Close All Tabs - Iran Is Winning The Slopaganda War

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

AI-generated Lego videos have become a tool of war. Since the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began in late February, increasingly elaborate videos featuring LEGO figures and catchy rap lyrics have been flooding our feeds. They're shareable, surprisingly high quality and they're deeply critical of the U.S. and Trump. They're also propaganda. Welcome to the age of "slopaganda" — where AI Slop meets information warfare. Michał Klincewicz, assistant professor of computational cognitive science, joins Morgan to break down the rise of slopaganda, what it's doing to our information ecosystem and why the U.S. is losing the meme war. Guest: Michał Klincewicz, assistant professor of computational cognitive science at Tilburg University.  Further Reading/Listening: Slopaganda: The interaction between propaganda and generative AI  — Michal Klincewicz, Mark Alfano, and Amir Ebrahimi Fard, Filosofiska Notiser  Slopaganda wars: how (and why) the US and Iran are flooding the zone with viral AI-generated noise — Mark Alfano and Michal Klincewicz, The Conversation ‘Vengeance for all’: How Iran’s Lego videos won narrative war against Trump | US-Israel war on Iran News — Alia Chughtai, Al Jazeera The Team Behind a Pro-Iran, Lego-Themed Viral-Video Campaign — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker YouTube removes pro-Iran channel producing anti-Trump videos — Alex MacDonald, Middle East Eye ‘We want the mullahs gone’: economic crisis sparks biggest protests in Iran since 2022 — Deepa Parent and William Christou, The Guardian  Read the Transcript ⁠here⁠ Email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Follow us on⁠ ⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and⁠ ⁠TikTok⁠ Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Okay, let me try to explain what I saw. And it's clearly AI. The setting is Lego Pirate. of the Caribbean, and it opens by zooming in on this Davy Jones-type character. You know, the cursed pirate with a tentacle beard. But this Davy Jones also looks a lot like President Donald Trump. Instead of a peg leg, he has a golf club, and he's steering his ship directly through a Lego gate,

labeled Straight of Hermuz. This is one of dozens of incredibly catchy viral videos from a song. small content studio called Explosive Media. All of their videos follow a similar format, Lego characters and taking shots at the Trump administration and the United States. Like calling the president the Twitter Finger King, Twitter Finger King fake ring cap master with the lies. Based on the style, tone, and topics covered,

you might think this content is coming from a left-wing American studio. Or maybe a progressive media. outlet. It's not that different from the kind of stuff the Democratic Party has posted to appeal to Gen Z voters. But there's a consistent thread through every single video. They all revolve around the war between the U.S. and Iran. And that's because they're coming directly from Iran. That's right, it's all propaganda. Wartime propaganda is nothing new. But take a look at the videos spreading across social media today. Something feels different. Welcome to the age of sloppaganda.

That's a combination of slop, as in AI slop, and propaganda. It's out of the bottle. The genie is out of the bottle, and it's going to be wreaking havoc for a while. This is Mihal Kleinsavich. He's a professor of computational cognitive science at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He's one of the leading experts on sloppaganda. He actually co-authored a paper on this last year. And he said that the sloppaganda that's coming out of Iran today is very different from the propaganda of past wars. It's more potent. It's turned out faster. There's a clear, consistent narrative that pulls viewers in and convinces them to keep watching.

Slopaganda has gotten really popular, making it harder to discern what's real and what's not. When our information ecosystem is flooded with catchy Lego music videos, what is it distracting us from? What happens when public opinion can be so easily manipulated by AI slop? That is a sloppaganda apocalypse. Slopagetan? Is that better? Slopagetan? Ooh. I like Slopagetan. Slopagetting. Yeah, that's better. You know, I just coined a term on your show. Slopagetting.

Today's deep dive is all about sloppaganda, how it took over our feeds, what it's doing to our brains, and why the U.S. might be losing the meme war. Plus, we're going to get into how we might be able to stop Slopagetan. Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives.

Let's get into it. By now, you know how this goes. Let's open a new tab. What is Slopaganda? Okay, let's break the first. this down. First, Slop. Slop is kind of mid to low quality AI generated

content that is online. That's Meihal again. So text, videos, images, anything of the sort. AI Slap has been flooding the internet for years now. But more recently, we've seen social media users embrace it, knowing it's artificially generated synthetic media. And that's led to some Slop content going viral.

