great this law is in it is good it is good momentum it is not saving the world but it is some bipartisan stuff that slowly moves us in the right direction i'm really glad

43:12Aiden:this got through i think uh it's nice to have such a solid base for stories all in one platform like this and a story that's been confusing to me recently has been the iran war because i tune it i i open the new york times they got a different headline about it every day it's open it's closed it's open it's closed we shot some people they shot us what is that what is fox news Make up your mind, New York Times. New York Times, stop telling me like it is. And give it to me straight. Yeah, give it to me straight. I want someone to explain to me what Fox News has to say about the Iran War.

43:57Atrioc:And ideally through a headline and not through substantial information. Okay, the Iran War. So the Iran War has been a very big piece of news lately, and I wanted to figure out what was going on through our news source, Fox News. So I went back and I looked how they've covered this Iran war through every stage of the process. Good. So back in March, Iran is losing this fight. Do we have it again? Losing this fight tremendously. Got that. Iran's under mounting pressure. Epic Fury advances. Reagan-style peace through strength is back, March 12th. This Iran war is closer to its end than its beginning in April.

44:30Okay? Later April, the Iran regime's at war with itself at this point. That's nice that we're off the hook. Yeah, if it's a war, it's only between themselves. Then by June, they've agreed to give up their nuclear weapon ambitions. So it's like the military strike worked and now they're giving up. Then we're forecasting an Iran deal by June 8th. Then they're confident on the deal progress by June 23rd, okay? Then in July, Trump is touting very good meetings, even as Iran threatens key shipping lane. And they're not mentioning Hormuz for the first time. Then the ceasefire is over. then we're back to blockading their ports again then as of today art of the deal we've hit iran with a brutal reality check as we announce an oil partnership with their neighbor so the truth matter is i don't know if you guys we talked about this before the show uh during the iran war we did a second blockade of their blockade then we had negotiations we got rid of that blockade and we're like okay you can send oil out so the iranians did send oil out 80 something million barrels it was a lot of money for the Iranian regime because we had a good faith ceasefire agreement deal.

45:40Turns out there was no deal. They just got a bunch of money. And now Trump is mad that they're still not opening Hormuz. And so he's striking them again. When asked whether it was a good idea to, I guess, go all in on this deal and give a bunch of money to the person you're fighting in a war. This is a Fox News question. Let me see if I have this right here. This is what he said.

46:02Aiden:Do you have any regrets about lifting the naval blockade or giving the sanctions waivers? No. I gave them a chance. I wanted to give them a chance at making a deal. You know, we had a deal two days ago. It was done. And then all of a sudden, they couldn't do it. They didn't like something about the deal. They couldn't do it. And they shot first. And that was a big mistake that they shot first because we have been knocking the hell out of them. They're very difficult people. 47 years we put up with it. the ss call you go back all the way thousands of people thousands of americans were killed a lot of soldiers were killed a lot of soldiers are walking around or not walking around i mean they've been so badly injured the arms are sorry about the ss call for yeah 47 years ago with the salameni with the bomb they uh they call it the roadside bomb most people call it the roadside bomb it's a disaster and i killed him in my first administration had i not it might be a different story today he was a mad genius he was a mad probably a mad man but he was a general and he had total control over the country and i actually think the leaders of iran were afraid of soleimani but i killed him and by the way with him went a very bad person also they happened to be meeting each other at the airport.

47:27This goes on. This is him giving the latest and greatest on what's going on. But the key is That actually does not sound like the latest.

47:36Atrioc:Yesterday, I saw the latest. No, it's not. Yesterday he said, okay, the second blockade is back on and America will be charging a 20 % reimbursement fee to make up for our war effort. So everything going through, The straight has to pay us 20 % of what they're making.

47:56Aiden:Well, if you're really tapped into Fox News like I am and you were checking updates on the story right before we recorded, the 20 % fee's gone, baby. Yeah, it's gone.

48:06Atrioc:They pulled the fee. Okay, and they've replaced it with when the ship goes by, they turn around an iPad that says, give the US a tip.

48:13Aiden:Yeah, it's just all, they do it on Square now. No, I mean, you can see it here. They're replacing it with, he talked to Middle East leadership and instead they're going to invest more in America, which counts as like, that's our fee. Well, he said, based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership, I've decided to replace the 20 % United States reimbursement fee with trade and investment deals that the various Gulf states will be making into the United States.

48:41Atrioc:Okay, so let me make sure I'm understanding what's going on here. We are blockading Iran now and nothing gets through the Strait of Hormuz. And if it does get through, though, they have to invest in America, but also Iran is still sending drone attacks at them.

48:58Aiden:So what I thought was funny from the Fox News report is the underlying basis for this is Trump is like, we have taken all of this action in this region of the world and it's provided so much benefit to everyone that we've done this and all these other countries need to pay us back somehow. That's the quote in the Fox News video from this morning. That's the reason for the fee. He's like, we've done so much good work here. It's time to start getting paid back.

49:30Atrioc:If I blew up your neighbor's house and they started getting generally upset in the whole neighborhood, I don't know that you owe me money. Well, you do. Oh, sorry, sorry.

49:42Aiden:Fox also did say that Trump, He said he pulled back the 20 % fee because he believes in the principle of free trade on these waters. Okay, great. And we just need this investment deal as a replacement because we do need to be paid back for the all-new work.

