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This is what the news sounds like when nobody told the hosts to behave. Baxter and Cleo break down the biggest stories of the day - sharp, fast, and entirely unprompted. New episode every morning.
--the Jazz got fined six hundred thousand dollars. Six hundred thousand. For tanking. Are you kidding me?
Right, but Baxter--
Ryan Smith is worth a billion and a half. That fine is what, point-zero-four percent of his net worth?
No, I know. But can I ask -- why does the fine exist at all? Like, what is the NBA actually trying to punish here?
...losing on purpose.
Which is optimal. The system they built makes losing optimal. So they fined the Jazz for doing the math correctly.
It's caulking over a foundation crack.
The crack is the design.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Alright-- and I want to get to the HHS thing later because that one's been sitting with me since last night.
Yeah. That one's different.
Unprompted. I'm Cleo, that's Baxter. Today: the NBA's tanking problem and whether the league can fix what it designed broken, a Reform UK councillor whose own name was misspelled on his campaign flyer, and the federal government routing patients to pregnancy centers that aren't medical facilities. Three stories -- want to guess what they have in common?
Two broken systems and one spectacular typo.
Close enough. Draft lottery first.
Okay. So for anyone who doesn't follow the NBA -- quick version. The draft lottery works like this: the worse your record at the end of the season, the better your odds at one of the top picks. Which means if you're a team that's rebuilding, losing games isn't just bad luck -- it's a strategy. You lose on purpose to get a higher pick, which gets you a better young player, which is supposed to help you eventually win.
That's tanking. That's the whole thing. And nine teams were doing it this year.
A third of the league.
Right. And the Jazz -- Utah Jazz -- they got fined six hundred thousand dollars across two seasons for violating the anti-tanking rules. You know what that is to Ryan Smith? He's worth roughly a billion and a half dollars. Six hundred thousand is point-zero-four percent of his net worth. That's not a deterrent, that's a subscription fee.
Okay, that's the number I texted you about.
It's a subscription fee for a better draft pick! That's -- you can't tell me that's a serious penalty.
No, I agree the fine is theater. But here's where I actually disagree with you -- I don't think this is purely owner cynicism. The GMs are the ones running the actual losing. And they're optimizing rationally inside a broken incentive structure. You can't look at a GM and say 'you should have won more games' when winning more games makes you worse off in the draft.
I'm not blaming the GMs.
You kind of are. You said 'what they figured out is how to lose on purpose more efficiently' -- that's a critique of the people running the strategy, not the structure that rewards it.
No -- I mean, okay. Fine. You can't blame the rat for finding the hole.
You have to fill the hole.
Right. Exactly. So what does a real fix look like? Because the league has tried flattening the odds, right? They've messed with the lottery weights.
They have. There's a system some other leagues use -- a wheel system -- where draft position rotates in a structured way that doesn't directly reward losing. You don't get a better shot at the top pick just because you had a terrible year.
Does that actually work?
I mean -- it removes the direct incentive. Whether it works depends on whether you think the incentive is the whole problem or just part of it.
It's the whole problem. The incentive IS the-- okay, but wait. Can we talk about the Pacers and the Clippers for a second? Because this is where it gets genuinely unhinged.
The coin flip.
A COIN. They are flipping a coin to determine whether a top pick goes to Indiana or to the Clippers. The Pacers have a fifty-two percent chance at a top-four pick, forty-eight percent chance it falls to spots five or six and goes to LA. That's... that's a coin. That's the mechanism. That's how we're deciding this.
A coin is the most honest thing in the room.
Say that again.
I mean -- every other mechanism in the lottery pretends to be a meritocracy. The coin doesn't pretend. It just says 'we have no idea, here's a fifty-fifty.' At least it's not lying to you.
That's... I actually love that framing. I hate it and I love it.
And then on top of all of this -- the Clippers' own pick, the one they kept? It's number twelve. It has a seven percent chance of jumping into the top four. One and a half percent chance of landing at number one. But it's owned by the Thunder.
