"SmartLess" podcast hosts launch new phone company

"SmartLess" podcast hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes, have launched a new phone company, the celebrity trio announced Tuesday.
Called SmartLess Mobile, the direct-to-consumer wireless service promises to be "data-sane and refreshingly BS-free," according to the announcement. The launch represents the first product spinoff for the popular interview podcast, which reaches millions of listeners each month.
SmartLess Mobile is billing itself as a low-cost phone carrier that will save customers money by scaling back mobile data they don't use. "If you're using less, you should be spending less," Arnett said in the statement.
SmartLess Mobile plans start at $15 a month and run up to $30. Customers can lock in their price in for life and won't deal with price hikes a few months in, according to a spokesperson from the SmartLess Mobile team.
The new company is attempting to distinguish itself from other phone providers like AT&T and Verizon that charge higher premiums for coverage. The company's tagline — shared on it's website — befits this mission: "Don't get outsmarted. Get SmartLess."
"If you own your phone, spend most of your day on Wi-Fi, and are on an unlimited data plan, moving to SmartLess Mobile could literally cut your monthly bill in half," said Hayes.
The new carrier will run on the T-Mobile 5G network, with service extending throughout the contiguous United States and Puerto Rico. A map on the newly-minted website showcases the extent of the network's 5G coverage.
The new phone company, which is a digital-only brand, allows people to keep their original phone numbers, according to the company statement. "Most Americans can bring their existing number with them just by scanning a QR code, and the whole process takes just minutes," according to the announcement.
In addition to Arnett, Bateman and Hayes, SmartLess Mobile founders include Paul and Jeni McAleese, leaders in the wireless industry. Paul McAleese, who previously led Shaw Communications, is listed as CEO of SmartLess Mobile on his LinkedIn, while Jeni McAleese's LinkedIn lists her as chief brand officer. The lead investor behind the new phone enterprise is Thomvest Asset Management.
Arnett, Bateman and Hayes join the ranks of other celebrities, including Ryan Reynolds, who have on taken leading roles at phone companies in recent years. Reynolds serves as the face Mint Mobile, which was acquired by T-Mobile two years ago for $1.35 billion.
Australian reporter covering Los Angeles protests shot with rubber bullet by police officer
LAPD chief speaks out about deployment of military forces to anti-ICE protests
Can Trump deploy National Guard without governor's approval?

