The Daily Beast Podcast - Why This Trump Leak is The Most Devastating Yet

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

Presented by PMI U.S., US Businesses of Philip Morris International. Share a prediction on America's future for a chance to be featured on The Daily Beast Podcast: https://beast.pub/america250 #ad  Joanna Coles and Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty trace the cracks spreading through Donald Trump’s White House as a flood of new leaks reveals an administration gripped by chaos, infighting, and mounting pressure over the escalating conflict with Iran. They dig into reports of Trump’s Oval Office outbursts, the controversy surrounding fallen American service members, Laura Loomer’s stunning reversal on Ukraine, and the growing questions surrounding Mitch McConnell’s prolonged absence from the Senate. They also reveal fresh reporting on the battle to replace Lindsey Graham’s Senate seat, explore the latest twists in the Jeffrey Epstein saga, and examine how the Tate brothers’ legal troubles could create new political headaches for Trump’s inner circle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. This is a portrait of a West Wing where it is all going wrong. Donald Trump is in the Oval Office shouting, swearing, screaming, and powerless with rage. He's kind of like King Lear. He's a ranting mad king

and it's all because, as you say, of this war which he started. We're getting leaks because this West Wing, this administration, the staff around Donald Trump don't know what to do. They are talking endlessly. They are gossiping endlessly about the craziness of this.

I'm Joanna Colts. This is the Daily Bees podcast. It's Friday. So it means our executive editor is here with me to debrief on the week. What happened to those four military? who died after our bombing in Iran campaign, where have they gone? Because they no longer are on the Pentagon website. They've literally disappeared. Four gold star soldiers disappeared.

What's happened to the Tate brothers? Who's challenging Darlene Graham in the most nepo of all elections for Senator? There's so much to discuss. And Laura Luma's documentary, can you believe this, her documentary on Ukraine. She's had a 180 turn and now says that America must support Ukraine. And it turns out that MAGA is following her. So, an unexpected week. Just a very big thank you to all of you who've subscribed. This week, we hit the milestone of 700,000 subscribers. Thank you so much. We love your comments. We love the fact you subscribed. And this is a lot. why we can have these conversations because we are independent media and we rely on your support. Okay, Hugh, tell me everything.

Hugh. Oh my God, Joanna, what is going on with your hair? Oh, Huey, this is just what we ladies do. I've been taking tips, though, to be fair, from the Daily Beast's favourite reader. Oh, I think I can guess who you mean, although I didn't know about tips. Do you know who I mean? Let's see what she's been doing this week. What's your question?

Okay, my question is, what is something about you that nobody knows, other than the people that are close to you? I don't know. Are you a funny person or are you a boring person? I don't think people realize that I am silly. I'm funny, I think. From a scale of one to ten. Well, because when I'm out at the podium, I'm like, Like, getting after it.

But I'm not like that in real life. So, you know, you just have to get to know me to know the real me. She's actually a total dork. Huey, when I'm doing the podcast, I'm like, let's get to it. But really, I'm kind of fun and a bit of a dork. What is she doing? She is the press secretary. And tonight she has the White House correspondence dinner, which has been shrunk because of, well,

we can talk about that later. Talk about all of that later. Yes, because you were in the room next door to the assassin. I was. Famously. Famously. Famously. But this, I mean, the White House press secretary is sitting around doing her hair,

finding time to do TikToks and Instagram reels, while the president is wrestling with a war he started against his base's wishes and which he cannot find a way out of. And his enemy knows that. Right. This is a portrait of a West Wing where it is all going wrong. We have been learning this morning about what's going on in the Oval Office. At the same time as Caroline Levitt is getting her hair done and giggling,

Donald Trump is in the Oval Office shouting, swearing, screaming and powerless with rage. He's kind of like King Lear. He's a ranting mad king. And it's all because, as you say, of this war, which he started. So there's also something going on here because for the longest time, actually, we didn't get that many leaks from the White House. And Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, first woman chief of staff, was supposed to have clamped down on leaking because we remember from the first administration, there were tons of leaks. It was just like a sieve that was so much information. And at the beginning of this administration, they only leaked by accident, like when Pete Higgsath managed to put his military classified information chat on signals.

But what's going on now? Because it feels chaotic. It feels like this is out of control. Donald Trump has no idea what to do. He's throwing tariffs back around, despite the fact the Supreme Court said no more tariffs, dude. So it seems like you say he's a mad king. He seems like a president out of control.

Yes. This is absolutely the, these leaks are the sign of a West Wing where things, as I said, are going wrong, but also where the control has been lost. You're absolutely right, Joanna. Susie Wiles was supposed to keep it all buttoned down and yeah, the first few months, certainly maybe the first year,

but definitely the very first few months of this administration, we didn't get a lot of leaks and now we have a gusher. A gusher. A gusher. I would say of oil, but of course you can't get oil anymore, can you? And it's too expensive. Nobody can afford their oil anymore. $100 a gallon for the key measure of oil.

that's what Donald Trump had said, oh, oil will go back down, everything will be fine, it hasn't. Gas will go back down, everything will be fine. It's over $4 a gallon again, and it is going up. And yeah, we're getting leaks because this West Wing, this administration, the staff around Donald Trump, don't know what to do. They are talking endlessly, or they are gossiping endlessly about the craziness of this. I thought that Michael Wolfe's point about Lindsay Graham, that Lindsay Graham was, in public, slavish to Donald Trump. But in private, he was a source for almost everybody and telling people. I'm now wondering, who is the leaker in the White House?

Caroline, in between hairdoes, you might want to find that out. Well, they're taking this idea as leakers in the White House so seriously that they've asked people to hand over their phones. Cash Patel has been involved in this. Oh, do you think Cash Patel is leaking? I have no idea, Joanna. but I'm sure he can look to the Trump, the president, straight in the eye and tell him that he is not leaking. Straight in the eyes, his big, big eyes. His eyes had always seemed to be like...

And the hunt for this, this idea that there are leakers has animated Donald Trump since the moment that he came down the golden escalator. Do you think it's him leaking about himself that Trump is furious? Because we know he used to do that. We know. We know that he used to do it. We know he used to be John Barron. We know from, you know, every, every, every, book that's been written about him, that he has been a source of many of these leaks. I'll just say, we don't know obviously what the source of the latest leaks are. I think what we can say is that these leaks don't offer anything positive for Donald Trump. The idea that Donald Trump is in the Oval Office shouting that the Iranians are effing scumbags, effing lunatics, and that the only option is to go and bomb them harder and harder doesn't reflect well on Donald Trump. This isn't a

strategic mind at work. It could also be Donald Trump. As we know, when he's not in the Oval office or he's not on the golf course, and obviously he spends a lot of time on the golf course, he's always on the phone to a circuit of people. And we've talked about, I mean, Anthony Scaramucci talks about when he was on the rotor of phone calls. So it's possible that he's telling people and saying, oh, you know, they're just scum, I can't bear the Iranians, they're just terrible. And that's how it also gets out. Because the people he calls then tell journalists and other people, right? Of course. And one of the, I think the hallmark of this Trump administration,

the second time round, is that his phone habits are out of control. We had testimony, I suppose, is one way to put it this week from Tom Holman, who is the border czar. I think people would be familiar with this. I think he's nicknamed Mr. Dorito. Right, because he was allegedly caught taking $50,000 in cash in a bag of Doritos, which the FBI was investigated. and Donald Trump shut that right down.

