Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov - After 250 Years, Trump is Killing the American Dream

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Got a question for Scott or Jessica? We're putting together a summer mailbag episode — send a short voice recording with your question to [e-mail]. We may feature yours on the show! Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov celebrate America's 250th birthday… but the mood is complicated. The U.S. economy added just 57,000 jobs in June while inflation continues to outpace wages, and July 4th revelers on the National Mall are facing 100-degree heat with coolers and folding chairs banned.  Despite a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling striking down his executive order on birthright citizenship, Trump is already calling on Congress to finish what the Court wouldn't let him start. Meanwhile, MAGA voices seem dedicated to finding obscure ways to implement the anti-immigrant plan anyway, with VP Vance calling the SCOTUS decision "preposterous."  Trump also announced that he will not be renewing the USMCA trade pact, the very deal he signed with Canada and Mexico in 2018. What does scrapping it mean for North American trade stability, and what does it tell us about how Trump thinks about his own legacy? Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly proposing that the U.S. government take a 5% stake in in the company, which has recently delayed its plans to IPO, while Palantir CEO Alex Karp is publicly arguing that the expensive frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic are already becoming too expensive for many companies using them. Plus, in honor of America's birthday and Canadian patriotism — which is apparently surging, thanks to Trump — we wish you all a belated Happy Canada Day! Get your tickets now for our live show at 92NY: https://www.92ny.org/event/scott-galloway-and-jessica-tarlov For ad-free episodes, exclusive livestreams, and to connect with Scott, Jessica, and the Raging Moderates community, join us at ProfG+ on Substack: https://ragingmoderates.profgmedia.com/ Get The Monday Rage newsletter: https://profgmedia.com/s/monday-rage/ Follow Raging Moderates on IG, Tiktok, and Facebook: https://www.instagram.com/ragingmoderatespod/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ragingmoderates https://www.facebook.com/ragingmoderates Follow Jessica Tarlov on Instagram, Substack, and Bluesky: https://instagram.com/jessicatarlov https://substack.com/@jessietarlov https://bsky.app/profile/jessicatarlov.bsky.social Follow Scott on Instagram, Substack, and Bluesky: https://instagram.com/profgalloway https://substack.com/@profgalloway https://bsky.app/profile/profgalloway.com Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RagingModerates Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One day, with the help of science, you might be able to live forever. Forever. Your body will just need a couple tune-ups. Injecting bone marrow in your 40s, your kidney in your 50s, your heart in your 60s, and so on, and then potentially a whole body transplant by the time that you were 90. This week on Explain It to Me, The Quest for Longevity. Find new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Climate change is making all kinds of natural disasters less predictable.

And insurance companies are jacking up prices all across the country. As someone in the insurance industry, intellectually, I understand it. But as a homeowner, it's awful. It really sucks. Today on Unexplainable, is the future uninsurable? There's a breaking point coming. Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Welcome, Regie Maritz. I'm Scott Calloway. And I'm Jessica Tarley.

So we're doing a mailbag episode, make a short voice recording on your phone, and then email it to Raging Moderates at Propggeemedia.com. Again, that's raging moderates at Propgimedia.com. All right, let's get into it. America's 250th birthday celebration is kicking into high gear, but it's doing so against some lessen celebratory headlines. The U.S. economy added just 57,000 jobs in June, while inflation continued to outpace wage growth. Average hourly earnings were up 3.5% year-on-year, well below the current inflation rate of 4.4. 2%. Turn out for the great American state fair has also been underwhelming. Trump is apparently livid about crowd size at his kickoff event, and we've all seen the dismal images on social media this week. Looking ahead to the event on the 4th, there's a heat wave with temperatures expected to be over 100 degrees on the mall,

and coolers and folding chairs are banned. Here's Trump talking about his appearance on the 4th. On July 4th, it's going to be approximately 107 degrees out. and I'm going to go and I'm going to make a really long speech just to show that I can do anything. It's going to be 107. All right. Charming as ever. Yeah.

We were covering this yesterday and I pointed out that he had arrived in North Dakota at the Teddy Roosevelt Library dedication on his new $400 million retrofitted Katari jet. Well, actually, I think it's like $800 million once we finished paying for all of the upgrades and the protections for it. So I'm in D.C. It is indeed very hot. We're going to be shooting outside from the state fair. And I think it's going to be 103 degrees today, 104 degrees tomorrow. It's not good conditions. And especially when you think about who might come out to something like this, be older people. And that's very dangerous. I mean, would the heat. advisory, they're basically saying that like kids and older people and pets should stay inside as much as possible. So he does have the weather technically working against him. He also has himself working against him and turning this into, you know, a Freedom 250 event versus an America 250 event, which was how it was conceived. There's this bipartisan commission, right? That's going to be running the festivities and things like the state fair if they were to have it. Now that that

that's been wiped away, people don't feel the same way about it. And, you know, you're asking a lot of people to ignore the realities of their everyday life. And this doesn't mean that a president couldn't connect with people at a time of economic crisis. We have seen that through history that it's possible. But there is no rallying cry. There's no, I feel your pain. There's just, you're an asshole if you don't like me. And I don't see. I don't see. that that many patriots are feeling it. There are also folks who have gone to the state fair and said that it's terrible.

