World News But It Gets Increasingly More Interesting | Ep.054 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Summary

Lemonade Stand Ep. 054: World News, But It Gets Increasingly More Interesting 🍋

Hosts: Aiden, Atrioc (Doug), DougDoug (Brandon)
Date: March 18, 2026
Network: Vox Media Podcast Network

Episode Overview

In this delightfully chaotic episode, Aiden, Atrioc, and DougDoug tackle world news and business stories with their signature blend of irreverence, wit, and surprising expertise. The episode’s conceit: each host presents five stories, aiming to convince the editor their stories are the most exciting, so they’re placed later in the episode—subverting the typical “save the best for first” rule. What unfolds is a rapid-fire succession of news stories, business trends, media industry gossip, and hot takes—aiming to leave listeners both informed and entertained.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Nordic Leaders & Canada: Diplomatic Vibes Over Substance

[02:43–07:45]

• Brandon presents the “least interesting” news: Nordic leaders (Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland) meet, praise Canadian PM Carney for his Davos speech, and release vague statements about “Arctic security.”
• Doug and Aiden parody the lack of real news. The comedic highlight is the group chat analogy, comparing excluded countries to being left out of a high school clique.
  • Notable Quote:
    “The cool thing is it doesn’t change anything yet, but it’s talking about things that maybe could change in the future.” – Brandon [05:20]
• They poke at the performative nature of international statements and the “deepening ties” phrasing.
  • Quote:
    “They all show their support for Ukraine….the ties are deepening.” – Brandon [05:00]
• Shout out to Carney’s “banger” speech and a Denmark PM quote:
  • Quote:
    “The speech you gave in Davos. I’ve never experienced anything like this....” – Fredriksen [Denmark] (as relayed by Brandon) [07:10]

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2. Duolingo & the State of Language Apps

[07:45–12:19]

• Doug breaks down Duolingo’s pivot to AI, its meteoric revenue growth (367% YoY, 1.04B in 2025), and the push/pull between free users vs. profitability.
  • Despite impressive growth, Duolingo is concerned about user friction due to aggressive monetization.
• Conversation turns meta: how has AI commoditized language learning, and can Duolingo still survive when AI can simply generate gamified lessons?
• Brandon questions the app’s educational quality:
  • Quote:
    “It’s not notably bad at teaching you languages.” – Brandon [11:14]
• They riff on the meme-ification of the Duolingo owl, noting its declining cultural cachet and compare it to other “edgy brand” social campaigns that lost steam.

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3. BuzzFeed’s Meteoric Rise and AI-Fueled Collapse

[12:43–19:25]

• Aiden narrates BuzzFeed’s story: from viral quizzes (“Pick a Channing Tatum and I’ll tell you which potato you are”) and Pulitzer-winning journalism, to a $1.7B peak valuation, and its downfall after pivoting hard to AI-generated content.
• Firing journalists and relying on AI led to massive decline in engagement and stock price; iconic spinoffs like Hot Ones were sold off (Hot Ones alone recently sold for $82.5M while BuzzFeed's valuation is now $29M).
• The hosts debate whether BuzzFeed’s readers ever cared about quality, and whether you can “slopify the slop.” Parallel drawn to other media companies that struggled to retain “star creators.”
  • Quote:
    “From a content perspective, once you hit a certain binary line of quality, people just go elsewhere. It’s an immediate free fall.” – Aiden [18:17]

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4. Game Industry Layoffs Amid Success

[21:25–26:40]

• Brandon shares gaming news: despite a historic Battlefield 6 launch, the studio lays off many developers—sparking industry-wide concern about job stability.
• Debate: is this normal post-launch contraction, or a symptom of worsening industry precarity?
  • Quote:
    “Laid off when game does bad, laid off when game does historically good. How can I win as a person who works in game development?” – Brandon [22:26]
• They discuss the outsized use of contracts and the shift of dev talent to lower-cost regions.

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5. Private Credit: The Next 2008?

[26:40–30:39]

• Aiden raises alarms about “private credit”—non-bank lending, unregulated post-2008. Massive, unmonitored loans, especially to tech companies, are now at risk as defaults rise.
  • Firms like Blue Owl, Blackrock, and Apollo have “gated” redemptions, triggering panic among investors.
  • Quote:
    “If you show up at your bank and there’s a padlock on the front...you get angrier and more scared.” – Aiden [29:18]
• Hosts speculate on whether this is a true systemic risk for global finance or just overblown.

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6. Valve Sued Over Loot Boxes & the Gambling Debate

[30:39–37:56]

• Brandon covers the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against Valve over loot boxes—equating them with illegal gambling. Valve’s defense: Pokémon cards!
  • Quote:
    “If you’re coming for this, you need to reconcile with the fact that this is the same mechanic behind Pokémon, Magic the Gathering....” – Valve’s argument, per Brandon [31:47]
• They debate digital vs. physical gambling, friction of addiction, and Valve’s increasing direct price gouging ($1500 for digital gloves?).
  • “Gaming used to be about shooting people. Now it’s about spending money.” – Aiden & Doug riff [36:56–36:58]

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7. Iran War: Oil, Coalitions, and Global Blowback

[38:25–47:52]

• Aiden recaps Trump’s fifth declaration of victory over Iran, and the logistical struggle of securing the Strait of Hormuz without broad allied support.
  • U.S. and allies drain oil reserves, but can’t halt price surges; global political fallout as countries make side deals with Iran.
  • Fertilizer prices spike, risking food shortages.
• Blunt assessment:
  • Quote:
    “I think this war is ending up being the stupidest decision of the Trump presidency.” – Aiden [44:56]
• Discusses China’s prepared strategy, U.S. missteps, and rising global frustration as costs mount.

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8. Japan: Moving Toward Remilitarization

[49:04–55:05]

• Doug: Japan, historically constitutionally pacifist, sees rising internal support (~39%) for military constitutional reform, driven by concerns about China, North Korea, Russia, and unpredictable U.S. foreign policy.
  • Quote:
    “When Japan is strong, the U.S. is strong in Asia.” – Scott Besant, U.S. Treasury Secretary [50:28]
• “War crime shrine” controversy: PM Takaichi’s plan to visit national shrine with WWII war criminals enshrined, stoking regional outrage.

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9. Car Industry at a Crossroads: Honda Abandons EV Push

[59:05–67:07]

• Honda cancels U.S. EV launches due to dropping demand (post-Trump policy, lower subsidies, and aggressive Chinese EV competition).
• Doug & Aiden discuss Ford’s CEO revelations on how legacy automakers are technologically years behind Tesla, and how auto industry transformation is hampered by slow-moving bureaucracies and outdated ICE (internal combustion engine) strategies.
  • Quote:
    “We’re stuck in these old ways...we need to abolish that entirely and rebuild.” – Ford CEO, relayed by Doug [65:32]

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10. Mobile App Monopoly: Googled-Owned Play Store Concedes

[67:12–73:17]

• Major legal settlement: Google drops Play Store commissions to 20% (apps) and 10% (subscriptions); allows 3rd-party payment systems (as low as 5%).
• This puts pressure on Apple, which still charges 30% on iOS; developers advised to shift users to cheaper Android purchases.
  • Quote:
    “You pay way more when you use the iOS app. Go subscribe on your desktop....” – Brandon [72:30]
• Discussion: why Google lost and Apple won in court (jury trial vs. judge, and “bad” Google emails).

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11. Washington State Introduces First-Income Tax

[73:25–85:13]

• Washington (previously no income tax) now taxes individuals making >$1M/year; expected to raise $4B to work down a $10B deficit.
  • Flight risk—is this meaningful? Studies suggest “millionaires” rarely move, but competition between states may blunt the effect.
  • Discussion deepens into federal vs. state tax competition and regressive tax systems (Washington’s sales tax is tough on lower incomes):
  • Quote:
    “Effectively, taxation in Washington is regressive because of the taxes they rely on.” – Brandon [81:23]

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12. Tech & Social—Reinventing Old Systems

[87:31–94:56]

• Doug covers Tinder’s “IRL events” to woo Gen Z (who “don’t want to swipe” anymore), and new app “YouTube Surfer” which recreates old-school cable TV scrolling.
  • Discussion: why is “real-life” and “appointment viewing” coming back? Is tech endlessly reinventing the past?
  • Quote:
    “You are just an event organizer.” – Aiden [90:07]
• Riffing on WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s return, now with a community-focused residential company (“basically, buy an apartment and guarantee events/community”).

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13. Apple’s $600 MacBook Neo: The Lower-End Market Shakes

[95:12–100:36]

• Apple enters budget market, shaking hardware giants like Asus. The consensus: Chromebooks and cheap Windows PCs are in trouble.
  • Quote:
    “Every review I see... is really, really positive...” – Brandon [97:11]
• Nostalgia for pre-bloat hardware, praise for Apple pushing competitors to innovate, and a slap at Windows’ inferior user experience.

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14. Paramount Buys Warner Bros.: A Politicized Mega-Merger

[100:40–109:13]

• While media attention is focused on Iran, the biggest media merger ever slips under the radar: ultimately, Warner Bros. is sold to Paramount (not Netflix) for $110B—pushed by political interplay, regulatory approvals, and jaw-dropping debt.
  • Quote:
    “The head of Netflix going to Trump to try to get soft approval for the merger... this is not normal.” – Aiden [103:30]
• The hosts express concern that increased political leveraging of media assets could harm journalism and cultural institutions. HBO employees are specifically anxious about whether their creative culture and jobs will survive new ownership’s debt pressures.
  • Quote:
    “It feels like everyone loses from this.” – Doug [107:36]

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15. Heartwarming: Individual Engineers Cancer Vaccine for His Dog

[109:21–118:07]

• Doug closes with the most “uplifting” story: an Australian tech entrepreneur harnesses LLMs and AlphaFold to sequence, analyze, and build an mRNA cancer vaccine—specifically for his sick dog.
  • Nearly 75% tumor reduction in seven weeks.
  • Highlights how open software and bio-tech advances democratize formerly impossible cures, with giant potential for human medicine.
  • Quote:
    “...it’s kind of crazy to see that a single person was able to do something like this.” – Doug [114:02]
  • The group discusses cost/scale hurdles, but end optimistically on the potential for democratized, fast-turnaround cancer treatments.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It breaks every rule of YouTube retention to put our most blind spot.” – Aiden [02:08]
• On Duolingo: “But now, those companies, that AI scare—that drop was the same time as like Adobe dropped, and CrowdStrike dropped—software companies been just shitting the bed.” – Aiden [10:36]
• On Apple vs. Google in the courts: “Google had a ton of internal evidence...like emails that came out were like, ‘we’re a monopoly lol’.” – Aiden [72:46]
• On Honda’s reversal: “They are sticking with internal combustion engines, which kind of sucks because I, I feel like we should move towards an EV future.” – Doug [61:36]
• Media mergers: “The story here is like a real...that’s not good. Holy shit.” – Brandon [105:23]
• On the dog/cancer story: “This is by far one of the coolest things going on in technology and biology right now.” – Doug [117:55]

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Episode Structure & Themes

• Humor and Sarcasm: The hosts maintain a tongue-in-cheek, sometimes self-deprecating tone. Running jokes mock media, corporate marketing, and their own limited credentials ("three guys with expertise to run a lemonade stand explain the world of business").
• Meta-Commentary: The episode format is intentionally chaotic, with a focus on subverting audience expectations about “content order.” There’s extensive riffing about podcast/YouTube practices, media mergers, and even the podcast's own editing process.
• Business & Tech Through a Cultural Lens: While stories are focused on business and tech, the analysis is deeply informed by social context—politics, economics, and the impact on real people (from layoffs to the democratization of medicine).
• Cynicism, but Not Nihilism: Regular skepticism—about AI, corporate motives, political “victories,” and big mergers—but also sincere excitement about practical innovations (like the cancer vaccine story).

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:43] Nordic Leaders & Canada: Diplomacy Lite
• [07:45] Duolingo: AI, Monetization, & Market Shifts
• [12:43] BuzzFeed’s Fall: From Quizzes to Bankruptcy
• [21:25] Game Industry Layoffs
• [26:40] Private Credit Meltdown Fears
• [30:39] Valve, Loot Boxes, & Poker vs. Pokémon Cards
• [38:25] Iran War: Oil, Allies & Global Backlash
• [49:04] Japan Remilitarizes
• [59:05] Honda Cancels EV, Ford CEO Speaks Out
• [67:12] Google Drops App Store Fees—Pressure on Apple
• [73:25] Washington State’s New Income Tax
• [87:31] Tinder’s IRL Pivot, The Re-invention of Old Tech
• [95:12] Apple’s $600 Laptop Disrupts Budget Market
• [100:40] Paramount Buys Warner Bros.: Behind-the-Scenes Power Play
• [109:21] Man Engineers Cancer Vaccine for Dog

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Closing Thoughts

“Lemonade Stand” delivers a mix of comedy, business insight, and cultural analysis—wrapping rapid-fire world news in the veneer of a “stupid little lemonade stand.” Listeners leave with a deeper understanding of business, politics, and technology’s weird intersections, and why seemingly offbeat stories (from loot box lawsuits to the quirks of Japanese war memorials) truly matter.

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For full stories and expanded tangents, join the Lemonade Stand Patreon. Next episode—live from China!

Transcript

[Aiden]

Listen, we've talked a lot on this show about how Aiden is really stupid at trading, but Tastytrade has features for advanced traders as well.

[Brandon]

I'm using them right now.

[Aiden]

They have active. No, you shouldn't be using. You're not qualified. Please stop trading. There's active trader mode. Just made a trade trading and smart order trading for those that actually know what they're doing. Aiden, please. You're losing all of your money.

[Brandon]

Stop.

[Doug]

Oops.

[Aiden]

Lets you trade stocks, options, futures and more all in one platform. It offers low commission so you can keep more of what you earn. Go to tastytrade.com lemonade today PastyTrade Inc.

