It's Still Shutdown | Ep. 032 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Summary

Lemonade Stand Ep. 032 – "It's Still Shutdown"

Date: October 8, 2025
Hosts: Aiden, Atrioc (Brandon), DougDoug
Podcast: Lemonade Stand (Vox Media Podcast Network)

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Overview

This episode dives into the ongoing U.S. government shutdown—now on day seven—with the hosts breaking down the practical, political, and sometimes absurd realities of federal funding lapses. Using their trademark comedic banter, Aiden, Brandon (Atrioc), and DougDoug run through why shutdowns happen, what they mean for everyday Americans, and how government departments are prioritized in a crisis. The latter half explores the partisan standoff causing the shutdown, the human impact on federal workers, and recent changes to H1B visa rules and AI content copyright battles.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Lemonade Stand Curse" and Government Shutdown Irony

[00:00–01:09]

• The hosts joke about a "curse" where major news changes the moment they discuss it.
• Doug: "If we talk about the government shutdown extensively today, the law of irony will flip it so that it's ended tomorrow and didn't mean anything." (00:14)

2. Where Are We Now? – Government Shutdown Status

[01:09–02:47]

• The shutdown is at day 7. Doug speculates it could be the longest ever (past record: 34 days).
• Stalemate likened to “Groundhog Day” (Sen. Jim Justice): Both sides are entrenched, no progress.
• Doug: "Both sides seem incentivized with their base to make a stand here to fight." (01:46)
• Aiden: Jokes about a Romeo-and-Juliet scenario bringing Congress together due to the shutdown (02:18).

3. What Does a Government Shutdown Actually Mean?

[02:47–03:56]

• Aiden asks what practical changes happen and why.
• Brandon: Outlines that Congress hasn't set a budget; 15 executive departments must decide what gets cut.

4. Simulating Shutdown Budget Cuts – The $5 Game

[03:56–19:02]

• The hosts play a game: 5 $1 bills to fund (or not) 15 government departments.
• Brandon: “When the government shuts down... you have to decide what gets shut down and what doesn’t.” (03:28)

Highlights of Department "Cuts" and Their Impacts

• Department of Education: Defunded. Mainly manages high-level policy and approving new student loans; immediate impact is minimal for the average person (05:00–05:53).

• Department of Treasury: Funded. Essential for paying all other government expenses and upholding financial markets (07:13–08:10).

• Department of Housing: Cut. 10 million Americans lose rental assistance (especially affecting seniors and disabled; e.g., Section 8), risking eviction (09:08–10:43).

• Department of Agriculture: Cut, but discussion highlights that it includes SNAP (food stamps) and school lunches; 40 million lose SNAP, 20 million kids lose lunch. Tariffs can't plug the gap.
  Quote:
  Brandon: “What is tariff revenue been so far? ... Snap's actually a trillion. Last year we spent a trillion dollars on snap.” (13:10)

• Department of Defense: Cut, risking military pay, operations, and readiness; hosts gamble the U.S. can survive a few weeks without it (14:05–14:49).

• Department of Transportation: Funded for air traffic controllers' sake; they're forced to work without pay but get back pay later by law—though current admin is sending mixed signals about that (22:30–24:22).

• Department of Veterans Affairs: Funded. Direct healthcare for millions of veterans.
  Brandon: “Not only do 400,000 employees work at the Department of Veteran affairs... they literally do manage the healthcare of the veterans.” (31:33)

• Numerous other departments (Justice, Interior, Health, Homeland Security, Commerce, Energy, Labor, State) are discussed, most are defunded based on the hosts' logic and gambling.

5. The Complex Realities of Furloughs and Back Pay

[24:22–28:56]

• Legal confusion over who gets back pay: 2019 law says furloughed workers must be paid back, but current admin hints at possible exceptions.
• Brandon: “It’s a wild thing that somebody who’s determining whether your plane crashes isn’t being paid.” (27:39)
• Human stories: Doug's friend is furloughed, living with ambiguity and stressful communication.

6. Real-World Shutdown Triage vs. the Simulation

[33:10–35:04]

• Actual shutdowns see departments funded on a sliding scale, not “all or nothing.”
• Hosts' “simulation” roughly tracks with real-world furlough trends:
  • Treasury & Veterans Affairs prioritized.
  • Education, Labor, Housing, and EPA are gutted.

7. The Political Standoff Causing the Shutdown

[35:39–48:46]

• Democrats’ leverage: Demanding three items before agreeing to a new budget:
  1. Extend/make permanent ACA subsidies.
  2. Reverse Medicaid cuts.
  3. Limit the executive’s power to unilaterally freeze funds Congress appropriates.
• Republicans’ stance: Threaten permanent layoffs, blame shutdown on Democrats.
• Aiden: “The ACA subsidies are probably the most substantial thing that people could see change in their daily financial life...” (57:35)
• Both sides see little incentive to compromise; public blame is ambiguous.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Losing SNAP and School Lunches:
  Brandon: “There are 20 million kids who won't get lunch anymore... also 40 million people on SNAP... You're going to have a lot, a lot, a lot of the country now a little short food.” (11:38)

• On Military Defunding:
  Doug: “You're not funding Department of War. Are you serious? ... this is a fingers crossed kind of moment. Nuclear deterrence, that's gone.” (14:50)

• Back Pay Confusion:
  Aiden: “This seems so obviously wrong that there must be something we're misunderstanding.” (26:53)

• On Democrat Strategy:
  Aiden: “There’s a very, very pervasive idea... that the Democrats are basically a bunch of soy cucks with no backbone, like, to say it politely. And I think the party has come around and recognized the fact that people view Them in this... way. And they need to do something substantial...” (52:16)

• On Shutdown Length Guesses:
  Brandon: "I'm saying 33 days unironically. I think 33 days is my guess." (62:40)

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Segments of Interest by Timestamp

• Shutdown Stalemate & 'Groundhog Day' (Sen. Jim Justice reference): 01:46
• Department Funding Simulation Game (start): 03:56
• Consequences of Not Funding Departments: 05:53–13:42
• Tariff Revenue Debate: 12:29–13:35
• Back Pay Legal Confusion and Impact: 24:22–28:56
• Political Maneuvering Explainer: 35:39–48:46
• Who Gets Blamed for Shutdown? Public Sentiment: 58:37–61:21
• Shutdown Length Bets: 62:18–63:14

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Immigration & H1B Visa Changes Discussion

[63:20–80:43]

• Trump admin raises H1B application fee from ~$5K to $100K (with White House waivers possible); causing panic especially for healthcare and smaller companies who can’t negotiate exceptions.
  • Aiden: “If you work at like a smaller healthcare institution... you might not have the leverage or the connections to negotiate those application fees down...” (75:30)
• H1B system is deeply abused: lottery system benefits big companies and Indian staffing agencies; employees are "trapped" until green cards go through, which can take decades for some countries (India).
• Doug: “It just feels like a really broken, underfunded, corrupt system that has so many like abuses and loopholes for the biggest corporations and not benefiting average Americans...” (80:23)

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Generative AI, Copyright, and Music Industry Segment

[83:11–94:47]

• Music industry is preparing for legal battles around AI models using copyrighted music or likeness: wants a Spotify-like model for payments (per-play).
  • Brandon: “Every time an AI song is played, if it utilizes our music, then we would get a cut.” (85:28)
• The hosts explain that since AI is trained on millions of pieces of data, the “sampling” analogy breaks down—who gets paid and how isn’t clear or workable in practice.
• Ongoing lawsuits will set future precedent, but once open-source models arrive, enforcement may become impossible.
  • Doug: “It’s going to be such a battle in the next year... all the movie industries are lawyering up. And then the AI companies have even more money...” (88:59)

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Conclusion

The episode weaves irreverent humor with serious analysis, highlighting how complex—and often absurd—the U.S. government shutdown process can be. Through their budget game, the hosts reveal how many seemingly obscure federal agencies have massive, often invisible impacts on daily life. The latter sections widen the discussion to broader issues like immigration policy and the coming chaos of AI-generated content, keeping up the lemonade-stand spirit of making big ideas accessible (and funny).

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For Further Listening:

• Timestamps above for in-depth discussion on federal departmental impacts, political dynamics, and big-picture implications.
• Next episode: More on H1B reform, AI legal battles, and the ongoing political standoff.

Transcript

[Aiden]

The government is dead.

[Brandon]

Opening on the blank is dead.

[Doug]

That can't be our recurring theme.

[Aiden]

No, it's.

[Doug]

It's too risky. It's too risky. We have eliminated stand curse. We have a problem with a curse. Aiden, my goal today, actually is to flip that curse into a blessing. Okay. I figure we always try to talk about good news and then bad news happens. If we talk about the government shutdown extensively today, the law of irony will flip it so that it's ended tomorrow and didn't mean anything.

[Brandon]

I actually feel like we talk about bad things all the time. And I don't know if that's an accurate assessment of the lemonade stand curse.

[Doug]

I'm saying is I think the curse is trying to make our show seem wrong in some way. So if we're like, this is the biggest story, the government shutdown, then by tomorrow, it'll be usually what happens.

[Brandon]

We talk about breaking news.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

And then minutes after we post, it majorly changes. So it's possible the government shutdown gets worse, but most likely it will get better within a few minutes.

[Doug]

You just said you said the wrong thing. But now it's going to flash forward.

[Aiden]

I can't acknowledge that he explained the plan too much. And now the great war now.

[Brandon]

And now the Etsy witches are going to curl their monkey paw.

[Doug]

Ladies and gentlemen, we are in day seven of a government shutdown, which is poised to become perhaps the longest one on record. I have no basis for that statement.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I was going to say. I was like. So just so you're aware, the longest one. 34.

[Doug]

34 days.

[Brandon]

Okay, so 34 days. Right now it's been seven.

[Doug]

Yep.

[Aiden]

That's.

[Brandon]

That's the info you went off of.

[Doug]

My info I'm going off of is.

[Aiden]

That we're closing in.

[Doug]

Everyone seeming very intractable on making any progress.

[Brandon]

Something I'll give to you. We've been in a. The shutdown is now longer today than it was yesterday, and if that keeps.

[Doug]

Up, it'll never end.

[Aiden]

Right? Right. No.

[Doug]

I saw a quote today. Republican Senator Jim justice called it Groundhog Day. As in, they're showing up every single day and they're saying the same things on both sides, making no progress and going nowhere. So I don't know how that breaks, especially because both sides seem incentivized with their base to make a stand here to fight. So I'm just saying we're in day seven. I don't see a clear path. Maybe there is a clear path that Doug's going to explain to me. How we get out of this.

[Aiden]

I think Jim justice, he needs to. It'll keep repeating until he figures out how to get AOC to fall in love with him.

[Doug]

That's what we need.

[Brandon]

We need a Romeo and Juliet type of situation across the aisle.

[Doug]

That would actually be awesome.

[Brandon]

And then as they both kill themselves, like we all come together in morning finally. It's kind of like a 911 situation that reunites the country. Yeah.

[Doug]

Love is so beautiful, right? Shedding tears.

[Aiden]

But I think when this happens, and you know, even in my memory, right, this has happened a handful of times now, although the last one, the. The most recent one hasn't been since 2018.

[Doug]

It was 1819. That was the longest one.

[Aiden]

And there were three in 2018, which maybe is why it feels like it's happened so often. I think the big questions that jump to mind is what does this actually mean when the government shuts down and why is it happening?

[Brandon]

I'm glad you asked, Aiden, because I brought my best government attire from home.

[Aiden]

Why is your government attire like a Bono outfit?

[Brandon]

This is all I had. I couldn't find sunglasses and I look more like a gay Colombian drug dealer than a government employee. But this is the best I got.

[Aiden]

And a shirt T shirt with me on it.

[Brandon]

This T shirt says trader with me. Aiden's face.

[Doug]

That is a beautiful shirt.