And I just as a small observation, I've never, to my knowledge, seen $50,000 in cash. But it fits in a bag of Doritos. Kind of surprising. Could have been a family pet. Could have been a family pet. Could have been in hundreds. With those different flavors.

You know, it's surprisingly small $50,000 in when you see it in hundreds. I'll take you a word for it. Tom Homan described how Donald Trump phones him at 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. And these are not casual conversations. He is dictating policy. He is telling Donald Trump is the chief executive. He is telling the people who work for him what to do.

Now, we know at the Daily Beast, we have relentlessly chronicled the unhealthiness of doing your business at two and three and four in the morning. That's what Donald Trump is doing. He is phoning people. Marco Rubio has said he phones two in the morning. They all complain about going on the plane with him because they say they can't get any sleep. and now they're complaining about going on the plane with him because the new plane doesn't have enough security. They're also increasingly the target of potential assassination.

Yes, and we've got a fascinating insight. And again, this has leaked. This is a matter of security. And people in Washington, D.C. are obsessed by security and obviously, oh, we don't talk about security. We know more about the security questions over this White House and the people around it than we've ever known. before ever. And this time, we learned that they are being told not to take, those closest

to Trump are being told not to take car services in case the Iranians use that to target them. I just say, it kind of speaks to the out of touchness of this White House that people in it are using car services. Well, what would you want them to use? Oh, city bikes. There's an excellent bike share scheme in Washington, D.C., which I've used. Washington, D.C. has an excellent metro system, which we've all, everybody... That would make them even more target, wouldn't it, if they're being followed. Well, is the point that... After they're targeted this as a question, but the fact that they are routinely seeing their commute

through the elitist, you know, way of getting around behind smoke glass, driven in the backseat, these are not people that are in touch with ordinary people. And I think this speaks to a very, very important point about what's happening inside this administration. they appear to have lost touch with ordinary concerns. Donald Trump, remember, said he did not care about inflation. And if you are living in an elitist world as he does, he's a billionaire, he's always flown in, not always, but he's flown in his own private jet decades.

If you are beginning to live in that sort of world, how do you stay in touch with what normal people experience? But just in terms of the vulnerability of his aides and the people who are supposed to be targeted, Is the idea that the Iranians are somehow in their cell phones, knowing when their car is going to come? I mean, what is the point of failure here that the Iranians are following people's routines? Well, there's long been suggestions, claims, allegations that Iran has sleeper cells in the United States. And let's be honest, they've never been activated.

So we don't know. but there have been people who have been prosecuted. There have been attempts to murder the enemies of Iran on American soil before. The point of failure here would be you can work out where a member of Trump's inner circle is from their cell phone communications with a car service as opposed to not a government car service or one assumes Uber Lyft are probably more secure because you're not doing it on open text messages. The ability to infiltrate phones is something they believe the Iranians have. And the casualties in the Middle East, among the concerns that exist about that is that it's entirely possible.

The Iranians are using cell site location of American cell phone numbers to work out where they should target their missiles. Can I just say I used to have a car service when I worked in fashion, especially during the fashion shows. And it was a wonderful thing. I had a driver called Serge, who was from the Russian military, who always managed to get the nearest possible parking space when you were coming out of a show. So you would come running out of a show because you had to go to the next one. They were very badly scheduled. And Serge would always be there in the front car. He was a miracle worker. Anyway, that's beside the point. So more targets on Americans, and yet what is this story that we had this morning,

that there were fewer military deaths now than the were last week. Four deaths have disappeared off the Pentagon website. Well, as we know, since these hostilities started back at the end of February, the United States has lost 18 members of the armed forces. And that's, you know, that's a group of people who in ordinary times would be honored as war dead. And this morning or late last night, we learned that the latest four casualties

had disappeared from the Pentagon's website, which displays them as casualties. And people rightly want to know who has sacrificed themselves, who have given their lives, their last measure of devotion. And we suddenly have this disappearance. And the reason that the Pentagon appeared, is extraordinary. It is that, in fact, the United States

was not at war with Iran at the time, so these are not wartime casualties. This was because we had a ceasefire in place. Because there was a ceasefire in place, and because the president had written to Congress and said, oh, we're not at war anymore, and therefore any casualties are not of war. So is this just a fudging to make it look like

there are fewer casualties than there actually are? I think yes, and I think also... Did they think nobody would notice? What about the parents of the four people that have disappeared? These are gold star parents who are being told that they are not gold star parents. I mean, I don't think you can get any more fondly disturbing and weird. How is that appreciating the warrior class, Pete Hagsworth, out there with your vaccination to give everybody extra testosterone? How does this honour the warrior?

Well, I mean, quite clearly, Joanna, and veterans are talking about that this morning. It doesn't. I think one of the hallmarks of the United States way of life is to honour the war dead. Right. And the process, the dignified transfer, which not every country has, and which is an amazing, an amazing thing to thank people for the ultimate duty. Yes. And I think for many presidents, it has been a humbling moment, an encounter between them and the ultimate price, the decisions they have made, draw on people who work for the United States.

They don't work for the president. The president's the commander-in-chief. They work for the United States. They work for every one of the United States, 360 million citizens. And that moment at Dover, where they see those coffins being unloaded, is profoundly emotional, but it is a profound moment of recognition

that this is a country that believes in honoring those people. To remove those names from that role of honor is, It's just astonishing. And I should say, sitting with these names in front of me so that I get them right. But in the last week, the United States has lost four soldiers, Private Isabella Gonzalez, 19. From Texas. Texas. Sergeant Angel Rampersad, who was from Queens in New York.

Lieutenant Tyler Feehan, who was from Hawaii. And Sergeant Michael Swinton, who was killed, I'm just going out here. The first three casualties were killed by a missile. missile strike, Sergeant Swinton was disposing of a drone and in Iraq, now both of these places, the missile strike was in Jordan, the drone strike was in Iraq. This is not a military, that the Iranian military is not a military that has been degraded to the point of which it cannot attack Americans. In fact, it killed four of them. And that's why Trump is raging in the Oval Office. And they're pretending that, oh, if we just don't count them and we come up with some nonsensical

word salad about, oh, we weren't really at war. The point is these men and women would not have died had Trump not started his bombing campaign in Iran. Yeah. And it's also worth saying that this is all about this White House. And we started with Caroline Levitt. This White House is all about communications. It's all about the presentation. And the presentation of 18 deaths is worse than the presentation of 14 deaths. Well, and disappearing for soldiers will turn out to be worse for them than just keeping them on the row. Major communications boulder. And similarly, we're talking about Trump raging.

