Five podcast episodes worth 20 minutes this week: a PHP zero-day, Ken Griffin's bubble call, and the last fortnight before November 3
The week of October 19-26, 2026 in five episodes, with the jump points that matter: two zero-days in the language behind most of the web, Ken Griffin calling the AI bubble, the quantum date two chief executives say is already late, and three Pod Save America episodes from the midterms' last fortnight.
Five episodes landed in the seven days to this morning, and all five earn dissection here: one All-In regular episode, one All-In interview, and three Pod Save America episodes from the last fortnight before election day on November 3.
Lex Fridman has published nothing since #502 on September 17, which this digest covered at the time. Acquired's newest is still "Seinfeld," published October 19 and covered in last week's issue. Both shows are absent because they published nothing new, not because they were skipped.
All-In prints chapter marks for its own episodes, so the jump points in its two entries are exact. Pod Save America prints none in its audio feed. Its times come from the chapter list on the publisher's video, which runs a few minutes shorter than the audio, so treat those as approximate.
Start here
| Priority | Episode | Best 20 minutes | Why start here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | All-In — "AI Cyber Panic, Ken Griffin's Bubble Warning, The Fall of France?" | 14:24–34:24 | Two zero-days in the language that runs most of the web, patched a day early after details leaked, plus the cyber chief's answer on how fast this now repeats. 1 |
| 2 | Pod Save America — "Stopping the Steal with Eric Holder" | about 03:02–23:02 | The former attorney general on what the Justice Department and Homeland Security can actually do to a result, and the filings already drafted for it. 2 |
| 3 | Pod Save America — "Fake Polls, Real Wave?" | about 03:03–23:03 | The cycle's last New York Times/Siena poll and the pollster that turned out to be invented, in one block about what the numbers are worth. 3 |
| 4 | All-In — "Arvind Krishna & Nikesh Arora: Quantum Threat, Open vs Frontier AI…" | 00:00–20:00 | Two chief executives on the date quantum computing breaks today's encryption, and the migration that is already late. 4 |
| 5 | Pod Save America — "Vance Bombs at Brutal Town Hall" | about 56:56–1:16:56 | The vice president taking hostile questions from Michigan voters, and the non-answer he gives about corruption in his own administration. 5 |
All-In — "AI Cyber Panic, Ken Griffin's Bubble Warning, The Fall of France?"
Hosts: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg; David Sacks was away. Guest: Nikesh Arora, chief executive of Palo Alto Networks. Published: October 23, 2026, 23:08 UTC. Runtime: 1:43:23. The official episode page carries the chapter list; the original audio is the feed file; the official video is All-In's own upload. 16
Ken Griffin of Citadel told a New York conference on Tuesday that investors are "almost certainly" in an artificial intelligence bubble. His reason was the bill rather than the technology. 7
"Corporate America has been very uneven in its ability to extract value from its AI models." — Ken Griffin 7
Griffin stayed bullish on the long run, calling it a golden era for entrepreneurs. The hosts split on the warning. Palihapitiya puts the concentration in numbers: 1% of companies account for 90% of AI spending, and 80% of that comes from unprofitable venture-backed startups. 6
He says Ramp's chief economist reran the estimate and called it "pretty much correct," and that Ramp gave the show an unpublished chart of how the top 1% of spenders allocate. The slice buying its own GPUs is growing, which Palihapitiya reads as enterprises drifting to open-weight models. 6
Calacanis takes Griffin's point apart from the other side. Startups are the fastest movers toward whatever is the cheapest edge, he says, and they moved the same way to cloud computing and to underpriced Facebook ads. 6
Palihapitiya's anecdote for the diffusion argument: a chief information officer at one of the largest American banks told his team the bank had cut its AWS and Google Cloud spend and built six data centers of its own. 6
Arora joins at 8:19 and explains why a security company prefers open-weight models: it can retrain the weights and read the chain of thought. Regulators in finance and health care want explainability and auditability, and closed models cannot supply it. 6
He also talks the hosts out of the obvious conclusion. Palo Alto runs 10 to 20 megawatts of inference, compute is scarce, and building your own data centers is "kind of an empty threat." 6
"I'm a buyer. I'm a taker of terms, not a dictator of terms." — Nikesh Arora 6
The next half hour is the week's real news. In August, researchers using AI found two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites. The plan was one coordinated patch release on October 22. Details leaked, and PHP moved it up a day. 6
The PHP Foundation's own account is more damning than the podcast version. Wednesday's releases, 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35, fix two flaws that let an unauthenticated attacker execute code on a server. The foundation called the years-long delay a structural failure of its own decision process. 8
The day itself was messy. AWS reported a jump in hacking activity, Cloudflare's chief executive counted millions of attempts, Wikipedia took systems offline to patch, and the NSA and FBI issued warnings. Arora's estimate of the interval before the next one is the number to keep. 6
"10 days is too long." — Nikesh Arora, on how often a scare like this one will now arrive 6
He offers two repairs: patch the code, or block the exploit pattern at the perimeter with a virtual patch. Neither repair helps the customers still running old versions that cannot take the patch; those sites have to come down and be rebuilt. 6
The last stretch of the cyber block covers personal agents logging into bank accounts with the customer's own credentials. A bank cannot separate the customer from the agent, so the argument has moved to who carries the liability when money moves. 6
France takes the back half. Calacanis opens with the numbers: more than half a million protesters, 3,000 damaged businesses, 4,000 injured police officers and 2,500 arrests. A 143-year-old city hall burned in Limoges, 250 miles south of Paris. 6
The market number matters more. France's 10-year yield touched 5.002% on Wednesday, a 24-year high, with the spread over German Bunds near 157 basis points. 9
The prediction markets follow. Polymarket prices an 18% chance of a state of emergency in France by the end of the year, and a 91% chance that Moody's or S&P downgrades the country by October 31. Friedberg's chart puts French public spending as a share of GDP near the peak reached by the Soviet Union, communist Romania and Chávez-era Venezuela. 6
The final eleven minutes turn to Trump's economic message, his search for a press secretary, and a long argument between Calacanis and Friedberg over the federal minimum wage. 6
| Time | Standout segment | Listening payoff |
|---|---|---|
| 0:11 | Griffin's bubble call | The concentration figure: 1% of companies, 90% of spending, 80% of it from unprofitable startups. 1 |
| 8:19 | Nikesh Arora joins | Why a security company runs open-weight models, and why it still rents its compute. 1 |
| 14:24 | The PHP zero-days | Two remote code execution flaws, a leaked patch date, and the two ways to defend a server. 1 |
| 44:17 | France on the brink | The 5% yield, the downgrade odds, and the spending chart behind the argument. 1 |
| 1:31:49 | Press secretary and minimum wage | The closing argument over Trump's messaging, then a policy fight that repeats an old one. 1 |
Best 20 minutes: 14:24–34:24. The cyber block needs its full length, because the defensive advice only lands after Arora has explained what the exploit actually does and who it hits. Second choice: 44:17–1:04:17 for the French bond market and the argument about why it broke.
Pod Save America — "Stopping the Steal with Eric Holder"
Host: Alex Wagner. Guest: Eric Holder, attorney general under Barack Obama and chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Published: October 25, 2026, 09:55 UTC. Runtime: 1:12:15. The official episode page carries the description; the original audio is the feed file; the official video carries the chapters. 210
Wagner opens with a clip of the attorney general, Todd Blanche, refusing to rule out Justice Department involvement in state certification. Holder grants that the words themselves could read as harmless. 10
What undoes them, he says, is the department's record: high-profile indictments filed in the weeks when Justice normally goes quiet, all of it aimed at making voters doubt the system. 10
"They don't come into this, as we say in the law, with clean hands." — Eric Holder 10
The concrete part is the preparation. Holder has run tabletop exercises on election interference at his law firm with Hillary Clinton and civil society groups, and on the Hill with senators. Representative Joe Morelle, designated by Hakeem Jeffries, leads for House Democrats. 10
Court filings for a certification fight are already drafted, he says, waiting for the district where it lands. His list of scenarios: rejected legitimate ballots, seized ballots, military deployment, ICE agents in particular neighborhoods, a state refusing to certify. 10
Homeland Security is the live test. A federal judge sharply limited what its agents can do under the "unlawful voter initiative," and called the conduct voter intimidation. The department says it found 20,000 likely noncitizen voters in California and 17,000 more records worth checking, and the Justice Department wants those ballots segregated once counting starts. 10
Holder has watched this film before. Nevada's version began at 19,805 flagged voters, was whittled to 185, and ended at zero. He expects the California list to end the same way, and argues the damage is done by the announcement rather than the finding. 10
His practical advice is about the ballot's route. North Carolina rejects mail ballots whose inner envelope is unsealed, so he and Wagner both steer voters to drop boxes and official early-voting sites. 10
Alaska is where the theory has already become a lawsuit. Counting there is slow by design and the Senate race may decide control, so the Justice Department sued on Thursday to block certification if the Republican incumbent loses. 11
The suit turns on name confusion: Senator Dan S. Sullivan faces a Democrat, Mary Peltola, and a third Republican candidate named Dan J. Sullivan Jr., whom the Alaska Supreme Court allowed onto the ballot. Trump told reporters, "I'm the one that said do it." 11
Holder's response to that filing is the episode's sharpest piece of law.
"I'm not sure what the basis, therefore, you'd have for not certifying the election if somehow you say, 'Well, Senator Dan Sullivan would have won but for the presence of the other Dan Sullivan's name being on the ballot.'" — Eric Holder 10
The gerrymandering half gives the episode its one piece of good news. Trump's plan to add seats through redistricting stalled, Holder says, because courts blocked the maps and because voters turned up outside state legislatures in Georgia and South Carolina. Both legislatures backed off. 10
His closing argument is about turnout and presence, and it is the line to take away.
"The best antidote to anything that they do is to have huge numbers of people come out and vote." — Eric Holder 10
He also endorses a specific tactic for the days after November 3: people gathering outside counting sites with signs demanding certification, peacefully, because the officials deciding are watching the crowd as well as the tally. 10
| Time | Standout segment | Listening payoff |
|---|---|---|
| about 03:02 | Justice Department interference | Blanche's answer on certification, and why Holder does not take it at face value. 2 |
| about 12:39 | The unlawful voter initiative | 20,000 flagged voters in California, and the Nevada precedent that ended at zero. 2 |
| about 26:35 | Risk before, during and after | The scenario list, from seized ballots to a state that refuses to certify. 2 |
| about 42:03 | Could a state refuse to certify? | The filings already drafted, and the district left blank. 2 |
| about 54:32 | The Alaska lawsuit | Two Dan Sullivans, a slow count, and a suit filed before the votes are in. 11 |
| about 59:18 | Why the gerrymander failed | Georgia and South Carolina, and the protests that changed the vote. 2 |
Best 20 minutes: about 03:02–23:02. The Justice Department and Homeland Security blocks are one argument about how a result gets contested, and the California numbers only make sense after the Nevada precedent. Second choice: about 42:03–1:02:03 for certification, Alaska, and the gerrymandering coda.
Pod Save America — "Fake Polls, Real Wave?"
Hosts: Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer. Guest: Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, interviewed by Jon Lovett. Published: October 23, 2026, 09:55 UTC. Runtime: 1:27:46. The official episode page carries the description; the original audio is the feed file; the official video carries the chapters. 312
The cycle's last New York Times/Siena poll landed on Wednesday. Democrats lead the national House vote among likely voters by 11 points, 52 to 41, and Trump's approval sits at 36%, a few points below the same poll in September. 13
Pfeiffer reads three things out of it. The floor under Trump's support is lower than anyone assumed, the MAGA base itself is cracking, and the Democratic brand has recovered. 12
The base number is the striking one. Trump won white voters without a college degree with 66% in 2024, and his approval with them is now 51%, with strong approval at 34%. 12
The Senate map stays close enough for an ordinary polling error to decide it. The Silver Bulletin average has Democrats ahead by about a point in Iowa and Kansas, two and a half in Texas, three in Maine and Michigan, and four in Ohio and Alaska. 12
Turnout modeling does as much work as the headline. The 11-point lead becomes 14 if the sample is weighted by how likely people say they are to vote, and falls to nine under a model built on past voting history. 12
Then the part that matters for how anyone reads a poll this week. A firm called Wedgewood Polls admitted on Tuesday night that it had fabricated its data, after FiftyPlusOne prepared an investigation into it. 14
Wedgewood called the whole thing an "experimental project" to show how a fabricated firm could sway opinion. Its numbers had been picked up by aggregators, including The New York Times, and by campaigns that made decisions on them. 14
The damage named on the show is Mallory McMorrow's Senate campaign. A Wedgewood poll showing her far behind cemented a two-person-race narrative, donors and endorsements moved away, and she left the race. 12
The two hosts disagree about what Wedgewood was for and agree that its operators have vanished. Pfeiffer adds a third firm he is watching, SoCal Strategies, whose site lists no clients and no methodology. 12
Money supplies the closing argument for the wave. Republicans are pouring money into Kansas and South Carolina, and are weighing a late buy in Mississippi, where Trump campaigns on Monday. 12
"The wall has broken. The enemy is inside the fort. We are now fighting hand-to-hand." — a Republican strategist, quoted by Axios and read out on the show 12
The rest of the episode runs through Trump's South Carolina rally, Vivek Ramaswamy's ad in the Ohio governor's race against Amy Acton, JD Vance's reception from his hometown NFL team, the last Senate debates in Michigan and Kansas, and a fresh scandal involving Alina Habba. 12
Keisha Lance Bottoms closes the hour on her return to politics and her race against a self-funded opponent in Georgia. 12
| Time | Standout segment | Listening payoff |
|---|---|---|
| about 03:03 | The final Times/Siena poll | 11 points, 36% approval, and the collapse of Trump's margin among white working-class voters. 3 |
| about 17:30 | The fake pollster | How a fabricated firm reached the aggregators, and the campaign it helped end. 14 |
| about 26:11 | Iran war after the midterms | What the administration is planning once the vote is behind it. 3 |
| about 32:56 | The Ramaswamy ad | The Ohio governor's race, and Republicans running away from their own nominee. 3 |
| about 42:50 | The last Senate debates | Michigan and Kansas, and the lines that will survive the election. 3 |
| about 1:02:40 | Keisha Lance Bottoms | Georgia's governor's race from the candidate, not the polls. 3 |
Best 20 minutes: about 03:03–23:03. The poll and the fake pollster belong together, because the second explains how much weight the first can bear. Second choice: about 32:56–52:56 for the Ramaswamy ad and the final debates.
All-In — "Arvind Krishna & Nikesh Arora: Quantum Threat, Open vs Frontier AI, AI Cyber Warfare & SaaS Collapse"
Hosts: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. Guests: Arvind Krishna, chief executive of IBM, and Nikesh Arora, chief executive of Palo Alto Networks. Published: October 21, 2026, 23:42 UTC. Runtime: 40:00. The official episode page carries the chapter list; the original audio is the feed file; the official video is All-In's own upload. 415
Krishna starts with a competition rather than a forecast. DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative began with a couple of hundred companies and is down to about 13, which he treats as a rough measure of what is real. 15
The date is the part a business should plan against. Estimates run from 2028 to 2033, and the middle of that range is 2030. 15
"If you pick the middle point, let's call it 2030, well, it will break today's cryptography. That's not a supposition, that's just a reality." — Arvind Krishna 15
The reason to start now is a stolen hard drive. An encrypted disk taken today can be held for five years and opened when the hardware arrives, which turns a storage decision into a future disclosure. 15
Post-quantum cryptography is already specified and written, he says, and adoption stalled on inertia rather than mathematics. His two milestones are error correction on a running machine, then scale: today's machines do about 10,000 gate operations, and adding a zero each year reaches 10 million by 2029. 15
Arora turns that into a procurement instruction. He tells the room that half its infrastructure spend is probably not quantum-safe and that replacing it takes years, so the deadline is inside the current planning cycle. 15
Calacanis asks whether AI might break encryption before quantum computers do, given the models now writing mathematics. Krishna's answer is physical: an algorithm discovered by AI still needs quantum hardware to run faster than the classical alternative. 15
The open-weight half is the more immediately useful argument for anyone buying models. Arora's rule for the experimentation phase is to let teams use the best model available and stop optimizing cost, then tighten later. 15
"You'll suddenly discover you don't need a Ferrari for every task. And by the way, the customers don't want to pay for a Ferrari for every task." — Nikesh Arora 15
Frontier models keep one clear job in his account: a live breach, where the cost of the incident dwarfs the token bill. Everything routine gets a smaller, task-specific model trained on the company's own data. 15
The economics do the persuading. A frontier model runs about $20 per million tokens, and a self-hosted open-weight model of roughly 800 billion parameters can land near $1 to $2 with a week of engineering. 15
Two further forces point the same way: a closed model can log the chain of thought and see the company's intellectual property, and the best open-weight models today are Chinese, with a capability gap the guests put at six to twelve months. Their estimate is that 75% to 90% of token usage ends up on open weights. 15
Krishna closes with what has already changed inside IBM. Agents write about half its code, and he rates that code better than what it replaced, because the same agents run the evaluations before anything ships. 15
| Time | Standout segment | Listening payoff |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | Quantum versus encryption | The 2030 midpoint, the stolen-disk scenario, and the two milestones to watch. 4 |
| 9:07 | Open weight versus frontier | Where the cheap model wins, and the one case that still needs the expensive one. 4 |
| 18:07 | AI and cyber warfare | Offense, defense and the asymmetry that decides which one is cheaper. 4 |
| 21:14 | Regulation and the arms race | Why neither government is likely to slow down, in their telling. 4 |
| 30:32 | Vertical integration | Why software consolidation follows the model bill, and what happens to point products. 4 |
Best 20 minutes: 00:00–20:00. The quantum threat and the open-weight case are the two decisions a reader can act on, and both fit inside twenty minutes. Second choice: 18:07–38:07 for cyber warfare, regulation and the consolidation argument.
Pod Save America — "Vance Bombs at Brutal Town Hall"
Hosts: Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor. Guest: Paige Cognetti, mayor of Scranton, running for a House seat in northeastern Pennsylvania. Published: October 20, 2026, 09:55 UTC. Runtime: 1:34:28. The official episode page carries the description; the original audio is the feed file; the official video carries the chapters. 516
Two weeks from election day, the opening block is a list of what the White House did in the previous seven days: an ambassador to Greece gone over a corruption scandal, a press secretary fired after five days, a cancelled livestreamed execution, and a president who moved again on Russia. 16
The Russia move is the substantive one. Trump signed an executive order Friday night rolling back tariffs and sanctions imposed under the Lindsey Graham law he had signed weeks earlier, and lifted sanctions on Russian diesel. 16
Vietor's accounting is the reason to listen to that block. The diesel volumes at stake total about 3.5 days of world supply, Hegseth is reportedly holding back Patriot interceptors, and the administration slowed the military Starlink service that Ukrainian interceptor drones depend on. 16
The Kennedy Center scandal takes twenty minutes to explain and is worth it for the shape of it. Alina Habba says her husband arranged a business deal that included a nearly $6 million donation to the Kennedy Center, that the money never arrived, and that Rick Grenell diverted it. 16
The same story runs through a payment from the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a Texas defense company. Axios reported an alleged text from Grenell promising access to White House staff and VIP events; Grenell denies sending it, and the White House is investigating. 16
Trump's own summary is the episode's comic highlight.