[Brandon]

Is a registered broker, dealer and member of finra, NFA and sipc.

[Aiden]

Adobe Acrobat, your team's home base. Collaborate within a shared PDF space. You've got your docs, your plans, your specs, and then invite the crew to build what's next. They talk of the teamwork. Here's an updated render. They think that this design could be a contender. But when somebody wonders what's the next step? AI helps you finish the rest. Bolts are tight now. Your plan's refined. Run a smoother business when you're all aligned.

[Brandon]

Do that with Acrobat.

[Aiden]

Learn [e-mail] do that with Acrobat.

[Brandon]

Lemonade Stand.

[Aiden]

That's not how we start.

[Brandon]

Lemonade Stand.

[Aiden]

Lemonade stand. You say it too.

[Doug]

This show is brought to you by Lemonade Stand.

[Aiden]

Ladies and gentlemen, Lemonade Stand. We have a quirky idea today. A bit of a goofy maybe from the mind of Doug. Doug Inspired. Twisted.

[Doug]

Don't put this on me.

[Brandon]

It's from Dug Duck's dark, twisted mind.

[Doug]

Unless the episode turns out really. If it's a banger, add that in.

[Aiden]

Otherwise we'll bleep it. Look right at you.

[Brandon]

Seen if how the video performs retroactively. Editing the video.

[Aiden]

This was L Wigs.

[Doug]

All right, here's the idea. We each brought five stories, five mini stories. Okay? We're going to each present these one at a time. You get about five minutes per EP per story. Right? And then at the end, our editor is going to order these from least exciting to most exciting. So our job is to pitch these and convince not each other, but the editor that it is the most exciting story and should be placed later on. And our score, our final score, will depend on who got more stories later in the episode. Any questions?

[Aiden]

It's so funny because it breaks every rule of YouTube retention to put our most blind spot.

[Doug]

It is the worst thing.

[Aiden]

Everything Watching will be the worst at first, and then.

[Brandon]

Yeah, no, those sports highlight videos kill. It's like Luka Doncic moments from Least

[Doug]

Exciting Deaf Curry threes, but they get increasingly more increasing.

[Brandon]

Yeah. Yeah. And you think that doesn't play?

[Aiden]

I think they don't even. I think they just ranked the last one in the first one. I've watched those videos, and it's, like, random. And then the last one's cool. All right. Hell, yeah, I'm ready. What else we got to say? Is there anything else we need to know?

[Doug]

No. We're going to go one at a time through these, and we'll find out who wins. Ready, set, go.

[Brandon]

I know you guys are pumped to hear about this. A news story that gets together. Some of my favorites. Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland. It's a clash between.

[Aiden]

This is the first story you're watching.

[Doug]

The retention on our. Going to see retention go from 95% to 2%.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Doug]

At this store.

[Aiden]

They might skip this like an ad.

[Brandon]

What's not exciting about this? You guys. Go, go.

[Doug]

You have a time limit.

[Brandon]

Go, go. The Nordic lead. All of these Nordic leaders met with Carney recently. Prime Minister Carney of Canada. And they gassed him up about the Davos speech. They were like, we never heard anything this good. We've, we, we all are these middle powers that need to stand together. You're right. Like, there's beefing about Trump. They're dapping Carney.

[Aiden]

Let's go, Karn.

[Doug]

And then they release a lot of fashion. They look cool doing it.

[Brandon]

Oh, sure. Assuring. Assuredly. I didn't see any pics, but. But, you know, Carney's got that shit on.

[Aiden]

Yeah. You stay fresh.

[Brandon]

And. And they released a statement. It's full of exciting news. Like how they're committed to Arctic security. Does it explain what that means? Not really. In. And then.

[Doug]

Wait, what is the news is that they hung out?

[Brandon]

It's that they hung out.

[Aiden]

Nordic leaders and Canada's leader hung out and then made some vague phrases about things they might do together.

[Brandon]

No, no, no, no, no, no.

[Doug]

I think for sure going first. I think some of these are pretty specific.

[Brandon]

Like, we are committed to building a competitive, prosperous and green economies for the future that are open to the world but guard against dangerous dependencies. What's not specific about that? Different.

[Doug]

That's not different.

[Brandon]

I, I. And, and they also, you know, they all show their support for Ukraine. They want to have a formidable partnership. And only economically, environmentally. Dare I say the last part of this statement? You'll. And you'll love this. They say that the ties are deepening.

[Aiden]

Whoa. I mean, look, this.

[Doug]

I wasn't in until that. I think that's a. That's an end of an episode or right there. I think we pushed. This is the last one that got pushed way back.

[Brandon]

Why can't you guys be excited for me?

[Doug]

Okay. No, I'm going to. I'm going to.

[Aiden]

True, true. To Sweden or Canada.

[Doug]

What is different? I don't get it.

[Brandon]

What changed? I think the cool thing about this statement is that it doesn't change anything yet, but it's talking about things that maybe could change in the future. I think if I was genuinely evaluating this, I think it is the beginnings of the fallout of things like Carney's speech that he gave at Davos. Like Trump coming for Canada's sovereignty, you know, sort of Denmark's sovereignty through Greenland.

[Aiden]

Sort of.

[Brandon]

Yeah. I think there's this weird thing where it's like Greenland trying to separate from Denmark anyway. But the idea that these are. These actions are resulting in these countries spending more time together and intentionally meeting and basically airing not only grievances about how they feel Trump is. Trump is moving against them, but actually making or starting the discussions of how we're going to be a block of countries together that does not need the United States in the way that we previously did.

[Doug]

And so it's like our ex is hanging out with the other high school kids.

[Brandon]

It's like. I would say it's like. It's like the US's exes all hanging out on maybe a reality show.

[Aiden]

It's like a group chat getting made. Everyone but Aiden in it. And you're saying about how the story wasn't that good?

[Brandon]

No, no.

[Doug]

I'm in this group.

[Aiden]

You guys are.

[Doug]

I think we're the ones who I left out of the group chat. Wait, so Carney dmd, you added you in, right?

[Brandon]

Yeah, I'm in the signal chat with all these guys.

[Aiden]

It is kind of cool for Carney to drop such a banger speech. You get invited to the world leader group.

[Brandon]

I think it was funny.

[Aiden]

Okay.

[Brandon]

There was one actual quote I thought was funny because the. The New York Times article that initially introduced me to this was they're specifying like how. How much they're gassing Carney up. And the quote, the quote from Mr. Fredriksen from Denmark. The speech you gave in Davos. I've never experienced anything like this. I don't think I've ever heard so many reflections on a speech from a colleague as I have Heard about your speech.

[Aiden]

He's a full body high.

[Doug]

Sweat glistened on your cheek.

[Aiden]

And the damn good speech, by the way.

[Brandon]

And then he said he got really into like carny fan fiction on Tumblr

[Aiden]

describing it to him.

[Brandon]

So I think it's got all of the big names. It's got Canada, it's got Sweden. It's like, what else do you need for an exciting. See you guys at the end of the episode.

[Doug]

And done. This one's quick, simple, easy. End of the episode, we cap it off. Duolingo went absolutely crazy in 2025. Duolingo, the beloved language learning. And now it's cr to all hell. And I think what's interesting about this is broadly what is happening in language learning. So Duolingo is by far the biggest one. But of course the big question, like, will probably we. You will have heard about multiple times now, is AI changing how companies are doing things?

[Aiden]

Right?

[Doug]

So last year they were like, we're going to be an AI first company. They made this LinkedIn post that a lot of people hated. Yeah. Except they actually have had a lot of success in 2025. So there's this massive stock price. So they went up to like $500. Now they're back down to about 100. But what's interesting is the end of the year, they're actually really, really profitable. They. They made 1.04 billion in revenue in 2025, which is earnings up 367% over the previous year. That is crazy. Their day use are 52 million. They have 100 people, 100 million people a month tuning into the app. But they've also been announcing recently. They're like, we feel like we've been putting too much pressure on our free users to convert them to money. We've been going all in on, like, get more money out of our existing user base. But it's causing more friction when people try to join the app. And they're like, they're pushing me on the subscription thing too hard. I'm turning off. And so what's interesting is they are doing very well objectively in terms of, like, cash flow and earnings and users. But they came out and said, look, our user growth is slowing down and we're going to pivot away from trying to acquire a bunch of money from these people and instead try to get more people into the app and give them them a good experience. And they even were like, look, this is going to cost us like $50 million at least next year. And that is not. They didn't like that. They did not like, hey, we think we've gone too hard on short term profits. So it's an interesting thing. One of just a quick little like what's going on with these language apps. The fact is Duolingo is doing phenomenally well even though I think most people are not stoked on it anymore. And particularly in this like if they're going AI first what even differentiates them from chat gbt. But they're having to pivot and I think it's a, it's a pretty interesting little mini microcosm of this industry that is Babel.

[Aiden]

First of all, don't get me wrong. Don't, don't ever. Don't twist it.

[Doug]

We should be clear in our contract we are allowed to say whatever we want. We have free editorial control.

[Aiden]

We personally sponsored by Babel tattoo across my chair and I actually use it.

[Doug]

So it is worth saying we're, you know there's been a Babel sponsorship in the, in the episode. We are contractually guaranteed we can say whatever we want. It's not like we're going to change what we say. So just so that's just don't say

[Aiden]

a bad word about battle. That's okay. My fucking presence.

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in general, but I do think

[Aiden]

that drop was not just because they've fudgeing missed. I mean not they didn't, they didn't miss but that they announced new spending. I mean that was what we were talking about earlier with the big AI. You know it was the AI scare that that drop was the same time as like Adobe dropped and CrowdStrike dropped and all, all these companies that were software based have been just, just shitting the bed.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Their stocks have been down, down, down. Because there's a real concern that AI, if not now will soon eat your lunch. Like it will soon make. You know, you could have Claude whip up a gamified language learning thing. It's not as good maybe as do. I mean I don't even know how good my understand with Duolingo is. Like it's really good at keeping you on streak.

[Brandon]

It's a gamifying something that I don't think it's notably bad at teaching you languages.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Brandon]

I think that's the which people already understand. I feel like there's this issue of this is already something that converges more on the trend side of things and the game side of things and I feel like over time you're more likely to reach a cap and lose people after that Anyway, but then you also have this giant introduction of something that is already probably better at teaching you languages that is competing alongside it.

[Aiden]

What do you think about the fucking howl, though? The Al fucks. Yeah, they like the owl. The owl marketing is based.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Doug]

It's just ultimately, I don't care.

[Brandon]

The apple.

[Doug]

It's.

[Brandon]

It's in the. In the language of trends. Like, is the, like the meme about the owl coming to haunt you in your dreams and stuff like that, Is that dead? Is that gonna be funny five years from now?

[Aiden]

You know what reminds me?

[Brandon]

Fairly funny now.

[Aiden]

Yeah. As you say that, I'm thinking like, you know, we used to think the windy social media roasts were cool, but now it feels so lame.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

It's like, maybe the owl's just dead, bro. Maybe that whole.

[Brandon]

The owl's out of gas. Yeah.

[Aiden]

You can only do it so many times.

[Doug]

I just like, I, you know, I know who. Who Kylie Jenner is. I'm not going to go buy her products. Like, you know, at some point, like a recognizability.

[Aiden]

You're the target market for Kylie Jenner's skincare.

[Brandon]

That's probably different.

[Doug]

Look at me.

[Brandon]

Look at me. Nice kids.

[Doug]

In fact, Adish, zoom in slowly on my face and then cut.

[Aiden]

Y' all remember buzzfeed quizzes?

[Brandon]

Oh, of course.

[Aiden]

Do you ever take them? You ever find out whether if you made a 2020s playlist and reveal which color you look best?

[Doug]

I'm Princess Jasmine. Sexually.

[Aiden]

Sexually. Sexually.

[Doug]

You heard me.

[Brandon]

Yeah. I remember how gay I am on a scale of different Disney characters. Yeah, Yeah, I think I remember.

[Aiden]

You remember their Pulitzer Prize winning journalism. I brought a quiz for you. Pick a Channing Tatum from these nine Channing Tatums and I will tell you which potato you are.

[Brandon]

This is a.

[Aiden]

This is a company that was at its peak worth $1.7 billion, largely off the back of quizzes like this. Pick a Channing table.

[Doug]

Wait, this is real. This is a real quiz.

[Brandon]

And they were outputting stars. Will Neff work there?

[Aiden]

We're gonna talk about that in a second, actually. Yeah. Will Neff there worked.

[Doug]

I'll take the middle, right? One that looks like the evil version of Peter Parker.

[Aiden]

You got mashed potatoes. That's your personality.

[Doug]

You know what? So credit to buzzfeed. That's the only type of potato I like unironically. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

[Aiden]

Go back, go back. Credit to me. I only had one solution. There's only.

[Doug]

I think this is a buzzfeed.

[Brandon]

I was thinking about how this is unpowerable.

[Aiden]

Possibly works.

[Doug]

So is this end of your segment?

[Aiden]

Yeah, that's it.

[Doug]

BuzzFeed. Yeah. No.

[Aiden]

So BuzzFeed, $1.7 billion valuation. A lot of people became stars from it. It was, it was leading the wave of Internet content for a brief period, especially among millennials. And Wilneth did come from them. Worth it came from it. Hot ones came from it. A lot of companies have come from it that have built on.

[Doug]

I mean, hot ones came from BuzzFeed.

[Aiden]

Yeah. And at its peak, they even had a BuzzFeed newsroom that was pretty well respected. They won the Pulitzer. And it was seen at least by maybe older out of touch types with money as like these guys get the Internet in a way that our dying media companies don't. And so money was pouring into buzzfeed and they had a publicly traded stock that hit its peak of $1.7 billion. And then around 2023, with the release of ChatGPT, their CEO had an idea, he's like, hey, we need to use AI to quote, enhance our content. But really it was, we are going to fire this newsroom, which is very expensive, and we're going to pivot all in on AI generated. Now, again, I can't say this was well crafted.