What's the mood like? What's the vibe like down there? It's really empty around here. I haven't done that much, admittedly, yet. I will have more to report on later. But just from looking at traffic, which there is none, what was going on at the airport, walking around a little bit,

in a very populated area. where I'm staying and going to work. There are not as many people as you would have thought. Like, it is a different kind of event, but I think about what it was like getting around in the days even leading up to the inauguration where everybody had poured into D.C. to be able to see Trump

and was going to do it in freezing temperatures. Like, that is not the vibe right now. So the vibe, at least from the images on television, it feels a little bit like, Have you ever been to a recommitment ceremony, Jess? No, I'm maybe like a little young for it. Like, they'll be coming soon. What age does that start?

I think it starts around your age. Anyways. I'll get there. So the recommitment ceremonies, the vibe is always like just off. Like, oh, we're supposed to be celebrating something that's a little weird. Recommitment ceremonies mean two things. One, dad is fucking a secretary and got caught. And two, they're going to be divorced.

within three to five years. But this just feels the vibe is just we're supposed to be celebrating and we're not. And there's just no getting around it. Things are better than the perception. And this was true during the Biden administration and it's true now. If you look at, if you take the perspective back on the American story since 1991, so just 35 years, child poverty is at a historic low of 14%. Violent crime has been cut in half since 1991. Despite this, four-fifths of Americans consistently tell pollsters that crime is rising.

So crime's been cut in half, and yet everyone thinks it's going up. Crime in New York is at historic lows. We've had the lowest murder rate in history, and we've built the safest, most educated American history and convinced ourselves that America's falling apart. And I think it's a couple things. One, a lack of trust in our institutions, social media constantly coursing our discourse, our leadership demonstrating poor and poorer character, whether it's our wealthiest people

demonstrating this performative dominant, you know, bad shit weird, pathetic form of masculinity, or the emergence of the Epstein class, or, you know, the emergence of the Epstein class, or, tech brothers or a general feeling that this extreme wealth is not trickling down to me. And also, your happiness is really, it's not a function of what you have. It's a function of the gap between what you have and your expectations. And I think social media has algorithmically normalized the 0.1% life for everybody. So let's bring this back to me. When I was 25, 30, 35, 40, when I went on vacation, I didn't take a lot of vacation, but I went to ClubMed once. I was single in my 20s. My mom and I once took a vacation to Niagara Falls, or we went to Magic Mountain because we couldn't afford Disneyland. So when I went to Club Med, and I went to this bad Club Med in Mazelon, I thought it was fucking amazing. I just thought, oh my gosh, beaches, and you could get these things called daquiries. And I just thought it was incredible. And the reason why I thought it was incredible is, I had never been to St. Bartz. I didn't know about St. Bartz. And I wasn't getting images of people my friends know or people I know,

parting in St. Bart's on, you know, Paul Allen's yacht with John Legend playing. And every day, people are constantly vomited other people's pretend life and that we have basically a crisis of what I'd call wealth porn. or shoved in our faces. So there are some real problems around an erosion in the middle class. Middle income adults have declined from 59% to 52%. And I do think that we have to acknowledge that the middle class, despite what the right says, is not a self-occurring organism. It's an accident. It's incredible and it needs constant reinvestment. Also, we've seen marriage collapse from 69% to 50%. It's a combination of one, young people having fewer venues and young men not leveling up to the ascent of their female peers such that they are less attractive and fewer people are connecting, not finding venues to meet each other. Housing prices have accelerated, you know, college because of incumbents, weaponizing scarcity.

But there's also no doubt about it. I get paid a lot of money to go speak places. It makes for a much more interesting speech to catastrophize. If you are honest about data, what you would say is the following. You'd get in front of a large audience and say, I've done all the analysis and run all the models. And here's the net net of the world, or at least the West. Every day, things get just a wee bit better. That does not get you invited back for a keynote speech.