A few weeks ago, we talked about an incredibly popular TikTok series called AI Fruit Love Island. Welcome back to Fruit Love Island. Today, we've got a steamy challenge. It was basically Love Island, the reality TV dating show, but all of the contestants were sexy, anthropomorphized fruit. This kind of low-quality, AI-generated content has become the norm online. Then there's a second part of the word, propaganda, or content that's designed to deliver some kind of political message, usually to persuade. So affect beliefs, perceptions, or emotional states of the audience with a political goal in mind. Propaganda is not always about boosting patriotism on the home front.

Across history, countries have used propaganda on their opponent's citizens to sow distrust in leadership. Like during the Vietnam War, there was Hanoi Hanna. She was a Vietnamese broadcaster who recorded English language messages designed to demoralize American GIs. Di, your government has abandoned you. They lie to you, GI. You know you cannot win this war. The U.S. has done it too, and on a massive scale. In fact, the U.S. has done this in Iran.

Back in 1953, the CIA helped overthrow Iran's democratically elected prime minister. They staged riots and planted fake stories in local news outlets to manipulate public opinion. It's a tactic the U.S. has repeatedly used over the U.S. last 70 years, sowing distrust, destabilizing leadership, and engineering regime change in Syria, Indonesia, Poland, throughout Latin America. I mean, the list goes on and on. Propaganda plays a huge part in it. And when you add AI to the mix? Miho actually published a research paper about sloppaganda last year, long before Lego AI videos went viral. He's known his co-authors for years. Mark Alfano, a philosopher who studies neural networks, and Amir Fard, a machine learning expert.

Among themselves, they've talked about how propaganda has evolved with social media, algorithms, and bot farms. But then, in May of 2024, right as the U.S. presidential election began heating up, they shared an experience that changed how they thought about it. They were all in Poland for a conference. Since it wasn't too far from where they were staying, they decided, to take a trip to Auschwitz. And I think that was a kind of a watershed moment for us because we connected the dots, really very dramatically,

between what was happening and the way that things were talked about in the United States and what we were seeing. The National Socialist Party of Germany had a propaganda wing. They used the radio, they used the newspapers, but they were delivering a message of disinformation about people that ended up dying there. And I think that for us, this caught fire. We talked about the sloppaganda right then and there. Eventually, this led up to writing a paper with Amir in November and December of 2024.

We sort of channeled that rage and anger. That's how we happened. In the paper, the researchers detailed the one-off deepfakes that went viral during the election. Kamal Harris saying something she never did. The AI-generated images that made Taylor Swift look like she endorsed Trump. The voters who got calls from a voice that sounded exactly like then-President Joe Biden, encouraging them to stay home and not vote in the state primary. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.

And then last year, right after inauguration, President Trump himself posted a video, and it wasn't a deep fake. Mi-how said that was a tipping point that started this dissent into Slopageddon. So there was a, I guess, a moment when Donald Trump during an interview or something said something about building a resort in Gaza City. After the Israelis sort of move in, I guess, and they will build a resort, a Riviera on the coast of the Mediterranean. And an AI video came out showing this. And Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump sort of drinking margaritas poolside with Gaza. front hotel in the background.

No more fear. Love Gaza is finally here. That was like the first one that clearly for us was emblematic of this. But the first clear case of like Slapanga, as we envisioned it, I think, is the Gaza video. To be clear, this was a video posted by Donald Trump's official account. The video starts with Gaza, demolished and reduced to, rubble. Then, it's transformed into a tourist destination. It's gaudy and over the top, like if Vegas was on the beach. There's a giant gold statue of President Trump looming over everyone.

There are market stands that sell golden effigies of Trump, and children carry golden balloons of Trump's face. Elon Musk makes a few appearances, throwing cash at beachgoers. It's uncanny and it's almost designed to not take seriously. Right. It's a way of portraying something abhorrent in a way, something morally problematic at least, if not despicable, through a joke. And it slips past, I think, our moral defenses in a way because we're fascinated by that, by like just kind of watching the train wreck, the moral train wreck in that video, and we watch it to the end. That's a little bit like maybe reality TV or something.