[Brandon]

That's beautiful journalism.

[Doug]

Think of how many Channing Tatum. Yeah, but they can make a ton of them.

[Aiden]

Right. And so they made it more slopify. It's already slopped. So there was like slop through a slop trough. And their stock upon this announcement spiked, as you can see here that I've cut off at no.

[Doug]

Okay, so for audio listeners, we are about 10% of the way through the grass. And it looks very high.

[Aiden]

And it looks very high. Massive near the top actually. Because if you think about it in the short term, it's like, wait a minute, our costs go to zero and our output goes to infinity.

[Doug]

Right.

[Aiden]

And so it sounds great. Unfortunately, the follow up from that was that people stopped engaging with the quizzes or the content. And so buzzfeed began a very meteoric downward slide where they have had a very rough time retaining the user base they had in their peak period.

[Doug]

This last like two years, three years. This is short time frame.

[Aiden]

This is okay, this is after ChatGPT right here.

[Doug]

So this is the gotcha that makes sense.

[Aiden]

And so as they started losing revenue, they had to start selling off parts of the business, including hot ones, which they sold for $82.5 million, which is actually a pretty incredible come up because the current valuation of Buzzfeed today is 29 million.

[Doug]

Oh my God.

[Aiden]

So hot ones is worth three times more than Buzzfeed's entire valuation today. So they have announced as of two days ago that they are okay. The CEO announced we have more cool AI stuff coming. But in the fine print of the announcement, the finance team said we are ending our ability to continue as a going concern, which basically means they're going bankrupt. That's. That's a fancy way of saying we lost $30 million this quarter. We have no short term way to get more money. We're nearing bankruptcy. So the story of this BuzzFeed thing, I mean it's, it's one of like people getting a little too overhyped about this new Internet company and they didn't really have a domination of media. But another one is like this AI pivot, at least for this didn't seem to work. It was not an effective thing. So BuzzFeed is now facing bankruptcy, likely will be bankrupt, and doesn't seem to have a plan. That's my story. Yeah, it's.

[Doug]

Sorry, go ahead.

[Brandon]

Was AI that for the actual content being output, but after this change was made.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

I don't want to discredit the incredible integrity of mashed potatoes and Channing Tatum quizzes.

[Aiden]

Yes.

[Brandon]

But is AI not. If I had to guess what AI would be able to do, it might be to put together which mashed potatoes are you, based on the Channing potato picture.

[Aiden]

Here's my one problem with this, is this example. I don't know if this is before or after the AI pivot. So theoretically this could be the slop post.

[Doug]

That's what I'm not getting because none of these quizzes ever made any sense at all. And the idea that a user is like, I just don't feel like it's accurately telling me my Disney character, like it never did that 100%.

[Aiden]

I agree with that. I do think Buzzfeed made a lot of actually popular stuff outside of just the slop quizzes and listicles. Those were its like bread and butter.

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aiden]

And all that stuff was cut. I mean it was expensive. So they cut it. They cut like paying people like worth it. They cut. But all this extra stuff that was like kind of having traction. They focused on how I can make it cheaper. And I think on the Internet it's like if, you know, you might think from a factory perspective, if this is like 80% the quality but 20% the cost, that's awesome. But from a content perspective, once you hit a certain binary line of quality, people just go elsewhere. Like you just, it's an immediate free fall. So you can't. I think sometimes a CEO, especially when you're public facing for content, doesn't understand that like you can't reduce the quality so much and get a linear line.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Doug]

We're almost on our time limit, but this feels to me like another example of an interesting. It's like a media company that established all of these stars. New brands like Rooster Teeth or Bon Appetit did this right. With, with oh my God, I'm blanking on her name. But I watched a bunch of those videos of like making gourmet Doritos or whatever it is. Right. Actually if you can pull it up because I feel bad and then. Or buzzfeed. Right. Which produced Try guys and produced the other brands you're saying produced hot ones. Right. And it's so interesting that if you're like this media conglomerate who produces these stars, they now have an extraordinarily strong incentive to go solo because you will make way more money and keep all of it as opposed to working for this company and giving them this massive thing. So it's so interesting to like, it's hard to imagine companies like this where their value is based on keeping extraordinarily talented individuals even once they've established their brand and can go leave.

[Brandon]

Can you think of to kind of send off this topic? I Can you think of a company like buzzfeed that came up in the Internet era that produces content that has managed to weather this problem? I can't.

[Doug]

The only one that I, I'm not deeply familiar with them, but Barstool, Barstool has, I think retained a lot of their core talent or at least retained partnerships, and that's one of the few examples. But they've also had weird ups and

[Brandon]

downs and they have had people spin off like the I, I, I can't remember his name, but he has like long blonde hair, a mustache and he does comedic interviews. Yeah, he spun off into his Barcel.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Doug]

He was and is, I'm pretty sure.

[Brandon]

Is it still under Barstool now? I thought it was his own.

[Aiden]

That's impressive. They kept.

[Doug]

Okay, my Internet isn't working.

[Brandon]

But anyway, I, I, it is interesting. It's like the, the value proposition. It's like even at Ludwig's company. Right. Like, like he has made mogul moves, but the company is him if he chooses to be done or leave. Like there's nobody who can replace him. And then for any of these companies, if they make anybody a star or a front face of the news that they put out. You just inevitably you can try.

[Aiden]

You go out there and go, boys, uh oh.

[Doug]

Just to fill eyes me, Ludwig would bet money. I literally think that is if you just took his place, it would be at least 50% as successful. It would not die. I think if it's just like, hey, it's, it's me. I'm doing Minecraft speed running today.

[Brandon]

So funny. I think I'd love to just try it as, as a social experiment of Ludwig goes on a six month sabbatical and then we just put like me

[Doug]

there instead and we just see the numbers crater. All right, great point. Definitely maybe second in the order. Well, see, this is probably second done.

[Brandon]

I got one little tidbit of. One more tidbit of gaming news. Maybe the first tidbit I've got the

[Doug]

first or second or potential.

[Brandon]

I shouldn't have said anything. Battlefield, the Battlefield 6 team notably laid off a. An undeclared number of employees from the various parts of the studio and at EA that helped put out that game. I thought gaming was back and gaming's not back. We're actually laying them off.

[Doug]

Like it's like they don't know how many.

[Brandon]

And well, the number of people that have been laid off has not been confirmed in the media. So which plays into the, which plays into the story here, in my opinion. And I think the initial reaction to big companies laying off gigantic amounts of people usually, or maybe any amount of people, is very, very negative from the public there. And especially in Battlefield's case, because they had a historically successful launch for this game, they sold I think over 7 million copies in the first three days.

[Aiden]

I was going to ask if it did well.

[Brandon]

And with an average concurrent player base just on Steam for the first week of like over 700,000 players, which is absolutely incredible. And I think the first reaction a lot of people had to this news is, wow, laid off when game does bad, laid off when game does historically good. How can I win as a, as a person who works in game development? And I did. I think this coincides with a few conversations we've had recently about like Riot laying off a bunch of people, projects like Concord High Guard, High Guard getting canned after massive amounts of money going into them and this, this general unfairness and flippancy that seems to be had with laying off people in the games industry. Even anecdotally talking to like a game dev friend of mine, he has gotten. Okay, okay. It came to come of me Sorry, it came become a meme.

[Aiden]

What a joke.

[Doug]

Where do they.

[Brandon]

He. He's been laid out.

[Doug]

What war torn country does he live in? He doesn't even enter.

[Brandon]

He, he's been laid off from I think four studios in the span of like the past five or six years. And it seems like a really shitty time to work in that industry when it comes to your job security. And then on the other end of it, one quick note I had, you know, defending it I guess is this is pretty normal for massive titles that go through long development cycles and then they release some sort of live service version of the game after like the undeclared number of the layoffs in this case, where it's not clear how many people actually did lose their jobs is a game will go through some giant development cycle and then even if it becomes successful after, the number of people necessary to keep the game functioning after the fact is naturally much lower. So a lot of the more recent or like contract staff specifically that works on these games will get let go after the game comes out because the things they were specifically hired to do to release the game are no longer relevant anymore.

[Aiden]

Yeah. It's crazy though because that was to

[Doug]

me if it was a one off. Yeah.

[Aiden]

Because Hollywood, Hollywood's like you don't expect someone to keep being hired on Star wars after it's over. The movie's over, you shot it.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

But this is a game that releases Battlefield 6. There's going to be a Battlefield 7 7. So it's weird to me that they felt the need after successful launch not to just get those people to keep working on the next game that is to decide.

[Doug]

They're waiting for a year or two to decide if they're going to do Battlefield 7. Then they hire them all back.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I mean I think that's why my, my villain chair stopping point.

[Aiden]

That's all we need to say.

[Brandon]

They're probably done. No, that's why my villain change we've done it all is because the number of people laid off is not confirmed and it's not this getting rid of the entire team that made the game or something similar to that. Then the benefit of the doubt I would give here is you're getting, you're cutting a few people that had a very specific role in the lead up and then that news of a select group of people getting laid off is being turned into this broader news story that people react.

[Aiden]

What I will say is that could be the case. You know, my understanding of the game industry right now is that layoffs are happening on Mass in Los Angeles and Ontario and in Vancouver and all these old traditional places for people to work in gaming and they're moving to Eastern Europe and they're moving to China and they're moving to people places that are cheaper. And like big studios are all taking moments like this like, oh, our game's done time to cut the staff and we're going to find a way to redo it cheaper. That is what I think is happening. I don't know about this story specifically,

[Brandon]

but yeah, I mean if anybody has any insight into the EA or Battlefield examples specifically, I'd be super curious if what, what specifically is the case going on? But that's it. It's just a bit of gaming news.

[Aiden]

Gaming's back, baby. Okay, this one was already a big A clip so I'm going to keep it hella brief. But I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention it because it may be another 2007 financial crisis. Okay, do you guys know what private credit is?

[Doug]

A card,

[Aiden]

not like a car. Doug. It's like when you make loans outside of the banking system. That's basically what it is. Like if you and me pulled our money and loaned our or our editor money to give us better rankings, that would be private credit. Private credit is not monitored. It's not, it's not tracked the way that banking is banking. You know what's going on. All their books are public, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Since 2008 we made a bunch of new rules that changed things about private around banking. Yeah, bankings have to be way safer. And because of that everyone still wanted these easy loans so they just went somewhere else. They went to what's called private credit.

[Doug]

Do they consider that when making the regulations?

[Aiden]

I don't know why they said banks only. I don't, I literally don't know why

[Doug]

I wouldn't plug any of the other holes or just this one that leads to this time.

[Aiden]

Yeah, it's like, like it's so I think it's a great question. 30 holes in our roof, but that's the one that leaked. So let's plug that and it'll never be a problem again.

[Brandon]

Villager. I imagine one of the reasons is because so many like regular people's lives are directly tied into banks specifically. So the risk of banks collapsing presents a greater public threat than perhaps a higher end private credit.

[Doug]

Unless it's necessary.

[Brandon]

Certain private credit groups like still supply like auto loans and things that touch normal people's lives.

[Aiden]

Yes, that. But also the banks, because they didn't have anywhere to lend, ended up just lending money to private credit firms. So the private credit firms that have made tons and tons of bad loans, the biggest one, the one that's popping the bubble lately, is that they made a ton of loans to buy software companies. Now all the software companies are starting to tank and private credit firms are doing what's called not marking to market. I don't know if you remember the end of the big short where they're like, why is it. Why are the prices changing? We know it's filing. That is what's happening. Like, if you're asked, like, we're seeing every software stock tank, but the private ones are like, they're good. The value is the same as we bought it. And like, everybody knows the lie. So they're going to the private credit companies and asking for their money back. And what they're doing is they're throwing up these things called gates. The gated redemptions are saying, no, you can't take your money out. They're saying, we can only let 5% out a year or whatever and we're not letting any more. And so obviously if you show up at your bank and there's a padlock on the front and says, no redemption allowed, you're not going to be like, well, that's it. You get angrier and more scared. So the panic is spreading. People are like desperately trying to get their money out of Blue Owl and BlackRock and Apollo and KKR and all these massive private credit firms, and they can't. The gates are up on all four

[Doug]

of those steel, man. The only thing to fear is fear itself.

[Aiden]

Possibly.

[Doug]

We just keep saying big numbers at each other. It is big.

[Aiden]

I think that is legitimately their strategy. And that's crazy. You came up with that Five seconds. That's.

[Doug]

The roof isn't leaking. No one look over there.

[Aiden]

They keep saying, we're good. You can't take your money out, but we're good. The valuation is the same. These are going to. These are good.

[Brandon]

Like, it's fine.

[Aiden]

And it's. It's not fine. I don't know, the usual thing. We don't know how big it is. In 2007, the real estate crisis, massive. And every estimate of private credit is that it's smaller than that. However, it could be systemic. That's why I'm bringing this up. Because these private credit firms are there again. Their defaults are rising and they have loans from banks so the banks can't get paid back if they fail. So we don't know if it's bigger. I don't know. I'm not saying I'm sounding a little

[Doug]

panicked, but let me ask a sincere question. Sounds to me like a whole bunch of sheep should let the wolves decide.

[Brandon]

Okay.

[Doug]

If everybody starts fucking panicking.

[Brandon]

That wasn't a question.

[Aiden]

You said let me ask you a question. Then you did a.

[Doug]

End of segment.

[Brandon]

All right. Well, we talked about a little about this on our Patreon, but the New York Attorney General announced that they were suing Valve for their loot boxes primarily. Primarily gaming's back.

[Aiden]

I didn't stand first to say it.

[Brandon]

And primarily to do with Counter Strike, but also other games like Team Fortress and Dota where Valve takes advantage of these loot box systems where you buy something like a case in Counter strike, you pay $2 to open it $2.50 and then it rolls items and then you get a different levels of rarity, like in game cosmetics from that little box. And then maybe if you get really lucky, that item's worth a lot of money, but most of the time that item is going to be worth less than what you paid to open the case. And the New York Attorney General announced that they were suing Valve for this circumvention of New York gambling laws by having this in the game.

