Big Tech's Game of Thrones | Ep. 021 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Big Tech's Game of Thrones | Ep. 021 Lemonade Stand 🍋"

Release Date: July 23, 2025
Hosts: Aiden, Atrioc, and DougDoug

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1. Big Tech Dominance and Antitrust Scrutiny

Overview:
The episode opens with Doug discussing a recent meeting with Lina Khan, the prominent antitrust enforcer, focusing on the persistent dominance of Big Tech companies. Despite ongoing antitrust lawsuits initiated by Khan, the "Big Seven" tech giants continue to consolidate their power, making them increasingly pivotal in the business landscape.

Key Points:

• Persistence of Big Tech: Despite antitrust efforts, Big Tech remains highly influential, with significant capital and Wall Street investment flowing into these companies.
• Shift in Competitive Dynamics: As Big Tech firms absorb potential competitors, their internal rivalries intensify, especially around advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Notable Quote:
Doug (05:00): "For the first time in human history, a company like Nvidia hit $4 trillion, showcasing the explosive growth driven by the AI revolution."

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2. The AI Race: Nvidia's Milestone and Elon Musk's Investments

Overview:
The hosts delve into Nvidia's unprecedented milestone of reaching a $4 trillion market cap, highlighting its pivotal role in the AI boom. They explore Elon Musk's substantial investments in AI infrastructure, particularly his acquisition of massive GPU clusters essential for AI development.

Key Points:

• Nvidia's Success: Nvidia's growth is attributed to the escalating investments in AI, positioning it as a cornerstone of the AI industry.
• Elon Musk's Strategy: Musk's continuous investment in GPU clusters underscores the intense competition and financial commitment required in the AI sector.
• Market Impact: The relentless spending in AI is reshaping Wall Street's perspectives, with investors beginning to question the profitability and sustainability of these massive investments.

Notable Quote:
Aiden (05:08): "This is crazy. They're like a hot dog."

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3. The Windsurf Acquisition Drama

Overview:
Perry introduces a case study on Windsurf, an AI coding startup founded by MIT students. The company experienced rapid growth with the launch of its AI coding plugin, leading to a significant user base. However, internal conflicts and aggressive acquisition attempts by major AI players like OpenAI and Google unravel Windsurf's success.

Key Points:

• Windsurf's Rise: From launching a successful AI coding plugin in 2022 to developing a standalone IDE, Windsurf saw exponential growth, reaching one million developers within months.
• Acquisition Attempts: OpenAI initially showed interest in acquiring Windsurf for $3 billion, focusing on its technology and leadership. However, complexities arose when Anthropic, another AI entity, withdrew support, leading to Google's unexpected takeover of Windsurf's leadership for $2.5 billion.
• Impact on Employees: The acquisition strategy predominantly benefits top executives and key researchers, leaving long-term employees and lower-tier staff without substantial compensation or future prospects within the new corporate structure.

Notable Quotes:
Doug (12:45): "People are getting bought out for absurd amounts, and it's disgusting."
Perry (15:35): "How would you feel? All your leadership is gone. You have nothing."

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4. Implications for Startups and Employees

Overview:
The discussion shifts to the broader implications of such acquisition tactics on the startup ecosystem and employee morale. The hosts express concerns over the sustainability of startups amid aggressive takeovers and the lack of protections for long-term employees.

Key Points:

• Reverse Aquihire Trends: Companies like Google and Meta are increasingly engaging in reverse aquihires, where they purchase only the top talent from startups, undermining the companies' operational capabilities.
• Employee Fallout: This practice leaves the majority of employees without their equity benefits and future roles, fostering a culture of insecurity and undervaluation within the tech workforce.
• Wall Street's Role: As investors begin to question the profitability of Big Tech's AI investments, the long-term viability of such aggressive expansion strategies remains uncertain.

Notable Quote:
Atrioc (22:23): "The only explanation is they want the talent, not the product."

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5. Broader Implications: Wall Street's Pressures and Profitability

Overview:
Aiden raises concerns about Wall Street's increasing demands for profitability from Big Tech firms investing heavily in AI. The hosts debate whether these investments will yield substantial returns or become unsustainable financial burdens.

Key Points:

• Investor Scrutiny: Wall Street is beginning to question how AI investments translate into tangible profits, demanding clarity on revenue generation amidst massive spending.
• Sustainability Concerns: The continuous influx of capital into AI without clear pathways to profitability may lead to financial instability for even the most dominant tech companies.
• Nvidia as an Outlier: Unlike its peers, Nvidia is currently profitable, largely due to its essential role in AI infrastructure, making it a unique case in the Big Tech landscape.

Notable Quote:
Doug (05:52): "How is this spending making money? Because you have to have a way to grow."

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6. Transition to Political Discussions: Trump's Handling of Epstein Files

Overview:
The conversation takes a significant turn towards politics, focusing on former President Donald Trump's handling of Jeffrey Epstein's case. The hosts discuss the ongoing controversy surrounding the release of Epstein's files and its impact on Trump's political standing.

Key Points:

• Epstein File Controversy: There's increasing pressure for Donald Trump to release Jeffrey Epstein's files, which has become a contentious issue within his base and the broader political landscape.
• Media Narratives: The episode explores how conspiracy theories and long-standing suspicions about Epstein's connections to powerful individuals have intensified scrutiny on Trump.
• Base Fracturing: The hosts discuss whether these ongoing scandals are causing a schism within Trump's support base, potentially affecting his political future.

Notable Quotes:
Aiden (39:20): "People get really, really fired up about pedophiles for some reason. Why can't people just chill out?"
Perry (55:18): "He'S like, why are you shedding tears? That person could have 20 million dol."

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7. Broader Political Impact and Media Narratives

Overview:
The hosts analyze how these political scandals intersect with broader media narratives and the challenges they pose to political figures like Trump. They examine the role of media in shaping public perception and the difficulty of maintaining a unified support base amidst mounting controversies.

Key Points:

• Conspiracy Theories: Long-standing online conspiracy theories about Epstein and their infiltration into mainstream discourse have complicated Trump's efforts to maintain support.
• Media Influence: The media's portrayal of these events influences public opinion, potentially eroding support among undecided or moderate voters.
• Future Implications: The ongoing sanctions and scandals may have lasting impacts on Trump's political aspirations, especially in upcoming elections.

Notable Quote:
Perry (57:33): "All he had to do was frame this as like, we've been foiled again by the deep state and we're going to get them next time."

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8. Short Business News: Brightline in Florida and Lockheed Martin

Overview:
Beyond major tech and political discussions, the hosts touch upon recent business news, including the struggles of Brightline, Florida's private train company, and Lockheed Martin's unexpected financial downturn.

Key Points:

• Brightline's Financial Struggles: Brightline faces significant losses due to lower-than-expected ridership and revenue, leading to bondholders' panic and potential insolvency.
• Public Activity Bonds: The failure to repay bondholders has raised concerns about the sustainability of such investments and the transparency of financial dealings in public projects.
• Lockheed Martin's Profit Drop: A classified aeronautics program led to a substantial profit decline for Lockheed Martin, highlighting the opaque nature of defense contracting finances.

Notable Quote:
Perry (58:38): "Train Trains are like AI. They go up in value."

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9. Conclusion and Personal Updates

Overview:
The episode concludes with personal reflections and updates from the hosts. Perry issues an apology for a previous incident involving derogatory remarks towards a critic, emphasizing accountability and responsible discourse. Additionally, the hosts share positive experiences from attending the Open Sauce event, reinforcing the community aspect of their podcast.

Key Points:

• Apology: Perry acknowledges and apologizes for past irresponsible comments made towards a critic, underscoring the importance of respectful dialogue.
• Community Engagement: The hosts express gratitude towards their listeners and recount enjoyable interactions at the Open Sauce event, highlighting the supportive community around the podcast.

Notable Quotes:
Perry (98:29): "I genuinely feel remorse about it. So to that person, if you happen to see this, genuinely sorry."
Aiden (100:53): "It was so cool, I think, you know, I imagine because the crossover with something like lemonade stand or."

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Conclusion:
In this comprehensive episode, the Lemonade Stand hosts navigate through the intricate landscapes of Big Tech's dominance, the competitive AI arena, and the tumultuous world of political scandals. By intertwining detailed case studies like Windsurf's acquisition drama with broader economic and political analyses, the podcast offers listeners a nuanced understanding of the forces shaping today's business and political environments. Personal reflections and community engagement further enrich the discourse, making it both informative and relatable.

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For more insightful discussions on the world of business and beyond, tune into upcoming episodes of Lemonade Stand.

Transcript

[Aiden]

With the Venmo debit card, you can Venmo everything.

[Doug]

Your favorite band's merch. You can Venmo this or their next show.

[Aiden]

You can Venmo that.

[Doug]

Visit Venmo Me Debit to learn more.

[Aiden]

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the.

[Doug]

Bancorp bank and a pursuant to license by Mastercard International Inc. The card may be used everywhere.

[Aiden]

MasterCard is accepted.

[Perry]

Venmo purchase restrictions apply.

[Doug]

Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

[Aiden]

With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down.

[Doug]

So to help us we brought in a reverse auctioneer which is apparently a.

[Perry]

Thing Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium wireless. Better get 30, 30. Better get 30. Better get 20, 20, 20. Better get 20, 20 everybody.

[Doug]

15.

[Perry]

15. Just 15 bucks a month.

[Doug]

Sold. Give it a [e-mail] Switch. Upfront payment of $45 for a three.

[Aiden]

Month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com Is that for real?

[Perry]

No, no. We can't include this as a bit.

[Doug]

What do you mean we can't include this as a bit? You're doing it for.

[Aiden]

It's not a bit.

[Doug]

It's not a bit anymore.

[Perry]

I've just. I. This is. I'm putting it away.

[Aiden]

You should.

[Doug]

That's actual. We're not tired. That's actual horse.

[Aiden]

That doesn't wake you up. That's not how electrolytes saga of this show is.

[Doug]

You slowly getting more and more addicted to horse.

[Perry]

It's just better than Gatorade. It's better. Hunter Biden did a whole interview about this. How much better it is.

[Doug]

Yes, he did. Yes.

[Perry]

That's what Aiden said. That's what Aiden said.

[Doug]

Implied there was more to it than just the horse electronics.

[Aiden]

I don't think anything about what I said implied that there was.

[Perry]

I read this on Twitter. He Hunter Biden in an interview apparently said that horse electrodes are better than crack or something like that.

[Doug]

Yeah, I did see a clip of him breaking down the difference between crack and cocaine. And then someone quote tweeted and said this is like LeBron breaking down basketball. He's just the go. He just knows the details.

[Aiden]

The top comment on the interview on YouTube is he doesn't even look like a laptop. Really makes you think.

[Doug]

That was a surprise three hour Hunter Biden interview out of nowhere.

[Perry]

Really one upped us after we thought we were doing such a cool job with Lena Khan and Then we damn.

[Aiden]

Dude, he stole our steam.

[Doug]

Didn't break down crack or cocaine. In our interview, she just talked about antitrust.

[Aiden]

She.

[Perry]

She did talk about crack off pod, but she was very partisan. Like, what was nice about Hunter is he really broke it down for both sides.

[Aiden]

Brought on the both take side.

[Perry]

Yeah, Steel, man.

[Aiden]

In all seriousness, that, that interview, I have listened to almost an hour of it so far and it's really, really good.

[Perry]

I reclina Connor, I was like, that's so pretentious to say that.

[Doug]

No, the Hunter Biden interview, it was really good. I think Aiden questions in particular were.

[Aiden]

Questions, especially if you're someone who is only interacting with that interview through a couple clips that you've seen on Twitter. I would recommend you go watch as much of it as you can because it is pretty humanizing picture of somebody that's been present in the media the last few years. I'm really enjoying it so far.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Aiden]

But we have our own topics today that we're not stealing from some other show and they are.

[Perry]

We're stealing them from ChatGPT. Like good, honest Americans.