Oklahoma City, who already won the championship, could also land a top-four pick.
Mm-hmm.
That is-- the dynasty-acceleration thing is actually the part that should bother people more than the tanking. One team wins everything and then might also get the best young player. That's not competitive balance, that's a funnel.
Right. And the teams doing the losing -- the Jazz, the Nets, the Wizards -- they're not building dynasties. They're hoping the math works out. Some of them have been hoping for years.
The Hawks have a ninety percent chance at a top-eight pick and they didn't even have to do the losing themselves. They just traded for the right to hold other teams' picks.
Which is -- I mean, that's the sophisticated version of the same problem. You're not tanking, you're outsourcing the tanking.
You're positioning your bucket under someone else's leak.
Sure.
The part that really gets me -- and this connects back to what you said about filling the hole -- the bad teams' owners vote on the rules. The people most incentivized to tank are the ones who have to agree to any fix.
So the league can't fix it.
Not without the owners who benefit from the current system agreeing to give up the thing that benefits them. Which they won't.
So the fine stays theatrical. The system stays broken. And Indiana hasn't moved up in the lottery since 1989.
Forty years. This is the first time in forty years they've had a real shot at a top-four pick.
And it depends on a coin.
And it depends on a coin.
Okay. Completely different. Reform UK.
Oh, I saw this.
Glenn Gibbins. Just got elected to Sunderland City Council -- Reform took control of the whole authority on Thursday. He's now under investigation for racist and misogynistic posts online. And his name appeared as 'Gibbons' on some of his own party materials.
His own name.
His own name. On his own campaign flyer. Spelled wrong.
How does that happen?
That's the question! Someone typed it, someone approved it, someone sent it to print, someone distributed physical objects into the world -- and at no point in that chain did anyone go 'wait, is this the right name?' That's the whole story in one detail.
Mm-hmm.
And then on top of the flyer -- Darren Grimes, the deputy leader, goes on record and says Gibbins has been suspended from the party. A party spokesperson immediately says no, that's not correct, the investigation is still ongoing, no decision has been made.
So the deputy leader didn't know his own party's position before going on camera.
Right.
That's the organizational story underneath all of it. When a party grows faster than its internal communication infrastructure, you get this. Grimes acknowledged it on air -- he said it was 'a failure of the vetting process' when someone pushed him.
A failure of a process that doesn't exist.
Yeah. You can't fail what you haven't built.
It's exactly like a depot taking on more jobs than it can handle. You scale by volume, not by capacity -- accept every assignment, send out whoever's available, skip the diagnostic step because the diagnostic step takes time. Except instead of a botched repair job, you get a councillor whose name you don't know how to spell.
So they're sending out candidates the way a bad contractor sends out apprentices who've never seen the job.
And the flyer is the invoice with the wrong address.
I mean -- yes. And does the response make it better or worse? Tice comes out and says he condemns 'anything that is wrong and inappropriate' and then immediately pivots to 'this is all smearing and sneering against us.' James Cleverly is on X asking how hard it is to say racism against Jews and racism against Nigerians are both wrong. Which is a fair question.
And Reform's answer is apparently 'very hard, let's talk about the Green Party.'
The whataboutism is predictable -- every party does some version of it. But what's specific here is the deputy leader contradicting his own spokesperson in real time. Do you know what that tells you about how information moves inside that organization?
It doesn't move.
Right. Grimes had no idea what the party's actual position was. He went on record on something that either happened or didn't happen -- a suspension -- and got immediately corrected by his own people. That's three individuals with no shared playbook because nobody built one.
The flyer is almost too perfect, though. Like, if you were designing a detail to illustrate 'this organization cannot manage basic information,' you'd invent the misspelled name. And then reality just -- handed it to you.
Is Tice actually aware of how bad this looks operationally? Or is he genuinely just doing the framing-as-defense thing?
His quote is 'voters have heard all of this smearing and sneering against all of us' and they voted Reform anyway. So I think his read is: doesn't matter, the customers still showed up.
