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

George Hahn connects the dots across the week's biggest stories: what happened when Trump banned three news outlets from the White House, how Meta's new AI agent leapfrogged ChatGPT to the top of the App Store, and how Iran and Canada might turn the midterms against the GOP. Plus, Scott discusses whether America's safety net has been cut too thin. We’d love your feedback as we build this show! Let us know what you think: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:43Speaker 01

  Hugging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It To Me, how to mind your manners. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:13George Hahn?

  Welcome to the week from Prop G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn and it's Friday, September 25th. Today, the White House shuts out three news outlets and CNN gets a new owner. Then, how Meta's AI agent got to the top of the App Store. And finally, what Iran and Canada mean for the midterms. Let's get into it.

• 1:47George Hahn?

  To start, last Friday, President Trump banned CNN, MSNBC, and Politico from the White House. Reporters from those outlets showed up to find their badges no longer worked. The other networks, Fox included, pulled out of the White House press pool in solidarity. Here's what Scott and Jess had to say on Monday's raging moderates.

• 2:08Jessica Tarlov?

  All the footage is going to come from the White House. That's exactly how they want it. And it's crazy to me. I was watching Scott Bassett this morning with Joe Kernan on CNBC. And you know, Kernan likes Trump a good amount. It takes a lot to get him fired up. And he is fired up about this assault on the First Amendment. And Bassett said, you know, I don't really know the details. I was away when this happened. You know, they're all so spineless. But this quote from Trump, it just, it just sticks with you and it sits on you. Like, how did we get here? He says about what's going on, it's sick. I mean, there's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stuff. Now, if they want to write them, that's fine, but I don't have to let them in my,

• 2:52Jessica Tarlov?

  into the people's house, into my, the people's house. It is not your house. You are a short-term tenant. You are a renter, at the very least.

• 3:02Scott Galloway?

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

• 3:46Scott Galloway?

  at some point, these, these press briefings are just going to look very sad and very weird. What do you think's going to happen here?

• 3:53Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, they all already have banded together. So there, no one is covering today. So UNGA is not going to be without a press pool. And the White House Correspondents Association statement, I thought was great. And the thing that stuck out to me the most is when they wrote, "This is about more than the rights of journalists. It's about the right of the American people to receive a full and independent account of activities, policies, and decisions of whoever occupies the nation's highest office." And Republicans know better. I mean, lo and behold, that has been the, the message or the, the biggest truism of the entire Trump era, that they know better.

• 4:33Jessica Tarlov?

  But majority of them just feel like their backs are up against the wall and then they have to dig in.

• 4:39George Hahn?

  The same week CNN was shut out of the White House, its sale to David Ellison's Paramount cleared its biggest hurdle. 12 states settled their lawsuit to block the deal. Ellison's family is close to President Trump and CNN will soon report to him. Ed Ellison spoke with Semaphore's Rohan Goswami on Tuesday's Prop G Markets.

• 5:01Ed Elson?

  The concern now, given what happened over the weekend with Trump essentially banning CNN from the White House because he doesn't like the way that they're reporting, just reporting and just covering what's actually happening. The concern will be that, I guess, David Ellison will move in more of a Fox Newsy direction or move into a more of a pro-Trump direction in order to get CNN back into the White House. And that might be the editorial direction. And I, of course, that is what a lot of people also worried about when it comes to this deal. Is there anything about this deal that should put those concerns to rest? I guess my question is, how unmitigated of a win is it

• 5:43Ed Elson?

  in terms of David Ellison and his editorial control over these properties?

• 5:49Speaker 05

  Ellison is, based on the conversations I've had with folks who know him well and who have been advising on this deal, is, I think, genuinely mostly focused on turning around a business that has already been encumbered with a huge amount of debt that he is adding more debt to. And so, any decision that reduces the cash generative potential of CNN, which does, I think, throw off $500 million to $600 million worth of EBIT annually still, would be monumentally stupid. Ellison is not going to want to do anything that undermines the business value of the assets that he bought. So I do think the business realities actually protect CNN as is, a fiercely principled and largely independent newsroom,

• 6:30Speaker 05

  with of course, a lot of editorial and opinion people who irritate the president and who frustrate the president, but which do incredible reporting day in and day out. Ellison has no business reason to meddle with that. Now, absolutely, I could see a world, and it is his right as the owner of a business, where if there are more, there are issues that he personally feels strongly about, Israel being the chief and most important one to him, where you could see a world where he intervenes or steps in. But in terms of actually diminishing the value of that asset, I don't realistically see him doing that, not in the short term. Longer term, five, 10 years from now, it's anyone's guess. But he's got to keep this ship together. Underplaying, diminishing CNN from a business perspective doesn't make a lot of sense.