[Doug]

No, I mean, I think last week we met with Lina Khan and we talked about, among many things, the dominance of Big Tech. And that was one of her big things. She tried to break up and start antitrust lawsuits. And they've continued into the next administration. However, let's all be real here. They're not working yet. Like, Big tech is still very dominant. And as all the money and the capital and the interest and Wall Street's money flows into big Tech and we have this big seven companies dominating things, they've become more and more important to the business world. So I think this week we're breaking down, first of all, not only their upcoming earnings season, how big they are, but how they're all starting to kind of when no one's left to fight, they can only fight each other. They've already glommed up everyone else's businesses into their. Their maw, and now they are turning on each other in a lot of snipey ways around AI particularly. Yes, so we'll talk about that. But. But you know, the big thing since we've last spoken is that Nvidia hit $4 trillion. For the first time in human history a company's ever done that. People thought it would be Apple forever, but Nvidia did it. And I think it's because we are now in the real. I don't know the heart of this AI war. The money is being spent like crazy and the Guy selling the guns and the bullets is Jensen Huang. Like Tesla just put out. I mean, it's funny because every day Elon will retweet Jensen just glazing him like Jensen be like, God, Elon is so smart and brilliant forward thinking. And you'll think about like, why did he say that? And it's because that day, I mean, every day Elon is buying another 10,000 GPU clusters for like a billion dollars. I mean it's great. I mean he is literally quote Elon is bragging about, I think what, 20,000 new. Sorry, I want to get. Yeah, here is 230,000 new GPUs, including 30K of the brand new top of the line.

[Perry]

How much does this cost? Like a buck.

[Aiden]

This is crazy.

[Perry]

They're like a hot dog.

[Doug]

50, 60 grand a piece.

[Aiden]

It's gotta be. I, I don't have one of the latest cards but the ray tracing in Minecraft. Yeah, crazy.

[Doug]

Now you see Minecraft on, on this.

[Aiden]

Minecraft on the cluster.

[Doug]

Cluster is unreal. It's unreal. So anyway, so it's, you know, we're going to talk about it a little bit, but yeah, Tesla's earnings are this week, Google earnings this week. And what I want to say from the business side is that Wall street finally, very in a slight way is starting to ask a couple questions they didn't ask before, which is basically like, hey, you guys are spending a lot of money and that's cool. And we, and we know AI is the thing and we're going to keep buying as we love that. How is it they're asking specifically, how is this spending making money? Cause, cause you're.

[Aiden]

I have a question from the class.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Aiden]

When you say Wall street is finally asking questions, does this mean things like hedge funds that are able to buy enough stock at once or own enough stock to kind of command authority with that company and ask those questions? They like they're an investor that has enough of a hold in the company to ask the question at all. Right. Because I could go on Robinhood and buy 10 shares of Apple right now, right? And I could ask Apple, hey, you know, where's this fucking AI thing going? Tim, Tim, how's it you can ask. No, but that's what I mean. I can't actually ask that If I have 10 shares in Robinhood. Yeah. So when you say Wall street finally asking questions, what does that actually when.

[Doug]

They have these earnings calls. Yes, the calls are open form, open question to analysts and large investors. That's the people that speak Up. So generally it's Wall street analysts who then put out guidance for what they think the company's going to do in the, in the future. So normally, you know, for, again, for. I've listened to many of these earnings calls. They just say like, hey, we're spending a lot of money on AI. And then everyone goes, well, that means you're going to win this. And then they buy more. Yeah, like that's. But now they're like, okay, you spent a combined $300 billion. You know, it's absurd amount of money. You should spend more, you should keep spending more. If it's working, is it making you any money? Because the real thing is, let's say you're an advertising business like, like Google or Meta. Is AI helping you sell more advertising at a higher cost than you were before? Are you making more money? Because if you have the same market share, same everything, then you're just throwing money into a money pit. Like there has to be a way to grow. You have to. That's what they want to hear. Otherwise they're going to stop feeding you endless piles of cash. And so these questions are finally being asked. I don't think it's going to change anything now again, these companies are super dominant and it's working, but it's finally being asked. And so the only company that feels ironclad is Nvidia because they are making money, they're printing money on, everyone just buys their stuff. So that's where we find ourselves. But you, you wanted to go into a specific story of like, yes, okay.

[Perry]

So there's a funny thing going on with a little company called Windsurf, which you might have heard of. So we're going to talk about the history of it. There's been this crazy ass drama with this company called Windsurf, who probably most of you guys have never heard of. And so instead of just being like this happened. I want to walk you through the story because I think the people at most impacted was the employees at Windsurf. So let's pretend that you guys, back in 2022, you hear about these two MIT students who started an AI coding company. Wow. Back then, ChatGPT isn't out, isn't it? Doesn't sound that exciting, right? AI is still kind of a nebulous thing. The idea that it would help people code, that's super unlikely. But, but these two guys were like, we're going to do it. We think we can make it. Awesome. So you join in at this company, right? Start working as this Startup. And by the end of 2022, you launch an AI coding plugin. So this is like people who are programming this tool that they can download into their existing kind of like set of suite of tools can help them code.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Perry]

Like, okay, cool. This is actually starting to work. And right at the beginning, like a thousand downloads.

[Doug]

Whoa.

[Perry]

And then a few months later, you get 10,000 downloads. Whoa. It's like, okay, it's starting to pick up.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Perry]

Like 10,000 software engineers is actually that's kind of hype. And then about a year later, we're late 2023, ChatGPT launches, right? And then things go crazy. Or that was 2022, right? 2022, late 22, late 2022, chat GPT launches. Suddenly AI has just exploded. Across the world, everybody's aware of AI. And suddenly not only everybody.

[Doug]

I remember that period specifically because everyone who was young realized they could use it to cheat. And all their teachers did not know what it was.

[Aiden]

They have no idea.

[Doug]

They talked to me and they're in my chat, they're like, there's a six month period where it was like nobody.

[Perry]

Knew what was going on. So it turns out against all odds, against common intuition, this stuff was really good at helping people code. And it's worth pointing out here, even though I think for many of us, AI is jammed into our lives in a bunch of areas that we don't really think is helpful, coding is the one thing that is sort of definitively has been very useful and very successful. So as a company getting a bunch of programmers who are some of the wealthiest people who are really are willing to spend a lot of money on their programing tools is like the best possible market. And this is like a holy shit moment. So ChatGPT pops, and as ChatGPT pops, within three months in February, they have a million downloads. So you, at this start, have been working for a few years. ChatGPT comes out, bursts AI onto the scene, and then suddenly everybody's looking for these AI tools. You have made this plugin called Windsurf and it is just exploding. So you guys hit the lottery kind of, right? But you're not like making a ton of money yet, but it is going, it's a plugin. So you start working on your own standalone product. Instead of being a plugin for an ide, you. This is its own sort of like coding set of tools, let's put it that way. So you guys start working on this IDE and you launch it November 2024. This is like nine months ago. Something like that eight months ago. So, you know, you've been working on it behind the scenes for a couple years now. The plugin did well. You launched this ide, and by July, within seven, eight months, you have a million developers using your program. You guys might have heard of something like. Might have heard of something like Cursor. We're making some money programming. These things have become super popular. This idea, free it. So I'm actually not sure the exact pricing of Windsurf. Most of them you download for free and then you pay a subscription because. So what's funny, you guys, the employees didn't actually make an AI model. You're making tools that use AI models to help somebody program.

[Doug]

So what, ChatGPT wrapper?

[Perry]

Yeah, I mean, that's an aggressive way of putting it, but. But yes, it's a really, really well made wrapper, which is to say it's going to use the fundamental AIs that another company, bu. In a way that's very specifically useful for programmers. Yeah. So if you pull us up here, you can see like, here's some pricing. Cursor has something similar, which is what I use. So.

[Aiden]

So you said, you just said a million users as of the current month? As of July, Right now, Yep.

[Perry]

Yeah. So over a million developers. There's 350 enterprise customers. So this thing has just exploded again. A couple years ago, nobody even knew what this was. And now not only are you doing very well, the, let's say category of AI with software engineers is absolutely massive and every company wants to be a part of it. You might have heard OpenAI has Codex and Google's working on their Gemini coding thing. And Apple has the or, Amazon is coming out with theirs. Everybody's trying to get a piece of this market, which is getting programmers to pay you a subscription for the coding tools. That's the future. Holy shit, man. You guys are crushing it. You have 250 people. You guys are like a big part of a relatively small company. You've made this thing happening. It's. It's the hype wave. And then you hear like A month ago, OpenAI, the big company that made ChatGPT, they're interested in buying you guys. This is sick, right? You're this like fairly small startup. You've been making this thing got a million users and it comes out they're looking at buying you guys for $3 billion.

[Doug]

Finally, we get to go to Burning Party.

[Perry]

There's 350 of you guys and they're offering $3 billion. I don't know what that breaks down to, but all of you are going to be crazy, crazy rich.

[Doug]

Well, I'll tell you, I was at Twitch when there was 100 people and we got offered $1 billion and my split wasn't very high.

[Perry]

Really?

[Doug]

They didn't really. It wasn't evenly split. The CEO, 21 year old.

[Perry]

Yeah. So the founders, you know, so this is partially why I'm saying this story is like, let's say you guys have been there for a little bit, right? You joined in May, Right. Maybe you don't feel like you deserve as much of a giant piece of this pie, but you've been there for, you know, a couple of years now, working on this thing since 2021.

[Aiden]

You're.

[Perry]

You should be there, right?

[Doug]

Going to be.

[Perry]

And so this is a huge deal of I ship $3 billion, and they say, look, they have an exclusive window to make an offer as they do this. So OpenAI makes one of the models that you use for your product. Anthropic makes one of the other ones, Claude, which is again, the thing underpinning your product. They cut you off. Anthropic says, if you guys are going to go sell your company to OpenAI, one of our competitors, we're not letting you use our tools anymore. So there's like a weird drama forming, right? You have multiple AI companies that you use their stuff and you make your product on top of it. Now, one of the main ones, the one that's considered the best for programming, is pulling away your ability to even use their stuff. So your product just got demonstrably worse because you're going to sell to one of their competitors. But that's fine. They're going to buy you for $3 billion. Should all be fine.

[Doug]

Sure.

[Perry]

But then you're hearing these rumors that Microsoft is having an issue with OpenAI. There's a lot of players coming into this. Now, why would Microsoft give a shit what OpenAI does with this $3 billion to buy your guys's company? It doesn't make sense. But eventually, July 11, which is like two weeks ago now, which is the end of the exclusivity window. So OpenAI had a, like few months to to exclusively get you guys bought and they couldn't do it. Something is going on. They aren't able to do it. So the exclusive window ends on July 11th. And that day, Google comes out and says, we are buying not your company, we're buying your CEO and a couple researchers and they're going to pay. Instead of three billion, two And a half billion. Not for the company, not to own any of the company, but just to buy away the leadership of the company you guys have been working on for several years. They are going to buy a license to the tech, but that's not really what they want. What Google wants is the top AI people. They want the people and all they give a shit about is the founders and the top researchers in this 250 employee company. They don't give a shit about anybody else. So two weeks ago Google comes in, they just buy out the leadership and bail. And you two who have been there for years are left with nothing. This is what we brought up with Lina Khan last week where we were like, this is an example of weird shit going on in the mergers and acquisition space. Because this is actually not the first time Google has done this. How would you feel? You guys get absolutely nothing. Your leadership is gone. And Anthropic, who was powering half of your product, still won't work with you.

[Aiden]

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[Doug]

Well, I think they would have done anyway, right? Anthropic is going to pull out no matter what. That's not even like a.

[Perry]

Well, it depends. Only if they're bought by a direct competitor, but it's all.

[Doug]

It's. So that's what we're talking about with this, this Game of Thrones thing. It's all so incestuous.

[Perry]

Yes, it is incestuous.

[Doug]

There's like six companies and they're all working with each. There's like two, three AI models everyone's fighting over and all these people, dude, I gotta say what this tells me more than anything is that the top AI researchers are just bouncing around these companies and making untold racks of money. It's disgusting. It is. Everyone wants them to the bell of the ball, dude. They're getting bought out for absurd.