[Brandon]

I will give no additional context now. When the government needed folks, when the government shuts down, by definition, you don't have enough money to fund everything, right? That's like. The whole point is Congress hasn't decided how much money the government has to fund the government. So as part of the executive branch, there's 15 departments which you've probably heard of before, like the Department of State, the Department of Treasury. There's 15 of them. And you basically have to decide that the whole area needs to decide what gets shut down and what doesn't. And so we are going to simulate that exact same scenario in an oversimplified form with these five $1 bills. Gentlemen, you are now the President and the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget.

[Doug]

Because one for you, four for me.

[Brandon]

When the shutdown happens, you, the OMB, you need to decide the rules and the agencies decide the details. The president is going to say, yes, I approve of all this, but technically it's not the President President that decides. And so what I wanted to find out is you, the average person listening at home, does it matter? Like, who is the Department of Interior shuts down? Who does that do anything? So I've brought 15 departments for you gentlemen to consider.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Brandon]

For each one of these departments you have five total dollars. It costs a dollar to keep the department running, otherwise the rest of them are going to shut down. Okay. This is just like what they're actually having to decide right now.

[Doug]

Why do we have government budget problems where every department costs $1?

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

Again, slightly oversimplified anal here. Let's start with the Department of Education. Again. You can fund five out of these 15 total departments. Would you guys spend a buck on Department of Education?

[Aiden]

Hold off on that. We have homeschooling now.

[Doug]

Yeah. Also Aiden, I've been studying ever since our conspiracy episode. I don't know if you noticed, there's an all seeing eye on this dollar. And that explains how they've been controlling us through education.

[Aiden]

Wow.

[Doug]

So we don't need this. This is what we don't need at all. I think we're supposed to listen to me, listen to YouTubers and that's going to get us in a good spot. So I think this one I would definitely not fund.

[Brandon]

So you know what, I actually would. I think the average person is not going to suffer too much from this. Unlike the name, the Department of Education doesn't manage schools or anything. It's not like a school is going to get shut down. They don't do that. They're managing overall high level policy and grants and things like that. The main thing they do that would affect people, student loans. They have to approve student loans. But even the student loans themselves, it's not like that shuts down. It's just new ones being approved. So in this, let's say hypothetical month that you guys are deciding to not fund the Department of Education, nobody's getting new loans. But honestly, not that bad.

[Doug]

Okay, I heard that you still have to pay your student loans, but there's no one you can call it for help.

[Brandon]

Right. If you're trying to be like. There are some very funny things about the department being shut down. For example, a little side tangent. A group of unions representing federal employees has sued the Trump administration because they don't want to be laid off by the Trump administration. However, the unions are stuck in a cycle because the Justice Department would handle those lawsuits and the Justice Department was deemed nonessential and is in handling them. So they just can't sue the government right now that's.

[Aiden]

Wait, one quick question. So as far as like, consequences or impacts go, we're talking in the context of like, immediate effects, like for the expected, you know, maybe some 7, 20, 30 day period that this could be, because traditionally shutdowns aren't very long. Like you said, the long, right? Yeah, the longest has been that 34, day one. And that's the longest by like 13 days. Yeah. So we're describing like the immediate fallout or effects of the fall, right?

[Brandon]

We're saying, like, to you, the average person at home, if the government ends up shutting down for 15 days, like for me, you know, I wouldn't really care normally. Doesn't seem like it affects me. That's what we're trying to decide right now. What do you guys need to do to make sure the average person doesn't have their life ruined by it? This.

[Aiden]

Okay, we cut the Department of Education.

[Brandon]

You cut Department of Education. All right, easy.

[Doug]

We have Treasury.

[Brandon]

What do you think? Is that worth a buck?

[Doug]

I think so.

[Brandon]

Now, why do you think that?

[Doug]

I just feel like if we lose the treasury, we're going to lose the value of this very dollar that I'm spending on other things.

[Brandon]

And that's a great point because the Department of Treasury is the one who pays for literally everything and collects all the money and balances the debt. So we would immediately. So you are paying for it? Let's just say.

[Aiden]

Okay, no, no, no. We have.

[Brandon]

Congratulations.

[Aiden]

We have rising rates of home treasury at home.

[Brandon]

Okay. All right, I'll take that dollar. Congratulations. We are keeping one of our government departments alive. It's Department of Treasury. That means we can continue to collect money, including taxes. That means we can spend money on literally everything. It's not very helpful to shut down the Department of Treasury while keeping other departments open because then you can't pay anybody anyway.

[Aiden]

Okay.

[Brandon]

Also, the entire global market is underpinned by our bonds and debt servicing and that all falls apart. So that is pretty definitively the most important.

[Aiden]

I take it this is one of the ones that's deemed essential in real life.

[Brandon]

Yes. In real life, this is one that has by far the lowest number of people who are laid off or furloughed, meaning they don't have to show up to work avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes.

[Doug]

So you don't have to.

[Brandon]

Don't know the difference between matte paint.

[Aiden]

Finish and satin or what that clunking.

[Doug]

Sound from your dryer is with thumbtack.

[Brandon]

You don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one.

[Doug]

You can hire top rated pros, see.

[Aiden]

Price estimates and read reviews all on the app. Download today the pumpkin spice latte.

[Brandon]

Is back at Starbucks. Crafted with our signature espresso and real pumpkin sauce, then topped with whipped cream, cinnamon and nutmeg.

[Aiden]

The psl.

[Brandon]

Get it while it's hot. Or iced. Only at Starbucks. All right, this one. I don't know what the fuck this does. Department of Housing, what do you guys think?

[Doug]

Department of Housing, who cares?

[Brandon]

Is any average person affected of the department?

[Doug]

Never heard anyone complain about housing in this country.

[Aiden]

We actually solved it this past week. I don't know if anybody read the news in the last week. You saw the headlines about how housing's been solved. So that's a bit of a relief. I will say though, stress off everybody's shoulders.

[Doug]

Aiden, if everybody is constantly complaining about housing, then how good could this department be?

[Aiden]

That's true.

[Doug]

How much could they be doing currently? I don't think we fund it.

[Aiden]

Maybe. Okay, this would be my thing here is I don't think we're known for the scale of our public housing services. And so it feels like a market that. It feels like an agency that wouldn't be providing the most compared to the other agencies of which we have a lot to get.

[Brandon]

We only have $4 more.

[Aiden]

So I feel, I feel pressured to say no to this one, admittedly.

[Doug]

Okay, all right.

[Brandon]

We are not funding for the next two weeks. The Department of Housing feel so definitive when he writes it, like, oh yeah.

[Aiden]

I can't even go back.

[Brandon]

And that means that 10 million Americans no longer have rental assistance and will most likely go homeless because this covers things like Section 8 housing. There's about 5 million families, 10 million total Americans, 70% of whom are seniors or disabled, who will now suddenly not have rent assistance and will probably be evicted. Hey, if the government shuts down only two or three weeks, maybe they aren't evicted by then. Hey, so sure.

[Doug]

It's looking remarkably prescient.

[Aiden]

Can I take it back?

[Brandon]

You cannot. No.

[Doug]

We've. We've ripped every rent furloughed and fired.

[Brandon]

And hey, you know, maybe the other departments are going to help more people, right? It's only 10 million. Okay, department of Agriculture, what do you guys think? Does that sound important?

[Aiden]

I mean it. I.

[Doug]

You know what? I do think food is a big deal. But my guess is the problem of agriculture is mostly based around giving huge subsidies to large factory farms.

[Aiden]

Yeah. And I feel like the. For the time period that this shutdown is likely to exist in your subsidy not being paid within this, let's say four week period.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Doesn't seem a month that pressing. Like it feels like you should we should be able to get through a net 30 invoice here.

[Doug]

I think so.

[Aiden]

So I'm going to say no. No. All right.

[Brandon]

We are dropping Department of Agriculture and for the most part your intuition was right. It's a lot of like high level regulation around farming, around food production. The problem is twofold. First off, you've got food safety and inspection. So no food will have any quality checks of any kind going forward. But fingers crossed, no food crisis. The other thing is, Oooh, there are 20 million kids who won't get lunch anymore at schools. Also 40. In 2024, there were 40 million people on SNAP, which is the food vouchers like food program. That's under the Department of Agriculture for some reason. SNAP is under Department of Agriculture. So is kids lunches. I don't know why that's the case. But 40 people, 40 million people no longer have SNAP assistance to eat food. You're going to have a lot, a lot, a lot of the country now a little short food.

[Doug]

No worries.

[Aiden]

Because.

[Brandon]

Okay, he is running to the other side of the room. He has found his own.

[Aiden]

Are you finding extra money wallet?

[Doug]

Because a little thing called tariff revenue just came in. And in real life, Trump is proposing to use tariff revenue to fund SNAP in the meantime.

[Brandon]

Okay, all right.

[Doug]

And probably to give bailouts to farmers. So we're gonna use this $5. Hey, buy yourself something nice.

[Brandon]

Okay. This is the only time you get to use tariffs because.

[Aiden]

And you know what, some of those extra soybeans while you're at it.

[Brandon]

Yeah, first, yeah, you are right, by the way. It's like farmers getting subsidies and stuff like that is a big part of it. But okay, fair. We'll say tariff revenue is unexpected and you guys get to fund the SNAP program, which by the way, what is tariff revenue been so far? Because I know what Snap costs in 2024.

[Doug]

It's, it's probably over Snap, right? 800 billion, something like that.

[Brandon]

Okay. Snap's actually a trillion. Last year we spent a trillion dollars on snap. This is a report from the Department of Agriculture last year. Trillion bucks.

[Doug]

So don't buy yourself something that.

[Brandon]

Yeah, so tariffs are great. That would be all of the tariff money to get 80% of people to have food.

[Doug]

Because he's promising so much of this.

[Aiden]

He's promising like it's the sheriff. Revenue is supposed to cover everything.

[Doug]

Covers everything. It's magical.

[Brandon]

It can't even cover snap.

[Doug]

He's like, we're gonna give everybody in America a two thousand dollar check on revenue.

[Brandon]

Tariff revenue is Gone. That's off the table. You still got four bucks, though. Okay.

[Doug]

We're all right.

[Brandon]

Department.

[Doug]

We're all right.

[Brandon]

Of defense now known as the Department of War. It is the military. What do you think? Now, this is one of the things where we are oversimplifying the analogy. This is more expensive than the other ones, but let's assume it costs the same amount. Would you fund it? Or could you just say, hey, everybody, let's chill for two to four weeks? You guys got this?

[Doug]

Here's what I'm thinking. The obvious answer is we don't fund this one because in a month, we're not going to need it. All right? However, I feel like this one has 10x the employees of every other one. And if they are furloughed and not paid, it is so many people unpaid. But at the very least, I rip this dollar in half, I give Doug half its dollar back. I mean, I don't know. This is a tough one for me because I know we have all of these bases and we have all these.

[Brandon]

Employees, military bases, even hospitals.

[Doug]

And I think Veterans affairs is a different department.

[Brandon]

Veterans affairs is a different department.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Aiden]

Ooh, that helps.

[Brandon]

That helps.

[Doug]

So maybe we.

[Brandon]

You're not throwing veterans on the bus by doing this.

[Aiden]

I think it's.

[Brandon]

You're throwing future veterans under the bus.

[Aiden]

It's only a few weeks. How bad could it get?

[Doug]

How about going to get.

[Brandon]

You're not funding Department of War. Are you serious? Okay. We do not have a military. No military bases, no readiness whatsoever. If there's any kind of attack on the United States, this is a fingers crossed kind of moment. Nuclear deterrence, that's gone. Now. China might go for Taiwan, Russia might go for Ukraine, but if we can hold out for three or four weeks.

[Aiden]

Come on.

[Brandon]

They're not going to move forward. And you were right, by the way. There's about 3 million people employed by the military.

