Mission Accomplished | Ep. 053 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Summary

Lemonade Stand – Ep. 053: "Mission Accomplished"

Podcast by Aiden, Atrioc (Doug), and DougDoug - Vox Media Podcast Network
Date: March 11, 2026

Episode Overview

In this episode, the Lemonade Stand crew dives into the complexities of global conflict and economics, specifically focusing on the war in Iran, oil market shocks, and civilian and military impacts. They juxtapose these weighty themes with their trademark humor, swinging from AI-weaponized cockroaches to a deep debate on housing policy—highlighting recent successes and failures across the US, Europe, and China. The hosts also tease their upcoming research trip to China, signaling more first-hand reporting and cultural exchange in coming episodes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Weaponized Cockroaches and AI: "This is the Bug Story Episode"

[01:23–05:48]

• The episode kicks off with wild speculation (and fact!) about "weapons on cockroaches":
  • Real research reportedly involves outfitting cockroaches with cameras, microphones, neural interfaces, and possible "little turrets" for military use.
  • The hosts riff on the absurdity and possible ethics:
    • “That cockroach looks like it’s got a weapon on it.” – Perry [01:56]
    • “Most of their things are AI-generated to make the cockroaches look really slick… But then in real life, they’re just giant mechanical things.” – Doug [02:13]
• Discussion turns to digital brains and AI:
  • Mention of uploading a fruit fly’s brain "one-to-one digitally", resulting in the digital fly behaving identically to the original.
    • “They uploaded a fruit fly's brain...and the digital fly behaved exactly. They copied neuron by neuron.” – Perry [03:23]
  • Musings on digital consciousness and simulation theory.

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2. War in Iran: Oil Prices, Civilian Impact, and Geopolitical Complexity

[07:16–34:49]

• Recap and satirical “analysis” of the Iran conflict:
  • Dramatic increase in oil prices, up to $115/barrel – affecting gas prices globally.
  • American and Israeli military actions, including confirmed US missile strikes on Iranian civilian targets and Israeli attacks on fuel depots.
  • On civilian suffering:
    • “...US military bombed a girls school and killed 175 people, mostly who are schoolgirls. Like this is horrific.” – Doug [12:33]
    • “Clouds of oil...raining oil down upon Tehran...major health consequences.” – Aiden [13:05]
• Policy and public reaction:
  • Contradiction in US political messaging:
    • “The war is very complete.” – Perry quoting government [07:43]
  • Iran’s struggle to leverage economic/psychological warfare through prolonging the conflict and oil blockade.
  • Russia’s rumored intelligence support to Iran, possibly escalating the stakes (debated with real-time news updates)[27:31].
• Regime change: why aerial bombardment rarely builds support for the aggressor.
  • “If an egg is cracked from the outside, it leads to death. But if an egg is cracked from the inside, it leads to life.” – Perry, quoting a commenter[16:40]

Memorable exchange:

• “We’re giving it suggestions, right? It’s not a crime for me to tell someone how to go murder another human being.” – Doug [06:39]
• “Yes, it is.” – Aiden [06:47]

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3. On-the-Ground Stories and Regional Perspectives

[23:01–25:31]

• First-hand account from Kuwait:
  • Civilian buildings struck despite claims of targeting only US military installations.
  • Heightened anti-Israeli sentiment and pan-Gulf unity.
  • Gulf states' anxiety about economic stability and reputation as business hubs.

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4. Housing Market Deep-Dive: Austin, Vienna, Helsinki, Hong Kong & More

[35:03–68:14]

• US "YIMBY" Success Stories:

  • Austin, TX: Massive increase in housing supply leads to falling rents, landlords losing pricing power.
    • “The rental market here is saturated with availability. Landlords have almost no leverage.” – Perry [38:30]
  • Legislative reforms:
    • California’s SB79 making affordable housing easier to build near transit (thanks to persistent advocacy).
    • Illinois considering ending single-family zoning.
  • Balanced takes: hosts acknowledge that rapidly falling home values could cause a recession and real pain for recent buyers.
    • “If houses were to materially correct, like… 20, 30% drops nationwide... It would be a recession level event.” – Perry [51:14]

• International Examples:

  • Vienna & Helsinki: High public housing percentages, price controls, and government-owned land maintain affordability.
  • Hong Kong: Government restricts development to boost revenue, resulting in the world’s least affordable housing.
    • “They intentionally choke the supply to explode the value of these leases because they have plenty of space to develop, but it's the primary source of income for the government.” – Aiden [65:03]
  • San Jose gets roasted:
    • “Respectfully, San Jose sucks balls.” – Doug [66:59]
    • “Culturally, out of all 20 of these... it is by far the bottom tier. It's crazy.” – Perry [67:14]

• Discussion of Prefab Construction:

  • “Prefab” building in Japan and Germany described as a major way to improve affordability and speed.
    • Potential for US to adopt prefab methods in large-scale developments.

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5. Chinese Tech & EV Innovation

[80:53–87:42]

• BYD’s new 5-minute EV charging stations and booming Chinese electric car infrastructure, implications for competition with Western carmakers.
• Short discussion of Nio’s battery swap and why it hasn’t revolutionized EV charging (yet).
• Note: Both China and the EU now require physical dials on car dashboards again—anti-iPad trend.
  • “I was so relieved to hear that because I’m hoping that’s a decision that’s made in more places.” – Aiden [87:42]

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6. Open-Source AI Arms Race

[88:29–93:58]

• The DeepSeek Model: A Chinese AI model, trained on domestic chips, now rivals major Western LLMs.
  • “It’s open source, but then the third thing is that it’s ... trained entirely on Chinese chips. This is the first one with no Nvidia chips involved in the process.” – Perry [88:48]
• Debate over how much is "copied" from Western AIs and how much is proprietary innovation.
• Hosts expect a big market reaction when DeepSeek 4 is released.

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7. Lemonade Stand Goes to China

[94:24–97:44]

• Announcement: Lemonade Stand will record several upcoming episodes while traveling across China, including city walk-throughs, interviews, and a factory tour.
  • “We set it as a goal for our Patreon...we promised to fund a trip to China where we go visit a bunch of cities, talk to normal Chinese people about what living there is like...” – Aiden [94:32]

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Notable Quotes & Humorous Moments

• “There's no rule that says a bomb can't be on a cockroach.” – Perry [06:11]
• “I do it because I love the job. They could pay me nothing.” – Aiden, on oil tanker captains [10:31]
• “San Jose is if God took a shit.” – Doug [67:31]
• “If you want to diminish the Iranian threat, show some guts and go through that straight...” – Doug, quoting Fox News [09:15]
• “As a homeowner then...are you okay with the idea of your property goes down 20% in order to correct the market?" – Doug [53:43]
• “I'm currently wearing a butt plug shaped like Gerald Ford's face.” – Perry, reading a prefab card [81:44]

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Timestamps of Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|-------------------| | 00:00–05:48 | Weapons-on-cockroaches & AI brain uploads | | 07:16–34:49 | War in Iran: gas price shocks, civilian targets, regime attitudes, and global reactions | | 35:03–68:14 | Housing: US and global perspectives, pro/con of building, zoning, and affordability | | 75:29–79:17 | Prefab building as a housing solution | | 80:53–87:42 | Chinese EV & battery tech; car interfaces | | 88:29–93:58 | Chinese open source AI—DeepSeek and global competition | | 94:24–97:44 | Announcing the China research trip—background, goals, destinations |

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Episode Conclusion

The trio closes by previewing one more "normal" episode before their China adventure kicks off. Continuing their blend of serious debate and irreverent humor, the Lemonade Stand podcast tackles some of the most pressing and bizarre questions of our economic age—signaling that, even in the face of war, financial quagmires, and AI cockroach warfare, there’s always room for lemonade.

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For more details or to support the show/patreon, visit patreon.com/lemonadestand.

Transcript

[Aiden]

I've been trying to learn more about finance and trading, so I'm on my 12th watch through of the Wolf of Wall Street.

[Perry]

You picking up Scott?

[Doug]

I don't know if they do a lot of investing necessarily in that movie.

[Perry]

They invest more, scam people. Right.

[Doug]

Also for services for the office seems above.

[Aiden]

Where could I learn? Where else would I learn?

[Perry]

But, you know, actually, this is crazy detail, but you could go to tastytrade.com and learn financial jargon and they demystify

[Aiden]

it for [e-mail] yes, lemonade stand.

[Perry]

It's a registered broker dealer and a member of Fenra, NFA and SIPC. Or you could try a 14th watch through. Maybe you pick up something you didn't get last.

[Aiden]

Dude, you pick up crazy things on the 11th, I'll tell you that.

[Perry]

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[Doug]

They're putting weapons on cockroaches. They're putting microphones and cameras on cockroaches, and they're selling them to NATO. It's happening right now. It's called Swarm biotics or whatever. It's not just that they put the cameras and the microphones in the AI and the cockroaches. They then use a brain neural interface. They're putting weapons on cockroaches. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next week.

[Perry]

Hey, good app. Wait, go back. Julie said again. This is crazy.

[Aiden]

No, this is real.

[Perry]

They're putting weapons on cockroaches.

[Doug]

They're putting weapons on cockroaches.

[Perry]

Okay, can I be honest, though?

[Aiden]

Uhhuh.

[Perry]

That is. That cockroach looks like it's got a weapon on it.

[Doug]

Yeah, I don't. I wouldn't like this wandering.

[Perry]

I'm not like, no bugs here. Nothing wrong with this.

[Aiden]

I'm not looking at that and being like, oh, this is a normal cockroach.

[Perry]

I'm like, what is going on?

[Doug]

Most of their things are AI generated to make the cockroaches look really slick. Like, they have really slick little sleek backpacks. But then in real life, they're just. There's like a giant, giant mechanical thing. But they're training the cockroaches. I was get a video. It tells them like they still control their legs, but the neural interface tells them where to go. This is so weird.

[Aiden]

Wait, maybe I. Maybe they, they. They'll start adding little turrets on top of it.

[Doug]

That's what I'm wondering. That's what I'm wondering. Look at that. You can put all sorts of stuff on that.

[Aiden]

Wait, the military industrial complex. They're pointing weapons on cockroaches.

[Perry]

This is the.

[Doug]

This is where.

[Perry]

This is your line.

[Aiden]

This was my line.

[Perry]

Don't get the cockroaches involved. They even have logos in the back.

[Doug]

I mean it makes you wonder if it could be used in other battles that are happening around the world.

[Perry]

No, no segue me yet because I

[Doug]

would say we're not segwaying. We're staying on cockroaches.

[Perry]

Okay, I want to say on. On. On bugs being turned into weapons or

[Aiden]

t. There's no way you have a second bugs into weapons.

[Doug]

Okay, title thumbnail. It's not Iranian. This is bugs. Cockroaches are weapons.

[Perry]

Okay, quick, pull us up. They have successfully. Oh, I read. I put the paper into fucking chatgpt to be honest.

[Doug]

But okay.

[Perry]

They uploaded a fruit flies brain completely one to one digitally and then the digital fly behaved exactly. They copied neuron by neuron. I mean they have like 11 trillion of our real brain in a fruit fly and it behaved exactly as if it is like a spooky to put weapons on cockroaches.

[Doug]

We'll see you all next week. Thanks for watching. On the nightstand.

[Perry]

We'll have more bug stories next week.

[Aiden]

I actually have a crazy. I hate we have more.

[Doug]

We keep going off a bug. All right, let's go. More bug stories. This is the bug story episode. Nobody cares about housing or Iran.