• 7:10Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 7:10George Hahn?

  Next, Meta. While OpenAI and Anthropic have been arguing about whether AI could end the world, Meta released an AI agent built for everyday life. It's called Muse, and it passed ChatGPT to become the top free app on Apple's App Store in the US. Scott predicted last year that Meta would be the most important AI company. On Monday's Prop G Markets, he explained why.

• 7:40Scott Galloway?

  Well, it's several long times, if you want to build a trillion-dollar company, you have to do one thing, you have to build a time machine. And that is you have to give people time back. And when you download Muse, you're like, you log in using your Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp, so it immediately knows you. So it's already benefiting from the first-party data that another company would take years to build. It knows where you like to eat, who your friends are, where you live. And it doesn't, it's also taking AI from defense to offense in the sense that it doesn't wait for you to tell it what to do. It, it takes about basically three clicks from the download to the Ideas tab where it begins telling you how it can help.

• 8:21Scott Galloway?

  So for example, it will proactively find and cancel random subscriptions you forgot about. It will turn your inbox into a daily schedule. It will track travel fares. It can even make calls on your behalf. So. When you think about all the drama and the AI doomerism coming out of Anthropic, it's kind of opened a pretty big void for these guys.

• 8:44George Hahn?

  One of Meta's rivals is already pushing back. On Tuesday's Prof G Markets, Ed Elson walked through what that could mean for the AI and tech landscape as a whole.

• 8:56Ed Elson?

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

• 9:41Ed Elson?

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

• 10:15George Hahn?

  OpenAI and Anthropic have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building AI. Meta's hit came from an app that's free to download and that most people already had an account for. On Thursday's Prof G Conversations, Scott asked CNN's Fareed Zakaria what Muse's rise means for the rest of the industry.

• 10:39Speaker 06

  The Meta app is now the number one app on the App Store. What does that tell you? It tells you that we are now getting price competition at every level. And the entire race that the hyperscalers, the Googles, the Microsofts have been engaged in has been on the theory that there are what we would call network economics at play here, right? Like that the person who gets there first or the person with the best AI model becomes like Google for search, becomes like Microsoft for software, becomes like Meta for social media. They rake in all the profits. They have monopoly pricing power, and that's why they're spending these crazy amounts.

• 11:21Speaker 06

  But what you're seeing is actually there's going to be competition. Anthropic and OpenAI are going to compete at the closed-end model level. There's going to be competition among the open weight models. There's going to be competition everywhere. And so it does make me wonder, are we seeing a moment of truth for these massive expenditures that are taking place?

• 11:44George Hahn?

  We'll be right back.

• 11:51Scott Galloway?

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• 12:54Scott Galloway?

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• 13:39Scott Galloway?

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• 13:55Scott Galloway?

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• 15:16George Hahn?

  Welcome back. The midterms are 39 days away. The prediction market, Kalchi, gives Democrats a 62% chance of winning the Senate and a 92% chance of taking the House. On Tuesday's Raging Moderates, Scott told Jess he wished the election were tomorrow.

• 15:37Jessica Tarlov?

  I too wish the election were tomorrow. A lot can happen in, what do we have, 42 days? But it does feel like the tide has turned against the Republicans en masse. There was a while where it was just more of a Donald Trump problem, and it wasn't trickling down as far down ballot. And it does feel like there's been some pretty significant movement in the last couple of weeks. The trade war with Canada is certainly part of that, but I really think that it's the war in Iran that is weighing on people's minds. CNN had a new poll out this morning, over two-thirds disapproval. Caitlin Collins tried to ask President Trump about it this morning, and he was pissed

• 16:21Jessica Tarlov?

  off that CNN still had access to the UN. He was like, I thought I banned you guys, but they're still allowed to cover because of the UN, which is a good thing. More transparency is always a bonus. But two big moves in the last day or so, Mike Rogers and Ashley Hinson, so pivotal races, Michigan and Iowa, on the Republican side, posting that Donald Trump has got to end the war in Iran. And this has, you know, been, especially Ashley Hinson, very much behind the president and what he wants to do or what he's going to accomplish there in Iran. Mike Rogers, the last couple of weeks have been slightly more tepid, but this is a real line in the sand.