[Perry]

Yeah, bouncing is I think a bit inaccurate. I think what's happened is that for like all of this AI stuff has, has developed so incredibly rapidly that if, if you were one of the people who's been in the field for five years, you're considered a big deal. So your guys a CEO that you're working under, he's been in the field for a time. Long, long time. Since 2021. I'm a. That's a joke. That's not very long. But compared to how rapidly all this has changed where chat GBT only hit the. The towers like two and a half years ago. Like this is right, that's, that's behind it. Yeah.

[Doug]

That actually doesn't line up on a timeline.

[Aiden]

Sam Altman, what happened in Tower 7.

[Perry]

The character AI is another example which you guys might have heard of. This is the one where people talk to their anime boyfriends. Yeah. So the guy who started that is actually used to work at Google was one of the people who made the Transformers paper. Basically one of the pioneers of the modern AI movement. He left Google because they wouldn't let him make his funny anime boyfriend platform goes and makes character AI. It starts to be successful. And I think it was two years ago, Google came in and paid billions of dollars for him, not for the company. The employees at character AI got nothing. Just a couple of the top people got bought back into Google. So Google is kind of going out into the world and pulling back the people who either used to work for Google or are sort of like the godfathers of AI and buying them back. Meta is doing the same. So it's less that these people are being bounced around and it's more that over the past few years they've gone out and done their own things and now the big tech companies are coming back for them and being like, we will pay you a billion dollars. Come work with us, please. And they're screwing over the other guy.

[Doug]

This is what Wall Street's asking though is like damn, billion dollars for the new guy.

[Perry]

That's an insane thing up front.

[Doug]

He must work pretty hard. He must work pretty hard. Can't wait to see what he comes like.

[Perry]

I, maybe he is a genius, but dude, he's your age.

[Doug]

Does that make we talk about scaling.

[Aiden]

He's my age, 28.

[Doug]

What are you doing with your life?

[Perry]

What am I doing?

[Doug]

Well, what were you doing five years ago?

[Aiden]

Making cowboy bebop merch.

[Perry]

What were you doing five years ago? He was founding Windsturm.

[Aiden]

It's the jacket that Spike wears in the show.

[Doug]

Cowboy people give you a billion.

[Aiden]

Tell you what that did in revenue. Not a billion, but you know what? It's money back.

[Doug]

Yeah, you have a profitable.

[Aiden]

Profitable.

[Doug]

None of this is profitable yet.

[Perry]

Yeah, none of this is profitable yet.

[Doug]

Not even close.

[Perry]

So to wrap up this little mini story about cognition. So this is, you know, a week or two ago, Google comes in and basically says, all right, we're just like scooping out the top talent. They take it and leave like some sort of weird predatory animal. And then cognition, or sorry, not cognition, windsurf the people. You guys, the other 225 people are like, what the fuck is going on? You just lost all your leadership. You lost the main tools you use to make the product. Everybody's in what the fuck?

[Aiden]

Mode.

[Perry]

Three days later, Cognition, who's another startup that also makes AI coding tools that also was apparently in the in the running, comes in and offers you guys reportedly 300 million and buys you guys out and says, don't worry, we're going to make sure all the employees get a cut. You guys will fold into our thing called Devin. We're going to combine them together and. And we're going to be this great new company and they make a big deal about how they're going to make the employees. Right. But they're a smaller company. They don't have two and a half billion to drop people. Right. So you guys are, you know, maybe.

[Doug]

You get a nice Subaru.

[Perry]

Yeah. Get a million, something like that.

[Aiden]

Get that hybrid Crosstrek.

[Doug]

Guess I'll watch Burning man in VR.

[Perry]

Yeah, you can rent a nice hotel. Four Seasons. You can't buy a place. Yes. Um, so this is crazy. And this is a trend called Reverse Aqua Hire, where a company comes in and just buys the top talent. And this is becoming more common. So there's a couple big thematic things going on. One is this funny drama between all the companies, and there's a few threads going off of this that get really, really weird, which is why Google's doing this as well as what Microsoft is doing. But it's also, you know, it's relevant to the Lena Khan conversation, because part of why companies are doing this, like Google is, is because you go through all this regulatory scrutiny. If you come in and try to buy the whole company or try buy any piece of the company and you get to avoid a lot of that. In theory, if you just buy the talent. If you just come in and what Google said is all, we're just licensing the company, we're just licensing your tech and we're taking some of your talent. In practice, what they did is they came in, ruined the ability for them to compete, took all the leadership and bailed. Right. It's like, I have a pretty. Yeah.

[Aiden]

I have a question about the licensing.

[Perry]

Yes.

[Aiden]

So because my initial reaction to this is your trade off, as opposed to going through the regulatory process to buy out the company, is that you have to recreate a lot of the software or proprietary work of the company that you would have bought out. Like there's a benefit to actually buying the company because the software and the tools and everything that was made by the employees of that company is owned by that company. You just have it. But if we do it this way, where we've hired staff, we need to get that staff to recreate their past work, which takes more time and potentially more resources. Where does the licensing part of the work come into this conversation? You're saying that they're licensing some of the software or the work that they were doing previously?

[Perry]

Yeah. So what Google is saying is we are going to use some of the pieces of tech that you guys have built, you know, YouTube collectively over the course of the last few years. We're going to use some of that. But what everybody's pretty clear on is they don't actually give a shit about that because it's exactly what you said that's not very useful to Google as a company to like. What they really would want is, if they cared, is to recreate the product themselves or buy the whole thing. Yeah. So the only explanation that makes sense is what they want is the talent. What they consider is worth two and a half billion dollars, is to buy the founders of that company that you guys have been in and the very top researchers and developers. And there's such an insane premium on AI talent right now, and is considered so much more valuable to get the guy who's been working in AI for four to five years and built something successful versus the, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of people who are in the industry now over the past year or two that they're willing to pay that much money. The bet right now for all these companies is get the smartest people and they'll figure it out. It's not buy an Existing product. So the license is like, it doesn't really matter as far as anybody can tell.

[Aiden]

This is like a. I feel like this is like the Miami Heat ruining basketball. You know, they're just making super teams now. We've changed, we've changed everything.

[Perry]

And we talk about this with Meta. Meta also did that as like the Dodgers or the Yankees. Right. They just, they just go in and they're just trying to buy everybody out of all the major companies. Like it's just work.

[Doug]

I just. That's for sure. Like we're at the part where they're buying everybody. Everyone goes, damn, this team looks great.

[Aiden]

But I mean, I think if we. Yes, there's two sort of courses here. Right. There's the broader situation of whether or not these companies are going to be successful by using these strategies. Right. Whether by investing a bunch of money into this industry to begin with or by spending exorbitant amounts of money on hiring new talent. And that has to pan out eventually. And it's interesting to hear that questions are starting to be asked as, like, when will we see the return on this level of investment? Right, right. At an individual level, if I'm one of the guys that founded one of these hot new supple AI companies and I'm happy they want your body, they want my body, and I'm getting paid a lot of money for it.

[Doug]

And like the highest amount employees have ever been paid in the, you know.

[Perry]

You have to share it with your employees now.

[Aiden]

Extraordinary salaries that from an individual perspective, it's like, oh, I'm being rewarded for all my time and effort and knowledge of this, of this interest of this industry. Right. On the other end of the individual scenario that you were asking about. Yes, I do think it sucks to be an employee at one of these startups who presumably had some amount of equity because that's how a lot of startup compensation is built.

[Perry]

Yeah, that's the pitch of like, come work at this startup, help us build it over the years and you will get payout if we get bought or we go public.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Perry]

And this new form is preventing that.

[Aiden]

And I think that was something that people overlooked in the Lina Khan episode. I did see some people pushed back to the posturing of that question to begin with, which was, you know, this environment of positioning yourself to be bought out in order to make money off of your company doesn't seem like something that's healthy. And I kind of agree. But people do forget that startups are loaded with lower level employees that take on often lower salaries than they might be getting elsewhere. Especially, I mean, at least in the 2010s for sure. And in exchange for equity at companies that they thought had high long term upside and then when the buyout happened or the IPO happened, they could walk and make a bunch of money from their early position at a startup. That was, I think that is part of the, part of getting a job at a startup in that era. I mean, I might make $20,000 less a year or $30,000 less a year, but I get equity in a company that might pop and I'm basically, I'm kind of gambling in that.

[Doug]

I just disagree with the whole premise, bro.

[Aiden]

No, I'm not saying. Hold on, that's the, that's the next part, right? I'm not saying that, that this is a healthy business environment. I'm saying that it still sucks to be the guy at the who who. When I remember when I made this decision for myself, right? When I went to go work at the tech startup I had, I could take the option of scaling my salary to like a max of like 55k with between 40 and 55k with an exchange of equity for that amount, right? And I, thinking that this company would never make it in the long term, in the very long term, took the max amount of salary I could. That was the risk assessment I took, right? But maybe at a different type of company or a different type of person with a different risk assessment, you max out the equity option option that's available risk.

[Doug]

It could have a downside. We're spinning our wheels. Over 200 employees at a Silicon Valley startup.

[Aiden]

I'm not spinning my wheels. They're not like, I'm not spinning my wheels about it. I think that doesn't change the fact that this shouldn't be the way it works to begin with. But if I'm the guy who had that planned and I happened to land at a startup where I'm making, you know, maybe $100,000 a year as a software engineer instead of the 150 I might have been making at a bigger company. And I also happen to land at a company that explodes in value, is extremely successful, and then also I get left with my dick in my hand because a bigger company decided to cheat the system a little bit that someone else bought you.

[Doug]

You got bought for 300 million from someone else. Google was never going to. I mean, this company, the people that didn't get bought, it's like 200 salespeople, they didn't want them anyway. They were never Going to buy them. They only wanted the guy at the top. If they were forced to buy the whole company, then I guess they would have done that. But this is always going to be for the people at the top. Yeah. So. And these salespeople had just been high. Like, it's like they built a product, and as it grew up, they hired a bunch of sale people. They didn't need them. I don't, I'm not losing any sleep. Those guys didn't get a massive payout. Life change.

[Aiden]

That. Who said I was okay?

[Doug]

It doesn't. You know, this is like, I agree with you.

[Perry]

You're saying they don't deserve any compensation.

[Doug]

They got compensation. They got paid money. And they're getting a buyout from 300 million. They're fine. It's like, this is, I don't even think this is like an antitrust thing. I think they literally just wanted those people. Like, this is their dream solution.

[Aiden]

Yeah. I think there's a strong argument that it might not have had to do with antitrust at all. I do think that that could be the case as well. But I think I'm just, I'm laying it out. It's like, for that guy, if. Because your, your question was, I'm that guy in this scenario.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Yeah. That sucks.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

I'm sad.

[Perry]

Sucks.

[Doug]

Yeah, it sucks for him, but he's.

[Perry]

He'S like, why are you shedding tears? That person who's been working at this company for three years could have 20 million dol.

[Doug]

For right now.

[Perry]

And now they're only making $200,000 a year in San Francisco. How dare you?

[Doug]

I mean, that's poverty wage.

[Aiden]

That's poverty wage in San Francisco.

[Doug]

You know, now that you put it like that, this guy could barely make ends meet. No, I, I mean, I, I, I semi get it. And I do think that, like, you know, it, it is just weird.

[Aiden]

He's mad. Twitch didn't give him a lot of stock.

[Doug]

I was mad at you on this guy's side. No, actually, it was good. Actually, I'll be honest with you, from my pov. Did I really deserve what I got? Like a Ferrari worth of money? Okay. And I didn't do, I didn't. You know what I'm saying? Like, people around me got absurd amounts of money because that was a big buyout. There was a small number of employees, but I, I just showed up and I, I tweeted some things. I changed the front page. I was.

[Perry]

You should have made $20 million. This is unacceptable. Anybody who makes an AI company or works at an AI company should make $20 million always from Google, better pay it. And Lena Khan needs to fix this. And I worked. I want $20 million, Lena. I want it.