[Aiden]

I wish. So a friend of mine who works at a government contractor, one of his projects was taking like slices of fly brain and breaking it down into like I think petabytes of data. What's the above? Terabytes. Like like every little literal connection within a fly brain and taking like slices and then building out the digital version of that maybe to translate into something like this. Maybe it's literally this. And he was one of the people working maybe on that same project. He said it took ages and he said they had to like develop a new way to intake the amount of data that just a fly brain is.

[Perry]

Yeah, I think it's the same thing. Neighbor's like we finally have enough storage capacity to do this and the fruit fly has the smallest number of parameters in its brain of like any creature or whatever.

[Aiden]

Yeah. And he was talking about how they created this whole digital apparatus. Not in the simulation itself, but where you could like click and zoom into like any part of the brain. The connections.

[Perry]

Wait, can you play his video while he's talking? No. I mean there's like. Keep talking.

[Aiden]

Keep saying you could zoom into any part of the fly's brain at the most minute scale and then click on the different neurons in the brain and get an explanation of what that specific neuron does.

[Perry]

That crazy.

[Aiden]

Which is. And that's just a fly's brain.

[Perry]

But I'm saying. But the issue of it is digital consciousness. Right. If you could do it again. The human brain is a bazillion times more complicated. But if you could. Isn't that like a weird. Isn't that a matrix level?

[Aiden]

And that's how. Why we're probably in a similar simulation.

[Perry]

We're probably in a simulation.

[Aiden]

I should ask him about this. You got me. It's. You got me weirdly excited about this episode was going.

[Ad]

Let me.

[Doug]

Let me try to segue us again and maybe you guys will stop it and do more bugs. One of the problems. And you can even pull this up. Perry. With. With putting.

[Aiden]

The only problem comes up with a screen. I'm going to shoot myself in the

[Doug]

studio with putting weapons on a cockroaches. This is technically. The Geneva convention isn't like doesn't cover that. Right.

[Perry]

It's like air bud.

[Doug]

Right.

[Perry]

There's no rule that says a bomb can't be on a cockroach.

[Aiden]

And me at the ICJ using the air bud roll for my war crimes. It's like. Your honor. Your honor. We killed the civilians with flies.

[Perry]

And you're on trial for massive war crimes for decades. But you did it all with bugs.

[Aiden]

Say anything that a fly can't do it.

[Doug]

The bug should go on trial. Not the human.

[Perry]

We're all human. The judge looks stunned.

[Doug]

We are giving it suggestions. Right? It's not a crime for me to tell someone how to go murder another human being.

[Perry]

Yes, it is not.

[Aiden]

Yes, it is.

[Doug]

Anyway. So you're a bad lawyer. You're Aiden's lawyer.

[Perry]

It's not a crime to help commit murder.

[Aiden]

Department of War. Anthropic. Anthropic. It was a human at the trigger. It was a fly.

[Doug]

If we. If we have every test.

[Aiden]

The fly decided to be the paragon

[Perry]

routing their AI through a bug. So it counts as having consciousness.

[Doug]

Put a cockroach on the Mouse. So they click the cockroach. But technically the cockroach pushed the mouse button.

[Perry]

Okay, well, but you know what's not funny? Let's get serious. That's the segue. You know what's not funny guys? Let's get serious here. Calm down for a second. The war in Iran is day 11. OK. But thank God there's a positive piece of news from our fearless leader. Okay, let's watch it right now.

[Aiden]

Yeah, please. Thank you. Mr. President, you've said the war is quote, very complete.

[Perry]

But your defense pause right there.

[Doug]

The war is very complete. Okay.

[Perry]

That's the first thing. And then maybe possibly followed up.

[Aiden]

Secretary says this is just the beginning. So which is it and how long should Americans be?

[Doug]

Well, I think you could say it both makes sense.

[Aiden]

So I don't know exactly where we're at.

[Doug]

I think it's the sort of thing like you know, the military's in and out but the amount of spy cockroaches we will leave will take decades. You have never get rid of to eradicate.

[Aiden]

Those are going to be you may

[Perry]

never be able to get raid doesn't do it. These are tough cockroaches.

[Doug]

Come I, yeah, that's, that's a dumb quote. That's pretty stupid.

[Perry]

Yeah. I don't know if you so you know, high level, it's day 11. There's massive, massive oil price shocks the other day. Like it hit above $100 a barrel at 115 which could lead to like $4 plus gas here. And it's hitting all countries all over the world. And so there was a bit of a, you know, a retreat, a little bit like, hey, this is almost over. We're getting oil to the tank through the Strait of Hormuz. The war is going to end soon. And then prices came back down. So I think it seems like to be a response to that. And then other people in the military were saying this could go on.

[Doug]

So it could go on kind of

[Perry]

like trying to massage.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Perry]

Both sides of it. I do think there is a, you know, if there's any one thing that will get the American public to unite against something, I think it's higher gas prices. And so it does feel like there's a lot of pressure to not let this go on because the longer that straight is closed, the more definitely not, not maybe 100% it will cause an economic slowdown because the gas prices will just keep rising. So I wonder. Yeah. I don't know.

[Doug]

There's a great quote by Fox News, Brian Kilmeade who cheered on the attack and told the captains of oil tankers that they must simply conquer their fear. Quite quote. If you want to diminish the Iranian threat, if you want to make sure this ends up with complete Iran capitulation, show some guts and go through that straight and do it. Which is, you know, it's a.

[Aiden]

Show some guts. Yeah.

[Doug]

I will say brave.

[Perry]

There are tankers who have. Yeah. For a TV guy to say, not a guy sitting on a ship about to go dangerous straight with billions of dollars of oil on him. But a couple tankers did do it. I don't think it was because of their bravery. I think it was because of their possibly greed. I mean there's so much money to be made if you can get through

[Doug]

the idea that the oil tanker ships and you know, I apologize to any oil tanker captain, we have a lot. It's a big assumption is that they aren't sending their boats and their people through the Strait of Hormuz for the love of the game. And they're not like for the love of a Khamene free Middle East. Like it's probably because it's their job. And the idea, this Fox News Channel host is like do, do you even. Are you in it for the money

[Aiden]

or are you doing it because you

[Doug]

love to ship oil?

[Aiden]

I do it because I love the job. They can pay me nothing.

[Perry]

The quote.

[Doug]

If you want to diminish the Iranian threat, show some guts.

[Perry]

Oh God. It's Iranian oil shipping for reducing fucking

[Doug]

probably international migrant who's being paid too little on a boat gives a fuck about this. What are you talking about? If our oil tanker captains were more patriotic.

[Aiden]

I do want to talk about a few of kind of the on the ground developments in the last week as we recorded.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Because I think there's some pretty heavy consequences, especially in Iran, you know, not just for the government but for civilians. So the Iran envoy to the UN has reported 1300 civilian casualties in Iran already, which is quite a lot.

[Perry]

Yeah, quite a bit.

[Aiden]

And I think there was a prevalent story of an elementary school being hit with over 100 people dying, which is incredibly sad. I mean over 100 people, including a lot of children. Also that elementary school apparently was attached to a former military base or sorry, excuse me, a foreign military base, but it's right next to it. And supposedly the reason for the attack, I think that was US strikes. Not sure if they were like Israeli as well. And then also Israel has attacked over 30 fuel depots in Tehran.

[Perry]

So I don't know, school real quick. I mean, just before we move on, my understanding, we didn't talk about it last week because at the time the only person reporting was Iranian state media. But now it's been confirmed, I think by the U.S. state Department.

[Aiden]

The U.S. had it.

[Perry]

Yeah, yeah, the U.S. had it. And then Trump came out and said, I don't know, maybe everything about Trump, but he did say that it's possible because they found it was a Tomahawk missile, which is an American made missile. Yeah, he said possibly the Iranians stole a Tomahawk missile and then launched it at their own school.

[Aiden]

That feels like probably not.

[Perry]

I think probably that feels like a flimsy. Yeah, it feels like a very flimsy.

[Doug]

It's at the risk of sounding pandery and being like, you know what, guys, I think war is bad. You know, the US Military, all evidence so far seems to, seems to point to it was the US military bombed a girls school and killed 175 people, mostly who are schoolgirls. Like this is horrific. It is absolutely horrific. So I just do want to just insert that before we get back to jokey stuff. This is horrific stuff that is happening. These are like innocent civilians dying anyway.

[Aiden]

And I think the point that I want to hit on here with the note of that school as an example, the overall number of civilian casualties and then the 30 plus fuel depots hit by Israel. So I don't know if you've seen. There's a pretty good on the ground reporting I've seen from cnn. I forget the guy's name and I apologize, but he's been tweeting out videos while he's been reporting there. And the clouds of like oil that are in the sky and like hanging over Tehran and are collecting and then like raining oil down upon the city. He took a video and there's like oil collecting on surfaces from the rain that's distributed everywhere. Yeah, yeah. And there's supposedly, you know, major health consequences because of the amount of, the amount of oil that's like been put into the air from these explosions and attacks on the fuel depots. And also there's been some videos that I have have seen. I have not, you know, gone out of my way to verify this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of that oil collecting on the sides of streets and in ditches and then catching fire at night. So the city is like on fire and burning those fumes and like building. It looks apocalypse.

[Perry]

The videos I've seen is like very like orange sky yeah, it's crazy.

[Aiden]

And I. One thing that has not been happening, there's sort of a call to action upon the Iranian people to, like, take this opportunity or take up arms because, like, we're attacking at the moment this, you know, pressure from the US that this is your moment to restructure the government, restructure your society, capitalize. And there hasn't really been any of that reaction in Iran that I think the US Was hoping for. And you also have to wonder, even if, I don't know if there was necessarily support for the US Specifically intervening in Iran, I do know that, like, there's a lot of people upset in Iran with the current regime that they're under. Right.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

But if you were hoping that you were going to have the support of people behind you going in, when you take actions like this, I think you obviously lose a lot of that support or the, or the chance of that support even existing if it, if it, if it did in some major capacity.

[Doug]

Right.

[Perry]

And I mean, we talked about it last week, but I, you know, there was that guy that studied every attempt to do regime change by the air and how it has 0% success rate, and it's because it generally hardens the populace. They almost have to support the current regime by default because it's just such a. There. There's no realistic way to change the facts on the ground. And the. Being bombed from the air consistently is just a demoralizing. Yeah, I think you're being.

[Aiden]

You're being attacked by like a. A faceless entity that's causing civilian casualties. It's not very inspiring. There's no way behind that side, the

[Doug]

one, like, poll sort of, that I've seen that talked about the amount of support is. This is from. I also forget her name. I apologize. This is the daily. So the New York Times podcast the day after the war started. And she mentioned how some of the best data that we have to understand how many people support the regime or not in Iran is these polling that they did where basically 20% of people showed explicit support for the regime, and then the 80% were not explicitly supportive. So in theory, there's this like 80, 20 where 80% of people are not a fan or are neutral on the current regime and only 20% are these hardliners. But who knows how quickly that shifts when you're.

[Perry]

There's a quote in our comments that has stuck in me. It's been rattling around in my head. And he said there's an ancient Chinese proverb that is if an egg is cracked from the outside, it leads to death. But if an egg is cracked from the inside, it leads to life. And it was the idea that if, you know, if these protests had worked and Iran cracked from the inside, they could have built something new. But because it's being smashed from the outside, it's like very difficult for real change.

[Doug]

That's such a good quote. Yeah. I mean one of the things that's so weird so now the question is like, what is the off ramp of the war? I think pretty much nobody is stoked about the idea of this continuing for a long period of time. But then how do you declare it to be over? And then it's exactly what you said. At this point, there's no indication that the regime is lost. And they just installed new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei. I'm sure I pronounced that.

[Aiden]

Well, who is probably nailed it.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Isaac Saul from Tangle quote, is more hardline than his father, younger, avoids public appearances and just had his wife, mother, father, a sister and a child killed in US Israeli strikes. Do we expect to be able to make peace with this guy?

