Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov - Trump’s War on Canada ESCALATES as New Bans Take Effect

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov open the week with the Canada trade war entering a new phase: outright bans on Canadian goods including alcoholic beverages, motorcycles, and whey kick in tomorrow. Unlike the earlier tariffs, these bans may not hit the Canadian economy as hard — so what's the intended effect, and does Canada have any reason to come to the table?Meanwhile, Dan Scavino and other notable Republicans are posting AI-generated videos online at a moment when Americans are increasingly worried about AI. Is that helping Republicans — or hurting them? Trump hosted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for dinner on Sunday night, after an appeals court ruling that the Trump administration could block Anthropic from Pentagon contracts. They also discuss Trump’s Oval Office announcement today about a new steel plant being built in Iowa. Scott and Jess talk about what kind of political posturing is going on, and why these moves will do little to make real change in the economy.  Over the weekend, Trump 2024 campaign ads re-aired during SNL and NFL broadcasts — but this time, stamped with "Paid for by the U.S. Government.” Ethics lawyers and politicians are objecting to the use of taxpayer money for what are effectively partisan campaign materials.  In the tech world: Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel has made a public case for why being evil… isn't all that bad. What does it say that a member of the tech billionaire class is willing to say this out loud? 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

Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to consumer advocate.org. You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. in Canada, with claims paid back in as a little as two days.

Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now. for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing

your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odu.com slash vox. That's odioo.com slash box. Support for the show comes from Honest. Parents want the very best for life's most delicate skin. That's why Honest holds every product to their highest standard, the honest standard. From honest, clean, conscious wipes to bath and body essentials and diapers, everything honest makes is designed for the delicate details that matter most. Because when caring for a baby, with so many little decisions, you need products you can trust. Your peace of mind starts with Honest. Shop Honest on Amazon, Walmart, and Target.

Welcome to Raging Moderns. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Tarloff. Before we get started, we're 36 days out until the midterms. Make sure to hit subscribe to support our show and help reach new audiences. All right, let's bust into it. The Canadian trade war is set to escalate this week, with outright bans on Canadian goods, including alcoholic beverages, motorcycles, and weigh that kick in tomorrow.

Jess, even though there are outright bans here versus just tariffs, this likely won't hit the Canadian economy as hard as the tariffs earlier in September. What do you think the intended effect is here? And does Canada have any reason to come to the table? I mean, they still have a financial reason to want to come to the table, but they have a pride and sovereignty reason not to, and they're going with that. And I respect it.

The whole world, except for us, seems to be. and big time respect Mark Carney and what he's doing mode. And what I thought was really interesting, and I hadn't seen this before, is that now the Canadian government is giving grants to Canadian businesses to help them find new partners so that they can work around having to be dependent on us. So, for instance, there's this company,

Excellivant makes temperature sensors used to produce computer chips. Obviously, Canada and the United States had a vested interest and not having to rely on Asia for these things. And the product goes back and forth between the U.S. and Canada, much like cars. And the Canadian government gave them a million dollars. And they said, you know, we have to adapt to these new circumstances. And I don't think that they would be making this kind of investment. So they're taking a financial hit and then they're spending more so that they don't have to be dependent on us or continue this relationship.

And obviously, you know, this is future-proofing for at least the next two years of the Trump administration. But I think that this is, you know, they're making their long-term plans because they're not going to waste their time on all of these new financial relationships, these new diplomatic relationships, these new defense and military relationships, unless they think that the long-term horizon is a world in which we are a partner, but a much degraded one. And I don't know that seeing the Canadian government giving out money to help their businesses not have to work with us. It hit really hard. Yeah. It definitely feels as if the ban is, I would argue the ban is performative, not economic. Single digit billions in a trading relationship that depend on how you account for it is somewhere between half a trillion and three quarters of a trillion. It's kind of like it's a restraining order on a neighbor who, you know, keeps.