[Doug]

Figures.

[Aiden]

I think the main exaggeration of this segment also is that in actuality, all of these things can be partially funded or like we're just saying yes, no, flatly.

[Brandon]

Right.

[Aiden]

And we're getting rid of the entire thing. We're taking it or leaving it. Yeah.

[Doug]

And we have $4.

[Aiden]

And we only have. And we have $4, which does fund it fully in this exercise. But that is. There's an amount of people you can put on leave. You know, it might be 20% for one department on leave, unpaid leave. It might be 80% for another department. That's my understanding. Yeah. Yeah.

[Doug]

I think in the Real world, it's a sliding scale of how much they get cut. And I think you're going to show it to us at the end. I don't know. I don't know.

[Brandon]

I sure did remember to get that graph ready.

[Aiden]

He sounds confident.

[Brandon]

Which AJ will take a graph.

[Aiden]

We have it. We'll take a look at it.

[Brandon]

So, yes, this is simplifying things. At the same time, this is a simplified version of an actual thing that they have to go through, which is to decide what are we shutting down during this period. I mean, these are real decisions they have to make, even if it's not quite, you know, this high level.

[Aiden]

Okay, well, we don't have a military right now. What else could we potentially cut?

[Brandon]

What do you think about Department of Justice? Okay, you want to play this?

[Aiden]

Well, like the anecdote you already provided. I think I'm kind of in the camp of you would, am I crazy? You would not fund the DoJ. I don't want to fund the DoJ.

[Doug]

You don't want to fund the DOJ.

[Aiden]

That's what I've decided.

[Doug]

You have no sense of justice.

[Aiden]

None. I think it should just be my call.

[Doug]

I think. Yeah. Okay, we'll run it through Aiden. Yeah, actually, it's fine. We're going to toss him.

[Aiden]

What happens if we cut the doj?

[Doug]

Right.

[Brandon]

So if you cut the doj, it's, you know, it's the laws where that aren't being enforced anymore. But here's the thing. Most laws, statistically, they're enforced at the local level, at the state level.

[Doug]

Right.

[Brandon]

So the federal government, they take on like tens of thousands of cases a year, but that's kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of cases that are taken in the justice system across the whole thing. And we're also not talking about the judges. That's part of the judicial branch. So this is the United States government being able to sue or take cases against people or companies that are doing illegal things. Now, the issue here is that kind of by definition a federal crime, something the government will broadly go and put this case up for, is somebody who crosses state lines. As in, it's a big deal. These aren't little tiny things. This might be a massive drug trafficking ring. This might be massive cyber criminal or financial fraud. This is going to be potentially something incredibly huge. It might be anti monopoly stuff, as we talked about with Lina Khan. So is the world going to catch on fire if the Department of Justice mostly gets shut down? No. You just have to hope that There aren't any major, major, major high impact cases that are going to be kind of screwed because they're out of commission for a month.

[Doug]

I mean, I feel like the doj, the last big case I heard them going after was like, Tai Lopez, the Lamborghini guy, because he bought Radio Shack and did a Ponzi scheme with it.

[Aiden]

It's like, all right.

[Doug]

I mean, that guy's not good. I'm glad they're getting him.

[Aiden]

But I can wait.

[Doug]

I can wait four weeks to get him.

[Brandon]

I, I think that's legitimate. Although people at the FBI who actually know the type of horrible that's happening all the time would be like, you guys are insane. This is an insane.

[Doug]

People at every one of these agencies are going to be mad about every.

[Brandon]

Guy because of course. Okay, all right. That being said, Department of the Interior. Come on.

[Doug]

You want to rain?

[Brandon]

You guys give a about this?

[Aiden]

Come on.

[Doug]

He's trying to bait us. You want to just randomly gamble on this one?

[Aiden]

This is going to be super important.

[Brandon]

You can tell by his about this. Look at this. There's a bison on it. We don't have a bison. Department of the Interior, congratulations. Your national parks will continue to be staffed and that's about it. So that is by far the least impactful one.

[Aiden]

I got a level with you. We're doing a terrible job.

[Brandon]

What do we keep?

[Doug]

So far we have the treasury. Good news on this.

[Brandon]

Goodness. They also coordinate things like permitting for the federal land, like if farmers want to graze on it, or mining rights so that they don't do it themselves. They issue permits.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

When you go to Yellowstone, you think of us.

[Aiden]

Okay.

[Brandon]

When you enjoy that beautiful nature vacation.

[Doug]

You think of old a truck, all right?

[Brandon]

This one is a wash. Nobody cares about the Department of Health. This is Health and Human Services led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

[Doug]

I cut it.

[Brandon]

You cut health.

[Aiden]

Okay, well, how much? Yeah, with each of these, I'm thinking about how much, like, boots on the ground, day to day effect does it have, like, if we lose this for 28 days, how problematic is that?

[Brandon]

Just so you're aware, Medicare and Medicaid are under.

[Doug]

This going to be some anger. Tell you what, we cut this, they.

[Brandon]

Have to make it. Here's the question that I wanted to answer.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

Medicare and Medicaid are managed by the Department of Health. Yeah, but if the Department of Health goes away, does everybody stop getting health? Are they the ones doing the health? I will answer that question shortly. You must guess, are they doing the health?

[Doug]

I default it.

[Brandon]

No we're dropping the Department of Health and Human. This is actually I think a smart decision. I mean smart in the context of an emergency obviously, because yes, they oversee Medicare and Medicaid, but what many people are not aware the government isn't personally managing people's health plans. They're not personally, they're not, they're not hiring the doctors that take care of people. They are, they're overseeing and approving the private companies that will be paid by the government to do this work. So over the course of a month, the people on Medicare and Medicaid, most likely they'll be able to continue getting health, continue to get services, continue to get insurance. They just can't resolve any problems and there can't be like major updates. Also, hopefully there's no pandemic because that is the cdc.

[Doug]

We're doing a lot of things.

[Brandon]

It's a fingers crossed.

[Aiden]

It's a huge four week gamble right now. I will say in this world, I like also you kept sitting getting health and I was like, yeah, just get.

[Doug]

In your health, just get healthy.

[Brandon]

I was more thinking like from a doctor or a pharmacy, but yes. All right, what do you guys think about Department of Homeland Security?

[Doug]

If we cut the military, I'll definitely cut Homeland Security.

[Aiden]

I mean this is, this is like the baby brother, the Department of War.

[Doug]

China's invasion of Taiwan. We're already gambling.

[Aiden]

That's my read on it. So I'm prepared to be very wrong.

[Brandon]

The only thing here is a couple. So Department of Homeland Security, it's what the name suggests. It was made after 9, 11. It's for internal threats, not external threats. And so that includes border protection and ice. That's, that's gone. Border protection is gone. TSA screening for the airports, that's gone. Now faster lines and that is, that is, well actually the opposite that is currently happening in airports right now. This is a real one. Fema, the, the agency that deals with disaster response. So if there's another hurricane or something horrific. Cybersecurity infrastructure. Oh and one other one U.S. secret Service. So our politicians are going to get much more agile. Agile. They're going to be very, a little skittish, you know, like a rabbit.

[Aiden]

Do a lot of zoom calls.

[Brandon]

We'll do more zoom calls.

[Doug]

We'll do zoom calls.

[Brandon]

Well, unfortunately you also lose cybersecurity infrastructure.

[Doug]

So we'll have some hacked zoom town halls.

[Brandon]

Department of Homeland Security is dropped. Okay, what about Department of Transportation?

[Doug]

People got to get around Aiden.

[Aiden]

They gotta, they gotta, they gotta. This is actually, this People don't know this. They have a direct Internet line to control anybody's car at given time. So imagine that goes away.

[Doug]

Yeah, that could.

[Brandon]

You're dropping this?

[Doug]

No, I think I'll pay for this.

[Aiden]

You pay for transportation, you're getting the Department of Transportation.

[Doug]

Well, you have one more dollar, you do what you want with it.

[Aiden]

Fine, fine. You take it. You take it.

[Brandon]

There's like six more. Okay. You do. Department of Transportation. This is a good decision because this is air traffic controllers.

[Aiden]

Oh.

[Brandon]

If you don't have this, nobody can fly. That being said, the rest of what the DOT does is not really a day to day thing. It's like overseeing the broadcast railroad system, the broad, you know, like airport system and whatnot. So.

[Aiden]

But I assume the operations like with a lot of these things. I think a common theme here is oversight of these things at a national level. But the local level, say the LA Metro would continue operating. Yes. Because it's its own organization.

[Brandon]

The highways. They oversee the broad planning of highways. They don't manage the highways. So the average person for the DoT, like getting shut down, they're not going to care. The only thing they will care over the course of a month is airplanes crashing.

[Aiden]

But we do need our air traffic.

[Doug]

Controllers saying though, in the real world, air traffic controllers are not getting paid but are still working well. So you could.

[Brandon]

But they'll get back pay.

[Doug]

That's right. Yeah. They're not getting furloughed as in.

[Brandon]

Correct.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

But even furloughed employees get paid. Right, Right. So anyway, yeah, it's, it's bad. This is happening right now. And again, like to what we mentioned earlier, certain parts, large chunks of the Department of Transportation are just told to not come into work right now. Air traffic controllers, they're like, please come.

[Doug]

In even then paid for the time you're furloughed though. I thought.

[Aiden]

That's what I thought.

[Brandon]

That's what I thought. But there's a law in 2019 that says they actually do get back pay.

[Doug]

For all the time they were.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I mean let's, let's double check. I didn't have time to like deep dive into it, but this is a.

[Aiden]

Good, this is a good thing to check on because this is a twist in my understanding as well was that there are, there's a bunch of people during a shutdown from all of these agencies at differing percentages depending on the agency, that get essentially laid off for that set period of time. They don't work and they don't get paid. And then There's a portion of people who continue to work, to operate or do their job at the agency. I thought those people are also not getting paid, but then they get the back pay for their work. Correct. That when they come back. I thought the people that do not work through that time period don't get paid, do not get back pay.

[Brandon]

That's what I thought, too. And there was a law passed in 2019 that furloughed people who aren't working will get back pay.

[Doug]

So I believe that your law is correct. However, there is a White House memo going around suggesting that not all government shutdown workers will receive back pay. Donald Trump was asked about it, and he suggested that not all furlough workers were gay. It depends.

[Aiden]

Okay.

[Doug]

He said. So we don't, we don't know what that means.

[Brandon]

Yeah. Historic. Yeah. And that's my understanding as well. Historically, before 2019, if you were furloughed, the idea is, look, we're just not paying you, but please come back to work in the future. Now, furlough also means we're gonna back pay you, which is basically not furlough. So it's a little confusing to me. But the Trump administration is trying to push back against that in order to save money to lay off people, et cetera, et cetera.

[Doug]

It's interesting because in 2019, the law you're talking about, it was signed by Trump.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

That said all furloughed employees shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriation. So they'll get their back pay. Which is interesting.

[Aiden]

There might have been different political motivations at the time, because the shutdowns in 2018 were. That was because the Democrats didn't want to. They didn't want the, the spending bill at the time to fund the border wall. There was a big dispute over it. That was the December, like the. Into 2019 shutdown.

[Doug]

Here's a direct quote. Trump, when asked at the White House on Tuesday afternoon about back pay for those workers, said, I would say it depends on who we're talking about. For the most part, we're going to take care of our people. So that's a big question mark. I don't.

[Aiden]

It's got it in that scenario. It's got to suck to be one of the guys who has to keep working.

[Brandon]

That's what I was gonna say.

[Aiden]

You could have just gone, everybody go into work, dude.

[Brandon]

If you're gonna pay them back anyways.

[Doug]

Yeah, it's. It's wild. If they're gonna get paid back, that they don't work.

[Brandon]

It's just the worst of both worlds. I don't understand.