[Aiden]

Okay.

[Brandon]

And Valve, which is a company that does not release public statements, very often responded to the lawsuit recently.

[Aiden]

Gabe Newell on his yacht. Facetiming into the judge.

[Brandon]

Yeah, it's actually a video. It's actually. And it was really interesting because they took the angle, the primary angle of we don't think we're breaking any laws. And if you're coming for something like this, you need to reconcile with the fact that this is the same mechanic behind Pokemon Magic, the Gathering, Labubus. Plenty of like physical items in the physical world that all rely on the same underlining mechanic of I don't know what I'm going to get in the box. I'm paying to find out. And I'm hoping I get a rare and a good one.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

And the implications of the lawsuit in New York seem to be that they're trying to drag in as much other stuff as possible because they think more. The, the outside third party's perspective is more people will have to help them push back and fight against this lawsuit if they make it more broad.

[Doug]

Right.

[Aiden]

They're saying we're all gamblers and then Pokemon steps up to help them out or whatever.

[Brandon]

If it's consequential for more parties outside of us.

[Doug]

The judge go look on polymarket of who wins this case. Like, you can bet on it right now. Why are you okay with that?

[Aiden]

And it is funny to be like, we're getting singled out here. Society is decayed to nothing. Everyone's a gambler, and we're getting singled out.

[Brandon]

It is funny because I was wrestling with the idea that. Yeah, I. I do think that the cases in Counter Strike, for instance, are gambling. Like, almost like.

[Doug]

Of course they are.

[Aiden]

They are gambling.

[Brandon]

But I think it is. It is a. Exactly. It is almost exactly the same as opening a pack of Pokemon cards. It is. It's the same.

[Aiden]

Exactly.

[Brandon]

The only difference is that there's like, no. With something digital lacks a layer of friction where I would have to go to the store or, like, order it and wait for that.

[Aiden]

Like, as a kid, I could not get addicted to gambling on Pokemon cards. I would need to get my parents to drive me to a store.

[Doug]

But, like, why is the money. It's like, if you had the money for. If you're a rich kid, you could get a date, I'm sure.

[Aiden]

Maybe I just think, like, there's clearly a pipeline of young people getting into skin gambling that there wasn't for Pokemon cards. And I'm not saying they're both not roughly identical, I think, but the digital frictionless experience.

[Doug]

I think if we kill Pokemon, that will stop the CSGO gambling. Right. It's like the malaria parasite. If you can kill it in its earlier larval stages, it won't mature, but it already exists. So we need a vaccine early in the stages.

[Aiden]

We need to go back in time and kill.

[Doug]

We have to kill Pikachu.

[Brandon]

There was one. Okay, so there's two more interesting parts

[Aiden]

of this meme pointing at Pikachu's head, crying.

[Brandon]

Is that in the. Valve also accuses the New York Attorney General's lawsuit of specifically calling out the fact that you can trade these assets, like, part of the value and part of the risk of the whole economy that they formed across these games is that you get the item out of the box and then you can trade it to other users. And they fervently defend that. Basically, that is a right of, like, all of the users across their platform. And they think that's a very important part of not only, like, Counter Strike, but games across the entire platform. And it was interesting to see them, like, so heavily stand behind that. A couple days later, another state has sued them, which is.

[Aiden]

It's hard to spread.

[Brandon]

Yeah. Washington state. There is, there is a class action lawsuit.

[Doug]

The home of Pokemon by the way, or Pokemon usa.

[Brandon]

Yeah, the home of Pokemon usa.

[Doug]

Valve and Pokemon USA are like a couple blocks away. Like Valve's just going to point at

[Brandon]

them again and Nintendo of America is there in the. In the same block, I think or like the same area of Redmond. But this class action lawsuit is accusing them of the same thing is that consumers played these games for entertainment unaware that Valve had allegedly already stacked the odds against them. We intend to hold Valve accountable and put money back players rol too many

[Aiden]

blues and they were. They like dumped all their. If I don't get a knife, I don't get a butterfly, dude.

[Doug]

You like stream it and you say streaming and if I get five blues in a row I sue Val.

[Brandon]

Having that political power it is, it

[Doug]

does feel a little bit like you're throwing a dart at a dart board. Like there's so many of the. Why? Why go after this?

[Aiden]

Because you have to start somewhere, bro. You have to like yeah, like we are, we are in the depths of gambling despair.

[Brandon]

Why are we starting with the one that I have?

[Aiden]

The one that you like? Okay.

[Brandon]

And I think a funny little thing that caps this off is I think you can tell from changes in the game from a long time in Counter Strike specifically. Again this applies across all of Valve's games though is they've been making little changes like phasing out of cases out of Counter Strike entirely. And they switch to these little things that we've explained before called terminals where it gives you the chance. It's like you don't pay to open it. And then it randomly generates five opportunities for you to buy one of the items from Valve. And then Valve kind of sets a market price through this that based on like the rarity of the item. Right. So they just announced this. Some of the more special items game

[Aiden]

used to be about shooting people in a dropping.

[Brandon]

It's not about that.

[Aiden]

It used to be about like playing,

[Brandon]

spending money. Okay.

[Aiden]

When I was younger there was a.

[Brandon]

The reason, the reason why I think this is insane is because you used to be able to pay 2 bucks to open one of these cases and crack like an item out of them. Right. But now with this new system and these new like gloves they added, they look Valve is charging you. Valve, the company is not a third party marketplace is charging you twelve hundred dollars for this pair of railroads.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Do you remember when gamers rioted over $2 horse armor in oblivion?

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

Sorry. Excuse me. It's 1300 Euros. So like 1500 US dollars.

[Aiden]

What happened?

[Brandon]

You now have the privilege of paying Valve that amount of money directly.

[Aiden]

We lost that fight and we lost the war and it's been over and now people are now children are paying €500 generated term.

[Doug]

It's a hedge against fiat currency.

[Brandon]

It's not that big.

[Aiden]

I have to pitch that to Steve Isa.

[Doug]

That's so crazy.

[Aiden]

That's awesome.

[Brandon]

I don't know how this is all going to play out, but it's crazy to see like two state lawsuits hit in like such a short period of time. Them making a rare public statement while they also seemingly like while they argue the lawsuit have clearly been making changes in the game to avoid further issues like this.

[Aiden]

Our editor owns some skins. This might be the last story

[Doug]

done.

[Aiden]

Guys, I have some good news. I don't know if you knew this, but we won the war in Iran again. Donald Trump has announced for the fifth time that this time finally we've completely beaten and keep hold this slide. Completely beaten and decimated Iran, both military, economically, in every other way. Obviously we can do a gazillion Iran

[Doug]

war updates and we've done very interesting every week.

[Aiden]

But the thing I want to talk about in my section is his attempts now that it's starting to spiral, to get a coalition of the willingness to help him patrol the Strait of Hormuz and get free and flowing oil. Okay, this should have always been a team effort and now it will be, is what Donald Trump is saying so that we can get harmony, security and everlasting peace. This is the fifth time Iran has been defeated this week alone. There's been a lot of announcements that they keep getting defeated. Polling has shown that the major takeaway from people across the political spectrum. This is a 22% polling positive or people primarily just don't see the point. They don't know why we are there. And they are noticing that gas prices are going up, which is becoming a big political and economic problem globally, not just in America. And so there has been a call for allied warships to secure this trade of Hormuz, not just America. America can't do it alone. So far though, no nations have confirmed plans.

[Doug]

Is this like when we helped like, you know, all of the British merchant vessels saved the people from the French beaches during World War II? Dunkirk, you mean, is this like a Dunkirk situation where we're calling answer the call. Civilians, bring your boats to the straight, put oil on it.

[Brandon]

If you had the gall to just go through that straight.

[Aiden]

Yeah, I don't Know who that was? Or it was Pete. Someone was like, yeah, just be brave. Be brave and go through the straight. And I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that.

[Doug]

So wait, wait, hold on, hold on. The team that we're collecting, like the Avengers that were. That Trump's trying to assemble.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

It's countries. Is it people who.

[Aiden]

It's countries. So the idea is that it turns out it's going to be very, very expensive and difficult to stop Iran from droning or mining the Strait of Hormuz, which is cutting off. Again. This is not just an American problem. This is becoming a world problem. It is cutting off 20% of the world's oil, 30% of the world's fertilizer. Fertilizer prices have spiked like 91%. Oil prices are already way up. This is going to cause food shortages and economic slowdowns because of higher gas prices and more than that. And it's beginning to cause panic everywhere. So a couple of things have been done in the short term to try and stop it. Number one was after saying he wouldn't do this, he is now releasing a bunch of money from money oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We're jumping like we're combining with other G7 countries and other allied nations to release it all at once. 400 million barrels from. From collectively our different oil reserves. That is four days of global oil consumption. And that's like basically what we got. It caused oil prices to go down for a little bit and now they are going right back up that announcement.

[Brandon]

If you listen to, I believe, Vance and Trump, you'll know that the oil reserves were low because of Biden.

[Aiden]

They were. No, they actually were. Joe Biden drained the reserve and it could be said politically to help him for the election. It didn't work. He lost the election and there was less. But the problem is, Donald Trump has said over and over on the campaign trail in his inauguration speech after getting inaugurated, hey, I'm going to refill that thing to the tippity top. Well, the time to do that would be when oil prices were super cheap before you started a war in Iran. And he didn't do it. China did do that. They bought millions of barrels per day, all of 2025. And now we're kind of. That was our. That was our big lever. Like, we pulled the lever. We put 4 million barrels. That hasn't stopped the oil prices from rising. And so he is urging the UK and other nations to trade. Now, I included this meme because this is what the response has been so far, like nations are just, they're, they're being very tepid about I'm going to send our actual troops and it's very expensive to send warships to go help patrol the Strait of Hormuz.

[Doug]

And just, just checking. We're, it's just us in Israel, right?

[Aiden]

So far? Yeah, yeah, I think, I think the UK as of today, and this is all live, is going to send like a pity boat or something. I mean there's like some small, a

[Doug]

little merchant vessel, they're dunkirking.

[Aiden]

But so far what we're seeing from every country is they're just trying to skip around this and talk to Iran directly. So India is having talks with Iran and be like, hey, let only Indian ships through. Because right now assuming the mines, I don't know the situation on the mines but based on drones they can basically say like Chinese vessels can go through or whatever. They can like let. So everyone's trying to get a deal. So France and Italy is doing this again I said India, France and Italy, China. So every, every country is like opening their own private line to Iran to be like, hey, we're boys, right? Let's not let our tankers go through because of how economically important it is. And there's not a lot of appetite to get this actual coalition. Now this is from an hour before we recorded this. They are now they plan to announce a coalition. We don't know who that's gonna be in the coalition. I don't, I don't understand. But I have to say, man, I, you know, we've covered a lot of news on this, on this channel and I just wanna say like directly, I think this war is ending up being the stupidest decision of the Trump presidency. I think it's one of the stupidest things I've seen a leader do. It feels so ill thought out and ill planned and I've steel manned the larger China angle. But I mean in terms of execution, this is proving to be a disaster. I think to do it right before midterms is fucking art because this is, this is collapsing. I've seen people burning their MAGA hats today like it is, it is collapsing his political base and will it is taking right as we go into their big election. So I mean, I guess good on that front but it is crazy and it is turning so many countries at least soft negative because they now have an economic problem that they know was caused by this very unplanned quick war like it is, it's kind of spiraling so this is Paul Graham, who I think is a great follow on Twitter. He had a prediction. When fighting in Iran gets too painful because of oil prices or polls or whatever, Trump will claim that the current state of things, whatever happens to be was his goal, declare victory and retreat. The problem with that is that none of that changes the reality that a country of 90 million, if you haven't changed the regime can always block this straight. And if they want to do it longer, we will get $200 barrels of oil. Like, unless they can fix that or change that, which doesn't seem to be possible. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know when.

[Brandon]

So on the negotiating with Iran front for all of those countries.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

It seems unlikely that Iran would say yes to anybody or at least not a lot of country partners because this is their main line of leverage for ending the war. Like, there's no reason for them to start saying yes because that would start lowering the price of oil and then they lose that.

[Doug]

Well, Connor wouldn't. If they keep saying yes to countries other than the US And Israel. Right. Doesn't that put pressure on us and Israel even more so because gas would only be going up for us. Or is the idea that the global price.

[Aiden]

We actually don't get much oil from the Strait of Hormuz. It's just that when someone else is desperate, let's say India, they buy it on global markets and it raises the price for everybody. Like technically we are energy independent from this is actually one of the least affected. But it doesn't matter for people at the gas. Gas pump because oil is a global market and someone else being desperate makes the rise. Rise for everybody. Okay, so. So yeah, I agree. If they, if they were like. Because letting only American ships not pass is. There's no ships. There's like, it's barely any. Most of the ships that are out are going to China or Japan or India or what. That's where they're going. So I don't think they'll do this. I also don't know that they can. My understanding is like the communication is kind of breaking down on the Iranian side and it's just they don't may not have a structured plan on this. It may just be like chaos, stop the ships.

[Brandon]

I think the other interesting thing here is that Israel being the other partner in the conflict is they're going to lose more institutional support. Like, I already feel like there is a tide shift among like the average person in terms of their outlook on Israel or support for Israel. Right. And they still have a lot of like political or institutional support in the United States, but also abroad from like a lot of other countries, governments and things like this. But when a decision that you are a huge part in, maybe the primary reason that this is happening now, you start to lose that institutional support you've built in other places. Yeah, like people can only tolerate the consequences of your actions when it affects them in this way economically for so long. And I feel like that's. They are going to see the results of that in the next few years.

[Aiden]

I think the high level would be that this is becoming an economic story more than a military story. Like this is, this is spiraling to millions of people in economic like gas prices worldwide, fertilizer worldwide. And if this doesn't get open soon and there's no short term reason, it would be. I don't know why, I don't know what the plan. Maybe they do have a plan. But if that doesn't happen soon, we're looking at 150, 200 barrel oil. And that is just. And. And fertilizer at 3x the time. That will be a problem.

[Brandon]

You see that? You know that funny gas station outside a union station in LA?

[Aiden]

Dude, it's got to be already at

[Brandon]

850 a gallon for regular, which is not indicative of LA on the wall, but it is like there's this like comically expensive gas station in LA that was like, like it was $7 flat last week and I was like, oh, that's pretty low.

[Aiden]

It's funny being in LA because I've been looking at all these gas price charts and it's like gas price up 88 cents. It's like 350 for the country. It's like broad 350, bro.

[Doug]

I've been paid four plus for years. That gas station setting it at like $6 before the war. Like you're already making a shitload of money. So they're like, oh, war in Iran. Everybody, everybody will think this, this is chill. And they're just cranking up like they're just vibing the price. That's awesome.

[Aiden]

They vibe it.

[Doug]

That sucks.

[Aiden]

Yeah, it does kind of suck, honestly, but. But I think worth talking about.

[Doug]

War is back, baby.

[Aiden]

Dude, put this right after I do the Iran word,

[Doug]

But not where you would think it in a little land known as Japan. Japan. War is back for Japan. Now we doc.

[Aiden]

Now, famously, war was really bad in Japan.

[Doug]

It's back when I was better for about 80 years back. War is back. Well, Japan, war specifically.

[Aiden]

Specifically.

[Doug]

So okay. After World War II, Japan lost.

[Aiden]

I'm gonna fact check that. Real patriots.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Perry correct that in the comments, but they. So they lost us takes over and basically kind of forces a new constitution where they renounce the right to. To wage war. Japan constitutionally cannot wage war right now. So Takaichi, who's the prime minister we've talked about a couple of times, she had this, like, massive win. They have the largest, like, electoral percentage right now in the history of modern Japan. Right. So she, as a leader, has more ability to kind of push agenda than anyone in any, you know, living memory. Right. And now people in Japan are justifiably concerned about China, North Korea, Russia, and the unpredictability of the usa. Turns out we're making it feel a little weird. And when we were in Japan and we talked to Professor Jeffrey hall, he mentioned how, like, if war breaks out between China and the US it's probably happening on military bases in Japan.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Doug]

Like, that's like the war. Like, they're dragged into one. Yeah. Kind of regardless of what you want. And the USA has explicitly pushed for Japan to be more militarized, because that's Trump's thing.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Doug]

He wants everybody to spend more on military. So he praised Takaichi's peace through strength agenda. Scott Besant, Treasury Secretary, said on X, when Japan is strong, the US Is strong in Asia. So in the past, this was not something that the Japanese population cared about that much. But if you pull this up, Perry, even over the past five years. This is from Bloomberg, the number of people who feel that reforming the Constitution to allow for something like this is increasing pretty dramatically. So in this graph, you can see, since 2020, the number of people who thought it was necessary to reform the constitution was like 29%. Now it is up to 39.

[Aiden]

Ticking up.

[Doug]

It's ticking up. And not only that, the number of people who think it's unnecessary has. Is shrinking. Actually, the number of people who are undecided or don't care is about the same. Is about the same. So it's just. It's notable that the people really opposed to this are sort of rapidly shrinking. And so this is hugely notable. We've talked a number of times about how the Japanese average person is a little more apolitical than us. They've been in this extremely long kind of era of peace. And now Takaichi is really pushing for it. Quote, I am committed to creating an environment in which a national referendum can be held as soon as possible to let the public decide on whether or not to amend the constitution. She also wants to create a National Intelligence Bureau by July. She wants to have a CIA or an M16 or MI6 M I6 type of vibe, which is like, that's not our best man. Don't model it after that.

[Aiden]

Hard to start that from scratch.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I do like the idea you could never do it like us.

[Aiden]

Yeah, you really got to put some effort in.

[Doug]

They should acquire our.

[Aiden]

I mean, we're talking about this before we go to China. But I will say that the primary urgency behind this, my understanding, is like. Like, there is rising tensions between Japan and China. You know, political tit for tats. They're saying a lot of things. Takechi said some stuff about Taiwan that got China really heated. Yeah.

[Doug]

So that was months ago.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Doug]

And we talked about that. She was. She basically said Japan would consider military action if Chai. If China goes for Taiwan. China's been very upset about that. And we talked about that a bunch, and they were kind of hoping that that would fade out. And they've put, like, some economic constraints and restricted tourism. And I even talked to someone in Japan who said that, like, the amount of Chinese tourists that she has seen in the last couple months has decreased dramatically. It used to be one of the biggest groups, and they were really hoping that Takaichi would, like, lose power, and instead she gained massively. And now she isn't backing down. She's planning on going and visiting the war crime shrine, which is a whole other mini story. It's a shrine where there's 14 war criminals. Criminals. Their spirits got added to the shrine without anybody noticing. And it became a big. This is real. And you can't separate out the 14 spirits. They become one spirit, you know?

[Aiden]

Okay. I don't know.

[Brandon]

No, she's gonna.

[Doug]

There's a book that has all the spirits, all the spirits combined into one spiritual kind of energy. You can't pull them away.

[Aiden]

That's basic spirituality. You're lecturing me. I already know that.

[Doug]

You're saying we should pull out the 414 war criminals because they've combined.

[Aiden]

They've combined. I don't. I don't understand.

[Doug]

And one politician proposed that, and people are pissed. That's not what you're supposed to do. You don't pull out the 14. So the prime minister. It's like. It's a big deal when you go and visit the shrine because the unironically. These are like. So it's a shrine for, like, you know, soldiers, Japanese soldiers who fell in battle, particularly World War II, but by putting war criminals in there, like, their spirits are officially logged. As in the shrine.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Korea and China aren't stoked about that because they were the recipients of a lot of the war crimes. So it's kind of a bad look if the prime minister goes and visits the shrine where they literally enshrined 14 Class A war criminals.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Doug]

Without telling the public.

[Brandon]

You paint committed war crimes.

[Aiden]

If you're gonna do a war crime. B class.

[Doug]

And she. And she said, like, I'm trying to figure out how to go visit the shrine right now. Like, she just said that she's not potential. And.

[Aiden]

No, everyone's getting super nationalistic over there. It's cr. I mean. Yeah. Like you said, it backfired because the pain from the economic stuff, like the canceling tourism and the canceling imports hadn't really hit yet. It was just like a kind of a mean thing to do.

[Doug]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Aiden]

And so everyone in Japan was like, well, you then. And they rallied behind her and she. She called a snap election right then. It was kind of politically brilliant. And so her. Her power didn't shrink. It massively increased. And it was kind of because of this. China, like, people were more. So it's kind of crazy.

[Doug]

Yeah. I'm channeling my CDUG VA and giving you the. The Japan news. I mean, we'll. We'll be learning more about this, but with all the tensions going around in the world, Japan, not.

[Aiden]

Not a good time looking to defend themselves.

[Brandon]

And I'll give you my opinions about what she said about Taiwan in four weeks.

[Doug]

Support for this show comes from Tastytrade.

[Aiden]

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

[Doug]

Is bitcoin a money?

[Aiden]

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

[Doug]

These are financial terms.

[Aiden]

Okay?

[Doug]

Yes.

[Aiden]

The Lady Macbeth strategy. Is that real or fake?

[Doug]

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

[Brandon]

That's real for sure.

[Aiden]

It's real.

[Brandon]

Really?

[Aiden]

It's real. Okay.

[Doug]

Yes.

[Brandon]

Everyone knows that.

[Aiden]

What about the. What about momentum canceling?

[Brandon]

Momentum cancel. That's from Melee.

[Doug]

Fake.

[Aiden]

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

[Doug]

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

[Brandon]

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

[Doug]

Fair point. That's a fair point. Okay.

[Aiden]

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

[Doug]

Brandon, what does it mean?

[Aiden]

Let's not focus too much on the details. You know who could explain it really well? Tastytrade. Because they have an actual jargon library that breaks down these terms help you understand so you can trade with understanding.

[Doug]

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

[Aiden]

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

[Doug]

Okay, I'm picking up on it.

[Brandon]

And it's a member of finra. Nfa. Nsipc.

[Doug]

Well, hold on. Hold on. Is it?

[Aiden]

Yes.

[Brandon]

Okay.

[Doug]

All right, man.

[Aiden]

Thank you.

[Doug]

Tasty trade for supporting the show.

[Aiden]

More for lemonade stand comes from Samsara.

[Brandon]

You know what my dream always was? Get behind the wheel of a big rig.

[Aiden]

He would be the worst truck.

[Doug]

What products would you ship?

[Aiden]

You would be the worst truck.

[Brandon]

But they stopped me. They stopped me. They should stop you because I got in too many assets behind the wheel.

[Doug]

Wheel.

[Brandon]

But for more responsible truckers, I guess. Yeah, I guess. If you're worried about an Aiden, they use dash cams to keep people like me accountable.

[Doug]

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[Brandon]

Back in the day you could just submit false claims left and right.

[Aiden]

19,000 of those claims are from Aiden Are for people seeing Aiden.

[Doug]

Don't wait for the next action to take action.

[Brandon]

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[Aiden]

That's samsara.com lemonade samsara operate smarter.

[Doug]

Order now and Aiden will drive a truck into your house

[Aiden]

or he won't.

[Doug]

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[Brandon]

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[Doug]

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[Brandon]

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[Doug]

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[Brandon]

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[Doug]

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[Brandon]

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[Doug]

Time for something exciting. Honda car company. You might have heard about it. They made a little announcement.

[Aiden]

I love Honda. Bite your tongue. If you're going to say a negative thing about Honda. I'm a die hard Honda Defender. We are not paid. This is not a sponsor.

[Doug]

Honda sucks.

[Brandon]

Thank you.

[Aiden]

We're going to have a problem. We're going to have beef bro.

[Brandon]

And you went to host the Honda Fit.

[Doug]

As long as Adish does doesn't drive a Honda, I think I'm good. Look, they made a post three days ago, big announcement where they said they are canceling the development and launch of three EV models that have been planned for North America. You can pull this up for just like a few seconds, Perry, but Honda posted this announcement and it is really bleak. Honda basically announced two problems. First off, they tried to pivot to EVs. They're like, we are going to make a goal to go carbon neutral by 2050. And the US especially under Biden, was like really pushing EV transition, right? So Honda as a broad global strategy was like, we're going to really focus on EVs, especially in the United States, okay? And then Trump gets elected and now there's a whole bunch of tariffs that make traditional hybrid cars very expensive. On top of that, we've been dropping. The United States government has been dropping the subsidies to buy EVs and just generally there's less interest in them. So the demand on the US Side has suddenly precipitously dropped. Instead of being this like long term goal that persists and China is coming in and eating everybody's lunch in the EV market. And Honda has basically said we are kind of, we're kind of fucked. They're posting losses, they're canceling the EVs, it looks real bad. And they're basically just saying like on both of our fronts, on through, on the traditional side and on the EV side, we're failing. So we're just going to focus on the traditional hybrids.

[Aiden]

Did they say anything about how they love the drivers of Honda fits and how that's their best thing.

[Brandon]

Why would they say that?

[Aiden]

We do something that you might mention, like as I throw a bone to your audience, right, we're failing on this front. We're feeling this far, but we crushed it on the Honda Fit 2017. And that's where and you think they'd

[Brandon]

be hanging on to that.

[Aiden]

So I just think if you have a big hit, don't forget to.

[Brandon]

Don't forget to mention it was weird.

[Doug]

There's a whole section. It's just like, here is Brandon Ewing at Dunkin Donuts. Here's Brandon at 4:30pm and it's drone shots that have been following you around specifically.

[Aiden]

That's probably what they're feeling. It's very expensive, it sounds like.

[Doug]

So I think, I think this is an interesting canary in the coal mine for some of the other big car companies, right? This is one of the ones that has tried to pivot to EVs and they basically are saying we're giving up. Right? And you're seeing other companies do this. And it's both the pressure from China, the weird regulation and vicissitudes of the US market, all this crazy.

[Aiden]

You gotta dive up. Good fucking lingo there. Vicissitudes, baby.

[Doug]

And so to kind of like wrap it up, they are sticking with internal combustion engines, which kind of sucks because I, I feel like we should move towards an EV future. So I think if you want to like tell Honda that you're upset with this, you don't want internal combustion engines, Tweet at them and say, hashtag abolishice. Don't stick with this type of car and let's move to EVs. You know, referring to internal and like you could say something like we believe people from other countries should be welcome here in America. Hashtag fuck ice.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Referring to Chinese manufacturers being able to produce cars and a general dislike of internal combustion engines.

[Brandon]

I don't know if you guys know this, but there's another, I think there's another thing going on right now. Couldn't possibly be like, it's like mass people picking up, picking up

[Doug]

unmarked vehicles, elephant in the room, self driving cars nobody's really talking about.

[Brandon]

That

[Doug]

was a great interview for car and Dragon driver with the Ford CEO. He starts talking about how like Covid threw them off because they thought there was gonna be like, oh, this massive surge for EVs and that it didn't really work out. Talks about how he thinks Ford has been iterating off of their previous ICE designs. Hashtag fuck ice. Internal combustion engines and that like their stuff was just not actually built from the ground up in a smart way for EVs so they're needing to redo that. Talking about how the software defined vehicles, cars really just being software that makes the user happy is like the future and really talks about this candidly. And apparently this. The CEO of Ford, like, does racing. He just does car.

[Aiden]

I've heard so many interviews with him. He seems like he gets it. But what's funny is Ford has made no progress. So it feels like he's a guy that's just like, bro. He comes out on these interviews, he talks about how, man, we're cooked. We got to do this, this, and this, and then nothing happens in the stock tanks. And I'm like, maybe you're. What's going. What is going on between his. He's the leader. But I agree with you. And I think, you know, this story is not just Honda, right? We talked about Germany and the German cars. Everybody's caught between what worked for decades and this huge wave from China and then, like different EV adoptions around the globe.