springing you casseroles. It just feels very performative and not going to have a big impact. You know, for example, on motorcycles, they're basically Canada exported about 5,000 motorcycles in total last year. So we're banning a product category that is sort of a, you know, the parking lot of a, you know, the Mall of America. It's just not, it's very symbolic. As is usually the case with tariffs, the real damage is to us. The U.S. share of new vehicle sales in Canada has fallen from get this, about 40% to 28% from nearly 50% a decade ago, Canada buys more from U.S. automakers than the next 10 markets combined. That's our biggest markets for our key industry or a key industry auto. We're not punishing Canada. We're firing our best customer. It just makes

no sense. So manufacturing, just the larger scorecard, manufacturing is down about 75,000 jobs since January of 2025, including roughly 26,000 jobs lost in autos, and car prices are up $6,000. So this is tariffs, folks. Fewer jobs, higher prices. The administration claimed that they were going to bring factories home. Instead, they brought higher price tags home. And I don't see why Canada would come to the table. I'd go back to the Lincoln quote. If you can't lose a war with public support, you can't win it without it, we're going to lose this war because the U.S. is mostly indifferent or against the tariffs. That's not a winning strategy. And Canada has incredible resolve and about 75 or 80 percent support of their leader versus 30 percent on our side.

So obviously, whatever goes on in the economy has a literal component, you know, how much money is in your wallet, how much money is in your 401K, you know, what's the increase in the price of school supplies, your gas, your groceries. But it very much also has a feelings component. And I think that all of the headlines and all of the coverage of yet another trade war, another set of tariffs, has a psychological impact on Americans that this administration was not prepared for and certainly doesn't want to head into the midterms with. And I saw that the Michigan Consumer Index just clocked that now Americans feel worse about the economy than they did during the two. 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, and we know that the economy is not technically worse at this moment than it was when the whole world was shut down because of the virus. So you have to think about the psychological impact of all of this on people here and that they're asking questions like, why, why would we be doing this? And then they're being met with a political class that, we're going to talk about. and we're going to talk about it later, but is making AI slop videos that are Marie Antoinette style. And Donald Trump is saying things like, we're leading the world in poverty and refusing to even utter, I feel your pain, even to the remotest degree. So I think that they are in for a very cold bath on election day if they cannot figure out a way to talk about the actions that they've taken, what the intent was, which.

where it maybe has gone wrong and what they're going to do to fix it. Meanwhile, Trump hosted a dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeh on Sunday night. This comes after Amade missed the state dinner with President Sheila's Thursday and follows the news late last week that an appeals court ruled that the Trump administration could blacklist Anthropic from all Pentagon contracts due to a national security risk. Trump is also expected to make an announcement from the Oval Office today about a new steel plant being built in Iowa. Okay, great.

the economy continues to be a major campaign issue and Americans are worried about AI. Some notable Republicans, including Dan Skavino Jr., are posting AI videos like this one. Let's roll the clip. Jess? So I'm not saying that you can't have any fun. And I'm sure that a state dinner is fun,

and I know some folks who went. And they indeed said that it was fun, not as good as the King of England's. I don't know if that was intentional or what. But you cannot imagine a more. out of touch, tone-deaf thing to do, as you see that married up with the fact that people think that they're worse off than they were during the financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic. And that's also not what you want from your AIDS, right?

I understand that Lara Trump and Eric Trump were pictured in it. But Dan Scavino, he's a very high-end flack, essentially, right? Like, this is a guy who works for the principal. You should not be the storyline. that's like Rule 101 of PR or, you know, how you want to run a corporation, right? Everything has to be making the principle look good. And I imagine as someone who is obsessed with optics that Trump would even know that about that video, which is getting a lot more play than any of the things that they actually wanted to be part of the readout.

I mean, it was all ceremonial in terms of what they got with the Chinese. but they're at least trying to, you know, put lipstick on the proverbial pig. And now that we have the family and Dan Scamino riding around in the bellhop cart. And that's what everyone is talking about from the state dinner. I think this is a real misstep politically. Americans are really wary of AI right now. We can argue about whether it's populism, whether it's catastrophizing, or, you know, how poorly the brand has been managed by the CEOs,