[Doug]

We don't get the services and then money.

[Brandon]

I would actually prefer if I'm paying the taxes for it. If you got, if you're gonna get paid either way, like, please do the thing. Please give people snap money.

[Aiden]

This seems so obviously wrong that there must be something we're misunderstanding. Do you know what I mean? Like, there must be something we're missing here.

[Brandon]

That was my thought and I learned about that like two hours ago. And I was like, I don't have time. I got to knock out these other things. So, you know, look, we can explore it more later. But yeah, there's people who are currently not working by the normal standard set in 2019 should also be paid back once the actual budget is passed by Congress that says who is getting what amount of money.

[Doug]

Interesting. Yeah. I mean, on this specific example of transportation. I'm sorry, of transportation, I was flying this weekend and I was thinking about in the air. I was like, man, the air traffic controllers that are working right now are not getting paid. I mean, they'll get back pay.

[Brandon]

Right?

[Doug]

Right. Assuming.

[Brandon]

But it's a wild thing that somebody who's determining whether your plane crashes isn't being paid. And then Burbank had to shut down. It says, you know, near us in LA was not able to operate and a bunch of planes were delayed because they were understaffed.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

So, like they're, you know, even with the situation of like, ah, we'll pay you in the future, like, not everybody's going to show up. Like, it's just. So this is all happening in real.

[Doug]

Time also, they're going to be permanently laid off. So again, another quote is asked Tuesday how many permanent jobs on the chopping block. Trump said he'll be able to say in four or five days. If this keeps going on, it'll be substantial and a lot of those jobs will never come back.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

So, you know, like, again, I have a friend, I was hanging out this weekend who is furloughed from his job in the government. I don't want to say where, but. And he. It's a very stressful time. Like, they're, they're trying to figure out what's going on. They have like, work that they, it's like larger project work that is sort of still going on, but they're being told not to work and they don't know what type of back pay or what they'll be receiving. It's weird. It's a weird spot to be in.

[Aiden]

I.

[Doug]

But it's confusing.

[Aiden]

It's funny to hear from a person in that situation that it's basically as ambiguous as it is for us.

[Doug]

Yes, they're, like getting weird emails from their managers and trying to figure out what to do. But it's. It's all day to day. They don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It's a weird spot to be in.

[Aiden]

All right, let's.

[Brandon]

Let's wrap this up and do a really rapid fire $2, because then we'll talk about the political maneuvering of all of this. Right. This is just what happens with the government shutdown. It's like, what are the different parties arguing for? So let's rapid fire Commerce. Department of Commerce. Do you fund it?

[Aiden]

I'm taking it.

[Doug]

And that's all the money.

[Brandon]

You're taking it?

[Aiden]

I'm taking the.

[Brandon]

You're taking. Okay. That is. Okay. What you've got? No, Nothing. You've got $1 left. Congratulations from. You get to keep doing weather forecasts. The Department of Commerce, it does the weather. And patents and trademarks. So that will not stop during the next month. Congratulations.

[Aiden]

Defunding the Department of Commerce and then pirating a bunch of Nintendo games.

[Doug]

What are you going to do about it?

[Brandon]

There's other things. Like they produce all the national statistics. So a lot of. A lot of commerce is based around the information that comes out of the Department of Commerce. But I would argue one of the less impact.

[Doug]

Wait, is the BLS ladder up into Commerce. Do you know that Bureau of Labor.

[Brandon]

I was going to write that down. I forget. I'm fairly certain. But that might be Labor. I think it's Labor.

[Doug]

Okay, well, that's defunded now.

[Aiden]

I know.

[Doug]

Because they're not releasing the jobs report.

[Brandon]

Yeah, that is for sure defunded.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Brandon]

Department of energy. You've got $1 and another four.

[Aiden]

Four. We have to get. See, now it's tough because I have to gamble.

[Doug]

Show us. Do it. Let's do a. Give it. Give us a spread.

[Aiden]

No, no, cut. Cut Energy.

[Brandon]

Okay, Cut. Energy.

[Doug]

Energy.

[Brandon]

So this is fine.

[Aiden]

We don't need it.

[Brandon]

The thing is, again, they're not maintaining the energy themselves. It's overall grid stability. However, they literally do make and maintain nuclear warheads. So those are out of commission.

[Doug]

We're already not doing war, Doug.

[Brandon]

No, that is a good call. Okay, Department of Labor.

[Aiden]

Department of Labor. No, we're cutting that. We don't need those fake statistics that they kept making up.

[Brandon]

Big one here. OSHA is going to be gone. There's going to be no workplace standards or regulations whatsoever. So it's like shut up about it.

[Aiden]

How about that?

[Brandon]

This is a fingers crossed situation. Oh no.

[Aiden]

Now no one will find me for having the 2024 work poster up. And I don't know if he's 2025.

[Doug]

Mogul moves his office. They worked into the bone and they don't have safety rails.

[Aiden]

Shut up. Stop saying that publicly on the show.

[Brandon]

Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to say the last two. Okay. You got to pick which one you fund. And I, we ran out of printer. It's just Department of State, the Department of State or the Department of Veterans affairs. You've got $1. What do you choose to fund?

[Doug]

All on you, Ed.

[Aiden]

I funded the Department of State.

[Brandon]

Department of State.

[Aiden]

I think I'm going to fund the Department of Veterans affairs because my understanding is they employ a ton of people and this is health care for a considerable amount of individuals.

[Brandon]

That is a great choice. Not only do 400,000 employees work at the Department of Veteran affairs, which is the next biggest after the actual military, they literally do manage the healthcare of the veterans. So unlike Department of Health and Human Services which pays a bunch of private people to do all the healthcare, Department of Veterans affairs literally is taking care of 9 million veterans. So that all falls apart immediately. So good call there. That's one that's extremely untenable to cut. Department of State. This means that the entire rest of the world can't interface with the United States whatsoever. There we have no more diplomats, we have no more embassies. You can't get a visa into the country, you can't get a passport. But good news, we don't have a military anyway based on your guys budget. So it's not like we could do anything anyways. Department of State is gone. So ladies and gentlemen, that leaves you with a pretty lineup.

[Doug]

We've got the Interior, we got Transportation.

[Aiden]

Treasury, Veterans affairs and oh boy, oh boy, the Department of Commerce and I.

[Doug]

Also funded SNAP with tariffs. This is a pretty damn.

[Aiden]

This is not bad.

[Brandon]

That's a hell of a government right there. Not a lot of safety, but a lot of ability to find a lot of things.

[Doug]

They don't know if we have nukes or not.

[Aiden]

I want to, I want to touch on something. I think we should show the graphic on screen. You know, for audio listeners. This is tough to summarize because it's a lot of departments and a lot of numbers. But the actual number of employees or federal employees through each of these agencies, the number that are expected to be furloughed, and then the. I think just the percentage. That's the percentage of the employees that are kept on to continue operating.

[Doug]

That was cut.

[Aiden]

And my, my initial question when we were talking about prepping this episode was, when you choose to keep funding a bunch of portions of these agencies, how is that actually paid for? Is it just your. The government is shut down until a new budget resolution is passed, and then all of that back pay for the employees during the previous time period needs to be supplied anyway. So you're essentially agreeing. You're making a decision that no matter what the budget is going forward, all of the people that are continue to be asked to work are going to be paid somehow in the future, once we have agreed on a budget resolution. Is that how it works?

[Doug]

I mean, that's what I thought. But what we find out today is that based on that 2019 law, everyone's getting paid.

[Aiden]

Yeah. Which doesn't. It feels like it doesn't make any sense.

[Doug]

It's actually this kind of shakes up my whole understanding of how shutdowns work in that we are not saving any money in this shutdown.

[Brandon]

We're not saving any money, but we're not doing anything.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

We're just doing less. Just the people of the United States are just getting less services as two parties. And quick.

[Brandon]

For audio listeners, let's just kind of go through. So Treasury. So we did this exercise. It's oversimplified, but in the real world, this is what's happening. There's all these departments and to call out some of them, the treasury, they are furloughing almost no people. So the treasury, they're just continuing to fund. Veterans affairs continuing to fund. They really wanted Homeland Security. That one stayed around, apparently. Same with Justice. But then on the other side, they almost fully cut Education, almost fully cut. Environmental Protection Agency, which is sort of different than this. Commerce is out, labor is out. Housing and Urban Development is out. So kind of on a high level, you guys roughly matched along with what the government is doing, which is saying, look, of all these departments, we have to manage like we're going to mostly leave this one's intact, and these are just going to be left to the wayside while having to pay them back to the future anyway.

[Doug]

That's so wild to me. Yeah. I don't know how that's going to play out. I mean, so. Yeah.

[Aiden]

Can you imagine being. Because the, the Department of Education is one of the ones where most of the people are being furloughed, right?

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

So in this scenario where the back is owed, imagine being one of the 10% of people at the Department of Education who has to keep working. I don't want the vacation.

[Doug]

You're doing extra work, no extra pay. And everyone that got the vacation is getting paid.

[Aiden]

Maybe.

[Brandon]

Well, why don't we use this as a transition point to talk about what both sides of the aisle are doing on this and, like, what they're leveraging?

[Doug]

Yeah, that's a good question.

[Brandon]

Because one of the things that Trump has been saying, the idea is that, you know, you furlough people, they aren't showing up to work because you don't know whether the government, Congress hasn't decided how much money we're going to spend over the next year. That is fundamentally what's going on. So we're not going to spend the money yet until we know that the money has been, by law, allocated. So the furloughing is happening to say, some people we just have, they need to show up to work. We're requiring it. Other people, we're going to pay you back later. And what Trump is doing as part of this is saying, I'm going to have to lay off a bunch of people. But that seems like something he wants. Like, this is basically an excuse threat.

[Doug]

To help push these negotiations.

[Brandon]

You feel like it's more of a threat. My sense is that, because that's, that's not necessary. Like, he doesn't have to do that because they aren't being paid right now, regardless of the furlough thing, it's not costing the money right now. It would just be like, this is a chance to shrink the government, is my take on it.

[Doug]

Maybe. I mean, it sounds like they are being paid. There's like, 400. I mean, this makes sense to what I heard. There's like 400 to $500 million a day of back pay accruing.

[Brandon]

Right.

[Doug]

That is like, owed.

[Brandon]

But, but it's what you just said, specifically the layoffs. Like, he keeps talking about, I'm going to have to start laying off a bunch of people. And that would be a substantial departure from what normally happens in a, in a shutdown.

[Aiden]

So there's like this whole political game unfolding around this right now. So earlier in the year, there was a similar opportunity for the Democrats in Congress to not pass a budget resolution in order with the opportunity to shut down the government by doing so. Right. And they, a lot of the Democrats at The time wanted to do that to slow the Trump administration and the Republicans in power. But there was disagreements as to whether or not this was the right timing to do so. Because if you don't, because this was early on in the year, if you don't allow Trump's admin to sort of unfold, then they have an easy blame during a shutdown of, see, we can't even take any action because the Democrat and the Democrats are more likely to become the center of blame for that. But now we're far enough in the year where so much of what Trump has done is polling so poorly with the Republican support behind him. The Democrats now feel like it's their opportunity to take a stand. And I think there's this view of the party being very wishy washy and having no backbone. And this is their opportunity to do something substantial and fight back. And it's one of the few pieces of leverage that the Democrats actually have, which is not passing this. And they have three stipulations as to why they're saying they're withholding their approval of the budget stopgap that they vote on. So the three things are, one, they want ACA or sorry, they want Affordable Care act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of this year to be extended or made permanent at the end of this year. There's a bunch of, there's a bunch of Affordable Care act subsidies that were approved a long time ago that allow people to enter the market when they're purchasing health care for themselves through the Affordable Care Act. And this is not Medicare or Medicaid. And it's the way that a ton of people, about 22 million people, access affordable health insurance in the country right now. And through the expiration of these subsidies, people's premiums are expected to jump a ton with an average of 114% increase, hugely dependent on your level of income. So if you're lower income and you're buying subsidized ACA healthcare, you're looking at maybe you're jumping from literally paying nothing to something like 35 to $65 a month, which is still a big increase if you're not making a lot of money. But if you're middle income, like, say you're making like $65,000 a year, right? And you purchase your health care through the aca, you're looking at a huge increase in your premiums over the course of the year, maybe a 10 to 20k increase in health care premiums to maintain the same plan that you are on now. And the Democrats are saying, we cannot allow these subsidies to expire. You need to continue to fund them and make them permanent. That's the first, the first stipulation. You looks like you wanted to hop in.

