We're At War Now? | Ep. 052 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Summary

Lemonade Stand Ep. 052: "We're At War Now?" | March 4, 2026

Hosts: Aiden, Atrioc, DougDoug
Network: Vox Media Podcast Network
Special Guest: Scott Galloway (virtual interview)
Main Theme: A comedic but incisive breakdown of the rapidly escalating U.S.-Iran conflict, its political and economic fallout, and a deep dive into AI companies’ entanglement with the military. The episode closes with a critical interview on tech, protest, and generational divides.

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Episode Overview

This episode detours from "light and fun" to grapple with headline events: the U.S. and Israel’s strike on Iran, its global and domestic ramifications, and a growing tech-military crisis around AI usage. The hosts utilize their trademark humor, clear explanations, and pop culture analogies to make sense of complex events—including dissent within the American right, economic repercussions, oil and China geopolitics, and a growing consumer protest against tech giants like OpenAI.

Later, business thinker Scott Galloway joins to discuss economic protest ('Resist and Unsubscribe'), the generational war over wealth and opportunity, and how tech CEOs and government are shaping the American future.

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1. Setting the Stage: From Tapas to WWIII (01:25–04:41)

• The hosts anticipate new listeners (possibly drawn by previous guests like Markiplier) and joke about pivoting from "tapasy" light fare to the seriousness of war.
• Memorable moment [02:37]: "Lemonade stand curse strikes again." – Atrioc.
• Introduction to the escalation: U.S. and Israel strike Iran, the Ayatollah is dead, and the region is in chaos.

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2. Why Should "Average Americans" Care about Iran? (04:41–06:42)

• Doug adopts the persona of "John Every Doug," posing as a football-watching, apolitical American, questioning the personal stakes in yet another Middle East conflict.
• Emphasis on the seeming disconnect between foreign policy and the daily concerns of Americans.
• Quote [05:03]: "Why the fuck do I care about Iran, Brandon?" – Doug.

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3. Dissent on the Right: Matt Walsh and Iran War Pushback (06:42–09:52)

• Discussion about right-wing commentator Matt Walsh publicly expressing skepticism toward the Iran war narrative—outlining the contradictions and lack of clear objectives.
• Quote [06:42]: “The messaging on this thing is, put it mildly, confused.” – (reading Matt Walsh)
• Noted “strange bedfellows” as even hard-right figures such as Nick Fuentes oppose the intervention.
• Context of the peace president image and how it's being challenged.
• Quote [08:48]: "The patriotism bump you'd usually get doesn't appear to be materializing..." – Aiden.

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4. Political Sales Pitch Failure & Economic Repercussions (09:52–17:19)

• Breakdown of why Trump’s administration is struggling to “sell” the new war, even to its core base (no big speeches, messaging muddle, odd Truth Social posts).
• Analogy-driven attempts to “steelman” the administration’s rationale:
  • Iranian nuclear/deterrent threat, forced hand by Israel, and broader competition with China for resources.
• Oil and Straits of Hormuz:
  • Iran supplies >80% of its oil to China; China gets 10–15% of its imported oil from Iran.
  • The Strait of Hormuz’s importance (“1/5 of all world’s oil passes through”).
  • American domestic gas prices spike despite energy independence.
• Quote [16:53]: "Gas prices have already ticked above $3 a gallon... If oil goes above $100 a barrel... prices are going to get astronomical." – Aiden
• Trump’s proposal for navy escorts of oil tankers to reassure oil supply, exposed as shaky.

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5. Regime Change: History and Skepticism (17:19–25:44)

• The group examines the logic and (lack of) historical precedent for regime change via airstrikes, referencing Venezuela and Libya as past failures.
• Discussion of the “decapitation” approach and its limits—often leading to chaos rather than liberation.
• Quote [23:14]: "Every single time in human history there has been an attempt to do regime change by air power only, it has a 0% success rate. Not like sometimes, not like rarely—zero." – Atrioc

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6. Iranian Public Opinion, U.S. Domestic Analogies, and Double Standards (25:44–33:33)

• Doug and Aiden propose parallels between regime change “gambits” in Iran and hypothetical foreign intervention in the U.S.
• Nuance: some Iranians are happy for regime change, others skeptical, diaspora opinions diverge.
• Frustration at Internet discourse that denies the possibility of “complex” positions—being critical of US policy while understanding why some would cheer intervention.

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7. The Wider Region: Gulf States, Religion, and Missiles (33:33–38:17)

• Iran missiles target Gulf states (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait), disrupting aviation and sparking regional anger.
• Sunni vs. Shia divisions briefly explained.
• Gulf states caught between benefiting from Iranian weakness and fearing blocked oil exports.
• Quote [35:53]: "They're not stoked. That was the opposite. They're angry." – Aiden

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8. AI, the Pentagon, and the Battle over Principles (41:09–61:16)

• AI companies’ contracts with the Pentagon: Anthropic’s ‘two red lines’ (no autonomous weapons, no domestic mass surveillance); Pentagon refuses, so Anthropic loses the contract.
• OpenAI steps in, claims similar red lines, but the wording is “softer” (as long as it’s legal...), raising trust issues.
• Quote [49:42]: “Anthropic said we have these two values that we care about. We don't want you using it. OpenAI has said we have these two values we care about, but as long as it's legal, it's okay.” – Doug
• Hosts discuss the moral authority of corporations vs. governments, the dangers of over-reliance on tech oligarchs for national security, and public blowback (mass uninstalls of ChatGPT).
• Quote [57:53]: "Eventually you have to be the soldier who refuses orders. Right. And anthropic is drawing that line..." – Aiden

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9. Philosophical and Political Conflicts of AI Control (61:16–64:33)

• Should democratically elected governments or unelected tech CEOs have ultimate authority over world-shaping technologies?
• Red lines matter: the government could simply re-write the law or enforce compliance.
• Economic self-preservation suspected as OpenAI’s true motive—entrenching itself as irreplaceable leads to government bailouts in a crisis.

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10. "Resist and Unsubscribe": Interview with Scott Galloway (68:46–106:16)

Key Segments:

• Galloway critiques the U.S. government’s arbitrary intervention picking winners and losers in tech, undermining “the rules by which companies compete” and threatening investment in American markets.
• “The most radical act in a capitalist society is nonparticipation—specifically to withhold your spending.” [74:32]
• Compares effective economic protest (e.g., the Montgomery bus boycott) with current efforts ('Resist and Unsubscribe').
• Galloway’s "debt" as a prosperous white male boomer, and indictment of the “cross between the Golden Girls and the land of the dead” currently governing America, enriching the old at the expense of the young.
• College is “never more valuable, just not a very good value.” Elite schools are criticized for LVMH-style exclusivity.
• Laments unpayable student loan debt and blocked housing access as core to a “generational war.”
• Quotes:
  • "Our tax code is just a giant transfer of wealth from the young to the old." [94:28]
  • "You have never seen a generation that is more selfish than the US baby boomer generation." [105:05]
  • "All this bullshit notion that young people are entitled. No, they're entitled to be enraged. It is bullshit." [106:11]
• Galloway’s actionable solution: collective consumer action (unsubscribing/cancelling Big Tech, putting economic pressure for real change).

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11. Closing Reflections & Meta (106:18–End)

• The group debriefs on the Scott Galloway interview, agrees on the value of action in the face of anxiety, and contemplates further episodes on generational divides.
• Recommends checking out Galloway’s 'resist and unsubscribe' movement at resistandunsubscribe.com.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "Lemonade stand curse strikes again." – Atrioc [02:38]
• “The messaging on this thing is, put it mildly, confused.” (reading Matt Walsh) [06:42]
• "Gas prices have already ticked above $3 a gallon... If oil goes above $100 a barrel... prices are going to get astronomical." – Aiden [16:53]
• "Every single time in human history there has been an attempt to do regime change by air power only, it has a 0% success rate." – Atrioc [23:14]
• "Anthropic said we have these two values... OpenAI has said... but as long as it's legal, it's okay." – Doug [49:42]
• “The most radical act in a capitalist society is nonparticipation—specifically to withhold your spending.” – Scott Galloway [74:32]
• "All this bullshit notion that young people are entitled. No, they're entitled to be enraged." – Scott Galloway [106:11]

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Key Timestamps

• 01:25 – Introduction, setting up expectations and tone for new listeners
• 04:03 – Segment begins about Iran/WWIII escalation
• 06:42 – Analysis of Matt Walsh and split among right-wing commentators
• 12:03 – Geopolitical breakdown: oil, China, and the Strait of Hormuz
• 16:53 – U.S. domestic blowback and gas price politics
• 23:14 – History and failure of regime change by bombing
• 33:33 – Iran’s regional missile campaign, Gulf States’ response
• 41:09 – Transition to AI and Pentagon contracts controversy
• 49:42 – OpenAI, Anthropic, ethics, and government contracts
• 68:46 – Scott Galloway interview begins
• 74:32 – Economic protest and “resist and unsubscribe” movement
• 94:28 – The generational wealth divide, "War on the Young"
• 106:11 – Closing, generational anger and entitlement

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Tone and Style

• Conversational, comedic, and self-aware, with deliberate use of analogies (The Cowboys, sitcoms, Marvel movies) to accessibly unspool complex political and technological topics.
• Willing to get serious and philosophical, especially around the consequences of war and the power struggle between tech and state.
• Deeply critical of both U.S. political and tech leadership, but always with a sense of the absurd.

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Listener Takeaways

• The U.S.-Iran conflict is not just a distant geopolitical struggle; its motivations, messaging, and blowback are already contentious domestically, even on the right.
• American economic interests are tightly tied to global oil flows and Chinese demand, with high risk to consumers.
• Tech companies wield enormous new power—but choosing whom to trust (if anyone) is getting harder, and public protest is an emerging avenue for pressure.
• The generational divide—especially young people’s eroding economic prospects and blocked mobility—is a deep structural issue, not simply young people’s “attitudes.”
• Economic action, especially unsubscribing from or boycotting corporations, is presented as one of the few tools for ordinary people to exert influence.

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Further Resources

• Resist and Unsubscribe: resistandunsubscribe.com
• Previous Lemonade Stand episode: Extended breakdown of U.S.-Iran history
• Scott Galloway's TED Talk: "The War on the Young"
• Vox, New York Times articles on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Pentagon contracts

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For more in-depth, uncensored roundtables, or to support the show, visit their Patreon: patreon.com/livelemonadestand

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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[B]

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and Replit use Vanta to get and stay secure. Get [e-mail] Vox that's V A N T A.com Vox vanta.com Vox welcome back to Lemonade Stand.

[A]

Lemonade Stand. Listen, I want to speak directly to the new viewers from Markiplier. This is going to be a slightly different episode. We've got jacksepticeye this week talking about Iran. Yeah, explain the war in Iran.

[C]

We got Pewdiepie talking about Anthropic.

[A]

Yes, we got. We literally.

[B]

And Benjamin Netanyahu's new indie movie.

[C]

We literally gotten a call on Thursday and Brandon was like cool. You know, like people really like the Markiplier episode. Probably some new viewers. Check out the next. We should do something kind of like light and fun. And the word you used was tapas.

[B]

Like we'll just, we'll just bring this

[C]

small Bites episode, little fun bits around the world. And then Trump seeing the numbers on

[A]

our episode was like, those fuckers shut them down.

[C]

He's like, you're going to go an entire two weeks without talking about me?

[A]

No, we have this clip here if you want to play it. Perry of the Patreon this is recorded right after the Markiplier interview. You know, Markiplier brings a new audience, and so they aren't going to recognize what the show is till next episode. We're going to hit them with, like, World War Three.

[C]

Yeah. Oops. And we got World War Three.

[D]

Shouldn't have said that.

[A]

Lemonade stand curse strikes again.

[C]

So today we're going to be talking about the developments in Iran and some fun tapas there that we're going to be eating. We're also going to talk about the very fun AI interactions with the Department of War. Brandy, you've already talked about both these things a little bit, but we're going to hit them from some new angles that I think should be interesting as well as later on, we did a virtual interview with Scott Galloway, who is. How would you describe Scott? He's very prolific.

[A]

He does a lot of things, but his claim to fame was he wrote some pretty great business books and he was teaching at nyu, right? Was it?

[C]

Yes. Nyu. Yes. It's funny, you look at me. You're the one who took his course.

[A]

That's why I took it online.

[C]

Okay. All right. But, yeah, we chatted with him and for about 30 minutes getting his thoughts on particularly the. The movement to divest from tech like subscriptions, which ended up being very prescient given the stuff going on with OpenAI and Claude.

[A]

He did it before any of that, so it's actually pretty relevant.

[C]

Packed schedule, Aiden.

[A]

And Aiden's taking notes. What are you writing about? What? You're just drawing. You're drawing fan fiction in there about fan fiction?

[B]

Yeah. So in the next 10 minutes, Doug and Atriok are gonna kiss. What were you guys.

[A]

That's crazy.

[C]

That immediately goes to the teleprompter. So when we see it happen, I will do what the teleprompter says.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So, you know, big, big escalation in Iran this past week. I guess there's a lot of angles we can take on this. I think just doing an event breakdown is not. You probably know. I think most people watching know the basic gist that we markiplier viewers love Iranian news that United States and Israel struck Iran. The Ayatollah is de dead. There is now the big question mark over what happens next. So I think there's a lot of angles we could go from this.

[C]

I would like to start with a basic one. I'm going to lean into my political knowledge, or lack thereof, and become John Every Doug representing the average American and their view about Iran. Right. So if I'M some sort of beer drinking football watching, God fearing, freedom loving American. Right. And I'm pissed off that the Cowboys traded Michael Parsons. We haven't even won the NFC south in like 40 years, not even in that division. Why the fuck do I care about Iran? Brandon.

[A]

Okay, wait, this is actually such an interesting. That's a topic I want to talk about the Cowboys. No.

[C]

Well, yeah.

[A]

45 minutes on the Cowboys. Are you guys familiar with the political. I don't know much about the political commentator Matt Walsh.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

You know, it's interesting you bring this up.

[A]

All right. Do you, do you, can you give an intro on him? I don't know him that well.

[B]

Yeah. Matt Walsh.

[C]

What are you talking about?

[A]

You and Matt Walsh when you guys are hanging out like so agreeing on

[B]

everything behind closed doors, when we text each other on signal because we're really tight and we just agree on so much. We just diverge on like a couple things. Me, me and Matt, when we used to hang out, how would I describe him? He is a voice. He's a very conservative media figure. He worked at or worked at the Daily Wire, which was founded by Ben Shapiro, I may be incorrect by that. And had his own show through that platform. Also put together like very conservative documentaries about trans people in America and like how they, how they don't, you know, how trans people like don't exist or like how the proliferation of trans.

[C]

Maybe like the most prolific and intense anti LGBT like rights figure.

[B]

This is very extreme.

[C]

A conservative is probably putting it lightly. He's extremely, extremely right wing.

[B]

Yeah. And he is primarily known for that. And so he's definitely like not only like a conservative or right wing figure, but I would say like notably so. And it's kind of come up in that era of MAGA media in the past. I feel like I've come to know or be familiar with him in like maybe the past like five years, like since COVID Ok. Yeah.

[A]

But what I'm saying is he is expressing this conservative dissent already to what's going on in Iran. I think the thing I haven't discussed on, on Big A, I think would be interesting to talk about here is what this action in Iran is going to mean, like how the dominoes are going to fall politically back home. So I want to, I want to bring this post up because I think it's an interesting kickoff to this. Matt Walsh says so far we've heard that although we killed the whole Iranian regime, this was not a regime change war. And although we obliterated obliterated their nuclear program. We had to do this because of their nuclear program. And although Iran was not planning any attacks in the U.S. they also might have been, depending on who you ask. And although we're not fighting this war to free the Iranian people, they are now free or might be depending on who seizes power. We have no idea who that might be. The messaging on this thing is, put it mildly, confused. And he got a lot of conservative pushback. And you know, the promotion of this war insists that Iran is not Iraq, fine, but Iran is also not Venezuela. It's full. Or you think you can just drop in, take out the top guy and leave with no problem like we did. In that case, Iran is not Iraq, but it's much closer Iraq than it's Venezuela. What I'm saying he's got a lot of these posts that are just openly from that, you know, from a, from a part of the wing that would generally never dissent on something this big. Openly dissenting.

[B]

I mean this is, this is the other clip I had seen because I think there's sort of this, if you're, if you have a left wing media diet, there's sort of a, what would you call it? Worst guy I know makes a great point meme going around about like him and Nick Fuentes right now because Nick Fuentes is doing the same thing. He's like this more from an angle of like anti, like an anti Israeli, anti Jewish angle.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But saying that this, this doesn't make any sense. So there's a weird splitting of people who are pivoting and finding ways to support the decision that is being made and then another group of people who are seemingly standing by the principles that they espoused before and saying like this is ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense that we're in attacking Iran.

[A]

Right. And I think, you know, there was just this long, we've, we've even shown some clips of this but there was this long tradition up to the election about this idea of the peace president, of no endless wars in the Middle east, of they've been a big waste and now that is being challenged now. I, I, we don't know this one's going to play out. I think this is a, the big question mark here is this has only been a few days old and maybe it does end in a few days. That's, that's a question mark that could happen. But I think people are already like even a few days in the normal, the patriotism bump you'd usually get doesn't appear to be materializing in polling and in feedback even from conservative sources. It's not like a huge amount of positivity around this. It hasn't been sold yet. And one thing I want to say that I thought was very odd about this action in particular was how cavalierly you know, it was a truth social post at 2:30am There was no speech to Congress. There was no speech to the American people. There was no. This is not how it has been done in the past.

[B]

Didn't Trump make a speech that night that the first strikes happened?

[A]

I thought it was true social speech. It was just like a post.

[B]

Right, okay.

[A]

And, and then in the follow up press conference they just did, he pivoted very quickly to talking about the ballroom. He did like 20 minutes about this ongoing war in Iran and then the ballroom. So I don't know, there's like, there's this pushback. So if you want me to like defend this to the American people, I will steel man this right now. Let me try to do the best possible take I can give on use

[C]

an analogy with the cowboys.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

Jerry Jones is the manager.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So you're you, you work for the Trump administration. You're trying to sell.

[A]

Yes. There's an average done a very bad job selling this even to their most die hard fans. I think that's like on controvertible at this point where a few days in people seem to be wildly questioning even among what's going on. So I'm going to do my best. I, you know I'm researching into this. I'm trying to do my best to steel man. I personally do not think we should have struck an Iran. I made a whole video about it. But I'm going to try and steal man what the goals might be now.

[C]

Iran is a country that's a good start to.

[B]

He's in character right now. He's in character.

[C]

Right. In character.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

So wait, hold on. Disclaimer. Some people are going to be pissed off. I'm sorry. To people in other parts of the world who are more educated than us. The American public school system taught us it was Iran. So we're undoing that. I am relearning to say Iran. I get it.

[A]

Yeah, I'm with you.

[C]

I apologize. This was how we were taught. It's not my fault kind of.

[A]

I've been in like. I'm like when they have an actor who's doing an English accent but it's bad. So they keep slipping back into the. I've learned but then I'M so look, we go a million years of history with Iran and America.

[B]

Well, a quick shout out because when we did a video a while back when Israel struck Iran last year and there was that brief 12 day war, you did a great introduction about the history of Iran and the US that had led up to that point last year. So if you guys want to check out that episode, I think has a great 20 minute presentation that Atrioc explains really, really well. That is good context for, for this. But.

[A]

But also just there's a updated version of that I just did in the big club. You can check out. But okay, so I'm not gonna go into history. Well, I guess what I'm saying is let's think about from a purely. Again, this is, this is theoretical and not my beliefs. I'm just saying from a purely American pov, what are some advantages we would want? Number one, we would like to have this geostrategic enemy in Iran to not have a nuclear weapon or strike capabilities on our bases and allies in the Middle East. So because it's a moment where they're very weak and because, and this is crazy, they admitted this. Rubio was out on tv. But because Israel said they were going to strike no matter what, again, you'd think that America would have more influence over Israel to tell them yes or no. But because Israel, they're going to strike matter what the Middle East. I mean Iran was going to counter strike American bases in the Middle East. That was the, that is the rationale for that initial strike at the time.

[C]

But the larger I growing up, we had like a dog and sometimes the dog would like run across the street if they saw another dog. And it would be really. And I was, I would always just go like, well if you're going, I'm going. I would start barking, screaming at them.

[A]

Yeah, you join in.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Okay. So on a larger macro level, there's this growing tension between America and China that's been brewing for now going on decades and certainly wrapping up since the trade war. And the idea is that they have gained the ability to squeeze America's balls over rare earth minerals. We did a whole episode on this is a thing that gives them escalation, dominance in a tit for tat. Like if we disagreed on something at a hard level, they have manufacturing capabilities and the ability to squeeze rare metals.

[C]

And we should point out. I don't know why John every Doug would know. Maybe I work for Raytheon also. They like produce all the things we need for our military, our Advanced military. So it's not just they have like stuff we want, it's stuff we need to be able to fight them militarily.

[A]

Exactly. And again, all of the missiles and all of the high tech equipment used in this conflict have supply chains that trace back to China and especially through rare earth minerals. So if there was ever an actual conflict and they cut it off, we don't have the capability to resupply our own weapons. Okay, so this is, I think, part of a larger attempt to gain the ability to squeeze China on oil. And if you look at all of these recent insane things that have been done geopolitically, none of which I agree with, I'm just talking about Trump's actions in Venezuela. Venezuela's largest partner for oil experts was China. Okay. So now they have a partner that's more amenable to American interests in Venezuela, and they could theoretically cut off that access to oil that goes to China, Iran largest oil partner, China. And in fact, it's one of China's single greatest oil.

[B]

Yeah. So for on Iran's end, 80 plus percent, some say 90% of their oil exports go to China. So it's a major source of funding for Iran's government and economy. And then on the other end, China receives of the oil that they use. Overall, an estimated like 10 to 15% of the oil that China imports is 15%, which is not insignificant, right?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Like it, you know, not the majority, but enough that it matters.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. And again, you know, so this map is terrible, but the Strait of Hormuz

[B]

is like have the straight.

[A]

We're not even looking on the camera, so I shouldn't even pointing at it. Do you have like a NDI image of the straight of horror movies or pull it up? Because it's like, it's important to talk about this because this is one of the reasons this part of the world is so chaotic and there's so much foreign meddling and interest. There is because of this Strait of Hormuz, where this tiny little gap right There is where 20%, 1/5 of the world's oil passes through every day. And Iran has the capability to mine that up. And what's interesting is all of that oil, almost all that oil goes to Asia, goes to East Asia, mostly China. And so the ability to squeeze that suddenly changes the dynamic of any, like, we disagree on, you know, the big example was possibly Taiwan. All of this is still tough to sell to the regular. Every person.

[C]

And China is a country because I

[A]

think every dog, if you're being Honest should think about how none of this is about the things he's actually concerned about, which is like cost of living,

[C]

NFC south, cost of living, health insurance, actually, and getting back Micah Parsons and

[A]

my in gas and gas prices. And that is why I think, again, this is going to be such a political disaster for Trump because already immediately, with the, with the chaos in the trade of our is only a few days in gas prices in America, which America only imports like 14% of its oil. We're actually one of the most energy independent nations on Earth. Gas prices have already ticked above $3 a gallon on average across the country. It's way higher here in California.

[C]

But.

[A]

And that's a big psychological breaking point for people. And if oil goes above $100 a barrel, which it's looking like it will, people in this country, which is like, we have no public infrastructure, we have no trains, you have to drive everywhere, many people commute a long way to work. The prices are going to get astronomical. So I think the political blowback for that, I just don't think this is something you can sell to people.

[B]

Trump is trying to beat out this concern as of today.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because in response to the attacks, Iran has shut down or threatened all of the oil tankers that would come from other countries through the strait. Yeah. Like this is a piece of their leverage and being able to control this. This position. Right. And Trump said that they want to start. The US Wants to start accompanying oil tankers with US And Navy ships in order to secure oil shipments as a way to dissuade the concern about oil prices starting to rise and trying to get ship shipments back through the strait.

[A]

I mean, just being real. Like, if you listen to Trump's State of the Union or his recent speeches, when he does talk about the economy, his one big thing he's been like, hammering is like, we've gotten gas prices down. Your gas prices are so low. So if that, you know, little pillar is kicked out from this and it's for another foreign war that is still going on, again, they are saying four to five weeks. That's the estimation. If it goes beyond that, if troops on the ground have to go in, suddenly it becomes, I think, I mean, I think, you know, we're kind of making fun of, like, the average person is not super engaged. I feel like the average American has a memory of Iraq and Afghanistan and a negative view of it. Like they.

