The Week: Trump vs the Press, Meta’s AI Win, and the Turning Political Tide

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1:54Apple Watch Series 12 study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12. Welcome to the week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, September 25th. Today, the White House shuts out three news outlets and CNN gets a new owner. Then, how Meta's AI agent got to the top of the app store. And finally, what Iran and Canada mean for the midterms. Let's get into it.

2:34To start, last Friday, President Trump banned CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House. Reporters from those outlets showed up to find their badges no longer worked. The other networks, Fox included, pulled out of the White House press pool in solidarity. Here's what Scott and Jess had to say on Monday's Raging Moderates. All the footage is going to come from the White House. That's exactly how they want it. And it's crazy to me. I was watching Scott Besson this morning with Joe Kernan on CNBC. And, you know, Kernan likes Trump a good amount. It takes a lot to get him fired up. And he is fired up about this assault on the First Amendment.

3:17And Besson said, you know, I don't really know the details. I was away when this happened. And, you know, they're also spineless. But this quote from Trump, it just it just sticks with you and it sits on you. Like, how did we get here? He says about what's going on. It's sick. I mean, there's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stuff. Now, if they want to write them, that's fine. But I don't have to let them in my into the people's house, into my the people's house. It is not your house. You are a short term tenant. You are a renter at the very least.

3:50The White House is public space. The taxpayers pay for it. And a key component of a healthy democracy is press. And no, the president does not have the right to start cherry picking only friendly press. My sense is, and I'm curious because you're closer to this group than I am, that even Fox doesn't like this. And eventually, everyone's going to like, OK, you throw a party and you think only people who like you and tell you how handsome you are are going to show up to your party. Well, you're not going to have a party. No one's going to show up. My sense is they're all going to rally together.

4:24The majority of the press is going to rally together. And at some point, you know, other than the Daily Wire or the Daily Call or whatever, or, you know, at some point, these these press briefings are just going to look very sad and very weird. What do you think is going to happen here? Well, they all already have banded together. So there no one is covering today. So UNGA is going to be without a press pool. And the White House Correspondents Association statement I thought was great. And the thing that stuck out to me the most is when they wrote, this is about more than the rights of journalists.

5:00It's about the right of the American people to receive a full and independent account of activities, policies and decisions of whoever occupies the nation's highest office. And Republicans know better. I mean, lo and behold, that has been the message or the biggest truism of the entire Trump era, that they know better. But majority of them just feel like their backs are up against the wall and then they have to dig in. The same week CNN was shut out of the White House, its sale to David Ellison's Paramount cleared its biggest hurdle. Twelve states settled their lawsuit to block the deal. Ellison's family is close to President Trump, and CNN will soon report to him.

5:44Ed Ellison spoke with Semaphore's Rohan Goswami on Tuesday's Prof G. Markets. The concern now, given what happened over the weekend with Trump essentially banning CNN from the White House because he doesn't like the way that they're reporting, i.e. just reporting and just covering what's actually happening, the concern will be that, I guess, David Ellison will move in more of a Fox News-y direction or move into more of a pro-Trump direction in order to get CNN back into the White House. And that might be the editorial direction. And of course, that is what a lot of people are so worried about when it comes to this deal.

6:21Is there anything about this deal that should put those concerns to rest? I guess my question is, how unmitigated of a win is it in terms of David Ellison and his editorial control over these properties? Ellison is, based on the conversations I've had with folks who know him well and who have been advising on this deal, is, I think, genuinely mostly focused on turning around a business that has already been encumbered with a huge amount of debt that he is adding more debt to. And so any decision that reduces the cash generative potential of CNN, which does, I think, throw off five to six hundred million dollars worth of EBIT annually still, would be monumentally stupid.

7:05Ellison is not going to want to do anything that undermines the business value of the assets that he bought. So I do think the business realities actually protect CNN as is a fiercely principled and largely independent newsroom with, of course, a lot of editorial and opinion people who irritate the president and who frustrate the president, but which do incredible reporting day in and day out. Elson has no business reason to meddle with that. Now, absolutely, I could see a world and it is his right as the owner of a business where if there are more, there are issues that he personally feels strongly about, Israel being the chief and most important one to him where you could see a world where he intervenes or steps in.