49:56Atrioc:Okay, so I feel like I'm missing something here. Wasn't the strait still not usable when Iran was attacking ships, even when we had the blockade? Is the idea that we're now like personally escorting ships through and stopping? Okay, there was nobody going through the blockade because there was two blockades at once. Okay. Then there was a brief ceasefire for this deal to get made. Trump, I guess, jumped the gun on this ceasefire and said, Straight of Hormuz is open for business. People started stealing through without paying Iran any money or tolls. They shot them. It was realized that it wasn't really open for business.

50:27Trump, in response, said, fuck you guys, there is no deal. It never was a deal. I never trusted you guys to begin with. However, during the time that was open, Iran did ship out 80 million barrels of oil and made a ton of money.

50:39Aiden:so it was open basically only for them apparently apparently Iran's explanation for the breaking the deal is that within the deal it says like to the best of our efforts we will open the strait in order to accommodate safe passage of vessels for 60 days what Iran is at face value you know if you're a normal guy like you or me you might say well that's great it's going back to the way it was for 60 days. Right. Iran's argument is there's a few channels in the strait. We're going to open one of them. It's going to be only the one that's closest to our shoreline. And if anybody else strives to move through, we still can take action against them.

51:25Aiden:And that's what Iran's explanation is for this. That's their best effort. And then they attacked, and then Trump was like, fuck the deal. I never wanted to work with you anyway. And now here we are. Yeah. And it was just funny because every step of the way, all these headlines and the comments with them are like, they're just on board. It's crazy how on board people like at the beginning, I guess this is because this is not a particularly popular war to my understanding, even in Republican base. We'll actually, we'll get to that with the Joe Rogan thing in a second.

51:55Atrioc:Yeah. But on here, it's, it's like we're crushing them. It's over. We're winning. The deal's about to get done. That's great. It's about to happen. Oh, there's no deal. They've, they fucking scum and they never deserve to do. I don't have a lot, but there, so I did look at some of the comments on some of the Iran ones. And a lot of them are like, this president is the first one who had the courage to actually push back against a regime. There is a lot of, if on Fox News, it's like, that is the preserved group of people for whom this war is good.

52:23Aiden:I think if you're like the person that is reading Fox news in 2026 and making comments is a very different conservative than like the Nick Fuentes fan on Twitter. So much older. They're just, they're just completely different demographics. Like you could just tell, I mean, I listen, I love Fox news as I could say today, but the vibe you get on the website is that it's for the elderly. These are the oldest people. uh anyway we'll go to the joe rogan thing because it kind of ties to what we're saying uh there's an article on fox news that says from joe rogan said trump fucked it up and may have handed the country back to the dems in 2028 with an unpopular iran war this is i mean joe rogan even in this quote very republican and clearly attracts a certain base republicans and i was wondering how the comments would be on this because it kind of tears me apart mentally i love these two goats fox news joe rogan i don't make me choose you hate to see him fight you hate to see fight.

53:19And the comments, they picked Trump. They picked Fox News. All the top comments are like, President Trump is the only president in 47 years to confront Iran and stop him from getting a nuclear weapon and pay for thousands of the Americans killed. And I thank God every day for him. Wrong, Joe, because Trump refused to kick the can down the road and risk a nuclear catastrophe. He looked at the country's welfare instead of popularity. Trump did not start the conflict with Iran. That's debatable.

53:46Atrioc:That has 854 upvotes. These are the top three upvoted. Had he done nothing to stop around from getting nukes, that would be even less popular, which I'm just not sure is true. I wonder if we can see the comment history. I can't imagine these folks were stoked about Joe Biden's foreign policy and the perception of starting foreign wars, but... Yeah, it feels like that was the big movie.

54:07Aiden:The big thing. Doug, it couldn't have been more clear. He didn't start the war. It was a comment with 850 upvotes that says Trump did not start

54:15Atrioc:When Trump and J.D. Vance repeatedly campaigned on the idea of no more foreign wars in the Middle East.

54:22Aiden:When Iran started this war, we had to respond.

54:25Atrioc:That's basically an Asian. That's not even part of the East. So this comment that was funny. Joan of Florida says, A significant number of Democrats lay the blame at Trump's door. But long before his entry into office, Tehran was destabilizing the region, attacking neighboring countries, and shipping lanes. Okay? And then this comment said, So what has changed? which I thought was funny because like okay if you think that is horrible and Trump needs to do something well so far that is exactly what is still happening there is no progress the war is still going on it's funny that there's no discussion of the fact that there was this period of like guaranteed deal and it's just gone it's just memory hold there is no deal and the war has no end in sight they're bombing again and the true story if you want an update an honest update not even talking about whatever Fox News is like in the past four days, we are back in open bombing, like the beginning of the war.

55:18It's like we've had as many strikes in the past four days as like in the beginning four days. It's bombs all over Iran. They're striking back on ships and in Gulf states, and nothing's changed. We have no progress from months ago on anything ending in this war. I don't know if they're going to bomb harder this time, and that's the plan, but this could go on a lot longer is the honest truth of it. Well, they didn't bomb that hard the first time. Maybe it's an amount of bombs situation. Yeah. Maybe we throw more money at it. I know Trump wrote to Congress and is like, not asking, but like saying we're going to get a new war declaration, a new 90 days or something that he doesn't need to ask Congress for, but he's asking for it anyway, to like re-begin like a whole new wave of strikes.

56:05So it's day one again, which is kind of cool. It's like a fresh start, you know? We tried the ceasefire. We tried all that bullshit. Let's get back to the fresh start on the Iran war.