[C]

Well, I got a question. In Venezuela, are boys in blue? Yeah, not just boys. Women and those who identify as women and men who I'm supportive of.

[A]

I appreciate that. Hey, you know what? That's, that's big.

[B]

Average.

[C]

Average.

[B]

Doug has come a long way listening

[A]

to Matt Walsh and I appreciate that.

[C]

Our boys in blue went in one day. In, out took them.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Last year, Iran, we went in, blew it up. There are the nuclear facilities are all gone. We're going to do the same thing. Military is crushing it. We're in, we're out. What's the problem?

[A]

So you know what? I'll have Donald Trump answer that. I'll have Donald Trump answer that. It's a great question. I have a clip right here. Hopefully we can get it pulled up. It's loading for me, so I can't believe you have it right here. Okay. This is Donald Trump being asked what the worst possible outcome is.

[C]

Mr. President, what's the worst case scenario

[B]

that you have planned for in Iran?

[D]

Well, I don't know if there's a worst case. We have them very much beaten militarily from the military standpoint. They're still lobbying some missiles.

[A]

At some point they won't even be able to do that.

[D]

That because we're hitting all of their carriers, we're hitting all of their missile stock. You know, they built up all these

[A]

missiles over the last few years.

[D]

They had a lot of them, They've shot a lot of them and we're knocking out a lot.

[A]

I guess the worst case would be

[D]

we do this and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person. Right. That could happen. We don't want that to happen.

[C]

Counterpoint, Mr. President, go and kill him again

[D]

in five years.

[A]

You realize you put somebody in, it was no better.

[C]

We just set a yearly date.

[B]

There's a way. It's so, it's so. It's like a, it's like a fucking. It's like a TV show, dude.

[A]

Dude, it's crazy.

[B]

It's like a comedy show.

[A]

People were describing it as like when you show up for the book report. You haven't read the book. Like it to, to be talking so cavalierly about. Like they just have been so unclear on what the actual immediate goals are. Which is exactly the problem with all these last forever wars. And then again, he didn't say it this exact way, but you have to be careful with language. People are so worried about this. He put out a true social post saying we have so because people are questioning if we're going to run out of munitions because again, we've, we use millions and use millions of dollars worth of missiles every day. And we don't restock them as fast as we use them. And he put out a true social post saying, we have so many munitions, we could fight this war forever. Like, don't want to hear the words forever and war at all. That's the thing that he ran against specifically. So, again, I. You know, there's many more.

[B]

It's not a forever war. He's saying, we could fight. We could do it forever. I don't think you.

[C]

I got a question. Me and my trans wife were listening to the New York Times daily podcast this morning.

[A]

Wow. You guys are.

[C]

And the journalist there said that Homin made every person in the Iranian command designate three to four layers of succession, so that even if we kill them, it just keeps going. And that has helped the fact that currently there's no power vacuum, apparently.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

That's what I heard.

[B]

I had a thought about this, because in. In Venezuela, right. This operation, it's. We replace. We effectively, like, replace the leader.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then put a bunch of new pressure on whoever this leader is in charge without changing the underlying, like, fabric of the government or, like, regime that's in place. Right. It's. We didn't see a lot of things can still play out there, but it's basically the same government with somebody who is more malleable to US Interests because of what we've done. That's what it looks like so far.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Feels like something similar here. And it reminded me a bit of the video you did recently on action against cartels in Mexico and South America, where we've had this approach for a long time that we're going to come at this guy at the top, like, decapitate the organization. But nothing has significantly shifted or changed. In fact, the violence that affects people day to day has gotten worse over time as we've continued to do this. And I think the other argument that gets flown around is that you're going to help or liberate the people who live there under that regime. But it doesn't feel like anything about what is playing out is necessarily gonna, like, free the Iranian people that are under the thumb of said, yeah, I

[A]

want to talk about that. Because I do think, you know, I've said, I think the Ayatollah was a horrendous leader. I think the crackdown they did on protest was. Was brutal. I mean, if I'm going to be somebody who stands up for, like.

[B]

I mean, they reportedly killed thousands of people.

[A]

Yeah. If I'm like, a person who's like, I think what happened to Alex Preddy is fucking horrendous. Then I have to be somebody who thinks 15,000 protesters being killed by the state, you know what I'm saying? However, that being said, I saw a really great breakdown of every single time in human history there has been an attempt to do regime change by air power only. It has a 0% success rate. Not like sometimes, not like rarely zero. It has never happened. You cannot change a regime from the air. All it seems to do every single time is actually entrench the current administration of the thing because it goes from the average person in Tehran being like, I really don't like the Ayatollah and the regime to bombs dropping and they, they cement it suddenly becomes this new outside enemy. And so I, I am skeptical that even that which I think is a thin veneer of an excuse. I do not think this is done

[B]

for the, I don't think it's done

[A]

purpose of saving the Iranian people. We, you know, because by that logic we would be in Sudan, we would

[B]

be saying you would be so many

[A]

more places, so many more places. This place is clearly has a geostrategic interest. So yeah, I just, I think the idea that it's going to change the regime is skeptical, which means they may need boots on the ground. And that has been like a hard line that Trump has been avoiding. Like, you know, that we would not send American troops to actually have boots on the ground like that. Then, then the comparisons to Iraq become so incredibly on the nose that it's hard to, so I don't know, I guess like I can see the larger movement that is happening probably within the Pentagon, not Trump himself, of like trying to gain leverage over resources for a coming struggle over a great power rival, China. I can see the calculus behind that, but the details, especially of this action seem very haphazard, messy, unplanned, chaotic. And you know, it's not like we don't have any recent examples or long history of examples of meddling in the Middle east getting bad consequences like doing something where you think this outcome will be easy. Even Obama, I mean Obama had Libya and Gaddafi, Gaddafi, you know, and like he presented it as like, this will be relatively easy and quick. And then thousands more died, huge blowback chaos in the country in Libya. And it's like, this is not, if

[B]

you don't look into it, you could, Libya's fine.

[A]

If you don't look into it, I'm in. Yeah, sounds based. So, yeah, it's just funny. I, I, it's not funny, but I Think it's funny. I think it's funny that I'm a

[C]

little tapa for you.

[B]

Okay. Can I, Can I take. There's another, there's another aspect I wanted this, that I wanted to bring up. And it's the other that a lot of similarities to Venezuela and the interviews that I had done from the interviews that I have seen done with people who live there. And I think there's this, this thing that still frustrates me about these topics right now is that because there is. I think there is a thing I see in discussion online where people feel very obligated to like, pick they. Because they feel like they have to pick a side, they have to find a way to rationalize the acceptance of one of the parties, like, fully. And in this case, I see a lot of people pushing back against the idea that Iranian people would be happy. And I'm not just talking about diaspora, who. I think even in my conversation with the Venezuelan people that I was talking to, right. One of them doesn't live in Venezuela anymore. And he was the most gung ho about gambling the consequences of an American intervention. They were all down for it, but he was by far the most like, like, the sacrifices are worth it out of the three people that I spoke to. And he's the one who doesn't live there anymore.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so ignoring. And it's not to say that the diaspora wouldn't have like, their own, like, valid reasons for having opinions about a topic like this, but if I were to just focus on the people who are living under the regime, but also would face the consequences of these strikes, and there is still this similar wave of happiness at any hope of change. And that doesn't mean that this is going to be any different at this time. It doesn't mean the US Is going in with good intentions. It's just the idea that it should be understandable that if you're the person under the pressure of a regime like this where you're unarmed, you're unable to fight back, you're unable to create the change for yourself, you feel like you've been like locked in this hell of a government for decades and you find you have no way out, it makes sense that a lot of those people would be excited about any possible opportunity of that changing, no matter the odds or the intention of that thing being successful. And Iranians don't feel like universally the same about this topic. There are people who don't want in Iran that don't want the US intervention. But from what I can see that the majority of people are excited at the prospect of a change happening. And I think what's frustrating is, like, the. The people seem to have to. They feel like they need to go hand in hand with this idea of, like, denying that that happiness might exist at the same time as, like, saying the US Doing this is bad. It's like, it can be both things. I can understand why an Iranian would want any chance to escape the circumstances that they're in while also saying that I don't think this is going to work. The US shouldn't be doing this. I think this is unethical for so many reasons. It's like you can have these complex opinions about something like this.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, just to clarify, 100%. I have two sources in Iran that I've been working with on the presentation I did for Big A. They have. They were there through the protests. Both of them are. I actually had an argument. I was talking with them because it's like they are deeply in support of this because they don't see another option. And I don't blame them. I get 100% from that POV. It makes sense.

[D]

And I think.

[A]

But from an American pov, you know what I'm saying?

[D]

Well, let's.

[C]

Let's make the American pov imagine that during the protests, you know, the last month or whatever, that the United States government had shot and killed 15,000Americans. Would you support Kim Jong Il bombing Washington, D.C. right.

[A]

And then. Or, you know. Or swooping in and kidnapping the President.

[C]

Yeah, or swooping in and kidnapping.

[A]

You know, I'm saying, like, I would

[C]

kind of be cool if North Korea took Trump. See, it's interesting.

[B]

It's interesting that you say that. It's interesting that you say that. Right. You're. You're. I think my. It's funny enough, it's like, in a way, I would say no, I wouldn't initially support that because I want a chance for, like, we need to fight back and, like, we need to fight back against the regime in place now. That is choosing to kill thousands of protesters and, like, the society's collapsing around us. But if me and you wanted to fight back and then we spent the next, you know, four decades trying, and then we couldn't, and everything we've done has failed, then I might be down

[C]

Kim Jong Un, kind of.

[B]

Then I might. And I might. Yeah.

[A]

People, you know, for example, people in America, a lot of them are very upset with Trump. If Putin flew a jet in and kidnapped Trump and pulled him out there would be people celebrating people right now. Before he did 15,000 kills, he would be celebrating right now.

[B]

Because I hate Trump. Because I hate Trump. I don't want Putin to do that.

[A]

Exactly. But then imagine phase two is then Putin starts putting Russian oil companies and seizing the oil or the resources of America and shipping it off. And, you know, there's bombing in major. You know what I'm saying? The next phases, you'd be like, wow, you might start to. Your initial enthusiasm at this leader you've hated being gone would fade quickly as you realize the new. The point was not to liberate you. The point was to get something.

[B]

Yeah, I would. There's. There's just this cross section of, like, circumstances and desperation and like, my life and the people around me's life has gotten so bad. So do I want to be picky and choosy about what happens still? And Iran, there's a disagreement about this within Iran from 100% Iranian people. Like, I think I, the. When we talked about this with Venezuela, I think something that frustrated me is there's these little fucking worms in the, in the comments who are, who are just. They, they think that even they. It feels like this is what it feels like. It feels like even acknowledging that an Iranian living in Iran could be happy about this is somehow a sign off for imperialism. It's like. No, that's just, it's just explaining what's happening. That's.

[A]

Yeah, I agree with you. I agree. Yeah, it, it is a. I mean, that's just the Internet discourse. It's frustrating.

[C]

One quick thing is like, what is Iran doing back? Because they are fighting back. This is not Venezuela where we were, you know, we poofed the president, and then the country just like keeps going kind of. So they've been doing all these missile attacks, but most of the missile attacks, like, there's, there's no missiles going to the U.S. which would, I think, substantially change the calculus here. Yeah, but what they are doing is sending a fuckload of missiles. If you pull this up, Perry, it's basically all the Gulf states. So Iran is on one side of the, of the Strait of Hormuz, and then on the other side is the uae, is Saudi Arabia, is Kuwait, and these are traditionally allies of the U.S. so this map by Bloomberg has basically, this is how many US Troops are stationed in this area. And basically across from the ocean, across from Iran, Every Iran, excuse me, every country basically has a ton of U.S. stationed troops. And so Iran has been shooting missiles back and hitting a bunch of Them. I don't know if you guys saw this. Dubai, which is the world's busiest airport, is shut down right now.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Because of missiles. Right.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Or. Sorry, I think it was a drone that came down.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So these are countries that, you know, strongly depend on their reputation as being a tourist hub and a safe haven in this area. Right. Like, and if that collapses, this is like a big, big, big deal to them. And they are super pissed. So the Gulf states have collectively said. Man, there were some, like, vicious quotes about. They like, return to your senses. This is insane. There's already been this tension between Iran and the Gulf states for a while. Part of that is the religious side of Sunni versus Shiite, but part of it is the feeling of Iran is sponsoring terror in their region.

[B]

Yeah, I actually think.

[C]

But then you have, like. I mean, these are all monarchies. It's not like this is, you know, the people are rising up against Iran.

[A]

Can regular Joe Doug explain the Sunni versus Shia.

[C]

Yeah. When Jesus Christ died, should Paul be the successor or should all the disciples collectively decide on who the successor to Jesus Christ is?

[B]

He's so Doug.

[C]

So, Doug, this is what me and my trans wife study.

[B]

We study theology.

[C]

We want to have a balanced view on our Christian faith.

[A]

Between that and the cowboys, you have a full day.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I think this is the last part that we didn't really touch on. Is this outside of this, outside of the greater kind of military goals that you. I think there's a Middle Eastern dynamic at play where Iran is the regional enemy of a lot of these other more American aligned states and their potential oil exports in this strait are what is at threat.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So there is a support or at least a abstinence, abstainment on their end of a conflict like this because they want the security of that strait for their own interests. And they're already within this American sphere of influence.

[C]

Right. They're. I don't know. Stoked is probably not the right word. Like you don't want, you know. You know what, I'll actually say it. I'm not qualified to speak on what the Gulf states in the Middle east want to. But yeah, I mean, they're. You know, this tension has been high for a while.

[A]

They're not stoked.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That was the opposite. They're angry.

[C]

Well, I mean, yes, but from what I was reading about this specifically, they. There's already been tensions. They were two days before the strikes trying to get Iran to, like, agree to nuclear terms because they're saying they. Israel is going to Strike soon is like apparently two days. And then the US And Israel just go in anyway. And they were essentially too late. They've been trying to get this to calm down, but Iran kind of lashing out at everybody. And for example, having things hit the Dubai airport feels like a bad PR move. It doesn't feel very targeted. Maybe you're just going to piss off the entire region. And it's like, the point is like they have military capability still. They're being bombed badly, but they can act right now. And it feels like what they're doing in response is pissing off the entire region.

[B]

This is actually a good question because I don't know the answer. Is there, there's two, there's two Gulf State perspectives here, from my understanding is there's the version of, in the long run, you do not want to have Iran to have so much influence over this space that your country relies on so heavily. Right, right. But on the other hand, any conflict with Iran introduces this blockade on the strait that doesn't allow you to sell oil in the short term. So you don't really want that either.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You want some, ideally some sort of diplomatic solution that makes sure you never stop selling oil at all, but ultimately provides the protection of the whole strait and the interests of the strait from your perspective. And so there's, I think there's a conflict of long term versus short term goals for these states that I don't really have the answer to. I don't know how they feel about it. I don't know what the reaction is to this happening.

[A]

Well, the reaction is they're pissed. They've already put out statements. I mean, everybody that's been struck by an Iranian missile, all the nations, all. The gcc, the goal or the Gulf State, something they.

[C]

Gulf Cooperation Council.

[A]

Yeah, that's what it is. Go. They're condemning it, they're against it. I mean, I saw someone say that Trump might get bailed out because Iran has struck so many countries in its near region that they might help him. Like, I think France is thinking of getting involved because some of their assets got hit. Like, because they struck so broadly. Broadly and indiscriminately in the range of all military bases.

[C]

They've hit a bunch of other stuff. Support for this show comes from Tastytrade. We're gonna do this the opposite that we normally do. I'll start by just saying what tastytrade is, all right? You can trade stocks with low commissions. You can learn how to trade. You can access free educational courses. And now Aiden will make the joke about going to New York City and throwing paper in the air.

[B]

I'm still trying. Every week. Every week I commute to New York. I fly on a plane, seven hours and I bang on the front of

[C]

the New York Stock Exchange.

[B]

And everyone has told me to go to Tastytrade. But I think they're lying to me.

[A]

They're not. Your family's telling me they're worried about you. Your bank account is.

[B]

You burn all of your talking to my dad.

[C]

I just wanna be clear. You've done this. This isn't a single story that you've been saying. You're doing this every week again.

[B]

Let me trade stocks my way.

[A]

Lemonade today. It's a registered broker dealer and a member of Fedra, NFA and sipc.

[C]

Look, the founding fathers did want you to have the right to fly to New York and trade stocks your way, but it's not in the constitution for a reason.

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

Learn [e-mail] do that with Acrobat. More for this show comes from AG1.

[B]

So I've moved on. I've stopped pouring the packets into my mouth without mixing them in anything.

[A]

This is really.

[B]

So I want you to be proud of me.

[A]

This is big. I'm sorry.

[B]

And I admittedly, AG1 it has all these, like, listed, you know, vitamins, health supplements. Admittedly, I like the taste. That's why I've been drinking it. I've kind of liked the flavors they got. And as proof, I recently drank. This is real. I recently drank a competitor and hated it. And I was like, it doesn't taste like AG1. And I've. And I've gone back. I've returned to the citrus, specifically the citrus flavor. That is the one I like the best, admittedly.

[C]

So you were able to resist your, like, corporate capitalist, vacuous desire for money and say no to that one?

[B]

Yeah. It's only about taste.

[C]

Should we salute him for being I appreciate your value.

[B]

You could go to drink ag1.com lemonade to get an ag1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 for free in your ag1 welcome kit with your first ag1 subscription. Order only while supplies last. That's drinkag1.com lemonade. And if they run out of supplies, they'll send you a car. You gotta put that in.

[C]

I don't know.

[A]

If we put that in.

[D]

Put that in. That's a guarantee.

[B]

Put it in.

[C]

Disclaimer that is not true.

[B]

Well, you know what would have cleaned up this whole operation? If the Department of War had access to claude.

[A]

It's funny, as they did, yeah, they

[C]

did have access to claude.

[A]

So this was. CLAUDE was still being used. After you go, quick primer. A bunch of AI conflict Gemini OpenAI Claude. The Pentagon signed deals with all three, but they've been using Claude for the department of War for all their actions, including Venezuela and including what happened in Iran. And the leader of of Claude, Dario Amadi, said, we have two red lines that you can't cross. If you're going to use our product in the Department of War. You can't use it for autonomous weapons.

[C]

You can bring mine up, Perry, and

[A]

you can't use it for mass surveillance, domestic mass surveillance on American citizens. And those are our two headlines. Outside of that, we'll do everything. And I just want to be so clear that they were already working with the Pentagon. They were willing, they were like pretty flexible even on the definition of autonomous weapons. If you really look into it. It was like pretty flexible. They just had to have a human at the wheel to press the final button. And the Pentagon would not agree to these two deals. So CLAUDE held held firm and they were kicked out of the Pentagon contract and Trump declared them a woke radical left company and they are attempting to put the Defense Production act and cut them off in the supply chain. So nobody who works with the US Government can work with anthropic, which means they would have to lose their access to Google and Amazon and all the big tech companies. So pretty big, like Government Choice. That's. That's sort of caught up to today. Until recently, OpenAI signed a deal with the Pentagon to kind of step into that gap that was left behind. And I think that brings us to what's going on right now. Sam Altman received a lot of flack for this and I think we were going to discuss like the merits and the whatever of is that. Am I caught up? Is there anything else I want to say? Yeah.

[C]

So what I would like to do in this conversation, at the risk of people assuming that these points are my points in the YouTube comments is to let's make an argument for why or try to understand the argument for why Open AI did this or why there might be merit in the idea of a private tech company saying that to the Department of War, to the United States military. Hey, you can use our stuff for anything as long as it's legal. So looking into this substantially, it seems as though these. The specific language.

[A]

Pause for one second. I just want to just direct a cam.

[C]

One thing.

[A]

Doug has been like a. He's like the first person on this podcast to even introduce me to Dario Ahmadi's work, his writings about AI for peace.

[C]

We can even. I assume we're. Well, hopefully they're okay with it. Like, we were pitched OpenAI as a sponsor and I turned it down and said we would love Anthropic the most. And that was months, months ago.

[A]

All right, so you're coming at this perspective of you were just generally trying to understand this because I know the comments are going to. Gonna go crazy on it. I just want that to be understood. Yeah, clearly. I think, you know, we're all pretty much. Yeah, whatever. I would, I would like to hear this because I think here's what I'll say from a PR and marketing standpoint, just on a straight level, this is a huge fuck up from Sam. Yes, this has been clearly a ton of blowback. I've seen uninstalls. I uninstall ChatGPT. Yeah, I unsubscribed and I don't usually do that. I'm not really a big. I think most boycotts fail. They're mostly. This was easy enough for me to do and I felt strongly about the two red lines that they held firm on that I unsubscribed. And so clearly they've seen blowback. However, there's been a ton of writing by Sam Altman that I have not read yet. He did a lot. He had a long ama. They've done publishing. And maybe he has a better argument than I don't understand. I would. I would like to hear the best faith interpretation of why. Right.

[B]

Okay.

[D]

Right.

[C]

I mean, I'll spoil it. I unsubscribe from ChatGPT this morning and I pay $200 a month. I've done that for over a year. And I have been a hardcore user of ChatGPT and OpenAI for a time. Long, long time. So I'm. I'm super not a fan of this, but I think there's two interesting angles to this whole thing. One is, what specifically is different between what Anthropic was doing and what OpenAI just did? So again, to make this clear, Anthropic said, hey, we're happy with you to keep using our models in your military, but we have these two things that we don't want you to do. And then the Department of War said no, and they've. There's this big blow up and then Sam Altman swoops in, like, literally the next day and, and does the same contract, basically. And so Sam Altman has been saying, and OpenAI has been saying repeatedly, we have the same red lines. Initially that was said and it looked like Sam was like coming. They were all unite, right? Everybody's like, wow, the tech companies are all together.

[B]

That's kind of what I thought was, I saw that announcement come out and I thought, oh, is this the second domino in the rest of these large companies taking a step in this in the same direction because they're getting pressure internally from employees.

[A]

Yeah, Right.

[C]

So there was a brief moment where it seemed like, whoa. All of a sudden Anthropic is, is like pushing back against the military about their use of AI, and OpenAI is coming in as their biggest competitor and saying, we're not going to do it either. And then the next day, Open AI,

[A]

like, it was such a bad look on Thursday. It was like, he's stepping up. He's, he's, he's putting his money where his mouth is. He's joining Anthropic. I thought Google should join in. And if all the AI companies agree that that was a red line, it's gonna be badass. And then to sign the deal with the Pentagon the next day.

[C]

Yeah, a funny one per. If you pull this up, like, one of the reasons he keeps talking about why they did this so fast. The main reason this is from Sam Altman. The main reason for the rush was an attempt to de escalate matters at a time where it felt like things could get extremely hot. And it made me think, imagine that behind the scenes, Brandon, you and your wife have been having issues. And then you mentioned to me you're

[D]

like,

[C]

we're getting a divorce. And I'm like, I want to diffuse the situation. I start dating your wife.

[D]

I mean, that's.

[C]

I. It's not. I wouldn't use the word diffuse personally.

[A]

Yeah, it doesn't feel like, it doesn't

[C]

feel like it's diffusing that hard. But I, you know. Okay, so if you look at OpenAI's like, statements about this on paper, it appears that OpenAI has done the exact same thing as Anthropic. They have said, here are three red lines that guide our work with the Department of War. Again, this is OpenAI. The people who switch swooped in and took the wife number. One, no use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance. Two, no using it for direct autonomous weapon systems. And there's a third one that wasn't there with Anthropic, which is that it can't be used for high stakes automated decisions, which is sort of nebulous. So on the surface, OpenAI has come out and there are other. There are other people. If you pull this down so I can pull up other stuff. There are other people in the policy department of OpenAI who are saying explicitly, look, we have the same red lines. We have the same red lines. We are showing them repeatedly. So the question is sort of, do you trust OPEN AI to stick to these red lines? And why did they even get approval when supposedly they're doing the same thing? So the last 24 hours, Sam Altman's been doing damage control. And even in their main post, they updated it at the top. This is updated yesterday. Throughout our discussions, we. We've made it clear that we need to, that our tools are not gonna be used for X, Y and Z. Here's the new language in our contract, consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment. It shall not be used for domestic surveillance. It may not be used for these things. So OpenAI is repeatedly. They have multiple people on their team trying to say over and over, we're following the same things that that Dario did. And so then the question is, why the fuck did this blow up with Anthropic and not Open AI? So essentially, people are speculating because we don't have the contract. You mentioned the sort of leaks. So some of the criticism, if you pull this back down, Perry maggots stuff

[A]

about the leaks, do you want to.