Or if they're justified and there's real insight into their concern, regardless just politically, they're wary of AI. And posting AI slob while voters fear AI is taking their jobs are going to cause a mass extinction event. It's like a fire marshal, you know, juggling torches at a fire safety conference. It's just, what are you doing? Every party or the Republican Party, and they've done a good job of this. they've become the party of the forgotten worker. They stole that from the Dems. And so cheerleading in the technology

that people worry threatens those workers' jobs is just, I think it's politically, I don't know, stupid. That's the word. Thoughts? Yeah, it's obviously politically stupid and everyone is desperate for some sort of middle ground approach where you don't say I'm calling for a total

and utter shutdown of everything related to AI, but where you can at least understand, understand why people don't want a data center popping up next to them and why they're afraid that if they can stay employed, there's no way that their kids are going to be able to do well, whether you're a blue-collar worker up to white-collar workers, you know, the folks who think that there will be no need for first through third-year lawyers because you can just put it all into an LLM and essentially get what you would have to pay for, you know, 12 hours of work at Kirkland or something like that, you know, it's just going to have a re-reveh.

impact on the industry. What do you think went on at the dinner with Trump and Dario? And why do you think he didn't come to the state dinner when all of the other AI leaders did? I don't know if it was a scheduling conflict. So the dinner itself. So you kind of change your schedule if you're invited to the state dinner. I wonder if they were worried about optics or this bottom as I don't know. This dinner with Dario or meeting with Trump and the Pentagon Blacklist, it's this pattern of courtship and coercion. It's, I like you, but you have to marry. It's just, it's distasteful and hypocritical. Blacklist the company on Thursday and then hosted CEO for dinner on Sunday. It feels like this isn't policy. It's a protection racket with, with a wine

pairing, right? It's, I like you, but brother, you better give me. my Vig and do what I want. It is not only, it's not just socialism. It's cacastocracy. It's an autocracy. It's Trump, again, getting involved in things he doesn't know about and then claiming that he wants to let our thoroughbreds run. In some, it feels like we're turning into the tribute economy, that the most powerful players can get more powerful by giving tribute, or again, be banished because of the political whims and influence, which is, absolutely totally contrary to every notion of capitalism

where you're supposed to set rules for everybody and then let them cook, so to speak. And every CEO now knows the price of doing business is showing up at the table. And so skipping the she dinner and then attending this one is the new enterprise, kind of the new diplomacy.

It's just weird. It's like your enterprise value is now a function of your RSVP. So I find this all, so contrary to the capitalism they claim they're embracing. If socialism, the definition of socialism is the state controlling the means of production, right? The UK administration decides they understand the automobile industry than anyone else and have massive subsidies for DeLorean and end up with warehouses full of unsold DeLoreans. Companies pick national champions and support

them above the smaller competitors and you end up with Air France. So the socialism here is just, or the government intervention in the private sector on a business level asking for a Vig, at the same time not putting in place regulation or guardrails such that these guys even know what are the rules they're playing under. I have never seen two people such as Sam Altman and Dario Amadei who are more over their skis. And some of it's not their fault. They've been said, here is a snowboard and here's Everest and they shove them off. And these guys, I don't want to say feel sorry for them, but I empathize with the fact that they have their series

A, B, C, D, E, F, and G investors who have put tens of billions into the company who were probably already counting their 5, 10, 50X returns to save their venture capital fund, to buy the house that you want if you're an employee who's just had your first kid, to be the hero economically, which every incentive in America is pushing these guys towards.

and then at the same time, they have employees saying there might be an extinction event. So they try and show some concern and put in some guardrails recognizing this could be potentially very bad. And then they have a president saying, I'm going to be vague on what the rules are or aren't, but you better keep going. And if Moderna put out, again, a vaccine and one of their biologists or epidemiologists came out and said, this could kill everybody. And then the CEO came out and said, well, he may have a point. it's unlikely you'd have a president, or maybe you might, in this case, or FK, say,

no, Moderna, keep shipping your stock price is more important to the economy than any concerns you might have. These guys are out, they are in so far over their head, as would any, I mean, their youth and a lack of regulation and the powers and existential risks of this technology have really come to fruition in a very bad way. And this will be a case study, I believe, in public policy courses for the next several decades. of how regulation is actually key to enduring economic growth. The IPOs have been put off, not because these companies aren't great companies, but because the CEOs have been able to, if you will,

