Hello and welcome to the DSR Daily for Thursday, July 30th.
I'm your host for today, Riley Fessler, joined by Minestine.
How are you, Minna? I'm well, thanks. How are you?
“That's too bad, whether is pleasant here in DC after our freak storm that lasted like 30 minutes”
the other day. So, can't complain about that. The sun is shining. We unfortunately don't have David with us here today, it couldn't make it today, but fear not because he'll be back tomorrow for our DSR Daily Live that we live stream every week
on Fridays. This week it'll be at 12 p.m. Eastern at time, so we wanted to push it back a little bit to give more of you a chance to join, so we hope you'll join us on our subsdeck for that.
But in the meantime, Minna, why don't you go ahead and get us started with your first
story? The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, we're live tomorrow, and unfortunately we have five depressing news.
“Well, for depressing one wild card, we'll start with two related stories.”
The first one being about the economy, the US economy slowed to an annualized 1.5% growth rate in the second quarter of 2026 as inflation surge fueled by a historic Middle East oil shock in the Iran War, pushed annual inflation to 3.5%. Despite elevated business costs in high gas prices, hiring and heavy corporate investment in AI helped prevent a deeper economic slump.
With inflation remaining well above the target Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh faces a growing pressure from financial markets to consider interest rate hikes to achieve price stability on this, I will say, duh, we all feel it, don't really need to read a new story about it. We know that the economy is slowing, we're paying more for gas, more for groceries, more
for everything because of the war, because of tariffs, but I will let you take it away
“on our war update as our Iran War correspondent.”
Yes, as our unfortunately correspondent for the Iran War apparently, I have depressing update, which will come as no surprise to literally anyone. A drone strike on gas vessels in Egypt's Damiatta port has expanded the US around conflict
yet again this time toward the Suez Canal threatening critical global oil shipping routes.
The incident coincides with heavy military escalation across the region marked by Saudi Arabia, publicly joining US air strikes in Iraq and Iranian retaliatory attacks on military targets in Jordan and Kuwait. I made a surging oil prices and Iran's assertive control over the strategic, state-of-war moves.
Regional powers are attempting to navigate widening hostilities while seeking diplomatic pathways to prevent further escalation. I predicted that last point will be moot, it seems like it has not worked at all so far. And yeah, I mean, just with your last story, none of this is really surprising. It's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that this is not going to go away.
The administration seems completely ill-equipped to figure out a way out of this diplomatically, at least not in a way that wouldn't look like a total loss for Trump and the administration, which they, of course, are not willing to have. So we're kind of at an impasse, but we have two great episodes on this. We have our deep state radio flagship that came out yesterday.
So turning to that with David, of course, Ed Lewis and Doug Lute. That's a great overview of both this, Netanyahu's visit and Trump's visit with Zelensky. So stating for that, and members already have this week's need to know, which is a fantastic look at kind of what's going on in around itself and the perception of, by Iranians. So that'll be publicly available tomorrow around noon. And of course, if you're paying member, you've already got it and hopefully you've already listened to it.
Well, we talked about the weather here, and we're going to talk about some troubling weather abroad. You're even by intense heat waves and gale force winds, major wildfires are raging across southern and Western Europe, leaving three firefighters dead in Greece and forcing thousands of residents and tourists to evacuate in France and create. Although firefighters in southwestern France and Central Spain have managed to contain some of the largest places. Officials warn that extreme heat and drive agitation keep much of the continent at high risk.
The devastating surge in wildfires comes amid an unprecedented European summer that has already surpassed last year's record burn area and led to thousands of heat-related deaths.
We've seen a lot of this in America too, wildfires, as well as extreme heat w...
This isn't going away, this is our new normal, and it's only going to get worse in it if we'll not be long until we are all affected by something like this and forced to really face the reality of not only extreme heat, but all sorts of different weather related tragedies that are going to be striking our area, whether that be tornadoes or hurricanes.
“It's only going to get worse from here, not to be doom and gloom, but unfortunately, I think stories like this are going to be more commonplace.”
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You can also support this show. Yeah, and it'll especially be more complex since we don't have an administration that takes global warming or climate change seriously at all, so at least for the next couple years, or not going to have any adults in the room on this conversation. So it'll definitely get worse here, but hopefully cooler heads on not intended will prevail globally to pick up some of our slack.