It's, oh, the AI boom is starting to crack, which I'm. I think it is. And these are the 30 companies that are going to go bankrupt in the next 12 months. This is why AI is going to destroy 80% of the jobs, which it's not. I call that apocalypse, no catastrophizing. But there's definitely a delta between how we feel about America and how America and the West is actually doing. And I think a lot of it is because our leadership demonstrates such a lack of character because of a unwarranted attack on our institutions and an economic incentive across social media and our thought leadership to basically convince you things are really bad.

Anyways, I'll stop there. I agree with a lot of that. And I think about actually pretty regularly going to see Bill Gates speak with Lynn Manuel Miranda and Melinda French Gates when they were still married. And it was this incredible conversation around the good of capitalism and how capitalism has been the most positive force in society. And he was rattling off all of the things that he's been able to do and all of the impact that he's been able to have across the world,

like curing diseases and whatever else he was doing through their foundation, because capitalism works so well. And I feel like that talk should be reduxed at this particular moment when folks are so down on capitalism. I'm not saying it's perfect. but it is arguably the best system that we have. I would just say, though, that I think what you're talking about ties into this question of patriotism right now. And there have been tons of surveys and it always happens around Independence Day asking how you feel about your country.

And there's a big delta between how much America means vis-a-vis people's identities versus how they feel about their national. or their patriotism. And Republicans, no matter who the president is, always have the highest level of self-reported patriotism. It's just something that's built into their politics that way, or, you know, how they're wired. But we now have the lowest share of U.S. adults that say that they're extremely proud to be American. And that's being driven by Democrats and independence. The biggest drop is amongst women and young Americans. And I don't think that that's all Trump Duranagement syndrome. I really don't.

What do you think it is? Well, I think young people are looking around graduating college saddled with this level of debt, right? All the stuff that you talk about, right? Like notes on being a man is about this crisis, right? That they can't get out of their parents' basement or they have four roommates. And, yeah, social media is messing with them. And they're seeing these influencers, like the, the day. dangerous ones, like the Andrew Tates of the world, you know, out there living those lives. But

generally speaking, I think that Americans are good and decent and they just want a shot at whatever version of the American dream is possible. Then for the drop with women, I think it's twofold. I think it's the moms that you always talk about, right, who are concerned about their jobs, their husband's jobs, to say the economy, but also their kids. And I think it's also a class of people who feel like there has been a governmental assault against us and our rights and our ability to live the American dream, which includes control over our bodies and how far we can go in society. And huge strides have been made. I'm not trying to take us back to the Stone Age. But there's obviously, you know, real palpable stuff going on there. You don't have those kinds of drops and levels of

faith in the system. And it did, to a large degree, kickoff with the first Trump administration. And then it has, like, everything else accelerated in the second. And I get asked a lot on the five because they love this topic, right? Like, why do you guys hate the country? I don't think it's about hating the country. I think it's about hating the condition that the country is in and that so many people in positions of power are unwilling to do anything about it. The collective side, of, well, I understand that all of these norms have been broken, or I understand that we are hollowing out the middle class, or that it's impossible for you to get ahead and what can we do when you are the people that we send to Washington to actually do something about it is universally frustrating. And I was thinking back to the conversation, you know, we have with Ruben Gallego, the Arizona senator, and something that he also had talked about where, especially for Latino, American. that they don't begrudge anyone their wealth. They just want the chance themselves, right,

to have the big effing truck, as he put it. And yesterday I was talking about this dilution and patriotism being linked to the fact that the system is rigged against us and that the president is flouting the system so brazenly in our faces, like literally saying, well, your stocks went up too when he made 21,000 trades or this Katari jet or making $1.4 billion off of crypto. And I think that stuff does.

have a real palpable effect on how you think about the country on the 4th of July. So you just say this wasn't what the founders wanted, right? It doesn't mean you don't believe in the ideals of it, but you don't see an elected class that wants to live up to it. Yeah. One, there's been research showing that these social issues take more of an emotional and mental health toll on young women than they do on the rest of the population. Also, I think it's fair that for the first time in our nation's history,

when a right has been taken away. We've been adding rights as time moves on. And the first time we took a ride away was when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And it just so happens that that, you know, the most probably arguably the most fundamental, elemental right for a woman domain over her own body,

this administration and this Supreme Court took away. So I think you can understand, especially why young women don't feel especially positive about the nation and are polling at the lowest levels of patriotism. I think you also have, William Gibson said the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. I think the same thing about prosperity. We have registered so much prosperity.

