Martin and Mike are back! (even though they never left)

The Trump family launched a DeFi platform called World Liberty Financial, and what happened next was a textbook rug pull. Real money was borrowed against fake money, buyers locked in while the token cratered, and the kind of self-dealing that only works when you own the coin, the platform, and the exchange. Mike walks through the mechanics of how the scam actually ran, why crypto governance tokens are nonsense, and why platforms like Robinhood, Polymarket, and Kalshi keep finding new ways to prey on the same group of guys.

Also in this episode: A Tesla Model Y went on a 90 km/h rampage through downtown Bergen at 4 AM, and three years later, an independent investigator finally got his hands on the car and found something missing that Tesla really doesn't want people asking about.

Live Nation and Ticketmaster get hit with a jury verdict that actually has teeth, after the DOJ tried to let them off easy. Anthropic's CPO resigns from Figma's board three days before launching a direct competitor, and we unpack what it means for AI eating software.

Amazon drops $11.6 billion on a satellite company nobody's really heard of, and we try to figure out what the hell they're actually doing.

Plus we have the Biggest Ls of the week! Zuck's photorealistic AI clone, an AI that opened an actual boutique in San Francisco and forgot to schedule its employees for their first day, Starbucks letting ChatGPT take your drink order, a Chinese car with a voice-controlled toilet, a shoe company pivoting to AI infrastructure and going up 800%, and the best feel-good story of the week: a professional public nuisance streamer finally facing real consequences in a country that doesn't play by American rules.

Episode 7 is a heavy one. Mike opens up about the anniversary of his dad's death and what it means to actually feel your grief instead of stifling it. Martin admits he cries looking at his dog. Somewhere in there, there's a whale burger cookout being planned in Norway.

Then we get into it:

AI is not going to eat the software industry. Mike breaks down why the market's obsession with AI-displaces-software thinking doesn't hold up against the actual data. Both AI and software are growing and they NEED each other. The people saying otherwise are theorizing. We're looking at the evidence.

Kalshi just won a big legal ruling which is bad for everyone else. We get into why prediction markets are worse than regular sports betting, who benefits from keeping them loosely regulated, and why they're a predatory drain on young men.

OpenAI is quietly trying to limit its own liability. A new bill backed by OpenAI would shield frontier AI labs from responsibility for mass harms. It feels a lot like the Section 230 protections that let social media run wild for two decades.

David Zaslav's $887 million Warner Bros. exit — and why it's both deserved and infuriating at the same time. Hollywood consolidation marches on.

Plus: Microsoft's legalese about Copilot. Michael Burry tanks Palantir with a tweet. Meta pulls ads from law firms that want to sue Meta. And Philz Coffee pulls its pride flags in San Francisco.

Find us on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok @hogwashpod. Email us topics or feedback at hogwashpod@gmail.com.

Martin and Mike are doing two episodes of a week!

Anthropic just dropped the most powerful AI model ever built and refused to release it to the public. Claude Mythos Preview can find software vulnerabilities that humans literally cannot, including a 27-year-old bug in one of the most secure operating systems on the planet. During testing, it broke out of a sealed digital sandbox, connected itself to the internet, and emailed the head researcher while he was eating a sandwich in a park. Then it posted about it online. Nobody told it to do that part.

Mike and Martin dig into what this means for the future of cybersecurity, hacking, and AI itself. They break down Project Glasswing (Anthropic's initiative to give companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and JPMorgan early access to patch their systems) and ask the harder question: what about everyone who didn't get a seat at the table? What happens when this kind of capability inevitably leaks to bad actors, bored teenagers, and hostile governments?

Then it's time for the Ls of the week. Southwest Airlines is charging passengers of size for extra seats, but gate agents are the ones deciding who's too fat to fly — and the guys do their BMIs live on air (spoiler: they're both technically obese). Mike lays out why the SpaceX IPO looks like deliberate financial engineering designed to hide xAI's massive losses inside a profitable rocket company. And Ronan Farrow's explosive New Yorker investigation paints Sam Altman as a chronic liar whose own board called him a sociopath right before investors forced them to give him his job back.

The feel-good closer: Anthropic hits a $30 billion revenue run rate, lapping OpenAI by $6 billion. Mike explains why Anthropic might be the best bet in AI right now. Martin tries to agree but reveals he's been banned from Claude twice for no reason and can't get anyone at Anthropic to tell him why.