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

USA Today

an hour ago

• USA Today

KPMG Women's PGA 2025: Minjee Lee wins third career major championship

A champion was crowned in Frisco on Sunday as LPGA pros competed in the final round 2025 KPMG Women's PGA Championship, the third major in 2025 for the women. Minjee Lee and Jeeno Thitikul were in the final pairing but it didn't shape up to be a Sunday duel as Lee was over par but able to fend off all challengers at a golf course that the No. 1 player in the world called "almost impossible" at times. Golfweek provided updates, scores and highlights from the 2025 KPMG Women's PGA Championship: KPMG Women's PGA 2025 live leaderboard Here's a look at the top of the final 2025 KPMG Women's PGA Championship leaderboard. Minjee Lee wins 2025 KPMG Women's PGA for third career major Lee was 2 over in her final round but she was able to fend off all challengers during Sunday's final round. Auston Kim and Chanettee Wannasean each posted 4-under 68s but were only able to get to 1 under. Lee did card three birdies but also posted five bogeys, but it was enough during a windy week in Frisco, Texas. She is the third Aussie to win three LPGA majors. The putt that gave Minjee another major 🔥🏆 Lee is the first Australian to win the KPMG Women's PGA Championship since Hannah Green in 2019. She's the third Australian to win three or more major championships, joining Karrie Webb and Jan Stephenson. Lee is now the 31st player in LPGA history to win three or more major championships. Minjee Lee earns $1.8 million for KPMG victory Earlier in the week tournament officials announced a purse increase to $12 million, matching the U.S. Women's Open for the highest prize fund on tour. For perspective, just four years ago the KPMG purse was $4.5 million. Lee earned $1.8 million for her victory. At the 2022 U.S. Women's Open, she earned the biggest paycheck in women's golf history to date when she earned $1.8 million. (Later that same season, the winner of CME Group Tour Championship in November earned $2 million.) -Beth Ann Nichols Minjee Lee posts back-to-back birdies down the stretch Lee is still 1 over overall in her final round but she has made consecutive birdies on Nos. 13 and 14 to get to 5 under and take a four-shot lead down the stretch in Frisco. Auston Kim has posted a final-round 68 and is the clubhouse leader at 1 under. Lee won the 2022 U.S. Women's Open and the 2021 Amundi Evian Championship. A KPMG victory would be her third major title and 11th LPGA win. Maja Stark breaks putter in frustration Three weeks after Maja Stark hoisted a trophy on a major championship Sunday, she broke her putter at the KPMG Women's PGA Championship. As the wind and heat made for an unrelenting cauldron of pressure, Stark's frustrations boiled over late in the final round. -Beth Ann Nichols Early bogeys not derailing Minjee Lee Minjee Lee has bogeyed three of the first six holes but still leads the KPMG by two. The two-time major winner began the day four strokes ahead of Jeeno Thitikul. In the past 15 years, eight players have held an advantage of four strokes or more entering the final round of an LPGA major and all but one went on to win. Jeongeun Lee6 was the lone exception after leading the 2021 Evian by five. -Beth Ann Nichols Minjee Lee now the lone golfer under par at the KPMG After Jeeno Thitikul bogeyed two of her first three holes, Minjee Lee became the lone golfer in Frisco in red numbers. Lee is 1 over herself after three holes but at 5 under, she holds a five-shot lead. Leaders are on the course Just after 9 a.m. ET, Lee and Thitikul took to the course to start their final round. Lee parred the par-5 opening hole while Thitikul bogeyed it, opening a five-shot lead for Lee. What will the weather be like Sunday at the KPMG Women's PGA? Players have dealt with brutal heat and strong winds to go along with painfully long rounds during this week's KPMG. Unfortunately, it's going to be another scorcher on Sunday. High temperatures will reach the mid-90s, with heat index creeping close to 100. Steady winds will be blowing at 15 mph from the south and could gust up to 30-40 mph at times. How much money does the winner get at the 2025 KPMG Women's PGA? The total purse for this year's KPMG Women's PGA is a record-breaking $12 million, with $1.8 million going to the winner. How to watch the final round of the KPMG Women's PGA

Yahoo

2 hours ago

• Yahoo

Wealthy business-owning Trumpers are clashing with MAGA purists over who should get deported