[Brandon]

No, I have a quick thing. It's these subsidies were not that long ago. They were enacted in 2021 during COVID And so during that point, Biden and Democrats had Congress and everything, and they said we need to expand basically the support we're giving to people through the ACA because Covid is causing all these issues. And then they extended it through 2025. It was initially just supposed to be two years, so it was meant to be temporary. Then the next year they extended it to 2025 and said we still need lots of support for people. So it's supposed to end now. In theory, that was started as a Covid era, like help people during this pandemic. And now Democrats are saying this should just be permanent. And that's the context.

[Aiden]

And then for the second stipulation, they want to reverse the cuts to Medicaid that came in the big beautiful bill, which we've already talked about on the show before. But Medicaid saw a bunch of cuts through making it more difficult to be eligible or prove your eligibility and saving money that way. And the Democrats want this reversed. And then the third thing is a commitment from the White House or the executive branch to no longer make unilateral decisions on pulling funding from agencies. That was approved by Congress in the past.

[Brandon]

So the way Trump's favorite thing to.

[Aiden]

Do, it's one of the favorite things right now. Right. But their thing with this is there's a general idea that this level of oversight or changing of funding to agencies made like, say, years ago, funding to these agencies decided in a budget bill is decided by Congress. Now, during this administration, the executive branch has made a lot of executive orders or decisions to defund or freeze funding for things related to these agencies. And Congress has a problem with this, even some Republicans, because it's like these are decisions that we debated and voted on and passed. And now you are unilaterally making decisions about how that funding should be allowed to continue when we already did this the correct way through Congress before. Also, if you continue to do this, any new agreement we come to about budgets means essentially nothing if you can just hand wave anything off as the executive and make a unilateral decision about changing it in the future. So there needs to be some sort of change or commitment for that, that will no longer be the case. And these are the three things that Democrats are seeking right now.

[Brandon]

Do you know why? While that sounds like a good idea, why is that part of the budget?

[Aiden]

I think it's not necessarily a part of the budget. This is the only piece of lever. This is the first substantial piece of leverage that Democrats have right now that they can use to push Republicans around.

[Brandon]

Interesting.

[Aiden]

It is a political move. I think there is sort of a public facing argument from Democrats that I've seen that this is very focused on health care, and they've picked health care to stand their ground on because they feel like it's the one issue they really can win on against Republicans right now. But overall, they're looking for any opportunity for a political win in a climate that has basically the most disgust or dislike of Democrats. Even though, you know, even if Trump's approval ratings are low, the Democratic Party's approval ratings are ridiculously low. I think they're even lower than Trump. And from a Republican perspective, the pushback here, or what they're looking for first, they, the big thing that they're holding in contention is like, if you do this, we're going to lay a bunch of people off. A bunch of people are going to lose their jobs permanently. And that's the stick they can wave in return and, like, really blame Democrats because they're making an effort to blame the shutdown on Democrats right now.

[Brandon]

Yeah, quick, funny thing about that. Trump has already announced that the officials in charge of layoffs have been deemed essential. They still got their jobs. They're showing up to work.

[Aiden]

Well, how can you lay the people off if the guy's laying the people off?

[Brandon]

Guys, you gotta fund the layoff.

[Aiden]

You need to fund the layoff, guys. And then there's even an argument here that Republicans are quietly happy for the shutdown occurring because they want better ground to stand on for these layoffs to happen anyway. Trump, from the executive position, wants to cut more federal jobs in general, but doesn't feel like he has the public confidence or goodwill to, like, continue making these cuts. But this is a situation that may allow them to do it basically without the same pushback that they would get otherwise. But I think that's up for contention because a lot of Republicans are flat out saying that it's bad that the government is shut down and we didn't want this. And they were fighting back against the Democrats to have it up and running again. And then the last point, or one more point I saw about this were the Republicans are pointing out that when they were in the minority under Biden, they never said no to one of these stopgap bills, stopgap funding bills, during the previous Democratic administration. They're like, even when we hated Biden, we weren't doing what you're doing right now. And this is feels unprecedented or we didn't do this to you guys, at least in this exact type of budgeting situation. And if you look back like the most recent shutdown before this was in 2018. Yeah. And the Democratic argument on the other side is these times and the decisions that this executive is making are so unprecedented that this is action is absolutely necessary to take at this time. And I think if you go further back, you can also make the argument that Republicans have caused different shutdowns in different scenarios. So there's an argument to be made there as well. And then the very last thing was another item of well, these health care programs were funding, were being abused by illegal immigrants. Which is sort of the headline version of the Republican argument of why these programs are like wasteful or shouldn't have been, shouldn't have existed in these facets in the first place. I've spent some time looking this up. This is complicated, but the headline is very misleading. It is. There's a very, very long winded explanation of there's the way money is like given out to states and then used. People who are like illegal or like undocumented could be using programs, but the vast majority, and what they're really saying is most people who are here through some legal protection, like say you're here through asylum or some other case that protects your legal status in the country, even though you're not like maybe you're not on a visa or a green card or something like that, you have some legal status in the country. This administration's aggressive policies and views towards those types of people that are often getting deported or no longer have that protection, those were the people who had access to these programs in the past. Because if you're flat out like illegal, quote unquote, or just undocumented, then you weren't supposed to have access to any of these programs in the first place. That are the healthcare programs in question, but they're available to people who had legal or protected status through different programs that the Trump administration no longer respects. So this is a very large distortion of the abuse of these systems that Republicans are claiming exists. That's what I could find. Sure. I can't. You know, I read something much more long winded than that and I'd encourage you to read more about it. But to me, this headline is a very dishonest read of the way these programs are being used. And we've I think to end this. These, these programs saved money like the Medicaid cuts saved money primarily by making it difficult for eligible people to access the program. They were like, you're just making it hard for people that would get on who have a legal right to be on it. And you're just making it giving more friction to those people having access to it. So that's, that's the political game that's unfolding. This week on Net Worth and Chill.

[Brandon]

We'Re joined by Susie Welch, the best.

[Aiden]

Selling author and leadership expert who spent decades helping people win at work and life.

[Brandon]

From climbing the corporate ladder at prestigious.

[Aiden]

Publications to co authoring Winning with Jack Welch, Susie has turned her insights into.

[Brandon]

Both career success and serious money. She opens up about navigating major life.

[Aiden]

Transitions, why loving your work is actually.

[Brandon]

A wealth building strategy, and how her ViewBridge tool can transform your biggest career decisions.

[Aiden]

I also had voices in my head that were preventing me from betting on myself. I was like, why would I bet on myself? I mean, the moment I finally stepped out and stepped into my purpose, I literally, like I was alone in my room at night and I thought for the first time in my life, I'm gonna do this terrifying thing. I'm gonna bet on myself.

[Brandon]

Listen wherever you get your podcasts or.

[Aiden]

Watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF yeah, you know.

[Doug]

I think what's interesting here is, is not so much the specific programs they're fighting about, but that they both no longer feel that there is any incentive to cooperate. I think they both have a political, I mean if they're, they're both already pulling Congress as a whole is polling so poorly, both parties, and they can't even go much lower. This was an argument that I saw, like they can't even go much lower. And Democrats have no power outside of this. They don't have anything in the House or the Senate or the judiciary or the presidency. They have nothing. So this is kind of their last lever. And so for them, I think the party split 50, 50 on whether or not they should negotiate. But like it's way, that's a way higher percent than it's ever been. And they, they risk so much by looking weak than they would by not negotiating here. I mean, I think they're trying to negotiate in some way, but. And then Republican side, there's no advantage for them to give in either they can get some things they may want about cutting. And also it gives them kind of a scapegoat, which is as the government is being more. The polling of government is going down, people are getting more and more upset. This gives you a sort of a little bit of an out. You can be like, hey, like, we're trying to do stuff. This is like, slowing us down, is getting off our mission. That was going to go great. So I just don't see either side having a real incentive to switch, which makes me think, you know, knock on wood, this could change by tomorrow. But this seems like this is going to be a longer shutdown than we've seen normally longer than the average one. I don't know if it'll make it to 30 days. I don't maybe not. But I don't see what the breaking point is, because people are upset, but they're not any more or less upset at the other party or this party than they were before. People are just generally rising in anger. I don't know. That's the vibe I get. I wonder if you have a different thought on it or if there's.

[Brandon]

I think so. I mean, one of the big things. So. So again, you know, Democrats are using this as what you said is basically the final lever. Like, they're not in control of Congress at all. They don't have Supreme Court, they don't have the presidency, and they're just being, like, outmaneuvered constantly. And then the big beautiful bill which we talked about earlier this year, they did a reconciliation bill which basically allowed that to be passed without 60% of the Senate. So they got in these, like, massive cuts. And so the Republicans have just done what they wanted. Asterisk for this whole time. And it feels to me like if the Democratic Party doesn't hold here and they give in, they're like, all right, fine, you can cut all the Medicaid. We're not going to stand up for this. Like, they're real fucked. Like, that's. That's the last bastion of, like, we have some kind of influence. And given that their polling and everything is so low already, it feels like they are not going to give in here because it's going to be, like, somewhat existential to their party.

[Aiden]

I think there's a. There's a very, very pervasive idea, and I would say it fairly, so that the Democrats are basically a bunch of soy cucks with no backbone, like, to say it politely. And I think the party has come around and recognized the fact that people view Them in this sort of like sad, you never fight back and do anything sort of way. And they need to do something substantial in order to come across. And this is their gamble. Right. It might not pay off. I don't know if people come out of this 30 days from now applauding, the Democratic Party may, you know, maybe they will, maybe they won't. But I think they're part of the reason why the approval rating is so low is, well, Republicans, they don't like the Democrats, obviously.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

But I feel like most Democrats or most left leaning people in general do not like the Democrats.

[Doug]

Like, have you seen the Chuck Schumer quote during this thing about, about the letter? Have you seen this?

[Aiden]

No.

[Doug]

It's like him talking to the news and they're asking him about the shutdown and he goes like, yeah, so I sent Trump a strongly worded letter and then he realizes what he's saying sounds so fucking ineffectual. So in the middle of his sentence he's like, well, I mean, not a letter. I, I demand it. You can see him recognize the talking points.

[Brandon]

They're like, you can see that people who, for their entire career in politics, their 70 year career in politics have been this very like kind of stuff, sterile, like both sides are now trying to be a Trump esque figure and just failing badly. Chuck Schumer trying to be like, hello fellow kids. It's so bad.

[Doug]

Yeah, there's a sense they gotta do something.

[Aiden]

My outlook is similar to yours. I came in this one kind of feeling, oh, this might be the longest one we ever have. And we did this whole exercise of, you know, which ones would we save? And you know, within the realm of let's keep this four weeks or under, within the expectation of past shutdowns. But I think this one feels like it can go longer. And then the pain, I imagine that is felt when you extend this to maybe more than a month, two months, three months, I don't know how long it could be just having this many people who are on federal payroll not having access to a paycheck for that long, people will be upset. They will demand attention to this in some facet that people have to be held accountable to to some degree. If you start fucking with enough people's paychecks in that, you just take them away. There's no. That's when people will be the most upset.

