When Politicians Ban the Press: A Dangerous Precedent

Ultimize. DraftKings spent years and millions of dollars building an artificial intelligence to identify problem gamblers, and then— this is the beautiful part— they sent them coupons. That's today's show: a casino that finds the sick and sells them the disease, conservatives inventing socialism, a president banning the news, and a Trump discovering shame. One of these is good news. Let's start with the coupons. The New York Times investigated DraftKings and found that in 2023, the company built a machine learning model that scores gamblers by how much they're likely to lose, then aimed $400 million in free bets at the highest scores. A former analyst told the Times, quote, the best investment would be a problem gambler. No kidding. DraftKings disputes the reporting. I get it. It's embarrassing when the math talks. Look, I know I'm supposed to be shocked, but this is a no-duh story. DraftKings cannot market to winners. Winners bankrupt them. The entire business model is find the sucker, feed the sucker. Being surprised by this is like being surprised that Girl Scouts target people who like cookies. They did build a second AI, one designed to spot gamblers sliding into crisis. They shelved it. Of course they did. It kept flagging their best customers. And here's the nuance nobody mentions: problem gambler is relative. Lose $100 grand a year on a million-dollar income? Okay, expensive hobby. Also a problem. Lose $20 grand a year on a $21,000 income? Now everyone agrees, same behavior. DraftKings just files one of them under VIP. I'm a solutions guy, so here's mine. You can't ban gambling, but a decent society taxes it hard enough to unbankrupt the people it bankrupts, and we mandate honest advertising. Every DraftKings ad is guys high-fiving on a couch. Where's the sequel? DraftKings, here's Kevin. He lives in his Hyundai now. Show me the confetti falling on an eviction notice. Show me the guy who parlayed his daughter's college fund into a futon. And skip the disclaimer scrolling by at 300 words a minute. Make the disclaimer the whole ad. Because the honest tagline is simple: the vast majority of you will lose. That's not cynicism. That's the product. Would you like to be the sort of successful person who is dominating news, at least in your industry? Well, if so, it's time to up your skills. At ultimize.com, I've created online courses to help you do that. Now, here's the thing. No obligation. You can get a free course on communication skills, a free course on how to build better habits. All you have to do is go to ultimize.com. That's ultimize.com. No obligation. Go there now. Okay. Moving on. Speaking of losing money on purpose, the federal government, the White House is drafting a plan championed by J.D. Vance, to let married stay-at-home parents collect federal childcare subsidies— money from a program built for working parents redirected to a spouse at home while the other works at least 35 hours a week, reportedly around $9,000. And many conservatives are furious at other conservatives. Dana Loesch calls it the new socialist right. Tomi Lahren compared it to the COVID checks and warned it'll become a giant fraud boondoggle. Angela Morabito, who worked in Trump's own Education Department, called it a gut punch to working mothers. So, let's review. For 50 years, conservatives warned us about creeping socialism— big government checks turning proud, self-reliant Americans into welfare queens. They predicted it under Carter, under Clinton, under Obama— that was mostly about a website. And they were right. The creeping socialism came. Government payments for staying home, Dependence by design. Everything they warned about delivered on schedule in 2026. It was an inside job. The call was coming from inside the movement. This is a 50-year Scooby-Doo episode where they finally pull the mask off the socialist, and it's a guy in a Heritage Foundation lanyard. And I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling other conservatives. And liberals, we should have seen this coming. We're supposed to be the smart ones. We have podcasts. The only people in America who could actually sell a government check for traditional families were the ones who spent 5 decades inoculating themselves against the word socialism. Vision boards work, people. Conservatives manifested socialism. They just filed it under reds. Moving on. From manufactured socialism to actual measurable personal growth. This may be the best news I've seen all year. A Russian businessman close to Putin, Umar Kremlev, which sounds like Kremlin, head of the International Boxing Association, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Don Jr.'s wedding celebrations in the Bahamas. Private island, fireworks. And on Friday, President Trump told reporters, quote, as I understand it, he paid him back. Do you understand what just happened? A Trump felt shame. Paint, secondhand, possibly imaginary shame, but shame. For 10 years, the man's superpower has been the total inability to admit that any line exists anywhere. Indictments? Witch hunt. Impeachment? Hoax. But a Russian oligarch buys his son a fireworks show, and suddenly He paid him back. That is the closest thing to a conscious sighting since 2015. Bigfoot researchers have better footage. As a personal development coach, I'm genuinely moved. This is what we in the industry call a growth moment. Progress, not perfection. Yes, he also said the whole thing was totally allowed. Yes, he suggested Don maybe forgot to run a background check on his close personal friend. Baby steps. Nobody runs a marathon in one day. You shuffle in dress shoes away from a subpoena. Now, do I believe the check clears? Well, okay, I believe the reimbursement gets calculated the way Don Jr. calculates everything— generously toward himself. Private island, fireworks, 2 nights of celebration. That's basically a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese for 7 10-year-olds, right? Here's $98. But mark the date, September 18th, 2026. A Trump acknowledged kind of sort of that a line exists. Put it in the gratitude journal. And on the very same day as that growth moment, he banned the news. CNN, MSNBC, and Politico banned from the White House effective immediately. By Saturday morning, the reporters were at the gate getting their badges deactivated. Asked why now, Trump said, quote, it's really just cumulative stories over the last 2 years. You get sick of it. That's not a legal doctrine. That's a Yelp review. Is it despicable what he did? Obviously, it's straight from the dictator's starter kit. It comes right between the flag pins and the balcony. But here's my honest take. I'm not sure it matters. Those 3 outlets can cover the White House beautifully from the sidewalk. What exactly did they lose? Access to officials who lie about everything all the time? That's not a source. That's a decoration. They could just get file footage of Trump and just say Trump again lied about everything today. Trump has been clear for over a decade. News is either positive about him or it's fake. Look, every president hates criticism. I hate criticism. My wife has notes on this monologue, but No leader in American history has said out loud that criticism, all criticism itself, is fake. That's the legacy he's building. And it only works if you have the full Big Brother package. He doesn't, not yet, because there's one outlet he can't ban. Reality doesn't carry a badge. Reality shows up at your house in the gas prices, in a mortgage payment that jumped $900 in a month. In wars going sideways on the evening news, you cannot deactivate a grocery receipt. And in a country where anything close to free elections—that story ends the same way every time: your party weakens, and eventually you get hounded out of the building. So maybe honest advertising comes for politics too, because the White House ad is already written. This administration. The vast majority of you will lose. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much. See you tomorrow. Ultimize.