56:13Aiden:Do you guys have, because through, even through the periods of time where I'm reading and trying to follow this story as closely as possible, it still feels confusing to me. And I was like, if you're paying the most attention to this every day, is there like, is this more sensical? I would say I'm paying the most attention but my read on it is that And it's like a quick, I mean, it's really hard to just walk away. It's not easy to walk away because you can't leave Hormuz not how you found it. Yeah. It's like very damaging. And so they're trying to get it open and then walk away, but they can't set that up without it falling over.

57:03So that's the problem. It's something that, it's like a one-way door that they've walked through and they can't go back through it. and Trump really seems like he wants to get out of this. He wants to be done with it, but there is no way to do it. So they're kind of like flailing between give him a bunch of stuff and like try to do a ceasefire. It doesn't work. Okay, we'll try to double down on attacking, but that's probably not going to work. And then they're probably going to be back to us, you know, giving up more stuff. Yeah, that's what it seems like is that it's just the flailing of someone trying to get out of this, but they can't walk away like they could somewhere else.

57:36Atrioc:It all started with Call Me Maybe. Over 10 years ago, we created Switched on Pop to listen closer, uncovering the song craft behind even the glossiest of pop hits. Since then, we've released almost 500 episodes. We've defined the sounds of our modern soundtrack and interviewed hundreds of musicians and music insiders, including the singer of Call Me Maybe herself, Carly Rae Jepsen. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And on July 14th, Switched on Pop is embarking on a new chapter. We're stepping out from behind our microphones and in front of the camera to stream our podcast on Netflix.

58:10Atrioc:Now, you'll still be able to listen to the show anywhere you get podcasts, but now you'll be able to watch us each week, breaking down the sounds of the moment, digging into musical minutiae with your favorite artists, and offering questionable dad jokes, as always. We're kicking off our Netflix debut with a four-part series on the art of the song, with help from artists, producers, and songwriters like Aaron Dessner, Audrey Hobart, Trevor Horn, Cypress Hill, and Taylor Parks. Stream switched on pop on Netflix and anywhere you get podcasts every Tuesday starting on July 14th.

58:41Aiden:Is Kamala Harris running for president again? Listen, I might. I might. I'm thinking about it.

58:49Atrioc:But does anybody want that?

58:51Aiden:Yeah.

58:52Atrioc:Yeah?

58:53Aiden:Yeah, I think so. Well, I don't see why not. Absolutely, I think Kamala Harris should run for president again. I don't think there'll never be a woman president in the United States. Now, wait, wait, wait, you can't just walk away on that. Tell us why. I know it's still early to talk about 2028, but as we build to our post-Trump future, it seems to be a big question about the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris leads all of the presidential polling. So does this mean that the person who led the ticket in 2024 is going to lead the party again in 2028?

59:24Atrioc:The campaign needs to be called by Biden. It's just a tainted brand.

59:30Aiden:Do you think from a donor community largely that there's any appetite for a Harris return? I don't. I'm Estet Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Every body is beautiful, yet society is so obsessed with thinness that it has become a proven financial asset, and there's a$300 billion and growing weight loss industry. If it literally pays to be thinner, are GLP-1s actually a worthwhile financial investment? I'm Vivian Tu, Your Rich BFF, and on this episode of Net Worth and Chill, we're diving into the thinness economy, its tangible effects on your income, and the impact GLP-1s are having on our everyday lives.

1:00:10Aiden:No, you don't need to change yourself to be amazing, but yes, you might make more money if you do. Oof. Listen wherever you get your podcasts and watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. We could follow the energy crisis to somewhere else in the world. Okay, what's going on elsewhere? So on Fox news, uh, I was a beautiful headline caught my eye. Europe bankrolls Putin's war machine, even as NATO races to bolster defenses. And, uh, it talks about how an environmental watchdog group release it, uh, a report about, uh, shipping data coming from an Arctic port in Russia. And like where those shipments of liquefied natural gas are ending up.

1:00:54Aiden:And, uh, I think there is some perception that a ton of Russian oil goes to China, and it points that out. And while that is the case, I think it's like overall something like 20 % of the LNG from Russia is going to China right now. A huge portion of that still goes to the European Union, which is sort of the lens that this article is like attacking the problem through. being critical of while Europe continues to be the most vocal force supporting Ukraine, they are simultaneously getting a lot of their energy from Russia through this time period still.

1:01:39Atrioc:And it's presumably through boats, right? Because the pipeline was blown up?

1:01:43Aiden:Yeah.

1:01:44Atrioc:Or blew itself up.

1:01:45Aiden:In this case, this is a shipment from a bunch of boats. Like of the 140 looked at, 136 are going to ports in France, Spain, and Belgium, whereas only four of these boats of liquefied natural gas are going to China. And it's, you know, I would say the article is very much framed as Europe being a hypocrite for continuing to do this. Uh, it does note that, uh, Europe, they are in this like phase out plan where they're trying to get to a point by which, uh, I think by the end of 2027, they are no longer reliant on Russian natural gas at all. And that date is like looming because still such a significant portion of that gas comes from them.

1:02:33Aiden:And Europe's argument against this is that like the oil coming in now is from like previous contracts that we like signed before this deadline. We're not being hypocritical. This is, you know, this is just fulfillment of like deals made in the past. And we're still working towards this situation. We're going to be fully ready to phase out. And then it goes into, you mentioned Spain specifically, where there's like internal disagreement. There's people that like work at within the shipping and like port industry that disagree with the politicians in charge in Spain of like whether or not this deadline is like realistic to hit on time.