It just doesn't feel like it's evenly distributed. And also, the wealthiest have not acquitted themselves well. All the headlines about the wealthiest, the most blessed fortune among us are mostly a story of depravity or a lack of empathy. And then you have a political system where essentially in a media ecosystem where because profits enjoy enraignment, it's just about making everybody look bad. But the data, if you're really honest about the data, it tells a different story. And there's points of real concern. America is about providing opportunity to everybody, not about identifying a superclass of frequently remarkable people or rich kids and turning them into billionaires, but giving as many people as high people as high people. a chance to be millioners, or as you put it, get that big effing truck. And I think people

feel very discouraged, especially young people, especially around what's required to form a family, begin saving money, and all of those things. College certification and buying a house now just seem out of reach. But there is definitely something unusual going on. And my kind of new intellectual model, Jimmy Carr, says this, happiness isn't a function of what you have, but it's about the delta between what you have and your expectations. And people's expectations have just gone absolutely apeshit in terms of what is a reasonable life that they deserve to have. No one could blame you if you thought this men's World Cup was going to be a disaster.

The President of the United States isn't exactly a welcome mat for the world, and there have been plenty of embarrassing stories for the country. There was the mom of Cape Bird's goalkeeper who wasn't let into the United States to watch her son play until the team started doing well and people clamored for her entry. The team from Dr. Congo hadn't made a Men's World Cup in 52 years and hardly made this one because the United States was supposedly worried about Ebola, even though no one on the team had Ebola. If you were watching Senegal, Norway last week,

and we're wondering where all the Senegalese fans were, they weren't let into the country, but you probably noticed we let in like a million Vikings. I wonder what's different about their fan bases. Oh, and who could forget? We're literally bombing one of the countries that up until Friday was playing here. Missiles aren't the problem. But, but somehow the vibes at this World Cup are mostly positive.

The World Cup might just be healing us on today, Explain from Vox. I'm Seth Matlins. My new show, Creator Destroy, Reimagining Marketing explores how every decision a company makes, not just the marketing ones, but the HR, IR, pricing, org design, and planning ones, and ones most don't consider marketing at all, contribute to either creating value or destroying it. Each week I sit down with CMOs, CEOs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building, breaking and reimagining how businesses grow or don't for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. Creator destroys the show that

argues. They've always been the same thing from the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdom is company. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. As America reaches its 250th anniversary, how should Americans assess their country's strength relative to the rest of the world? We're moving into a genuinely multipolar world, and that's a world in which every nation is basically for itself, because nations can no longer rely on the United States to protect them. I'm John Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan, and we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we sat down with historian and foreign policy expert Bob Kagan to assess America's role in the world at 250 and the future of American power.

The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game, wherever you get your book. podcasts. Trump is now calling on Congress to end birthright citizenship after a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling struck down his executive order looking to end-birthright citizenship. Maga supporters are taking things even further with Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist, taking the social media to suggest alternative options to circumvent the court's decision, including denying entry to all pregnant foreigners, denying entry to all female foreigners, requiring sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry. Jesus Christ. Hello, hello, eugenics. or a dissolution of the nation as a solution?

Here's Trump talking about next steps. We'll take care of the birthright citizenship because that was not meant for rich people from other countries that was meant for. Actually, it was meant for the babies of slaves. If you look at it, it was a month after the Civil War ended that it went through. That's because it was meant for the babies of slaves.

It wasn't meant for rich people. from China. It was that came over in Gulfstreams. It was meant for the babies of slaves. So what? What the fuck is he talking about? Is he trying to say it's a good thing or a bad? Jess? What's going on here? Well, bad thing. But also, you are at the dedication of the Teddy Roosevelt Library. Like, that's where he's saying that. I mean, Sean Davis losing his mind on Twitter. Stephen Miller, I, you know, made a weird comment on air as well about like, you know, pregnant. women, et cetera, like is they're going to stop letting pregnant women on airplanes? But they're scrambled.

And they also see an opening that the vote was so close. That's the thing. Like there were many smart people who thought that it would have been seven to, right? Because language really couldn't be clearer. So you figure maybe you're going to lose Thomas and Alito just because they're the most crazy, I guess, but that everybody else would see what Amy Coney-Barran. saw and wrote a beautiful defense of birthright citizenship. So I think they can't really handle the rebuke.

And it just has become one of these racist animating features of the administration. And they're hard pressed to let go of it. I feel like they got, you know, ice flooding the streets of liberal cities taken away from them. Knock on wood, that continues. And so they're like, where can we go from this? And it is going to become one of those crazy pet projects for the rest of the turn. And I just want to add, if birthright citizenship weren't around 40 years ago, no Chivans and Cash Patel is U.S. citizens.

They're both anchor babies themselves. And our American soccer hero, Fulleran Baligan, the guy who scored last night and got the red card. I don't know how you feel about the red card controversy. I also maybe butchered his name, but I wanted to put it out there. I mean, that guy, his Nigerian mother, they live in London, comes here, seven months pregnant. They won't let her get on the plane to go home because she does want to deliver at home. So he is born here and goes home at two months and now plays for the U.S. team.

