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The men of GLoP are (finally) back and this week, they discuss their celebrity encounters, delve into Amber Heard, Johnny Depp, and the ACLU, the tale of Twitter and Elon Musk, and more.
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Wow, that “illustration!”
Rob should have told Johnny Depp about meeting before. Depp probably would have enjoyed it.
Is there some law or something that says Elon Musk has to pay for the bank loan with money from Twitter? What if he pays for the bank loan with money from Tesla? Or by selling Tesla stock himself, or something?
On the student loan thing, I think there are probably a lot more people who worked hard and paid their loans or didn’t have any student debt, than there are people who want other people to pay their loans for them. But Democrats seem to dangle this in front of their base before elections and then let it go away. This crowd is probably stupid enough to actually go through with it.
I don’t think Jonah understood Rob’s position on the Depp trial. Rob wasn’t supporting Depp because he’d met him. As I understood, Rob had met Depp and had a positive experience, therefore, he was going to side with him in this case.
I used to watch Vladimir Posner on the old Ted Koppel show.
Koppel, a liberal Republican by repute, always introduced Posner as a “Soviet journalist”, and always treated him as if he really were a journalist.
Now, in the Soviet Union, journalism was illegal. Posner was actually a spokesman for the government. So when Koppel asked him questions, Posner would often reply with maddening equivocations, if the Kremlin had not yet determined the Party line on that particular issue.
Nonetheless, Koppel would go on having Posner on his show, and go on treating him as if he were a journalist. Because, I guess, even if this tended to mislead Koppel’s audience about the nature of the Soviet Union, it was the decorous and polite thing to do.
I’m sure Ted Koppel tut-tutted when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire. That was not decorous! That was not polite! Similarly, the GLoPers spent four years tut-tutting the words of another blunt-speaking President.
Ah, the futility!
Rob and (I think) Jonah are concerned that banks may take over Tesla if Elon Musk loses money on Twitter.
But how much is Tesla worth without Elon Musk? I strongly suspect the banks would lean over backwards to make sure that never happens.
Something Charles Krauthammer said, if you don’t get the politics right, you don’t get anything right (or words to that effect). If the Looters’ Party gains firm control of the US government, instead of the tenuous control it has right now, how many rockets will Elon Musk be sending to Mars, anyway?
The Looters’ Party can think of better uses for billions of dollars, like handouts to millions of voters with their, er, hands out. Illegal drugs aren’t going to buy themselves, after all.
I noticed one thing they did not talk about was CNN+.
Did this hit too close to home for Jonah?
Finally! One month without GLOP!
“Slow horses” is brilliant, Rob’s comment made me think about the length of the show, I think he’s right 3 or 4 episodes had been enough.
Another favourite of mine is “Tokyo Vice”. I endorse this show.
Meeting famous people: Many moons ago when I was still an irresponsible youth. I found myself in Mozambique and by chance, I end up manning a boat for a Portuguese film crew that was there filming a “soap opera”. I met the Portuguese equivalent of Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt. I had to make several trips with the boat starting and ending on the beach. On the first trip, I asked the passengers to jump in the water and push the boat, not everybody jumped, but the first to hit the water was the “star”, without thinking, like a reflex. I do think, sometimes, the real character of someone is revealed in situations like that. I never let anyone bad mouth him around me.
On the other hand, you know who Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt are, but we have no idea who you’re referring to.
“Diogo Infante”. You will never hear of him unless you google it. You guys have truly international stars. And the non Americans are international through American productions. Then you have local superstars in India, China, Brazil or Nigeria. But Portugal has 10 million people. Our “big” is very small. They are very normal people.
Rob is wrong that Musk has bet Tesla on his Twitter play. Musks’ current stake is worth upward of $170 Billion and he’s financing only around $20 Billion. It’s probably true that Tesla is overvalued, but that’s probably a good reason for Musk to take a little off the table right now to fund that other approx $20 Billion he’s fronting.
Note that Musk has pointed out that he’s going to depend on less ad revenue and possibly a use a subscription model for more reach. I think the fanatic Tweeters would be more than happy to kick him $1.99/month and, although I haven’d done the numbers, I think that would be a huge windfall.
Especially if each Russian bot kicks in $1.99 too.
Musk has also said people will be able to kick in a small monthly payment to get Verified. If they did that, I might only follow Verified accounts, with possibly a few non-verified users who are clearly not bots.
What if it’s $1.99/month + $1.99/month for every tweet after a certain number of tweets (say 30)? That’d do a lot to eliminate bots of all stripes.
$1.99 per tweet seems like a lot, except for the Kim Kardashians who get PAID $1 million per tweet.
$1.99 buys you a month worth of tweets up to a limit (30? 100?). Then, you pay more for more tweets. Maybe $1.99 is the wrong price point and maybe $1.99 for an additional N tweets isn’t right either, but I think they could monetize tweets and it would make the place better.
Especially if they make it so 10,000 bots can’t all use the same (possibly stolen) credit card.
What am I missing by not having a Twitter account?
Once again, it’s a lot easier to do two “episodes” per month if you don’t wait until more than halfway through to do #1.