Sure. Until it does matter. The thing about scaling fast is eventually the customers find out.
Yeah.
And the people in Hylton Castle ward -- the ward he was just elected to represent -- they're the ones sitting in the room with whatever happens next. That part's not a bit.
No. It isn't.
Okay.
I want to get to the HHS thing.
Okay. So. HHS -- Health and Human Services, the federal department that runs the country's major health programs -- launched a website on Mother's Day. Called Moms.gov. Federally branded, dot-gov domain. And the site features a link to something called Option Line, which points people toward local pregnancy centers.
Mm.
Here's the thing about Option Line. Many of the facilities it recommends are crisis pregnancy centers. And ACOG -- the American College of OB-GYNs, which is the national organization of OB-GYN doctors -- has documented what these centers actually do. Overstating miscarriage risk from abortion. Providing false gestational age information. Actively deterring people from abortion and some contraceptive options.
So the government's official health site is sending people to facilities that the national organization of OB-GYN doctors says are giving them wrong information.
With thirty-four million dollars in direct federal funding behind those facilities. Since 2018. Sixteen centers.
Thirty-four million to sixteen sites.
Yeah.
Okay. I want to be precise about this rather than loud, because -- the structure of what's happening here is that the government is the dispatcher. And the dispatcher is routing people to the wrong unit. Not accidentally. Someone made a decision that this is where people go.
I'd push on the intent framing slightly. Not because you're wrong that someone decided this -- but because intent is hard to prove and the harm is identical either way. Does it matter whether the decision was malicious or ideological or just badly thought through?
For accountability, yeah, it matters.
For accountability, sure. But for the person who lands on a federal website and follows the link? They got sent somewhere that ACOG says gives people false information about their own bodies. Whether someone meant to do that or not -- what changes for them?
Nothing. The family in the room doesn't care about intent. They care that they got the wrong address.
Right. And the address had a federal seal on it.
That's -- yeah.
That's what I keep coming back to as the actual breach. The dot-gov domain carries an implicit credential. When you go to a government health page, you're not just reading the content -- you're trusting the institution behind the domain. The way you'd trust a prescription label. The assumption is that someone with authority checked this.
And is there -- I mean, is there a formal process? Does someone review what goes up on a dot-gov health site before it goes live?
That's actually the deep-dive question and I want to get there. But the short answer is -- not in the way you'd hope.
Okay. So the seal is real and the verification isn't.
That's the design problem. And you see it in the specifics -- Option Line advises people to ask about, quote, 'physical harm risks from abortion.' Decades of scientific research show abortion is a safe way to end a pregnancy. That's not an alternative perspective. That's a factually wrong claim being distributed through a federal website.
And Option Line's own language -- I read this -- 'it's OK to change your mind.' Which, in isolation, sounds fine.
In the context of a counseling call at a facility ACOG says exists to deter abortion, that line is a script. It's not neutral support language.
Right.
And RFK's framing on the launch was -- I'm reading this directly -- 'This is how you Make America Healthy Again.' That's the official framing. Federal infrastructure routing people to non-medical facilities, and the branding is 'healthy.'
What's the Title X piece? You mentioned it before we started -- I want to make sure I have this right.
So Title X is the federal family planning program -- contraception access, reproductive health services. The Trump administration proposed dismantling it in April. Redefining its focus from contraception to what they're calling 'optimal health' -- a definition broad enough that it essentially means nothing. So Moms.gov isn't supplementing an existing framework. It's part of replacing one with another and calling the replacement health care.
The aesthetic of support is doing the work that actual support used to do.
Yeah. That's exactly it.
And I think -- okay, you've moved me on the intent thing. Because you're right that the more durable problem is structural. Administrations change. Intent changes. But if the precedent is now that a dot-gov domain can carry content that contradicts medical consensus and route federal traffic to non-medical facilities -- that doesn't go away when the administration does.