[Aiden]

So it's, I think there's a juxtaposition here of the US government having a success, quote unquote in Venezuela and then feeling that maybe they empowered to take action like elsewhere in the world. Yeah. And the difference, I mean it feels almost impossible for them to not understand that this difference would exist. And maybe, maybe I'm naive for thinking that, but in, in Venezuela's case, it's like we captured a foreign leader, new person came into power that we wanted to come into power and we now have, at least at a government to government level, a stronger relationship with Venezuela than we did before. We have some sort of leverage over that government. And also the underlying system in Venezuela hasn't shifted or dramatically changed, albeit there's a lot of time for things to like play out and we'll see how this change affects the country, if at all for the average person there. But in this case. Right. It's like new leader installed, not necessarily by us. He's been like assigned into the position and the government is clearly not on good terms with us. It's not playing out the same way at all. So even in this best case scenario where you believe the intentions of the U.S. government in both of these scenarios, let's just like say we exist in that world. It's not playing out how you would hope at all.

[Perry]

Yeah. So I mean from like a game theory perspective, Iran, you know, they lost this military, they're not going to, you know, they've lost air superiority. They're not going to win the war in any conventional means. But my understanding is that they are trying to damage. Make this, like, such a bleed economically. They make the pain so much that. Because if they were. If they were to agree to ceasefire an hour and surrender, the thought on their side would be that the US And Israel would just resupply, refuel, and then probably do something like this again. Like, whenever they're ready. They would just. And so my understanding is their goal is they have to drag this out as much as they really can to make it so that this is not attempted again. Because the pain was so high. The economic pain, the backlash, the political pain. Like, even they have people from the Iranian state media apparatus, like, tweeting to Americans about how you're going to have higher gas prices. Like, they're putting out, you know, they're putting out this kind of like, that's the messaging they're going for. They're going for, like, almost a Vietnam style, where it's like, we're not going to conventionally win this militarily, but the damage at home will be so high.

[Aiden]

I'm kind of wondering. So a couple of the things I've read in reporting is there's kind of this race with the Strait of Hormuze to, like, get it back in action as quickly as possible. And part of the way of doing that is US Ships have. And maybe Israeli navy. The Israeli navy as well has destroyed over 40 ships in the Iranian navy. So they're trying to, like, deconstruct the apparatus that could enforce the blockade on the strait so that these painful factors that will influence the opinions of, like, the Gulf states and other allies in the region from, like, getting rid of that pain as quickly as possible. So Iran doesn't have that piece of leverage anymore.

[Perry]

Yeah. But here's the problem is it's not conventional navy that's blocking the Strait of Hormuz. It is the fact that they can set up, like, you can weld together these drone launchers and put out a $10,000 drone.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Perry]

And one of these drones can stop a tanker or blow it up. And so the risk reward is so stacked against it that nobody will ensure a tanker to go through the strait. That's why even though China's vessels have been given, quote, safe passage by.

[Aiden]

They're not doing it.

[Perry]

They won't go. Nobody is going through the strait except for a few very risky ships that are, like, turning their Transponder to the

[Aiden]

love of the game.

[Doug]

I'm sick of people who just do it for the money.

[Perry]

Yeah, they're doing it for the love. They just love the thrill.

[Aiden]

Did you guys see this at all? I was curious if this point came up because a few, a handful of people recommended watching Professor Jiang's videos about this. He does. He's like game theater theory guy and he, he really emphasizes the point about like desalination, desalination plants in the Gulf states because there's kind of this resource war of water between Iran and these other states and how if they attacked desalination plants, this is a huge area of risk for these places. None of these desalination plants have been attacked so far from what I can see. I was curious if you have any thoughts on that, because people kept bringing it up.

[Perry]

I think that's a good point. I mean, it's weird. I watch that guy and he says a few things that are really cool, and then he just throws in a truly crazy thing every fourth line. And so I don't, I don't know what to think about him. Example, an example was he's like, the US and China will both fall and the great powers of the world would be like Germany and Japan. It's like, I just think there's no Germany. You're the only one saying that.

[Doug]

Oh, I'm sorry, Germany's on the rise.

[Perry]

I don't know, it just seems like, where, where are you pulling that from? It just seems so.

[Aiden]

Guy who doesn't read. Yeah, guy just hasn't read a lot of.

[Perry]

I don't know. And he's got a couple other crazy liner. I'm not pulling off the top of my head. So maybe, maybe he's got. I mean, he did correctly make a good prediction on this war in Iran. So.

[Aiden]

But anyway, I just thought that the note of the risk was interesting to me because I hadn't thought about that part and those places aren't under attack yet. I did want to share something with you guys. So I have a close friend who lives in Kuwait and he was just sharing his perspective on what's going on right now because they're one of the places that has been hit. Hit in Iranian strikes. So Iran reports that they're only attacking military targets in these places. Right. But he did say that while this, this is a claim and they are primarily hitting like US bases in Kuwait, that they've hit a place like the public institution for social services, like a government building that handles retirement payments, pensions, and other Financial services to, like, orphans and widows. And that place was hit and a few civilians have been injured. And during the early part of the war, like, the initial reaction, the sirens were going off, like, very frequently. They could hear bombs or strikes very frequently. It's apparently petered off in the last week. And he said the reaction on the ground isn't necessarily. The average Kuwaiti isn't very, like, pro US they're very anti Israel, especially in Kuwait. He noted that even compared to other Gulf states, he thinks, like, anti Israel sentiment is particularly strong there and that there's a real sense of, like, Gulf unity right now. Like, we stand together as the Gulf states and, like, want the wars to end as soon as possible. We don't, you know, we don't want to deal with this. We, like, stand with our Gulf brothers. It was interesting just getting his perspective as someone who's, like, living a bit more of it right now, obviously, comparatively removed to, you know, someone in Iran, but on the other side of it,

[Perry]

I mean, my understanding is that all the Gulf states were, you know, those cities out there, a lot of them were thriving and growing, especially in, like, tourism and banking for regional, Like, a lot of people are, like, people are starting to flood places like Dubai, but other cities around there. And this is obviously hurting the narrative of, like, these are safe, great places to do commerce and business and. And that was growing. So there's, like, a real push from a lot of people and entrenched powers all over the Gulf of, like, hey, this needs to end. We were on a great path, and you're. Everything's fucking it up.

[Doug]

I guess the counterpoint, so the view I've seen expressed is the realistic end goal is that the US And Israel just destroy the shit out of as much of Iran's military capacity as they can, and then they leave. So, like a quote. This is from Arab News again, I'm going to hit this flawlessly. Abdul Rahman al Rashed it. In the coming weeks, estimates suggest that the remaining elements of Iran's weapons arsenal, along with its factories and military institutions built over three decades, will be destroyed. This could grant the region a reprieve from Iranian threats for perhaps a decade in which a weakened but surviving regime attempts to rebuild its capabilities. And apparently there's a lot of people who are like, look, that's okay. You know, folks in, like, the Gulf states, for example, who feel like Iran has always been the kind of crazy person across the water and that this, if it stops them from being a threat for, like, 10 years, maybe, like, Even that could be good in some senses. But that's gets what you're talking about, right? Which is like, can they. Like if this ends really fast and at the same time stops Iran from being able to shoot missiles and fund a bunch of insurgents all over the place, maybe they're happy with that.

[Perry]

Yeah, maybe. But you go ahead.

[Aiden]

I have kind of a question to that.

[Perry]

Two things that tie into both. What you said is you mentioned, you know, the initial reaction from Iran was kind of like willy nilly firing missiles all over the Gulf, kind of as like a.

[Aiden]

Just primarily at U.S. bases.

[Perry]

Yeah, primarily U.S. bases. But it was, you know, I mean, hit hotels in Dubai, possibly US Soldiers were staying there. But like it's a hotel, people.

[Aiden]

Well, that's. Sorry, quick interjection. Kuwait friends said that they also hit a commercial port in Kuwait and the claim was that US Troops were there. Right. That isn't necessarily like, even from a Kuwaiti perspective, that isn't necessarily true.

[Doug]

Like lunch, like they were shopping.

[Aiden]

Like. No, they were like a, like a, like a port, like an oil port.

[Doug]

Oh, I was imagining like a, like a fish market. No, no, no, no.

[Aiden]

Sorry. Anyway, anyway, keep going.

[Perry]

They had all these targets and they've been seemingly getting more precise on US Military targets. And there is a sense that possibly. Is the claim that Russia has stepped in to help with targeting. Like they're giving them satellite.

[Aiden]

No, they've said openly that they're.

[Perry]

Well, Russia said they didn't do it.

[Aiden]

Oh, okay.

[Perry]

Russia's claiming otherwise. But there's a. There's a sense that they did do it, which is kind of an act of war in itself, like Russia. That kind of elevates the stakes outside of just Iran because that's now a. Russia is the.

[Aiden]

I wonder where the good. This is from a New York Times thing today. But I had seen that it seemed like Russia had come out and said that they were providing the Iranian government intelligence and also that this isn't really that big of a deal because they've been providing Iran intelligence for a long time. And that's like the Wall Street Journal

[Perry]

said Russia secretly sharing locations of U.S. targets with Iran. U.S. officials say. But then Russia told Trump directly this is his. Him and Steve Wyckoff saying, yeah, it has not shared intelligence with Iran during the war. Okay, so it's like. And that's the more recent. That's seven hours ago.

[Aiden]

Yeah, yeah.

[Perry]

So they're saying.

[Aiden]

You didn't read the one from three hours ago. I just, I told you, this guy doesn't Read.

[Perry]

Yeah, that is an escalation. But, but I'll say on what you said is that there's a worry that if nothing fundamentally changes on the ground, you know, this is, this is an egregious act of war. Like, it's, they now are going to be full speed ahead. The second things are much more motivated with Russia and China both motivated to make sure that they are well stocked with missiles. Well, you know, completely to reset up deterrence capabilities and possibly nuclear again. Like, there's no sense that the new Ayatollah or Iran is going to be like, all right, well, we're okay. This is.

[Aiden]

Yeah, this is my big question kind of off the back of that. And what Doug had said is, as this is happening, Israel is also getting more aggressive in Lebanon with the claim that they're like helping further dismantle Hezbollah and their integration into Lebanon. Right. And then they're attacking Iran, they're attacking Palestinians. Like I've recently watching like more of the post 10-7-Life in the west bank and like the degree of like checkpoints and you know, I would, I would say apartheid, apartheid, living conditions in the west bank and Gaza, like completely devastated. When. What is the end goal? Like, even, even if I took Hezbollah in Lebanon. Right. They did that walkie talkie attack where they supposedly decimated Hezbollah, which kind of makes sense from the reporting that was even told Right. On the Lebanese side. When is enough enough? When is, when is it end? When have you won? Like, are you going to kill? And even in Gaza, it's like you've leveled the place entirely. You've killed so many people and that, and the aggression still hasn't stopped. There isn't this like glowing rebuilding of that place or something? I just don't understand from an Israeli perspective, like, when will you ever stop attacking people? When will you know you are safe? If this is, if you continue to take these drastic, violent actions. I, I don't know what I think this was.

[Perry]

This. I think they thought. Because most of those things you're talking about are proxies that were funded by Iran through their oil.

[Aiden]

Sure.

[Perry]

And I think they thought this was it, but it's seeming more like. I'm talking about from their pov.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Perry]

Like, this is a, this is, this is not going to work that way. Like, it's just.

[Aiden]

Yeah. You're attacking a country of 90 million people and the citizenry that you've is supposedly supposed to rise up and like flip flop things isn't fucking doing it. So. So now what?

[Perry]

Yeah, yeah. I was like, yeah, and I genuinely

[Aiden]

seek the answer to that question.