"I know they're having a little bit of a feud. Whatever it is, I wish them luck." — Donald Trump, at the White House 16
The press-secretary post-mortem explains how a tenure can last five days. Politico reported that Susie Wiles helped arrange the Sean Hannity interview that ended it, which two White House sources called a sanctioned hit. The interview ran six minutes and 45 seconds. 16
France arrives as the Republican October surprise, imported. Trump wrote that "the migrants have taken over France" and that the borders must close fast, and Vance and Ted Cruz posted versions of the same warning. 16
The hosts' read of the same riots All-In covered is the useful comparison. These protests began in high schools outside Paris with no furniture and sometimes no electricity, after a summer without air conditioning, and public-sector unions then added grievances about the 2027 budget. 16
Their conclusion is that immigration is being fitted to an affordability story. France votes for a president in 2027, the far right leads, and fuel prices are doing more work in the streets than the border is. 16
The last third is the title. Vance took questions at a CBS town hall in Michigan, and the audience did not cooperate. One man said he planned to vote for Abdul El-Sayed and asked why he should vote for Mike Rogers instead; another raised ICE conduct and Vance's own line about H-1B workers as indentured servants. 16
Then a voter listed the corruption stories in order: the president's crypto profits, an IRS that will not audit him, an ambassador accused of selling access. Vance's answer is the moment the episode is built around. 16
"I have not seen a single shred of evidence." — JD Vance, at the CBS town hall, on whether Trump profited from office 16
The hosts' reading is that the 2028 campaign has started and that its premise is distance from the administration he serves in. Cognetti closes the episode on corruption in Pennsylvania and a House seat the Democrats need. 16
| Time | Standout segment | Listening payoff |
|---|---|---|
| about 03:25 | Trump bends to Putin | The waiver, the held interceptors, and 3.5 days of diesel as the price of a headline. 5 |
| about 11:58 | The Kennedy Center scandal | Habba, Grenell and a Congo payment, in the clearest telling available. 5 |
| about 19:33 | Five days as press secretary | The Hannity interview that ended the job, and who set it up. 5 |
| about 26:12 | Republicans on the France riots | The same weekend All-In covered, read as an affordability story. 5 |
| about 56:56 | The Vance town hall | Hostile questions from Michigan voters, and a non-answer on corruption. 5 |
| about 1:12:11 | Paige Cognetti | A mayor on running against corruption in a district that decides the House. 5 |
Best 20 minutes: about 56:56–1:16:56. The town hall is the only place this week where a member of the administration answers, badly, for the record. Second choice: about 11:58–31:58 for the Kennedy Center and press-secretary blocks.
Also published this week
One All-In interview, listed with its link and not dissected:
- All-In — "Dylan Field: Is AI Replacing Designers?, Design is the New Code & Democratizing Creativity," 40:33, published October 19. The Figma chief executive on the blocked Adobe deal, whether AI is killing software as a product, and why taste survives automation. 17
At a glance
| Episode | Published | Runtime | Core signal | Best use | Timestamps |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-In — "AI Cyber Panic…" | Oct 23 | 1:43:23 | Two remote code execution flaws in PHP forced an emergency release a day early, after 70% of the web's language leaked its own patch date. | The cyber block, 14:24–34:24. | Exact, publisher chapters 1 |
| Pod Save America — "Stopping the Steal with Eric Holder" | Oct 25 | 1:12:15 | The Justice Department sued to block certification in Alaska before the vote, while Homeland Security's voter initiative was narrowed by a federal judge. | DOJ and DHS, about 03:02–23:02. | Approximate, video chapters 2 |
| Pod Save America — "Fake Polls, Real Wave?" | Oct 23 | 1:27:46 | The last Times/Siena poll put Democrats 11 ahead with Trump at 36%, and the same week a fabricated pollster was exposed inside the aggregators. | The poll and the fake pollster, about 03:03–23:03. | Approximate, video chapters 3 |
| All-In — "Arvind Krishna & Nikesh Arora…" | Oct 21 | 40:00 | IBM's and Palo Alto's chief executives put the quantum break of today's encryption near 2030 and said the migration to post-quantum systems is already late. | Quantum and open weights, 00:00–20:00. | Exact, publisher chapters 4 |
| Pod Save America — "Vance Bombs at Brutal Town Hall" | Oct 20 | 1:34:28 | Vance told a Michigan audience he had seen no evidence of corruption in his own administration, while the White House fought a donor scandal and a five-day press secretary. | The town hall, about 56:56–1:16:56. | Approximate, video chapters 5 |
References
- 1All-In, "AI Cyber Panic…" official episode page\
allinchamathjason.libsyn.com
- 2
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- 4All-In, "Arvind Krishna & Nikesh Arora…" official episode page\
allinchamathjason.libsyn.com
- 5
- 6All-In, "AI Cyber Panic…" official video
youtube.com
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17All-In, "Dylan Field" official episode page
allinchamathjason.libsyn.com
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