That is birthright citizenship in action. And I'm sure they won't be commenting on it. But those are the cases that we're talking about. Does birth tourism exist? Yes, it does exist. There are very real stories about what rich Chinese people, are doing. But this is in the Constitution and net net, it's a benefit to the country. Well, just as the left wants to obsess over whether someone went through transition pre-puberty,

which enables them to play in women's sports, and we're talking about a couple dozen, maybe a couple hundred people, and we're going to make that our issue and the Republicans are going to seize on it. And our likelihood of taking Congress will go from, you know, 70% to 60%. The Republicans want to create a weapon of mass distraction and talk about something that just isn't that common. And I love that you incorporated the World Cup into this. Both America and England advanced, which is huge.

Americans look incredibly athletic and strong. The U.K., unfortunately, they're going to have to play Mexico in the Mexico City. Anyways, but just on a broader level, the World Cup, is so much what we needed, right? And the analogy I used is that cousins that just love each other, finally have a sleepover because they're parents

who are constantly fighting are out of town. And also, the absence of Trump, thank you, President Trump and Stephen Miller for getting nowhere near the World Cup. I think that has been the nicest thing about it, is there hasn't been this poltergeist

showing up and just shit posting it and the end shittification of the World Cup. has not happened because the administration and Stephen Miller have stayed away from it. It also reflects just how wonderful Americans are. To see, you know, people in Seattle, in Philadelphia, in Kansans, the way they treat tourists, it just makes everyone feel the correct way about America, and that as on the whole,

Americans are an interesting, funny people that eat really fattening fried food that is wonderful. It has been, the World Cup is, really has been probably the best branding event that we desperately needed for the United States. Now, I have a personal story around an anchor baby, and it's the following. I am an anchor baby. My mom and dad immigrated from Glasgow in London separately on a steamship in their late teens and early 20s and landed in Canada. And my mom was a stenographer. my father sold candles, and they met at a dance, got married, got pregnant.

I'm pretty sure it was the opposite way around, but they didn't tell me that. And they could not handle the idea of another Canadian winter, and they were reading, I think, the Globe and Mail. And my mom read an article that said, the best weather in North America was in this place called San Diego. And so they packed up my mom's Austin Mini Metro, which is basically a lawnmower with doors.

My mom was seven and a half months pregnant, and they drove across the nation staying in people's homes and staying in cheap hotels and got to San Diego, I think, seven or nine days later. And I was born something like 29 days later. I was early at La Jolla Memorial or something or San Diego Memorial Hospital. And if this law were enacted, my mom would have either been stopped at the border or what I would like to know is, is given that my mom entered illegally, do I have the tax obligations of an American citizen? Because, and this is a flex, but I'll make it, me and my companies have paid well over $100 million in U.S. taxes over the last 30 years.

So can I have that money back if I renounce my citizenship, given that my mom really had no rights to enter, meaning I am not an anchor baby, thereby I'm not really a citizen such that if I piece out to Dubai on my next liquidity event, I'm not subject to American taxes, because I'm here for it. So the notion that we don't benefit, whether it's incredible forwards and strikers who are born in America or whether it's, you know, angry professors who get very lucky, courtesy of big government of the University of California, you know, this anchor baby thing, first off, it's a small number of people. And I think if you really did the analysis, you would find that these anchor babies are accretive to the nation, that they are a net positive.

And something, again, we don't like to talk about, is the people that take those kind of risks and come here, their kids inherit that DNA. And generally speaking, are productive citizens. So it's an unimportant issue that they will use as a cudgel to tap into the darkest racist fears of Americans who feel with some legitimacy that immigration is out of control and that their life and their culture is being taken from them by immigrants who are eating cats and dogs, so to speak. But this, again, is a non-issue that really doesn't affect many people. And I would argue that people who risk everything and get in Austin mini-metros and drive across the nation and get birth to their kids in San Diego, then on the whole, the nation is a better place for it. And instead, we're going to try and weaponize this, tap into people's worst instincts, and pass unnecessary laws that are ineffective, don't really have any really impact. other than to say to the world, don't trust those people in Kansas, don't trust those good people in Philadelphia. We Americans are actually a really fucking awful people, which is not good for our brand,

not good for our trade, not good for our soft power abroad. And also, it's just not true. We not only have a minority government, we have a minority complexion of how and what America actually feels like and how they behave. Yeah. Just to add to that, and I love your personal story, the real promise of like we're going to go somewhere where we're going to have a better life and doing it. Better weather. Well, better weather, yes, leads to a better life. But, you know, having been seven and a half months pregnant, the idea of taking a risk like that in that condition feels very far-flung to me. So I grit through the bad weather. Anyway, very cool story. Just to add that at a moment where Americans have very real issues and it doesn't mean,