What's behind President Donald Trump's flip-flop on raiding farms, hotels, and restaurants for immigrant workers? In a repeat of the conflict over H-1B visas, Trump-supporting businesses that rely on immigrant labor are clashing with MAGA purists who see deportation as a key strategy to get higher-paying jobs for Americans. The Trump administration's hardline immigration enforcement is careening headlong into pressure from business owners who stand to lose huge portions of their workforces if President Donald Trump fulfills his campaign promise of deporting millions of immigrants. The deportation crackdown might even be impossible to pull off without undermining the U.S. economy. A series of high-profile raids earlier this month have put a chill on the agriculture sector, with employees now terrified to show up for work, leaving cows unmilked and crops unpicked, Bloomberg reported. Trump has cited complaints from farmers and hoteliers that ICE raids were 'taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,' according to a Truth Social post that presaged a brief pause in enforcement for those industries. The reprieve lasted barely a day, though, with Trump vowing to double down on immigration raids, with an emphasis on Democratic-controlled states and worksites. In a Truth Social post, Trump decreed ICE officers 'to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,' including 'expand[ing] efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.' The following day an email went out directing ICE to continue raids at food and agriculture businesses. The sudden and complete reversal highlights a fundamental schism within the party of Trump: Wealthy hotel, hospitality, and agriculture executives and business owners have complained to Trump about losing a reliable workforce. But the MAGA base and immigration hardliners see the most stringent immigration enforcement policies as a core promise of the Trump campaign. The conflict between the two factions is playing out in real time as workers fear for their jobs and relatives while business leaders—many of whom believed that promised ICE raids would focus on criminals and gang members rather than law-abiding workers—watch their revenue streams go up in smoke. 'Fear is really the common thread,' said Emily Knight, president and CEO of the Texas Restaurant Association, a trade group that advocates for the restaurant industry in Texas, which employs 1.4 million workers. 'The fear is not only the workforce not coming but customers staying home, and what that economic reality is.' Foot traffic to restaurants has been dropping since Trump's inauguration, with a particularly steep drop in heavily Mexican areas, according to data the TRA shared with Fortune. 'It's a ridiculous fantasy that somehow you can deport the immigrants that are doing the work of this country and not blow up this economy,' said Ted Pappageorge, head of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents 60,000 hotel and hospitality workers in Las Vegas at hotels, restaurants and casinos. The group represents a vastly diverse membership with immigrants from some 170 countries. Pappageorge noted that recent rapid-fire policy changes, such as revoking Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, quickly turned 'legal' workers into 'illegal ones.' The change affected 'thousands of workers in the state of Nevada, hundreds on the [Las Vegas] Strip,' he said. 'They had permission; were law-abiding, going to work every day and powering this economy—they had their status revoked.' 'Guns pointed at cows' Immigrants, many without legal status, work throughout the food chain. One in five food production workers—a 22-million-strong chain that stretches from fields to meatpacking plants to restaurants and supermarkets—is an immigrant, according to the Migration Policy Institute and the National Restaurant Association. In some niches, like the dairy industry, more than half the 160,000-strong workforce is foreign-born. It was a videotaped ICE raid on a New Mexico dairy that reportedly changed the president's mind. A routine check on June 3 escalated, and half the farmer's workforce was arrested and ICE enforcers 'even came into milking parlors with guns out pointed at cows,' Beverly Idsinga, executive director of Dairy Producers of New Mexico, told reporters this week. The dairy owner went from 50 employees to 24 employees overnight, she said. 'He's getting high school students on break; he's stopping his farming operations,' Idsinga said. Notably, following this raid and other high-profile clashes including at a popular San Diego Italian restaurant, GOP members of Congress raised concerns to Trump. Rep. David Valadao, who represents California's Central Valley, an agricultural powerhouse that produces 25% of the nation's crops and is known for its almonds, peaches, olive oil, and grapes, said on X the administration should 'prioritize the removal of known criminals over the hardworking people who have lived peacefully in the Valley for years.' 'They need to knock it off,' House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson, of Pennsylvania, told reporters of the administration's targeting of the food sector. 'Let's go after the criminals and give us time to put processes in place so we don't disrupt the food supply chain.' Andy Harris, the Maryland Republican who chairs the highly influential conservative House Freedom Caucus, told reporters Tuesday he supported expanding legal visas for immigrant workers, including possibly creating a new category. 'With an unemployment rate of 4% you're not going to find American workers for a lot of these tasks. You haven't found them even when the unemployment rate was higher,' Harris said. Harris was speaking at a press conference held by the American Business Immigration Coalition, which is pushing Congress to create a new type of long-term work visa for immigrants. That desire runs counter to the policies of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration crackdown, who has been widely described as an ideological purist. According to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Examiner, an impatient Miller urged top ICE officials to 'do more' and, rather than targeting criminals, show up at Home Depot and 7-Eleven and round up people waiting for work. Miller later nearly doubled the administration's arrest target to 3,000 arrests a day. The labor is the point For a sizable contingent of Trump's base, getting rid foreign labor is precisely the point. ' Our position is there should be no carveouts for anyone,' said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for restricting immigration. For FAIR, there is a simple solution to industries who say they can't attract domestic workers: Raise pay. 'You can turn any job in this country into a job an American won't do simply by degrading wages and working conditions. We shouldn't do that,' Mehlman told Fortune. 'Even in lower-skilled jobs, there are a lot of people looking for work at wages that can support their families. We should hold the employer accountable.' Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, also came out against the carve-out, posting a poll on X indicating a majority of respondents disagreeing with the brief enforcement pause and retweeting a farm touting its citizens-only hiring policy. And rightwing commentator Matt Walsh posted, 'Employers who knowingly rely on illegal immigrant labor should be in prison. Instead we're going to back off of immigration enforcement for their sake? Hell no. We can't tolerate this.' Asked for clarification on the administration's enforcement policy, Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to Fortune: 'The President has been incredibly clear. There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE's efforts.' 'Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability. These operations target illegal employment networks that undermine American workers, destabilize labor markets and expose critical infrastructure to exploitation,' she said. What will employers do? What most observers agree on is this: Achieving the stated goal of 3,000 immigration arrests per day is near-impossible without sweeping up people whose only crime consists of unlawfully entering the U.S. The full impact of these sweeps, however, remains to be seen. A Nebraska meatpacking plant that lost 76 employees to the state's largest workplace raid to date has since been inundated with applications for the newly opened positions, NBC reported. And the optics of using a heavy militarized force to arrest low-level workers are turning off a large portion of Americans, according to Pappageorge. 'When you bring the Marines in to arrest dishwashers and cooks and farmworkers it's going to create a backlash—–not just in the industry but among citizens,' he said. Employers bear a large part of the responsibility for the 'broken immigration system,' he added. 'The employers need to come to the table with the labor movement and the Democrats and Republicans that represent these massive industries,' he said. It's uncertain that will happen—at least not in the way MAGA envisions. The last time MAGA clashed with Trump's business supporters it was over H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled immigrants to be hired in the U.S.—at the cost, according to critics, of undermining Americans' wages. Trump, after having decried H-1B visas during the campaign, sided with business in that fight.