let these things run unfettered and has created massive risk and concern. We used to be worried about data centers. Now we're worried about a mass extinction event. It's gone from this technology, we'll take our job to this technology might kill us. So this is an example. of an administration that really has no feel in my view for the difference between over-regulating,

which does happen, and under-regulating, which creates chaos and insecurity in an industry, and has now delayed their IPOs. Yeah, well, I'm sure that they weren't particularly thrilled to see Trump's remarks about AI at UNGA last week, where he said that he totally rejects, you know, any notion of a global framework to regulate AI. And we know that China has managed to be pretty successful with putting in some guardrails or safeguards, however you want to say it. But I saw, and I thought that it really encapsulated the absurdity of this administration, that there were two memos circulating within the White House about Dario. One was that he favors Democrats and has ties to them and has been critical of the president in the past. I mean, look at your own vice

president. I have a problem with people who have been critical, but you know that they're sitting around getting all hot and bothered and exercised about that. Like, you know, how are we supposed to work with somebody who once said that, you know, Donald Trump was an asshole? Like, Newslash, that's most of his base also thinks that he's an asshole. And then the second memo is about anthropic and the effective altruism movement. And because these companies and what Sam Altman is talking about and because Amaday, you know, thinks that there's some reason that we should be concerned about protecting humanity in all of this, that he's someone that you can't have a productive conversation with. So the best next step is to ban his company, which is already

wired into a lot of our Pentagon systems anyway. So I don't really understand how this ban works. I mean, I know that the ultimate goal is to make sure that the U.S. government runs on grok. So everything is going to be okay. Don't worry about that when they're, you know, hallucinations are white supremacist. But, like, you know that this is the kind of stuff that Dan Skavino or Stephen Chung is trafficking and, you know, saying, like, this guy was mean about our dear leader. And we don't even want to signal to the public that we care about the protecting humanity aspect of this, which regular voters are clamoring for. They just want to hear that you have heard them. It's politics 101, right? Like, everybody.

showing up at town halls, and it's a top three topic for them, is to talk about the threat of AI and what's going on in their lives. And when Republicans actually do man up and do these town halls, they're hearing it too. And so they're on the ground, the individual candidates are trying to rewrite history, like Ken Paxton and Mike Rogers, on data centers and on AI. But all Trump can muster is the huge accomplishment that now they'll call it super intelligence instead of artificial intelligence, you know, another meaningless renaming that will be undone, you know, within 10 minutes or frankly that they're the only ones that will use it. I saw this on the Sunday shows. I think it was Mike Walts, you know, corrected the interviewer to be like,

actually, it's super intelligence. Like, are you kidding me? And I like Mike. But like, this is what you're being reduced to to have to push back on some, oh, no, sorry, it's the Gulf of America. Support for the show comes from Ship Station. Sure, online. shopping is easy for the consumer. But if you're an online retailer, this time of year gets tricky. Between holiday shopping, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and a million other pressures, things can get overwhelming. Shipstation can help. Ship station is an end-to-end order fulfillment platform for e-commerce businesses built to handle your entire shipping workflow so your team can focus on growth. They have everything from order management to inventory and returns, all centralized in one platform.

And with automated rate shopping, you can compare rates across UPS, UPS, UPS, U.S. USPS and FedEx with savings up to 90%. Our colleague Eric has tried ShipStation, and here's what he had to say about it. Just when my wife and I ran an e-commerce business from home, we relied on ShipStation all year-round, but especially around the holidays. Being able to easily comparison shop carrier rates is key when you want to keep fulfillment up, and doing everything all in one app will save you time and sanity. Peak season doesn't wait, and neither should you. Get ahead of it today with Ship Station and get 60 days free at ShipStation.

Shipstation.com with code moderates. That's shipstation.com code moderates. Taxes and fees apply. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The most successful business owners don't do it all themselves. They delegate. Upwork lets you build a team of highly skilled specialists for every function your business needs, so you can focus on what you do best and let the experts handle the rest.

Upwork gives your business fast access to highly skilled specialists, so you can fill critical skills gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without committing to full-time. headcount. Upwork is where businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work. From software development and AI implementation to marketing, design, and business operations. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the roles you can hire with confidence and get started quickly. And with Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on Upwork. An AI-powered curated shortlist of top freelancers match your goals in just under six hours.