[Brandon]

I think genuinely your hands are probably a bit tied in that situation. Right? Because the amount of transformation that your company needs to take and the people that you need to convince and maybe the legislation that would push you in the appropriate direction, all of these things are gigantic layers of friction that make that change. Such a big gamble. And you have to deal with the short term consequences of what your shareholders think. As the CEO, I'm not, you know, I don't care what happens to the Ford CEO. Like, I. He's. He can.

[Aiden]

You are an asshole. But Jim Farley is a nice man.

[Brandon]

But I can see how the, the him getting it in interviews doesn't translate into immediate change for a public company that might not make it through that transition.

[Aiden]

Probably a big, slow ship that's hard to turn. Right?

[Brandon]

Yes. I mean, and it's funny because all of the people that are invested in the company, it's like, okay, you're going to let it die slowly instead because you'll inevitably lose. Like the EVs. It's like, there's no getting around that the EVs are going to win eventually.

[Aiden]

Yeah, the story about Harley, where, like, they realized that only old people were buying their bikes and so they.

[Doug]

Oh, Harley Davidson.

[Aiden]

Harley Davidson Davidson. And so they were like, we need to try a youthful pivot. And so they tried this big pivot for like a year, maybe eight months. It didn't really work off the ground. And they were like it. And then they went all in on old people. They're like, the company will die eventually, but we're going to make money while we can. They're just, they're like, the brand is not going to revitalize for young people.

[Doug]

That's the way I feel about Honda it's like you're giving up on what

[Aiden]

is clearly the future.

[Doug]

We're just going to, we're just going to can the side. We're going to focus on hybrids. Do a quote from the Ford CEO.

[Brandon]

Like I kind of like that level of honesty. If he came into the interview. Well tell me what. Yeah. What's the actual quote?

[Doug]

Well I just. So this is Ford CEO. He says when we ripped apart a Tesla I was absolutely flabbergasted. The Mach E meaning his own EV, Ford's EV the wiring harness was 70 pounds heavier and 1.6 kilometers longer. Basically the wiring that, that hooks up the pieces of the car. We didn't know what was going on in Tesla engineers minds but now we understand they had no prejudice. We had prejudice. They said let's design the vehicle for the lowest, smallest battery. Totally different approach. So he admits like we're stuck in these old ways and we're kind of just trying to like jam a battery into these ICE cars. And what we need to do is rethink it from the ground up. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we need to. You need to abolish that entirely and rebuild.

[Aiden]

That's very smart. What you said about software is really. Because that's what I've heard too is that these companies, they thought, I mean it's been true that to be good at making cars you're good at certain processes. And one of them was not software.

[Doug]

Right.

[Aiden]

But the modern day car is almost like an entertainment unit. It's you know, the dashboard, everything. Like the Chinese cars are built like phones almost with a bunch of different.

[Doug]

Right.

[Brandon]

Well it's funny to. Xiaomi is a phone company.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

And like they don't care as much about now that they're bad at it, but they don't care about horsepower. Like those things are not the number one thing it's ranked on. It's like all the media features and all that stuff.

[Brandon]

Well that was the quote in Kaput when it was talking about the German car companies is like they couldn't get their heads around them. Not talking about, they're like what do you mean you guys don't talk about speed?

[Doug]

Horsepower. Yeah.

[Aiden]

It's like everyone just gets a car to go to the grocery store. Most people it's like if it gets it done and you can listen to music and watch media. So anyway it shows that it's pretty

[Doug]

interesting because we're way over the time limit. People seem to love this one. And cut.

[Aiden]

Continuing from what Aiden just Said, I'm sure we're laying right in order. There's been a massive hatred of Apple over what they've done with the Apple App Store. Oh, yes, such a good story. Monopoly battle that was kicked off by Tim Sweeney and Epic Games and Fortnite because they're the only ones that had the muscle post Covid when every single kid on the world was addicted to Fortnite. They were tired of 30% of every in app purchase going to either of these stores. And they said, this is stupid. We can make our own store. But then all the stores would like, block their store or like make it hard to get to or like cut them off the App Store. And so there was this big lawsuit by Tim Sweeney against Google Play and against Apple. Now for some reason, I don't know why, they lost the Apple lawsuit and won the Google Play lawsuit. Google Play was declared a monopoly in the way they did. I don't know why there's a difference on this. Maybe we could look it up. But the point is there was legal battles that continuing, continuing. And finally Google has given in and they are making substantial changes to their App Store, which is in. App purchases drop from 30% to 20%. Subscriptions dropped to 10%. Developers using their own billing pay as little as 5%. They can no longer make it like really like warning sign danger if you try to go off to a different store because they do like right now, if you're like on that, on the, on a game and you want to go to their online store, it like goes, danger, you're leaving the app. This is crazy. Now it's easy. So everyone can easily make their own purchase store. So it's, it's now a huge competitive lob at Apple because now on the Play Store, you will get a much better split as a developer than you are on the Apple Store. Used to be about even. And Tim Sweethey came out, I got the, I got his tweet somewhere around here. Google is opening up Android. You can put on the screen with robust support for competing stores, competing payments, and a better deal for all developers. So we've settled all of our disputes worldwide. Thanks, Google. Is that their five years of legal battle, Tim Sweeney at least gets a win in this area, which is pretty crazy. Now I do think it's funny that, listen, if you look into this, at every single step of the way, Google has fought tooth and nail not to make this change. And when they finally had to do it, they're like, like, we're gonna, we're opening up. Yeah, we're developers. We're pro developers and it's kind of working. Everyone's being like, oh, Google's pro developer now. It's just so funny to be like scraping against it. So anyway, this is a, this is a huge deal that kind of. If Apple feels like they have to respond, we'll finally end this. Gar. Not let me end, but seriously weaken this gargantuan duopoly that has existed since mobile phones became dominant. Like, this is so huge.

[Brandon]

You're saying in the most idealistic scenario, because Google is such a huge player and they are making these changes, it will pressure Apple to also make them. Even though they won the same lawsuit on their side somehow.

[Aiden]

Apple won their lawsuit, but they did.

[Brandon]

It's because they've done nothing wrong. Apple makes great computers and phones and they're compatible with your watch.

[Aiden]

This is not an ad. Yeah. So six years of legal warfare, $200 billion mobile app market. Apple still charges 30%, but Android is now dramatically cheaper. And that does mean something. Developers will start to notice how much better that feels because again, having a third of your profit slurped away by these big stores is like they've been complaining about it more and more and more and more and they've been trying to get around it and get outside of it and now they can do it easily on Android and they can't on.

[Brandon]

Isn't this incredibly naive though, like, to believe that that would be an outcome? Apple has such a gigantic portion of the market, you can't not engage in their store. Like, I understand there's a huge other player, but it's. If I'm making any sort of app, why would I not like as long as iPhone is so big.

[Aiden]

So imagine if your friend who owns an Android can use the Epic Play Store or whatever easily.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

And they're getting a discount, they're getting a better deal. And so you as a customer start noticing that the iPhone person is paying more, has worse updates or whatever. Like the experience becomes worse because the developer prefers the, the platform when they can make a lot more money.

[Doug]

Yeah, it's literally, you know, if Uber is like, oh, Your ride is 10% cheaper when you use Android, like that is going to start to your, you know, your gotcha game that you play, all the like all the in app purchases you do on literally anything your Uber, like if everything starts dropping because of this, eventually I don't think people are going to not post on the iPhone store. But I think people will increasingly put pressure on their customers to be like, you can get it cheaper over here. And that's what Epic has been doing. Like what they did win against Apple is that the judge agreed that Apple had basically prevented people from being able to set up their own alternative payment. And so there was a follow up with a judge where they said, Epic, excuse me, Apple needs to make it easier for people to set up their own payment system. So Epic got sort of a win. And again, if people are, if developers in an app are saying like leave, go here, buy this somewhere else. Do not buy this on iPhone. And that just keeps repeating over and over and over. Eventually people are getting a couple customers.

[Brandon]

If you subscribe to the lemonade stand Patreon or are thinking about it, do not subscribe on your iPhone. Subscribe on desktop. You pay. This is not a joke. You actually do have to pay way more when you use the iOS app. Go subscribe on your desktop or on the app. Actual Patreon website. Do not.

[Aiden]

Anyway, I'll end this segment by saying the. The reason that Apple won and Google lost apparently is first of all, Apple had a. A judge decide the trial. So it's one judge just made a decision. Google one was a jury trial. And the second thing was that Google had a ton of internal evidence that was. Looked really bad. Like emails that came out were like, we're a monopoly. Lol. Like that type of shit is kind of of the reason as opposed to Apple which is more buttoned up on that stuff. So it made it easier of an open and shut case.

[Brandon]

Cut Washington state another place. Well, sorry, let me, let me restart.

[Doug]

Don't edit that. And it's going to be first. It's the.

[Aiden]

Don't edit that.

[Doug]

This is going first. And leave this in.

[Aiden]

We're open all five stories with Washington State, Canada or Scandinavia eight issue.

[Brandon]

If you put that issue. If you keep all that in, I'm going to leak your okay in Washington state. I don't know if you guys know this, but it's one of the few states in the US that does not have an income tax.

[Doug]

Sure do. Aidan. I learned the hard way.

[Aiden]

You learned the hard way. You wanted to pay income tax.

[Doug]

No, I started making money when I lived there. That's when I suddenly started to like make a lot of money.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Doug]

And then I moved to California and I got, and I got plugged like that leak.

[Brandon]

I'll never, I will never, ever forget the jarring change between moving like I used to do my taxes on Turbo tax.

[Doug]

Oops, you just dropped earlier.

[Brandon]

And in watching it and you get to the state section and then you just click done and then you come to California.

[Doug]

It's like a whole. Another part of your.

[Aiden]

It's a crazy huge.

[Brandon]

Just at a personal level, I remember enjoying that part. But they have just introduced a. Their first income tax ever after many previous rejections of income taxes in the past. And it is specifically on people who make more than a million dollars a year, which is apparently 20, about 20,000 people in the state of Washington.

[Aiden]

It doesn't include streamers. All right, because they're.

[Brandon]

No, it actually excludes streamers because of the value to society. No, no, it says they're worse people but do deliver value to society. Okay, great.

[Doug]

It excludes them because they're.

[Brandon]

And it does say also rounding. The governor of Washington is on record saying that they want Clavicular to move.

[Aiden]

Their tax benefits will do that.

[Brandon]

Interesting. It's. It's like they used to seek out Amazon HQ but now it's all baby,

[Aiden]

my cortisol will spike and I have to pay.

[Brandon]

But up until, up until now, Washington state is primarily funded by sales tax and taxes on businesses. And they have never had an income tax to raise income. But they're now they're at this cross section where the state deficit has gotten so much larger. And this is supposedly going to generate around $4 billion, which helps close the apparently $10 billion gap that they have on their budget.

[Aiden]

Every story about anyone's deficit is like we're trying this very crazy thing to fix it. It's going to do like 1%. It's like, well that's 4.

[Brandon]

That's, you know, it's 40%.

[Aiden]

Yeah, no, that's a big deal.

[Brandon]

And, and also it's at a time socially where I think the energy for taxing the wealthier is much more strong than it used to be. And obviously this is coming with the usual trappings of the wealthy are going to leave. They're disappearing. With previous examples of. Jeff Bezos had already moved to Florida. He moved to Florida because of the differences in capital gains tax or, or if. Or his parents health could be either.

[Aiden]

It was like three months after the capital gain. He's like, my dad is sick and I have. You have a jet, but you don't need to move your residence. Jeff Bezos, I'm so fucking stupid.

[Brandon]

Howard Scholz, the former CEO of Starbucks moved announced that he was moving to Miami shortly after this tax was passed. However, he had already apparently purchased a property there and had committed to moving to Florida prior to this. But the frequent argument against this is that you're going to lose a bunch of your tax base by putting something this into place. But I personally have a hard time believing that in a place that has no income tax to begin with.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

And also studies have shown, albeit I could specifically reference a study that reviewed, well, flight out of the UK from earlier last year, that people above this like million dollar income mark are way less likely to move than the average person because usually their wealth is tied to the area that they live in in some way either through the companies and they own and the people they employ. And so the only argument I can see here is that over a long enough period of time, people will, in the low enough friction of moving between states, you would lose these people. But from Washington it kind of seems like a win win, at least in the short term because you have no income tax to begin with and you, you're bringing, you're taxing these high earners that at whatever rate you can kind of get out of them. It's, it's at a 9.9% rate for every dollar they make past a million or something.

[Doug]

I mean, which is high. I mean to, you know, counter arguments. One is that might be the case, you know, of like leaving New York City. It's like, oh, are people really going to leave New York City if, if Mamdani increases taxes? Like New York City is so special and great. And I think there's a fair argument that a lot of people in Seattle, if they're suddenly being taxed at the same rate of California, would move to California. Right. I mean that is one of the big draws of people going to, so Washington and Seattle. Right. There's famously a lot of people fucking hate the weather there. And if you're like, oh, I'm going to have the same amount of taxes. I mean, you know, for somebody who's making, you know, whatever, let's say $2 million, the first million is untaxed. Right.

[Brandon]

So as far as I understand.

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. So after that point they would then pay this 9% or 9.9. So they'd be paying. If you make $2 million a year, you're now losing $100,000. I mean that is a lot of money.

[Brandon]

Right, but it is way less than what you would be getting taxed overall in a place like California.

[Doug]

I thought California is also about 9, like high 9%.

[Brandon]

Yeah, but it's in way earlier I think California's highest like income tax. Again, like, I guess that's $100,000.