mean that some indicators aren't going in the right direction, but where they feel a financial pressure, like an anvil sitting on them, that the Republicans seemingly want to run an election on fake stories like election fraud with the Save America Act, you know, fake immigration problems with birthright citizenship is not really speaking to the needs of the populace, to say the least. What I think is amazing is that Make America Great Again appears to have made Canada great again. Americans aren't the only ones trying to gin up patriotism this week. Happy belated Canada Day to you, speaking of Canadians, Jess. How much do we fucking love Canadians? Can I just remind everybody again that my favorite test of who is a true friend was by what

the Holocaust survivor said to Warren Buffett and she said, my litmus test is, would they hide me? I heard that and it was one of those things I thought, that is so puncturing. Would they hide me. And just to remind everybody, Canada hit Americans in the 1979 hostage crisis and put themselves in real physical harm, hid Americans in the embassy, got them out safely, and then stuck around in an enormous personal risk. Canada is the largest undefended border in the world. Unfortunately, they fucked up and trusted us and created an economy where 70% of their exports come to us, and then we got somebody who decides to provide comfort to his enemies. And shitpost is allies.

So, but anyways, having said that, happy Canada Day, I absolutely, when we did that tour, the pivot tour, hands down, best audience is Toronto. It's just, it's a wonderful ally. But new polling shows that Trump has actually managed to foster Canadian patriotism. And Canadian pride and flag waving have been on the decline until he returned to office. Nothing unites you like a head-up-your-ass neighbor. unjustifiably shitposting you. Any thoughts? And he's also trying to undo this trade act that he actually himself signed between Canada and Mexico and 2018, which makes...

That he thought was a great deal. That was so much better than NAFTA. Yeah. Any thoughts on this, Jess? I'm always happy for a Mark Carney story. He excites me. I love when you said that he's become the leader of Europe, actually, de facto. know, ripping up the USMCA is an interesting choice. I am not a trade representative. I do not know every line of the agreement. We do know who originally picked these terms,

and it was the president himself, and he hasn't had a complete lobotomy. So he used to think that this was a good deal. It's going to have huge repercussions if we do pull out for the auto and agriculture industry is the most. I think it's probably a little bit of a negotiating tactic. So the USMCA had like a 10-year range then they need to renew, and then you would get another 16-year deal.

He's trying to, though, have bilateral agreements with Canada and Mexico, which is not what they want. They want to have a North American agreement. Scheinbaum has been pretty defiant, as she usually is. And I think that Carney is just kind of like things that were a bit of a yawn at this point. Like, he has been working so hard to America-proof Canada that I'm not saying he doesn't need to have a relationship with us. But I think that he's so used to the bluster and the kind of faux showmanship of Trump and the Trump administration that he's not sweating this particularly hard and knows as well that the auto lobby and the farm lobby will not allow Trump and. Jameson Greer, the trade representative, to do their worst, essentially. But it feels like, you know,

since Liberation Day, there has just been these dominoes falling. And the idea of undoing, you know, their own version of NAFTA is just another one tipping over heading in a very bad trade direction. Well, so a few years ago, I invested in a company called NEVA. And the reason I invested it was he was essentially subscription search. And this guy named Sridar Ramoswani, who ran Google search for Alphabet and just an enormous brain. And you speak to the guy and you're like, take my money. This guy just sees the matrix.

So I invest in this company. And his thesis, and I agreed with him, was that it was the ad model that made search bad for people, that if it was subscription search and it just took you to the right place as opposed to a place to get further monetized would make search better. So fine, I invested. Never got traction.

It ends up to people would rather have free ad-supported search that might take them to another place where they can further monetize. And the company was acquired by Snowflake, this SaaS company or Workflow company, actually I know what the fuck they do, Snowflake. And the reason it was clear,

the reason they acquired the company and gave the investors their money back was it was an aqua hire, that they just wanted StreetR. and now Street R is the CEO of Snowflake, because they met that team and said, okay, Street R is worth $200 million, so we'll acquire the company.

My idea is I'm absolutely in favor of the U.S. invading Canada and then thinking of it as an acquihire and putting Carney in charge of all of North America. I think we should acquire Canada and put him in charge, and I think that the world would just be a much better place. A lot of us probably grew up with mountains of video games stuff. Cartridges, consoles, disks, other disks, broken discs, more discs, everything. And now it seems like those discs are gone.