No endless searching required. Visit Upwork.com. right now and post your job for free. That is upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-o-k-com. Upwork.com. Support for the show comes from Grunes. Holden flu season is approaching, which means it's more important than ever to make sure your body has all the nutritional ammunition it can get. Grins are a convenient, comprehensive formula, and one delicious daily pack of gummy bears. This isn't a multivitamin, a greens gummy, or a prebiotic. It's all of those and then some at a fraction of the price. And bonus, it tastes great.

Generic multivitamins only contain around seven to nine vitamins. Grunz has more than 20 vitamins and minerals, with 60 ingredients which include nutrient-dense, whole foods that include 6 grams of prebiotic fiber, which supports digestive health, biotin, and niacinamide, which provides thicker hair, nails, and skin health, super mushrooms which promote brain and gut health, and the old standby vitamin C, which reduces immunity damage, stress-inducing free radicals. Those 60 ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications. I've tried Grooons and found them nice to eat, actually.

I don't mind it. It feels like it's healthy at a pretty low cost. Save up to 61% off with free gifts with code moderates at grooms.co that's spelled gr-un-s.c. Yeah, I want to talk for a moment just about this Iowa steel plan, which I'm fascinated by. And that is, I think we have to negative effect, absolutely generous. politics, and that is Trump, and this was an effective strategy, said we have feminized politics. I'm going to come in with so much testosterone in this weird, performative version of macho, and that I think that's what America wants.

And the best thing you can do is an industry, if you want ridiculous subsidies or irrational decisions, is to literally grow as much chest hair as possible. and, you know, be as Hulk Hogan, be as just like this crazy, weird, ramble-like masculinity is the kind of smartest thing you can do because think about windmills. They feel feminine, so we don't like them, or the Trump administration doesn't like them.

And it takes capital away from them, despite the fact that fossil fuels have gotten over a trillion dollars in their own subsidies, despite the fact that in Texas, which is not by any means in any way, woke has decided that during the day, 60% of their electricity comes from when. Why? Because it makes economic sense. And maybe in the future, had we not, I had Tim Snyder on the Prof G-Pod, who is just a role model of mine. I'm talking to him later today. I love Tim Snyder. He's fantastic.

Yeah. And he made such an obvious but insightful point, and that is if 30 or 40 years ago, we had decided to take all the money we've spent on foreign wars and move it towards energy, transition to renewables, we might not have these wars. We might not be in this state of chaos because many of the countries that get revenue from $100 a barrel oil have not necessarily been good actors, and we might not need to have the need to intervene constantly in hotspots around energy, that if we had taken a fraction of the money we've spent on wars and used it to escalate or speed the transition to renewables, that it might have been just this wonderful upward spiral of a lack of need or justification for these foreign wars. But what you have with this macho here

is, you know, why did this, this company, this steel mill, $15 billion for about $17,000,000 jobs is roughly $9 million per job, you could give every worker a lifetime salary, a house, and a boat, still have change left over rather than looking for a photo op where you're standing in front of fire, sparks, and hard hats. That's what this is. This is the most expensive attempt to establish village people like macho to your brand. It's a branding event that is costing American taxpayers a ridiculous amount of monies. These tariffs protect, the steel tariffs protect about 80,000 mill jobs and tax millions of workers at automakers, builders, and appliance makers that need less expensive steel, which foreign plants are able to provide or foreign producers.

After the 2002 Bush steel tariffs, estimates found more jobs lost in steel using industries that the entire steel sector employed. What this is, these steel tariffs are basically chemotherapy that's harder on the patient than the underlying tumor. This is treating the disease by speedballing it. And the reality is the following. U.S. steel is about 30% more expensive than Europe's and nearly double China's. We didn't make steel great again. We made it expensive again. And this impacts every, and this impacts so many industries.

Again, we've raised the prices of everything from automakers to home builders such that he could have a photo op. feel, you know, believe that we all think he's got, you know, he's a bigger dude, if you will. There's four million tons of new capacity coming. Demand is flat. And Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may lose jobs here. We're robbing Pittsburgh to pay Des Moines. Iowa isn't a coincidence. The bottom line is, this is a primary map. This isn't a thoughtful long-term strategy for American workers or manufacturing. It's a dumb photo. in a primary map.