Yahoo

3 hours ago

• Yahoo

Conspiracy Theorists Are Creating Special AIs to Agree With Their Bizarre Delusions

Conspiracy theorists are using AI chatbots not only to convince themselves of their harebrained beliefs, but to recruit other users on social media. As independent Australian news site Crikey reports, conspiracy theorists are having extensive conversations with AI chatbots to "prove" their beliefs. Then, they post the transcripts and videos on social media as "proof" to others. According to the outlet's fascinating reporting, there are already several bots specifically trained on harebrained conspiracy theories, including a custom bot designed to convince parents not to vaccinate their children. The news highlights a troubling trend, with countless ChatGPT users developing bizarre delusions and even spiraling into severe mental health crises, as we reported last week. Experts have warned that AI chatbots are designed to be incredibly sycophantic, predisposing them to agreeing with users even when doing so is clearly harmful. Much like delusions of spiritual awakenings, messianic complexes, and boundless paranoia, conspiracy theorists are finding the perfect conversational partner in tools like ChatGPT. Since they were trained on the open web — an enormous data set that includes unfounded conspiracy theories, like the belief that vaccines cause autism — they can easily be coaxed into furthering these theories. As Crikey reports, one chatbot called Neo-LLM was trained by a Texan anti-vaxxer using over 100,000 dubious articles from the far-right conspiracy theory news website Natural News. It's unclear how many users have downloaded the chatbot, but promotional videos have garnered tens of thousands of views. In short, it's an alarming trend that shows the dangers of powerful AI chatbot tech falling into the wrong hands. In particular, people suffering from mental health issues can be convinced they're talking to a real authority, rather than a parroting language model that continuously calculates the probability of the next word. That kind of delusion can have devastating consequences. As the New York Times reported last week, a 35-year-old man — who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia before becoming obsessed with ChatGPT — was shot and killed by police after he charged at them with a knife following a mental health crisis centering on the bot. Since AI chatbots have become incredibly effective at generating convincing-sounding answers, their ill use could have real-life implications. Researchers have shown that AI chatbots can easily be weaponized and taught how to spew an endless firehose of disinformation. With the Trump administration actively rolling back AI regulations and key politicians furthering anti-vaccine conspiracy theories themselves, the future looks bleak. Even tech companies have historically failed to implement effective guardrails to stop chatbots from hallucinating. However, some experts have pondered if the tech could be used for good as well. Last year, researchers at MIT found that chatbots can also be used to reduce the belief in conspiracy theories, a glimmer of hope as the internet becomes increasingly polluted with deranged, AI-generated claims. More on AI delusions: People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions