TikTok Ban, Journalists Have Ethics?!, and the Gods of Cannes 37:58

I'm Ben Smith. I'm Naeem Araza. And I'm Max Tani. Max, you're here early. Yes, and I'm going to steal Ben's line. This is Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media. Good job. You said it better than he does. This is the whole problem.

Today we're doing something a little bit different. No guest here because we have Max Tani from beginning to end. It's like when the besties hang out in the All In podcast, except we have a lot fewer billions. Which one am I? Am I the heel? Are they all heels? I feel in racial profiling. I'm Chamot. But we are in a squillionaire spot. We are taping this live from the south of France.

for the Cannes Lion Festival. We're going to be talking about a couple of things that are missing at Cannes this year. One of them is any fear of the TikTok ban. Senior executives of the social media platform are here as are an array of influencers, Tyla, Teffy, etc.,

But no one but Max Tani seems to be discussing the TikTok ban, so we will be talking about it. And the other thing that seems to be missing is Will Lewis, who at the time of this taping is the CEO of The Washington Post. Hmm, but that might not be the case by the time that people hear this. We don't really know. We'll take bets on that. I think he's going to be okay for two more days, but I might look really stupid.

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All right, before we dive in, let's give some color about what Canline is because it is actually the money that powers the media machine. It's one of the real media hardship assignments, and I'm sorry to have dragged you guys out here. Kicking and screaming. It's essentially...

an advertising business conference in a beautiful Riviera tent. But what I kind of actually like about it and find interesting is that there are three sets of companies that you're really familiar with here. There's a huge tech giants, TikTok, Meta, Google, Pinterest, Snap. There are big journalism companies. The New York Times had a huge presence here, as does every other brand you've heard of except the Washington Post. Sorry.

And the entertainment companies are here. There's a lot of, I would say, maybe not absolute A-list celebrities, but like hustle and low A-list celebrities here. And the reason they're all here is because this is where the advertising dollars are. Lots of celebrities. And I would not necessarily call them not A-list. You have celebrities like Jessica Alba. You have...

Allie Love from Peloton, Kenan from Saturday Night Live. He's definitely A-list. He might be the next, you know, Lorne Michaels for all we know. The most brand safe celebrity, John Legend is in the house and performed beautifully. He's at multiple different events. He literally attends panels as a guest, as we reported in our newsletter, just like random celebrities.

that he's attending to kind of learn more about marketing. This is a place where companies that spend the rest of their year in public focused on talking about technology, focused on talking about journalism, focused on talking about entertainment,

where they show what the business they're in, which to varying degrees is advertising. And they are all here to worship the feet of chief marketing officers. The gods of Cannes are CMOs, as they're known in the business. And the place revolves around them, and that's who the celebrities are here for. That's who the fancy journalists are having dinners for. And it's this one week of the year when the shape of the business kind of reveals itself. They're all

kind of here for each other. They're buying and selling, but yes, those are the money bags. This is your first time out here, Naeem. I'm curious kind of how you found it because it's a strange situation. I never really understood why the French hated Americans.

until this week, I would say. Which is that if you've ever had the pleasure of being in South of France at any point, it's generally beautiful, like kind of unadulterated visions of beautiful sea line, the highway down. It's stunning. And now it's just LED screens, billboards, drunken executives at some point, and everybody's walking around talking in English. So you're saying it's because they hate capitalism? Well, no, but I think

Max hates capitalism right now because the other day he told me this place is turning him into a socialist. Max, explain yourself. You know, I'm not a particularly radical person. I like nice things. I spend too much money at restaurants. I spend too much money on clothes. I like going on vacation, all this stuff. But I really do feel that CanLion brings out a side of me in which I feel that, you know, all of this advertising is

in service of mostly kind of meaningless stuff. All of these panels and everything you go to is about how to optimize your business for getting people to buy things that they don't want. And that's kind of a failure of our whole system. That's how I feel for at least one week out of the year.

There are a lot of these kind of circuses around the world where you see this at the Correspondence Center. You see celebrities, you see executives. The thing that's very conspicuously missing here is anybody from government. I haven't met a single person, a single regulator in town. No one from the White House, no one from Congress shows up at the Cannes Lion Festival where all this money is being exchanged, which is probably somewhat related to our first story, which is that

Here we are. TikTok has a big presence at Cannes. And the fight over TikTok is heating up in the United States. In the last several weeks, there have been two lawsuits that have been filed against the law that would end up banning TikTok from app stores if ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, doesn't sell TikTok to a U.S. owner before January 19th, the so-called TikTok ban. The FTC also issued a statement saying that an investigation uncovered reason to believe that TikTok and ByteDance were in violation of COPPA.

This is the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which is one of the few online and digital privacy legislations that actually exists in the United States. And yet nobody at Ken Lyon is talking about

the potential death of this big business. Max, you seem to be one of the few people who's up in arms about it here. It's so strange that a major piece of legislation passes that would ultimately fundamentally alter and certainly threaten the future of this company. And yet it is acting like there's been no change whatsoever. They have a big tent set up in the exact same place as last year, and they didn't mention it at all at

their press conference, they alluded very vaguely to it, but they talked mostly about innovations that they have in the AI space. And didn't you see this funny TikTok and look at how brands could work with the platform? And it was a bit surprising to me. So I asked their president of global business solutions, Blake Chanley, basically what he thought about this. And it was a very kind of simple question, just noting that the US government, the president had just signed a bill putting ByteDance on the clock to sell TikTok. And

And he basically said he's not hearing about anything like that from advertisers and nobody's really mentioned it, though it is, of course, the obvious question. He said it was the obvious question when you asked it, even though it hadn't been asked in any of the other questions that preceded yours. So it's kind of a strange situation where everybody seems to be ignoring it and acting as if it's business as usual. Meanwhile, in the United States, people are freaking out. I mean, listen to this TikTok video from one of the eight creators who's filed a lawsuit against the government. The costs are being covered by TikTok.

but you'll get a sense of their main arguments. This is infringement upon our First Amendment right. As Americans, we should be free to choose whatever app that we want to use. The government...

does not have the right to tell us what we can't use, especially when they have improved or provided evidentiary evidence to show the danger of said app that is unique to TikTok and not common on the other social media platforms. Right. So I'm fighting against it because that's what you do as a patriot.

If there's nothing else that we do, we stand for the rights that we were given by God. Hmm. The rights that we were given by God. Good legal briefing here. And I mean, should we talk a little about the sort of the swirl of conspiracy theory? Yes. I mean, I think the thing with TikTok is that it's the subject of real conspiracy theories. And, you know, who knows? A lot of it is unknown, maybe real conspiracies. There's a belief at the top levels of the U.S. government that it is a Chinese conspiracy to influence Americans.

American citizens in various political ways. This is something that the CEO of TikTok, Xiuqu has addressed in congressional testimony. ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government. It's a private company. But of course he would say that, right? Meanwhile, legislators are offering us conflicting accounts. Some are coming out of these briefings that we are not privy to, saying that they're alarmed. Others, like Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs, are coming out saying that they haven't seen anything that suggests

you know, this level of concern that is different to any other social media company. Because what we know is that the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence in the United States, says that TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm were reportedly targeting candidates. But this is something we see on every social media platform, right? On Facebook, on, you know, on Twitter. This sounds just like what that other TikTok guy said.

Well, I mean, I do think that we have yet to see the evidence. That's true. But it's also very plausible. And we know that ByteDance in China has accessed information about U.S. journalists who were spied on by TikTok and ByteDance. And so, you know, there is definitely cause for concern, but the jury's out on this one. I wish that TikTok was bold enough to actually use this as its pitch to marketers. Like, look, we are so good at getting people to do things that the U.S. government is tantalizing.

terrified of us and it's terrified of our influence. And that's how influential we can be for your brand. Facebook succeeded with that pitch for a while. We were all out there flacking for Facebook when we were saying how powerful it was.

Yeah. And that's the second conspiracy. The concern is that not only is TikTok potentially being used for espionage, but it's being used for propaganda. It's seeding preferences and perspectives on everything from the Israel-Gaza war to what music you should like. And it's why, you know, musicians can't get in the top 10 anymore. It's that it's

It's kind of this idea that they control everything. They are the puppeteers of the next generation, as it were. Mostly true. That's why people here at Con are still really obsessed with TikTok. And I think to some degree, wishcasting, that all this U.S. government stuff is just theater, that it's never going to happen, and that they're going to be able to keep marketing. It's really, it is striking here. Well, the U.S. government stuff really turned on at the midst of the Israel-Gaza war and the college protests in the United States, which breathed fresh life to this generation.

divest or ban effort that had been in play for a long time, but was resuscitated early this year because of everything happening in Israel-Gaza. Also definitely true. You know, you look at the studies and you look at all the information that gets put out, surveys, and it says that while some people are obviously using TikTok to get their news, the vast, vast, vast majority are not. And so this idea that the Chinese government is using it to subtly

push in one way or the other. It just cuts against what Americans are saying in terms of where they're getting their information from. There's an argument for privacy and the information that they're collecting on people. But as far as a tool of influence, do we actually think that people are getting their perspectives from TikTok in a way that's moving the needle in any sort of way? Well, I think that where you saw that happen was in response to this ban, right? Where actually TikTok was pushing, lobbying,

its users to call up members of Congress and demonstrate how they felt on this, which is something that you could see a lot of companies kind of pushing and lobbying efforts pushing. But TikTok was able to get a bunch of young kids calling, screaming, some threatening violence or suicide in rare cases to their congressional representatives, some of whom were not old enough to vote, right? So that you do see, I think, the influence. But for the most part, I do think that

TikTok is as much like it's a reflection of the culture. It's that algorithm. It's like the, it's getting you deeply in yourself and your interests and your machinations and not puppeteering Gen Z to act a certain way. Yeah. The move that you're describing, which was when TikTok told everybody to call their congressman, was the worst act of political malpractice in the history of that kind of Washington lobbying. They're basically saying, hey, look, we're not playing politics. We're just an engine for youth culture.

And then they've got a bunch of tweens calling members of Congress, pushing a policy, and it turned the government just massively against them. It was just this kind of unbelievable unforced error by them in what was already a very difficult situation.

And I think that is why, you know, you really do have a consensus now in Washington. It's so alien to the conversation here and it's so striking. Yeah. It's been thought that this ban won't happen because Donald Trump, who, of course, initiated talk of the TikTok ban under his presidency, actually did a flip-flop on this because of his proximity to Jeff Yass, who's a major TikTok investor. That is actually a conspiracy theory, the idea that some donor is going to change

the direction of his administration's policy. Because the thing to realize here, and our colleague Morgan Chalfant has a great story about this this week, and I was just talking to her about it, is it's not that Trump is going to get into office and decide, should I ban TikTok? He's going to get into office and decide, should I proactively come in and intervene to save TikTok, withdraw the lawsuits and unroll this stuff?

And he's surrounded by people whose idea it was to ban TikTok, who are focused on banning TikTok, who promise they're going to follow through on banning TikTok. He's promising confrontation with China. Just see no reason to think he's not going to go through with it. The courts might stop it, but I was actually surprised that TikTok's rivals aren't just licking their chops about this.

And the other thing you excluded from that is he's also surrounded by a bunch of people who want to buy TikTok, too, who would love to take it off of his hands. Steve Mnuchin, his former treasury secretary, was one of the first people who came out publicly and said he wanted to buy it. If you believe the conspiracy that he could be influenced by this one donor, there's a lot of other noise to suggest that that may be more complicated. Yeah.