[Doug]

So that's what I read. I read that around the 30 day mark specifically is when it becomes a real big fucking deal. Cause that's when paychecks that's when your monthly paycheck would normally arrive. And when that doesn't get there, shit starts becoming unable to get paid.

[Aiden]

So there was an interesting thing that happened during the last one, because it was the first one that surpassed 30 days. A theory or a feeling that one of the reasons they finally had to cave and make a decision was the air traffic controllers. Because although they were supposed to be coming into work and I think this has already happened at Burbank Airport, people just started taking their sick leave and they're like, I'm not going into work. Like, for anybody who doesn't know, air traffic controllers is a famously stressful job.

[Doug]

You work extremely, extremely stressful job.

[Aiden]

And people. And if you're not getting paid for such a long period of time, people just start calling in their sick days or not showing up and saying basically, you know, you see a spike in.

[Doug]

Sick days, they're soft quitting.

[Aiden]

Yeah, yeah, they're soft quitting. And enough air traffic controllers choosing not to show up during the last shutdown was like one of the last big things that happened before they finally caved and like made a decision together to get the budget through.

[Doug]

And I think, yeah, again, because air traffic controllers have mortgages to pay to if their paycheck doesn't arrive, their life starts to get spiraling, unwind. So that's where I think this gets. I mean, listen, I think both sides are getting more negative polling from this against it is not positive from any American, I think, on the ineffectiveness of government. But it's going to come down to who feels like they're getting the worst PR deal that is going to have to cave.

[Aiden]

I did have this thought when I was going over it of. I think I agree with the Democrats taking this stand and making this decision. Like, from a political strategy perspective, I do think it is better for them to do this than nothing. But then I thought about how, dude, if I'm not a person who like reads the news and listens to the news every day and I'm not in tune with what's going on to some degree, and also I'm in the privileged position of having like a financial position that isn't affected by this at all. Like, if I was just a normal person who wasn't tapped in, then I would be. I would not be applauding the Democrats here either. I would just be like, the government shut down. Fucking figure it out. Like, I would just be.

[Doug]

I think that's what most people are saying in Joe, even if they have a Side, I think, you know, I understand the fight for the AC subsidies. I get it. And I think this is a fine spot to take a stand. I get the strategy, but I overall feel like, f k. I get so frustrated because, like.

[Aiden]

Well, I think the fear of this is a big thing. The ACA subsidies are probably the most substantial thing that people could see change in their daily financial life. Right? Yeah. So if I'm one of these people that sees a giant increase in my premiums for my health care. Right. These subsidies don't expire until later this year. Still, you have yet to feel the effect of those expirations happening. So you, from a Democratic strategy perspective, you're like, gambling on these people's understanding that their health care premiums would have gone up in the future, but never actually did. You need to, like, you need. That needs to be so valuable to people and some people. That's what I mean by tapping. Right. If you're not paying attention, if you're just not paying attention to this at all, and you just pay your health care every month and the subsidy is part of what keeps it low, but you don't give a shit about politics, and it never actually goes up because this whole situation plays out. What part of it makes you reward the Democrats for them?

[Doug]

No, but if you don't give a shit about politics, you probably haven't even felt the effects of this yet. The shutdown hasn't trickled into your life.

[Aiden]

No, but that's what I mean is like, just statically, your opinion of the Democrats is pretty low. And because none of this is affecting you yet, including the subsidies going away, if it all ends and the subsidies continue, nothing about your opinion of the Democrats has really changed. If you're that person. Do you see what I'm saying?

[Brandon]

So let me rephrase that. They need to wait for those people to feel the pain and the Democrats come in to rescue them and reinstate their benefits. But if that doesn't. If there's never a period where it's actually lost, everybody will keep living their lives and go, why the fuck was it shut down?

[Aiden]

Exactly.

[Brandon]

There's a world where the stronger strategy for Democrats is actually wait till the end of the year, people lose their health care coverage or subsidies, and then Democrats are like, we are arguing to. And you could actually do that because you can do a continuing resolution, which means the government is funded at previous levels for, let's say, three months. You get through the year, and then you be like, then the Democrats can go, hey, all of you people on these subsidies, if you don't help us and we don't get this through, you are screwed. You will feel it right now.

[Aiden]

And I don't know if that's, you know, ethically the correct choice or even strategically the correct choice. It was just one thing I saw is like, this feels like a hole where the value you say you're bringing here, most people might not even recognize.

[Brandon]

The average person is not going to.

[Doug]

I think the 22 million that are on this are aware of this. I think Marjorie Taylor Greene even is flipping. She's flipping her vote. She's flipping to be on the Democratic side for this because of these subs. She has two kids, she says, that are on this health insurance that are gonna have their premiums triple. And she like. And she's like, deep. I think people are aware of this. I don't think it's completely unknowledgeable. And I also think if you're someone who doesn't pay attention to any of this and not affected by healthcare, once this catches up with you, once some kind of government, you can't go to a national park or the lines of the airport are too long or whatever, this catches up to you, you generally overall are going to. I mean, if you listen to the messaging and be like, ah, maybe I blame the Democrats, may I blame the Republicans. But at the end of the day, you also go, I am tired of the chaos. You end up blaming the administration overall just because. I don't care whose fault it is. Like, it's. You have the power and we're not.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Which is a larger. I think this is a. I think they're being hurt just as much.

[Aiden]

Highly edited anecdote here, but a cut of like street interviewer in the city asking people who they blamed on the shutdown. I don't know what city it is that shapes the opinion, of course, but I do think there's a general opinion here of people know that the Republicans have control of everything on paper. You're the guy in the office. You have the Supreme Court and you have control in Congress and the government shut down. Fucking figure it out. Republicans. I do think there's a feeling of that for sure.

[Doug]

That's what I'm saying. I think this is still politically somewhat strong for I think they both can play it. And that's why I think it's so long.

[Brandon]

I bet you guys $5 that it ends when the Republicans agree to the Medicare things, but with a bunch of stipulations that describe how Illegal immigrants absolutely cannot qualify. Even though that has no real impact. That's not what's going on. But then allows them to claim, we have solved the problem. And we made sure the Democrats wouldn't give it to a legal prediction that is like. Because they.

[Doug]

That get some kind of W. Which.

[Brandon]

Is funny, because, to be clear, Democrats would be getting the entire W, but Republicans would get the, like, visual W. Like, you know, all those illegal immigrants who are on health care, they're gone now. And it's like, yeah, they are. They are. Yeah, sure.

[Aiden]

That's a. That's a lot of money to bet. That's last month's Terror Friday.

[Brandon]

Quick, quick, final thing. Number of days before the shutdown ends. Go.

[Aiden]

Oh, this is good. Fun fact. When we recorded a second test episode, Doug and Atrioc both thought the Ukraine war would be over by now.

[Brandon]

No, not just by now.

[Doug]

By March, by fucking February. I thought, day one. He promised me. Well, he.

[Aiden]

He did say day one.

[Doug]

He promised me day one.

[Brandon]

Why doesn't he furlough Putin? I'm saying 33 days unironically. I think 33 days is my guess.

[Doug]

Price is right rules 34.

[Brandon]

Okay. I think Trump's gonna make a big deal about how it's not the longest shutdown ever, and he's gonna say we need to end it before that. It's all optics.

[Aiden]

I'll go now. See, I kind of want to go in that pocket, too. But now I'll go high. I'll be the high guy. I bet it'll be a historic 45 days.

[Doug]

Damn, I got a nice window here. Close without going over.

[Brandon]

I. I think I have the best window. To be clear, I was gonna go.

[Aiden]

Like 31, but then you said 33.

[Brandon]

Speaking of illegal immigrants.

[Aiden]

Don't look at me.

[Doug]

Prater. Yeah. Wait, wait. We want to talk about H1B's. There's another big.

[Aiden]

Oh, man. Yeah, I wanted to talk about. No, I.

[Brandon]

That was an obvious softball to you.

[Aiden]

No, that was a really good softball. And I'm just. I'm just. I'm tired.

[Brandon]

Well, also, it doesn't make sense. They're not illegal.

[Aiden]

They're also.

[Doug]

They're nothing illegal about it.

[Aiden]

I wanted to talk about H1B visas, which is something that people might know changed recently. I've been wanting to talk about this for a while.

[Brandon]

I've heard that illegal aliens are getting H1Bs.

[Aiden]

They're signing up for them in droves.

[Doug]

That's what I've heard.

[Brandon]

And this actually makes them legal. This is A way that illegal?

[Aiden]

No, no, that's the illegal H1B visas. That's what it's all about here.

[Doug]

I heard Mogul Moves been firing hardworking American workers.

[Aiden]

You keep talking about what we do at Mogul Moves, replacing them. I don't like that H1BS because it's like, I tell you these things in confidence, and then you come on the podcast.

[Doug]

I need content, so I like to tell your secrets to the world.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Brandon]

Can you bleep out what you said earlier? Just some of the words randomly.

[Aiden]

Okay. For people who don't know what H1BS are, these are visas for, quote, specialty occupations. Basically, jobs that require a bachelor's degree or higher in a specific specialty. Like your degree has to be attached to what you do. Easy example, you get a job as a software engineer at a big tech company, and you have a bachelor's in computer science. And this is the type of visa that you would need to move and work in the US from another country. And, you know, other common jobs that might use this. It could be an accountant, it could be a doctor, unlike. It wouldn't be somebody who is like a cab driver or like, cleaning staff or someone like that. Yeah, there is a big change. Trump recently announced that they raised the application fee for this visa from a peak of $5,000 to $100,000.

[Doug]

Racks, baby.

[Aiden]

Insane.

[Doug]

Yeah, big deal. I mean, there's a lot of turmoil around H1B people. People, I think rightly, in some cases, have felt that they are being undercut on their wages by H1B workers. And then H1B workers have often felt the system keeps them tied to a single employer, trapped in that job and unable to negotiate for better wages. So it's like a weird double bad situation.

[Aiden]

Yeah, the way this works is you. You enter basically, a lottery for the chance of actually applying for the H1B. And there is a limit on how many of these visas can be issued per year. I think it's like 65,000 a year to people with bachelor's degrees and then another 20,000 ish set aside for master's degrees and higher, specifically. And the main one, second, what's crazy.

[Doug]

Is there's a lot of gaming of that system. I don't know if, you know, I looked into H1BS a while back, like, so let's say Google, you want to hire a software engineer from, I don't know, India or something, China. So what you'll do is you will, first of all submit as many possible entries in the lottery as you Can So even if you, you know, submit more than you need so that when whatever you get, you can apply, but then also you will hire like a staffing firm that is also basically their main job is to constantly submit thousands of entries into this lottery.

[Aiden]

Yes.

[Doug]

And then once they get their share of like 50 or 60 or whatever, then you can hire through that staffing firm. So it's like, it's like a numbers game and a money game where the biggest companies can overwhelmingly use loopholes to get as much of the lottery H1BS as they can.

[Aiden]

And historically the intention behind this is to take some specialty area area in America and that's underserved by America's labor market and get people to fill those roles. And that's, that's the good intention behind it is like, oh, we don't have enough people that specialize in this type of work. Please let's get them here so that our companies can grow and, and get talent that they need to be successful.

[Brandon]

H1B is like underpin most software big tech companies. Like it's an incredible many H1B visas and often the smartest people in the given room are H1B visa holders.