[Doug]

Okay, but what about the larger question here of like your honest opinion because you're more tech? Yeah, like these guys can't be worth it, bro. I can't imagine like maybe somebody somewhere is going to come up with something. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills that like this, this is really awesome for the few people that are benefiting, right. But it just feels like the last gasp of multi trillion dollar companies that are sniping over the last few percentage inches of AI dominance and they haven't figured out how to turn it into anything profitable yet. So I, I, I, that's where I'm at, where I'm like this, this can't be worth it. This can't be worth it.

[Perry]

I think that it will probably not be worth it. I think we've talked about this before. The mindset of the tech companies is AI is going to be so fundamental to how their products operate, to how people interact with technology and the world that even if you just wanted to keep your curtain current market share, AI is going to be critical to do that. If you are Google and you have search, I would describe ChatGPT as being a vastly better search engine than Google. It is for people who start, have started at this point just using ChatGPT to ask questions on the Internet. Vastly better. I mean such a better experience. So you can obviously extrapolate that to say if you're Google, you're sitting here, you have one of the most successful and largest essentially monopolies on, you know, the Internet and search ever that powers this unbelievably giant company. And then this new technology has the ability to basically undermine your entire system. That is an existential threat.

[Doug]

That's a fair point.

[Perry]

If you are meta and you have social media and another company comes in, for example, let's say TikTok expands into a much more sophisticated AI driven social media platform and just sort of eats Instagram and Facebook's lunch. That is an entire massive company, one of the biggest in the world, who is existentially threatened by this. You can apply that to every single tech company. It sounds like you wanted to say something, but this is, this is the core thinking is is this stuff has the ability to threaten all of this.

[Aiden]

There's a more simple argument here for this specific company. Just the way you laid out the pricing model of Windsurf.

[Perry]

Right.

[Aiden]

I looked at that and the Miami thought was Google Workspace. So for those who don't know, Google offers a platform where you sign up and pay like monthly fees as a company and then monthly fees per users to support things like company email addresses and company tools and Google Drive storage and stuff like that. Right. A bunch of companies pay for that service already. So this type of tech rolls really easily into. If you develop an equivalent or competing package to what Windsurf has at Google, you get to roll it really conveniently into something that already has a massive user base or a massive customer base. You offer a bunch more services that are really valuable, already used by a bunch of programmers that are willing to pay a relatively high price for that service that you get to add into the pricing for a huge thing you already offer. That feels like a very straightforward product proposition to me. Rather than this nebulous idea of AI changing the future. It's. You're just developing really good tools to roll into a massive program you already offer at Google that does bring in tons of revenue.

[Perry]

There's two simple ways you could approach it. One is if you're an AI company, you think AI is going to bring in trillions of dollars with how much it's going to revolutionize the world, in which case spending 10 billion right now to snap up a bunch of people. If you're Mark Zuckerberg, that's worth it. But even if you don't believe that, I think that even if you just believe you need to protect your own castle, like just what you currently have is under threat. Even in that case, if you are worth whatever Microsoft or Meta or, you know, Apple is worth, it could be worth it to go buy the top people. If nothing else, just to stop them from going to Google to potentially take away that from you. So it's a, it can be a purely defensive thing as well, even if you don't. Even if Mark Zuckerberg secretly doesn't believe the hype.

[Aiden]

Yeah, the disconnect, I would say is that I don't think Wall street hedge funds are investing massive amounts of into Google because of Google Workspace getting better. Like, I don't think I'm even sure.

[Doug]

They'Re going to make a product with those guys. I mean, it sounds like they just want the talent. Everything I read about, like, they, they have no concrete plan to create Windsor.

[Perry]

Not only are they not going to do that, they're going to integrate them into DeepMind to work on their existing Gemini stuff. Yeah, right.

[Aiden]

Well, me Me, Me. That's why. Good thing I'm not on the board at Google.

[Perry]

No, you're right. What you're saying is right, that's what.

[Doug]

Their business should do. But I don't think they're.

[Aiden]

That's what I would do. I'd be like, so we'll make the tools and we'll, we'll embed it into our current product. That's what I would say. You guys are in the board meeting. I can't do ours in the board meeting.

[Doug]

I would feel uncertain about the stock I'm holding. If you're giving that speech, you're saying the same thing. I think your point is good. I actually fully agree with that. I actually have heard some on some of these earnings calls where they basically say, like, this is so existential. Yes, we can't answer your question about profits just yet, but this is so important.

[Perry]

We can't probably. Many, many, many investors are getting duped because if you think about it from the defensive standpoint of we just need, you know, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, we just need to make sure that some company doesn't come in and destroy our social media empire, then maybe you're just spending the billions and billions of dollars on defi. And that doesn't make Wall street like you more. So you have to keep saying, oh, yeah, we're going to grow, like so much money. And like, it's quite possible that they do. There's a lot of theories about how this will become massively profitable in X, Y and Z, but at the very least, you have to do it defensively. So do I think the stock should be skyrocketing every time people invest in AI? No. Do I think the companies have a good reason to put this much into AI talent? Yeah. Yeah, I do. And again, we've talked about this in the past, but, like, when it comes to software and particularly research like this, getting the smartest people matters a lot. I would rather have one Ilya Sutkever, who's like one of the godfathers of this stuff and a total genius. I would rather have one of him than a thousand of me. And I'm like a decently smart guy with tech, but I don't even care how many. I would rather have one of him than a million of me. It's. You can't just throw people at these problems. Right? It's just like in the same way you would rather have one Einstein rather than a million dumb people. Like, having more dumb people at the problem doesn't help, right? If you were trying to make the atomic bomb, would you rather have oppenheimer or, like, 1 million dumb frat dudes?

[Aiden]

How many dumb frat guys would it take to have built the atomic bomb?

[Perry]

It's. It's infinite. It would never happen. That's the point.

[Doug]

That would be a better movie.

[Perry]

That would have been a better movie.

[Doug]

If we were to watch a million frat dudes just.

[Perry]

Bro, we could condense the atoms.

[Aiden]

Brad, where did you put the uranium?

[Perry]

So there's a real. There's a real premium on, like, the smartest guy. If you're the guy who comes up with the next tech, that is what causes your company to make the AI tools that suddenly accelerated by everybody else. You get to AGI all this stuff, you become the biggest company in the world, the most influential. That's worth it by far.

[Doug]

I get it.

[Perry]

I just will say this, and I deserve $20 million.

[Aiden]

It's.

[Doug]

What they're saying is indistinguishable from a gigantic grift. And tell the truth. Until it happens.

[Perry]

Right?

[Doug]

We don't know. So it's. It's. It's Schrodinger's fucking drift.

[Aiden]

Schrodinger.

[Doug]

Until something happens, we. I'll just say it's not, and someone will say it is. And we won't know because it's just up in the air. But it feels so bubbly. It feels so. Like at some point you guys are.

[Aiden]

You're always talking about the vibes, man. You talk about the vibes, but you're fucking them up.

[Doug]

Yeah, no, I'm not going with the vibes, dude.

[Perry]

I think there's a few more years before somebody, Wall street goes, stop saying AI is going to do all this stuff. Has it made you money? But right now, we're years off that. Right now you can just keep saying, it's just, oh, bro, it's going to make so much money. You won't even believe how much money it's going to keep going for a while longer. We're like, we're not even at the good stuff yet.

[Doug]

I mean, the good stuff's already happened for Nvidia, but they're there.

[Perry]

Yeah, Everyone.

[Doug]

Everyone has to buy from them. That's crazy.

[Perry]

Okay. Yeah, we gotta move on.

[Doug]

Yeah. Okay.

[Perry]

We'll swing back at the end. There's a funny drama between Microsoft and OpenAI, which I didn't realize about. So we'll swing back. That little Oreo sandwich you can get to the cream in the middle. We'll get back to the cookie at the end. All right, give us. Give me some cream, Atriak.

[Doug]

I don't want to do any cream metaphors. Talking about Jeffrey Epsteelist.

[Perry]

Hey, give me the cream on Jeffrey Epstein.

[Doug]

I'm gonna give you guys a minor update. You know, this been discussed ad nauseam all over the place. I think it's really important. So a minor discussion. This Epstein thing is not going away for Donald Trump so far, unlike most other political scandals that he's bulletproofly navigated through, it seems like this is sticking a little bit louder and longer than other things. There's a real demand for people in his own base to release these files.

[Perry]

Don't make a pun. Do not make a pun.

[Doug]

What was your pun?

[Perry]

Okay, never mind.

[Doug]

I don't even know what the pun was.

[Aiden]

Ok, make a pun.

[Perry]

I'm just saying this is serious. We shouldn't joke about it. That's what I'm saying. You shouldn't be smiling and laughing right now.

[Doug]

You could joke about it. It is cosmically funny that this is all going on your words.

[Perry]

I, for me, Per. I think Jeffrey Epstein isn't that funny.

[Doug]

I don't.

[Perry]

I don't think it's that funny. What he did.

[Doug]

I'm not saying what he did was funny, Doug.

[Perry]

Oh, you think his. Him killing himself was funny?

[Doug]

Well, we don't know if that happened. All right. Aiden has different theory.

[Aiden]

He might have done.

[Perry]

It is Schrodinger's suicide.

[Doug]

Anyway, what I'm saying is of all the issues he's been polled on, this is by far his worst polling issue in the history of both terms of Donald Trump. Negative 44 disapproval to approval. Like 44% more disapprove than approve. People are deeply upset about it. He is now in a lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox. Like, that's a breaking of his. That's a fracturing of an empire that helped make him. And, you know, we're just seeing this weird unwind. And as there's a demand for a vote on it. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Republican, closed down the House so they couldn't vote. Like today, this happened today. There was gonna be a vote to release the files and they just sent everybody home, so they can't do it. So we're in, like, we're in the middle of like, a pretty big demand. And many of the Republican House reps were, you know, on social media demanding, like, what the fuck's going on? We want to be able to. We want to be able to. I think they're maybe appealing to their base or whatever, but this is happening. So this is all happening live. And I think until there's some more news on it, people are going to keep asking. I don't think it's going to be like, ah, fuck it, move on. That's my theory. Possibly it is because we all have brain rotted.

[Aiden]

There's a couple things I think are really funny about this, which I understand at large, not a funny situation at overall, but. But I do think it's really interesting that if you look back, Trump never himself made this a core tenant of his campaign or platform. There's one interview where he said like, yeah, I would release the files. And then he goes on to clarify, but I would be careful about how I would release them. And like, you wouldn't want anything.

[Doug]

A lot of phony stuff in there.

[Aiden]

A lot of phony stuff in there. And that's like one of the only times he, he himself talks about this.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

But everybody around him that campaigned with him, it became this large issue within his base and now it's biting him in the ass.

[Perry]

Okay, you're right. This is funny. It's actually pretty funny.

[Aiden]

It's just, it's not something that Trump himself was like, he wasn't campaigning on. Yes, I will get into office and I will release the files. And we need to hold people accountable. He's always been like, you know, you don't know. You just don't know. And, but all of the people around him, like, really latched onto this issue, especially during his last campaign. And all of the media pundits that lean more right or very far right really have captured this issue for a long time. So I think it almost accidentally became a rallying cry for the people in his base. And I think that's very interesting that he never wanted this, but it is coming to haunt him now.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

And at least, at least from the way I see it. And then the other thing that I kind of wanted to posture a question to people listening right now. I do think there is a theme here that we've gone over this year of the big beautiful bill and the deficit spending sort of fracturing this tech right support he had that was more intent about moderating the deficit or the debt. Right. And then we come along to the issue of how he handles Iran on.

[Doug]

The tech right thing. I mean, Elon Musk is the one that kicked off this whole, you know, Donald Trump will not release the Epstein files.

[Aiden]

Yes.

[Doug]

He's in them. Like, this is. This was. That was part of that fracturing.

[Aiden]

So he puts that out there. Right. And then we come to the, the issue of Iran, the possibility of getting involved in another foreign war. Not getting involved in another foreign war is another core tenet of his kind of, of his campaign and his political constituency.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

So we start to see more fracturing of support from that issue. Right. And then this Epstein issue really rises up and seems to be another place where there's a huge break among a lot of people who support him on well, why won't you release this? I don't understand why, like you are obfuscating or you just refuse to release these files. Right. So there's a media narrative right now that the base on the right is fracturing and, but the media and the way people like to talk about these things, especially if you're generally opposed to that position. I think people like to latch on to any clue or hint that the other side is weakening. People like the idea of the tides turning and themselves starting to win. And oftentimes reports of let's call it the leopards ate my face arguments are not really representative or true of how the opposing side actually is feeling or fracturing. And I wanted to know from people who maybe have more conservative family members or friends or if you're, you know, a more conservative person listening to this podcast, do you feel like these issues are actually fracturing the Republican or let's say more MAGA base on that side? Because I want to have a more realistic understanding rather than me looking at, at the media. That's fed to me of. Do you think this is actually these three back to back issues, especially the Epstein thing, Are they actually swaying people's opinions on this stuff?

[Perry]

There's a good tweet that is related to what you're saying. If you pull this up, Perry, which is someone tweeted, well, I'd like to see old Donny Trump wriggle his way out of this jam. Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily. Well, nevertheless, I'd like to see. And then it just loops and we've seen this a billion times. And I do often wonder because people are. It's exactly what you're saying. People are so excited for the downfall. And this is. There's whole, there's whole reddits about just people jerking off of like Trump Gret or something that it's called, you know, of this idea. And I also agree it's hard to get a real on the ground thing, but certainly from my perspective as well, having not followed what he did with in nearly as much depth in the 2016 term. It feels like his base is upset. Back in 2015 it was like everybody else besides the hardcore MAGA are pissed off, but they're still really loyal and this is like, like they seem really unhappy. I don't know.

[Doug]

Yeah, I mean I've seen this iconic tweet and that's sort of what I'm saying is before this, this is my default response. He seems to get through a lot of yeah, this feels different. We could be wrong. It's a fully fair point.

[Aiden]

That's why I want to know.

[Doug]

I feel question to my stream and I got some Republican people reaching out. They basically said no, the die hard of the die hard have not changed. They're 90%. They're locked in. But there's people that used to have the flags and the hats that now don't. They still support them, but it's more quietly. People are, you know, it's just like this open enthusiasm is clearly waning. The huge surgeon among young people is evaporating like that. The, the. I think I have a link for you, Perry, but Gen Z specifically has completely flipped and all polling on Trump like you'd see right here, it's massively, it's a purple line there. Negative 40 approval of young people. It was even a start of his term. Like they, they, they have buyer's remorse here. They thought they were getting something different than what they're getting. I do feel like, you know, you can always say who cares about polling? Nothing happens is everything's the same. I don't think he has the same level of enthusiasm and support and he started the term with. I mean, that's actually a pretty fair thing to say. I think it's pretty. And so it's. And I think it's more negative now than it was then. I think people have not loved the way he's governed the way they thought they would when they voted in the election. That, that's my, that's my honest feel. I don't think it's. I don't even think it's a biased take. I think that's where people are landing.

[Perry]

It's really going to hurt him for his third election.

[Doug]

We should talk about that next week. But yeah, who's going to 28. Whether this matters. It could happen in the midterms. I mean this could, this could matter. We don't need to talk about it too much more. But this EP thing, I, My guess is that, I don't know. I can Never underestimate people's ability to be like, ah, what's next? You know, move on to the next thing. But I think this has some sticking power. Like, people will keep asking about it.

[Aiden]

People get really, really fired up about pedophiles for some reason. Why can't people just chill out?

[Doug]

That's like, basically what he's saying, by the way.

[Perry]

That is.

[Aiden]

Well, I, I actually, I, I broke this down to somebody this week. I was trying to explain why I think this is such a, an important thing beyond the, the subject matter being so heavy and something that, you know, it's not really, it's not a political issue to say that people don't like pedophiles. Like, that's, that's pretty close to managing to be bipartisan on that one. But I was trying to describe why this has so much momentum from this political angle or base. And I think it's because if you, if you dig, if you work back, like, why is this issue that feels very disconnected from what Trump has actually said about it, so important to this crowd of people? And it tracks all the way back, like before the 2016 election, where Stuff like Pizzagate was like a year leading up to the election, right? Kind of like Pizzagate time period, Hillary's leaked emails, time period. There's a lot of momentum.

[Doug]

Pokemon go to the polls.

[Aiden]

There's a lot of momentum for, I would say, conspiracy theories circulating around, like, Democrats being involved in, like, rings of pedophilia. And then, and then Epstein kind of enters this public conversation on the Internet that to a degree that I had not seen before, like, he has been so, you know, he was arrested in the 2000s. It's kind of been known that Epstein was a bad guy, right? But in the mid-2010s and leading up to the election, the Epstein stuff starts to get kind of tied into reporting leading up to the election and tied into other things that are more conspiratorial, I would say, like Pizzagate. And if you were, if you were checking 4chan at the time, if I'm being honest, this was it start Q and on. And this idea of the deep state and like pedophilia and all of this stuff is building a lot of momentum. It always existed online before this. Like, there's the, you know, the Alex Jones crowd. The idea that politicians, like, meet up in the woods and sacrifice people and all that. Like, all of the, all of this, like, existed in, like, little threads and ideas, but hadn't reached this, like, place in popular culture, I would say, especially not in mainstream media, but if you're like a die hard right wing maga sort of guy and you've been on the Internet, this type of issue has been so pressing for you for like over a decade and now you're in a position where the Epstein himself has been arrested. There seems to be a conspiracy around him being murdered. He, he's directly linked to all these powerful people. It's like the most concrete version of any conspiracy theory you've been perpetuating or engaging with for more than 10 years. And your guy is finally in office and he has all the power in the world with all of the people around him who are completely unchecked compared to the people that were around him in his first administration who often said no and wouldn't let him do things. And you have the files in hand and it's like you've been frothing for this moment, right? And now he won't do it. And you've been promised by all of these people around him for so long. So I can imagine if you are in that position, it's incredibly frustrating. Like it seems insane that you're not getting the information that you've kind of sought after for 10. Maybe put us in a box. Go ahead. That just gives us some to break out of.

[Perry]

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[Doug]

Them when you can shatter them?

[Perry]

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[Aiden]

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[Perry]

This is like 911 for 911 conspiracy theorists.

[Aiden]

Yeah, this kind of. Yeah, it's. It actually kind of is you like you're telling a joke, but it's, it's as if the 911 conspiracy theory had like a gut. It's like we, we address if we arrested George Bush for 911 like and the files were not being shown and.

[Perry]

George Bush killed himself in jail.

[Aiden]

Like, I don't know. Like it is, it is kind of like that. And I was trying to just lay out all of that context for some, for why I think this is so important to so many people who have been in this space for a long time. Because I, I just remember reading and, like, seeing that stuff happen at the time. Like, there's an undercurrent that led to this stuff becoming so mainstream to begin with.

[Doug]

I mean, that explains why it's important to them. But, you know, this feels like a bipartisan, important issue. This feels like people broadly are mad about this, and it's. It's kind of uniting people asking questions. This is one of the few issues that seemingly has bipartisan support in the House and Senate, except for when these votes to release it come out. People talk about it this year. Yeah.

[Aiden]

So, I mean, it's like the, you know, it's. The real test will be, like, the bill.

[Doug]

Right.

[Aiden]

It's. It's not a budget bill. It's about, you know, leaking the information about the pedophile is dead now, and, and all the people he trafficked. So, you know, we'll see who holds to their word or not.

[Perry]

What I keep coming back to, which is so weird because normally Trump is really good at, like, rallying his base around stuff. You mentioned this, the goat of, like, reading the room, and this is the one time that I've seen him just totally miss the mark. Because the super easy way to do this is because they released information. They released footage of his jail cell. And they're like, see, nobody went in. They're like, we looked through all the things, all the documents. There's nothing in there incriminating anybody. There's no list. Right. They said all these things and they did the supposedly, you know, they did all this research and then they released it, but they just said, and there isn't a list and there's no conspiracy. Sorry. And what in that came out from Pam Bondi and Cash Patel and all them. And what they should have done been like, there isn't a list. This is. Probably goes even deeper than we thought, but right now we don't have anything.

[Doug]

Right.

[Perry]

That would have kept everybody happy.

[Doug]

He sort of did do that. I mean, he said he's still implying there's like, a list, but it was written by Obama and.

[Perry]

No, but, like, Cash and Pam were like, there. There was never a list. Like, get over it.

[Doug]

Yeah, right.

[Perry]

And he's saying, like, guys, why are people still obsessed with this? All he had to do was frame this as like, we've been foiled again by the deep state and we're going to get them next time and just like rally people around even more and make the fact that there's no list or they're not willing to release it part, part of the story. It's so baffling to me that they didn't do that.

[Aiden]

It'd be funny to see because part of me does think that would work, would have worked better. But the idea of blaming the deep state when you hold every conceivable position of power in government is.

[Perry]

But all the people who want this to be the big juicy conspiracy, like the core people we're talking about, that this seems to upset them in a way that nothing else Trump has done. Like, they just needed another, you know, worm to go after. They just needed to chase another car. But he was like, guys, the car isn't real. Stop chasing the car. That was his mistake. If he was like, the car is actually way down there. The Democrats like used whiteout on the pages and we can't see what was underneath. Like, that's all they had to do. He just had to pretend like it goes deeper.

[Aiden]

They didn't. Well, I think that's kind of what he like half assed. Yeah, he sort of did try to do that.

[Perry]

He was like, why is everybody still obsessed about it? They are done for doing this.

[Aiden]

Yeah. Then he tried to. Course. Correct. And then.

[Doug]

Yeah, he did a little bit.

[Aiden]

By the Democrats.

[Doug]

By the radical.

[Perry]

Gotcha.

[Aiden]

Okay, I guess I'll go on the record. I bet you if there, look, if there's a book and names in it and you know those pictures of the binders with blacked out names on it? I bet you there's some Democrats on there. Oh yeah, yeah.

[Doug]

It didn't release under Biden.

[Perry]

Charge the Democrats.

[Aiden]

I'll say it here first. Charge the Democrats.

[Doug]

The list.

[Aiden]

Yeah. How. Look how brave I'm being. Anyway, I, you know, I, I don't want to get too bogged down in like any more of this because I think this is like one of the, you know, I'm sure if you're listening to this, you've heard a lot about this already. But I did want to explore that idea of, you know, how real is the, is the division within, within the party right now?

[Perry]

I would have.

[Aiden]

Any anecdotes to share about that.

[Perry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For any people in the audience, if you have, if you have, you know, stories from or your perspectives, particularly if you are either in that camp or no people who are in that camp who felt like super loyal and were willing to see past all the other perceived, let's say, shortcomings of the Trump administration so far. But this is uniquely problematic. I'd be very curious to hear it. Yeah.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Well, I got a topic. I want to. I want to join with the topic. And it's a topic that it could threaten the very fabric of this podcast. Okay. You know one of our core pillars in this podcast.

[Aiden]

Oh, yeah.

[Doug]

Is Lee Kuan Yew. Another one is trains.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Aiden]

Lee Kuan Yu trains. Actually two killer pillars.

[Doug]

And this, this pillar is about trains. Okay.

[Perry]

And one of the two pillars.

[Doug]

Do we have a third pillar?

[Perry]

No, I think we're just a straight line.

[Aiden]

We need to come up with another pillar at least. A Triangle.

[Doug]

Trains podcast. In one of our early episodes, we talked about Bright Line, a privately owned train in Florida. You guys are clapping. I have an update. Do you guys remember how you pitched me? They had. They had these government bonds, not government month. They had. They had.

[Perry]

You could buy the activity bonds.