Yes, Donald Trump has proven to be an unreliable partner for many. And the idea that he's going to come rushing in to save TikTok is hard to say. But I think that there are a couple of winners, no matter how this thing plays out. It's estimated that Meta would draw up to 60% of the ad revenue that TikTok has if there was a ban, while YouTube could

take another 25%. And on the day of the announcement of his ban, Meta's stock actually went up. That's true. Another winner of this, I think, could actually be, counterintuitively, the Chinese government. Because the way this is being reported in China right now...

This is in China Daily, so take it as you will. But throughout the kind of Chinese state-run media machine, you see this kind of description. This is by a gentleman named Tom Foddy, who is an Oxford-educated British journalist who's published in all kinds of state-run media. I think he's been banned from China Global Television Network, but

Otherwise, you do read his byline a fair bit. He wrote, the idea that the U.S. believes it has a right to extort a company into selling a hugely successful operation is an act of extreme arrogance, entitlement, and unbridled callousness. Not only does it illustrate the absurd levels of irrational paranoia and McCarthyism that have gripped Washington, D.C., but also the total lack of respect it has for China and its

people, using the auspices of the Communist Party of China as a justifying premise for anything in the country they do not like. And the way this is being set up, not just in China, but in an increasing part of the world that is under, I would say, the Chinese sphere of influence, is that the U.S. has long presented itself as this kind of like holder of free expression and capitalism, and now is the greatest hypocrite

in this world. And they're undermining what has been like a big part of the global order in the last 20, 30 years, which is America's soft power, America and the kind of Washington consensus and the Western liberal values as a kind of vanguard for where the world should head to. And that I think is a really interesting part of this TikTok ban. So I'm glad you have a favorite Chinese state media columnist. No, but I think your friend obviously has a point that

Not my friend. Tom Foudy is not my friend. And the real and most obvious conspiracy here is just we're shifting from this big open internet to an internet where there are national champions, where countries are favoring their champions. You know, we talk about the winners being Meta and Google here. These are huge national American companies that, by the way, are much more experienced and much more...

compliant, partly through having been burned a lot of times with U.S. government regulation than TikTok is. I guess the question is, is a greater threat to national security for the United States to have TikTok continue to compete in the United States, become over time a kind of irrelevant or passe social media platform, or for the United States to kind of

of be this idea of hypocrisy in the rest of the world. Oh, this is a country that has interfered in foreign elections, right? Like it has a long history of interfering in Latin American governments, et cetera. This is a country that, you know, sold us exactly what it wanted to through Hollywood. And now they're stripping away the rights of this foreign thing. So we'll watch how these lawsuits play out. You know, we will be watching. The people in Cannes, it seems, will not be watching. All right, comrade, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.

Modern Marketers is a new podcast from Think with Google, featuring Google marketing veterans Josh Spanier, who you know from this show, and Bethany Poole. They chat with some of the biggest names in their industry, the people behind the campaigns that really leave a mark. They get into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to launch great creative, take calculated risks, and stay relevant in the ever-changing world of marketing. You'll learn a ton about leadership, making tough calls, and how to shake things up within your company.

That includes episodes with Uber's CMO on creating a great Super Bowl ad that everyone remembers, and Zola's CMO and CEO on building a brand with strong values. If you're a marketer at any level, check out Modern Marketers by Think with Google, available wherever you get your podcasts. So noticeably absent from Cannes is not just the TikTok conversation, but also a gentleman, Will Lewis, who we talked about a couple weeks ago on this podcast, who at the time of this recording is the CEO of The Washington Post.

but someone who's become really embattled in recent weeks. Yeah, you know, Will Lewis arrived in Washington with a storied but pretty complicated reputation as a cleanup guy for Rupert Murdoch after the phone hacking scandal, among other things, before he was a successful CEO of Dow Jones. And

On arriving at the Post, he was welcomed, the newsroom loved him, and then he violated a very important American journalistic tradition, which is that the Washington Post wrote a couple of stories about Will Lewis, that mentioned Will Lewis, that mentioned he had been Rupert Murdoch's cleanup guy after the phone hacking scandal, that he was implicated in a lawsuit.

by Harry and Meghan and many other victims of phone hacking. And Lewis didn't kill those stories, but as Max Taney first reported, people at the Washington Post started getting edgy about distributing the stories. Sally Busby, the former editor, has told people that Lewis expressed displeasure over the stories. And that just violated this really like sacred, weird American tradition that you show your purity by reporting independently on yourself, which Lewis is not the British tradition and he apparently did not like.