1:03:14Aiden:but when you consider the amount of energy like I think it's over 50 percent of Russia's exports and it's 2026 right now it does seem like it's going to be a really really difficult transition I don't know I think this whole thing is silly because even if you sank I think sanctions on a country as big as Russia for oil and gas which are untraceable commodities it just doesn't it's just like provably doesn't work like if europe goes we're not going to buy russian oil what happens is they just sell it to india and then india sells it to europe which has happened like they just someone buys it and they're the middleman they take a little cup and then they like it just gets to you because you need it and it exists and it's a global commodity market and they put it on shadow tankers and you can't this is what happens every time like it's not that's what i was talking about is like the kind of the heroic efforts of a couple republican senators including Lindsey Graham pushing forward the effort of a secondary layer of sanctions on European countries that continue to engage with Russian energy.

1:04:17Aiden:Oh, he was pushing for

1:04:18Atrioc:European countries to get sanctioned. Yeah, I mean technically everybody

1:04:22Aiden:but Europe being one of the huge participating parties of like who is in this oil market. The other thing to add on to what you're saying that there's a way to circumvent that to begin with, uh, is that through periods where there has been a drop in Europe's demand for this Russian, uh, LNG, they just pick that demand back up with China or Japan during those down periods. So Russia is able to maintain their level of output even without, uh, Europe. These aren't necessarily like, who knows what this could be over the course of years, but over these like week-long periods or month-long periods, the demand is just picked back up by other countries outside of the European Union.

1:05:11There's just no, like, every barrel of oil and all the LNG on a tanker gets sold. Every amount, there's none of it sitting there like, ah, well, no one wants to buy it. They always get sold. So, I don't know, it just feels like a huge waste. And it's crazy. I mean, I'm getting off my Fox News. No, no, no, no. Instagram wants Europe to have more expensive natural gas to help fight the war effort, but it's easy for us to say because we have a huge glut of natural gas. So it's like not, the sanction is not hard for us to take part in.

1:05:42Aiden:I think there's two layers to this. One, to give Lindsey Graham a minor bit of credit. Actually, this isn't really giving him credit. It's bipartisan, technically. It wasn't Lindsey Graham and another Republican guy. It's Lindsey Graham and there's Democrats. Actually, from an American BOV, it's like easy to say because it's not a hard sanction for us to do. But the reason that, I think this is even brought up in the Fox News article, and a huge angle of the comment, surprisingly, is this is good. Put the pressure on Europe so that they become reliant on our American natural gas. Like figure out a way to make Europe engage with us because we have the capacity to give them - Tons of natural gas.

1:06:23Aiden:Tons of natural gas. Why are they working with Russia at all? And these sanctions are part of the effort to make Europe more reliant on American energy, not just because like we want to help Ukraine.

1:06:35Atrioc:I mean, is there validity to that strategy from the U S perspective? I mean, absolutely. I mean, yeah, I can see if you're Lindsey Graham, that that seems like a win-win. Yeah. I mean, he, he did think that. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I guess that's, that's the way you stop people buying from Russia, right? is you offer more gas, right? You sell more to Europe. You have Venezuela's new oil ramp up and go to Europe. No, it's fine. It's just the point is like if they all switch their contract to American and they bought American LNG, then someone else somewhere is not buying that because it's going there now.

1:07:18And then the price just shifts around and they export to them.

1:07:20Aiden:The Russian LNG is still ending up somewhere. And then I also think the twist in this article is the way they present the data. They're like 136 ships out of 140 are going to Europe. And I bet you will think they're all going to China. It's like they took a group of ships from one port at one specific time. And if you look at the actual data, it's like, okay, a lot of it is going to Europe, over 50%, but like 20 some percent is going to China as well. And that's not the number they're presenting. but that's you know that's off Fox News stats I don't know it's just it's it feels kind of beautiful or like the main thing that's helped Russia more than anything is the Iran war because it literally took supply off the market so it made oil more expensive so they made a lot more money like that was the biggest thing more than like individual sanctions which you just get around if you helped our allies

1:08:16Atrioc:Venezuela true

1:08:20Aiden:I think the number one place I'd like to read about vaccines is probably Fox News.

1:08:28Atrioc:Yes, absolutely. There is some great vaccine news. It combines all my favorite things. Vaccines, AI, and Fox News comments. Oh, wait, can I say that? Yeah. That was the funniest part of exploring the Fox News website to me, which is great. Don't get me wrong. There just is no tech section. It's just not. If you're interested in tech news, you maybe can find it by individual headline. Well, I would go to US and I would go to campus radical. It's probably campus radical.

1:08:55Aiden:Why would I need tech if I have blue city crime? I mean, but nowhere. There is no like business or tech news. It is not important.

1:09:07Atrioc:If you want to find like... Of these sections, by the way, if I go over media, I was like, maybe media would have like technology, AI. The only drop down is Fox Nation coverage. And then if I go to entertainment, it's Taylor Swift, royal families and country music. I found it. I found it.

1:09:24Aiden:If you go all the way to the right and you go to, there is an AI section. Okay. If you make the browser as big as possible. And then if you go into more, you can find, wait, is there still not a, there's a science and tech section in the more section. Okay. If you scroll all the way to the bottom

1:09:44Atrioc:to this easily, easily navigatable.

1:09:46Aiden:But yeah, I mean, it is interesting because you can see what gets the most clicks. Yeah.

1:09:52Atrioc:Okay. So this is some cool vaccine news. So it's a mix of interesting vaccine news plus the Patriots giving comments. So researchers from universities of Cambridge and Southampton developed a quote universal vaccine designed to protect against multiple coronaviruses, which they explained in news release is the large group of viruses that occur in nature, which caused the COVID pandemic. so to explain this in English what I found interesting I don't know if you guys did too as we explored our beloved homepage of Fox News is that a lot of the articles are perfectly neutral right and then it's just kind of describing a thing that happened I mean this is not that different than other articles I read that were of the same thing right it's just recapping some news

1:10:36Aiden:I what my experience was there was articles like this and then there would be news articles that have an inflammatory headline yes like the headline is ridiculous but the actual meat and potatoes of

1:10:48Atrioc:the article was like surprisingly neutral the opinions are are very intense but yeah the opinion

1:10:54Aiden:and then the opinions are like they're using marxists every at least every paragraph yeah

1:10:59Atrioc:um okay so this article is basically just recapping a research report that was just posted in the virology journal i believe by some pretty legit uh researchers and so here's the general concept of it. There are like 10 strains of coronavirus in humans, but there are like thousands in animals, right? Like in bats and whatnot. And so normally the way we develop a vaccine against some kind of virus like this is that we look at what the current strain is and we say, okay, we're going to find an antigen that essentially represents the shape of the virus. And then we're going to manufacture that. We inject it into our bodies and now your body knows how to look for that particular thing, right?

1:11:38Atrioc:That's how a vaccine works. That's how we do with coronavirus, but then when a new coronavirus comes out... I thought vaccines work by sending my data through 5G to Bill Gates. They added that.

1:11:49Aiden:No, the antigen... They don't all do that? No, no, no. They all do it now, but it's like the last 15 years. That's a recent. As tech evolved. Okay, that makes sense.

1:11:58Atrioc:It's like Batman Begins, where Morgan Freeman is sitting in the Batcave, and he's looking at all of the screens of all your antigens, except it's Bill Gates. But it's Bill Gates. Okay, I got you. So every time a virus mutates, you've got to make a new vaccine. And that's part of the problem with it. It's why there's new COVID vaccines all the time. So what Cambridge did is they had machine learning analyze hundreds of different coronavirus strains, like the genetic sequences of it. And the idea is, hey, instead of looking at whatever the most recent virus shape and DNA structure is, what if we look at all of them, including the ones that are in nature, and we use this analysis, we let a machine do a ton of data crunching on this and find to the common structures that exist amongst all of them.

1:12:40Atrioc:And that's what they did. The model was then able to make, hey, here's an antigen that's going to represent and basically defend our body from not only the current coronaviruses we know about, but any future shapes they might take. It is future proofing against future versions of how viruses might mutate. This could be huge. Single virus that takes care of this forever. Quote, first time a vaccine whose active component was designed entirely by computer simulations has been tested in humans they tested this with 39 volunteers triggered an immune response it seems to work for all of them from the trial's chief investigator sol faust if we can develop and clinically advance this new class of vaccines before a virus outbreak begins millions of lives could be saved lockdowns avoided and the economy preserved we could get ahead of viruses because we can see the entire family of pat you know and not just individual.

1:13:35Atrioc:Really cool, really interesting. Obviously, there's the question about like how involved, you know, how do we test and make sure that something that an AI designed is extraordinarily safe and it's in the early stages. Super minor note in this article about how it's administered with like a micro fluid jet, which is like a newer vaccine thing. That's like a minor thing that's not related to the AI. So this is really interesting. This is a potential world where as we've talked about a couple of times, medicine could really transform with AI. not because you're talking to chat tbt but because it is extraordinarily good at processing huge quantities of complex data and finding patterns so this is really interesting so what are people in the comments saying um i was surprised by this to be honest i thought it would all be talking about vaccines being bad and there's some of that for example fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me fauci did a lot of damage in the public's confidence in jabs this is not fauci that's the wrong person this is faust this is a different person um but almost all of the comments getting back to how old the people who seem to read this website are are about the way the vaccine was administered which was one sentence and is not the point of this article and is not what ai did here we go apparently artificial intelligence is not that intelligent it came up with using a tiny high pressure stream of liquid and does not require a needle when i was in army basic training over 50 years ago they ran us through an assembly line injecting who knows what into our arms at station after station using exactly this method okay this tiny high pressure stream of liquid was used by the army over 60 years ago let's keep going drafted into the army in 1969 all of the draftees in my basic training got multiple shots in an airstream ejector in 1969 i was in naval boot camp in san 50 years ago, whose entire reaction to an incredible new potential form of vaccine is to complain about the type of injector they used, which is not the point of the article.

1:15:41Atrioc:Anyways.

1:15:48What was it? As a young kid, I was definitely afraid of shots.

1:15:51Atrioc:This one. Yeah, some people are just complaining about shots. I managed to kick one out of the doctor's hands one time. The irony is later diagnosis is a type one diabetic. a lifetime of needles. I hope this quote new microfluid jet works better than the last time it was tried in the 60s. It's just, anyway, so they're really latched onto that.

1:16:08Aiden:It's just so crazy to see the confirmation that they really are that old. They're old. It's the old, like that's what I've found is they're the wisest and most experienced among us is across this website. They do have a lifetime of boot camp, naval boot camp experience that I do not have.

1:16:23Atrioc:When I went through basic training in the summer of 1968, there are four people who were in basic training in 1968 through 1969. You guys already thought, so the vaccine's cool, right? I mean, look, this is very much, to be clear, this is not like a working vaccine that's going to cure everything. This is an interesting indicator of the possibilities that might happen using this type of technology remains to be seen.

1:16:47Aiden:It's awesome. I mean, as a streamer, I prefer if we had another coronavirus and there was no way of stopping it, so I'm going to...

1:16:55Atrioc:Oh, wait, I should say, the particularly interesting thing about this is not only could we have a future-proofed coronavirus vaccine you could do this for other viruses like influenza we could potentially just come up with an influenza vaccine that's permanent harder because it mutates faster you know what another one that could work for and i won't have any excuse to get out of things and you're not going to like this because i know this is one of your favorite diseases ebola we could do this with ebola and you future-proof it with a vaccine instead of going off the current strain because

1:17:21Aiden:if we got rid of ebola then i couldn't talk about the outbreaks on the podcast what would So far, we're just talking about things that hurt this show. Disease outbreaks are really a big part of our dollar in trade.

1:17:35Atrioc:Dude, your stream is going to pop off during the Ebola pandemic. During the Ebola slash Corona 21. It's going to be a great month while people are alive.

1:17:43Aiden:So I was taking a peek at our run of show. Yeah. And one of our last stories is Trump to shrink national monuments. Oh, I saw this. I was wondering if we're actually going to go around and make them smaller. Great question, Aiden. Listen, I was on Fox News, and I discovered something that I thought I'd be angry about, but I changed my mind really quickly. Trump is going to shrink two Utah national monuments. If you know what a national monument is, I'm going to answer that question for you right now. I'm going to preempt your question. It's like a national park, but a president can create it unilaterally.

1:18:17You don't need an act of Congress. And they are being shrunk by 90%. This is Grand Staircase, Escalante, and Bears Ears. They're going from 3 million acres to 300 ,000 to allow the rest of the land to be used for development and natural resources. This is the new maps.

1:18:34Atrioc:Okay, I think a lot of people, myself included, when I heard monuments, were thinking they were going to go, like, make the Mount Rushmore faces smaller. That's what I thought. That would have been cooler.

1:18:42Aiden:He was going to take the presidential shrink ray and kind of make the... So this is a park. There's a big federal land. Big federal land.

1:18:51Atrioc:no shrink race no well on the map how would you get the map to be smaller it doesn't make any sense and of course they've shrink so this land can now be sold to developers to be used for great all-american clean coal which is what i found out through the comments because i thought people might be actually angry about this one because national park's a fun thing to go to or national monument with your family it's beautiful untouched american unspoiled terrain yeah these are the top comments something a lot of people forget is that one of the largest deposits of low sulfur clean burning coal is on the grand staircase long overdue when was the last time millions of acres of land were taken in a so-called blue state the way this land was and when they say taken they mean they're talking about when it was turned into a national park when was the last time millions of acres of land were taken in a so-called blue state the way this land was which dude i do want to talk like california is so much a lot of national what

1:19:43Aiden:I want to give the top comments some credit. Okay. Because something a lot of people forgot is that one of the largest deposits of the low silver, clean burning coal is in the grand staircase. I did forget that. I'm not going to pretend like I... I mean, Princess Roxanna says, it's not about preservation of native antiquities, but it's about removing huge chunks of our natural resources from the economy. When they created this national park, the goal of previous presidents like Bill Clinton was to take the resources out of our economy. That's why he did it. He didn't want us to have clean burning coal.

1:20:18And now, thank God, years later, we can shrink these damn things and get more coal back in the economy. This ties right into stopping Russia from selling LNG.

1:20:25Atrioc:We send this coal over to Europe. Yep.

1:20:27Aiden:So did the article give you any insight as to the return or the surge of coal industry that will return to the United States in order to? No. Because my understanding is leading up, We're on a pretty consistent decline in the amount of people employed in the coal industry in the country, even under Trump's terms. So Trump said they, referring to previous presidents, took the land from the people, quite honestly, which is not really what a national monument is. It's supposed to be for the people. For the people. And now he's giving it back. Utah governor praised the move. The original size of the monuments is far too expansive.

1:21:04Protections for national monuments apply to the surrounding landscape as well, preventing drilling, mining, and construction. But now we can do that. because they have large deposits of coal and uranium. So how about that? Yeah, Treasury, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has pushed for using more federal land to expand U.S. energy production, clearing the way for mining and oil drilling in Alaska as well. So this is good for the economy, Aiden. Okay, so get on board.

1:21:31Aiden:Well, what does Fox News have to say about the government's potential 5 % investment in OpenAI? look as a as a site that doesn't highlight tech it's a great question aiden you know why because

1:21:44Atrioc:i was curious i what do people on fox news think about ai genuinely curious what was going on they even had a little poll at one point so interestingly kick this off 77 of people in a fox news poll said that we need to either it is extremely or very urgent to get government regulation on ai i was surprised by that you know most of the people in power are pretty anti-regulation at the moment when it comes to ai uh but yes okay so this is a story that's been going on for kind of a couple weeks now sam altman actually i'll read the title open ai sam altman wants to negotiate a five percent stake in the company for us if competitors agree to a key provision he has gone to trump besant and howard lutnik and proposed that the government should take five percent of open ai but that all of the leading ai labs such as meta anthropic and google should also do the same.

1:22:36Atrioc:You might be wondering like what is going on here. So as a reminder, the government under Trump has invested, I think a dozen companies now, one of the most notable was the 10 % stake in Intel. And this is a somewhat interesting and strange for a government to take direct ownership in a company like this, something like Intel. We've talked about it a couple of times. And I'm going to be honest at first, I, when Sam Altman was proposing this thought he's a fucking commie because government should not control the means of production. Government cannot control shit. Right. We should nationalize. You shouldn't nationalize 50 articles on here about the dangers of communism.