[C]

Yeah, go ahead with the leaks.

[A]

So, you know, the leaks basically make it clear that the OpenAI contract is just a lot softer than the one Anthropic was demanding, which is basically saying that, like you like. It's from the point of OpenAI, you, the Pentagon, have to follow all the laws of the United States and you have to follow your own directives and then point to some directives, like directives against automatic surveillance. The problem is the Pentagon has the capability to change those whenever they want.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

While Anthropic was saying, we don't care what your rules are, we won't let our product be used for these two things, we will stop that.

[C]

A different way to phrase this is anthropic said we have these two values that we care about. We don't want you using it. OpenAI has said we have these two values we care about, but as long as it's legal, it's okay.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So that it's a slight difference where OpenAI has stated, look, as long as it's legal, it's cool, but look, it has to be legal. But that's slightly different. On top of that, Sarah Shocker, who previously led OpenAI's geopolitics team, there's a lot of modifying words that are in the sentences that the OpenAI spokespeople are giving. The use of the word unconstrained, they're saying you can't use unconstrained surveillance or personal data. The use of the word generalized or open ended, that's not complete prohibition. There's a law expert, Jessica yeah wrote there's a tension at the heart of this agreement with OpenAI and the government. If the safety stacks, if the safety of OpenAI blocks a lawful use, which provision is in control? Does the military then get to take over the to put this differently, OpenAI is saying, hey, internally, as part of their damage control, we're going to have all of these safety measures to make sure this stuff isn't used. But if they've signed a contract that says the government can use it for whatever they want, as long as it's lawful, the government can come in and just say, you need to shut those down because what we're doing still follows the law. And then there's many people who have been making the argument that Trump and Hegseth this is from the New York Times, Maureen Dowd have have shown contempt for the law when it gets in the way of their whims and assumptions. This from James o', Donnell, an MIT Technology review. An assumption that federal agencies won't break the law is little assurance to anyone who remembers these surveillance practices exposed by Edward Snowden. And so I think there's a strong,

[A]

there's a great Dario interview that was a few weeks ago before all this blow up where he was talking about how theoretically, perfectly legally, right now you could, you know, public spaces are free to record. You're allowed to record public spaces. But prior to the development of AI, there's no way you could record all that and have any meaningful use of their. It's just too much data. You couldn't possibly sift through it but because of AI, he's like, well, theoretically, you could record every public space, track every conversation and everything, tag it. I would collate it and give you a perfect map of what everyone's saying. You could find opposition political opponent. You could do everything. And he's like, that would be technically legal under the Constitution, but it would be a mockery of the Fourth Amendment. And so that's the type of thing where if he's taking a stand, it means something because he's saying that even if it were legal technically, I would not feel comfortable doing it. And so that's the area where.

[C]

And that leads to the next part, which is the hard thing. Aiden, this is where you're going to shine. The question, and I think the bigger philosophical question that is worth asking, is if we go on the assumption that these AI technologies are an incredibly powerful new weapon, which most people would agree with, it literally was just used as part of the Iran invasion. It's being used by the government constantly. It's becoming more powerful. If you agree with that, imagine it is like a nuclear weapon. Ben Thompson wrote about this in Strachery and basically says if, Imagine this hypothetical, if nukes were developed by a private company and not the government, and then that private company sought to dictate terms to the US Military about how and when the nukes could be used, the US Would be in a position to destroy that company or take over control. That essentially there are some technologies that are so fundamentally powerful, that are so fundamentally related to a government's ability to dictate power in the world that they cannot be in control by a private entity.

[B]

This is, this is low key. The plot of Civil War, the Marvel movie.

[A]

That's the most Zoomer shit you could have said in that moment of all time.

[C]

I know you can start this. Feel free.

[B]

King me off the pod. Feel free to give me a lock.

[A]

Feel free to kill me.

[B]

Because my Zoomer mind can only contextualize things.

[C]

Who are you rooting for?

[A]

I think the Straight of Horus reminds me of I, Carly, in a way that's true.

[B]

It is kind of. It's like when Freddy was thinking about leaving the show, right?

[C]

Do you want Jerry Jones to have total ownership of the cowboys, or should the government take control?

[B]

No, I've derailed. I know I've derailed, but this is a good. No, no.

[C]

So, yeah, I think this is a good example. I think this is the more interesting conversation here, which is I, I. It's real fucking easy to look at our current administration and what they're doing and going, I don't want our tech companies to be supporting, with no limits, this particular administration doing whatever they want with this AI, particularly when they've shown a willingness to abandon the law repeatedly. And actually multiple administrations do this, as Snowden showed.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And then the question is, do we want unelected CEOs to have control and decision making over technologies that increasingly are going to become maybe as powerful as nukes? I. I like what has happened.

[A]

There's one. Imagine it's not nukes. Imagine it's. You're a. You're a hobbyist drone company.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Okay. And I make cool drones you can take photography with. And then you find out that your drones are being purged by the military and used to kill people.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You should have the right to say, I don't want to sell you my drones for that purpose. That's if it's not a nuclear technology, if it's a regular technology, the idea that the government should be able to punish that company, destroy them financially, try to isolate them from their. It's an American company because you're Captain America. Because they don't want it to be used for war is crazy. I think that. But the second thing is that if it is a fundamental technology, the specifics of the red lines matter, because these red lines are not meaningfully constraining the ability of the US Military to use this to defend itself or for war. Like, if you say that we need mass domestic surveillance or we're going to fall behind China, or we need autonomous drones, we're going to fall by China. You better make that case pretty strong the American public, because I don't think, like, that's. These are not things that you need to have the power over. Like, it's not like, it's like, if the nuke company said you couldn't use it to nuke Chicago, you can use it for military, but you can't nuke Chicago. And it's like, we need all purposes. We need, we need every.

[C]

Okay, I will make the counter argument if you. I think it's. It's so easy in this context in that example, because the current government is pretty unlikable to the average person. But in the case of national security, the idea that the US And I want to be really clear as a reminder here, the democratically elected representative should be able to decide what to do with America's most powerful technology. That is the question. Ultimately, I love. I mean, love is a strong word. I strongly like Dario Amade in General and really like what is crazy? What I want him to kiss him. I desire.

[A]

That's the fan fiction he's been writing. Dude, he's got drawing little doodles of you and Dario.

[C]

Yeah, but it's just.

[B]

Imagine this scenario is different Dario and it's Iron Man.

[C]

What if Sam Altman is. If he's the company that comes up with AGI and we're like, okay, he should be the one to be in control of it. I think it is, I think it is a little worrying to imagine that tech CEOs have control of this increasingly powerful, extremely potent technology and that the democratically elected government ultimately can't use it for the. What it determines to be as national security.

[B]

Here's, here's the, here's my, my actual analysis.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

The Aidan's Aiden, 28, almost 29 year old analysis.

[A]

The greatest thing before analysis to say that you're all, I'm 28 and a half.

[B]

Keep in mind if I go back three pages in this notebook, it's about throwing smokes on Mirage. But there's no simple answer of like this example or analogy needs to be the fixed framework for these things when the stakes are so high. I think the idealistic scenario is you have like a government and institutions that you have a deep enough trust in to do the correct thing that their regulations of. And decisions over all of these things are trusted enough that when they step in.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And they are and they are like oh I. We do want to like nationalize or control this asset because of the danger it represents. The bulk of your society is lock in step with that decision because they believe in the institutions they are a part of. But we are at this time where everything is so polarized and a lot of people have lost faith in these institutions or the institutions have deservably lost credit through their actions over the last decades. Or we believe these institutions are so corrupt that we're. No, like eventually you have to be the soldier who refuses orders. Right. And anthropic is drawing that line in the sand. Like if you, if I'm. If I'm a part of the military and I'm given a mission or a goal and I'm a patriot and I believe in the country and I love my country. I don't mean the US specifically, I mean like a broad, just a hypothetical country. Right. But eventually I have some sort of moral compass that and my, the my boss or my country is asking me to do something I don't believe in anymore. I don't think that is the correct thing anymore. You have to stand up and push back against it. And there's no fixed framework here that just says whether this is okay or isn't okay because of the uncertainty of the stakes of the situation. And I ultimately think Anthropic is drawing a line that I think is appropriate because I don't have faith in the apparatus right now to make the right call.

[C]

That's a great point.

[B]

But I wish ideally the goal of government would to have the trust of the society to be able to make that decision. That's like the ideal scenario.

[C]

Yeah, no, that's a great point. I think, you know, there's many people in the either right wing tech, for example, Palmer Lucky we don't need to get into his argument who are basically just saying that over and over the government, the military should be, should be the one to decide it. And that is one of the key points that Sam Altman keeps coming back to as he is doing damage control right now. Like on these Twitter AMAs he keeps saying, I just firmly believe that the democratically elected military should have primary say of how this stuff should be used and not a private tech CEO. And I think you're, you're right that it is different in the time where we see the laws being bent repeatedly by a government that we've lost trust in.

[A]

Well, we're talking specifically about like if this was more nebulous, but everyone involved is so specific about what red lines we're talking about about. So it's just tough to make the case that like they need the capability for domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons.

[C]

I mean that's why it's, it just keeps going up to the philosophical ones.

[A]

Yeah, the philosophical ones, like they've used an example multiple times in these groups where they're like, what if there's a missile coming out of America and we need to decide quickly and we're gonna have to get an approval from a CEO of a tech company before the military does something. But like Dario and Anthropic have come out and said first of all, for anything related to that, we are everything. We're. We're 100%. That's not what, that's not our red line and would never get in our way and we would give full access. And it's so, it's just like, it's tough to. When you try to expand it, it seems like you're trying to obfuscate. And in Sam Altman's case, what is frustrating for me as someone who was a JGPT paying customer and has now canceled. It's like it's very obvious that there is a financial benefit to you that is being ignored.

[C]

Yes. Not only is there the obvious financial benefit of OpenAI is now going to get money from the government.

[B]

Right.

[C]

I Forget if it's 200 or $300 million. I think 300. The anthropic had a contract with the government. It's actually not that like death, that's not that much of a death knell for them to lose. They were at like 9 billion in revenue last year. So in theory Anthropic is going to be okay. And right now Claude is blowing up and ChatGPT is losing all these subscriptions. Right. But here's another one that I was thinking about. Our administration, bless their hearts, loves to pick individual companies and be corrupt. And so, so if you, if you are OpenAI, where there's many reports that they're starting to have some existential worries about finances, right. And you embed yourself in the United States military and you cozy up and you show super willingness to work with Hegseth and Trump and all this stuff, right. In two years, if they do go bankrupt, the United States cannot let them die. This is like, if you consider it from his perspective, many people have been saying OpenAI is increasingly looking weak and vulnerable. This is the most brilliant self preservation tactic ever. The government becoming dependent on your AI models is not going to let you die.

[B]

The Intel Strat. It's kind of the Intel Strat, right?

[C]

No, but like way, way more. There's a difference between the US government being like, we need intel to make chips for us. Please make a factory and our military doesn't function if your code turns off, if your servers turn off. That is crazy different. Right?

[A]

So I see, I do see how from a purely calculus perspective, how that could work for Sam Altman. I do think it's funny though that that argument is tied with, with Rubio going out there and saying we had to strike because Israel is going to strike as like two things that are like fundamentally designed to be off putting to the public. You're trying to convince the idea that you're going to tell the public we have to do this deal because we might go bankrupt and we need a government bailout. It's like, you know, like these things would make people even more angry than already are at these companies because it is so anti the interest of the consumer as the public. We don't care if Sam Altman can't make a profitable business and we Certainly don't want him to embed in the Pentagon so that we can one day bail them out if they're, you know. Yeah, but I understand that is probably a smart move on his part if he thinks that's existential. But on the flip side, I don't think he expected how many unsubscribes Chad GPT would get from this. Like, he clearly is panicking a little bit over, you know, there was like a 235% increase in uninstalls. They lost the number one spot on the App Store. And that is like a big source of OpenAI revenue which they need to grow. So if their revenue falls, but they have this embedded in the government thing, they might have traded one risk for another and who knows if it'll work out.