This week on The Vergecast, we're talking about why the gaming industry is going all digital and what it means that that's going away. Plus, whether Rivian can take on Tesla, whether any of us can figure out how to vibe code, and much more. On the Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. The AI race is shifting fast. Open AI is reportedly proposing the U.S. government take a 5% stake in leading AI companies,

while Palantir CEO Alex Karp says OpenAI and anthropic's expensive AI models are already losing favors, cheaper alternatives catch up. Let's watch a clip from his interview on CNBC this week. In this country, at every single enterprise I deal with, these people are livid. They're like, I am paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights in alpha of my business, and they're creating a wealth tax that does not help the poor.

It just punishes, starts with the billionaires. Every single person at this table is going to be paying a wealth tax only to punish us. And the reason for it is because these models have been completely over, irresponsibly over-sailed. This is, I need you to work my way through this. I mean, I know that Open AI offering a stake in their company is a facet of Trump's personality, right, that everyone knows that they have to kind of pay a bribe. And then he's turning us into, you know, a quasi-socialist enterprise here. But I'd love for you to explain to me what Alex Karp is talking about.

It seems like he's pissed that he doesn't have the direct relationship with the government that he used to that now that the other companies are getting in on it. So I turn it to you to help me out here. Well, so Open AI is saying it wants government equity and Palantir. says cheap AI wins. So open AI proposing that the government take a 5% stake in AI is essentially a protection racket that we'll give you some equity, a give, in exchange you favor us over everybody else. It's essentially cronyism dressed up as patriotism or at worst. It's what I've been predicting and that is a bailout of the AI companies whose valuations can't or CAPEX commitments can in any way be justified by the demand that you're already starting to see as not nearly as a fraction of

what these guys were all claiming it would be. What they're really saying, or what Altman is really saying is we would like you to regulate our competitors and give us a government anchor client and favorable regulation or lack of regulation exchange for equity. It's, I mean, it's arguably it's brilliant, but it's mostly gross. And CARP, I mean, whenever you have the far left and the far right agreeing on anything, you know, it's a really bad fucking idea. They both come together on anti-Semitism, bad idea. They both come together being anti-vaccine, bad idea. They both come together on socialism. The far right believes it makes sense to make an investment in Intel. That's socialism. That's picking winners. They think it's a good idea to have a golden share in U.S. Steel.

That is socialism. They think it's a good idea to start taking investments in certain AI companies and not others. That is socialism. And what you end up with is warehouses full of unsold DeLoreans in Ireland or Air France. And the left believes, the far left believes in government-run food stores, which I would just refer to as government-sponsored food lines, that somehow government knows how to do this shit. You don't want your produce picked by the guy running the DMV, and you certainly don't want Donald Trump weighing in on what intel should be doing, what kind of chips they're going. You know, what kind of chips they should be producing or not producing. So carp is actually right on the economics,

and I've been thinking about this a lot. Commoditization of AI models is happening fast, and the expensive frontier model business is getting squeezed, and that is Uber ripped through its AI budget in two months, and the CFOs of every business are saying, these bills are out of control, and I need people, managers, to start telling me what we're getting, what the return is when we spend $40 million,

at Uber on AI, how is that getting Jess's, you know, QX60 to her house faster? How is that making the ride to Chey Margo for Scott nicer? Like, what exactly are we getting from this? And managers are having an increasingly difficult time justifying the spend, and CFOs are starting to say, okay, maybe we should pull back this spend. And what you're seeing in the market is it supposedly the safe place was an infrastructure spend, you know, big data centers. And what we're starting to see is that there appears now to only be two customers for data centers, anthropic and open AI. We thought Facebook would be a huge

player for demand. It ends up, they built all this infrastructure. Now they're leasing it out. Musk built a huge colossus in data center infrastructure thinking that his XAI or GROC would be a huge hit. It's not, and now he's renting it out. It looks like we're going from a demand. crisis to a supply crisis on the infrastructure side. So as AI is essentially following the exact same curve as cloud computing, margins compress. The bet is that infrastructure players win. I don't think that's true. But what we're seeing right now is the application layer is getting commoditized and slimming down to one or two players. And the question people are asking is who owns the pipes? And right now it's a three-way race between Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. And everyone else is

is renting from them. But I think with both open AI and now Anthropic delaying their IPOs to next year and both XAI and Facebook saying, we're going to rent out our infrastructure because we overestimated the internal demand for it, I believe you're starting to see, you know, cracks in this AI wall. And there's going to be nowhere to hire it. I don't care if you're a Japanese bondholder or in private credit or an investor infrastructure, whatever it is. there's going to be nowhere to hide when I think this coming drawdown happens. But what Karp is saying, I think, is actually true that these models are all of a sudden, it ends up there's only two big customers for all of this, driving all of this spend.