7:43But in terms of actually diminishing the value of that asset, I don't realistically see him doing that, not in the short term. Longer term, five, 10 years from now, it's anyone's guess. But he's got to keep this together. Underplaying diminishing CNN from a business perspective doesn't make a lot of sense. Next, Meta. While OpenAI and Anthropic have been arguing about whether AI could end the world, Meta released an AI agent built for everyday life. It's called Muse, and it passed ChatGPT to become the top free app on Apple's App Store in the U.S. Scott predicted last year that Meta would be the most important AI company.

8:24On Monday's Prof G Markets, he explained why. What I've said for a long time is you want to build a trillion-dollar company. You have to do one thing. You have to build a time machine. and that is you have to give people time back. And when you download Muse, you log in using your Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp. So it immediately knows you. So it's already benefiting from the first party data that another company would take years to build. It knows where you like to eat, who your friends are, where you live. And it's also taking AI from defense to offense in the sense that it doesn't wait for you to tell it what to do.

9:03It takes about basically three clicks from the download to the ideas tab where it begins telling you how it can help. So for example, it will proactively find and cancel random subscriptions you forgot about. It will turn your inbox into a daily schedule. It will track travel fares. It can even make calls on your behalf. So when you think about all the drama and the AI doomerism coming out of Anthropic, it's kind of opened a pretty big void for these guys. One of Meta's rivals is already pushing back. On Tuesday's Prof G Markets, Ed Elson walked through what that could mean for the AI and tech landscape as a whole.

9:44As of this week, Amazon has blocked MetaMuse from accessing any and all products on Amazon.com. In other words, if you ask MetaMuse to, say, restock on paper towels, it won't be able to do it. You will have to do it yourself. Now, clearly, this isn't a huge problem right now. MetaMuse could just find another retailer to buy your paper towels. But if this becomes a theme across other companies, then it could be a real problem. I mean, for example, what is stopping Google from cutting off Meta's access to Google Search? What is stopping ByteDance from cutting off their access to TikTok? What is stopping any tech company from targeting any AI agent and inhibiting their ability to interact with the internet.

10:30After all, it's not really the intelligence of these agents that make them useful. It's their ability to go out into the web and do things. Without that ability, who is to say that anyone will use agents at all? In other words, this could be the beginning of a very different chapter in the AI agent story. This could be the chapter of less interaction, less integration, and more technological seclusion. It could be that agents become increasingly unhelpful because of the restrictions that were put up by that competition. OpenAI and Anthropic have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building AI.

11:11Meta's hit came from an app that's free to download and that most people already had an account for. On Thursday's Prof G Conversations, Scott asked CNN's Fareed Zakaria what Muse's rise means for the rest of the industry. The Meta app is now the number one app on the App Store. What does that tell you? It tells you that we are now getting price competition at every level. And the entire race that the hyperscalers, the Googles, the Microsofts have been engaged in has been on the theory that there are what we would call network economics at play here, right? Like the person who gets there first or the person with the best AI model becomes like Google for search, becomes like Microsoft for software, becomes like Meta for social media.

12:02They rake in all the profits. They have monopoly pricing power. And that's why they're spending these crazy amounts. But what you're seeing is actually there's going to be competition. Anthropic and open AI are going to compete at the closed-end model level. There's going to be competition among the open-weight models. There's going to be competition everywhere. And so it does make me wonder, are we seeing a moment of truth for these massive expenditures that are taking place? We'll be right back.

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16:03Welcome back. The midterms are 39 days away. The prediction market Kalshi gives Democrats a 62 percent chance of winning the Senate and a 92 percent chance of taking the House. On Tuesday's Raging Moderates, Scott told Jess he wished the election were tomorrow. I, too, wish the election were tomorrow. A lot can happen in, what do we have, 42 days. But it does feel like the tide has turned against the Republicans en masse. There was a while where it was just more of a Donald Trump problem and it wasn't trickling down as far down ballot. And it does feel like there's been some pretty significant movement in the last couple of weeks.

16:50The trade war with Canada is certainly part of that, but I really think that it's the war in Iran that is weighing on people's minds. CNN had a new poll out this morning over two thirds disapproval. Caitlin Collins tried to ask President Trump about it this morning, and he was pissed off that CNN still had access to the U.N. He was like, I thought I banned you guys, but they're still allowed to cover because of the U.N., which is a good thing. More transparency is always a bonus, but two big moves. And in the last day or so, Mike Rogers and Ashley Hinson. So pivotal races, Michigan and Iowa on the Republican side, posting that Donald Trump has got to end the war in Iran.