• 17:05Jessica Tarlov?

  Like, we got to get out of there if you think that we're going to be able to win any of these elections.

• 17:12George Hahn?

  We're seven months into the Iran war, and oil prices are beginning to bite. JP Morgan's commodities team has stopped publishing a baseline forecast for oil and says it can't model how the war with Iran ends. Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kepler, tracks where every barrel goes. On Wednesday's Prof G Markets, he told Ed Elson where prices go from here.

• 17:39Speaker 07

  The concern really is that we do get escalation once the midterm elections are out of the way. And that escalation being, you know, whether it is Trump trying to define his legacy in terms of boots on the ground or whatever that may be. It's just very difficult to see how we see an end to this conflict here. The kicker to all of this really is that, as you mentioned, there were all prices around sort of $98 here. On the product side of things, we're seeing them absolutely ripping, you know, on a retail basis in the US. Diesel is at $6.50 a gallon. You know, that's up sort of 75% year-on-year. We're really starting to see that biting in terms of inflation, but in terms of everything, right, that those higher costs work their way into.

• 18:23Speaker 07

  But just in terms of the Strait of Hormuz, the ironic thing is that we've been seeing oil prices rising over the last month. Well, we've actually been seeing improving volumes coming out of the strait as well. And so there's more barrels getting out, but I think it's the risk premium involved that is the, that's what the issue is, is that while there's increasing flows, there is an increasing chance that you're going to get hit by Iran there. And I think that's the main option that Iran has, right, to deter these flows or keep leverage over the strait. And so I think on a certain level, we should expect them to be doing more of that going forward here.

• 19:00George Hahn?

  Then there's Canada. The European Union just invited Canada to become the EU's first associate member, and President Trump called that a hostile act. Fareed Zakaria told Scott on Thursday's Prof G Conversations that the trade war is hitting American carmakers hardest.

• 19:20Speaker 06

  The largest producer of cars in Canada is Ford, which is our largest producer of cars. So we're crippling our national champions. And so Canada has to find ways around this problem. And what Mark Carney has been really brilliant about is saying, I don't have that much power. I'm a much smaller country, but I do have flexibility. And I'm going to take what power I have and create a better situation for me where I'm not as dependent on this hostile and unpredictable superpower. So he's made a trade deal with India, made a trade deal with Europe. And as you say, even with China, the result is the Chinese are essentially entering the Canadian car market in a way that they would never.

• 20:04Speaker 06

  So if the American car industry gets expelled or becomes unaffordable in Canada, it is going to be replaced by the Chinese car industry. And the Chinese are showing other countries, in a sense, the way to get around this, which is treat America as the problem and increase free trade with everybody else. So you get more growth. So it's terrible for us both economically, but it's also terrible for us geopolitically, because the single biggest beneficiary of all this is going to be China. I mean, China's car industry is going to take over the world now.

• 20:40George Hahn?

  Canada also came up on Wednesday's office hours in a question from a listener in Edmonton. Her daughter moved to the US and thinks Canada's safety net kills ambition. She asked Scott how America could strengthen its own safety net without losing its edge.

• 20:59Scott Galloway?

  So where are we in the US? We believe and actively promote in winners versus losers, which means more risk to the downside and more risk, if you will, to the upside in a good way. The question is whether it's gone too far. And the result is a series of expenses and anxiety and depression among young people because of a total absence of a social safety net or a reduction in it such that we can continue to fund this transfer of wealth from the young to the old. I would argue that it's gone too far. I do believe that shelter is a basic human right for Americans. Or just more basically, I don't even like saying the term human right. A lot, you know, there just aren't enough rights to go around for what's deserved or enough resources to give every individual the human rights that we all like to think they deserve.

• 21:43Scott Galloway?

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

• 22:26George Hahn?

  That's the week. I'm George Hahn. We'll see you next Friday.