[Perry]

You know, I think Israel would like us to do the heavy lifting on this, but it feels like Trump's patience is really, you know, he's a, he's a guy that changes his mind quickly when there's market pressure and is also generally doesn't hold attention on a subject very long. And it already seemed like his last press conference, you know, he, he said both sides of his as both. But the tone of it was that he's like, this is about to be over, everyone relax. Like where he clearly would like to move on pretty quickly. And so, yeah, from, from Israel's baby. Like they're just stuck. They've made all this chaos and enemies and then the US Is going to bolt and run. I think they're going to get out pretty soon. If, if gas prices are above $4 consistently, if, even if Trump didn't do anything, the midterm sweep will be so drastic, they could also lose the Senate. Like nobody wins an election if gas prices are but $4 consistently. It's going to be a bloodbath. So I assume that's, that's impeachment talks, that's, there's all these next level effects that'll happen if this holds. So anyway, I don't know if you guys any final thoughts on Iran because we do have a major topic on housing that I'd like to get to

[Aiden]

because I hate everything. Any thoughts?

[Doug]

No, it blows. You know, something that just for people who aren't American or even are American, who maybe forgot, you're supposed to have Congress declare war. You're not supposed to do this.

[Aiden]

Oh, this is. Okay.

[Doug]

So, you know, the way it should work is that a president can do this and then you have 60 days to wrap everything up and then an additional 30 to like get everybody out. But apparently that's not very well enforced. I have not looked into the exact history of it. But just a reminder, you know, when we went into Iraq, we, we voted, Congress voted.

[Aiden]

That's crazy.

[Doug]

That's supposed to happen. It's not supposed to be the President can just decide to bomb countries.

[Perry]

It is. Well, in my lifetime seeing these two different conflicts, Iraq and Iran, you know, both of which are seeming to be ill advised quagmires. But Iraq, they did, they went through so much effort to try to sell it to the public. They, you know, they marched out, Colin Powell to the UN to talk about WMDs to every nation on earth. They had, they got Congress to vote on it. They, they did every possible thing. And I think, you know, no credit to Bush on this, but at the very least you got a record of which representatives voted for it and who didn't, which is important. You got a. You got. It's tougher to say, like, oh, we got into this blindly or whatever, you know, but. But when your president does it at 2am via tweet, randomly.

[Aiden]

True social post.

[Perry]

True social. I'm sorry, it really does. It's like a much darker version because there's not even an attempt or a care to even sell a public line on it. And again, the public at home, I wouldn't say they're as against it as I thought they might be. It's falling mostly along party lines, but it's not popular this, this, this strike in Iran and certainly will get less popular as gas prices bite.

[Aiden]

So, yeah, the last thing I wanted to mention was the Swiss Defense Minister Martin Pfister, on behalf of Switzerland, said that the us, Israel. US And Israel have broken international law with their attacks on Iran. So it's like, that's Switzerland, the famously most neutral country, coming out and saying it.

[Perry]

I think that's so funny, though. Like, saying international laws are being broken lately is like saying the sky is blue. It's like such a useless. International law has not meant anything for a few years now. Nobody does anything. Nobody.

[Aiden]

It's cu.

[Doug]

They're weapons on cockroaches. Cockroaches close to following international law. Jesus Christ.

[Aiden]

All right, well, we want to talk a little bit about housing. We all wanted to come with a few different examples of how things are trending in good directions, how things in certain places are trending in bad directions. Back to the lemonade stand roots.

[Doug]

Yeah. Why don't I start with a little kickoff of America and kind of what's going on with America? I think generally the three of us agree that building more housing is good. I would argue that we also feel, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, fellas, that other things are good too. Like, for example, preventing institutional buyers from just taking up homes.

[Perry]

And ice cream is good.

[Doug]

Ice cream is good. War is bad. That, that, for example, like, I would support, like, government building, right? So when we say building more homes is a good thing, which is generally my. My feeling, it's not like that's the only thing you should do. And it's like Ultra Pro developer with nothing else. There's an article I like by no opinion, Noah Smith. It's called the Left NIMBY Canon. And you can find It I'll raise my arms, Perry, to show it. This article I think is good. It's a few years old, but what I liked about this is that he makes an I thought you don't have to subscribe for this one. But he makes an argument that is backed. He basically lists a whole bunch of different articles that show how building does bring rent down. And even in the case where you're building market rate housing, that market rate housing is going to absorb, in his words, yuppies. It's going to absorb the like the rich out of town people. And that means that those yuppies aren't moving into the more working class poor neighborhoods. So I point this out, not to say this is the truth, but I think he references a lot of different articles that I think are good and worth and worth looking into and again makes the point of like, look, we aren't like these free market absolutists that think developers should run roughshod over everybody. But it is a core, it's a core belief of yimbyism that building more will drop rents. And even if you support government housing on a mass scale, as we're going to talk about like right now, this is an article by the LA Times, Perry, that is, this is in 2022. So it's like, you know, potentially a little bit outdated. But affordable houses like per unit in Los Angeles are taking, or sorry, this is Northern California, are taking a million dollars per unit. So even in the context of like, hey, we want to really invest in affordable homes by the government and enforce this. Our government is so unbelievably inefficient and so expensive at building these things that we aren't able to get the things built. So regardless, there needs to be changes at least in the US to making more things built. So I think that's sort of the premise. There's some interesting success cases. Let's start with Austin, Texas. Austin is notorious for having gone on this just absolutely gigantic building spree over the past couple of years. They hit a peak of where rent jumped 25% in 2021 during the pandemic. Cause a ton of people pushed there and then they have just been going crazy on development ever since. And now not only have rents dropped dramatically as they've built an absolute shitload of units, they're 22% off the peak. The landlords like just basically have way less bargaining power and are having to offer all these discounts to people in Austin. Looking at some of the numbers. Yeah. So almost 50,000 rental units were added to the city in 2020, 2024. By contrast, 50,000. 50,000. By contrast, in that same two year period, San Francisco added a total of about 4,300, over 10 times the amount of new ones. So Austin, Texas, which is a blue state by the or blue city by the way, is like a success case of they've built a ton of housing. Rent has fallen dramatically. I don't know, go back.

[Perry]

I just love that line. That line is the, is the core of it. The rental market here is saturated with availability. Landlords have almost no leverage. She has seen buildings offer three months free to new tenants and rate reductions to keep ones already in place. That is the core of why this works, man. I just think when, when, when there's so much competition for your rental dollar, they have to give you the best deal because otherwise you'll just go down the street somewhere else. And that is, I mean that is just the, that is the best way. Like laws that restrict landlords are less effective at punishing landlords and than just by making them having to compete with other people. Because when they have to do that, you literally can just ignore them. You can just go somewhere else and then they're desperate. If you're, if they're the only game in town and there's laws that say you can only charge a certain amount or whatever they find, you know, it's, it creates this black market where they try to find ways to get around that and you're, and you're still stuck there. You have only one option which is this landlord who may or may not be an asshole. But when you have a lot of supply then it changes the math. And I have a graph here too. If you could pull it up while

[Doug]

you're playing it up. It's funny, in this same Bloomberg article they're quoting like the landlords being sad. It's like the supply picture is really tough.

[Perry]

No, that's what I'm saying. Out of Austin they're all like the flip side of it is the homeowners and the rental owners are getting pissed.

[Doug]

Right?

[Perry]

They, they thought they were is going to be a gravy train. People that bought Airbnbs and try to do that in Austin are getting of

[Doug]

the Airbnb and it's like that is

[Perry]

what up zoning does. Rental to income ratio is the cheapest it's ever been in Austin right now. Which is like pretty awesome as progress.

[Aiden]

Oh do you know like top head. Are there any?

[Doug]

Because for audio listeners it was big now small.

[Perry]

Yep. There you go.

[Aiden]

I think in the last year, we're at a time in the US where the average rent is declining for the first time in a long time. Right. So what are the other. Do you know what the other notable areas or cities where this decline is also happening?

[Doug]

Well, not the exact answer to that question, but there are. There are positive developments happening. Here's three examples. One, in California last year, we signed SB79. I even went up to Governor Newsom at TwitchCon. I shook his hand and he said, you want to take a picture? I said, no, I don't care about you, but I do want to congratulate you on. Thank you for signing SB79. I think it's great. And what it did is it makes it much easier and lowers restrictions to build housing and developments near transit stops, like big transit stops, which is crazy. The idea that the. The taxpayers will fund a BART station in wherever, and then the local neighbors will stop any housing from being built at that train station that we all paid for.

[Perry]

They were only allowing single family homes near train stations. I don't know.

[Doug]

Have you guys ever gone to the end of the BART on East Bay? It's crazy. You drop off and it's like. It's like the most barren place. It's like, why the fuck aren't there skyscrapers everywhere?

[Perry]

There's nine story buildings.

[Aiden]

I did this on accident at the first day of an internship I had because I got on the train the wrong way. And then I'm going in the. Clearly going in the opposite direction of San Francisco after like three stops. And it was near the end and I was like, why? There's no buildings around at all.

[Doug]

Yeah, it's wild. We spent anyway.

[Perry]

So why didn't you get off and go the other direction? Shut up.

[Doug]

Support for this show comes from Tastytrade.

[Perry]

Guys, I'm getting real tired of you not knowing serious financial terms on this show, okay? Steve Eisman comes on and we can't even explain ourselves in the complicated financial way we seem like chumps.

[Doug]

Is Bitcoin a money?

[Perry]

This is the problem, Aiden. So I came up with a quiz to test you on your financial knowledge. You're gonna tell me if these are real or fake. Okay?

[Doug]

These are financial terms, okay?

[Perry]

Yes. The Lady Macbeth strategy. Is that real or fake?

[Doug]

That's a chess opening. That's not real.

[Aiden]

That's real for sure.

[Perry]

It's real.

[Ad]

Really?

[Perry]

It's real, okay?

[Aiden]

Everyone knows that.

[Perry]

What about the.

[Aiden]

What about momentum canceling Momentum cancel. That's from Melee.

[Doug]

Fake. Fake.

[Perry]

Yeah, it's from Melee. All right, what about. What about. What about a broken wing butterfly?

[Doug]

That's gotta be. It's too weird to be made up.

[Aiden]

That doesn't make sense. Feels like it's real. Feels like it's real.

[Doug]

That's a fair point.

[Perry]

Okay, it is real. So you guys are getting some of these, right?

[Doug]

What does it mean?

[Perry]

It's not focused too much on the details, you know, could explain it really well. Probably Tastytrade because they have an actual jargon library that breaks down these terms help you understand so you can trade with understanding. Wow.

[Doug]

Are you saying I could go to tastytrade.com/lemonade today and that Tastytrade Inc. Is a registered broker dealer?

[Perry]

That's exactly what I'm saying. You finally got it.

[Doug]

Okay, I'm picking up on it.

[Aiden]

And it's a member of finra, NFA and sipc.

[Doug]

Well, hold on, hold on.

[Perry]

Is it? Yes.

[Doug]

Okay, I'm in. I'm in. Thank you, Tasty trade for supporting the show.

[Aiden]

As you guys know, we're going to China pretty soon. We'll be spending two and a half whole weeks there with plenty of downtime because we won't all be. Always be talking, always doing stuff. And I'm going to be studying Swedish while I'm there. And. And you could study Swedish or a number of other languages.

[Perry]

Spanish, which I'm going to be studying with Babel. We are going to China to study Swedish and Spanish with Babel.

[Aiden]

This is actually. This is actually real. I have to do my Swedish. I practice Swedish every day. And if you're looking for a way to start like studying or learning a new language, you could check, babble out. Doesn't matter. The language doesn't have to be aligned with the country you're in. Be free.

[Perry]

There's no rules. Don't check your IP and go. You have to learn the language.

[Doug]

Shanghai is little Sweden, I believe is the name.

[Aiden]

A lot of people have said that. Doug. To start speaking a new language in three weeks, go to babbel.com eliminate and you'll get up to 60% off your subscription. That's up to 60% off your subscription when you use our link.

[Perry]

Join the millions of Babel learners breaking the language barrier every day. And go to babbel.com lemonade sport for lemonade stand comes from Shopify.

[Doug]

Aiden, did you ever have a dream and you didn't have, you know, the confidence to know if it would work out?

[Aiden]

No, I think I. I've had confidence Are you? Yeah.

[Perry]

Unconfident right now?

[Aiden]

I don't sound uncomfortable.

[Perry]

You said you're getting less confidence as we speak.

[Doug]

Who is this character?

[Aiden]

I just started. I could start a business. I could sell things online like I did when I started at Mogul Moves. I was starting to work. I was selling clothes for Ludwig and we had a Shop. Shopify account. A Shopify account that we used as the backend for all of the merchandise that we sold, mostly clothes. And I found out we love Shopify so much at Mogul Moves that we had two separate subscriptions under two separate emails that we'd been paying for years. Now, I wouldn't recommend you do that, but you can sign up for a single account and use Shopify because it's actually a great platform.

[Doug]

Or if half of the people listening could do that, that's also cool.

[Aiden]

Turn your what ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com lemonade. Go to shopify.com lemonade. That's shopify.com/lemonade.

[Doug]

So we're making progress in Illinois. J.B. pritzker, governor, did a push recently. It hasn't been approved yet, but he's basically proposing this bill that is going to dramatically increase the ability to build homes. A big theme that keeps coming up is zoning, where people have set up zoning that only allows single family homes, and then you just can't build more. You can't build certain types. And so there's been this.

[Perry]

Yeah, zoning. It's like an area of land of your city is only allowed to build a certain type of thing. And generally in most cities it's single family homes, which is because that keeps the property value for other single family homes around it high.

[Doug]

The character of the neighborhood.

[Perry]

The character of the neighborhood. And so there's a lot of political pressure from homeowners to not change the zoning. This is like, this is just a rule that stops people from building duplexes, triplexes, apartment buildings, anything else. And the Pritzker example is he literally said all residential lots are effectively ending single family zoning. And you could have duplexes, triplexes, and four flats on all these places. So, you know, it is progress. We're seeing progress like this in pockets all over the country. Not even left or right thing. I think there's a general consensus.

[Doug]

Yeah, it's bipartisan.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Which is fantastic. And so, and I think generally for, for a long, long time, local homeowners have had the ability to shut all this stuff down. And it was not politically tenable. Because if you're going to go try to get a law passed that says, hey, we're going to allow a lot more building and a lot more neighborhoods, the people in those neighborhoods who are the most active voters and old people who are the most likely to have homes and be the most active voters are going to come out and strongly oppose it. This SB7 bill or 79 bill is like repose. What a coincidence. By a whole bunch of people in the rich neighborhoods in Los Angeles. What a coincidence. They're so concerned about the character of the neighborhood.

[Aiden]

Keep in mind, I think it's important to fight for the other side here. Put me in the villain chair of I was watching a news piece about Surrey in British Columbia in the Vancouver area and how there is an increase in efforts to build affordable housing projects. Often duplexes are triplexes in these areas. Much larger buildings than a lot of the residential homes in the area. And this older woman came on the program and said that she doesn't like how the buildings look different and hang over her home.

[Perry]

Good point.

[Aiden]

And. And I. And think about her and how the height of the homes near her might. It might fuck.

[Doug]

Well, it's so tall.

[Perry]

You have to mess with her day.

[Aiden]

She has to. It puts her building in a little more shade during certain times of day.

[Doug]

Right.

[Aiden]

I feel like we're not with me.

[Perry]

We all steal, man. It. Do you think 2007 was. Or 2008 was a good thing? You guys think the Great Recession was a good thing? You think everybody getting.

[Doug]

I think war is bad.

[Perry]

You think the recession was good? Huh. Because that was caused by falling housing prices. So think about that.

[Doug]

Well, that's. That's like saying that the many, many, many rep. Refugees post World War II is because there's falling housing opportunity. You know, there's not enough.

[Perry]

I do say that all the time.

[Doug]

Yeah. But I would argue is more because of the war that did that, not the. There was an upstream effect that I've

[Perry]

only heard of World War I.

[Aiden]

To give that a little. A tiny piece of credence. Right. Say you were to like maximize this effort across all places in the US as an example. At the same time. And then people who are heavily leveraged in real estate, usually older people. And I'm not talking about companies or I'm talking about. Oftentimes the major source of people's wealth is locked up in their homes or properties they purchased. And I'm not saying that it's fair that housing has been commoditized in this way. But if you do lower the value of all these places at the same time there are like knock on economic consequences of that. Like people, when they feel less wealthy, they spend less money, they maybe don't have their retirement in that, like this is their primary nest egg, then their retirement isn't spread across any other type of asset. I'm not necessarily saying you have to feel bad for these people, but understanding that there can be a negative economic consequence from this type of policy making in the long term, or sorry, in the short term that we, I think we inevitably have to fight through in order to arrive at a more balanced housing market that is fairer for more people. Like there has to be some sort of pain for somebody. And right now a smaller, older pool of winners gets to be happy about the current situation and most younger or working class people cannot afford places to live. And that's the broad problem that needs, there needs to be some sort of give on one side of this.

[Doug]

Yeah, I mean that's, yeah, it just needs to be balanced. Like housing has gone up. I forget the exact number, so I need to check. But just like a crazy amount over the last 10 years, something like 73%. Like I'm sorry, that's too fucking much like that if you're a homeowner. I like, obviously our society, at least in America is set up to like where that's your primary investment vehicle. But it shouldn't be the idea that you. It is that it's unfair if we ask you to lower your home prices even though it doubled in the last decade or two. Like, sorry, if it only has gone up like fucking 40% over the last decade, that's an insane return. I mean, I don't know what the exact numbers, but God, it's like it's so ridiculously out of control.

[Perry]

Yeah, I agree with all this. I mean, we've talked about this on the show many times. I just, you know, I think people need to be ready to understand the scale of the pain is real. It will not only hit, it will heal everybody. And that's just. Yeah, that is what it has to happen. Like if, if housing prices were to materially correct, like I'd say, you know, 20, 30% drops nationwide.

[Doug]

Right.

[Perry]

It would be a recession level event. There would be massive job loss, there would be huge slowdowns in spending and it would be a pain that would, I guess primarily hit these older wealthy people, which is good. And then we could find a way to work through. But that like the slowdown that's happening, for example, after the ever grand implosion in China, which is currently in two years of falling housing prices. The impacts of that are real. Like, especially outside of the major tier one cities where there's a lot of export growth, like most people. And China really doesn't use a stock market. They don't have 401ks. Most people invest their retirement into housing. They would buy a very expensive apartment in the city or a house in the city. And those have been falling and falling and falling. And the propensity to spend has gone. I mean, it's completely gone. Like it's really, really slowed down the part of the economy that's not exporting EVs, solar panels, whatever. And the pain from that is real. Like that is the type of thing you'll feel if we do that here and we have to do it. And I actually commend China for trying to pop the bubble and like slow it down, but it. That is, I guess people just think it'll be easy, like if we just. Yeah, and it's not going to be easy.

[Doug]

I would really feel for people who've bought a home in the last five years, but for somebody in the who's has held homes of any kind for like the last 10, 20 years in almost any area where these prices have skyrocketed and it's become unaffordable. It's like, sorry, you got to take some pain. It's this. We can't younger the boo three generations take all of this pain. This is absurd.

[Perry]

But yes, like you said, I mean, the people that bought in the last five years post Covid houses, they're going to be primarily millennials. Primary millennials who stretched a bit to get a big fucking loan, who did in the last.

[Doug]

Okay, as a homeowner then, or as a property manager, you scumbag.

[Perry]

As a landlord who has 12 slum tenements.

[Aiden]

Oops, next month I'm raising them again.

[Perry]

Do you imagine Aiden comes in with that face and raises your rent? I would murder suicide. It would be murder suicide.

[Doug]

And I'm pretty sure the only person living in your place is your girlfriend. So you do you upcharge her, right? Every. Every month.

[Perry]

Oops, babe, sorry, it's up again.

[Aiden]

She pays rent. She pays rent.

[Perry]

Oh, she pays rent. Double charging her.

[Doug]

Wait, so, all right, so here's a question. All right, you have bought recently, presumably you bought not just for the love of the game, like an oil tanker captain, but also because you thought it would go up in value over time. Are you okay with the idea of your property goes down in 20% in order to correct the market?

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Perry]

So funny if you said no though. No, no, not me.

[Doug]

I would assume you're not stoked about it.

[Aiden]

So the thing is if I, it's like I got in.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

I got on the ladder by, by podcasting and it's like I want. I look at all these young people around me, they aren't starting podcast.

[Perry]

What are they doing?

[Aiden]

And I rather pull the ladder up.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

To the moon, baby. Yeah. I think I genuinely if. If rents in like Los Angeles went down by 20% or homes, I mean like just straight up the value of homes went down by 20% and I could, yeah, I'd be happy with that. But I'm also in a, I would say a privileged situation where I do not have the bulk of my income in my. Or, sorry, the bulk of what I have in my home.

[Perry]

Yeah, it would be, you know, it'd be painful for you because I think for people that the thing is people that are not hurt by this too much, people who are one property they plan on living in, but you, you're gonna sell eventually, pretty soon to go to Sweden.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Perry]

So yeah, basically you would take a hit if it fell now.

[Aiden]

Yeah. I think the, the thing is like I, I think I would say that no matter what because it's something that I understand and I'm firmly believe it. Right. But I think it is hard and don't get me. This is not me. I just want people listening to remove the Aiden of the situation because my situation is different. But I do think I know people in Los Angeles who are sort of like in that high middle income bracket who have like worked for like the, the dinks of the world, the double income, no kids who both have like high middle income jobs who have saved a lot of money and then kind of all, all into their money to buy a home and it is all they have. I think it is hard for those people because they, they barely cracked it to like make it work. And now everything is in this one thing. And if your situation is that I have more empathy for you because, because you're just trying to fucking own a home. And you, and, and you made, you

[Perry]

were given this game, you were born into this game and you played it as best as you could and you tried and you scraped and you, you say then you found a way to do it and. But the game is so rigged and bad people. We're going to have to Change the rules and you're going to get fucked.

[Aiden]

And that it's like the people who all end the. The taxi medallions in New York at the worst time, right? Those people, like, they took on huge loans, much like you have to to fucking buy a home. They found a way to get like a down payment on the medallion, which like skyrocketed over a million dollars for people who don't understand the context to drive a yellow cab in New York City. There's a limited amount of medallions that allow your cab to operate. And because of that cap, the prices of these things skyrocketed. And prior to Uber, a medallion to operate a cab in New York City crossed like the million dollar threshold, if I recall correctly. And what people would do is take on enormous amounts of debt in order to buy this medallion and become a cab driver in New York City. But then Uber and these apps like came into the market, completely changed the dynamic of how these things work and the value of these medallions crashed. And it's like you can, you know, say, fuck those guys. They all end on a bad investment. But I think there's an equivalent of that in, in housing where I'm not saying things shouldn't change. I think it's so important. We have to create change and there has to be pain somewhere. But I know people in my personal life that scraped by and found a way with their pretty good jobs and their conscious savings and they're not incredibly wealthy people who manage to buy a home in a cheaper area of la and that's all of the money that they have. Like, it's going to hurt for them, of course. And I hope it's like you need to provide in the same way that the cat like Mamdani brings up the cab driver thing a lot now. In the same way support, I think should be provided to those people. You need to find ways to ease the pain for people in that spot. I don't think the pain should be eased for people like me because frankly, I don't need it.

[Perry]

I think you should increase the pain on you.

[Aiden]

I don't think we need to increase pain.

[Perry]

I think whoever the next politician is should promise to hurt you a little bit.

[Aiden]

All right. Could I posture actually?

[Perry]

You got to score now. You set up a posture. I have to know what you're posturing.

[Doug]

Well, I have an interesting defensive position.

[Aiden]

Take housing things.

[Perry]

Take, take, take.

[Aiden]

So I looked at two international examples. A while ago. We made an episode where I talked a lot about Vienna's housing model and for those who aren't familiar, Vienna breaks down their housing into like social, public provided housing from the government, partially subsidized government housing, and then private housing sector. And by like providing a lot of like supply in all of those areas through different means, they've managed to keep rent very low in Vienna compared to a lot of large European cities. Helsinki in Finland turns out they do something very similar. And Helsinki owns 70% of the land in the city, which is like insane, nowhere near what most cities own of their own cities. And because of this they have like ordinances about development. And basically like 25% of new development needs to be allotted towards like fully public or social housing, where there's like a limit on basically like you can't run like rent for profit and those areas still get developed. And then like 30% of development is like partially price regulated and then 45% is totally private sector. And they have over 60,000 social housing units in a city of less than 700,000 people. And this dynamic is part of what keeps rents in Helsinki relatively affordable compared to a lot of European cities. The average is like €1250amonth, like 700 for a studio. And I thought that was interesting because the execution of this plan is very similar to Vienna's. And I think the value of this plan is that you have a public, nonprofit motivated way of building housing that competes against all of the private offerings on the market and you balance. It's like private housing can still exist, but if you have a large enough percentage of the market that is not profit motivated, competing against the private offerings, it forces those private rents to compete against the public options. Especially if you keep the supply of those public rents widely available in that's becoming more difficult over time. They are struggling to keep the socialized housing available. And it's increasingly becoming a lottery system over time.

[Doug]

Like they just aren't building enough or what.

[Aiden]

Yeah, they're falling behind their goal of like units built per year. They're trying to build like 6,000 to 7,000 units per year. And right now they're only building like 4,500.

[Doug]

And this is the government on their own land.

[Aiden]

Yeah, the government is. It still contracts with companies. Okay.

[Doug]

But it's their business.

[Aiden]

And the reason companies sign up to do it is because the developers have a guaranteed amount of profit, like built into their contract still. And then they, because the public housing is in such high demand, their project is guaranteed to pay out. So there's still like a motivation from a developer side to like get involved with the city. And I thought any, you know, it's just interesting.

[Perry]

I just think there's this general sense especially. I just feel like outside of maybe East Asia, I think especially time. But like most western countries, it feels like when they've lost the ability to build, to reliably build things quickly and on time and on budget and like it. You know, we see this most in the, in America. I see this in California all the time, but it's happening all over. Like it, it just feels like that. I don't know if it's because the web of laws has restricted in some way or if it's just a loss of practice or capacity or whatever it is, but like, you know, 50s America built massive highways on time and on budget. We built like all the bridges we built. It's like crazy with trains. And now we can't build these things and it's just so, so slow and hard. So I'm, I'm sure it's a complex nuance thing. We've talked about parts of it before. But it does feel like one of the biggest obstacles, especially to get people to even trust, you know, in your example, I think that's a snowball effect. People trust government to do something that they do it well and they're like, oh, I want to do more things.

[Doug]

Right.

[Perry]

And whenever you. It's. It works both ways. When it doesn't work, when you throw money at it and it doesn't work, you will trust it less.

[Doug]

Right.

[Perry]

And so, yeah, I don't know. It's. It's something that I think a politician would do well to solve. I like what mom has been trying to do, to be open and honest about costs and try to get things that people feel a material impact. But I think it takes, it's going to take time and wins because people at this point are at the lowest level of trust. And this kind of stuff had in

[Aiden]

the US as an example. Right. So social housing has such a stigma behind it to begin with. The idea of like being on social or public housing has a very different meaning in a. In this context versus like one in Vienna or one in Helsinki where these buildings are like way more normal to build in. They're like very nice. Yeah.

[Perry]

Higher quality.

[Aiden]

Yeah. Which, which affects people's faith. That stigma also affects people's faith in like that program being rolled out or something like that. I thought a different example of housing gone wrong. Do you guys know much about Hong Kong?

[Perry]

Not really.

[Aiden]

Do you know that it's like the most unaffordable housing Market in the world by like a pretty wide margin.

[Perry]

I had heard that. Well, isn't it like. Is it really? Is it. I thought it was up there with some Canadian cities.

[Aiden]

No, the Hong Kong has got all of the Canadian, Australian cities beat out. Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers in the world of any city. They have like over 500 skyscrapers. And it's a pretty crazy juxtaposition of like this endless sea of skyscrapers backed onto like green mountains and nature. And there's, it almost feels like there's no in between. Like when you look at the city. And part of the reason when you actually look at the land of Hong Kong is that it's relatively underdeveloped. And Hong Kong, similar to, you could say similar to Helsinki, owns the land of like the entire place in more, more than Helsinki. But how they handle this is there's no, there's, excuse me, not no very low income tax in Hong Kong. And the way they primarily raise revenue for the government is by leasing land to developers or landowners on these like 50 year time leases. And because these are so limited and there's so many people there and there's so much business opportunity, there's. The value of those leases has exploded and that makes everything more expensive like by square meter. It's incredibly expensive to be in Hong Kong. Even anecdotally, like I know a lot of people who live there. The apartments are usually incredibly small. Even like I have one friend whose family is insanely wealthy and they have an apartment that is like maybe twice the size of the studio we're in. Which I don't know if that's great context for audio listeners or even for people watching.

[Perry]

Audio listeners were in a giant 6,000 square foot warehouse.

[Aiden]

I don't. Perry, do you know how many square feet the studio is?

[Perry]

The lemonade stand compound is not say

[Doug]

that, but imagine what you can see and multiply that by about 5 is the amount of space.

[Aiden]

Yeah, I think like there, I'm guessing,

[Doug]

I would say my double the amount.

[Aiden]

My friend's place is probably like maybe 1800 square feet if I had to take a real guess. And it's in like the central part of Hong Kong. And that apartment I think is like $10 million. That's crazy. It's fucked up how expensive it is. And the way they approach this, they intentionally choke the supply to explode the value of these leases because they have plenty of space to develop, but it's the primary source of income for the government and they don't want to raise Taxes, because the amount of like wealthy people and businesses that operate, there's. So there's just in this chokehold where this is the only way we get money. We have to keep expanding the value of these leases. We don't want to give any permits for people to build. And this is the complete opposite approach where it's like we limit building as much as possible even though we own all the land and we use it to. To maximize the amount of funds.

[Perry]

Yeah, it's bad incidents. I have a graph here. Perry, you were totally dead on aid in Hong Kong.

[Doug]

Worst in the world.

[Perry]

Surprisingly, I didn't know Australia had beaten Vancouver here.

[Doug]

Sydney is number two.

[Perry]

San Jose, number three. I lived there. I do recall. So even. You know, I think I hit the fucking lottery working at Nvidia. I remember I was thinking about whether I wanted to stay there or move. And I was like, one of the factors of that, other than hating San Jose was like, do I really want to spend this amount of money? And you know, it's. It was a. Just a disgusting amount of money for a small little home here in San Jose was disgusting. It was.

[Aiden]

I think it's just.

[Perry]

I can only imagine on a job I had before, like a regular, I don't know, it's just.

[Doug]

Respectfully, San Jose sucks balls.

[Perry]

It does. No, not respectfully, disrespectfully.

[Aiden]

Look at this list of cities. Look at every city on this list. I think I've been. I think I've been to like, almost like most of these places. Yeah, dude, San Jose is the worst place on the.

[Perry]

Culturally, out of all 20 of these. It is by far the bottom tier. It's crazy.

[Doug]

It's the third highest. Insane.

[Perry]

And it's only because it's near all

[Doug]

these people deeply aware of California. It's right below San Francisco. This is the major city right below. So it's like Silicon Valley.

[Aiden]

It's awful.

[Doug]

SF has, is beautiful. It's my favorite city in the world. San Jose is if God took a shit.

[Aiden]

Oh my God. If you haven't been there after working

[Doug]

on the beauty that is San Francisco, if you just.

[Aiden]

I want you to imagine the worst place you've ever been. Okay? It's that bad.

[Doug]

It's just boring. It's.

[Aiden]

It's just really boring.

[Perry]

But really expensive.

[Aiden]

And imagine, and imagine it's the worst place you've ever been. But it's just, there's. There's single. Single family homes everywhere. And that's all as far as the eye can see.

[Perry]

Family homes and tech Companies and.

[Aiden]

But there's nowhere to go, nothing to do do or buy anything.

[Perry]

And everything's expensive.

[Aiden]

You can't hang out with anybody.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

You have to understand how hard this is for tech people. You're paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and you have to spend a lot of it on rent. Show some sympathy.

[Perry]

God damn symp. My understanding, by the way, I don't know if you have any insight into this, but my understanding is that, you know, Canada is also at crisis levels in many major cities for housing. You're shaking your head no, it's all good. No, but because it's been a crisis, I'd say about two years ago, there has been a similar thing to what we're seeing now, which is kind of like a focused, desperate attempt to be like, we have to change something. And there have been, I'm not super well versed on the specific laws like SB79, but there have been forward motion in Canada to change zoning to get building going. Yeah, to. And they've been like moving kind of quickly because the problem is so severe.

[Doug]

Right.

[Perry]

You know, Canadian incomes are lower and prices are higher on average in many of these cities. So people are like, it literally makes, you know, we're talking about people who like, they kind of did everything right. They're doing like no kids. They were able to get like the almost doesn't exist in Canada at some levels. Things are so expensive. You just kind of don't have a way unless you're already wealthy, you're left money or you get incredibly lucky. Like those are the only three ways to like get on the property ladder in a major city.

[Doug]

That's the good thing. And that's like, that is a takeaway from this. Things are finally changing. So Scott Wiener is one of the California legislators who've been pushing for housing bills for a long time. And basically they just get shut down. It's been going on for, I don't know, 10 years, something like this. And SB79 is the first major one that actually got through. And that was with again like mayor of LA coming out and saying, like, we're strongly opposed. We feel like local neighborhoods should keep the character. And it's, you know, the normal, the normal opposition. And like we finally got something through Illinois, the mayor of Illinois to say we're like, I'm pushing, it hasn't been approved yet by legislature, but I'm pushing to remove zoning essentially in many capacities. Capacities. And then, you know, if you pull this up, like Mamdani, like one of his big Things is about building. And it's just this. I bring this picture up. He met with Trump. We talked about this. This was two weeks ago. He went to Trump. And so the background here is that they're like, right east of Manhattan in New York City, there's a giant train lot that is just not being used. I forget what is the name of is the Sunnyside rail yard in Queens. It is crazy to look at a map and just see this huge undeveloped land. And it's used by trains, right? It's a train yard, but it's wild in, like, one of the most expensive areas. And for decades, people have been trying. Mayors have been trying to get something built there. And so Mayor de Blasio tried to build it, got plans it couldn't go through, but now it's like, getting more momentum. And then, you know, Mamdani goes and talks to Trump and says, hey, here's what the newspaper would look like if you approve and give us, I believe it's $21 billion in federal funding to cover the train yard over the top, so it's still usable. And then we'll build on top of that. And the reason it's particularly notable is because the paper that they printed out for this photo shoot is mocking an infamous, infamous paper from the New York daily news from 1975, where our hero, President Gerald Ford, said to the city, drop dead. Ford to city, drop dead, vows he'll veto any bailout.

[Perry]

We finally got Gerald Ford on the pod in a way.

[Doug]

Well, I feel like this is the spiritual successor.

[Aiden]

We're.

[Doug]

We're. We're carrying on his legacy.

[Perry]

You know, I looked up, because I thought it'd be a funny bit. I looked up Gerald Ford impersonators just

[Doug]

not understand that doesn't make any sense. As one of America's famous and most successful president. Yeah, he did nothing but win.

[Perry]

Apparently Chevy Chase did a really good Gerald Ford back in the 70s on SNL.

[Aiden]

We lost him.

[Perry]

We lost him, but we can't really get him. I don't think Chevy Chase will do our pod.

[Doug]

So we'll reach. We'll try to get, like, we'll hit up all our contacts. We're trying to get Chevy Chase on the pod, and when he finally responds,

[Perry]

we're gonna ask him to be.

[Doug]

We're like, hey, it's just to do a Gerald Ford for five minutes.

[Perry]

Actually, I don't know why I said it's very good. It's famously bad. Apparently, Gerald Ford tripped once during a press conference, and that's the only aspect of him that Chevy Chase does. He just kept being clumsy. He was his normal voice. He just was tripped a lot.

[Doug]

The best part about Jerry for he never won an election. It's so awesome. He just kept the people above him just kept resigning or dying. He just kept moving up.

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[Doug]

Okay, I think it's a good, good cool segue to talk about prefab homes. So I was looking into like what are some ways that maybe people in the west are actually going to speed things up? Perry, if you pull this up, prefab homes are basically the idea that instead of having a, you know, a team of constructors go to a site and you build everything there. You build many of the parts and as many as you can essentially in advance in a factory and then you ship them there and you, and you sort of construct it there and it cuts way down on these costs and shipping times and has all these interesting benefits. And so if you look at some of the other countries that are successful in this one is Japan. So there is this study that was done by Australians and I'll pull it up, we'll link it in the description I guess that looked at all these Japanese companies who do this after World War II they were so desperate to get homes made. This is by mdpi, so desperate to get homes made that they did a ton, a ton of prefabricated housing. And that has become a huge part of the Japanese housing where something I believe it's like 13%. It says here in this article that you can pull up Barry, that it's a huge part portion of what they're building is these companies that do these pre made things and show up. Yeah, 13% of total residential construction started in Japan. Weirdly, unintuitively for these three companies it actually is more expensive than having them build a home. But the idea there is they're working with you lot and really customizing it rather than just they just show up and like make the exact same thing Every time I reached out to cdawg and he said that when he had been like looking into potentially buying a home in Japan, that was an option for him where he was like, yeah, you can do all these prefab options where they're going to come in and just like build a house super fast, way cheaper, way faster. Or even if you go with one of these like fancier prefab companies in Japan, like, it can be really nice on top of that. And there's all these benefits where they do super high quality, like quality assurance in their factories.

[Perry]

It could be really cool.

[Doug]

And then Germany, the first wave of

[Perry]

those was like pretty bad, right? But they've got so much.

[Doug]

So, so here's, here's the thing. So Germany is an example of them not being great where post World War II, not great prefab homes.

[Perry]

I thought German jam were about to

[Aiden]

take over the world. Professor Jiang is wrong.

[Doug]

No, no, here's why he's. Here's why he's right. So Germany, basically as a Bloomberg article, Germany revised as a building style. Again, prefab. I mean, you know, pretty similar history here. Germany also Post World War II, dealing with tons of refugees. So particularly in East Germany, Soviet style, they just did, you know, massive amounts of these, like identical homes that they would just make in this sort of single format. And so these are starting to come back in Germany and become more popular. And they're talking about how, look, this can be like six to nine months faster than a traditional home that's made on site. And the value of this is not only can we be a lot, lot faster, faster with like, we just see they've built way fewer apartments. Not only can we be faster, not can we be cheaper, but we're finding ways to address that concern of like, you're just getting the same thing as everybody else. And we have these customizable options. So what I thought would be cool, we can start prefabbing our conversations here on lemonade stand. If we plan them in advance, we don't have to actually like think through everything. We can just be right. So I'm going to ask a question, Aiden, I'm going to give you three prefab option. So even if you don't like the first answer. Okay, wait, wait. Even if you don't like the first answer. Right, right. You can look to the second card. So just let me know.

[Aiden]

Audio listeners, Doug's passing out cards.

[Perry]

Okay.

[Aiden]

So sorry, I'm not supposed to look at my second card yet.

[Doug]

Yeah, just, just first one, then you decide. So we, we don't have to think all prefab. Hey, Aiden, what are long term ramifications if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz and I have to just to pick one of the. The whole point is that I can pick starting from scratch.

[Perry]

Yeah, you don't have to think about this.

[Doug]

Right. You have to pick one. The whole point of this.

[Aiden]

No, no, no. Sorry, it's just all of them are so good. I don't care if oil prices go up, I'm rich.

[Doug]

That was great. You didn't have to do any thinking. This was really efficient in and out conversations.

[Aiden]

I didn't think about it. Doug, isn't it? Are there more cards than this I don't know if I love? No, no.

[Doug]

So the whole thing with a prefab right is I'm not giving you every option under the sun. That would be traditional development. It would take too long. The point of this is the conversation is pre made with some amount of customization and you're going quick.

[Perry]

And I like this. It's revealing a lot about you.

[Aiden]

Am I going to get asked another question here?

[Doug]

I've got one for atrock. So question. What do you think about former president Gerald Ford?

[Perry]

Oh, I know what I think.

[Doug]

What? Well, you have to read one of the prefab.

[Perry]

Oh, you gave me so many good options, I'd suck that man dry. That's the best option.

[Doug]

That's the best one.

[Perry]

That's the best one.

[Doug]

Isn't this cool how you're customizing the conversation?

[Aiden]

Hesitated. Homophobic of you, don't you think?

[Perry]

No, I didn't hesitate. I just loved my options and I picked the best one.

[Aiden]

Yeah, I gotta be honest with you, I. I would have loved that option option instead of know what,

[Doug]

by the way?

[Perry]

I don't think I can read this one. I don't think I can read this one.

[Aiden]

I won't even say that one. If you want to diminish the Iran threat, show some guts and go through that straight.

[Doug]

Yeah. All right. And then I got my own prefab card. So the rest of the episode, if you guys ask me a question, I will just pick from one of these prefab answers.

[Aiden]

Okay.

[Perry]

Okay. Hold those because I have a. Wait, are we.

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

[Perry]

I have a topless topic.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Perry]

That I thought's really interesting. You pull this video BYD just. I want to hear your Doug's take first. I'll tell you the top level topic. BYD just unveiled 5 minute charging stations and they've proven the technology and it works. And they're going to roll it out all over China and then in Europe, kind of dramatically changing the EV versus ICE car debate.

[Doug]

That will be fixed by AI.

[Perry]

I don't see a change yet. This is the normal episode.

[Doug]

Okay, ask me another question.

[Aiden]

BYD is giving ICE cars. I don't like that.

[Perry]

I don't know. Internal combustion engine, right?

[Aiden]

Okay.

[Perry]

I was like, why? Why? Why is it called ICE Cars? Why is it called ICE cars?

[Doug]

Aiden, you're a liberal cuck. Get a real job.

[Perry]

Doug's been kind of based on the podcast lately.

[Doug]

I don't even have to think anymore. I just say my other one.

[Perry]

I'll say it. I'm currently wearing a butt plug shaped like Gerald Ford's face. That's one you wrote for me to say. You think that's one of my three prefab topics.

[Doug]

I'd say you can, you can pick which of the options. The whole value of this.

[Aiden]

I'm in there.

[Doug]

No, we're not gonna.

[Perry]

If you guys are watching real quick, it's kind of. It's actually kind of crazy tech. And you know, one of the things I hear people talk about with EVs. As someone who currently doesn't own an EV, one of the risks I have is like, what if you don't have a charging station? How long does it take? It takes, you know, it's a pain versus filling up gas. It's quicker. This is crazy, crazy fast. Full charge. And they can do like 70% even faster than this. So you can just get in and go. And they're building these new battery stations. And, you know, I do think this is one of the big holdouts for EV adoption. And they're planning to build I think 3,000 of these in China and then a few hundred in Europe really soon to start kicking it off there. So I do think, you know, kind of scary for non Chinese, especially non BYD EV companies. It's like a really coming, like, you know, I think this is something that might impact Tesla. It makes Tesla sort of less competitive because they've had this charging network advantage. And now that BYD is building out something that I think will be significantly faster based on the comparison that I saw, could cause disruption in the market.

[Aiden]

Do you know, do you know, Aiden,

[Doug]

you're a liberal cuck.

[Perry]

You mentioned that and I do agree with that. That's actually a really good point. It does, it does apply on here and I do think Aiden should respond.

[Doug]

I'm an expert on blank, and that's wrong.

[Aiden]

He's got me Locked.

[Perry]

He's got me locked up.

[Aiden]

He's got me locked up. Do you know much about the. A friend who had lived in Shanghai for a few years had told me

[Perry]

this is the IQ ones. No, I'm sorry, the Neo ones with the battery swap.

[Aiden]

Yeah, yeah. About that battery swap thing. Is that. Because in that context that seemed to remove a layer of the. The charging downtime. But is that something that is like not caught on? It's not.

[Perry]

Super full disclosure. I lost money putting betting on Neo stock because of this idea back in 2021 and it didn't pole.

[Aiden]

It's.

[Perry]

I guess it's fine. But the idea is, you know, if you don't know what it is like they drive up to a station, it takes a battery out, puts a new charge battery already and you're out instantly.

[Doug]

Okay.

[Perry]

But I guess the process of it is more difficult and it's harder to build these stations everywhere. And there ended up sometimes being a line anyway where you're like waiting. So it wasn't as like it wasn't this miracle that maybe will want to buy the car. Additionally, people just simply don't seem to think of that too much when they're buying the car. They want a good price quality car and they think of that stuff later, the charging stuff later. So yeah, I feel like the.

[Doug]

At this point. So I don't know. I don't own an electric vehicle. I would like to whenever I end up buying a new car. My understanding for the average person that this is not critical and then. But the instant you have this five minute thing, like the last reason to go buy a gas car I feel like is gone. Right. That's only what, two minutes longer than stopping at a gas station.

[Perry]

Yeah. In some cases faster. I mean, you know, again you can get half charge or whatever like super fast and then it does the rest.

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah.

[Perry]

So anyway, I think, I think it's a remarkable feat of engineering. I think it's pretty interesting and I do think it is. Yeah. Breaking down the final barriers to making this.

[Doug]

But then the question is like are we going to have this in America or will we put a tariff on it to stop it from being here? We will not have it in America. We don't want communist charging stations. We do it the old.

[Perry]

That is the problem is while you're charging you have to recite a. A passage from Xi Jinping Thought and miles the Red Book. And if you don't do that, your car does not charge. And it is one. It was a stipulation they said was demanded.

[Aiden]

I just. I'll do it for the Xiaomi SU7. I'll do it. I don't know what to say.

[Doug]

I'm excited. As a reminder, we are going to China soon. Yeah, we're going to China.

[Perry]

Very excited.

[Doug]

Very soon, in a week or two. So we are going to be doing multiple episodes from China trying to cover China, everything that we can see and talk about. And one of the things that obviously we'll be talking about is just the electric cars. I mean suspicion is that it'll be everything and everywhere. Right. And it'll be interesting to see what the, what a city looks like with that everywhere plus a, you know, crap ton of public transit.

[Aiden]

I mean we're supposed to be taking. Using the high speed rail network while we're there. I'm really excited to check out Chengdu and Chongqing specifically because I've heard those cities are like great examples of like modern Chinese cities. Like even Shanghai is like something that is a little, a little relatively outdated, relatively westernized. Like I've heard Shanghai is amazing. But like if you want to see what, what a Chinese city looks like from the past 10 years, specifically where we're going to check some of those places out. And I did want to attack one thing on. I saw an interesting piece about these cars in China and Europe apparently. But I think China's enforcement comes into place by 2027 that like all new must have physical dials for their functionality. The iPads have to go away, really. And I was so relieved to hear that because I'm hoping that's a decision that's made in more places. It's probably the thing I hate the most about the car that I currently have. I don't have an electric car, but I have like a.

[Perry]

You don't like the dashboard? I think it's kind of cool.

[Aiden]

No, I hate. Because you have to touch the screen to like multiple times to get to things, right? Which means you have to look at the screen to navigate it.

[Perry]

Oh, I see.

[Aiden]

But with old school dials, right, you just know where they are and you can like keep your eyes on the road. It's like way easier to navigate. You don't have to go through multiple menus to access things and you aren't hung up by software in the same way. So China and Europe are apparently taking a step in this direction, like requiring cars to be built with physical dials again. And I was like, woo, that's. I feel like that's a. I feel like that's A very consumer forward choice because I actually think the iPads are a worse experience.

[Doug]

But yeah, it's not quite. I mean it reminds me when they removed buttons from the iPhone. You know it's like. Well I would have preferred it but you know you get used to it eventually. But yeah, I. Having some dials would be great. It's true.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Perry]

I don't know. It's tough. I have to try one. I mean I think the 2017 have an ancient car. The 2017 Honda Fit is the greatest car ever made. It has dials so I can see why you'd want to emulate that. And I'm never going to change it. The car's falling apart and it's in the fucking parking lot now with pieces falling off. But I.

[Aiden]

You need to buy a new car. Can I say I'll say it on

[Perry]

the take off the tariff and I'll get a Xiaomi.

[Aiden]

As you said, you're trying to do the Sam Bankman fried. I don't use my money type of thing. Just get a new car. You could buy it. It could be used.

[Doug]

I'm not doing the same Bankman Free.

[Aiden]

You're doing the same thing and you're probably as good a league as he was.

[Perry]

He was caught. He was. He was iron bronze. Wait, I want more China tech story that I think is interesting. You guys remember we actually you helped me with the video on he did a little thing the Deep Seek flash crash in like middle of last year.

[Doug]

Okay. Video in quotes but yes how you did a little.

[Perry]

Yeah you just segment in there. But the idea that it was the first big time that western AI companies woke up to the fact that an open source model from China could kind of distill what's called their weights. I could just. It could prompt Chad GPT something questions and use that to train its model and catch up and have like an equal. Anyway Deep Seek 4 was supposed to come out already around the recent Chinese economic conference. It hasn't come out yet but it's going to come out soon and I do believe we're going to see another big reaction because apparently this one is matching the latest models. So there's already a scare on that front. It's open source but then the third thing is that it's according to them and we'll see if we're going to dig into it. Trained entirely on Chinese chips. This is the first one with no Nvidia chips involved in the process which is going to cause like a bit of a panic or a scare I think this is coming pretty soon. We're gonna see a lot of headlines about it.

[Aiden]

Taiwan is a part of China, so Nvidia would be Chinese chips.

[Perry]

You already got your Visa. I agree. Until I get my visa approved,

[Doug]

it's Wallies, dude. This stuff is even for me as, like, you know, someone who wakes up, like, with morning wood thinking about, I. I have kind of gotten bored of the, like, did you see this new model? It's even better. I mean, this happens.

[Perry]

I'm not sure it's going to be like, oh, this is the greatest new model. I think it's more the story of, like, how they made it, which is possibly distilling other weights and then also no Nvidia chips. It just basically says, how do you have a sustainable advantage if the hardware is an advantage.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Perry]

And the software can be, you know, distilled. What is the. Where's the moat in AI models?

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Perry]

I think that's the big question.

[Doug]

Here's a counterargument. One, Deep Seq did not just copy other models. It is clear that a lot of the Chinese models that are being developed, like Kimi or Deep Seq, are using the American models to get a lot of the questions and answers to train on. Because with some of them, you can say, what is your name? And it'll say, I am Claude.

[Perry]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And so that is true. But at the same time, time, I don't remember with enough technical details to give specifics. But Deep Seek did go and come up with these innovations. What was particularly interesting about Deep Seek is that because of the restrictions they had on chips, they managed to come up with these, like, crazy optimizations in order to make their model competitive. So while there was a sense of like, okay, Deep Seek has clearly been sort of cheating. You're not supposed to go, I don't.

[Perry]

I have no care about who. I mean, again, you trace it up the chain and they, you know, like, all these AI companies stole.

[Doug]

No, I'm just saying, like, you know, it is oversimplified. And some. I've seen other people suggest this on the truth platform x.com, which is that, you know, Deep Seek is really valuable and they were able to make it because they copied the other models. And I think there's clearly more to that. They've got some really smart people who did some crazy optimizations, and they're leading in, like, the.

[Perry]

The video space with Seed Dance. And I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not making this a competitive thing. I'm just talking about from a market dynamics perspective. It's like, yeah, pretty wild that an open source thing is about to come out. That it's going to be close or matching.

[Doug]

Yes. So the reason I'm trying to establish that it's not just copying is because I think there's more differentiation than it might appear. And I think a lot of people are just, here's the benchmark with the newest model. But you know, the big hype thing for the past three months now has been Claude code. This substack I think, does a nice job of overviewing some of the features of Claude code. If you pull it up, it's called Claude code and what comes next. And this talks about how there's more than just. They're not just scaling things bigger anymore, which I think was particularly susceptible to an open source model coming in and eating their lunch. They're starting to add some really smart ways that the AIs are coordinating sub agents and doing all these different things. Right. So he calls them magic tricks. But the AI companies are increasingly doing more than just increasing the amount of data. As that happens, I think they're going to be differentiated more and more and I think it's less likely that you're going to see the same thing that happened a year or two ago where it's like, oh, new model just came out from Llama. That's open source. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying we're getting to the point, almost like Moore's Law, where it started to get to a point where it's harder to fit more transistors on a chip. So companies had to start parallelizing. Right. In order to get more out of chips. And I think that's, that's seemingly starting to happen here of where the AI companies are starting to hit the value of what just giving even more data looks like. So they're having to really invent optimizations and clever things things, and that's not easily copyable in the way that Deep Seek potentially did with Claude. Does that make sense? Yeah, the point. The point is like, yes, I agree with you. Everything you're saying, it is going to be wild of an open source model comes out and it could really hurt Nvidia and it could really hurt all the AI companies in the west at the same time. They are starting to actually finally differentiate. Yeah, in some ways. Right.

[Perry]

I think it'll be a big discussion point at least.

[Doug]

And it is very funny that companies like Claude and OpenAI are annoyed at Deep seek for stealing their like, responses and using the AI for training.

[Perry]

Because everyone is.

[Doug]

Everybody's stealing. Everyone's stealing everything.

[Perry]

That story about Facebook or meta, like having people, like, leave the company campus so they could set up a separate area to just download every book in existence. So it wasn't like, on Facebook property.

[Doug]

Right.

[Perry]

They torrented like, they like, petabytes worth of book data and then fed it into the machine, but off campus.

[Doug]

So it was.

[Perry]

Anyway, yeah, I think at the end

[Aiden]

of this episode, I want to kind of round it out and talk a little bit more about our trip, if that's all right.

[Perry]

Okay.

[Aiden]

First of all, I want to say thank you because the reason we're going on this trip was we set it as a goal for our Patreon. When we got to 10,000 paid members on the Patreon, we promised to fund a trip to China where we go visit a bunch of cities, talk to normal Chinese people about what living there is like, what their experiences are like, hopefully tour some universities and factories. We have some interesting things lined up while we're there. We're going to be recording and publishing two episodes of the Normal show and two episodes of our Patreon show while we're there. Do you think it's fine if I tell them where we're going or where our plan is right now?

[Perry]

Yeah, sure, why not?

[Doug]

Maybe just not specific dates.

[Perry]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aiden]

The plan is we're going to Shenzhen and Guangzhou and Chengdu, Chongqing and Shanghai, and then we will be going to a couple smaller places along the way as well. So trying to mostly focusing on some, like, big cities and opportunities that will be in each of those places. But I really hope it's a fruitful trip for us because we've talked a lot about China on the show about, like, the amazing things that are supposedly there, and I'm really excited to experience them. As someone who went to China, I've only been to mainland China once. I went a long time ago when I was a teenager and I've heard it's changed so much since then.

[Doug]

I mean, we've read three of the books we've done for book club are in some way. I mean, abundance, kind of. But then House of Huawei and Breakneck are both about how China as a country is super organized around this massive amount of development and infrastructure and manufacturing and exports. And hopefully we can see that. Right.

[Perry]

I don't know.

[Aiden]

For example, we're going to tour the factory where I produce most of the mogul and yard merchandise for like, the past four years. Like we get to meet the factory owners and the, you know, get introduced to the process of like how that clothing is actually manufactured in China. And there's a few more opportunities that are similar to that.

[Perry]

I mean, I'll leak it here. First we are going to have an exclusive interview with Xi Jinping. I didn't want to say that kind

[Aiden]

of because it's like, you know what the big asterisk on that is?

[Perry]

What's the asterisk?

[Aiden]

We got to do it with Tucker.

[Perry]

It's Lemonade Stan. Tucker Carlson.

[Doug]

I don't want the show to be

[Perry]

biased and it's multiple perspectives and it's a roundtable and we're not going to talk about anything you think we're talking about. It's mostly gonna be the boys chilling.

[Aiden]

I think similar to our trip to Japan, we're also thinking about filming some of our like walking around cities. We've, we did like a walk and talk episode while we were in Japan that a lot of people really liked and we're planning on doing something, something similar. I think if you want to check out the Patreon for that extra stuff that gets posted, including the normal extra 60 minute episodes that we post every week, you can go to patreon.com lemonade stand and check that out. We. But the next time you see us, we will wait. No, we have one more normal episode.

[Doug]

Excuse me?

[Aiden]

We have one more normal episode.

[Doug]

I was wondering why you're dropping on this.

[Aiden]

I forgot. I thought it was in my head. We're leaving next week so. But I forgot that we have one more normal episode.

[Doug]

Going to squeeze out an episode right before we go and then you'll start seeing the China episodes.

[Aiden]

Yeah. So yeah, that's it. That's it. From Lemonade Stand.

[Doug]

Can you give a little like closing

[Aiden]

words in Chinese if you want to diminish the Iran threat? Show some guts and go through that straight.

[Perry]

Yes. Thanks for watching, guys. See you next week.

[Doug]

And you're a liberal cuck. Go get a real job

[Perry]

for this show. Comes from Tasty Trade.

[Aiden]

Tastytrade doesn't know that I have my hat on backwards right now, but they probably do know some things about trading and I would go there if I want to learn a little more or maybe trade a few stocks.

[Doug]

I don't know how to engage with this character.

[Aiden]

Seriously.

[Perry]

Because of the hat. The backwards hat.

[Aiden]

The backwards hat is fine. You can go to tastytrade.com lemonade today to get started to learn about trading.

[Doug]

What is who are you supposed to be? Oh, that explains.

[Perry]

Oh, that explains. He's Tyler. To realize the future America needs. We understand what's needed from us. To face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are marines. We were made for this.