17:36And this has been, especially Ashley Hinson, very much behind the president and what he wants to do or what he's going to accomplish there in Iran. Mike Rogers, the last couple of weeks have been slightly more tepid. But this is a real line in the sand. Like, we got to get out of there if you think that we're going to be able to win any of these elections. We're seven months into the Iran war and oil prices are beginning to bite. J.P. Morgan's commodities team has stopped publishing a baseline forecast for oil and says it can't model how the war with Iran ends. Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kepler, tracks where every barrel goes.

18:22On Wednesday's Prof G Markets, he told Ed Elson where prices go from here. The concern really is that we do get escalation once the midterm elections are out of the way. and that escalation being you know whether it is trump trying to define his legacy in in terms of uh boots on the ground or whatever that may be it's just very difficult to see how we see an end to this conflict here the kicker to all of this really is that you as you mentioned they're all prices around sort of 98 here on the product side of things we're seeing them absolutely ripping you know on on a retail basis in the u.s diesel is at six dollars fifty a gallon And, you know, that's up sort of 75 % year on year.

19:02We're really starting to see that biting in terms of inflation, but in terms of everything, right, that those higher costs work their way into. But just in terms of the Strait of Hormuz, the ironic thing is that we've been seeing oil prices rising over the last month. Well, we've actually been seeing improving volumes coming out of the strait as well. And so there's more barrels getting out. But I think it's the risk premium involved that is the that's what the issue is, is that while there's increasing flows, there is an increasing chance that you're going to get hit by by Iran there. And I think that's the the the the main option that Iran has, right, to deter these flows or keep leverage over the strait.

19:42And so I think on a certain level, we should expect them to be doing more of that going forward here. Then there's Canada. The European Union just invited Canada to become the EU's first associate member, and President Trump called that a hostile act. Fareed Zakaria told Scott on Thursday's Prof G Conversations that the trade war is hitting American carmakers hardest. The largest producer of cars in Canada is Ford, which is our largest producer of cars. So we're crippling our national champions. And so Canada has to find ways around this problem. And what Mark Carney has been really brilliant about is saying, I don't have that much power.

20:26I'm a much smaller country, but I do have flexibility and I'm going to take what power I have and create a better situation for me where I'm not as dependent on this hostile and unpredictable superpower. So he's made a trade deal with India, made a trade deal with Europe. And as you say, even with China, the result is the Chinese are essentially entering the Canadian car market in a way that they would never. So if the American car industry gets expelled or becomes unaffordable in Canada, it is going to be replaced by the Chinese car industry. And the Chinese are showing other countries, in a sense, the way to get around this, which is treat America as the problem and increase free trade with everybody else.

21:14so you get more growth. And it's terrible for us both economically, but it's also terrible for us geopolitically because the single biggest beneficiary of all this is going to be China. I mean, China's car industry is going to take over the world now. Canada also came up on Wednesday's office hours in a question from a listener in Edmonton. Her daughter moved to the U.S. and thinks Canada's safety net kills ambition. She asked Scott how America could strengthen in its own safety net without losing its edge. So where are we in the U.S.? We believe and actively promote in winners versus losers, which means more risk to the downside and more risk, if you will, to the upside in a good way.

21:57The question is whether it's gone too far, and the result is a series of expenses and anxiety and depression among young people because of a total absence of a social safety net or a reduction in it such that we can continue to fund this transfer of wealth from the young to the old. I would argue that it's gone too far. I do believe that shelter is a basic human right for Americans, or just more basically, I don't even like saying the term human right. A lot, you know, there's just not enough rights to go around for what's deserved or enough resources to give every individual the human rights that we all like to think they deserve.

22:31What I would argue is in a country like America that has registered the prosperity it has, that just too much of it has been crammed into the people who are the most fortunate and at some point just don't need any more resources. and those resources would be better allocated across a middle class that requires constant reinvestment in terms of infrastructure, lack of anxiety from health care scares, more money in terms of unemployment insurance, more investment in the young that will ultimately have a positive ROI. Sorry for the word salad here, but I think that the U.S. having a more risk-aggressive culture, believing in winners and losers is a good thing.

23:08But at some point, it's become the Hunger Games that's the week I'm George Hahn we'll see you next Friday

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