[Aiden]

So the change to 100k aside, up until now, the, the issues with these that I see is if you're on this visa, right, you can only work for the company or the job that sponsored your application. So if I get a job at Google with my H1B, I can't just freely go seek a job elsewhere. I also need Google or whoever my employer is to sponsor my green card, which is my permanent residency in the United States if I want to seek that out after a few, after a few years of living here, I think it's five. And your H1B is good for, for three years. But you need to keep that job with that company. The issue is that you as the employee, you don't have a lot of flexibility to go freely like negotiate and seek out other, other offers. Right. And relative to the field of jobs you could be getting elsewhere in the US you might be underpaid because the friction to you go to freely go seek other work is so high. And the company also doesn't have a ton of incentive to sponsor your green card because as soon as you're issued the green card or permanent residency, you can leave freely and not worry about them being the holder of your H1B anymore. So that's on the worker side, one of the prospective issues of these visas to begin with with. And then on the other Side while the intention is to fill, you know, underserved markets within the US labor market as these jobs or markets like kind of ebb and flow in certain spaces. Right. So in a sector like tech right now, tech in the last few years has been downsizing. We're out of the period where people are hiring a ridiculous amount of people into. Into tech workplace places. Right. So there's an incentive to lay off like higher cost or like higher salary local American like salaries at the expense of maintaining or continuing to hire H1BS at lower salaries. And in general, from what I could see, there is a historic H1BS have historically been used like correctly. They seem, they seem appropriately used and have like, like studied, not out competed like local labor markets in the US.

[Doug]

But I think I would disagree. I like, I did some research on and I found a lot. I mean, I guess I got to know the stats maybe. Yeah, yeah, it's that. But I saw a lot of examples of especially like an accounting. Disney fired their entire accounting department, replaced it with H1BS. Like there's. I've seen multiple big companies lay off a lot of people to replace it. And the only point is the lower labor cost. It's not like.

[Aiden]

So the loose idea that I got here is that this system has been potentially increasingly abused as time has passed.

[Doug]

Yeah. The meta gets figured out.

[Aiden]

Yeah. And especially as. So if we were to use tech as an example, right. When tech started exploding in the US the number of available positions or like the talent demanded greatly exceeded the amount of people in the US that were even educated to do those jobs. Right. But then we have this whole reaction internally to pushing software engineering, computer science degrees, coding, boot camps. There's a whole industrial like reaction within the US to educate and push people towards this exploding field. Right. But then over time the explosion in that field like levels out or maybe even turns in the opposite direction. And now all of a sudden you do have all this American labor that is educated and able to do those jobs, but can still be laid off at the expense of hiring those H1B employees. Right?

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

So it depends at like what stage and like the cycle or like what level your, your business is at or how many of these like lottery spots you're able to get or game. Does that make sense?

[Brandon]

Yeah, all villain chariot. I don't hate immigrants actually. So I think they.

[Doug]

I just, I was just about to say I was strongly pro immigration. I just think the H1B system specifically is like rife with abuse. It is, it is a. It is Just a way to have undue leverage over a worker from a different region who you can then pay less than the local going rate in America.

[Aiden]

No, I think the core problem with this is that everybody loses basically. Right.

[Brandon]

Like if I think companies benefit, to be clear, all the normal people.

[Doug]

Talented people.

[Brandon]

People.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Brandon]

You get talented people and they can't leave and they have no negotiating leverage. It's great for. If you're Microsoft. This is great.

[Aiden]

Yeah. I think a good change to this would be if H1B, if H1B holders could basically freely seek other employment or freely seek other related employment while they were.

[Doug]

Yeah, there's like two things, right. There's the O1 visa, which is like a super talented person who's really good at their job. They can get an O1 visa, which has more flexibility.

[Aiden]

That's the streamer. Visa, Visa.

[Doug]

And that's what, that's what some of the. That's what Linkus has.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And that's become more and more chosen as the route to go. People have gotten way better. There's like systems now where you can fill out the right thing and figure it out and get no. 1 visa. That, that's been happening for top tier tech talent who don't want to be locked into the H1B system. So that's happening. And I think an expansion of that and a better funding of that and a better understanding that to get more people, if people really are talented, want to come to America, you should, should. It should be our number one priority to get them to be working. So I agree with that. And the second thing is this idea somewhat on its face makes sense, which is the idea that like if there's 100,000 fee, then you're only going to get truly down to build for your H1B. You're not going to get someone who you can just underpay. You're not going to get accountant. You can pay 45k instead of 60k from, you know, a different country. That's the plan. That's the idea. I get the idea in theory. However, in practice, this law has a carve out, which is the White House can waive your application fee at any time. So in practice, what it means is everyone has to go through Trump. Every big company now has to go through Trump to get their H1BS at a discounted rate, not to pay 100k per. And you know what happened when this rolled out is they said it was 100k retroactively. So every company was freaking the fuck out and they were Saying to all their H1B employees, do not fly in, like, stay over there, we'll figure this out. Don't. So there's a lot of chaos and panic. And then Caroline Levitt came out and said, no, no, we didn't mean retroactive. We meant like starting now for the future. Which was a backpedal. And now. But they're saying with a carve out through the White House. So that like, like most things that this administration does, even if there's a kernel of something that they're attacking, the execution is either grifty or chaotic. And in this case both. So there's the chaos. And then into the part where it's like, requires you to go through him.

[Aiden]

Well, it seems like the big pain points I can see from this is with that being said, right, if you're Amazon or Google, you're one of these companies that was kind of seen kissing the ring in the build up to the election anyway, you might have the relationships with the White House to go forward and negotiate that fee down for your company. Right. But places that will be hit in different ways, like a huge source of health care labor is H1BS, like for, for nurses or doctors. And this is areas where we're like famously understaffed, where we're still hiring in a, in a job market. That's terrible. Right? The one sector of the economy that's still hiring and looking for people. And, and if you work at like a smaller healthcare institution, like a smaller, like local hospital or a smaller network within healthcare, you might not have the leverage or the connections to negotiate those application fees down or even talk about those application fees being lower.

[Doug]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the problem is it's, it's a two tier system where those with connections and those that kiss the ring and those that have something to offer the White House can get better deals on labor now, which is again, crazy.

[Aiden]

I want to add one more crazy thing that I didn't know. I didn't hear at all about this until I read more. And so about 70% of H1BS issued are to people from India. And when this announcement was made, there was no significant change in the American stock market, but there was a big shift in the Indian stock market in reaction to this message, which was wild. And I think because so many people like Indian diaspora that are in the US like if you get one of these jobs, right, and you have this visa, it's, you know, part of the reason why you are getting this job is even relative to The American market, if your salary is low, right, it's probably much higher than what you were earning back home. And you send money back home to your family and that helps, you know, stimulate local economy or local business in like, wherever your family lives in India, inadvertently, you know, being attached to, like, Indian Indian companies. And there was a reaction in the Indian stock market to this change being announced. And I thought that was, that was pretty wild.

[Brandon]

There's huge companies that have made a business. I forget the names, but these IT companies where their whole thing is this.

[Doug]

And yeah, I know that it's an H1B.

[Brandon]

It's so perverse onto how this whole idea is supposed to be, which is they're basically just, they apply for as many H1Bs as possible. They just try to get as many as they can. It's almost entirely Indian workers. And then they are then just offload that to major tech companies for a fee. It's, it's a fucking racket. It's terrible. So, you know, again, I'm super, super pro, you know, positive, skilled, fair, immigration. But I do agree the H1, I mean, and you know, the big counterargument is, is what you already addressed, which is like, we need super talented people to keep winning as a country. That's like the, that's, that's the foundation of America, right? Is getting the best and brightest people to come to America and build it. And then particularly with all the fervor around robotics, AI, et cetera, it's like AI is shockingly high leverage if you're a really brilliant person, right? If you're like one of the smartest people, it's like that person can have such an outsized impact. So you want them here really bad.

[Doug]

74% India, 11% China, and then 1% Canada. So it's.

[Aiden]

I know, isn't it crazy?

[Doug]

It's just basically India and then a little bit China. Yeah, yeah. And again, the percentage of these visas every, these H1 visas every year that go to the largest tech companies plus two gigantic Indian staffing firms is like, I want to say it's like 80. It's like, I saw the stat and it was, it was, it was shocking. Oh, you can see here, Amazon, Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Google, Cognizant, JPMorgan, Walmart and Deloitte. And like these combined are like all of the, the H1BS. They're, they're pulling almost all of them. And then Tata consultancy gets a massive number of the H1BS and then they sell subsidiary, like, accounting services to like all these different companies in America that can then just sell, lay off their entire accounting departments. So it's just the way it's being used is like systematically just undercutting wage pressure in America. It, you know. Yeah, there's no benefit except for the companies.

[Aiden]

Can I, can I talk about, I want to. One kind of tangential immigration thing related to this is so a bunch of people obviously do get green cards eventually, right? Like eventually. Not everybody does, but. And once you have your green card, you could apply for citizenship. But when you have your green card, there's a, there's a quota system on how many people from different countries can become citizens off of their green card. And these quotas don't scale with rates of immigration or population of countries. So obviously like if you're from Denmark, like you'll be on your green card. I think it's five years or maybe you need five years to get your green card. And then I think you can apply for your citizens citizenship like right after that or something. But if you're from Denmark, we don't have enough Danish immigrants coming to the US to get anywhere near the quota. So you can just apply and then become a citizen. It's relatively quick as far as US immigration stuff goes, right? But as you can imagine based on this number, dude, people are on their green card from India for like 15 to 20 years right now because the, because of where they are in the queue within that ladder long line, because we don't scale or change it at all. Which seems absolutely ridiculous to me.

[Doug]

No, it just feels like a really broken, underfunded, corrupt system that has so many like abuses and loopholes for the biggest corporations and not benefiting average Americans on immigration. Life is hard for the immigrants coming in. I mean, maybe they're making more money than they make, but they're, they're in a big, at a disadvantageous position at every step.

[Aiden]

They're like, yeah, I think you just have so little negotiating power once you're at that company that employs you. Right. You can, you're, you know, you're put in a spot where you probably feel obligated to work longer hours, do more to keep your job.

[Doug]

If you get fired, you lose where you live. It's so yeah, I mean, I have friends who have an H1B. It's, it's. And I, what I would say is, dude, one of the pure proofs that like this is not being used in the way it's intended is that part of the law is that everyone who hires somebody for an H1B is required to have made a job posting and try to find. They can't find. They have to prove they could not find a qualified American candidate for the role. That's like part of the law on H1B.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And so the way they get around this is so obviously fraudulent. Like they have so many ways of like they'll only post it in the newspaper.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Like you have to require to mail in a letter with your resume. Like it's like the ways they get around like contest law. Like there's so many ways they do that so they can make sure that like no one can actually apply except for the candidate they want to underpay.

[Aiden]

This is another thing with like time passing and the system being abused more. Yeah. Is like early on a lot of these catch alls the way you're supposed to prove that you couldn't have hired an American in this person's place.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

It's like these things started off more honest and effective at the beginning of this program but as time passes it becomes more and more distorted.

[Doug]

I feel like that about so many things in government in general. It's like a video game map. It just gets people figure out how to how whatever the law gets made. It's like a countdown till somebody figures how to abuse it. And that's why you need wise leadership that updates.

[Brandon]

And then Trump dropped a balance patch. Except there's microtransactions to go to the old version.

[Doug]

Dude. True. It's pay to win.

[Brandon]

It's pay to win.

[Doug]

It's pay to win.

[Aiden]

And there's already a lottery system involved. So it's like you're already, you're already packs.

[Doug]

You're trying to get a five star accountant for me.

[Brandon]

Infosys gets approval to keep doing this without the 100,000. I mean.

[Doug]

Yeah, it's crazy. Well, yeah.

[Aiden]

I mean do you have a. Do you guys have any more of those?

[Doug]

I think I said what I said. Yeah, I, I stand by it.

[Aiden]

I don't have anything else I wanted to move on to. Do you want to talk about. We have two AI topics we can end on. AMD OpenAI thing that just happened that you wanted to talk about or generative AI news that has also come out recently.

[Doug]

I would love to hear what Doug says because I'm going to form a clip on the other thing anyway tonight.