[C]

Fair. Fair.

[A]

Which brings us.

[C]

Well, I'll just, you know, I'll just give my. Again, my conclusion, to be clear. I think this fucking sucks and is a huge bummer and would have been an opportunity for the AI companies to show that they're going to like really put hard lines on these more moral concepts and put accountability to a government that people don't trust, as you were saying. And that didn't happen. And that's super, super fucking disappointing to me. And I'm going to try to act with my wallet.

[B]

Acting with your wallet is a huge thing. We did a remote interview with Scott Galloway, who is leading this resistant unsubscribe movement right now, which is primarily about how consumers forget that their spending power is one of the primary ways to like wield influence. And if you take your money away from these companies en masse, it's, it's a way to put a lot of pressure on them. And I think this links well into what we're talking about. We ask him a handful of questions related to this topic right now, as well as a few other things. So we'll get into that interview.

[C]

It starts a little slow, but then we start talking about condoms. So don't worry, it gets going.

[B]

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[A]

All right, perfect. Hey, Scott, Thanks. Welcome. Welcome to Lennate Stand. Thanks for coming on.

[D]

Thanks for having me, guys.

[A]

Appreciate it. You know, we have a little bit of a history, you and I, in that. I took your section 4 brand strategy class when I was at Nvidia and now I'm a podcaster. So I don't think it actually worked too well for me.

[C]

He actually declined in his career.

[D]

You know, I think it was a super smart move to leave Nvidia. They haven't done very well, so well done.

[B]

Yeah, now that I think about that.

[A]

Now that I think about that, what a genius plan. I'm with you guys. Anyway, there's a lot of things we want to talk to you about, but I think the prime opener is your resist and unsubscribe movement because there's been such a galvanizing of it around what's going on with OpenAI and the Pentagon. I don't know if you have any thoughts on how that's added kerosene to what you've been pushing for.

[D]

Yeah, well, first off, when you have let me back up. The US market has experienced multiple expansion since 2008. And it's almost impossible to be wrong when you're a stock in the midst of a market multiple expansion. So since 2000, when the BRICs were kind of in vogue, and then they become very out of vogue, if you're a stock in Latin America, you could double your earnings and your stock was probably going to go down over 10 years because they experienced massive multiple contraction as capital fled from almost every market into the US and if you look at what's happened in the last 12 months in the US, while it feels good to be up 14% on a dollar adjusted basis, we're the 21st best performing market out of 23, which means we're the third worst. And I think I will get to the point. I think one of the reasons our market is underperforming is that our multiples are traditionally greater or richer. PE multiples, a function of a few things. Risk, aggressive culture, incredible IP university research, great entrepreneurs, but also incredibly deep pools of capital because people are Confident when they invest in a company, they're going to understand the rules by which that company plays under. And when governments start intervening and saying, oh, intel, you're a winner, I'm betting on you. Oh, anthropic, you're a loser. The world's largest customer of the US Government is going to go after you and persecute you. Capital leaves that market because they don't know the risk of regulatory punitive behavior goes up. So I think this is just terrible for the markets. I also think it reveals Sam Altman is, you know, doesn't. He doesn't acquit himself. Well, he said he wasn't going to porn, said he was going to have advertising. You know, he's gone back on both those things. And I think, actually, Dario, I don't know if you saw the interview on cbs. It sort of starched his hat white and is setting up sort of a good cop, bad cop situation.

[B]

I'm wondering from what you just described, like, if people become increasingly wary of investing in American companies because of the actions that are being taken, or specifically American AI companies, Do you. Is there, is there really another market or place where that money is going to start to move to right now? Because it doesn't. Or is this just mean a lack of investment broadly? Like, if I'm an investor who has enough money to look at these American AI companies, am I fleeing to some other AI market because I'm not going to go and invest in China, which has like stricter capital controls or something like that?

[D]

I think it's already happening. So our earnings, the, the earnings are not down, but you're seeing basically a contraction. I think the US Is becoming less investable is the bottom line. And that is if I invested in the private markets in anthropic and I woke up and I found out that the world's largest customers decided they don't like the company. I think I'm less likely to invest in US Companies. So I think it doesn't happen overnight. But I think Americans take for granted how strong a magnet for capital, the rule of laws and systemic laws that, I mean, if you're underal and you want to apply Silicon Valley ethos and technology to making weapons to kill people, you're allowed to do that. And the Defense Department can buy them or not buy them. If you're a Palantir and you want to go to work with the Israeli government, as long as it's to clear security clearances and help Israel track down terrorists, you're allowed to do that and so is any other company. So a set of rules that everyone has to play by such that investors know who they're waking up next to, I think is hugely impactful. So I think these types of one off decisions feel much more like an autocracy. And my experience, I'm an investor in a couple Chinese companies and I'm an experience in a couple investor in a couple companies in the Gulf. These are autocracies, but they generally speaking have pretty strong respect for universal systemic guidelines that apply equally to all companies because they want to attract capital to their markets. So I think this is just a. I think we're all going to be less wealthy in the US if they continue to decide that these companies can be the subject of political retribution.

[A]

I mean there's a lot to unpack there. There's two directions we could go. I mean, and it brings me to talking about what's going on with paramount and the U.S. government. But also you talked about starching his hat white. Isn't there an argument to be made that this has been a huge win for Anthropic and Claude? I mean they hit number one on the App Store. This may not hurt their business in any measurable way. Given the word of mouth spread.

[D]

I think I've been saying for a year there was a commercial opportunity for a company to stand up and say demonizing immigrants, shooting mothers in the face, case killing ICU nurses, taking care of veterans. We're not down with this. We think the values that made this company amazing. I thought the opportunity was for Nike to put out a very elegant commercial talking about how many immigrants have become US citizens and won gold medals for us. And that was my advice to the CEO of the company. They did not take that advice. It ends up that Dario has become kind of the hero we didn't know we needed. And I think that over the short term he's going to pay a pretty severe price and over the medium and the long term it's going to be a great move for them. I think people are. And part of the resist and unsubscribe movement is to send a signal to consumers that the most radical act in a capitalist society is non participation specifically to withhold your spending. If you look at the greatest political action in terms of the size of the action and the crispness in the last 50 years. It was in Q1 of 2020 when we literally flushed trillions of dollars into the market and came up with new regulations, new laws, new guidelines. And it wasn't because in my View, tens of thousands of people were dying from COVID it was because GDP crashed 31%. So I think that people are ready to. And this is where I'm headed with the resist and unsubscribe movement. I'm going to encourage people to really give anthropic a hard look for their paid and unpaid usage of an AI and send a strong message to OpenAI, which is now the largest funder or contributor to the Trump administration that we are noticing and we will vote with our dollars.

[A]

What do you think makes this different? Because in the past, I would say a lot of boycotts are a lot of social media talk and buzz, but no real concrete action. But it does feel like this is making it like the movement of Claude on the App Store. The words I'm hearing from people in my life, people are canceling their OpenAI subscriptions. I guess I'm wondering why you felt you got so much traction for this reason of subscribe and for what's happening with OpenAI in general. What makes it different?

[D]

Well, I think you're being generous. The two objectives were one, to send a signal to consumers that they had a weapon hiding in plain sight. And I think we achieved that. We've had a lot of people talk about a ton of media coverage. The second was incentives. And what I mean by that is, unfortunately, all the incentives are for Big Tech. CEOs have been pointed one way. Come to the White House, give to my campaign, pay for me to tear down the east wing, don't say anything about what's going on, even if you disagree with it, and I'll figure out a way for you to not be subject to tariffs or you'll stay out of my crosshairs.

[C]

Right?

[D]

And the general, and I hear from a lot of these guys, the general strategy has been I have or excuse, I have an obligation to shareholders. I just got to stay out of his way and wait him out. And I think the worm is turned. And I think that Dario correctly has sensed that there's a commercial opportunity to be seen as the good guy that is willing to stand up and say, I've had it. Now, in terms of having become sort of a minor student in protest, the majority of economic strikes do not work. The most famous one is the Alabama bus strike. Excuse me, Montgomery bus strike. Now, what people get wrong about that is they attribute the success to this cinematic moment where a courageous woman refused to give up her seat. What actually happened was a young Reverend Martin Luther King organized an 11 month long carpooling effort with thousands of carpools. It was costing the municipal bus system a quarter of a million dollars a month in rider fares. And then after 11 months, they acquiesced and decided to desegregate the bus system. So the ones that work, whether it's South Africa or the Disney movement, are usually sustained and take a while. The majority are not successful. So I'm trying to learn from the ones that are successful. But it's a build, it's a slow build, and it's usually economic.

[B]

What's the example you gave the Disney movement?

[D]

Well, Disney basically canceled Kimmel. And the general belief was that they did it under pressure from the FTC chairman that Trump had weaponized to say, I don't like this show, which is anti Trump. So we're going to, we want you to take Kimmel off the air. And what happened was there was kind of a consumer boycott where people started unsubscribing from Disney. And what is interesting is when they actually put Kimmel back on the air, the level of unsubscribes was waning, but some of the public shaming and a real problem in terms of morale with their own customer base, they decided to put them back on the air. So there are examples of when and where it works, but there's a lot more that are more cinematic than they are effective.

[C]

I'm curious how you identify the services and companies that you feel like particularly should be targeted in this protest movement that you're organizing, because so many particularly large tech companies have so much overlapping stuff. Ultimately, while I like anthropic, there are also concerns about stuff that they do. I think you can kind of levy that at basically any tech company. So I'm curious how. I think it's very easy for the average person to go, whatever. I'll just use the things that are easy for me. And I'm not going to personally go in and figure out the corporate background of every single one of these. How do you distinguish that and pick which ones should rise above the crop?

[D]

It's a really good question. It's probably the correct question. And that is so far. What I did was I took all of Big Tech and I put all of the links to make it easy to unsubscribe. And I said, you decide if you think Uber is better or worse than Lyft. You describe where. You decide which streaming media platforms you're comfortable with. You decide which LLM you're down with or not down with. And a lot of it was, look, you can save some money here at&T is providing infrastructure for ice and communications technology. When I went on to unsubscribe from AT&T and switched to Noble Mobile, I found that I had four contracts with AT&T, three of which were for iPads and Blackberries that have been in landfills for 10 years. I don't think people realize how much money, how. How easy it is. These companies make it automated such that that money comes out of your account every month. So one of the features I liked about the initial stage of the movement was that I don't want to too much be an arbiter of what you should or should not do when you unsubscribe, when you resubscribe. I'm not going to tell a single mother to cancel Amazon prime and Netflix because she needs cheap calories and cheap entertainment for her family. So I put up all of the subscription unsubscribe links for subscriptions for big tech, most of whom I believe are enabling or quite frankly, staying quiet. And then what I call the blast zone, and that is companies directly working with ice, whether it's Hilton or I think it was Enterprise Rent a car or AT&T. And then you decide. Now what I'm thinking about doing, quite frankly, is taking on, I don't know, the unfair, pretentious role of being an arbiter and saying, all right, in March, we're going to focus on unsubscribing from OpenAI, who seems to show, in my opinion, fairly aggressive behavior around supporting an administration's policies that you may or may not agree with. But I've struggled with not wanting to be the arbiter, if you will, and just give people the option and let them know they have a weapon hiding in plain sight. But we are thinking about evolving to a more specific recommendation. We'll still leave the side up in terms of all the different companies, but it's a judgment call and I don't take it lightly. And I respect people who say, look, I don't need you to be the arbiter of who's good and who's bad. I'm just going to say, look, I think that Anthropic, for the purposes of, if you like me, believe that some of the behavior of ICE is really does not, does not align with American values, that it appears to me that anthropic is taking a stand and OpenAI is enabling it. And to bring bring attention to that

[C]

issue, if I could offer a steel man to kind of get your thoughts against. So one argument for let's say a company like YouTube, which we are, you know, you're probably watching this on right now, viewer.

[D]

Yep.

[C]

I think it be easy, particularly after the, the Biden era, for a company to, or at least tempting in a self serving way to say we're not going to get involved with politics. The United States people decided via democracy what the administration would be and we're going to respect that. And it's become much more easy to be apolitical. I'm just curious, like what is the argument against that for the average, let's say moderate person who's sort of going, well, I don't like what Trump's doing but ultimately he'll be voted out in X years or at least the people should decide, yeah, how would a company navigate, how would the average person think about that?