There's a kind of thing that happens as you're watching it, that by the end it's somehow conceivable. The Trump administration was just the first. Slapaganda flooded elections in Europe, too. Russia's propaganda machine dates back to the days of the Soviet Union. AI just supercharged it. One of the defining issues of our times, the use of artificial intelligence, and the risks that it could pose not only to all our jobs, but to democracy itself.

This year, during the Hungarian election for Prime Minister, the country's social media feeds were overrun with fear-mongering AI-slop videos. A message he's hammering home with the help of AI. They claim that Hungarians would be forcibly sent to war in Ukraine. The video ends with a warning that Brussels could make such a nightmare real. Of course, none of it was real. The candidate behind those ads, the incumbent prime minister,

has close ties to Vladimir Putin. It's the same stuff that we would have seen from Russia. So, you know, disinformation campaigns about candidates, scandals of corruption, right, narratives that are meant to undermine, for example, the effort to put sanctions on Russia. All of these things are amplified with generative. AI content. So text, images, videos, and so on. And some of these are very effective or effective in that they're like high quality. So why is sloppaganda flooding our feeds? There's no escape

from it. It's polluting pretty much every political conversation. But in the U.S. specifically, especially sloppaganda from the White House, well, Mihao said it may have something to do with the ties between the U.S. government and big tech companies. The long-term consequences of mixing corporate power and governance is very well known and studied around the world. It's called fascism and a classic Italian Mussolini-style fascism. That's what they built in Italy and they kind of with a few tweaks re-implemented in Germany. The rise of subaganda or rise of like AI-generated content has political consequences. consequences even independently of that.

Because I think it gives a lot of power to a few people that can create the message. And it takes power away from the individuals that will be at the voting booth, casting a vote. The person that controls the prompt, as we saw like with GROC or something, changes the conversation. Okay, but why can't we look away from AI slot? What about it is so effective? We're going to get into that after this break. But first, we wanted to remind you that close all tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kwed.org slash podcasts.

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When you keep your money with Star 1, you keep more of your money. Star 1 credit union in your best interest. We're back. Let's open a new tab. Why is Slopaganda so effective? I've seen people refer to what's currently happening between the U.S. and Iran as a meme war. And memes have been very potent vehicles of propaganda and disinformation. There is a long documented history of memes being weaponized in politics

and conflict. What makes this current iteration with sloppaganda different? It's generated quickly. The quality is much higher. It's more persuasive. It's more complex. It has many layers and audio one, a visual one, a narrative one, that are done extremely professionally. So all of that has to do with the fact that it's generated by AI, actually. So these tools enable this kind of fast turnaround, high-quality stuff to come out. Explosive media, the digital content studio behind a lot of Lego sloppaganda, started posting animated political videos on YouTube last year. They had an anti-American theme, but didn't really catch on.

A few months ago, right around the first U.S. Israeli strikes on Iran, explosive media began posting Lego-themed videos, and they blew up. One of the earlier videos had no dialogue, just intense music. It showed scenes of people who've been oppressed by the American government, Native American riders and horses, dressed in traditional regalia, Japanese villagers gathered in front of a photo of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb, Palestinians and Gaza, West African, who were chained and subjected to slavery.

And they're all Legos. They take turns sending missiles to the White House, the Statue of Liberty, and the Titanic. They gather and cheer and text appears that says, One vengeance for all. That got some attention, but only went so far. Then explosive media added rapping on top of the Lego videos, and suddenly, they crack the code.

You said you ain't no pedophile, but bitch, you are. They gel them worldwide. for that Epstein scar. The Iranian videos are using the language of contemporary dialogue about colonialism, about imperialism, about the Epstein class. All of these things are the kinds of words or the kind of concepts. that we can hear being thrown around by people in the U.S. that comment on current affairs. This is what Iran is doing.