Right. And that, of course, like as every good story does, like let open the crack where the light came in, David Fallon Flick came in and said, oh, he tried to exchange a story with me when I was going to write about him. And, you know, he was always the cleanup guy, but there had been this allegation that he ordered the deletion of millions of emails. And

It's unclear if that was in the process of following up on the company's email security policy or if it was in a way, like as it's been alleged, to kind of cover up the News of the World hack. And as the words email security suggest, this is a 15-year-old exciting but old story that had been laid to rest in the UK and that

Will just kicked over the rock and it is now being reinvestigated, particularly by the New York Times, which I believe has like a 50-person team in London embarked on an 11-part series. And you know what? This principle of journalistic independence is important and important to American journalists and particularly important to the way the Washington Post thinks about itself.

And he really did violate it. And it's really a huge problem for him. But the machinations of the story, why it's fascinating is like, why is this the story? Because the lead of the story is the Washington Post was losing subscribers. People were no longer interested in the Washington Post. And now it's the media story of the moment because there was all this stuff kind of

living in the light of day, and then somebody with an ax to grind, somebody who had kind of cause to make this into a story. And the media's utter desire and love of reporting on itself. And also like upholding and fighting for these ethics that are guidelines. They're not like in England, these are regulated in large part by the law, which is very specific around journalism. So it can be, as you've said, Ben, a trade. But in the United States, these are like

code of principles, a kind of like unwritten rules are codified by various institutions and they're on their web pages that American consumers, media consumers think journalists have ethics in the United States. They would think that they don't. One of the questions here is to what degree American journalists really do hold ourselves to the standards that we aspire to. And really historically looking back, how real that has always been. I mean, Lewis is accused of

of being part of a culture that hired private investigators to obtain people's phone records, and particularly private investigators who misrepresented themselves, who lied about their own identities on phone calls to get information, which they call, charmingly, blagging. Yeah, and also paying for sources. And the British press has a practice of paying for stories, particularly when they think they're in the public interest, and sometimes just, you know, because they're great stories. And I guess that there's a question here of how...

how really outrageous this is, even by American standards.

Well, I mean, I think that obviously these have developed over the years, particularly in recent years in the time since Watergate, which, of course, was broken by The Washington Post. And if you take a close look back at Watergate and at the reporting, you'll see that Woodward and Bernstein actually did very, very similar things to what Will Lewis has been accused of. The thing that's kind of interesting to me is, I mean, I just really ultimately think that this is pretty major comms.

screw up by Will Lewis. I don't know if it necessarily is entirely to do with the journalistic ethics, because of course, one of the ironies here is that Woodward and Bernstein, who are responsible for some of the greatest acts of American journalism, and of course, the acts that still define the Washington Post today, actually did some things that by today's standards would be pretty unethical, which also included illicitly obtaining phone and banking records and impersonating other people

obfuscating, getting way too close to sources. I mean, these are things today that wouldn't fly. And I think that would get them both fired from the Post. But in the time of Watergate, got them awards and lauded. Right, exactly. And so I think that the problem here is it's twofold. One, it's that the Washington Post has had a really, really difficult run over the last few years post-Trump. It's lost a lot of subscribers and a lot of viewership and traffic. And I think people are pretty on edge and they're scared about the changes that will, Lewis.

is going to have to put in place to kind of keep this place afloat. And of course, Will Lewis himself underestimated the amount in which people are nervous and suspicious. And, you know, if you are tense and rude, even in the name of tough talk, which is kind of how he put it, that people weren't going to respond particularly well to that. And so I think that that's ultimately the kind of confluence of things that's really shaping this.