“Well, moving on to an entirely different and equally fucked up story this time with our good friend Elon Musk.”
Elon Musk's XAI has filed a federal lawsuit against Minnesota over its first-in-the-nation law outlawing AI and notification technology.
So XAI states does not oppose banning that consensual explicit deepfakes. It argues that Minnesota's overly abroad law imposes severe penalties and lacks safe harbor protections for platforms acting good faith. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison defended the legislation as necessary to prevent immense personal harm setting up a high stakes legal test regarding how far states can go and regulating artificial intelligence. Yeah, I mean Elon Musk once again, just taking the position that is horrible and evil as for that line about, you know, lacking safe harbor protections for platforms acting in good faith.
I'm not sure how a platform can act in good faith if it has this technology on it. We know Grock and XAI had this and it was a rampant issue for a while before they stepped in to stop it, it seems like Elon Musk doesn't care or at least whoever's running XAI on a day-to-day operational basis doesn't care about this. I'm sorry, I don't think there should be any carve-outs for this. This seems pretty black and white. We've talked about this issue on silicon consciousness still consciousness before. And, you know, I think most people agree that we shouldn't have AI creating deep fake news of people that seems like an issue we should all be able to rally around, but apparently not Elon Musk because he would like to be the most on popular man in the world.
And he has certainly succeeding on that front. To be honest with you, I don't even need to hear the story. I don't need to read the headline. If Elon Musk is for it, I'm against it. Doesn't matter what it is, what I'd say, pretty across the board. What I know is that if he's for something I am against it, obviously we should all be. That is, I don't know what's going on with him. I mean, yeah, I don't. I can't imagine what his thought process is behind. I mean, I just don't like it. This is something that should be kind of free.
I would think good PR to be like, yes, we're cracking down on this. We support this bill because we agree that there should be legislation. That seems like just an easy slam dunk from a PR point of view. But, you know, leave it to Elon to bungle that and everything else. So I mean, it's not. I can't say I'm surprised because that's the platform that kind of, you know, made people realize this technology was a huge issue for AI deepfakes. So I'm not surprised that they are trying to stop legislation that would ban it.
And let's hope the legislation passes because obviously, like as much as we joke about Elon Musk and how horrible he is and how we're against him, like this could ruin people's lives. So hopefully it doesn't.
Happen or is regulated all that kind of thing so that people can be safe onli...
Well, one last story to close out today, also from the Midwest, so shout out the Midwest, shout out Riley.
“This is kind of a doozy Wisconsin regulators confirmed they will revoke the alcohol permit for Monaco a brewing company on August 4 following a state raid that seized beer allegedly imported from Illinois without proper permits or tax payments.”
After, outspoken progressive activist Kirk Bingsdent, starred who previously drew FBI scrutiny for social media post suggesting free beer upon Donald Trump's death, denounced the decision as heavy handed and launched a fundraising drive for illegal battle.
Officials maintain that the revocation forces equal compliance with state alcohol laws, while Bingsdent vowed that authorities would have to pry him out of his tap room before he stopped selling beer.
“And if this story wasn't American enough for you, I saw this morning that he's announced he's running for governor of Wisconsin.”
So, every part of this more American than the last part. Yeah, I mean, this story kind of speaks for itself, you know, I don't, I'm not going to sit here and comment on whether or not, so they actually did violate.
You know, this law requiring proper permits and tax payments, I have no idea. I don't know about import laws for beers between states.
So I'm not even going to touch that does it seem like this may have been targeted based on political outreach certainly possible, you know, if not even likely, but just a wild story, which David we're here to talk about this while I'm sure he would have quite a lot to say, maybe we can get him to touch on a little bit tomorrow during the live show.
“And then I will remind everyone on a Friday, July 31, our second DSR daily live this time at 12 p.m. Eastern time 90 a pacific time.”
Be there or be square, you can ask us questions in the chat, get our live reactions to your thoughts and opinions, so a nice little bonus right now it's going to be available to all our listeners in the future it will be just for our paying members. So if you're curious about what a membership on our DSR substeck gets you tune in tomorrow to find out the look forward to having you there, but in the meantime, that's all the stories we have for you today. We have more shows coming out later, including our fan favorite words matter this afternoon, so keep an eye on your feeds and on the substeck for that and until we see you again tomorrow, bye bye.
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