They're not presenting their propaganda or their message using the language of, say, Shia Islam or the Iran-Iraqi War or any of these things that really matter to the old guard of the Iranian revolution. This stuff is new. It's fresh. It's hit. And it's kind of capturing our attention here. as opposed to the attention of the Iranians there. The Lego music videos are so effective that it's inspiring similar ones, from people in other countries, who also feel wronged by the U.S. earlier this month, the U.S. announced

additional sanctions on Cuba, which has already been devastated by the American imposed fuel blockade. Days after that announcement, an ex-user, based in Havana, posted this video. The translation? Listen to the roar descending from the hills. Here, there is no fear, nor trace of a shiver. They seek to suffocate the sap of this land with claws of empire and war drums. This video's got it all. Legofied depictions of Havana's colorful cityscape,

the idyllic Caribbean beaches, the vibrant tobacco farms, wrapped up with a patriotic message about defending Cuba from an American invasion. and obviously set to a very catchy beat. It's a trend now. Criticizing the U.S. in any way, do it with Lego. The White House has also been posting sopaganda to its various official channels, though the American version is, well, just listen to this. Okay, so that video, again, posted by the White House,

starts with an ESPN clip of real-life bowling champion Pete White House. preparing for his legendary winning strike. Then it cuts to a bunch of animated bowling pins, carrying guns and a sign that says, we won't stop making nuclear weapons. They're in a desert. They're marching. And yes, that is Leonard Skinner.

It's free bird that you're hearing. Suddenly, they're in a bowling alley, getting into formation. And then a bowling ball, emblazoned with American stars and stripes, comes hurtling toward them. The pins come tumbling down, and a fighter jet comes flying out of the bowling ball. And as the beat picks up, the video cuts to real footage of American airstrikes on Iran.

Fade to Black. And then a title card that says the White House, in case you forgot who made the video. They're not really high-quality stuff. This is kind of their memes or content for made by, I think, boomers for boomers. essentially. And I think the Lego videos from Iran are made by millennials for the world. And the White House is using the kind of language and conceptual tools that may have been effective 30 years ago. The messages are kind of mixed. They don't form a coherent narrative. The Iranian stuff, on the other hand, is very coherent. And there's a way in which it's presenting a narrative from one video

to the next. The golf is I heard him. The gate is open. Yes or nah, I just smile at them. I said, inshallah. It's almost as if these things were episodes that come out every day. A spokesperson for explosive media told Al Jazeera that there are 10 people who work on their videos. It's a Gen Z studio.

All of them are between 19 and 25. I would speculate a large team of people that know what they're doing. have a very keen sense of both the media landscape in the United States and in the world, but also love the themes. So I would think this is probably the tip of an iceberg of some kind of a massive media and propaganda operation. The studio claims to be independent, but has admitted that their clientele does include the Iranian state. And it shows in how this propaganda video is. are used. They're used to really undermine the war effort in the United States and to, I think,

get Americans and other people around the world on their side. Until recently, a lot of AI-generated media has been designed to intentionally dup people. The deep-faked call of Biden's voice, telling voters to stay home, the videos of Ukrainian soldiers appearing to surrender on the front lines. But the Iranian Lego videos are so obviously AI slop. No one thinks the Lego guy in the Little Orange Man video is actually Trump. No one is getting duped into believing that's really him, dressed in a pirate get-up and getting shipwrecked in Iran. So why is this propaganda still so effective? Perhaps it's so effective because it appears not to be real. These are not deepfakes. No one is pretending that this is real, that we know it's AI generated, that kind of sucks you in.

And there's some kind of uncanniness about it. We're kind of like, wait, what? And that moment, I think, is the first hook. There's probably different videos, different styles of subaganda for different audiences. That's also one of its powers that it's so easy to make, customized version of the same message for a specific audience. In various interviews, a spokesperson for explosive media, who goes by Mr. Explosive, explain some of the team's processes.

He's talked about how poetry is a pillar of Persian history and culture, so the team writes the rap lyrics themselves. Then, they use AI to Americanize the songs and generate the singing voices. And it's clear that they have their fingers in the pulse of American pop culture. The Pirates of the Caribbean, for one, is one of Disney's most successful franchises. It's something that's immediately recognizable and familiar to a lot of Americans. All of the one that's biased. Votches on the water, fiend up for the black gold.