1:23:15Atrioc:Yes. But then I realized that once you talk to Trump and Besant and Lutnik, it's like, okay, well that could make a lot of sense. And they seem excited about the idea. Trump apparently seems good with it. And so I realized probably it's like, you know, this is America first, making sure we get the benefit from some of the companies and we've contributed to this until I realized he is a, fucking call me because he met with bernie sanders if you scroll down or up i don't know where you are on this article he then went and talked with bernie and they had an hour-long conversation and bernie's been pushing for 50 government ownership of all the ai companies right at this no no no bernie sanders there we go bernie sanders we talked about this super briefly like a month or two ago but he proposed publicly he's trying to push it into congress as well the idea of u.s should own half of the AI companies and have some sort of sovereign wealth fund or redistribute that to people.

1:24:04Atrioc:So Sam Allman went and met with him with Bernie Sanders and they talked this through and apparently he's on board with this idea, which is ridiculous.

1:24:12Aiden:It is interesting because in the financial situation that OpenAI is in, would Altman balk at a US government like 40 % purchase of OpenAI at its current evaluation? because they do need cash so desperately.

1:24:31Atrioc:Well, so dude, there's a lot of ways to interpret this thing. And the most likely is that because Trump's administration has shown over the past month that they are perfectly willing to tell AI companies, you can't distribute our models. They did it with Anthropic, as we've talked about a number of times. And I don't think we mentioned on the show, the most recent version of Chachapi T 5.6 was not released for like a week or two because the US government told OpenAI and told Sam Altman, yeah, you need to hold it. It's too dangerous until we explicitly approve it. So they have set this standard of the government is going to explicitly control this private market of what products they can release.

1:25:09Atrioc:And probably what's going on here is Sam Altman is trying to say, you should be invested in our company because then he knows the likelihood that they're going to shut stuff down like that goes way way way down and so you know arguably because sam altman is not agreeing to the 50 for bernie and saying he really wants to work with trump i think he is he is a capitalist and he's not a filthy commie until i read the comments what do the comments say quote this is communism whether the name is trump or g selling or demanding private equity and firms to the government for protection is communism by definition another comment not in favor of the U.S.

1:25:46Atrioc:government owning any part of the private company. The government owns 31 % of the health industry and look where that has gotten us. No. Final verdict, communist. I mean, I agree with this third guy here. This is Sam asking the U.S. taxpayer to bail out his company. It just feels like - That's what I'm saying.

1:26:03Aiden:I feel like he's in a position now where it's like that regardless of your ideological stance or something, he's just not in a circumstance where he can reject these amounts of money. Well, I mean, it's just like, if you give 5 % to Trump, your likelihood of him and the US government helping you out when shit gets bad or if you're in a tough, like it's way higher.

1:26:23Atrioc:It's just way, way higher. It stops being a free market, right? Like the incentive then for the US government is to ensure that OpenAI and these specific tech companies that we would be picking as winners, like go on to win. But what if they do shitty things or they're incompetent or other competitors come up and then just don't get that advantage. It doesn't seem great. Like I'm on board with the idea of some way of tapping into AI. You tax them. Right. That's what always works. It's like they compete and no matter who wins, you get a big cut for the government and you spend it on people. Do a value-added tax for tokens.

1:26:57Or like picking certain companies and you own a percent of them. It's just like there's so many bad incentives. It's what I would have thought until I read this article and now I've changed my mind. I don't want to talk about taxes on Fox Newsweek.

1:27:08Atrioc:I'm baffled that this isn't portrayed as like a horrific communist thing, which I'm assuming is because it's related to the Trump administration. But this is like, it's, this is bizarre. This is really bizarre to come from the supposedly very free market focused administration.

1:27:25Aiden:Do you guys feel like you had any big takeaways reading pretty much just Fox this week? Like what are your, what are your big thoughts as you kind of like went through articles it doesn't cost me any money that's another thing i don't know i could cancel all my other subscriptions and i could just fox news they do fit a lot of ads but not a small price to pay for that great journalism yeah so that's the first thing i noticed no i mean i don't know it was interesting but i read a lot of fox news this week for this thing and it i really had to dig through a lot of trashy celebrity stories they are everywhere it's it's yeah it's like a third of every category is they try to angle it through a celebrity yeah usually an aging star that someone old would know about it's like that was kind of an odd thing is like i'm like as i'm looking for iran war updates or like a trump news i would also see like an article that has shirtless pictures of harrison ford and his new body it's like half half like people magazine half kind of political news yeah it's so bizarre

1:28:32Atrioc:how much of it is that and I really I mean we've like joked about it but I really appears to be an extremely old audience yeah like really old like these are boomers these are like genuinely like the oldest generation that we have right now yeah there was a Marjorie Taylor Greene quote recently where she was talking because she's totally gone off the Trump train you know she's like entirely separate branch Republican now and she was talking about how there is a diehard group of Fox news only very old boomers who are 100 % locked behind Trump. Nothing will change. Literally nothing can change. And she's like, I'm just going for a different, like that, not, not to give credible credence to Marjorie Tom Green, but like that, that quote, I remembered in my head and it kind of rung true reading this.