[Doug]

Yeah. And the government said they were tax free, but they weren't guaranteeing them. It was just. You're buying their debt. It's tax free, but it's their debt. If they don't pay it. Whatever. They didn't pay it. Can you scroll down, Barry? I'll understand. This is what they're trading at these bonds.

[Perry]

I don't understand. Trains are good.

[Doug]

Go down, down, down, down.

[Perry]

Train Trains are like AI. They go up in value.

[Doug]

That's what I thought right there. That's the. A day ago or whatever that is when they announced they were not going to be paying the interest on the bonds that they promised to pay, which usually is a sign of like insolvency or not having the money. Bad sign. The value of the bonds plummeted instantly overnight. Everyone that bought in thinking it was kind of like soft backstopped by the government because it's. As it's public activity is now experiencing in real hold on that person.

[Perry]

Be very stupid because that's not what they are.

[Doug]

So what they are. But they're sort of thinking, oh, it's got the endorsement. It's got the. It's a kind of.

[Perry]

Except that's not what it is.

[Doug]

Well, yeah, they just thought it was less risky than it is. And the risk is not going apparent because. And this is the other bad news I want to deliver. Ridership is 53% below estimates and revenue is 67% down from estimates. People just aren't riding this train. And enough so I don't. And part of it could be marketing. It could Be. It's a new thing. Americans don't understand trains.

[Aiden]

It could be marketing. It could be price, too. I did look at the feedback to. When we talked about this last time.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

And there were people who lived in the area who talked about Brightline overestimating the impact or overestimating the ridership they had. And they were citing the expense of using the train.

[Doug]

I think that's super fair. So I looked into it. The people that do ride it regularly, which is not as high as they thought. Love is hitting a mark for a certain group of people, but that group of people isn't as big as they thought it was. So they're trying some things. I'm not saying it's over. They have enough cash to last them through 2027. And they're trying. They're partnering with JetBlue, they're partnering with Disney. They're making these things happen. It's possible they can get ridership up. But as of right now, based on projections, they are going to lose quite a bit of money. And the bondholders are freaking out and trying to unload these bonds to anyone who will buy them.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

They're becoming junk. People are talking with lawyers are trying to find a way because now they're. They're concerned they're not going to get their money back. They loaned as debt to this company.

[Aiden]

Well, when I was looking at Public Activity Bonds, when we were prepping for that episode, we talked about this. They were kind of weird because they aren't guaranteed.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Except sometimes. So maybe there was a. There could be a gap in knowledge to where people didn't understand or, you know, underestimated the risk of what they were buying. The idea that maybe they wouldn't get paid back that interest. But I think on other projects through the country, there has been scenarios where even though they're Public Activity Bonds, the government still stepped in to, like, foot the bill after the fact that. So maybe they were hoping for some sort of bailout that they're not getting.

[Doug]

Everyone's always hoping for that in this country, but I hope that doesn't happen.

[Perry]

I think you guys are assuming these investors are stupider than they are. They probably realize exactly what this is, which is that it's an investment with some risk attached.

[Aiden]

Yeah. And then the risk.

[Perry]

And the risk came. Came through and it's. It's not good. They're not doing well. I think it's as simple as that. Not that they, like, didn't understand what was going on or thought the government would back it. Up. Yeah, you're probably, you know, Public Activity Bond is just where the government helps bonds not have to pay taxes on the revenue. So if you go in on this particular investment and it works out, you'll make some more money on the back end because you don't have to pay taxes. Yeah, I, I'm, I guess I'm not understanding who this investor would be. That is so dumb. They like walked by the train and was like, no, you want money.

[Doug]

Like they're hoping, which is a fair assumption.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

That the government, which has been touting this train bright line. It's awesome. It's great for Florida. We're building this. This is a huge success of our, our state, don't want it to fail. Which means they will step in and back. I think that's a sad.

[Aiden]

Maybe they're accounting for that in the risk. Right. The idea that even if this company fails to pay back the interest, maybe the government will choose in this niche scenario to still step in and bail out the interest payments.

[Perry]

But that's a fair point because it is so key to like Florida presenting itself as this, you know, modern hub and develop. But assuming there's. That's fair.

[Aiden]

Assuming they're smart, like you're saying, that's, that's a part of the risk calculation and the risk came to fruition regardless.

[Perry]

Right.

[Doug]

It's not over. I don't want to make it seem like this, this train is dead, it's going to keep running and they're working on things to grow it. It's just that they made big projections that would allow them to pay the money back they borrowed and those projections are not happening. So there's going to be problems. And this could throw off the construction of the Las Vegas one. It's just the saga for trains in America continues to be hard. Basically what I'm.

[Aiden]

Well, I know my perspective on this changed a bit when we talked about the Vegas to LA to LA one, because I wonder from, from people who have used this or been around it, locations of the stations taken into account, how, you know, ignoring the price, how useful is something is this actually when you exist in city infrastructure that is so car centric to begin with or so difficult to create rail lines into cities. Like my issue with the LA one when we talked about it last time, my heart sank when I found out that it's actually in Rancho Cucamonga and not Los Angeles.

[Doug]

Yeah. If you're gonna drive an hour to.

[Aiden]

Get there, I can't really express to you how far Rancho is. Away, it's not feasible. I may as well drive to Las Vegas at borderline and I certainly it is price competitive for me to fly out of like LAX or Burbank, then take that, then drive all the way to that station and then fly. Which sucks because I want there to be trains. I want them to be more useful. My maybe fear with a project like this is similar to the LA one is even if the train is getting built, how practical and accessible is that station? Even for me like when I think about using the Metro, there's, there's a reasonable case for me to be using the Metro versus my car for a lot of the places that I have to go in Los Angeles. But it doesn't, it unfortunately adds a ton of time to traveling because none of the stations are actually close to where I need to go. There's no station actually close to my house like or very close to my house. There's no station actually close to my work. Like they're, they're all like a little more inconvenient than they ideally would be. Right. Versus when you're in bigger cities that are better planned, that have better station layouts where you're no more what feels like you're never more than like a 5 to like 10 minute walk away from a station. But that isn't to say I'm like giving up hope on trains forever. I want there to be more trains. It just sucks to hear that I'm.

[Doug]

Not giving up at all. I just think we had a, a bit of optimism on it and it's seeming more like to be able to do this without government will be impossible. They just, you have to have somebody imminent domain or they give us a little closer. If it's this inconvenient out of the way it's like maybe in Florida it'll change if they can find the prices down or whatever. I'm not going to rule it out, but it's not working the way I thought.

[Perry]

There's a little bit of hope because they haven't expanded to the Disneyland area yet. So if they do that it's, that could be huge. Right. So that you know, in theory is like a major, major, major reason people would want to use the, the train. So but presumably they already had that in their metrics and projections of like oh yeah, once we do that it's going to be even bigger. So this looks bad. I'm going to be honest. This looks real bad.

[Doug]

I know it's unfortunate. When I read I had hoped for a better outcome we'll see. I have one more small business story, and that is just how glorious it must be to work for a defense contractor company because I was listening to the earnings call of Lockheed Martin. They announced an 80% profit drop. Huge, huge decline. Really bad day for them. But then people asked, why, what's going on? And they said it's classified. Specifically we had a billion $950 million charge as a result of difficulties in a classified aeronautics program. And then they can't say more. And then suddenly. So that's like they wiped out all of their profits. They're actually net negative on cash flow this. This quarter. We don't know why. We don't know what happened. But they. So obviously it took a hit to their stock. But yeah, they're just like, yeah, we have no money. There's no money like this quarter.

[Aiden]

And that's. And that's fine because classified classification over something like that is. Supersedes your.

[Doug]

Yeah. Your legal. Your legal rights to disclose. It's just very funny. They could just say it's classified.

[Perry]

We should start classifying our own opinions just to make sure we don't get flack.

[Aiden]

It's classified. Yeah. My get out of jail free of card.

[Doug]

Yeah. Sorry.

[Aiden]

What are you talking about?

[Doug]

Class military.

[Perry]

And I was a bit of an. But there's. There's an explanation.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Perry]

I can't tell you.

[Aiden]

I can't tell. Okay.

[Perry]

Who else has trains?

[Aiden]

France.

[Perry]

What?

[Aiden]

France sure does.

[Perry]

Is anything happening in France?

[Aiden]

Yeah, I'm trying to.

[Perry]

Literally anything. Aiden.

[Aiden]

Any. It's. Something's happening. Something's happening. So I'm. I'm trying to leave smoking.

[Perry]

What are they protesting about today?

[Aiden]

Well, it's funny you asked, Doug, because they're. They're kind of back at it. There is always, always something. So they. France recently their prime minister. Not their president. Their prime minister of the. The same party as Macron, from my understanding. Beirut. Beirut released their Epstein files. The French Epstein files.

[Perry]

The French teen files.

[Doug]

Yeah, that would be. That would put a light of fire under our ass. You know what I'm saying? Everybody.

[Perry]

Free market.

[Doug]

Everybody else released their own Epstein. Pretty jealous. We'd have to catch up.

[Aiden]

He released their budget proposal because I.

[Doug]

Give you context in this guy. Do you know Beiru?

[Aiden]

No.

[Doug]

He. He was brought. Okay. They had a huge fight over who was going to be this. This prime minister role.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Because. Because Macron can. Can suggest somebody, but they have to vote to appoint him. And they went through all these rounds of people and finally they pick like the most Safe middle of the road. Like this guy is going to just deal with the budget because we, we, we got bills to pay. Shit's going wrong. Nobody can agree on anybody. We're going to go with Bairu, he's the middle of the road guy. He's going to, he's compromised. We can all agree on he's going to deal with the budget. I don't know your story, but I just know him going in well.

[Aiden]

This is his attempt to solve the budget problems in France because France is running a massive deficit, basically. Who is it there? A little bit. But they're, they're among the highest in the EU right now. I think the second. Sorry, the second highest or the highest. And they have a debt to GDP ratio which if you're confused on why that's important. We have a great episode on national debts and like why they're a problem. I suggest you go listen to that episode. Like a little bit of background on this. But they have a debt to GDP ratio of 110% and climbing. So not the highest in the EU right now. I believe it is lower than Italy's and Greece's, but the difference with theirs is that it's on a trajectory upwards right now. Whereas Italy increases is coming down. So they're in a tough situation where their budget is being mismanaged. Right. And with the backdrop of. They have a commitment and expectation that they're going to be increasing their military spending to 5% of GDP. All of the EU has to like hit this benchmark by 2035 and currently they're military spending is only 2, 2% of their GDP. Which, what's ours.

[Perry]

Ours is like 15%. Right. 20 something crazy.

[Aiden]

No.

[Perry]

Is that too high? No, I'm going off of the budgetary stuff. But anyway, yeah, it's, it's.

[Aiden]

I mean ours is higher, but I can't remember what it is.

[Doug]

It's like 8%. There's.

[Aiden]

Yeah. It's not crazy.

[Doug]

There's no way. It is crazy, by the way.

[Aiden]

That is because we got, because we got 4 fat.

[Doug]

We have a big country and 8% of our GDP for military is crazy.

[Perry]

See my tanks? Yeah.

[Doug]

You could go to 4%, still have the biggest military in the world and we could afford like a million things. We could.

[Aiden]

And they're so they're having a similar problem to us where their bond yields are going up. The amount of interest that France is having to pay to get people to buy its debt is increasing. And for the first time the. A big marker here is that if you look at the 10 year bond yield in France, it has surpassed Italy. And Italy is like the forsaken EU child in many ways of their debt is unreliable. Like don't buy Italy's debt in a similar way that people look at Greece.

[Doug]

Yeah. From like an easy perspective. It's just your bond yield is a way of the market deciding how risky it is to lend to you.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

So when the market is saying Francis is higher than in Italy, it's saying France is riskier to loan money to than Italy, which is crazy. That's, I mean that's not normal in European politics or history.

[Aiden]

So that's. And this is on top of France's commitment to decarbonization and getting more access to energy. So they have all of these fronts. Right. Like rising, rising rates on their debt demands, new demands for spending on defense and trying to bring their country into the future when it comes to carbon free energy, which they're doing a relatively good job of.