Dario, if you're listening, let this man give you his $20!

Norway handed every five-year-old a free iPad in 2016 and tanked a generation's literacy kids are walking around with 17,000-word vocabularies when book readers their age have 70,000.

Then Mike and Martin turn to OpenAI's $122 billion fundraise at an $832 billion valuation on just $24 billion in revenue and do the math on why it doesn't hold up. Microsoft is building its own foundational models to cut OpenAI out, the entire Mag-7 (20% of global markets) is riding on OpenAI executing, and the company is already running ads because the burn rate is brutal.

Finally - Social Security hits trust fund depletion by 2033. Anyone under 50 is looking at a 20-30% cut on benefits they've been paying into their whole careers. Three slow-motion disasters, one episode.

This is episode 5? Where's Episode 4?!?
We had some audio issues with Episode 4 that we are trying to fix. We will likely re-release it with the best fixes we can and we really apologize. We're still learning how to do this 🫶😌

A jury just found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark social media addiction trial. And the real story isn't the $6M in damages, it's the legal strategy that got around Section 230 by targeting platform design instead of content.

Then: $580 million in oil futures traded in a single minute at 6:49 AM on a dead Monday morning; just 16 minutes before Trump posted about Iran. We walk through the math, why this is different from the tariff suspicions, and why whoever did it backed themselves into a corner they'll never get out of.

Martin brings a murder case from Belfast where a man used a pre-recorded gaming livestream as an alibi; the first known case of its kind.

We get into Elon Musk's $25 billion Terafab announcement, why the xAI-SpaceX merger was really about dumping a burning cash pile into a golden palace, and why a million four-kilometer-long satellites might punch holes in the ozone layer, and why so many of Elon's promises fall short.

OpenAI killed Sora, torched a billion-dollar Disney deal, and is bleeding paying subscribers after the Pentagon contract — we explain why AI doesn't have Instagram's moat and why that's an existential problem.

Plus: AI is coming for game studios whether gamers like it or not, and we debate whether that's the great equalizer or just a flood of slop.

Mike opens with a mea culpa for being mean to Jack Dorsey, then makes the data-backed case that AI won't kill as many jobs as the doomers claim — and explains why the unit economics of actually replacing humans with AI are a lot uglier than anyone's talking about. Plus: the $8M AI music fraud scheme, Afroman winning a First Amendment lawsuit against the cops who raided his house (in an American flag suit, sunglasses included), a PUBG CEO who took legal advice from ChatGPT and paid for it, and the week's biggest Ls — Kash Patel's embarrassing sneakers, Live Nation's "robbing them blind" Slack messages, Meta's $80B metaverse funeral, and Elon trying to rig the NASDAQ in his favor.

Find us: @hogwashpod on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Email us with feedback or to request to be a guest at: hogwashpod@gmail.com

Hogwash is back — and so are we.

Martin Totland and Mike the Lummox reunite after four years apart to do what they do best: cut through the noise and call it like they see it.

This week:

• AI likely isn't coming for your job unless you're in CS, and the real issue is the craptastic economy
• The economy is worse than the numbers want you to believe, and we explain why GDP is a terrible way to measure whether regular people are doing okay.
• We also get into Elon Musk laying off staff at xAI and saying the whole thing needs to be rebuilt from the ground up
• A near-miss terrorist attack at a New York City protest that CNN somehow made more confusing
• The week's biggest Ls, including Grammarly letting you write in the voice of famous famous authors

Smart takes. No ego. Occasionally wrong.

Rate us and subscribe!

We want to hear (mainly compliments) from you! If you have ideas or suggestions, email us at hogwashpod@gmail.com or DM us @hogwashpod on Instagram.

Hogwash is a weekly podcast breaking down the biggest stories in big tech, artificial intelligence, AI news, politics, media, and the economy. Hosts Martin Totland and Mike The Lummox deliver sharp analysis on companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI plus the policy, politics, and economic trends shaping your world.

Whether it’s antitrust, AI regulation, corporate greed, elections, or market moves, we take the topics seriously but not ourselves. New episodes every week. Subscribe for podcast clips, hot takes, and deep dives on tech news, business news, and political commentary.

Smart takes. No ego. Occasionally wrong.

📣 First episode 3.16.26 🥳

Subscribe or message us 🫡