This whole thing started because Will Lewis offered Sally Busby the job of moving from executive editor of the newsroom to the editor of a third newsroom, a third newsroom that would be separate from news and opinion, but actually be kind of a social media desk, but like the social first news content across social media platforms.

And this is, I think, amazing because Sally Busby saw it as a demotion. But I have to say, and this might be a generational thing, I see it as a promotion. I think every newsroom should actually be looking at doing a first. Oh, you've been spending too much time in Karen. Really? Yeah, this is a PR stunt to put the social media people under a fancy editor so you can go out and sell advertisers that you've got some new innovative thing.

third newsroom with some video. But actually, but this is where people are, you know, what is it, 20 to 30% of Americans are getting their news on social media. And how many people are reading the, you know, 14,000 word Evan Osno's profile of Joe Biden and the New Yorker versus seeing a tweet or seeing an Instagram post?

Will Lewis isn't here, but maybe you can go on his sales calls because there's so many marketers here eager to hear about the Washington Post. Maybe he's going to offer me the job that Sally turned down. You can run the fourth newsroom, which is the most interesting stuff in the Washington Post, which of course is its coverage of itself. For a long time, these things have been seen as service desks to the print journalism, but it might be that print journalism becomes the service desk to putting out the great Instagram content of the Washington Post or the TikTok guy.

I think you and Will Lewis will have a good time selling that on the beach next year. I won't be back, Ben. I will not be back, but we will take a quick break. In this week's segment sponsored by Think with Google, I visited their studio on Google Beach at Cannes to chat with Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about the impact AI will have on creatives and advertising. I'm Ben Smith from Semaphore. I'm here at Cannes with the VP of Marketing at Google, Josh Spanier. Josh, thanks for...

Thanks for taking the time. Bonjour Ben. So on stage here at Cannes, there's an enormous amount of optimism about the use of AI, particularly the use of AI in the creative space. There are companies up and down the beach here seeing a very kind of optimistic and profitable future for AI and marketing.

Privately, enormous amount of anxiety among creatives in particular that AI could replace them. I'm curious how you see that tension, how you see the future of AI in advertising. Cannes this week is feeling a lot like the Oprah, famous Oprah moment. You get AI, you get AI, everyone gets AI.

And I'm actually really, really excited. I see AI as a tool, a tool that's going to unlock all sorts of opportunities for us to do things in more interesting ways. I think AI is going to unleash creativity across the board to enable us to do all sorts of things that we never can conceive of.

I understand there's sort of fear out there right now, but this year already, it feels like we've moved from last year, which was all about the wow of AI, to more of the how of AI. So we're seeing on stage from my own company, Google, all sorts of new features and products which are enabling marketers to really reinvent and rethink how they do their creativity, how they uncover insights, and how they measure their campaigns and deliver results.

the media, top to bottom. - Anything specific you're doing with Google? - So just this year, we worked on our Pixel phone campaign. We used a Google tool called Demand Gen to generate 4,500 different creative assets, which flowed across all of Google's advertising services from YouTube and beyond to actually drive brand preference and actually sales of Pixel phone. That sort of scale, that sort of creativity isn't possible in a manual, always-on world.

And the irony of it all, given all the doom and gloom headlines, is we've needed more people to actually execute that work at our agencies, more creative minds to actually imagine and help the machines scale our ingenuity and possibilities of what we can do. It's been really exciting. All right. Now, time for Blindspots, Max.

You've been here from the beginning, so we feel like we know everything. But what is not known? What's bubbling up on the left and right? We do not know. There's plenty that we all don't know. I mean, we've been swimming in the world of advertising and marketing. And because we're six hours ahead, we have a weird connection to the news cycle. But the big story in celebrity slash fashion media this week is Paul Meskel's shorts.

This week, Meskel pulled up to the Gucci menswear show during Milan Fashion Week wearing a pair of Gucci striped cotton shorts, which he described as a, quote, cute pair of shorts. But essentially, they were high fashion boxers. And he told Sam Hine from GQ that he's

a fan of the short inseam, saying that, quote, from my eye, it's to do with proportion, a shorter short with maybe a longer top. And these went totally viral because they're incredibly short shorts and he looks great, but it's obviously kind of a statement. Now, I'm kind of curious, Naima, where do you come down on the, as our resident, uh,

person who is explaining what women's perspectives on men and things that men should think about. As your resident woman, yes? No, as our resident woman who has informed opinions about men. I'm curious if you've seen the Paul Meskel short shorts, what you think about them. Do you think that that's going to break into conservative media at all? Or is this just all, you know, are liberal dudes in New York going to be wearing these short shorts because Paul Meskel is going viral wearing them?

I think it might be a trend amongst a certain generation, but I don't think it's going to last. I don't know that the shorts looked great, Paul. But I'm actually very curious, looking at Ben's face, if Ben has any idea who Paul Meskel is. It's a blind spot for me. Amazing. Paul Meskel is an Irish actor, and he was an after-son. I think he's Academy Award nominated. He's incredible. He's incredible. He's incredible.

He must be in his 20s. Sorry, Ben. He's in his late 20s. I got to hand in my media reporter card. The actual blind spot was who Paul Maskell is. Do I think that the shorts are going to make it? Look, I think short, you know, the weird thing is that this summer is like women's shorts are getting longer, like Bermuda shorts. You're seeing this and the men's shorts are getting shorter. And I can only imagine that Ron DeSantis is getting some legislation ready in the state of Florida to stop this from happening. And he will save America or at least Florida.

From short shorts. I kind of thought that this, I considered this to be a conservative blind spot because this is only the things that coastal elites talk about. But what it really was, sorry, Ben, was an age blind spot. Ouch. Well, why don't you take us to...

Beyond the coastal blind spot, what's happening? What's bubbling up on the right this week that the coasts aren't seeing because they're being so blinded by Paul's shorts and what might be under them?

And the RNC posted a video of him seeming slightly lost somewhere kind of in between standing up and sitting down for about like 10 seconds. And of course, some prominent online conservatives said that he had pooped his pants. The Daily Beast noted that Dave Rubin, who's a conservative commentator, tweeted that he was, quote, pooping or sitting in an invisible chair. While the podcaster Tim Pool blared he, quote, pooped and, quote, holy shit in all caps.

claiming that the president quickly needed to leave the ceremony to clean himself up. Of course, it should go without saying that this is not true and that the president was just kind of trying to look for his seat. But it was really interesting to me because the RNC has gotten really good at posting these quick kind of out of context clips where he's

lost or seems lost. And these have done really, really, really well for them. And they've made their way across social media. And it's basically a full time job for Democrats on social media to push back against these clips and to provide context for them. But of course, we know that that's not how things work on the Internet. I'm curious if you guys have seen and if your feeds have been full of these Republican National Committee clips of Biden seeming lost or losing his train of thought.

Yeah, I have seen these. I've seen them posted also by Democrats. I mean, I think the Twitter in particular acts as just a machine for confirmation bias. And if you think that President Joe Biden is too old, that clip will find its way for you, confirm everything you already thought, and you will reshare it. It's interesting because, of course, for all the fears of artificial intelligence,

and distortion. The real thing melting all our brains right now is very selective, old-fashioned video editing. And even Andrew Ross Sorkin had some comments that had come out of like 80 CEOs went and met Trump. And a couple of them had mentioned to Andrew Ross Sorkin that Donald Trump was meandering in his points. And that was also lifted a little bit out of context on the left where people were kind of saying, oh, he was meandering in the ways that, you know, kind of a

look, you say this about Biden, but it's happening to Trump too, when in fact it was a very different claim. So I think this is just happening everywhere. I almost wonder, like, does any of it matter? Is there any signal in this noise? Because Americans look at this and they kind of, there's no new information. There's no reporting. And they're seeing something they recognize as overreacting

Yeah, I mean, I think if anything, the reporting isn't going hard enough at trying to sort of block out that noise, which, as you say, is self-fulfilling nonsense. And I think it's important to think about that.

and get a real sense of how's Joe Biden doing? What is it like to spend a day with him? My proposal is the White House just let Max come spend a day with Joe Biden and then he can tell us how he's doing because these clips are just unbelievably misleading garbage and

Also, the president is being kept pretty protected by his staff from us really knowing the answer to that question. Well, first of all, I will say I just want to publicly say that I would absolutely be willing to spend a day with President Joe Biden. I just want to put that out there for our podcast listeners, many of them in the White House, 100 percent, of course.

But I think one of the other issues here is when the White House has given access, it's not necessarily to these kind of people who are ubiquitous or the people who can kind of reach the largest audience. We say that, you know, he did a short interview on SmartList, but there were like a bunch of other former presidents there. The Howard Stern. Yeah, Howard Stern.

He's given the most access to Evan Osnos, who you mentioned earlier in the episode, Naima, which is, you know, for these long, windy New Yorker profiles, which are totally fascinating and which talk about how coherent he is. But how many Americans are actually reading something like that or paying attention to it? And is that enough to kind of counter out these things? I have my suspicions. I have my doubts about that.

Hmm. See, well, when I'm editor of the third newsroom, you'll have content that you can read delivered by Max Tani, who I will poach from you, Ben. I'm happy to go on TikTok and make TikToks with Joe Biden for as long as TikTok exists for our third Washington Post newsroom. All right. Before we run, quick prediction. Will we still have the job by the time people are hearing this episode or will we just sound completely out of touch?

I predict that he will, but that the guy he's brought in to nominally run the Post in Britain, Rob Wynette, will not. I think that's become a bit of the conventional wisdom over the last few days is that Rob will not be getting the job and that Will will stay on. But Bezos put out a note supporting Will Lewis, and I'm going to go the opposite direction. I'm going to say they've all bought into the newsroom has gone too far and Bezos is going to stand strong behind his guys. Behind both of them.

I think he's going to stand behind both of them. Naima, what are you thinking here? I thought it's funny because Bezos, it's like a bit of a Rochard test. I don't feel like Bezos' letter was so standing behind Will Lewis either. It was kind of saying nothing. It was like the art of word salad in an email. The ethics will be upheld, but also we can't do what we've been doing, but it won't change the ethics.

And so I think it's a note for everyone to stand down and Jeff is going to do what Jeff wants to do. So it will be, you know, it will be Will Lewis, Rob Burnett, and then myself in the third newsroom. I think that's the future of the Washington Post.

You will lend prestige to that newsroom, which will be your job. But it seems like maybe you guys have also become a little bit socialist here at Cannes in the sense that you believe in the power of the workers to overturn the will of managers. Oh, I think that that's what they're most excited about. I'm sure Jeff Bezos is like, I'm excited for the people I do not need to buy out because they will leave in protest of this. And so goodbye to you all. You squeaky union, you know, woke union havers. Just

That's the door. See yourselves out. I'm just impressed by how fast Max got from socialism to Gucci and back. I contain multitudes. All right. That's it for today from Socialist Max, Comrade Naima, and Ben, ever the capitalist. Thanks for listening to Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media. Our show is produced by Max Tani, Alison Rogers, Alan Haberchak, Joe Stross, Shina Zaki, and Andrea Lopez-Crusado.

with special thanks to Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, and Jules Zern. Our engineer is Fernando Arruda. Our theme music is by Billy Libby. And our public editor is Gucci, who says the shorts can be as short as they would like to be, but this podcast remains a bit too long. If you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And if you really like us, give us a review. If you're watching on YouTube, give us a like and subscribe to Semaphore's channel. And of course, don't forget to subscribe to Semaphore's media newsletter.