Straight free loaders doing what you tell. All of these references are the sorts of things you may hear from more progressive, liberal parts of our country about the problems of, say, you know, wealth and equality or abusive power or corruption by the Trump administration. This is where the stuff is coming from. So they're kind of using. the message that actually would resonate with people that are already in some ways uncomfortable. Like this video, which is an outlier for explosive media. Instead of a story about Lego pirate Trump

bumbling his way through the strait of Hormuz, this one starts with an overhead shot of Tehran. A Lego version, of course. A Lego figurine smiles at the audience and holds his arms out to the viewer. Like he's welcoming us in for a hug. We do not hate you. people of the West. We have watched from across the ocean from behind their walls. And what we see

is the people who deserve better than what rules them. The video lays out all these grievances with the American government and mainstream media. These are sentiments that resonate with a lot of Americans, concerns over rising costs, opposition to another war, feeling disempowered by the current political system. The billionaire who funds the law,

The law that writes the law himself. The pharmaceutical machine that keeps you sick for profit and for wealth. The school that teaches history with chapters torn away, so you never asked the question, who really made it this way? The previous videos from explosive media have always attacked Trump or members of his cabinet. And for the most part, left the American people out of it. This video directly addresses Americans. Instead of taking personal shots at specific leaders, it's a critique of the systemic failures

of American society at large. It's almost a show of solidarity. We're not your enemies. We're prisoners of the same cause. It's convincing. It's supposed to be. This is the kind of emotional appeal that makes propaganda especially effective. I mean, emotions are the first thing that we may have when we see a message.

And if they're negative emotions, in particular things like fear or anxiety or resentment, whatever it is that we experience or we believe while we have, while we have these emotional states, we're more likely to remember. There's a lot of research about this. And the negativity bias in memory is pretty prominent. And once it's in there, it doesn't get out. So you form that negative association with a politician or some kind of a celebrity. It's going to be very hard for you to get rid of it and moving forward.

When there's so much noise, it's hard to pick out what's real and what's not. There's only so much information that a human being can consume and process every day. What breaks through the noise and captures our attention tends to be content that's emotionally alarming. It triggers our brain's emotional center before we can process that information rationally. And studies have shown that people remember negative information better, which can ultimately influence our beliefs and reasoning. Between a dry news article and a catchy Lego video, which one are you going to remember next week? Next month?

Next election cycle? It's important to note that these videos are a very effective distraction. All that stuff is distracting us from the nature of the Iranian regime. That literally in January machine guns like tens of thousands of its own people. At the end of last year, amid Iran's worsening economic crisis, shopkeepers and university students took to the streets in protest to the country's Islamic leadership. A week later, demonstrations erupted across the country, calling for an end to the religious government and demanding a secular democracy.

Iranian authorities crushed the protest with brutal force. Human rights groups say that more than 7,000 people were killed during the protests, with tens of thousands more still unaccounted for. Doctors in Iran estimate that the death toll could be over 30,000. Two things can be true. The Lego sopaganda videos coming out of Iran make points about the U.S. that a lot of Americans might agree with, about its leadership and how it's failing its own people, while also taking the spotlight off of Iran's own government. Even if you know that the Lego videos are fake and AI, if they're hijacking your attention, drowning out other content online,

then the sloppaganda is doing what it's supposed to. That changes how we consume information of whether we care about truth at all. And that's very bad for democracy, actually, if you have a bunch of people that don't care about what is true and are used to not sort of taking what people say seriously. So what happens when Lego Rapp overshadows actual news? When we can't look away from an AI general,

generate a disc track, when a whole population can be so easily distracted. Slopaganan. Mihow and his co-authors call it the Slopaganda shitstorm. For our next tab, we'll go with my favorite. Slopaganda Apocalypse. Let's open one more tab. How to Survive the Slopaganda Apocalypse. Mehow said it's not really a question of stopping the Slopaganda Doomsday

scenario. We're already living it. And sloppaganda is, relatively speaking, so new. We're in uncharted waters here, and we don't have solid research on the effects that sloppaganda will have on society and democracy down the road. But Mihao has a few hunches. One real possible consequence of this is that sloppaganda is going to be here for to stay. And it will be a tool in the toolbox of every authoritarian regime in the world. just as like batons and riot police have been, so will this be.