[D]

So I've been on seven public company boards and whenever the issue of politics comes up, I basically, my advice is stay away from it. It don't make political statements, don't take political positions, sell. I was on the board of Panera Urban Outfitters. I'm like, sell your Cobb salad sandwich and chenille pillows to anybody who wants them and just stay out of politics. And I still feel like mostly that is the right move. But politics have weaponized business and I think when the Pentagon decides, oh, we're not going to buy your products because we don't like the way you're behaving and it has nothing to do with the law, then I think essentially the Trump administration has dragged companies and to a certain extent consumers into politics. But it's up to you if you decide. I love that OpenAI is pro Trump and is doing this and I'm going to subscribe twice. That is your prerogative. But I think there's a lot of people out there who are very anxious about what's going on here, myself included. And I've decided action absorbs anxiety and I want to do more than just sit on my keyboard or hector into a mic and try and create a campaign that gave people the option and made it easy for them to unsubscribe and basically tell them you don't realize how powerful a weapon you have with your consumer. Spend T Mobile was projected to sign up 990,000 subscribers in Q1. They signed up 962, they missed by 30,000 and they lost 13 billion in market cap. And the only time Trump has backed away from discussions like annex in Greenland or Chinese tariffs which threw the small and medium sized business market into a bit of A tizzy is when the bond market or the S and P has fallen. He doesn't seem moved by protests or even the Supreme Court sometimes are definitely not co equal branches of government. He could give a shit what Congress thinks, whether it's declaring war or tariffs. So what I'm saying is, look, you make the decisions you want. These are my views. But be cognizant of the fact that you have a very serious bazooka in your wallet and that These companies control 40% of the S and P. The President listens to these CEOs and to the markets, and that this is arguably the weapon that's been hiding in plain sight. But the strategy you're talking about is the one that companies have largely adopted, and that is just stay out of his way. I get text messages from these guys and they're all dudes. I know most of them saying, oh, I hate myself and I hate being here and I'm at the White House and oh, this is awful. I'm like, well, we hate you too. And crying to people privately. Crying to people privately does nobody any fucking good. It's like all these former congresspeople who go on Bill Maher after they've stepped down and all of a sudden they start talking real talk. It's like, well, okay, you being very forthright about your views on issues doesn't do us a lot of good. Once you're out of power, you're out of power.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's useless.

[C]

Wait, when you say they hate being there, are you saying it's like tech leaders going to Washington or congresspeople being there, having to. What part of that are they struggling with?

[D]

Tech CEOs being show ponied at the White House, texting podcasters that they hate themselves and the podcast are writing back, I hate you too. And what you're saying to me does nobody any good.

[C]

Yeah. Have you followed all in at all that podcast?

[D]

I don't. I see occasional, I see occasionally clips of it on TikTok, but I don't listen to it.

[C]

Yeah, I followed it a lot because it was very tech and business focused a couple years ago and I've sort of moved out of that particular space. But they, you know, David Sacks is one of their co hosts in the White House running AI policy and they just have this non stop interview series with everybody in the White House doing like little showcases with. For all the tech CEOs. It's become, become pretty masturbatory, if you will.

[D]

Yeah, well, it's basically they've I mean, so pivot is. Pivot used to be considered sort of the left version of all in. An all in was considered the right version. But I find my understanding is that now that David Sacks is part of the administration that it's sort of full time. I don't know, I don't want to call it propaganda, but it's very, very right leaning.

[C]

Yeah, he's basically doing PR for the White House on every episode.

[D]

Yeah, it feels like a paid podcast. That's kind of the front facing podcast. And maybe those guys believe. But one of the guys is supposed to be the Democrat and he reminds me of. I forget what her name was. Meghan McCain. Basically the view used to bring on a screechy stupid Republican to kind of make their points for them. And I feel like the Democratic. Whenever I've seen that the. But I feel like the Democratic viewpoint is so poorly made, it just kind of makes the Republican or the White House point for them.

[A]

You mentioned that's my role on this

[D]

show, to make the other two's points seem really strong.

[C]

Yeah, I come in and just kind of spout some shit that I read off Twitter and then they get to look great and smart.

[D]

You should see what people say about me when they're talking about Kara. Like literally our comments are like, oh my God, I love Kara. I love. Kara's a genius Scott Srank. Kara's a genius, Scott.

[C]

We carry the real burden here.

[A]

We make podcasts around us.

[C]

Look, what would you two be without me and Scott? I don't know.

[B]

Destitute. Destitute.

[A]

Anyways, you said a phrase that stuck with me. You said anxiety absorbs action or action absorbs anxiety.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And that stuck out to me because that is what I'm hearing from not just people our age, people younger in our audience where they just feel this incredible sense of anxiety, of no ability to have a control over their future or what's happening. They don't feel like they have. What's the word for it?

[B]

Agency.

[A]

Agency.

[D]

Agency.

[A]

They don't feel like they have agency. And so I wonder if that's part of why this is getting some traction. I just think people are. Maybe you disagree. I would love to hear. You can speak to these people directly, but that's what they feel. I guess the sense I get is that they feel they have. It's a clouded future and they don't have a lot of agency over where it goes.

[D]

Yeah. What do I do? I had what I call my last straw moment when Secretary Noem described Alex Preddy, an ICU nurse as a domestic terrorist, and that he was there brandishing a weapon with int of massacring federal agents. I just thought, fuck it. That's it. I want to do more than just bark into my fucking podcast. Mic. And I got my team together and said, how do we do this? I think I know the soft tissue. I think I understand the markets. And it just, quite frankly, feels really good to do something with other people. And I'll use a raw and cringy example. I coach a lot of young men. And about six weeks ago, this young man I've been coaching who struggles a little bit with depression and anxiety, called me, and he was so freaked out and so upset, and he said, I had sex with a woman who was unprotected. And I think I have an std, and I don't know what to do. And I'm like, brother, every man who has had sex has had unprotected sex. I'm like, it always starts with a condom. And every man who has ever had sex has been worried the next day that he caught an std. And every man is experiencing anxiety. You're experiencing. And this is what you do right now. You're calling. There are clinics all over the city. He's in. You're gonna make an appointment. And the moment you make an appointment, you're gonna feel better. And the moment you go in, you're gonna feel much better. And when you find out what's going on, and you're gonna find out that almost everything can be cleared up with antibiotics, the only thing you're gonna regret is how fucking upset you were. Action absorbs anxiety. Hang up with me right now. Make an appointment. Find out what's going on. And you're all quiet. I realize it's a cringey example, but the point is, when something's bothering you, hands down, you take action, right? You figure out what's going on, you get to the bottom of it, and at least you feel like you're addressing it. And this, for me, has been. I struggle in anger and depression, and I've always been able to disassociate from politics. And just lately, I find myself increasingly rattled and upset about what's going on in the US And I find, just for my own mental health, it feels great to do things with other people. And people are sending me all these screenshots, and it just feels really good. And if it helps, great. If it doesn't, you know, the way I see it is people in my generation, you Guys are younger than me. But if you're a white heterosexual male born in the 60s, basically what America's done for you is giving you unparalleled prosperity with the lowest taxes in history. I've never been called to serve. I've had unbelievable winds, typhoon like winds in my sails. I was raised by a single immigrant mother, lived and died as secretary. I now have my own fucking plane. And I'm not humble. I'm a fucking monster. I have tremendous grit and character. I work hard. It wouldn't have happened to me in Paraguay, it wouldn't have happened to me even in Canada, much less. I probably been in jail in China. So I have a debt, and I think any man my age who's registered, the blessings I've registered, has a debt to America. And I think this is our moment. And if you look at other moments in American history, whether it's civil wars, world wars, depressions, plagues, we have gotten through much darker moments because Americans have risen to the moment. And I want to be able to say I have a very strong sense of my own mortality at the end. I want to be able to answer the question, dad, what did you do in the war? And this isn't a huge commitment, but it's something, and quite frankly, it's more than I've done in a long time. So I want to be part of the resistance, I want to be part of the rebel force. And I want to say I did more than show all this virtue and keyboard courage that I actually risk public failure. I spent some time, I spent some money and tried to do something. Because I think all of us are going to be asked, I generally believe people are going to look back on this period as a, a pretty ugly period in American history. And I think we should all be ready to answer, what did you do?

[C]

That's a great answer. If I'm reading this correct, Trump started his term with a condom, but now it's off. And we all need to go to the clinic.

[B]

Yes.

[D]

We need to make appointments.

[C]

We gotta make appointments. No, sincerely though, that's a great answer.

[D]

We're the antibiotics.

[B]

I appreciate that perspective. I'm wondering, my introduction to you was the TED Talk that came out about two years ago now and where you talk about this shift in society, in the U.S. opportunity and wealth shifting away from young people and towards older people. And at the end of that, you list a number of things in different areas that you know that we could seek as long term solutions to this problem in the US And I was wondering A couple years out from that. Do you, do you still feel hopeful about the US turning around the situation for young people? Because we, we talk to our young viewers a lot and they do have this fear of the future. And I'm wondering, since you made something like that, do you see things changing and your with the action that you're choosing to take now, is this like a step in changing that course?

[D]

I hope so. I mean there's the resist and unsubscribe movement is more trying to send a signal to the present vis a vis the markets in big tech. What you're talking about. My ted talk in 2024 was called the War on the Young. And basically the way you could describe our government is a bunch of old people vote in even older people who vote themselves more money. And Washington has become a cross between the golden girls and the land of the dead. And effectively and old people vote. So you have every year the greatest transfer in wealth from young people who are 24% less wealthy. People under the age of 40 are 24% less wealthy than they were 40 years ago. To the wealthiest generation, $1.2 trillion in the form of Social Security to the wealthiest cohort in the history of the planet. And the average 70 year old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. Our tax code is essentially just a giant transfer of wealth from the young to the old. Two biggest tax deductions, mortgage interest rate and capital gains. Who owns homes and stocks? People my age. Who rents and makes their money from salary? People your age. We have decided that our tax code is meant to tilt and transfer capital from earners to owners, which is from the young to the old. So what do you know? 60% of 30 year olds used to have a kid, now it's 27%. It's because they don't like kids. No, it's because they can't afford them. So in sum, our tax code over the last 40 years going from 400 pages to 4,000, those 3,600 pages are basically there to fuck young people. One of two forms of debt that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy is student loan debt. So you come out of, you go to college, your parents think college. The answer, you're not cut out for college. Two thirds of kids never end up with a traditional liberal arts degree. But a nice lady in a pantsuit with a college logo behind you says, always invest in yourself here, sign here. So we can continue to rape and molest young people and charge them $72,000 a year. For a mediocre degree and a kid comes out sophomore year, decides to drop out, but they have 50, 60 grand in debt, which is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. If there is any form of debt that should be forgivable, shouldn't it be student loan debt? No, but we want to indenture a bunch of young people.

[A]

We're literally rising student loan defaults, like massively rising student loan defaults across the board. I think something has broken in this system that is not allowing people to make the payments on things.

[B]

I'm actually curious where you stand on the importance of post secondary education now as people realize the value proposition isn't really the same as it used to be. Because in that same presentation you're talking about how like I, this like 2.3 GPA student, like got into, still got into Berkeley after UCLA, still had all these opportunities that I was able to forge for myself. But this value proposition has clearly changed. So where do you stand on kind of the importance of college and young people's lives now?

[D]

College has never been more valuable. It's just not a very good value. Now what do I mean by that? If you had a drug that you could take for four years, every day you took it for four years. And by taking that drug for four years, it made you twice as likely to get married, twice as likely to stay married, half as likely to be obese, one third less likely to kill yourself, 40% less likely to kill someone else is the only way you'll ever probably be elected president. You'll make twice as much as your friend who just got a high school degree. You know, wouldn't you want to, would you want to hoard that drug? Would you want to make it just too inaccessible and too expensive? That is higher education. The problem is my industry has figured out a way through a rejectionist LVMH like structure where the admissions rate at UCLA goes from 74% to 9%, such that we have the pricing power to raise our prices faster than inflation. And we make the mistake of believing that academics such as myself are more noble than the rest of us. Every morning we wake up and ask ourselves the same question. How do I increase my compensation while decreasing my accountability? I know. Let's figure out a way to become LVMH and sequester artificially the supply of freshman seats such that I can raise costs faster than inflation. Dartmouth has an $8 billion endowment. They let in something like 1100 kids a year with a good Starbucks service in the middle of fucking nowhere. They could let in 11,000 and not sacrifice inequality. But no, they've decided they're Birkin bads, not public servants. Which means in my view, if you have an endowment over a billion dollars and you are not growing your freshman class size faster than population growth, you should lose your tax free status because you are in a luxury brand now. You're no longer a public servant, you're a hedge fund offering classes. So my industry is guilty of a lot of this now. Not everyone. There are a lot of universities doing God's work. Asu. Actually, the University of California is trying to expand the number of seats the Cal State.