[Brandon]

Oh, there you go. All right. So you linked me an article by the FT that I read which is about the AI music companies working on licensing with some of the Big music publishers. And this was very light on technical details, which I found concerning. But it was very much like, like the music companies are saying, okay, during the Internet era, with Napster and Limewire, all this pirating, it was this huge thing. The amount of share the music industry had in totality, like dropped like 60, 70% as a result. Like, they just got quite cratered, right? They got wiped out by the Internet, never fully recovered. And so they're like, we understand that AI is a similar existential threat. We got to get ahead of it. So we are talking with licensing deals. And the thing I saw one of the quotes is like, we want it to be something like Spotify, where every time an AI song is played, if it utilizes our music, then we would get a cut. I mean, that makes sense, right? It's or similar to sampling music, right? If you use a sample. And the AI companies, at least in that article, didn't comment on it in any way. They're just apparently in communications. So for this specifically, it's interesting because the generative AI in general, it's not. Some people seem to think it's like you're sampling music if you, if you make an AI song, it's not like it picks five songs and combines them together. It has been trained off of millions or in the case of images, billions of pieces of data that it slowly trains on. And so when you ask it, go make me a cool EDM song, it's not going and saying, I'm gonna get Justice's song and sample it and I'm gonna get Skrillex's song and sample it. It's similar to if you said, hey, the Weeknd, the artist, you just released a new album, everybody you've ever taken inspiration from, and any music you've ever listened to in your life, you need to give them a cut of the mud money, because that technically influenced how you made your new thing. It's like, how on earth would you enforce that? So it is interesting that the AI and audio industries are talking about this because to me, this doesn't feel tenable at all. And on the other side, I definitely want us to move to a world where if you create content and that is used by an AI company to train their model, who then goes and makes things. I think you should be quite compensated for that. And that's the world we seem to be moving towards with like the New York Times licensing, Reddit licensing, various other companies are saying, hey, AI companies, you can use our stuff if you pay us. But at the Same time, the idea that the music industry is like, yeah, we should get a little credit. Every time somebody makes a song, it's like, that doesn't, that doesn't make sense. Because on the technical level, that's not how it's working. A model is being trained off of millions and millions and millions of songs which turn into a math equation that can, can sort of reverse engineer what a song is.

[Doug]

True. But I mean, it's being trained off of the songs they own. Right. Those songs are being ripped without permission.

[Brandon]

Yes.

[Doug]

And being trained on them. You know, it's interesting.

[Brandon]

I mean, it's a complex thing. And this, this article made me think like music industry, you don't understand how AI works.

[Doug]

You understand the Internet either.

[Brandon]

Right.

[Doug]

They're probably gonna get screwed on this.

[Brandon]

And they're confidently saying, we're not gonna be left behind on this one. We know it's a big deal. And it's like, you don't sound like one of the quotes is literally like, if a song is played that uses our music, we should get credit. That's literally every song. Again, to train an AI model, you train it on all of the music that slowly tweaks a formula that would mean every single song in existence that it's been trained off of is used every time. Technically, yeah. So this doesn't make sense. I do agree. It's a weird intractable problem that applies to all of generative AI and I don't see an easy solution to it.

[Doug]

And we're seeing this problem on a bigger scale. We talked about the, the, the AI slot feed Sora launched and they had an opt out copyright law program which basically said if you don't want us to steal your stuff and make Rick and Morty or whatever, then you come and opt out. But we're going to do it otherwise. Which is not how copyright law works.

[Brandon]

Can you do that with crime? Like you can rob a bank, but they have to let you know.

[Doug]

Yeah, all the banks in the area have to opt out.

[Brandon]

For me robbing them, dude, you're covered.

[Doug]

So they did that for one day. Literally one day until they got, got 10 billion legal calls. I mean, I think the WWE was the one that led the most because they were getting their stuff pirated or whatever.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And so Sam Altman backtracked and now everyone on, on the Sora Reddit or whatever is complaining because they're getting so many more. We can't make this because you're trying to make. Anyway so that that's happening. But you Know, I mean, I get what you're saying, Doug, in that it's training on everything. But I've been scrolling so hard to test it out. Like, they're creating south park episodes, have the voices and the drawings and the. And then I heard, like, it was outputting the actual unchanged Stranger Things soundtrack, like, as it was.

[Brandon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Doug]

So, like, there's clearly some.

[Brandon]

Yeah, no, I can do. And that's what makes this so complex and weird. It's like. So let's say that you want to say if your AI uses our copyrighted content explicitly like it.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

And when I say use, it would recreate it. But let's say it recreates spongebob or the Stranger Things soundtrack. In that case, if it's clearly recognizable, let's say your company has to try to identify it in some way. We get credit. And maybe you do that. But then the question is, again, if I say make a song that is inspired by the Weeknd, right? That's not gonna. It's not gonna be the actual sample.

[Doug]

I think that's a much. I agree with that.

[Brandon]

And then again, this is how real human creatives work. I'm inspired by people all the time. I don't have to give them my YouTube revenue because I was inspired by a cool Hitman video you did or something, which isn't a real case. So it's.

[Doug]

Oh, it's a real case. You're gonna have to pay me.

[Brandon]

Yeah, yeah. Well, jokes on you. It didn't work very well. All right. People didn't think it was that funny for GTA V. It's so challenging. So that would be an easy one where you say, hey, if the AI recreates a recognizable piece of copyrighted content, you have to pay. That's easy. The much harder version is where it's Sponge man instead of spongebob. And it looks similar and it's a clearly inspired show. And at that point, what is the difference between inspiration and ripoff that's so hard to define.

[Doug]

I think this is going to be such a. Such a battle in the next year. Like, this is everyone. Everyone is gearing up. And like you said, I think what I've read too, is they all. They have fresh pain from the Internet. They remember how they got screwed, right? And so they're throwing every dollar. Like all the movie industries, they're. They're lawyering up. And then the AI companies have even more money. A substantially amount more money. They have billions.

[Brandon]

So it's like, yeah, they just make money appear by Just saying the word AI.

[Doug]

So that's infinite money. Well, and so they're both just about to go crazy. I mean, I don't know how it's going to play out.

[Brandon]

I'm definitely going to keep trying to follow it pretty closely and currently I see no good solution. The most obvious thing is going to be the AI companies pay a license to be able to train their models off of the library. And that is already happening with a number of companies. But there's, you know, as we've talked about it before in the past, there's huge lawsuits right now that are going to be determining this about whether a company can say, say I shouldn't have to pay you in the first place because it is transformative so.

[Doug]

Well, also because right now all the AI models, the really good ones everyone's using are through a few, you know, mostly big, mostly American companies that they can still negotiate with. But once the, once the tech gets more and everyone can run locally on a, a deep seek like, you know.

[Brandon]

China can and will make a model that does this exact same thing and you will not be able to.

[Doug]

And you can run it locally and then make as much copyright was you want and then put it on TikTok. Like it doesn't. It's going to be such a problem. I don't really understand how to. I don't. Yeah, it's a wave coming for all these companies and I don't understand how to.

[Aiden]

It kind of feels like there's no winning like for, for those companies.

[Brandon]

It's, it's.

[Doug]

This is Sam Altman's blog, by the way. It's very funny. It's worth a read. It is him after one day of Sora recognizing how this is not working, how he planned. It's first him saying, hey, rights holders, we're not going to do that opt out thing. I was. That was mostly a goof and we're going to have a thing where we can share the revenue with you and we're going to figure that we're working on it. So that's him realizing like there's legal pressure coming immediately. The second thing is him saying like, hey, we really do have to make money on this though. People are making way more of these than we thought and most of them are not getting as many views as we thought. Which is very funny because it's very expensive to make like the gpu time to make a video. And we thought about this also funny.

[Brandon]

Because he said this exact same thing several times. Yeah, like on every, on every Product launch, which leads me to believe that and other people as well, that this is not an accident. That it wasn't like, oh God, no. No copyrighted content. It's a very deliberate strategy to put it out there, get it a ton of attention. So everybody's like, holy shit, what's going on? And then you get to pull it back and go, I'm sorry, I saw me.

[Doug]

But I do think, I mean, I don't know if they expected how much of the traffic would come from people just yoinking the stuff off Sora and putting it somewhere else where they can't modify, monetize. Like how does OpenAI make the money?

[Brandon]

Well, it's off of compute time. That is their current plan, so it's the creation of it.

[Doug]

Yeah, but you know, I was saying this on stream, but you know, have you ever been to like meme generator.com or whatever where you can like that is not a profit. That's a small business. It's a very small business. If they become the GPU Meme Generator, is that really enough to. To pay for the.

[Brandon]

I mean potentially a trillion dollars they need for the.

[Doug]

The of rest?

[Brandon]

Not that much. But you know, counterpoint Adobe, right. Adobe is a set of tools to be able to make things. And if this is a different tool where you can go and say, this is the type of video I want to create, you don't have to pay 50 bucks a month for Adobe maybe.

[Aiden]

I mean, you're just gambling on enough people paying for the tool because it's a creation. The social media is the vehicle to advertise the tool. Basically. It's like if I keep seeing if I. It's the same thing with like the, the Ghibli. The Ghibli profile pictures.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

It's like those things spread everywhere and everybody's like, how do I make mine? Then they go seek out.

[Brandon]

They're trying Adobe, they're not trying to be YouTube. And that's a really important distinction. They're trying to say, hey, do you want to make things like this come to our website and pay us?

[Doug]

I'm just like, Adobe's money comes almost entirely through big long form corporate contracts. Like the most people, regular people pirate it. They or they find some way of using it it like it's not you and me paying for Photoshop is not how they make their money. They make their money because they sign a deal with Microsoft or whatever for a big corporate.

[Aiden]

You actually sound like me. Sound like me explaining to my parents when I was 15 why? It was okay that I stole Photoshop.

[Brandon]

Coming for me.

[Doug]

Adobe knows you steal it and they want you to use it so that when you grow up and get a job in the industry, you require your corporation to buy this license. So maybe this will work. Maybe enough corporate people need to use. Use AI to make spongebob. Like. I don't know.

[Aiden]

I just.

[Brandon]

How is the company gonna function if you can't. By the way, some of the best ones. Mario in a cop chase going down.

[Doug]

A lot of cop chases. A lot of cops been arrested.

[Brandon]

Every person. Dude. Michael Jackson stealing my fried chicken. Incredible. I mean, there are amazing videos out of this.

[Doug]

There's a really good one of Sam Altman breaking into Studio Ghibli's headquarters, grabbing all the papers off of Miyazaki's desk. Desk. And running away while he's chased by Miyazaki. That was. That was Chef's.

[Brandon]

There's a huge trend around Sam Altman. The Creed committed crimes. Which is so funny. So funny.

[Doug]

Internet's undefeated, guys. That's our stand. I. I do look forward to seeing how this plays out. I agree with you that it's going to be an epic legal battle for generations. I don't know how it's going to play out.

[Aiden]

I want to see Nintendo get involved so bad.

[Doug]

They're the way. They're the SWATs team.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

When a certain line gets crossed, it's going to be in the crosshairs of Mario's Delta Force.

[Aiden]

It's been on the opposite side of the Nintendo one so many times that I just want to see it play out. I want to see it play out the other way.

[Doug]

I've seen Mario smoking weed. I've seen all this stuff.

[Brandon]

Here's the thing. This is all. It's all good. It's going to be really interesting. Fun little battle until Deep Seek launches Deep Seek video. And then all hell breaks loose because there's no ability to enforce it at all.

[Aiden]

I'm safe, actually.

[Brandon]

Why are you safe with that?

[Aiden]

Because it's going to come pre. Installed. Never mind. I'm actually more compromised.

[Doug]

And that's why this shirt wraps up our episode.

[Brandon]

Aiden is a traitor from me, Brandon and the Trader. Thanks for watching Lemonade Stand. We'll see you next week. Bye Bye, guys.