It will just be AI-generated slop is going to be yet another way to bamboozle distract people around the world. Slopaganda has already wormed its way into L.A.'s mayoral race, with former reality TV star and current candidate Spencer Pratt reposting AI-generated videos of his opponent. Like the Star Wars-themed one, where incumbent L.A. Mayors, Karen Bass, portrayed as Darth Vader, schemes with California governor Gavin Newsom, whose deep-faked as Emperor Palpatine. You didn't finish burning the city to the ground in your first term. Make sure you finish the job in your second. The only thing that can stop us is someone telling the truth.

As long as they don't have any hope, the city's ours. Spencer Pratt appears, depicted as a Jedi, and battles Darth Karin above the Hollywood sign. This is peak sloppaganda. You could argue that AI tools have, in some way, democratize the creation of propaganda. Anyone with access to a video generator and a taste for pop culture has the potential to make their message go viral. Slopaganda itself, and the AI tools used to create it, are morally neutral. Mehow joked about how we could have more sloppaganda about recycling. or being nice to each other.

But instead, we're increasingly seeing political candidates and government institutions use it to undermine opponents and steer the narrative. I think it's going to give a lot of power to people that have a lot of money to do this, that will be able to basically create the world in their own image. The second, the consequence of this, and I think this is maybe optimistic, is that people are going to turn away from the internet.

I think that there's a way in which AI content is kind of really taking over all the spaces on the internet that people cared about. And I think at some point you'd just be going to say, you know what? Yeah, I have better things to do with my time. Are there any feasible interventions to stopping the Slopageddon? If you were to look a little bit more to Europe, I think there's some ideas about what this could look like. There's a Digital Services Act, which is connected to the European Commission and the AI Act. These are legal instruments meant to police basically Facebook and X and so on from stealing European citizens data. And the tech companies hate them because they have real bike.

Unfortunately, Miha doesn't see that happening in the U.S. I don't think there's going to be any meaningful institutional interventions from the United States anytime soon. California, for one, has tried to crack down. Back in 2024, Governor Newsom signed a series of laws that required more disclosure and transparency around political deepfakes and required social media companies to remove the deceptive content before an election. Here's a twist. Slopaganda might actually be protected by the First Amendment. It could be considered satire or political speech.

Long story short, Elon Musk sued the state. And now, my ex-feed is full of AI Spencer Pratt doing deep fake return of the Jedi. Zooming out, back to the war between the U.S. and Iran, it's clear that the White House sloppaganda, reactive, disjointed, made to appeal to boomers, is failing to reach a lot of its own citizens. I don't think it's working. I think it's kind of cringy and clungy. key stuff. But I think maybe they're portraying themselves as winning the war.

So without institutional change, what can individual people do to be a little bit more resilient to sloppaganda? Not just in this war, but in any political setting. Slopaganda, again, is neither good nor bad on its own, right?

Just remember who is sending this stuff and why. Educate yourself a little bit about the larger context of what's happening. There's a history there. There are motivations that are hidden behind the acute videos that we may not know about. We need to remember why we're watching this content in the first place and interrogate its purpose. What kind of reaction is it eliciting? What is it distracting you from? How did it come across your feet in the first place? And if you get overwhelmed, well, Mi'i Hao has one temporary solution.

log off, catch grass. The slop is never ending. But you can still give your brain a break from consuming it. I think we need more love in our life. I mean, seriously, just get away from the internet a little bit from social media and just kind of start hanging out with each other more. And then this stuff just doesn't matter. And with that, let's close all these tabs.

Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and it's reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Kueva and edited by Chris Agusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer Brendan Willard, additional music by APM. Audience Engage with Support from Maha Sinad, Jen Cheyenne is our director of podcasts,

and Ethan Tovin Lindsay is our editor-in-chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, local. This episode's keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white eponemaker, High 75 keyboard, with Fogredin, Red Samurai keycaps, and Gatoron Milky Yellow, Pro V2 switches.

Thanks for listening. I think there just aren't enough professionals there anymore. Maybe they got rid of them with Project 2025. I don't know. Maybe there is no more media wing of the White House. The Doge cuts. head deep. The doge cuts. That's why the stock is clunky and sucks. These memes are not bad.