He was raging about the fact that his insecure Air Force One had been leaked. He wasn't raging that Air Force One was insecure. He was raging that this had been leaked. And that's what a lot of this is. It's the fact that the communications are what obsessed people rather than the substance. Well, interestingly, they had the New York Times leaked the original story about Air Force One, the new Air Force One, the Grift Force One, as we say, every time we talk together, your phrase, grift force one, because it's based on the plane that was

given from Qatar, a $400 million gift. I mean, it's an amazing backstory. As you were pointing out to Michael Wolf. Well, and we've all forgotten about it, although Laura Luma, who we're going to come to in a moment, Laura Luma, even she said that this was too much of a grift. But we know the plainness had to be retroactively fitted with all sorts of security, you know, paraphernalia. Maxed out was the words used by the present. Something I normally hear with a credit card. With a credit card or it's not good. Or its looks maxing and young men are breaking their jaws. Yes. Yes, which will, I don't recommend. If anybody's out there with a hammer thinking of breaking their jaw,

stick to Caroline Levitt's hair tips. So Laura Luma, Laura Luma, who was last seen saying that she had it on very good authority, and the White House was not shutting her down, that Mitch McConnell was in a vegetative state, she's now produced a documentary from Ukraine. I know, this is, Laura Luma is a sort of zealig-like figure in this Trump administration. She doesn't do Caroline Levitt's hair,

but she's pretty much I've got a finger in every other party here. And the, so you will know, we all know that for the last five years, MAGA has been obsessed by basically wanting Ukraine to give up, surrender to Russia,

they have been full of conspiracy theories. They have hated Bodimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president. They have smeared him as a pain addict. They have claimed that he's still. all the aid. They have gone wild with the idea that there should be no weapons given to Ukraine, something that J.D. Vance and Pete Hegesith continued to advance. But Laura Lumer, who had been at the heart of this, made a really extraordinary journey this week. She went to Ukraine. To get to Ukraine,

of course, as we know, you don't fly direct, you have to get a train from the Polish border. She documented all this, and she has had a damaskine, a heaven conversion. She now says that the Ukrainians are the good guys, that the Christians of Ukraine are being persecuted by the Russian attacks, which has been a big MAGA talking point, by the way, about Christian persecution, and that Putin was standing up for Christians. I mean, quite obviously, this is crazy, but she had been pushing this. She says, no, I got it all wrong. She sat down with Vladimir Zelensky, who obviously sent it an amazing turn of, you know, turn of view here, which he wants to turn to, clearly turn to his advantage. And she is going to come back, she is going to come back show this documentary and evangelize for the people of Ukraine. And I think she got caught in an air raid too, right?

Which will also do a lot. when you actually see the reality of war on the ground, it's very different than when she's sitting in the middle of the country, just, you know, posting away about something that she has zero experience. And I think the thing that we should take away from this conversion is over the last few months, our colleagues at Daily Beast, particularly Alison Quinn, who for a long time lived in Russia, then Ukraine, and now lives much more safely in the United States, have been documenting how the Ukrainians are not being defeated. And in fact, they are beginning to cripple the Russian economy in a way that people did not foresee. They have executed drone strikes on oil production, on Russia's version of Amazon, because that's how the Russians were moving around parts for their drones.

They have made, I think, Vladimir Putin concerned that he might get overthrown. He's living in a bunker all the time, Alison was revealing yesterday, on a live stream, which you can find on this YouTube channel, go back and watch it. It's fascinating. And clearly there is a question over momentum here. And MAGA doesn't like losing. If it does lose, it says that you've cheated. But if Vladimir Putin becomes a loser, they don't want anything to do with them. And we'd a sign this morning that not just Laura Luma is on this train,

that there's a comedian called Tim Poole. He has a vast MAGA audience. He turned himself around as well and says, yeah, I now back Ukraine. So, and we know that Vladimir, Samir Zelensky is coming to Washington next week. He's expected to have a meeting with Donald Trump. He's coming for Lindsay Graham's funeral memorial. And we know that Lindsay Graham, despite the 180 on Trump, having called him a fruit loop and that, you know, he was out after January of 6th. And then, of course, we discovered that 40 minutes later, he was straight back on the

phone call saying, I don't know why I said that. That wasn't me. I don't know what I was thinking. He was straight back in there, but the one thing he has been consistent on is Ukraine should win this war. The US should support Ukraine. This is a gateway opportunity for the Russians to go into Europe if the Americans don't do something. And of course, the Ukrainians have armed themselves with drone, learned drone technology and proved, like unfortunately it turns out Iran has proved that just because you invade a smaller power, within theory, a bigger military, does not mean you win the war. No, and we saw that this week, actually, when Pete Hegseth was in front of the Senate, we all saw John Ossoff's forensic destruction of Pete Hegsett.

They reduced him to a stuttering mess. But some other senators were asking Pete Hegesith about, why are you not taking advice from Ukraine? Why have you not gone and got every bit of help you can from Ukraine? And the quid pro quo is Ukraine needs weapons. And Pete Hegis' response was to go back to this MAGA talking point, of we sent all our weapons to Ukraine, and that was the woke Joe Biden. I'm using, you know, a sort of an stiche of his words here, but that this was bad and that America lost out. And these senators

were absolutely robust in pointing out to him that Ukraine has the technology and the knowledge to prevent the sort of drone attacks that led to the death this week, for the last few days alone, of Sergeant Michael Swinton and have injured many, many more troops in the middle least. And the lack of understanding, I think, of that in Baga, come to this point is intriguing because now we have these voices saying the opposite, saying let's allow ourselves properly with Ukraine, let's beat Russia. And let's get this done. I mean, remember Donald Trump saying, oh, I'm going to solve this war on the first day that I'm there. And of course, he's discovered it. It can't possibly do that. They've got no diplomats in the region. Right. Steve

Wittkoff and Jared Kushner have no idea what they're doing. They're just casting around for business. deals. And also this cover story that the reason that Pete Hegzeth needs the $1.5 trillion to run the Pentagon, a man who literally was drummed out of his previous two jobs running veteran affairs organizations under accusations of financial mismanagement as well as intoxication at work are something that we've talked about a lot before. But the idea that this cover story of why we need the money is because, oh, we've sent all our weapons to it to Ukraine, we've run out of weapons. I mean, the whole thing is...

Of course, it's a nonsensical cover story, but there are real concerns that there is a lack of supply of munitions, particularly defense of munitions for the Middle East. And we saw in the last few days this attempt to step up bombing on Iran in the belief that this will bring them to the table, which obviously hasn't put so far. They deployed B1B Lancers for the first time, I think, in four months. The use of these heavier and heavier munitions is partly because they're real concerns about supply chains. But it's just a consistent theme in American foreign policy that America underestimates any other country. It just believes in itself so much.

And it's the disadvantage of America's self-confidence, which is one of the reasons I think we both moved here. There's the sense of energy and positivity. Absolutely. do anything here. The inverse of that is the refusal to understand other countries, refusal to learn other languages, and a refusal to believe that other countries have the ability to fight back, fight back effectively. Absolutely, Joanna. And the Middle East has been a quagmire for the United States, Afghanistan, Iraq. Now we have Iran. And just to mention that Trump this week, we have another leak, that he was,

first thing, basically, to go to war in another country completely. Oh, good Lord, good Lord. In Mali. Well, he want, in Mali? Yes. In this, and Mali is in northwest Africa, France got out of there forever war. Do you think he's confused Mali with Bali? And he thinks it'll be easy to bomb Bali.