[Perry]

Yeah. It's like they're 2% of their GDP right now is military. They have to go up to five. That's a lot.

[Aiden]

Yeah, that's a huge, huge.

[Doug]

You're already overspending, you already don't have the money.

[Perry]

That's massive.

[Aiden]

That's, that's the issue. Right. So you're in a place where you need to figure out your budget somehow.

[Doug]

Right.

[Aiden]

Or do we raise taxes, do we cut spending? We probably have to do both. And that's kind of what I want to get to at the end of this. So Beirut had proposed a new budget. I think, I think it was Tuesday of last week and the reception was extremely negative. So I looked into what, you know, what he was actually asking for. So the first thing is that people and like headlines caught on too heavy is that they wanted to cut two public holidays in France. They wanted to get rid of Easter Monday, Monday and then a holiday that celebrates the victory in World War II on May 8th. These cutting public holidays generate more economic activity and headlines across France grabbed onto these two things and it's a huge part of the public pushback to this. Anytime there's an infraction in France on holidays or anything to do with pensions or anything in France. Right. There's major, major pushback. France famous for, for protesting any intrusion on the, I would say leisure or workers rights. Right. Which is good in many ways.

[Doug]

You want to protest.

[Aiden]

Yeah. It's super easy to have your day.

[Doug]

No one wants to have a holiday taken away.

[Aiden]

Yeah. And then the other thing that they were asking for were spending cuts and a spending freeze. So he was asking for what they called a blank year for 2026. Basically the way it works in France is every year pensions and welfare scale with inflation, basically or scale with, with costs. Right. So every year they're a little more than they were the previous year. His request was that all 2026 spending on these things remain the exact same as it was in 2025. Let's just maintain our spending at the exact same level for one year and that will save us. I think they estimated like 7 billion euros or something.

[Perry]

Sorry. Rather than increasing it some amount, rather.

[Aiden]

Than increasing it by an amount, cost them $7 billion more dollars. And they have a, you know, they have a really hefty welfare, welfare system, but also a notably expensive health care system. Even among European countries, French people spend a disproportionate amount of money on health care because there's a lot of services and offered to French people or a level of medical service that is offered to in France that I think is not comparable elsewhere. Things like nurses being paid for to be available for newborns when you have a child, for example. So that was his request to like freeze those spending, except for anything that has to do with debt servicing. So like naturally you're going to be having to pay more interest on your debt over time as you take more out. So that doesn't account. And then the military spending that they're going to have to do so they can increase the military spending within these provisions he had laid out because they still need to meet those commitments. And then the last thing, I thought these were tax increases at first, but they're, they're not, which is kind of the interesting part here. So they wanted to close a bunch of tax write offs that either are deemed low utility or disproportionately benefit wealthy people in businesses. They want to make sure that wealthy people in businesses don't abuse the tax system or abuse as many tax breaks. And they pay more in taxes by fixing those things. And then also they wanted to create, create a. Excuse me, this is called a solidarity contribution. I had to look this up. My understanding is that, that it's not the same as like changing the tax structure, but you're demanding people pay extra for a specific reason or from a specific system. So an example I could give is maybe you demand that wealthy people have to pay more into Social Security. They have to pay more beyond the tax system into Social Security that they see no benefit from, from you're not paying more into your own Social Security benefit that pays you out later. You're basically, quote, donating money into Social Security. And the point of this is to just create equity among society, like take money from the wealthiest people to. And apply it to a very specific purpose. And he is proposing that they do have a solidarity contribution of some kind from the wealthiest people in France in order to help deal with the budget concerns.

[Doug]

Voluntary or what I understand.

[Aiden]

No, it's not voluntary. This is. The wording is really weird. And perhaps that's why some people are upset, is because rather than like saying you're advocating for this concrete change in taxes on the wealthy, you're wording it in a more ambiguous way.

[Perry]

But maybe I'm a gun at them and saying, don't you want to give to the poor people? It sounds like out of the goodness of your heart. Right?

[Aiden]

It's. That's what it kind of sounded like. I don't think that is. I think I'm misunderstanding how solidarity contributions work. I think you can effectively think of them as. The way I was reading it is you can effectively think of them as an additional tax, and in this case, an additional tax on wealthy people. But it's an additional tax with a very specific purpose to be applied to a specific sector or.

[Doug]

Or fund in the way I read it. Again, I don't know as much about this particular story, but the overview I heard of his budget was like, they're very, very concrete on the things they would cut.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Which hurts. But they're very vague and nebulous on the. On the taxes they will raise.

[Aiden]

Yes, yes, absolutely. Okay, so in all of these things, right, Receive major pushback right away, like losing my public holidays, like spending spending cuts on services we need. The interesting thing is this is being universally pushed back on by both ends of the political sector. No voter wants nobody. Nobody wants to. Like Le Pen, famously on the right in France is shitting on this. The left wing parties in France are shitting on this. Nobody is happy with these changes. Nobody wants them. Right. And I think the question, the question that I kind of wanted to ask, because I think if you're nitpicky and you go through the details of this, I would say my major criticism is, okay, you're being really concrete about the spending cuts and. But you're not being concrete about the revenue part of it. You're not laying out a plan for, like, how taxes are going to be raised or changed on the wealthiest people. Even though you have a semblance of an idea of Getting wealthy people to pay more. However, I don't think that's why the average person gets upset. I don't like when you look at the headlines for the pushback on this, it mostly has to do with the public holidays, right? It's like the most simple, you just don't want to lose eye catching thing. And the question I wanted to ask you guys, because we're at a similar, you know, even higher debt to GDP ratio, right. As we head towards this financial crisis, I think compared to how we've been dealing with our budget issues, this feels a little more grounded in its approach where like it at least is laying out something or acknowledges that wealthy people need to pay more. But no one wants tax increase like no one wants to hear about tax increases applied to them. No one wants to hear about like spending cuts or freezes. There comes a point in your budget where you probably need to do both things. How do you get people on board with that? Because in France right now, it doesn't matter what end of the political spectrum you're on, they all disagree with the proposed changes here, right? And they're on seemingly like a financial crash, crash course. And it's like how it feels so difficult seeing this situation versus America's has like made me much less confident about any ability to turn the ship around when it comes to this financial issue issue. Because nobody wants to contend with the short term reality of the policy proposals that are necessary when your debt to GDP is this crazy.

[Perry]

The McDonald's snack wrap is back.

[Doug]

You brought it back. Ranch snack wrap. Spicy snack wrap. You broke the Internet for a snack? Snack wrap is back. Butter.

[Aiden]

On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this.

[Doug]

So whether you're sharing the streaming password.

[Aiden]

In the family chat or trading those late night voice messages that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone.

[Doug]

Yeah, this is the political problem of being at the end of this massive debt cycle. We've kicked the can for so long that whatever solution will be painful. It'll. It'll be unpopular. However, you know, somebody's going to have to bear the cost of this many decades of debt binge profligacy. When you tell regular people who are not even thriving that they have to bear the cost by cutting their holidays or it's just not, that's untenable.

[Aiden]

I don't expect them to be by any means.

[Doug]

You're not saying that at all. I'm just saying that that feels like a path that's not going to hold. And I think the only way you can do this is because even though they have a lot of money and a lot of power, they have fewer votes because they have fewer raw number of people. The only way is to have some of the burden of this knuckling up, toughening. Whatever, whatever metaphor you want to use has to fall heavily and concretely on those who have the most. Like it just has to.

[Aiden]

Yeah. The only solution I could think of here was if I can be a New Deal shale for a second. Is the GDP a debt to GDP ratio during World War II and into the beginning, you know, the early years of FDR's term was extraordinary. And what was the path that we took at the time? Well, we levied a ton of taxes on the wealthiest people in the country and eventually, and you know, that's not the only thing that's happening around that time period. But I think it was a key part of turning economic things around in a positive direction where we could reel like basically create enough economic growth and create a bunch of revenue from taxes and reel in the fiscal damage.

[Doug]

People talk about austerity a lot. And the one thing I don't like when they talk about is like, austerity is so fucking terrible. You shouldn't be cutting things. And I actually agree with that. I think for most people you can't be cutting their health services. This stuff is, is too harsh on people that need this stuff the most. However, people often on that single level, we should just keep borrowing. You can't do that either. You have to find a way to balance the budget without cutting the stuff that's most important to people at the bottom of income society.

[Aiden]

I guess that's the question I'm sort of asking is how you know, in this specific circumstance with France? I don't know what the answer is, but how possible is it when you're being pulled in all these directions is like, okay, we have all these demands for like defense and military spending because of the situation we're in with NATO and Russia and I. But I also need to keep all of my incredible like social services and my incredible medical system and my public holidays and my like all of my provisions for, you know, good work, life balance in France. And I also need to reel in the budget somehow do. Is there, I'm more talking about the math is like, is there literally Enough wealth in France to be taxed to like pay for all of that is. And it's a fair point.

[Doug]

Maybe not.

[Aiden]

And the answer I hope is yes. Like I would like that to be the answer.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

But I wonder if you reach a point of your debt is so big that that doesn't get to be the answer anymore. And I don't know what stage that is at.

[Perry]

So let's use the USA as an example. I think that something that people use as a kind of like cure all panacea when talking about this stuff is make the rich pay their fair share. And nowadays the term is billionaires rather than millionaires going off of chatgpt. I don't know if these numbers are totally accurate, but there's about 800 billionaires in the US combined wealth of 5.7 trillion. So let's say about $6 trillion held by the billionaires. Even if you took all of their money, not increase their taxes from whatever it is, 33% to 50. 50. Right. You just took all of their money that would fund the country. Like that would help our deficit for like less than three years. Yeah, that might sound good, but that's a one time thing. That doesn't fix the fundamental spending issues. There's you know, various questions about whether that's even possible in the first place. That's if you took all their money, if you doubled their taxes. Right now most of the money from billionaires and super wealthy people is from assets that are being held. They're not. They don't have 7 trillion, $6 trillion sitting around in cash. The vast, vast, vast majority of that is stocks.

[Doug]

So I got a couple of points on that.

[Perry]

Yeah, no, I, so I would, I would love a clarification on this because I agree that rich people should pay more money. It feels very silly that we just cut taxes for a bunch of wealthy people at the same time. The idea that you can be like we need, look, the way we solve the deficit is to tax the wealthy. That is massively oversimplifying and the math doesn't add up. We are $36 trillion in debt. We go to more trillion every year or more. At least we go to trillion. The math is not even remotely accurate.

[Aiden]

Could I synthesize my question quickly?

[Doug]

Sure.

[Aiden]

I think taxing the wealthy, we've talked about it before, is probably one of the most important things you need to do. Right beyond, it's an important part in raising revenue to begin with. But we've talked about how beyond raising revenue, it's an important Part of keeping your economic game in your country a healthy agree thing to participate in. Right. My question is at what point kind of what you're posturing here is like do. There is certainly a point of debt because we've pushed it so far where just raising those taxes is not enough anymore. And in the US an example we've talked about is like, okay, well if you pivoted to a universal health care health care system where you can negotiate as a single buyer, you could reduce your health care spending a lot without losing any thing in terms of quality or availability. Right. That's that, that's a something we've talked about that's important in the U.S. in France's case, I don't know France well enough to be like, what are the areas that you could cut spending in that. In a similar way that. Because eventually I feel like the debt is big enough that you need to do both. Right.

[Doug]

You are probably going to have to do both. Fully understood. But two things I want to say to your point.

[Perry]

Yeah, no, I would love to hear your.

[Doug]

You mentioned billionaires specifically.

[Perry]

Yeah, yeah.

[Doug]

What I don't think was mentioned was corporate taxes, which is where there's a much bigger amount of wealth that can be. And they used to be higher. So they've been lowered over decades. Right. So corporate taxes, that's a huge, huge amount of money. And you're not trying to pay off the 32 trail. That's nearly impossible. The amount of money that we're talking about, for the debt to actually pay it off. Impossible. What we're trying to do is just get to a balanced budget. We just have to stop it from growing. And so to do that, you just, it just simply cannot be continuing to ask regular people to see a quality of life decrease. They're just already at their edge.