Production starts around 2030 for this mill. And so this is a 2026 press conference for a 2030 factory paid for by, you know, 2028 politics and Americans over the next 10 or 12 years. This steel mill will eventually be shut down after Trump is gone and will do the math and think, okay, what were we thinking? We were thinking that I was in play. And that Zach Lane, who is the gubernatorial can. on the Republican side lives in Kansas. Did you see this? That his Strava app has exposed him? I love it.

Where they're just like, actually, where the guy cycles or runs tells the whole story here. And it is seemingly all but accepted that Rob Sand, the Democrat, who is running basically with no party affiliation. I mean, his ad work is just absolutely incredible. He's so good. My gosh. I interviewed him on a panel and I was like, be still my heart. I did not know that I could be. He's so talented. And he has made it his mission. His whole life, he's voted for Republicans in the past.

His job is at as an auditor. He's like, all I care about is rooting out corruption and putting money back in your pocket. Like, there is no better message for someone running for office these days. And Zach Lean is particularly weak. And the question then becomes, are Rob Sands coattails going to be enough to help Josh Turrick, who is also running a great campaign, though I would say Ashley Henson is stronger than some of these other Republicans running in these battleground states. I can't believe we're calling Iowa a battleground. But here we are. It brings to mind, like, when you look at where they're campaigning, and you have J.D. Vance in Kansas,

and you have Donald Trump going to Iowa for a photo op where people are acutely aware of how much money's in their pockets and how many farmers have gone bankrupt in Iowa and have been, you know, not just, begging for a bailout. They're proud people. They don't want that, right? They want to be able to have markets for their products and they don't want stupid trade wars that are making it impossible for them to do well. Like how much of the bleeding Trump can blunt. And I saw there was new polling out on his $5,000 pledge that, you know, everyone will get paid if they win the midterms. And it had majority disapproval and only 13% believed that he would actually actually pay. That is not the traditional MAGA base, right? It's usually 25 to 30 percent that are like,

you know, so far gone that they would go for if he shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. I'm still going to stick with him. We're down to 13 percent. So, you know, people have got his number. And the question is, what can Democrats, or in a lot of cases, independents, like Dan Osborne, who's running in Nebraska as an independent, can deliver on the other side because people are shopping around for better government. I've got a text. The summer might be almost over, but a new bombshell has entered the villa.

Meet the voices of Deep Graham Flux TTS. I'm Drew. Low-key casual. I'm Alexis, an upbeat morning person. I'm Haley. Always cheerful. Flux TTS has some real personalities that are ready to speak. You can interrupt, pause, and keep talking without losing the plot. Fancy a chat?

Come try all the voices free through September 12th at DeepGram. dot com slash keep talking terms apply support for this show comes from harvey a i the future of law is agentic not just tools that assist but ai agents that navigate complex matters that's why harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end they build a plan pull from secure data sources run subagents in parallel and draft the work product ready for your review so you delegate the work and on the judgment trusted by more than 60 percent of the am law one and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work.

Harvey, AI, tailored for law. Learn more at harvey.aI. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing,

all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odu.com slash Vox. That's ODOO.com slash Vox. Let's talk about these ads that popped up over the weekend during S&L and NFL football. They were re-airs of a Trump campaign ad from 2024 with the words paid for by the U.S. government slapped on it. Let's listen to a clip.

This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the war mongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxist, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all. It's scary stuff.

Jesus, tomorrow belongs to me. My God, it feels like 30s fear of the black and white. It just feels, you know, I hate to say it. I think it might be effective. I don't think anything rallies people like fear. You disagree, please disagree with me. Tell me why this hopefully doesn't work. Well, I think that it's more scary than it makes you think that he's going to be a positive force in your life.