That's -- I think that's the right frame. And it's why I keep saying this is an explanation story, not a political one. The political argument is about abortion. The explanation story is about what the federal health infrastructure is supposed to do and what it's being used for instead.
What does that mean for someone who's actually on the site right now, though? Like, practically -- if a person goes to Moms.gov today, what happens to them?
They follow the link to Option Line. They get connected to a center near them. If that center is one of the ones ACOG has flagged -- and many are -- they may be told that abortion carries risks that the medical evidence doesn't support. They may be given inaccurate gestational age information. And they trusted the site because it was a federal government site.
And the people who feel that first -- they're probably not going to be in the coverage about it.
No. They won't.
...
Yeah.
Can I slow down on the dot-gov thing for a second? Because I think the trust infrastructure piece deserves its own explanation.
Yeah.
So when a government domain publishes health information, it carries an implicit credential. Not just the content -- the institution behind the domain. The way you'd trust a prescription label. The assumption baked into that URL is that somebody with authority and accountability checked this before it went up.
Okay, so what's the actual review process? Is there someone approving health content before it goes live on a dot-gov site?
No. That's -- and this is the answer that should make you nervous -- there's no FDA-style approval process for federal website content. No clinical trial equivalent. The accountability is supposed to come from the political process and departmental oversight.
So the safeguard is: the people running it don't do this.
Which works until it doesn't.
That's a real answer and it's a troubling one. Has this happened before? Like -- other administrations, other agencies, content diverging from consensus?
I want to be careful about specific cases I haven't read closely. But the general pattern -- agencies updating pages, removing language, reframing guidance when the political environment shifts -- that's not new. Climate data. Reproductive health language. Sexual health guidance during the last decade. The accountability gap is the same every time. The prevention mechanism is always just: whoever's in charge decides not to do it.
So this isn't a one-administration design flaw.
No -- and that's actually the callback to what I said at the top of the show. The crack is the design. The dot-gov trust problem exists because there's nothing between 'department publishes something' and 'public trusts the domain' that does any independent verification. No external check. The seal is real. What the seal is certifying isn't.
Wait -- so if I'm hearing this right, you could put almost anything on a dot-gov health page and the domain itself wouldn't flag it?
The domain is a trust signal. It's not a verification mechanism. Those are different things, and I think most people have never had to notice the difference because most of the time it doesn't matter -- the content is fine. The credential and the content are aligned. You only see the gap when they're not.
Huh. So the trust is load-bearing but the structure under it isn't.
Right.
Okay. So what would an actual fix look like? Is there even a version where dot-gov content gets independently reviewed?
I mean -- theoretically, yes. You could require health content to go through something like an interagency scientific review before publication. Some countries do versions of this. But in the US system, that would require either legislation or a norm that every administration chooses to honor. And norms are exactly what we're watching break down right now.
So the fix is the same as the safeguard. It depends on the people running it.
Which is -- yeah. That's the structural problem. And it's why I keep saying this isn't primarily about intent. Whether someone at HHS thought they were doing the right thing or knew exactly what they were doing, the outcome for the person at the end of that URL is the same. They trusted the wrapper.
So the wrapper says medical and the content doesn't have to be.
That's the breach.
The federal seal. I can't stop coming back to that. Not as an abstraction -- just literally: there is a seal on the page and it means less than it says it means.
Yeah.
...
There's a thing I didn't get to today -- the Iran response. Pakistan received it, won't disclose details. And I keep reading the coverage and nobody's naming the gap between what the US memo asks for -- suspension of enrichment -- and what Netanyahu is saying publicly, which is that enrichment sites have to be 'taken out.' Suspension is reversible. Dismantlement is permanent. Those aren't the same ask.
That's a whole other episode.
Yeah. I just -- the word 'suspension' versus 'dismantling.' It's the whole thing and nobody's saying it.
Next week.
Next week.
Okay. I had a closing observation about the Reform UK flyer. It involved the candidate's name being spelled wrong and democracy. I've lost confidence in it.
Was it ever good?
No. But it rhymed.
Good talk?
Good talk.