[Aiden]

Yes.

[Doug]

We can't be. It just does not. It's not politically possible. There's going to be so much anger. Just take away people's holidays. Like almost a comical end of that game where it's like they're shaving off a few billion by giving away holidays to try and balance his budget. It's absurd. Like, so that's my point. It's like it's, it's, it's highest in people and corporate taxes.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And then I guess, yes, of course from spending cuts, especially efficiency ones are the ones that's best where you can get the same quality of service but you're spending less on middlemen. That makes total sense. But, but the end of the day, it's going to be unpopular because we've had it too good for too long, there's been too much debt field and there will be pain. I totally get that.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

But who bears that pain is going to be the big question of our next 10, 15 years.

[Perry]

It's like, so, so you feel, and this is a genuine question, you feel that at least. So to put this really Simply, we spend 2 trillion more in every given year in the US than we make. If we can get that down, we can pretend whether we don't owe an additional 36 trillion. I guess. So if we can find 2 trillion. But it has to be every year. You feel like at least a huge percentage of that could be covered. I don't think taxing billionaires covers that much of it. You would have to do capital like capital gains tax.

[Aiden]

I could give you a little math.

[Perry]

Because I haven't looked at the corporate tax and how much of that dropped.

[Aiden]

Yeah, so we, I did look at that when we went through the. I forget what episode, but I looked at this because we cut the corporate tax rate in the United States in 2017. Right. And I wanted to see the difference in that revenue. And from what I just looked at, I, I think if we had kept the corporate tax, assuming that corporate profits remain the same Right. Through the same period, which is the big tax rate had remained the same, then we'd be making, I think it was 200 billion more, 200 to 300 billion more a year in revenue. If the corporate tax rate in America had just stayed the same, instead of getting cut in 2017. Yeah, yeah, that's in the current year, we would be making 200 or 300 billion more in like 2024, 2025. So, you know, that's not, that's not an insignificant amount of money. Maybe you could push the corporate tax rate even higher.

[Perry]

Yeah, even that. It's like, so, okay, let's. I, so again, I agree. I'm just, I'm trying to point. What I'm trying to do is push back against what I often hear, which is like, well, we just need to tax the rich more. I agree, but I don't. The math doesn't make sense to me. That would save us 200 billion a year. Right. Again, we need to get to 2 trillion. So that's 10% of the way there. If we have 800 billionaires, let's say we go to every billionaire and say you need to put up 250, $50 million a year. Let's say we can make that tenable, that's 200 billion. Right? So that's another 200 billion. We've asked billionaires for this crazy amount of money. I mean not crazy, a large amount of money. They are paying right now. We've made 400 billion. We're, we're 20% of the way there. We're a fifth of the way. Where the fuck do we make the rest of it? And that's my concern. And obviously we have to cut spending and some. But I would love our military to go down. I would love our health care to go down. I just don't see where we get all the money. Two trillion is so I think much money.

[Aiden]

I'm even thinking I would love this.

[Perry]

For it to be rich people. Sure, there's somebody who's going to comment.

[Aiden]

But like outside of the. I'm thinking about this issue outside of the the US is my, my basic question for somebody who has a more, you know, masked out answer of this is what is the threshold you get to where you, you have no choice but to start cutting spending on things that people like that average people like. What is the threshold where you have to start doing that no matter what? Well, you can't do it politically and that's very vague. And you can't do it politically. I understand all of these things. Right, I get that. I think I'm just wondering what. There is a point where you have. So you have rode the gravy train for so long that you need to make like hard choices. And I'm wondering where that is. And I rather start with things like wealth taxes or like land value taxes or fucking estate taxes, higher income taxes on the wealthy, raise the corporate taxes. All of these things that I think are essential to having a better functioning society. That at a base level I want to start with all those things because we haven't done that yet. We've been going in the opposite direction for a really long time and that's the part that needs to be reverted 100%. But yeah, I'm asking like the question of the math and I don't know, I understand that we don't have like the exact numbers or like the answer. Yeah, I'm more curious.

[Doug]

No, I mean I think the realistic outcome, this is what I hear from people talk about the same thing, is that we won't figure it out and we're going to run full speed into the wall. And what that means is the, the cost of borrowing will get so astronomical that you just can't pay that, that people will stop because you know as your debt gets so big, people charge more and more. You have to pay more and more yield to get someone to loan you money and that's going to get out of control and then we're going to have to print money to buy our own debt. This is like the end game of Japan. Japan's going through this right now. I mean Japan's in a bit of a. Japan just had an election where their far right party to make Japan great again type thing.

[Aiden]

Yeah, they want, they're sweeping.

[Doug]

And the LDP lost a majority for the first time in the history of Japan, really forever. And people were angry there because they're at the end game. They have 200% jet to GDP. Yeah, they're printing money, they're getting inflation, but wages aren't keeping up. People are getting angry and that's, that's. You gotta get political upheaval. If you can't solve the debt problem, if you can't balance the budget, you eventually get it. You can delay it for a long time and we have. But you will eventually get political problems. So yeah, I don't know. I mean the UK sort of had it with. They had a budget that was so bad no one loaned them money. And Liz Truss got kicked out of office in 30 days or whatever.

[Aiden]

That's crazy. That's still crazy.

[Doug]

So I don't know. It's happening, it's happening all over. This is a question not just in France, but everywhere. But I totally agree with your question. I don't know how it's solved, but I do know that starting with public holidays or starting with things that are, are impactful to regular people is a no go.

[Aiden]

Yeah, it feels silly.

[Doug]

People won't, it's not even silly. It won't work. There's gonna be so much pushback that you can't get it done. It's just that era of like we're gonna do a little bit of cost cut and everyone's gonna tighten their belts is just not going to work anymore. There's just too much money concentrated in too few hands. Even if they won't fully pay for it. Yeah, that's where you have to start.

[Perry]

You just agree with that.

[Doug]

People won't take it is my honest assessment. I think people will are at the end of the rope on it. That's my, that's my theory. But we'll see.

[Aiden]

No, I think that maybe if you.

[Perry]

Start with that and you're like, look, corporations and the super wealthy are paying a lot more and now we have to start going to other areas. It's at least a step that then makes broader society go, okay, maybe we can collectively shoulder this thing we've been kicking down the road forever. But, yeah, great. You can't start with holidays.

[Doug]

It's just cartoonish.

[Perry]

Dude, it's such a bad start, man.

[Aiden]

You know, can I posture one other thing that I think should save some money before we end? And I've been meaning, I swear to God I'm still gonna do this, this topic soon because I've been meaning to do some interviews about it, but I've talked about Estonia's, you know, digital bureaucracy before.

[Doug]

That's our third pillar, dude machine Estonia.

[Aiden]

The reason I thought about this this week is I've been dealing with a bunch of paperwork related to, you know, my businesses and taxes lately and just how annoying and complex getting through a lot of it is. It's just annoying. And you have to submit the same information about yourself, the same information about your business. You know, in the case of the company that we own for this podcast I'm getting, you know, I think I've asked you guys for like, similar information like two or three times because I just need it over and over again for like different agencies or different groups of people or whatever. Right. It is a painfully arduous process in so many ways. And from my understanding, Estonia created this incredible model of cutting out a lot of the paperwork and process that people need to do just business or do things in their life, like their personal taxes or handle something like their marriage or any interaction that involves paperwork. And the government, which is all of them, they have managed to consolidate into a really clean process. Imagine a world where you have like a single profile of your information that's accessible across all of these different government, like institutions and websites.

[Doug]

It's Google login, but it's fills out.

[Aiden]

Your form for you. Exactly. And that is something that saves so much money and time for so many people like that. To me, when like the vague notion of doge, that is like what the. What could be pursued is like, that's what efficiency actually means to me is greasing the wheels of like, how all of these systems work, because I interact with them all the time. And, you know, not, not just if you're a business owner, but just if you exist in society. You have to interface with, with paperwork and submissions all the time, whether it be for your driver's license, ID voter registration, whatever. Right. All of these systems could be made more efficient and consolidated and digitized and save so much Time and money. And I feel like that. And Estonia, that's a huge part of how they started running massive surpluses, obviously. Smaller country. I fucking get it. You commenter, who's making a comment right now? I get it.

[Doug]

I was gonna say it.

[Aiden]

I fucking.

[Doug]

I was gonna say.

[Aiden]

I understand that. Obviously, I understand that. I'm just saying that that was a huge course that they took to make things better there and to save themselves a lot of money. I think taking a very conscious and concrete approach to something like that when we're talking about things like this could be really good. Anyway, I'm done.

[Doug]

Yeah, I mean, I. I think it reminds me of some of the Lena Khan stuff where it's like, hey, maybe this won't solve everything. Maybe one click to cancel is not going to fix our corporate monopolies. But, like, people just want to see a nice step in the right direction might be nice. You know, that's unequivocally good. Makes people's interaction with government better. Saves us money. Just go for it. Let's lose. Yeah, it gets momentum going. People like, oh, okay, I believe that you. I have some trust in the system that it's getting better and it's going to work, and. And they buy in a little bit instead of constantly trying to find their way out of it.

[Aiden]

For sure.

[Perry]

I want to end with two quick little things.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Perry]

First off, somewhat serious. I want to make an apology. A few months, two ago, maybe now, we talked about, I just post a video about the emotional challenges I have had with some things going on in my life. And then we talked on the Patreon and I talked about a quote, unquote hate thread person who had criticized me and my opinions in the wake of that. And I think I had sort of exaggerated what this person had said and I called them psychotic and this other stuff. And I recently learned that somehow that had gotten back to this person and that obviously some people found who this was and found the thread and all that. And looking back, that sucks. Like, just straight up that that sucks that I did that. I think as much as I was not in a good headspace at that time, I'm a public figure and I don't really think about the fact that if I'm talking about these things to hundreds of thousands of people and calling somebody psychotic, that fucking actually sucks and is really irres responsible with me. So I, as I learned about this recently, I did genuinely feel remorse about it. So to that person, if you happen to see this, genuinely sorry, I hope you do not get any harassment over that. It's also just broadly, I wanted to say it because I think I'm learning how to be responsible as a public figure. And this is one of those things of, like, okay, there is a real consequence to just, like, talking shit about a public person. And I super do not want to contribute to that type of culture of. Of public figures, you know, roasting people online and everything that comes with that. So why.

[Aiden]

You need to be nice to Jeffrey Epstein.

[Perry]

That's why. Jeffrey Epstein.

[Aiden]

And that's the takeaway.

[Perry]

So I wanted. Because I talked shit publicly, I wanted to publicly say, that really genuinely sucks. And I kind of felt like an asshole when I realized what I did. So I do apologize for that. Follow up, slightly more upbeat. Went to Open Sauce this last weekend, last minute. And you went to Open Sauce. And we saw so many amazing people. I just got to. I mean, I didn't even announce I was going. I just, like, saw these people who were so nice and so enthusiastic and many people said how much they enjoyed this show and appreciate what we're doing, and it was incredibly heartwarming, and I just appreciated that a lot. And it is really nice to be, like, grounded and talk to an actual human being and be like, oh, people are real. There's like, not. It's. I don't just have to be in the Internet world all the time. It's like a real thing. So that meant a lot.

[Aiden]

It was so cool, I think, you know, I imagine because the crossover with something like lemonade stand or. Sorry, the. With open sauce and the type of content and the content creators that are there and the things that are presented. But I have never met this many lemonade stands.

[Doug]

That's good.

[Aiden]

In one place. And it was so nice meeting so many of you, truly. I had a wonderful time saying hi to everybody. It was so, so cool. And it made me feel like we're making something really special.

[Perry]

I don't think people give a shit about my YouTube anymore. There was like two people out of a hundred who brought it up. Nobody ever was like, I love lemonade sales. Like, thanks. And then by the 99th person, I was like, I do YouTube also. You should check it out sometime. Thanks so much, everybody. See you next time.