And it feels like we're hitting this frightening yolo phase, essentially for the administration, where they have just decided I'm not interested in even glancing at the rules. I'm going to do what I want. And that carries over to anything that they're going to do vis-a-vis advertising and potentially around the elections. And you're hearing a lot more sane people than you did before talking about, you know, are they going to seize voting machines? How are they going to make it more difficult for you to vote? They may not be getting the rulings that they want, even up to the Supreme Court, based on for mail-in voting. But if you have enough people that are bad actors, that are delusional, and that have sworn fealty

to this guy, that they are going to make an absolute mess of the 2026 election and that they are set on. making sure that you can't exercise your constitutional right to vote. That's what that ad says to me. And I think that, you know, it's different when it's a midterm versus an election where he's actually on the ballot. And obviously he believes that things are going to go better if people do think that it's about him.

But at this moment, you know, rehashing an ad that might have been effective in 2024 and, you know, saying all the things that he said he was going to do that he didn't, people know that. Right? And I'm not saying the average viewer of college game day or watching the NFL yesterday, you know, is sitting there thinking about the ethics laws when it comes to paid for the U.S. government, which is blatantly illegal. And folks like Norm Eisen and Mark Elias are ready with their lawsuits. But I think that they know that it's fucked up and that this is not supposed to be how it is and that he is trying to make them afraid. And, you know, the No Kings movement, there's going to be another protest. I'm not trying to make that into, like, the biggest deal in the world, though, obviously getting tens of millions of people to participate in these things. But that ad is exactly why people are marching in the streets and why they are pushing back and they are finding ways to make their voices heard. This guy wants to be a dictator.

That's what he loves. That's who he aspires to. And seeing that ad, you know, I'd forgotten about it because it's been a couple of couple years and that feeling of being afraid again. I came rushing back and I imagine that a lot of Americans felt that way too. It's good to see Republicans speaking out about it. Senator John Kennedy was on doing Sunday shows, said, I don't think any public official, including President Trump or Christy Nome or John Kennedy should spend public money on private ads for themselves. And then he said, I may end up with a sombrero on my head, but I also think we ought to have a rule that no politics,

can have a building named after him when he's alive. You have the judiciary, the calls on the Judiciary Committee to look into John Jr. subpoena him for the gifts from the Kremlin-backed businessman for his wedding. That came from Utah Senator John Curtis, Tom Tillis backing him up, John Cornyn. They're both leaving the Senate. But you are seeing whether it's just for blunting the electoral blow that is to come as a result of this, or, you know, they've just found. their morals or familiarize themselves with the ethics rules. He is not cakewalking through the next few months if he's going to behave like this. In other news, as technology again permeates everything, let's check in again on the tech world. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel seems to be

making the case for why being evil isn't all that bad. If you're evil, you're at least competent. And if you're evil, you're not bad. And therefore, maybe you're actually kind of good, because you're at least getting something done. So I think it's better to be good than evil. I want to be very clear. The moral question, the moral question our society is, we have all these good versus evil debates, and we're full of badness.

It's most of the time, most things are not, they're not even evil. They're not even good. They're just merely bad. And so if you're in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent. What the actual thought?

Just. It's South Park. I mean, they just nailed it. And it's strange to me that people sit around, I guess, thinking about things in those terms and the darkness that lives within them. And maybe if I, you know, understood technology better or worked in that space, I would have more of a dumer mentality. But the most important thing that he said, I thought during the interview, he was talking about Trump. And he said, there are a lot of things that got wrong. He was crazier than I thought.

It was more dangerous than I thought. You wish they'd appointed more competent people. The administration is staffed by not very smart but very loyal people. Like, obviously, how did these super smart people not get that this is exactly what was going to happen? It's just so strange that when someone who's worth billions is reasoning that evil isn't so bad, it feels like, okay, it used to be grab your wallet with these guys. Now it's grab your wallet and your kids. and the broligarch narrative went from don't be evil to maybe evil is underrated. To a certain extent, I sort of respect it.

And I think Peter Thiel is oddly, not oddly, but frighteningly smart. And that's the scariest thing about him is I wonder if he sees things more clearly sometimes and I don't like what he's seeing or that he's definitely a nihilist. There's something very odd there. And I appreciate that the broligarchs are no longer pretending. they used to pretend to want to save the world. And now they're not even pretending. And these are the guys who own the platforms.