Because Bali's a peace-loving nation. They won't see it coming. That's entirely possible. Isn't it possible? I think it's possible. I can see him on the beach in Bali. Right. Just, you know, sort of, we've had enough of the flowers.

the purple flowers, I don't want the purple flowers everywhere. They've got, they're peace-loving people, will eat in and out, in and out, like Venezuela. It'll just be, what a disaster. All right, so, Lindsay Graham's funeral, Memorial, what do we know about it, other than Darlene appears to be ready to take his seat? Well, it's going to be quite a spectacle. He is going to be in the capital, so there was going to be a procession of people to come and to come and honor him. We believe that Zelensky is going to be there, not 100% confirmed, but I think that's almost certain. It would be very surprising if he doesn't come.

We know that Benjamin Netanyahu has been wanting to come and wants to come and see Donald Trump in Washington. We also know from this leak from the Oval Office that Donald Trump doesn't want to see Benjamin Netanyahu because he annoyed and he feels that Netanyahu dragged him into this war in the Middle East. Netanyahu, I think, would give a very different version of events. Right. But we are going to see a lot of people come to Washington. And as you say, Darlene, the newly installed senator, she's newly dropped her married name. She is only calling herself Darlene

Graham. She is going to hope that this is an occasion that propels her into the primary and gets the six-year Senate seat. It's pretty extraordinary spectacle. It's two weeks between the tragic death of her brother, her swearing in as a Senator, her being revealed by the Daily Beast's Swamp Newsletter to have made a donation to a pro-choice Republican state senator. That was a great exclusive by the Swamp Newsletter, by the way. It was fantastic.

And it has caused a lot of problems with Darlene. Our Swamp newsletter comes out every Tuesday, every Wednesday, and it follows the money. It does the thing that every journalist in D.C. should do, follow the money. We followed the money. and we found her only political donation is to state senator, Kate Shealy. And the significance of this is that this is a state senator who filibustered, a Republican state senator who filibustered a very draconian abortion ban in South Carolina. And we then discovered a second donation that Darlene made using an alternate spelling of her name.

Darlene usually spells it D-A-R-L-I-N-E. She is legally Darlene, D-A-R-L-E-N-E, but she says that Lindsay Graham taught her to spell it with an I, so that's what she uses. Anyway, she made a second donation after the state senator filibustered the abortion law another $100. These are the only donations she's only ever donated to one person

and it is the state senator. And yet, it's caused eruptions. Right, because what she was trying to do was leave the door open for women to have abortions for both longer. This covered time and circumstances. Right, time and circumstances, which of course is a huge deal because Lindsay Graham was completely anti-abortion. Yeah, he... He was a hardliner. He was very hard-line.

A man that had no apparent relationships. So therefore no... Oh, he did date Laura Ingram in the late 90s? Oh, did he? I didn't know that. Good Lord. Good for you. Lindsey Graham. Rather you than me. But for a man that didn't appear to have any sexual relations,

I say didn't appear to, because who knows what he was doing, he was very keen on others being held to account punitively if they did. Well, I think the important point about this is he was very, very aware of the South Carolina Republican political base. And that political base is very, very against abortion. And he was aware of that. He courted that. And this, when he was in with Trump, he was out with Trump, that didn't really matter because in South Carolina, he always had the solid calling card of saying, I am the pro-life senator. And he proposed numerous laws before the overturning of Roe versus Wade. Basically, every year from 2013 onwards, he proposed some form of abortion ban, and some were more draconian and others. None of these were ever going to pass

the Senate. was about positioning. Right, it was performative. But Will Darlene... And she has performed the opposite now. Right. Well, she hasn't... I mean, she did it as a private citizen quietly, right? Yes. Clearly didn't want people to know because it would have been embarrassing for her brother. But do we think that she will be contested in this election? Are people stepping forward? Yes. She absolutely will be. The wildest candidate that you could possibly come up with in South Carolina has already stepped forward. It is Mark Sanford. Mark Sanford, who used to be the governor, who went, of course, on his Appalachian Trail walk.

Yes. And, in fact, it turned out, had a relationship, at least as far as we know, with Olivia Nutsi. Olivia Nutsi, the journalist from New York Magazine and then Vanity Fair, who was a digital lover of RFK Jr. Yes. And, you know, I don't know. are there no second acts in American public life? He's back. He is going to run for this Senate seat.

And he says he's better qualified. And hey, he is better qualified. She is a NEPO candidate, a NEPO candidate. But it's therefore likely that others will throw their hats more formally in the ring. There have been three or four other names that have voted around. But none of them have immediately gone in on it. He has. Now clearly if you're a more serious politician in South Carolina, you might be like,

I don't think Mark Sanford's a great idea, and you might go in yourself. One of the things that's worth pointing out here is South Carolina has runoff laws. So Darlene has put her name in for the primary. If there are more than two candidates, then the winning candidate in the first round has to get above 50%. Otherwise, there's a runoff. So this could, this would, which would take place two weeks. weeks later. So this could actually run in well into August, and of course the election's only in November, and this is not what you need if you're the Republicans. It's kind of messy.

You think of it as a deep red state, but even deep red southern states have yielded surprises. And we've got Mitch McConnell's eat, which is effectively empty. Darlene is sitting as a senator until the start of January in Lindsay Graham's already, you know, his normal term. Lindsay Graham was up for re-election. He was going to run again in So she has put in for that six-year term, which would start at the start of January, the election would be in November. There is a primary in August. There could be a runoff later in August.

But in the meantime, she can vote. She has been voting. She's been doing what Mitch McConnell can't. Mitch McConnell. Let's talk about Mitch McConnell, 40 days and 40 nights. Yes. We pointed out a biblical absence from Washington. Yes.

Can he speak? Is Laura Luma right? Is Mitch McConnell in a vegetative state? Well, first of all, we haven't heard from him, have we? But we do have some new information from Scott Jennings, which we can play now. Scott Jennings, have you had another phone call with the former majority leader recently? Phone call, no. Have you traded? Do you know anything new about his condition that you can update us with? Well, I know he continued. used to do his rehab activities. I know he's still following doctor's orders. And my assumption is sometime between now and Monday, they'll probably issue another update on how he's coming along. I don't know if they've made any decisions about whether he's going to be cleared to come back to

work or not. But I would be surprised if we don't hear from them again by the weekend or by Monday. If I were Mitch McConnell's doctor, I would think it was quite stressful for Mitch McConnell. McConnell and his family to have to deal with rumors that he's essentially comatose. Why don't they issue a 10 second video saying, hi, I'm Mitch McConnell. Thank you for your good wishes. I'm working hard at rehab and I will be back soon. That's all anybody needs. Yeah, we, I just say the Daily Beast, and I just want to say to our subscribers, thank you.

Because of our subscribers, we have been able to do what, let's be honest, other people have not done. Ask these questions. We've been to the hospital. We've seen the security detail. We have tried to track down the people that are, that know the answers. Well, and the security detail is parked outside the hospital, these huge black SUV. And we're paying. We are paying for this healthcare. We are paying for this. And we've, you know, I've, you know, mentioned this before, Joanna. There is medical privacy. There is also the question of he's a senator. He has huge powers. Where is he? So we haven't had a video. We've had no new statement. Terricamak, who is his chief of staff, a long-time aide, paid $226,000 a year, was finally spotted in the corridors of the Senate this week. Absolutely nothing to say.

He was peppered with questions. He didn't say a thing. So what's the actual conspiracy theory here, that the senator is actually unable to speak? I think that many people have this very reasonable suspicion that the senator is unable to speak. And if you listen to what Scott Jennings said, he hasn't been, Scott Jennings now says he hasn't had the phone. The question was incomplete, but he clearly has not been exchanging texts with Mitch McConnell. It is possible that his condition has worsened. It is also possible that he never had this call in the first place. You know, all we have is

his word for it. He's never shared any phone records. CNN disowned his version and said that's his personal recollection, not our fact-checked and verified reporting. So in that situation, the chief of staff of the senator becomes incredibly powerful. He is the person who liaises with other senators, with other chiefs of staff. And I'll just say, there is a real-world effect going on here. Republicans are beginning to warn that they are paralyzed on some really, really important things, not just for appointing Trump's people, which is part of their job, but that will have real-world consequences.

a government shutdown, the Farm Bill, the Farm Bill funds subsidies to farms, which allow us to eat. And if this bill, every year it is a must-pass bill, defense on the Farm Bill or must-pass, Mitch McConnell is critical to these efforts, and he's not there. And his vote doesn't exist,

and if his vote doesn't exist, it might not happen. So there's a real possibility that we are beginning to get moved towards some sort of government shutdown. Where is Mitch? If he can't speak, can't vote. And we're about to go into the six-week long break that senators take over the summer, correct? I mean, I love how these politicians award themselves the best healthcare, the ability to take unlimited time off work without telling anybody what they're doing.

Witness Tom Keene, the congressman in New Jersey, who disappeared for months on end. I mean, he missed how many votes? 146 votes. Yes. This is not what people vote. But he did do some stock trading. him in for. Yes, happily, happily, because he said that he'd been off because he was depressed, he wasn't so depressed that he couldn't carry out some investment trades.

It's the trading that keeps him going. It's the trading that kept him positive. It's just astonishing to me. And then, of course, they have great health care and they have very long holidays. Who doesn't want to run for office? Well, the host, by the way, is firing up the jets this morning to get out of town. They're coming back. maybe five weeks time, and they won't do anything in between. Independent media has nothing on being a senator or a congressperson in America. And I know there are lots of very good politicians out there, as we've just mentioned, John Ossoff is doing a fantastic job and has obviously clearly risen up the democratic,

hopeful ladder for 2028. So final question, Epstein has crept back onto the schedule I've noticed. I mean, I felt as a... if Donald Trump had actually won the Epstein files at one point, but the oversight committee had Jess Staley back in today, the former JP Morgan executive and former CEO of Barclay's Bank, an astonishingly high scalp for the Epstein case, and a mystery death of a model agent who was very close to Jeffrey Epstein and supplied him with girls as hundreds of emails have revealed. Yeah.

It's been Epstein week. It never goes away. And again, if we go back to that Oval Office, another reason to rage. This week, as you say, Jess Staley was in front of the House of members of Congress in a brief appearance of them from their holidays. But the more significant thing is this mystery death of Daniel Sead. Daniel Sead was found at his home in a suburb of Paris called Colom. And we still don't know. why he died, but this is another suspicious, weird twist in the Epstein case. He was being investigated by the French authorities. He had been accused himself of a rape back in the allegedly committed in the 90s against the Swedish model. And he was being investigated on grounds of supplying to Epstein, women who let, or girls, obviously at the time, who were sexually exploited by Epstein. And some of the emails that he sent her really just so depressing and there are things like if you promise her

that you'll get her a modelling job, she will be easy. I mean, it's just a terrible, terrible indictment of the whole modelling business. Yeah, one that obviously you know far better than I do, Joanna, but there's a real question mark here about the French authorities, about why had he not been arrested? And they say they didn't have the evidence. He had protested his innocence, but those emails were stomach churning,

on their own terms and they are not the similar Jess Staley's situation that it was the emails that really have brought out the worst here Jess Staley

who appeared in front of Congress and who denied I mean one of the reasons he lost his job at Berkeley's bank was he knew Epstein denied that he was a friend yes and I just one exchange that he had

with Epstein in 2010 after Epstein's conviction And recently after his conviction too. This was not a secret. People knew. He knew he had corresponded with Epstein. Well, Epstein was doing his sentence. But in 2010, Staley emailed Epstein.

That was fun. Say hi to Snow White. So sinister. So weird. And Epstein said, what character would, which character would you like next? Which staley replied, beauty and the beast? And Epstein said, well, one side is available. and these creepy, horrible, weird, misogynistic emails. I mean, these emails are sickening.

It's such an interesting insight, I think, for people into the lives of certain powerful men and how they treat women and just the idea that these are kind of cartoons to them. Yeah. Well, those are not, of course, the only powerful men that we've seen exposed this week. We've also had to hate brothers.

Mm-hmm. Horrible misogynistic influencers and quote marks. and Tristan Tate, who were arrested in Miami on charges which include rape, sexual assault, and child sexual abuse imagery. Absolutely horrific selection of charges. They say that they're innocent. And the charges have been brought in the United Kingdom, so they are up for expedition. But what is really fascinating about this is that they are closely connected to the Trump world.

And there are real questions being asked by one Democratic member of of the House this week, who has written to the, well, she's written to the House Oversight Committee, Chairman James Comer to say, we need to get Baron Trump in to answer for his relations, the relationship with the Tate's. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive. of 19 speaker AKG surround audio system.

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well again it's just this revolting misogyny and money and Andrew Tate back in 2004 and I've had to just make sure I get these quotes right said I'm very close with the Trump family I know them well and he said he had spoken to Baron

and was also looking forward to telling the president or I guess in 2024 the former president that he's a bulletproof badass and this is actually a real for the Trump's, because Yasmin Ansari, who's the rising Democratic Congresswoman, who wrote this letter to say, we need to talk to Barron and the other Trump's. Don Jr. appeared

on a live stream with Andrew Tate. J.D. Vance follows these dates on social media. They don't have the power to force subpoenas. They don't have the power yet. But Donald Trump, raging in his oval office, knows that it is very likely that the House is going to flip to the Democrats at the midterms, and then they can enforce this, and we could very, very well see Baron Trump served the subpoena to say, what do you know about the Tate's? Well, and the Tates also were originally arrested in Romania for sex trafficking and underage pornography, right? And were miraculously because they're American. They are both American and British, yes. American or British.

So they... On here, but then brought up in our native country. But am I right in thinking that Donald Trump helped them get out Romania? We absolutely believe. So we have the word of Andrew Tate for this because a text message that was leaked to the New York Times earlier this year said that just before Donald Trump came back into office, Tate was texting his friends and saying, I had word from the Trump admin that they're on top of things. I've been told I'll be free soon, but Trump needs to see me in Miami. So according to Tate himself, yes. And the White House this week have said that they're not going to stand in the way of the extradition

and that they should end up going back to the UK to face charge. They have washed their hands of these Tates in a way that the Tate should have seen this coming because that's what they did to Epstein back in 2019. But this is going to be a new vulnerability. There is an echo of the Epstein files here, the closeness of the Trump family to toxic people is something that Democrats are really, really keen to get their teeth into and could

be a real vulnerability, a real narrative of questions, and a real problem also for Melania Trump, who we haven't discussed, because she has been so protective of baron. He vanishes from the public alive for months at a time. The most recent time we saw him, obviously, last weekend at the World Cup final.

But like Melania, he's a bit of a mystery. and this could blow him open. Well, we know that Melania won't be accompanying her husband to the White House Correspondence Dinner tonight. For those of you who have joined us and don't know what happened at the last White House Correspondence Dinner, Hugh, why don't you tell them

whose room you were adjacent to in the Washington Hilton? Well, we went to the last White House Correspondence dinner, not to celebrate Donald Trump, who was going to be there, but because we had thought, thought about this a lot and took the view that we have to report on this as journalists. And also, we have to say to Donald Trump, this is our territory.

You're coming on to our territory. And, you know, I was concerned that a lot of the elite DC media that go to this thing were going to get their champagne, clap, yell, cheer, and ask for selfies. Because, quite frankly, that's what goes on in D.C. and I thought it was important that The Daily Beast goes and reports as journalists. What I didn't expect was that I would end up being turned out next door to the gunman who tried to get in. There was an astonishing breach of hotel security. He walked into this hotel, armed, nobody searched him, nobody searched any of us,

and he got to within 20 feet of being in the ballroom, the vast ballroom for this event takes place. And there were two and a half thousand people in the borough of them. Two and a half thousand people there. It's a much smaller event tonight. 700 people. And again, I'm concerned that DC elite likes this show. We will, one of our reporters, Farah Thomas and will be there reporting on this event, not clapping, not cheering, not yelling, not seeking selfies, not giving approbation to Trump,

who has been attacking the First Amendment, attacking journalism, demanding action against New York Times journalists. revealing that his griff force one was insecure. I have brave personal reservations about the idea this event even took place. We have to journalistically be there to report on it because that is the most important thing that we can do. And we should point out that Trump wanted to serve subpoenas to the New York Times journalists who broke the story about the lack of security around the new Qatar Griffith Force One. And he did in fact serve subpoenas, but then it all fell apart because a judge told them that's not how you're serve a subpoena. The DOJ was forced to withdraw the subpoenas. They voluntarily withdrew the subpoenas before they were ordered by the judge. But this attack on the First Amendment is

not over. They may well come back with fresh subpoenas and try to force these journalists to reveal who their sources were, which is an incredibly bad idea for the free press, but also shows you that this story was true. And the story was denied by the point, I was denied by Caroline Levitt with a roller in her hair and you can't prosecute a journalist if the story was if you're going after the journalist obviously the story was true so you know

quite a remarkable turn of events well I hope that Farad Thomas in does get at least one glass of champagne tonight at the White House correspondence dinner well not to toast not to toast the First Amendment absolutely yeah to toast the First Amendment really the dinner is to celebrate the incredible

importance of the First Amendment which we see undermined every single day by this government and this cabinet, not least the removing of four of the service people's names who died in this bombing of Iran. Huey, thank you so much for keeping us up to date. I know you have an editorial meeting to get to. I do. It's always a thrill to wind up the week with you. There's one thing I want to stay on top of, Joanna, which is a discussion we had last week about high tea.

High tea, yes. has started a debate. It's a very British debate. I'm Scottish, obviously. Joanna. I didn't know you were Scottish. I keep it concealed. No idea you were Scottish.

I know who is. Does he tell us every single time? I'm very discreet about it. But we discussed high tea and you offered one definition of what high tea. Well, we talked about high tea because of Pete Heggs is, right? The proper definition of what high tea is, which should be sandwiches, little cheese sandwich, possibly salmon, bit of chicken, coronation, chicken, Margaret Thatcher's favourite dish, with scones cream, it doesn't matter if you put the cream on or the butter on or the jam on first.

Always a debate in England. This is what English people argue about. Well, I hate to tell you, Scottish people and some people from other parts of the north of England, not Yorkshire, obviously, I have a different definition of high tea. And I asked my parents define high tea in Scotland. It's a bit old-fashioned, but we would, it's between 4 and 5 p.m. And it's not scones and cakes first. Fish and chips. Maybe a steak pie.

Steak pie is not high tea. But it has to be accompanied by a very, very big steaming pot of tea. And afterwards you can have a cake. Fish and chips at 4 o'clock. Who would do that? Who would do that? No. It's sandwiches, it's clotted cream and scones, and it's fruit cake.

And then possibly a fondant. Nothing better than a fondant of Fortnham and Mason. You thought that you can't get any more English than that. You really can't. Anyway, thank you for all your comments about Haiti. You can tell us, do you really want steak pie or battered fish and chips of four? Yes, you do. I don't think so.

I don't think so. Hugh, it's very good to see you. If you have comments on Hugh's accent, the fact he's Scottish, or on some of the things we've talked about, like the disappearing of all American military. Yeah, I think there's a few more serious things to talk about. Right. Or Carolyn Levitt's hair. How do you roll your hair? Is that what you do? I find the lint roller is quite good because the hair sticks up there of its own accord.

Well, the lint roller is a chord. Anyway, write and let us know. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We just reached 700,000,000. 700,000 subscribers. 700,000 subscribers. And we started only just over a year ago. So we are thrilled.

Thank you very much for your support. I'm really excited for you to hear this next conversation with Dick Costello. He is the former CEO of Twitter and the co-founder of 01 advisors and in it. Well, he really caught me up short, actually, by predicting the end of thinking. Now, this conversation is produced in partnership with PMIUS, US businesses of Philip Morris International, as part of a year-long initiative to celebrate and accelerate American innovation and reinvention. we're looking ahead to the next 250 years of America and reacting directly to your comments. So Dick and I are discussing the future of social media and the internet.

Let's dive right in. So Dick, is social media basically over now? It's certainly fractured. So what I mean by that is taking a walkthrough Soho here in New York will tell you that it's not dead. The number of boyfriends of Instagram taking photos of their girlfriends standing in the middle of the street with a bag over their shoulder looking longingly down the cobblestones is there's one every other block sometimes do. So certainly TikTok and Instagram are not over. I think the challenge is Facebook feels long, long past Snapchat. is not what it used to be for high schoolers.

And Twitter is filled with the very thing that Elon said he wanted to get rid of, bots and now AI slop. Right. So I'm going to protest about Snapchat because I'm on the board. So I'm just registering. This martini that you poured me in the Daily Beast Cup is delicious, by the way. Isn't it good? It's good to have, martini. It's sneaky, sneaky there.

So if you're sort of looking out over the next five to ten years, how do people continue to communicate on social media? And where have the conversations gone that I used to love so much in the early Twitter days when you were CEO? Thank you. They're not, those are gone seemingly not to return, at least on one of the existing places. platforms. Those, those things are gone. People, you know, the, all you need to do is look at any one, very sort of, anyone who proposes anything controversial on, on Twitter is met with nothing but, you know, trolls and the, and the, and the, and the trolls are so, um, they're, they're, they're, they're what gets attention, you know, of friends who call it the sort of,

the anger economy and the the the the troll economy they there's a whole economy for those people that by just being mean and cruel and everything get attention and get engagement and get fans um one need only look no further than the tate brothers who are like rich from being crazy misogynist um so so the the challenge with AI now entering the fray is that if the discourse is gone, with the emergence of AI, the amount of content that's being posted that's just AI slop to spot. By the way, not forget about just social media, but from Facebook to LinkedIn, to Twitter, to Spotify music, to Amazon books. I have four or five people now who've sent me, oh, I wrote a book. I want, can you review this book? Well, they're using,

everyone's going to write a book and everyone's going to be a musician and everyone's going to be an artist. And the problem is when everyone does it, nothing is interesting. As you remember, hold on, let me just linger on that. I love that. When everybody does it, nothing is interesting. It's increasingly hard to find anything of any value. Because you can use AI to create this stuff and then post it, you can be a musician, you can be an author, you can be a, it's impossible to, it will be kind of, it will be

almost impossible to find anything of interest that's new and unique on these platforms. I mean, and don't forget, AI brings, as much as social media pushed all of us to our corners, the right and left, and everybody hears their echo chamber on these platforms, whether they're far right or far left. Artificial intelligence being the, having studied the entire internet and giving you back the average of what everyone thinks, you know. Again, I say this all the time, but go to OpenAI and say, pick a random number one through 10.

Give me a random number one through 10. It will always say seven, always. Really? The reason it will always say seven is because that's the average. AI brings everything back to the middle, meaning it homogenizes everything. Right. By homogenizing everything, all these books and music that are published to Spotify and Amazon and so forth are going to all be the same. So none of it will be interesting. And we're at

the very early innings of people doing this stuff. You know, look at the millions and millions and millions of songs that have been added to Spotify that are AI slop. And, you know, you and I haven't done it yet, but probably will go, oh, wait until it's, wait till it's even easier. Right. You know, I got a fun tune in my head. Yeah, I promise you. I'm never going to send you that. So, so there was a CEO of Twitter between you and when Elon was like nine. There were nine CEOs. I know. They were like they're like spinal tap drummers, the CEOs of Twitter. Okay. So what was killed in a bizarre gardening incident, you know, it's no, it's straight out of a spinal tap. Are you making nine of them? No, that was online from

that was, okay. What did Elon must get right and what did he get wrong about X? Yeah. Well, he's certainly got right that you didn't need as many people as were in the company at the time. I mean, I think there were 7,000 employees when he took over from Parag. Jack left, made Parag CEO for a hot minute, and then Ilan took over. There were something like 7,700 people there, and now, you know, there are, what, a couple hundred, 300, 300, 300, maybe, 200, 300, 300, 300, 300. Which is a while, I mean, it's a radical departure. So, yeah, and I think, but all these companies, Google, meta, I mean, everyone had overhired.

And it was just, you know, doesn't matter because we're profitable and we don't need to pay attention to that. I mean, for whatever reason, all these companies wildly overhired. And so he got that right. I think the thing he got wrong is, I mean, there are probably a bunch of things. The thing I think I would say he got wrong is probably any more than a couple hundred. Because literally, I mean, if you'll remember, when he took over the platform, he kind of was raging about bots. There are too many bots. And, I mean, all of the re-t, whenever I post something now, a week later, I'll go and look at my, you know, act engagement and see that, oh, a few of your tweets were retweeted like 19 times.

It's all adult. It's always 19 times, by the way. 19 is the magic number. It's all like sex cams, adult, you know, it's all bots and it's all, for whatever reason, mine happened to be all porn bots. So that's unfortunately, you know, the complaint, the thing that he was actually complaining about has gotten significantly worse. Right.

I will say this. The person that he brought in to run product there now, Nikita Byer, is exceptionally good at thinking about how to grow the platform and the kinds of things that users really want and what needs to be at it. He's done a great job and he's only one, I think he's the only product manager there and good for him because it's a hard job. Right. So if you're looking out sort of 20 to 30 years, how do you think we're going to be communicating with each other? I think that we underestimate how much cognitive offloading, do by our use of AI right now, and that's going to get a lot worse, and people are going to stop

trying. So there's a great paper out, and I can't send it around to all your listeners. The TLDR of this paper is, even people who only use AI for as little as 10 minutes stop trying to think for themselves to solve a problem and just like, well, I'll just ask for the answer. You know, if you, if you If you're in a university. Yeah, it's so interesting because it's so much better. Yeah. If you're in a university and you get one-on-one time with your professor and you say, I mean, let's use coding as an example.

Hey, how would I code a binary tree to sort X, Y, Z more quickly? The professor would say, well, you know, how would you start? And you have some back and forth and you learn along the way. Well, when you ask Codex or Claude Code, like, hey, I need to search for whatever as quickly as possible in something less than three seconds. Can you build it for me? It just goes here. And so once you start to use AI and quickly learn, oh, it just will do it for me. Human beings have evolved to offload as much cognitive stuff as they can so they can, you know, run away from the Sabretooth Tiger. I don't have time to think right now. I got to chase, get away from that thing

and find some Barry's deed. Right. So we'll do all the cognitive offloading. Anything will let us do. and AI is, hey, you don't need to try anymore. I'll, like, answer it for you. And it's already happening significantly. I think that's going to get a thousand times worse. So I'm like, one of the things I worry about is as AI becomes even better, how do we make sure people are still learning? It sounds like a simple thing to ask, but it's going to be, it's going to be, for

parents who don't pay attention. to their kids and the way they learn and how they learn, they're not going to learn. They're just going to, they're not, they're going to go, this thing will tell me the answer. I don't have to try. And is it, so are you predicting the end of thinking? I'm predicting the end of thinking for a lot, for a large segment of humanity. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's alarming.

I mean, it's so effective. I mean, if you said that 10 years ago, you'd be like, well, people are going to still think. of course they'll still think. But it's already happening. You see people, they, I'm telling you, this paper, you know, thousands of people with as little as 10 minutes using AI, they just stop, they just stop trying. They're like, well, I don't need to ask how to do this. I'll just say, what's the answer?

Do you think, right, yeah, and also I know from my own behavior, the kind of memos or whatever that I whip up or that AI whips up for me, why would I ever want to go? back to writing those myself, but actually something is lost in the offloading, as you say, probably. Yeah, well, you learn by making mistakes and screwing things up and then you find out things along the way, right, that you wouldn't, that aren't, you learn things that aren't the thing you were trying to learn in the process of making mistakes and screwing things up and trying and, oh, that's interesting, this funny thing happened. Right, the serendipity of the journey.

Yeah. So which are the companies that survive then? You know, Open AI, Anthropic, GROC AI. Do you have a sense of which ones are here to stay? It's very, so there's a thing that's super relevant to right now, which is that once again, the Chinese models, and it's different ones on different days, have emerged again as, hey, these might be getting. better a lot more quickly than we thought, and they're not nine to 12 months behind.

In fact, they might not be that far behind at all. And there's a group of people that will say, well, they're basically going and distilling anthropic and what I mean. But what distilling means is their AI is just going and asking anthropic millions and millions of questions and taking them for itself and, you know what I mean, basically stealing anthropic, if you will. Right. So distilling is essentially, you're going in copy.

being anthropic by just having billions of bots go ask your questions and steal it. You're trying to do it a sneaky way and it blah, blah, blah. And anthropic or open AI can't stop that? Well, it's like it's like spam, you know, like now I'm doing, you block or bots on Twitter. I block it over here and now it comes in over. So there's lots and lots of ways to do this. However, there's another group of people that are like, it's too good to have distilled

anthropic. It's better than anthropic in these kinds of things. It's a little bit worse than these kinds of things. The point being, these open weight Chinese models are very quickly becoming, I'll boil it all down. The point is, these open weight models, and in fact, all the models are very quickly becoming commodities and all the same. And you can sort of look to a year from now or two years from now or three years from now, and say, these things are all going to be, they're all going to be just as good.

And if that's true, and the open source, you know, pick whatever, you know, version nine of this particular Chinese model that's great at coding is two cents for, you know, 10 million tokens. And anthropic and OpenAI are, you know, trying to make money and are spending all this money on compute in the U.S. and data centers and blah, blah, blah. And they're $10 for the same amount of tokens. Enterprises are going to go, well, I want to pay two cents because I'll be much more profitable if I pay two cents. So there's a sort of reckoning that's on the very near term horizon here for whether Open AIA and Anthropic and GROC and Gemini from Google and, you know, Lama from Facebook are going to be, you know, profitable businesses or something else. else happens. And that's something else is arguable, right? What is it? Do they go into some sort of

new business model where they're like, oh, we can't charge for token use anymore? Like we, you know, we can't charge $200 a month for XYZ. We have to be in the, I don't know, workflow automation business or something. Or do they go to the U.S. government and go, hey, you need to take a stake in us and then, you know, yes, we can't charge as much as we were charging to enterprises, because People will just use open source models, but you should only use us at very expensive rates for the Department of Defense because otherwise the Chinese models will, you know, be hack up, we'll hack into our Department of Defense systems and blah, blah, blah, all by way of saying, if these things are all commodities and Open A& Anthropic are spending as much money

as the, and Facebook, sorry, and meta and Google and GROC are spending as much money as they're spending, they're not going to be able to be profitable doing what they're doing and they'll have to do something else. And whether that's the government regulating stuff and only using US models for government contracts or something else happens or they go into a different business, who knows. But it seems to be true that these things all are headed to be in commodities. And are they all going to be? Assuming some American companies do survive, do you have a sense of which one at the moment is in the lead? If you were to put money on it, if you were to go to Calci?

Yes, but it changes. I mean, Anthropic is the answer. Right. Okay. They were smart about the way, they were smart about the business to go into. They've got a great team. The product works. Mike Krieger there was the chief product officer,

and I think as the chief science officer, was co-founder of Instagram is a, you know, fantastic. I mean, all these teams have great people, but he's just, he's just very, very good. But having said that, it changes. You know, a year ago, it looked like it was Open AI. Now, GROC's got a great coding model and it has the, you know, that's the ability to go bring in the cursor folks there and have, who are obviously great at this and build out the GROC coding model.

So we'll see. They certainly keep leapfrogging each other. It looks like Anthropics in the lead right now. The digital world was supposed to bring everybody closer together. We appear to be living through what we're told is an epidemic of loneliness. Yeah. It's definitely pushed people further apart. Right. Yeah.

I mean, all you need to do is go to a restaurant and look at couples who are both on their phones. Right. Like while they're sitting there right across from each other on a date or whatever. I think it's... So is there a solution? Can tech provide a solution for that? AI's making that worse too, as we're already seeing. People are like, well, I'm just going to have an AI girlfriend because it's not going to,

you know, she's not going to tell me she doesn't want to go out with me. I'm never going to get rejected. And I'll just develop this relationship with this AI. You know, you would have thought that was still years away. It's happening all over the place already. You know, people have these relationships with some AI. bought, which seems crazy to probably you and me, but it's happening everywhere. And we'll just get, obviously, there'll be more and more of that.

So there will have to be some sort of a societal, like, hey, man, enough is enough. Like, no one's talking to any, we're not talking to each other anymore. Is the regulation? The new inventions are making this worse, not better. Like, the glasses are like, wait, now when I'm looking out at the world, it's going to have a layer over it. That's, like, popping up the next dance, like dance move or like, oh, That's Rebecca, you know.

And then then you've got people like, I don't want to talk to anyone wearing these glasses because they like are creepy. And meanwhile, the creepy people are like, look, I know. I'll know. I know. That's Joanna Coles right there. It's crazy. But it's not going to get, that's not going to make it better.

Right. Okay. So you actually not, you're not two thumbs up on human communication going forward. Or do you think we'll figure it out? I'm two thumbs up on communication going forward. I mean, look, if you can think, and you're. you know that like, hey, AI, AI is here to make it all easier for me, and so I don't have to try. And then you know that, you go, okay, I'm not going to use it for stuff like that because I don't

want to stop thinking. So I don't use it for things like, give me the answer. I use it for things like, hey, I'm trying to figure this out. Like, you know, how, like, give me the first step and how to do that to think about how you would go do something like this. Even for things like cooking, I'll just say like, hey, how would you, if I was trying to do this and this and this in this particular meal I'm trying to make, how would you think about getting started with this and why? And then I'll, oh, that's interesting and I'll think about it. Okay, so you use it as a kind of companion, not an answer. We are on a text exchange, which I find hilarious. It's a group of four of us. It's incredibly well informed. I'm the least informed person. And I'm wondering if that's also the way that social media goes, that people just inevitably form their own little groups. Yeah, I'm seeing more and more of that.

Right. I think that's a hopeful outcome. And I have several of those kinds of communities. There's little groups that are great. Little WhatsApp chats. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then you can get different perspectives from people,

which I found really valuable with the ones I have in Europe. Yeah. Someone will probably, someone will come up with some sort of platform to make that easier, or not that WhatsApp's hard, because it seems like the right way forward for having thriving conversation again. Okay, we have a question here from a viewer who says, is the internet dead? It definitely seems like it's headed in that direction. The short answer is, I think the internet is dying because people are just going to these AI

platforms now and asking their question, and they don't have to go search. So if the internet is dying, what do Open AI and Anthropic and Grok and everything, what's the new stuff that they search? They have to pay or find their own way to use these data companies like Micro One and Handshake and Mercor and others to go help them aggregate the data they don't have. Like, for example, I need to learn about oncology and I don't know anything about this particular pancreatic cancer mutation. But here's a PhD, you know, candidate from the University of Washington who's written a thesis on this. We'll go interview him and pull all that data into our platform and now we know everything that that person knows. So there's a lot of that going on.

And they'll be going and creating new information. Correct. Right. Okay. That is actually happening right now. So final question. Will social media sites ever be able to actually clamp down on? I mean, I've completely stopped on X now because it's all bots.

The short answer is it's possible. The longer answer is it's expensive and hard. So it's just a question of the willingness to do it. And I think that Elon is learning that it's a lot, you know, or finding out, I don't know whether he's learning. He's finding out that it's not as simple as you, it's not as simple as you think it is. Dick Costolo, it's always good to see you and it's always good to get your opinions. Thank you for coming in to talk to us.

Happy to do it. Big thanks to Dick Costolo for joining me. And next Friday, I'll be talking about the future of sports and technology with Vivek Rana DeVe, the co-owner and the chairman of the Sacramento Kings. And great fun to sit alongside Hortside if you have the opportunity. If you want the chance to have your prediction read and responded to live on air, Leave us a comment with the hashtag America 250 on this YouTube video or head to beast. combs slash America 250. Reminder that by posting with hashtag America 250, you agree that the Daily Beast may include

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