[Doug]

Okay. No, no, no, that's totally fair. That's totally fair. So it is still different. I guess that's the argument. And in, I think particularly when you are talking about a place like Seattle, which famously a lot of people don't enjoy the weather. I love it there. But I would not be surprised of a lot of people who are just optimizing for money are then like, okay, well, I'm going to go live in, you know, whatever part of California that has that's 80 degrees every single day.

[Brandon]

There's also some controversy as to how this passed. There's, you know, for the, apparently the Washington constitution, like, restricts income taxes traditionally. And that's part of the reason why one has never been passed previously. And there's some sort of loophole to be able to put this in place. And that's like, inherently controversial the way they approach that. I think the, I mean, I, I

[Aiden]

like the idea of taxing the wealthy. I am annoyed with this game of. Because I, I, I agree with you that wealthy won't flee the country. But I think the state lines thing, I wish.

[Doug]

But also stop going for millionaires.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Just go for the billionaires a little bit higher. Everyone above me. No, but I think the, the, like, I, if it doesn't, if it exists in one state but not the other, I just feel like people are, are the people that can leave will try to move. Right.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Shouldn't it be national?

[Brandon]

I don't know.

[Doug]

I will, I will do the exact counter argument to what I said, which is that I fucking love Seattle and I would of course live there and pay this. Like, I, you know, so I think probably there won't be that much flight. It is just, it is notable that it's not something like New York City, which is like, extremely unique. I don't know that that many people feel that degree of intensity about Seattle, I guess.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

The thing I could disagree as someone

[Doug]

who loves the city.

[Aiden]

Like, yeah, it's like that we have states always competing in a race to the bottom to make the best deal for people with money. Right. That's the problem. It's like, so they're going to be

[Doug]

tempted over to Miami or whatever.

[Aiden]

I just like, why, why is Ohio or Florida or Nevada competing with Seattle on Taxi? It's like, it's like the way that billionaires shop around in different cities to get them to pay for their fucking stadium.

[Doug]

Wait, so are you advocating for a federal income tax?

[Aiden]

We have federal income. I mean, like a higher one. And then not making it, the state should be like almost the same. I don't know.

[Brandon]

Okay, so I think I, I agree with you this, like race to the bottom is stupid to begin with. I, I generally think that this is worth trying and the risk of flight is low. From the things that I have read. I think the inherent competition is stupid. The other thing, and the reason why I think this is important to put in place is if you make this amount of money in Washington, there's already a regressive tax system in place. So if you're taxed, like if your primary vehicle of being taxed is sales tax, Right. And if you have higher income, sales tax affects you at a lower percentage than it affects a middle income or a lower income person. Right. So effectively taxation in Washington is regressive because of the taxes they rely on. And people who make a lot of money pay less than, less in percent in total taxes than the people do at the bottom. It's not even like raising, it's not even just about raising it on them to like get them to pay more. It's about getting them to a threshold that like evens it out with other normal people. And I think, you know, I, from an outsider perspective would like to see how this plays out. And if it fails, like if you're five, ten years from now and you can see the negative effects of it, well, you could say, at least we tried and we approach it with something new.

[Aiden]

That's what I meant. Okay, like what if it fails because people move to a state that has zero income tax or whatever, it's like, that shouldn't be enough. Like, yeah, why this wouldn't fail if there wasn't like a Florida or a Puerto Rico or Nevada where they can just, or Texas where they can go to zero. That's what's annoying to me is I don't know if it'll fail. Maybe it won't fail. I move. But you should be allowed to move. But you can't chase around the country.

[Brandon]

You're saying your argument is the threat of that being a problem shouldn't exist in the first place.

[Aiden]

But, and then because it does this, imagine this did fail, everyone goes, well, that doesn't work. It's a bad idea. Because look, but it's like, well, they can't compete against a state that will race to the bottom, take political money, cut all the taxes for the top. Like that's, that's the frustrating part is like this would even be good experiment to me because we don't know, hopefully it Just works and there's no problem. But, yeah, you know, what Jeff Bezos is doing is, like, so naked transparent that it's like, I can't.

[Brandon]

I think Jeff Bezos is also a bad example because he's someone who is so wealthy and has so much money in stock specifically, that he was already under threat. Under threat from the taxes being levied through capital gains specifically in the stock. And then in this situation, this is more about, like, this is affecting people making over a million dollars a year in income, not necessarily from, like, stocks or, like, assets they own. Right. That can. And I think if you have that much income, like, if you're sitting in the, like, million to $10 million range, that a bulk of these people would be. They. That income is tied to businesses and things they presumably have to do in Washington. Washington. They don't have this, like, insane level of wealth and mobility that someone like Jeff Bezos did.

[Aiden]

I agree. This will hit. This will get the dentist in Seattle. This will get the. This will absolutely get the. The higher, upper.

[Brandon]

Yeah. Andrew, my anesthesiologist friend,

[Aiden]

if they own a practice a year, then just make bank anesthesiologist.

[Brandon]

It's, It's. This is going to hit the anesthesia heart.

[Aiden]

It's not going to hit the guy that owns, you know, a ton of smock or the Microsoft executive or the, you know, those people may flee. I don't know if they will or not, but they, they are much easier to flee. So it's frustrating because, you know, I think the dentist should be taxed more. But it's. That's not the person. Anyway, whatever I do.

[Doug]

Yeah, I agree with you. With you. I would like. I'm excited to see what happens.

[Brandon]

All right, Jarvis, pull me out.

[Doug]

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[Aiden]

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[Doug]

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[Aiden]

Doug, what you got for us?

[Doug]

Let's talk a little bit about a company named Tinder. They just did their first little keynote about new products and one thing that jumped out to in this keynote is right here.

[Aiden]

We're also extending Tinder beyond the screen because today we're launching URL events bookable in the app in Los Angeles. Creating real world.

[Doug]

All right, so if you pause it there, there's a whole lot that they cover in this hour long keynote of new features and quotes. A lot of them are what you expect. This is how we're going to use AI to do blah, blah, blah, which is also what Bumble right now is doing. Bumble's doing the like AI is going to be your matchmaker. So a lot of that, some things I thought were interesting. The, the dating apps are all trying to get Gen Z and like that's like the big hot thing.

[Aiden]

They don't date.

[Doug]

They don't date. And you know, the, the, the quote is like, you know, they don't, they're, they're not interested in swiping anymore. They don't want to swipe.

[Brandon]

So they're at home listening to Lemonade.

[Aiden]

Yeah. Gen Z is collectively all listening to

[Doug]

this podcast and so they have announced that they're going to start testing this idea of events where people like meet up in person and then you can start doing this thing. And what I thought was interesting is that, that you're just like reinventing dating from first principles. And then if you go to the second one, Perry. There's this new app that came out this last week called YouTube Surfer, where what it does is it recreates old school style cable TV channels where there's YouTube videos playing and you can click like on the left pair, you can go to like the History Channel and you, you just join in, like midway through whatever video is playing and you

[Aiden]

can see the thing kind of sick.

[Brandon]

And this is more money.

[Doug]

It's awesome, right? And a bunch of people are like, okay, this is kind of sick. Like, instead of choice paralysis or if you're unhappy with the YouTube algorithm, you can kind of do channel.

[Aiden]

YouTube. Video in the middle is kind of based, right?

[Doug]

And you can see how many people are watching right now at the bottom, it's like 300 people are watching.

[Aiden]

You would join a movie in the middle and it'd be kind of clicking on the left. Can't wait to watch the beginning.

[Doug]

Yeah. Okay, so now we're watching the History Channel and we're going to join midway through this video.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Wow. The Great war. So this is another one in this app idea. Really cool, really creative. Right. And what I think is so interesting.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Doug]

Is it feels like the newest innovations and the things that are getting a lot of like viral attention are us just reinventing what we had 20 years ago.

[Aiden]

Yes.

[Doug]

This. People are like, you know what, what's so cool about this? This, to be clear, little, you know, viral, fun kind of toy app. But people are like, yeah, it's really nice to feel like you're watching other people like or have the same kind of thing. There's a limited choice. So I'm not just endlessly scrolling and the same thing with events. The idea that Tinder's big breakthrough is gonna be to get a group of people together in person to talk. That's just not Tinder, dude. You're just organizing events. And so I just thought you are

[Aiden]

just an event organizer.

[Doug]

You're just an event organizer.

[Aiden]

A different business.

[Brandon]

I think the Tinder example is really good. I think we're far enough along into sort of digital life that we've had time to like, like, societally react and reshape how digital things fit into our lives as utility. So in the case of dating, right. They're like, let's digitize and make this process like as, as quick and as seamless as possible. Frictionless. Just swipe.

[Aiden]

Friction is life.

[Brandon]

And then I think inevitably the, the experience of dating online via apps like this is bad. Most people think it is bad. And now that is culturally prevalent enough. We've all spent enough time trying those things collectively that we're like, we're looking for a return to doing it the normal way. And Tinder can be a facilitator for that. I actually think this is a good angle for them because I do think that there still needs to be. There isn't this like free flowing idea of meeting people in the same way you could decades ago? There's still like a. There needs to be a push or a shove for you to go into dating somehow. And Tinder can be the gateway to that, but in a different way than it used to be. And I think the example we talked about on a Patreon episode a long time ago was I met that guy who was developing a dating app called like 5:30 or 6:30. And he was focusing around like calls and in person meetups.

[Doug]

It's like restrictions, you know, it's people. It's people saying, hey, just having this endless mass exposure to everybody on planet Earth is not actually healthy for us and we should go back in some ways.

[Aiden]

Can you pull us up, Perry? Do you guys remember this guy? He was the WeWork CEO.

[Doug]

Yeah. I saw this bit of fraud, but

[Aiden]

he's back with a new idea, which is essentially this, which is like, I'm buying instead of office space for companies, I'm buying residential space for humans. And we're doing a ton of events all the time. Yeah, it is going to be like. Yeah, it's built in community.

[Doug]

Yeah. And I think it's, it's kind of brilliant, which is that you buy into, you know, if you're buying a condo or whatever. Like a part of what you're paying for is the idea that people in that entire complex are going to be doing events and you can meet them and hang out with them. And that feels meaningful. Unfortunately, it's by Adam Newman, who's a giant scam artist, but the concept makes sense.

[Brandon]

It does. This could be anywhere you live.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

If you put effort in.

[Aiden]

That was an example.

[Brandon]

Am I fucking crazy?

[Aiden]

Like, there is. This could be any apartment you live in.

[Brandon]

This could be any apartment you live in. If you just put it in a little effort.

[Aiden]

Yeah. And also, like, apartments do this now. Like, I've lived in apartments where they're like, we have a, you know, they do little events. I guess he's leaning into it in More extreme way.

[Doug]

He's doing it in a way where he can generate a lot of investment money.

[Aiden]

Yeah.

[Doug]

I'm the only places you live that bake community things into the place you live is obviously a good thing.

[Aiden]

I mean it's a human. We love this as humans from the dawn of time. And people are feeling atomized and isolated in the usual area. And I think people are trying.

[Brandon]

This is what I think is gonna happen here is clearly the difference here is you're everybody signing up for one of these units has kind of the implicit agreement that they want to put the effort in of meeting and having these events. But in the same way that like I. I think I'm gonna be involved in my apartment building social committee. And I said yes to it five years ago.

[Doug]

You're not gonna.

[Brandon]

I'm not. I'm not gonna fucking. I'm not gonna. Nobody's gonna fucking do it.

[Doug]

I think if you live at that place that doesn't change whether you're an Aiden or not. Aiden makes friends with everyone everywhere. I am not. I'm gonna stay inside on a Friday night and play video games.

[Aiden]

Signing up for the Adam Newman fucking flower Fred than sitting in his room.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

No, I mean, yeah.

[Doug]

I think something like this could be great. You know, when I went to. When I moved to Seattle it was hard to meet new friends and like something like that would have been really valuable. You know. I definitely would have utilized it. Yeah.

[Aiden]

I just think it's such a dumb business because it's not like everything that you do to be good is like very personalized and effort driven. There's no scalability. There's not. He preaches it like a tech company or like a. There's no.

[Doug]

Yeah, no, he's a.

[Aiden]

He's just. It's just unique.

[Doug]

There's a section where he says here's our era. Everything here is made in house in our flow kitchen. And he shows all the like smoothies that are presumably $12 each. And it's like, okay, this is. This is for all part of your. Yeah, yeah.

[Aiden]

I mean. Yeah, I think the demand is real.

[Doug]

I think trend here. The reason why this should go later in the episode 8 ish is because I think it's interesting that we will probably see more and more tech services that have really grown over the last decade or two making products that like revert back in a weird way. And I wouldn't be surprised if Valve ends up releasing real life loot boxes with guns.

[Aiden]

With real guns physically.

[Doug]

And that's gonna be it feels good

[Aiden]

to hold an AK47.

[Doug]

That'll joke will make sense depending on the order of this.

[Brandon]

I guarantee you were after that one.

[Doug]

You thought that was okay. Good. Thank God. This was a pretty interesting one.

[Brandon]

All right, a bit of tech news that's not about AI, which I think is somewhat novel in the current time. And so Apple announced their, or released, excuse me, their MacBook Neo, which is a, I think $600, $500 laptop, primarily for a lower end market that Apple has left underserved for a long time. Their laptops are, I would say, famously expensive and it's allowed Windows, different Windows laptops to really corner a portion of the market. And things like Chromebooks that Apple has had a rougher time competing with because they only offer these more expensive, arguably premium in some ways products. But the Neo, which is basically the $600 notebook, is finally out and it's reportedly shaking things up a bit on the Windows they're freaked out manufacturer thing. Yeah. So the CEO, the co CEO of Asus SY noted that in the past Apple's pricing situation has always been high. So for them to release a very, very budget friendly product, this is obviously a shock to the entire industry. And he noted later however, that one of his I would say coping mechanisms for this laptop is well, the laptop isn't built to like, like upgrade the ram and it's not as like modifiable as a lot of the competitors buying

[Aiden]

Apple products in the history of computing.