And those two customers have shelved their IPOs, meaning they did not want to display, open the cupboards, and show their numbers. This is all, in my opinion, it means the storm clouds, the storm clouds are forming. And what we're going to see here is the biggest bailout since the PPP loans or the bailout of the banks in 2008. And it'll try to be – Trump will try to cosplay or pretend that this is growth or an investment or the government's going to make money here. Instead, all this is will be a debt-fueled tax on future generations to try and bail out AI, which America has become a giant bet on. In some, capitalism on the way up, privatize the gains. and socialize the losses on the way down.

That's not actually even socialism, it's cronyism. But the far left and the far right are both meeting at this dangerous place that somehow socialism makes sense. Well, that was an uplifting story. There you go. Thank you. Glass half empty.

I'm not here with a message of hope, Jess. No. Except that England is bringing it home. England is bringing it home. Do you really think that? I mean, your Sweden pick was like a little off. Oh, that. That hurts.

Fucking anyone but France. Anyone but France. My God, did you see that goal from Mboppe? Jesus Christ, France is good. Yeah. And I like it. I mean, I saw him in the 2018 World Cup and when he was like fresh, you know. Yeah, I think, did we figure out we were in the stadium together?

You went, you were in Russia? Yeah. We talked about this. We did talk about it. A couple days. of Russian food I can I can really hang with. Anyway, sorry we missed you there, but Mbapé is, he's so good. And he seems like a really sweet guy too.

I know that's very ladylike of me to emphasize that that matters to me, but it does. Yeah, fucking adorable. I hope Morocco beats them. Morocco's amazing too. But yeah, it was very exciting to see both Team England and Team at USA Advance. This is very exciting. Okay. Yeah.

Speaking of very exciting. Let's talk about those weirdos that went to the top of the Empire State Building. What were they doing up there, Jess? Well, they were making a statement about making love, not war, and they got engaged. It is the most insane ring pick ever taken. Hopefully our editors will lace that in here. It was fun, though. I was at work, and every network then changes to live coverage of a couple scaling the Empire State Building

over 1,400 feet tall. They're the couple from a 2024 Netflix documentary, so had a lot of experience with this. They were arrested. I did love also that Jessica Tisch, the NYPD commissioner, used the body cam footage of what the rescue looked like. She was like, okay, well, we better get in on the idea that, like, we can do something really effing well, too, right? And, yeah, I don't know what kind of jail time or what's going to happen to that.

I'm not going to serve any time in jail. It was very exciting and pretty cool to me. I saw someone posted that it's an amazing thing when you can find someone as insane as you, right? And then you can go on to marry that person. Oh, that's fucking adorable. I see it as narcissists that don't like each other that much, that, hey, look at me and also, you know,

if the other person dies and falls to a fury death, I'm okay with that. It's not that big a deal. I mean, these are two people. It's just, I mean, okay, these people love attention, and they like each other, but they don't love each other. They don't love each other enough not to endure the risk involving your fiancé.

I think it's easier just to have a recommitment ceremony and get divorced two years later. I was going to ask, so low odds of a recommitment ceremony for this couple? I think those things are literally the most ridiculous. Yeah, I've been invited to two of those who refuse to go. I'm like, just tell us when you're getting divorced. And I'm sure he's sorry. And, you know, whoever was fucking someone else, you know, hopefully, hopefully it was just an errant thing.

But these are the most ridiculous things in the world. We just had our fifth wedding anniversary. And our original wedding was really tiny. I was just in a restaurant. I was peak COVID. I was pregnant. My dad was dying. It was like, you know, not any sort of, it was a fair to.

You got married during COVID? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, 2021, June 2021. But for our fifth anniversary, I was pitching like a big party. And originally I said like, you know, we could also get married because I wore like a pink cocktail dress. I didn't wear like a wedding gown and he was like, F no. We are not getting married again like that. Not doing that yet. Have a party. A big party. Yeah. Have a party. Okay. Brian, if you're listening, Scott supports the party. You know what we'll do. For your event at the 92nd Street Y where we're talking about your book, we'll do a party afterwards and you can show up in all white.

I love it. Thank you. Making my dreams come true. There you go. Thanks. All right. I hope you all join us at Jessica's second wedding after her book party and specifically the 92nd Street Y.

That's coming up. What's that date? Let's plug that. We plug everything else. September 16th. I think there are a few tickets left, but they're going fast. And it'll be really fun. And I'm getting married.

There we go. 92nd Street Y on September 16th, we're talking about Jess's new book. Let's leave it there, Jess. Have a good rest of the week. You too.