1:29:17This is like a, yeah, just a segment of like decently well-off elderly boomers who are like, just that's the view they see things through they most people have homes most people have there were okay stories

1:29:33Aiden:there was like decent no i mean like the live or on war update thing was like it was minute by minute tracking what i would get elsewhere it was like you know updates on what centcom said and

1:29:45Atrioc:what happened in congress the vaccine article did not have conspiracy stuff for anti-vaccine stuff and it was just this is the scientific update and that was it it was held to the comments i think

1:29:54Aiden:I'm also like it's not lost on me that like any basically anything you read is going to have a level of like political bias present in it that's that's not even the part that I feel like I'm getting at it's more like the presentation of it and the bombastic nature of the headlines like if I what I would normally normally read like a given week would be like okay FT New York times Reuters and then maybe like Al Jazeera and the guardian uh like and I think what all of these things have in common that is so substantially different from from Fox News is I feel like the the headlines are just a little more straightforward like every headline here is intermingled with way more inflammatory language in order like in order to attract the attention of that like 70 year old Fox News consumer and it's you know it's packaged between you know a couple celebrity stories and like how AOC fucked up this week yeah and that's the whole site there's a lot of culture war lens on everything and a lot of celebrity trash on the lens of everything

1:31:08Atrioc:which is usually through the lens of like going back to Jesus a lot of you know like traditional conservative values somehow become tied up with the celebrity stuff too.

1:31:23Yeah, you know, I wanted to test, so I went to MSNBC's website too.

1:31:30It's kind of the mirror version, right? It's also boomers watching largely, and it's just a different demographic. Their shtick is that almost, I'd say, 95 % of articles have Trump in them, and it's usually something like, he fucked up, or he's bad, or you know, it's like, that's the idea. Because that just gets clicks. People that are old and to like Trump want to hear about how he's doomed. It's over. He's all about the, yeah. So that's part of it.

1:31:56Aiden:I feel like the actual barrier that I realized reading this, because when we do research for like normal episodes, I feel like MSNBC or like a CBC are the types of websites that I'm going to way, way less than like the outlets I just described. and there's kind of this line in the sand in between subscription news and free to access news that's like packed with advertisements like msnbc fox like sit in this realm of i open the page i scroll through like three video ads like a few image ads in like a bunch of different sections of the article, but I don't have to subscribe to read anything. And ultimately I get a more bare bones, uh, version of events, more inflammatory title compared to the, like the New York times FT, uh, situation where, okay, after an article or two, I have to subscribe.

1:33:02Aiden:And there's usually a lot more depth and straightforward nature to the, I feel like that's like the real divide in news media is like, is that? Yeah. Yeah. That's what I would notice from both those websites is that the headline kind of tells you how to think before you've clicked it. You know, what the angle is. So you can kind of know what you're getting into before you click. Yeah. It was, it was an eyeopening experience. I do feel, um, much, much more informed and now I'm going to stick to Fox news.

1:33:32Atrioc:Let us know in the comments if you'd like this to be every episode or only every other.

1:33:37Aiden:I think if there was any takeaway, if there wasn't something already, it's like, even if you have a solid news source that you like checking the most, I think this is an affirmation of maybe don't read all your news in one place. Just try, especially if there's just a story or thing you're particularly interested in, go follow the thread across different sites and like try to picture, like put a picture together from those multi like the multitude of things it gave me a deep insight not a deep insight but I get a better idea I have some family members extended family members who only watch Fox News and I just I almost like can see the talking points that they're saying as I'm reading the website I can just you get where they got it from and that's where it guides you like right to a conclusion it gives you a conclusion it's just like you know how to think you don't even really have to read the article because the article actually has a bunch of data.

1:34:33You just kind of know the gist of it and you can jump to the comments and then you...

1:34:37Aiden:Dude, there's a great Shane Gillis bit about this from one of his stand-up specials where he's talking about having a Fox News dad and how every night his dad sits and watches Fox News until he's so pissed he can't watch anymore. And his dad's goal every evening is he needs to walk away with one fact that he can say at the dinner table. and that most of the time that fact is nancy pelosi's a bitch

1:35:06Atrioc:okay all right we'll do an episode in the future where we go to more extreme version of this which is it's a fox news headline show we can't do any research beyond the headlines and then we just have conversations do we need to go to oan or uh harris rip dude i thought about sneaking this is

1:35:22Aiden:my idea for this week yeah was sneaking an oan an article in and just seeing if there's like a layer of disconnect between the two because dude if you go on it's even crazier on there oh yeah it's it's actually because half these articles again are like trying to be it's the way they're packaged right it's like they're trying to have some facts but they package it in a way but oan doesn't give a shit they go crazy i think if you're in the you there's an unfortunate reality if you're in this like mainstream, more corporate news media world and you're intending on making everything accessible for free, you just have to go for like inflammatory, what gets the click, what moves the ad revenue sort of shit.

1:36:02Aiden:And you can't rely on like the traditional tenants of journalism because that's not what people are there for. They need the click. But thank you for joining us this week on Lemonade Stand. Thank you for joining us for a week of Fox News prepared stories.

1:36:18Atrioc:We hope that this helps you better connect with your conservative uncle. Yes.

1:36:22Aiden:And if you want a more normal lemonade stand experience for the week, you can go to patreon.com slash lemonade stand for an extra hour of the show. We'll see you guys later. See you guys next week. Thank you very much for watching. Bye. Bye. I'm Glenn Washington, host of Snap Judgment, the award-winning storytelling podcast from KQED. Every week, Snap deals a new card, like the girl whose sister was a monkey, or the man who lived in the woods for 30 years or even the woman who snuck her lover out of prison in a dog crate. Pick a card. Any card. Tap to listen now to Snap Judgment from KQED on Spotify.

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