They fund candidates. Vance supposedly is very tight with Teal and is the reason he was selected to be vice president. Something Peter Thiel will never hear from a president Vance if Vance is elected president is no. I mean, this is, be clear, if Vance is ever in the White House, it's because of a guy who thinks that maybe

evil is underrated. And their philosophy, or isn't, it's not just a podcast curiosity here. It's sort of policy by other means. And it's very, I heard Elon speak. And it's such a weird chocolate and peanut butter or contradicting forces because he talked about the new, I think it's the new heavy falcon rocket. And the launch capacity, he's just such an enormous, big thinker. The launch capacity of his new rocket.

It has the greatest thrust of anything that's ever been invented, and it can have the payload to lift the entire space station into orbit in one launch. And he wants to be launching one of these things every five minutes. I mean, it is. The guy, you can't accuse him of not thinking really big. There's an element to it that it's just inspiring, that I'm just going to just literally press the outer limits of what is possible. and he's shown an ability to kind of do that.

At the same time, he talks about we have to have a base on moon and then a base on Mars because of the likelihood of a mass extinction event or Earth no longer being habitable and we're going to need a plan B. And any reasonable economic analysis of what it would cost to put people on the moon or Mars in 10, 20, 50 years is that the absolute. the best case scenario is that movie Dr. Strangelove, where at the end, the generals and the powerful people are going to get to pick a small number of people

to create a safe community under the ground. It's so nihilist. I was sitting next to a journalist who saw the same speech I did, and he said, I thought it was really inspiring. And I said, I agree with you, but do you think you're one of the people that gets on the rocket to the moon if shit really gets real? And again, I go back to my go-to here.

If only these guys spent a fraction of their, brainpower and capital on trying to make this place a little bit more habitable, instead of focusing on a go bag to Mars, I think we'd be in a better place. It's just so, the word I would use for these guys is nihilist, and it's frightening because we naturally think they understand the world better than we do. And I don't think having the option to have a bunker in New Zealand or colonize Mars is good for the other 99.999% of us that won't be invited on the last rocket, you know, off of Earth with Elon, I find it also disturbing that the people with this kind of intelligence and insight

and resources have opted, have sort of almost kind of given up on what life might mean here long term. And also the evidence is that the world gets better every day over the long term. There's just no, granted, we face huge risks with climate change and income inequality and extremism and AI. But to think that it's gotten so bad that we need to make these. staggering investments in another planet which will make living on top of Everest feel like a picnic. It's quite frankly, it's just so nihilist and weird. Any closing thoughts here, Jess? They're weird. But you need weird people. Yeah. I mean, you need people to be pushing the envelope like this. And no one would dispute the incredible effect of Starlink or Neurlink or what he's done for the EV world.

I think, you know, not to make it too grounded or bring it back to my wheelhouse or what I think about basically 24 hours a day, the question's going to be, what are you going to do with all of these people in terms of politics? Because they want to be big players. And they're already not Elon, but like Google, meta, et cetera, they're already cozying up to Democrats because they see writing on the wall. and they want to make sure that they're, you know, spread out wide enough that they can have impact no matter what happens in the elections. And there is going to be a base of people very unhappy if Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, paling around at inauguration the same way that they were for Trump or, you know, a Peter Thiel. Obviously, his ideology is more baked in, you know, and Zuckerberg used to be a liberal. But Elon Musk is going to spend big on Republicans. but, you know, he's a creature that understands he needs to survive. So if he's going to have to be in relationships with lefties where he used to be, if only we had invited him to the EV summit. Anyway, what could have been?

It's an interesting question for electeds, like how they manage these people, not just whether we're going to go live on the moon or Mars. Just let's leave it there. Support for this show comes from. CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible, and at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. Corweave is the essential cloud for AI, ready for anything, ready for AI.

To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to coreweave.com slash ready for anything. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to consumer advocate.org. You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. at any vet in the U.S. in Canada,

with claims paid back in as a little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines. Every athlete at the top of her game knows that greatness isn't just a destination. It's a grueling, lifelong journey. It's built on early mornings, silent sacrifices,

and an unwavering drive to outclimbing. the achievements of yesterday. That is the journey of a WNBA athlete, and Delta is there every step of the way. Delta is proud to host these competitors, providing charter flights for every WNBA team, to elevate their travel experience and champion equity on every leg of their trip. Keep climbing with Delta Airlines, the official airline of the WNBA.