[B]

You could have said any other fucking school.

[D]

Are you guys, Are you guys UC and Cal State?

[A]

Uc and I'm asu. That's crazy. You said that.

[B]

University, baby.

[C]

And then he's Michael wannabe. You see who didn't get in. So you saw Doug? Complimented him, shamed him.

[D]

I used to row against my Huskies. Anyways, dad, by the way, they used to kick our ass. They have a great have a great bout. But asu, Michael Crowe there, he said, why wouldn't I want to graduate 200,000 kids a year? And I get it. Harvard doesn't have to let in everyone, but should IT let in 5% of its applicants when it's sitting on an endowment? That's the GDP of Costa Rica. Come on guys, what's the point? It's like this is what happens in my University. At NYU, the dean stands up and says, we rejected 91% of our applicants this year. And you know what we do as faculty? We applaud. Which in my mind is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging that he or she turned away nine in 10 people that showed up last night. We're public servants. And I have an obligation because I was unremarkable. I barely got into college. I had to appeal. I got 11:30 on the SAT. I had a 3.1 GPA. I spent five years making bongs out of household items and learning every line from Planet of the Apes. Awesome. Graduated with a 2.27 GPA and Berkeley let me into business school. And you think, okay, that's weird. Well, and here's a flex when I'm going to make it. In the last seven years, I've given 20 million bucks to the University of California. So guess what? It's worked out for all of us. You know who doesn't need College? The top 1%. They have amazing educations, contacts, summer camped for EQ, incredible athletics through their sports leagues. And kids, I think it's great, they go to school. I'm sending my kid to college. But who needs college is unremarkable kids who might be remarkable and no institution can be the arbiter of greatness and an 18 year old. So the whole fucking shooting match is, okay, maybe you don't have your shit together, go to SMC and if you can show you can get your shit together and then you can transfer into UC Irvine or you can go to a good trade school instead. We've said no, let's identify a super class of the children of rich people or the freakishly remarkable and let's try and turn them into billionaires. We have fallen out of love with the unremarkable and the United States. And I'm a product of this. Used to love the unremarkable. Used to say, maybe there's a shot that someday you'll be remarkable. I always brag I'm a product of big government. I got assisted lunch, Pell grants, my mother accessed family planning, otherwise we would have been impoverished. I built all of my companies on taxpayer supported technology, specifically DARPA and the Internet. Immigrants built all of my companies. And the reason I'm here talking to you guys, all the pillars upon which my awesomeness exists is under attack right now. Everything's being attacked. So the Scott Galloway born 40 years later, I'd be lucky. If I'd be lucky. I'm a talented guy. I'd be the second best salesman at the local Subaru dealership making a decent living. I wouldn't be flying fucking private to the Vanity Fair Oscars show. So I have a debt. And if most people, especially white heterosexual males of my generation, really reverse engineer their success, they're going to find a lot of things were not their fault. And what's so obnoxious about a lot of men my age, especially in technology, especially some of the people you referenced earlier in this program is they just think they're so fucking awesome. And they don't want to credit the country, they don't want to credit social programs, investments other people have made in their future. Cal State, UC infrastructure, rule of law, government investments in technology, immigrants instead, they just think it's all them, that they're successful despite the us well, go up the western seaboard. I'm really ranting now. You get to Seattle, all the multi trillion dollar companies stop. You gotta go to Lululemon in Vancouver, you go all the way down, it stops in San Diego and you gotta go 6,000 kilometers to Mercado Libre. There's nothing more obnoxious than these fucking douchebags shitposting America, which is the very reason they're billionaires, not the second, the number two salesperson at Kia of Santa Monica. Anyways, that was a rant.

[C]

I love it.

[A]

I mean, yeah, you're hitting on a vein that is very common in our podcast, which is just feeling there's a bit of a. A generational struggle or a generational. You don't want to make it out to be a war, but it feels like. It just feels the deck is stacked. And it's. So it's interesting to hear you say that, because the exact opposite is what I'm hearing from younger people, from their parents, which is that, you know, you just need to do what I did. You just need to go show up with a resume printed out, hand it in, and, you know, like, things are clearly different even for me. I talked to people who are 10 years younger than me. I graduated into the tech market in 2014. It was a booming time. It was easy to find a job. People that are graduating Berkeley now with Peter Science degrees trying to. Trying to get into the market, it's way harder. It is just absolutely harder. And when you pretend that it isn't, it becomes either demoralizing or angry and anger inducing for them.

[D]

Yeah, when I got out.

[C]

Well, just to respect your time, Scott, we got like, one minute left, but.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Okay, final note.

[D]

When I got out of business school, I got offered a job at 100,000. I bought a home in San Francisco in Potrero Hill for 280,000, 2.8 times salary. This year, the graduates of HOSL make 200 grand. Big money. The average home costs 2.1 million. So it's gone from 2.8 to 10.1. Why? Because homeowners have done the same thing that graduates of university have done. They have weaponized the housing code, and they have made it harder and harder to build housing. Once you own a home, you become very concerned with traffic, and you start making it impossible to build new homes. So what are young people the primary means of getting ahead and building wealth and finding a mate? Education and housing. And the incumbents. My generation have decided, I know, let's make it really hard to get a degree or getting housing permits such that my assets go up in value. You have never seen a generation that is more selfish than the US Baby boomer generation. We think everyone paid it forward before us, whether it was storming the beaches in normandy or paying 60% tax rates in the 60s. 70s and 80s now we're like, fuck you. I got mine, you get yours. Well, guess what? They're coming for us. All this bullshit notion that young people are entitled. No, they're entitled to be enraged. It is bullshit. The theft that has gone on of old people robbing from young people. It needs to stop.

[A]

Doug Elway, thank you for coming on our show. Appreciate it.

[B]

Really appreciate it.

[C]

Thanks so much.

[D]

Thanks, guys.

[C]

Have a good one.

[B]

Great to meet you, Scott.

[A]

That was fun. That was fun. Interview with Scotty G. I've been, you know, I'm very familiar with that guy. Other than just taking his class. I used to read. He had a book, the Algebra of Happiness that was very, very formative for me in the early days of COVID We were all stuck at home when I was at Nvidia and I is what motivated me to start doing more YouTube videos about like I started the first marketing Monday after reading that book.

[C]

Oh, interesting.

[A]

It was interesting.

[B]

I did have a question. So one of the first questions that we asked or that I had asked him was about this idea of investment in AI in the US being shaky because of the things that are playing out right, right now. And I wanted to ask you both something and something I was trying to get at with him. Where do you think that investment will be redirected? Because the AI hype is still there. And that's why I have a hard time imagining a market better than the US's AI market, even with this big shakeup right now.

[A]

I don't know if got this across in the interview. Well, but what he's saying is factually true, which is that the US stock market as a whole has been dramatically underperforming. Latam, Japan.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Europe, like all of these other stock markets, all these big stock exchanges have on a adjusted basis the past year done better. Like Us is up 14, but they're up 20, 25.

[B]

That isn't necessarily driven by AI companies in those places.

[A]

No. Yeah.

[B]

Those markets, broadly.

[A]

I think I would push back on the idea that people are taking their AI money from America and putting it somewhere else because they can't really.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The, the, the Chinese ones are not investable in that way and there's nobody else. It's US and China and AI. So I guess that's a fair counterpoint. I don't know that.

[B]

I was just curious because it seems like it's too hot of a thing to like just stop investing in. Right. So if you were taking your money out, my first thought was like, where is that being redirected, but maybe it's just to other companies.

[A]

I mean, after what happened with Iran, you know, gold is back up to all time highs. People have been buying some bonds. Like, I think people are just getting out of these. You know, the idea that you could put $300 billion of investor money into something like anthropic and then maybe the government just blows it up. Like they. Yeah, like that scares people and so they move money. Something else. I don't think they're going to AI.

[B]

What did you think? So I, He, I mean, he was right. It was a little goofy. Maybe it was a little cringy. His example with the condom thing. I, I actually think that he has, he has something there in that, like action. Just action is what relieves anxiety basically. Like even doing something in the direction of giving yourself an answer just removes a lot of the tension and anxiety around anything.

[D]

If.

[C]

I don't know if society broadly is feeling upset about affordability or something. Go bomb Iran.

[B]

Take action.

[A]

Take action.

[B]

Take action.

[C]

Do something, you know, do.

[B]

Working at.

[A]

What are you.

[B]

What do you want me to do? I bombed Iran.

[C]

We've tried everything.

[A]

We just trumped. I tried every possible thing. I started a war in the Middle East. I killed protesters. Like what me.

[B]

And he said we take a couple darts, we throw them at a globe, we see which ideas stick, break things.

[C]

Love the Silicon Valley mantra. We move fast. We break an ayatollah.

[B]

I am curious because I enjoyed that discussion. Maybe it's. It's also off the back of. I have seen a lot of him speaking, but I would be very interested in having him on for 90 minutes at, on an actual episode and talking to him about just, just some other stuff.

[C]

I don't think we're cool enough for that.

[A]

We'll get there.

[B]

We could. What? He's on the same network.

[A]

He shouted out both of our schools, so we're.

[D]

Yeah, that's true.

[B]

Yeah. And then he made an offhand comment about the Huskies, my team. And. Oh, he doesn't like me.

[A]

Me.

[C]

I. Yeah. Well, I guess maybe we shouldn't say where he was, but. Yeah, I know it'd be great. I mean, I just. He watching his TED talk is what got me into my boomer hating phase.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And he's just. And he got into that again at the end and I just. I continue. I mean, we're gonna.

[A]

No, it's always good to get a nice boomer age trader. Yeah. I love seeing a boomer flip. I'm trying to flip as many boomers as I can. Bro. We got it. We need him in the war.

[C]

I mean he's like not. He's 61. This is Gen X right?

[A]

Is he. He's born in 64. Isn't the last year a boomer? Maybe he's the very oldest anyway on

[C]

the, on the sort of inside. But you know, I think we are planning on doing a episode focusing on this more of just how lopsided society is in terms of how it's focusing. And the more I've learned about it, the more I've just been baffled. Also I googled Scott Galloway age and it's showing me pictures. I'm shirtless for some reason. Maybe join the, join the Patreon and we're going to take a deep dive

[A]

doing the Putin thing where you got to be sure.

[C]

Oh my God, he was jacked.

[B]

Maybe this is just because day after. But one thing I thought is we didn't summarize. He didn't ask us to plug this either. But his resist and unsubscribe movement resistant unsubscribe.com if you want to see a summary of it. But it's this idea of unsubscribing from a variety of tech companies to put pressure on them primarily because of their associations and willing willingness to work with DHS or ICE at, at this current time. And I think it's if you're interested in that. I, I don't know if he summarized that like through the questions that we had asked, but I think it's worth checking out. But if you enjoyed that interview, you know, give us some, some thoughts. We're playing around with like these mid episode interviews still. And if you want to join us for an additional 60 minutes every week you can check out patreon.com live lemonade stand.

[C]

This week we're gonna be doing a tier list on all of Scott Galloway's shirtless, shirtless pictures.

[B]

Dude, he's jacked.

[C]

It's probably several hours straight of just looking at, just looking at this.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So that's pay up. Thanks guys for watching.

[C]

Thanks everybody.

[A]

See you next week. Appreciate you.

[B]

Bye.

[C]

Support for this show comes from tastytrade

[A]

and I get it.

[C]

This is the post roll. The reason you're listening to this is because you're asleep.

[B]

Can't reach for your phone.

[A]

Quiet. We're going to incept your dreams though.

[B]

And like you want to go to Tasty Trade

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Calm. You can learn how to all the jargon. It's.

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It's just find it within your dream but if careful if you die on Tastytrade in your dream, you die in real life.

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You're falling.

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You're go to tastytrade.com lemonade today to

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