[Brandon]

And I was like, am I, is the quote being mistranslated or something because this guy's Chinese. And I was, I was like, what an insane argument for the market that this laptop serves. Who was buying $500 like Chromebooks or $500 Windows laptops so they could add like modify the RAM in there.

[Doug]

You know, honestly maybe him expressing the idea of just broadly being more customizable.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Doug]

With Windows versus macOS. I think that's a more legitimate argument. It's like at the end of the day. But again, the market of people who don't care about that is way, way, way bigger.

[Aiden]

It's just bigger.

[Doug]

It's so much bigger. Yeah, but my mom does not give a fuck if she can run Linux. No.

[Brandon]

And every review that I see about these things is really, really positive in terms of their performance according to the price point. And I think it's, I think the laptop runs on like the same chip that the last iPhone did, which is pretty incredible in the first place, that we're kind of at a place where like you know, the phone chip can just make a laptop do what it needs.

[Aiden]

I mean it's like a, that's what

[Brandon]

it is, but that's who this consumer is. Like if you're a student, for example, it's like you're pulling up PDFs web pages. You're not like editing YouTube videos or like rendering 3D objects. That's not what this is for. Most people just use these things to like, you know, open notion and talk

[Aiden]

to cloud, do a podcast and do

[Brandon]

the lemonade stand podcast. And so it's pretty cool to see them move in this direction. As you know, somebody who likes Apple products a lot coincidentally using the wrong laptop.

[Aiden]

You have Huawei today. Yeah, we gotta get our Visa.

[Brandon]

And it reminded me a lot of how their Mac Mini sort of serves this market as well. It's like a little more expensive but like a really high performing kind of like mobile ish, but still desktop computer that Apple offers. And I think for all of the manufacturers that get to pump out, I would say shittier Windows laptops that are like loaded with Windows's bloat in their software. This is a, this is actually a nice thing to see. No, I mean as an Apple shill,

[Aiden]

when I was at Nvidia, we used to work with all these hardware partners for laptops. We had to do these yearly marketing campaigns. So it's like Acer, Asus, Lenovo, hp, all these people. And they fucking loved the Chromebook market. The Chromebook market was like just bread and butter cash cow. Because you could make something for cheap. People were buying it like crazy. There was no competition from Apple. It was. So this is them panicking. Everything I've read is that all these CEOs are like in different stages of the five stages of Greek, you know, like they're angry about it, they're denying they're bargaining, but it's like all of them are like, this is just going to seriously hurt our. Because this is apparently I'm not an Apple guy. I'm not like you, I'm not going to buy this product. But my understanding is the reviews are like pretty stellar. It does exactly what a person buying a $600 laptop is going to want to do. And all of a sudden they're just getting punched in the gut. I think it's going to really shake up the PC market.

[Doug]

Yeah, yeah. Even as a certified Apple hater, like, like brilliant play. I'm super glad they're doing it. It's awesome. Like make this more competitive. Make like put this out There. It's fantastic.

[Brandon]

Yeah. If anything, I think it'll just push some of these other companies to offer a Windows Laptop or maybe changes to Windows OS that make it fucking suck less. That would be my hope, dude.

[Aiden]

I actually agree because, like, the laptop I have now is a Samsung laptop. Laptops like this did not exist for windows until the MacBook. The MacBook forced everyone's hand to make these look nicer. Like the Windows surfaces. And like. Like, they just, like, went back to basics. They made things look polished and clean and nice, and they used to be clunky as fuck. Loud fans, like, all that shit. Like, Apple had to push the game forward on that, and I appreciate them doing it, even though I think, you

[Doug]

know, they're fucking and they do, and

[Brandon]

they've done nothing else wrong. To the next segment.

[Aiden]

Oh, I got one. Wait. Perfect. Wait, it's not gonna. It's not gonna line up.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I know.

[Doug]

Adish, make sure these don't line up.

[Aiden]

Guys, listen, we've been talking about a lot of things and in the news lately, obviously it's been Iran, but.

[Doug]

Well, this might be the first one. We. We might not have talked about anything yet.

[Aiden]

No, no, I mean. I mean, it's in general. I mean, in life, people have been talking about this Iran war thing, but things have been getting buried underneath this story. And the number one thing that's been buried is the biggest media merger in history, which is happening the Same week that U.S. has been bombing Iran. So almost nobody's been noticing. But we talked about it on this show, and we all collectively voted that Warner Brothers would get sold to Netflix. We thought because Netflix had the bigger bid, because. I'm sorry, they had actually a smaller bid at the end, but they had support from the Warner Brothers board. And because Netflix is Netflix, they're a bigger company and they're more established, and they. People. People at Warner Brothers wanted to sell to Netflix, so we thought it was a done deal. In that time between, there was a lot of political gamesmanship. The Ellison showed up at the State of the Union. They've been talking with Trump. They got. This is, like, absurd. They got regulatory approval for the merger almost before the merger was even agreed upon, while Netflix was still a big question mark, whether we get approved.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

And all those things started increasing the risk premium for Warner Brothers, who was like, wait a minute. We want to just. We want to sell. We want to make sure we sell.

[Doug]

You explain for somebody like, yeah, what would the risk profile mean? Like, if you're on the board Of.

[Aiden]

Of.

[Doug]

Of Paramount. Like, what is. Or, sorry, of. Of hbo. Like, what are you thinking of? Like, oh, it's gonna be really hard potentially, to even get this through.

[Aiden]

So we're. Yeah, we're Warner Brothers. We're all sitting around. We have a company that is starting to fucking fall apart. Like, we. We have a ton of debt. We have these great properties. We have Harry Potter and we have Godfather and Spongebob and Game of Thrones Season 8. Game of Thrones Season 8. A true classic.

[Brandon]

Beloved.

[Aiden]

We have all these things that are worth lots of money, but our company is falling apart. We can't compete in the media environment anymore. So we're trying to sell to a bigger player. We need one of these deals to go through or we're stuck holding the bag of our own excrement here. This is. So that's why they brought in this CEO, David Zaslav, who just, like, ripped all this shit out, packaged it all up and started selling it. So they were gonna go to Netflix because it felt like the more solid deal, but because of the political implications, it has now been won by Paramount. The deal is over. Netflix has dropped out. And I know it's politically involved, not only because of things I said, but because Ted Sarandos went to the White House to plead to try and get this deal through and get something through. The day it was canceled, and his White House meeting with Trump was canceled, and he realized it was over. And so they announced that they were

[Doug]

giving up the head of Netflix going to Trump to try to get soft approval for the merger.

[Aiden]

And then they canceled his meeting. And then he was like, and this is normal or not? This is not normal. So, again, Warner Brothers said many, many times they wanted to sell to Netflix now because of all this risk and because Paramount again came over the top with an even bigger bid that they can't afford. I mean, they're taking on. This is going to be a very indebted media company company. It's going to be. Warner Brothers already has debt. Paramount has even more debt. It's all. It's all coming together. So it is being sold, though, and it is for a total of $110 billion. So another reason the Netflix dropped out, and I have to say this is. They said. This is what they said. So I think it's a political thing, too. But they said the purchase price is getting too high. We don't want it at any price. We're not going to. Like. They probably could have matched the bid and kept this fight going, but the price is getting so absurd. And so Netflix, when they abandoned the bid and they had to pay the breakup fee, actually, I think Paramount had their stock went up because people were like, it's actually good that you're not like, this could have been a really risky thing for now. I think we've seen this in esports a lot where company make these big purchases and then. Yeah, separate. A Twitch, actually where Twitch paid $110 million for the Overwatch League and then they couldn't afford anything else and we had to cut things to the bone and.

[Brandon]

Yeah, but at least that panned out.

[Aiden]

Yeah. So Netflix walks away. They retain what they have, which is still the biggest streaming company company. But now, you know, Harry Potter, HBO, CNN, CBS, the Godfather, Spongebob, a million TikTok are all funneled under the Ellisons, which have this big media empire which is very tied in with Trump. They're meeting him all the time. We were having again, who's Pete Hegseth during his round wars? Which is like, I can't wait for Paramount to take you over talking to cnn because then you'll be actually. You'll actually ask real questions. So it's like getting very. Oh, you know, I think it's a. You know, the story here is like a real.

[Brandon]

That's not good. Holy shit. I know. Look, I know.

[Doug]

Warhead telling a media like a journalist can't wait to get bought by Larry Ellison. That's fucking crazy.

[Aiden]

And when they have so much leverage over who gets bought. That's the fucked up part. It's like Warner Bros. Can sell to who they want, I guess. But they wanted Netflix. Like the government got involved here and that is the fucked up thing. And it got kind of ignored because of Iran war. So I wanted to bring this up, up the.

[Brandon]

Not to be Aiden who has a friend about this.

[Doug]

No, I want.

[Brandon]

Okay.

[Doug]

In every one of these stories, I want to hear what friend you have that's related to my favorite friend.

[Aiden]

He loves Larry Ellison. And when they met and they have.

[Doug]

I love learning that Aiden used to play obscure Nintendo game online with a child in Kuwait. I love hearing about this every time.

[Aiden]

Larry Ellison, Manny's mother.

[Doug]

Okay, who's the friend and what video?

[Brandon]

Larry Ellison. He says it's gonna be fine.

[Aiden]

Oh,

[Brandon]

someone who does events and like talent management at hbo. I was talking to this weekend and I had kind of forgotten this was happening because of all the other news that was going on. And he was like, no, it's a really big deal internally right now. And from An HBO specific perspective. He's like, we're hoping that the new management sees HBO as like this crown jewel, like some, a very, very valuable piece of what's being picked up so that this part of the company isn't dissected or picked apart or changed. Because people who work at HBO really like sounds like they really like working there and they really like the way that it currently is. And there's this tense vibe internally as to how this is going to affect everybody's job because nobody there actually has any insight into what this transition is really going to mean for that brand in the long run.

[Aiden]

Yeah, that's the vibe I got from friends who worked at Activision Blizzard prior to the Microsoft announcement that they acquisition. And the end result was that there was a ton of layoffs. And I do think with the amount of debt coming into this combined package, I don't know about HBO because HBO is sort of a crown jewel. Maybe they're just like, don't touch that. It's like our only private center. But I feel like I cannot imagine that everything just goes smooth. I think it's going to be a bit of chaos.

[Doug]

That's the thing. It feels like everyone loses from this. Right.

[Aiden]

Like David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers, makes the fattest payout package of all time.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Aiden]

Returning this scrap of shit and selling it and exactly.

[Doug]

The story of Barbarians at the Gate. The book. It's just that again, which is just they bid each other up and then one company buys it and now it's basically way overpriced and they're going to have to cut everything to the absolute bone and make season nine,

[Aiden]

maybe they remake season eight. It's all worth it.

[Doug]

Unironically, they're going to announce three new Harry Potter shows and 15 HBO Game of Thrones.

[Aiden]

Like actually, yeah. It's going to be like when Disney did Star wars the best Star wars and just forced out like 40 shows. There's going to be so many Harry

[Doug]

Potter, some sort of Mandalorian Knight type figure. There's going to be like a really serious adult Reboot of Spider. SpongeBob.

[Aiden]

SpongeBob Origins. He picks up the spatula for the first time.

[Brandon]

You kept bringing up Ted Sarand Sarandos cause he's the CEO of Netflix and I won't name them, but we all have a mutual friend, somebody who's good friends with Ted's kid. And one year I went to Ted Sarandos son's Halloween party.

[Aiden]

Oh my God.

[Brandon]

Dressed up as a shark. In a business suit. And that doesn't give me any insight into this. I'll be real.

[Aiden]

That is the most a story I've ever heard in my entire life.

[Doug]

The ranking just went down. This is going earlier.

[Aiden]

You're taking my. You're taking my position.

[Brandon]

Yeah, 8ish. 8ish.

[Doug]

You have to take the. All of our contributions and that's.

[Brandon]

I'm moving this down the list.

[Doug]

Aiden, tell us more about Norway. All right, we're gonna cap off today's episode with a really heartwarming story about a dog.

[Aiden]

You're sure this is cap off?

[Doug]

I think this isn't the final one. Aish hates dogs and appreciates dogs dying. Okay, so we're just gonna leave the Today show Australia. This is one of those morning news shows that nobody our age has watched ever, but they just like do little heartwarming stories. And here's what happened. Okay? Paul Cunningham, he's a sort of tech

[Aiden]

entrepreneur guy is the guy left here.

[Doug]

He's the guy on the left is Australian, right? And he has a dog named Rose who's 7 years old. And recently, I believe 20, 24, she got cancer, started having tons of tumors. You will see pictures on the background, and it's rough. They tried chemo, surgery failed, and she was given one to six months to live. And you know, he says, like, this is my best friend. She's there with me through everything. So he decided to try to cure her cancer himself. So here's what he did. He went and took a sample of her healthy cells and then of the tumor cells. And then he paid this, like private company to sequence her dog's DNA. It was $3,000 and was like, look, I have. Can you just. Can you sequence this for me? And sequenced both. And then he ran a whole bunch of different pipelines to compare the two. The idea is once you've sequenced the healthy DNA and the unhealthy DNA, if you compare them and you can have some sort of system, let's say a machine learning system, that can look at the data and find out the exact differences between the two, between the healthy and not, you're basically finding parts of DNA that are going to create proteins that are unique to the cancer, right? Cause it's one what's different and what's mutated. Okay. So then he used alphafold as well as other LLMs to model the 3D protein structures in the tumor mutation. So after getting both DNA sequenced, after comparing them, after finding the differences, he actually models them. And this is using AlphaFold, the tool that we've talked about, like a year ago. And then from that he says, okay, I know the types of proteins that are basically identifying the cancer in my dog specifically. And he finds a company, the RNA Institute in Australia, who agree to make a custom MRNA vaccine for his dog. So they're going to make a custom MRNA that is going to tell his dog cells to make the type of protein that's only present on his dog's tumor, so that the immune system learns to attack that and then will then go for the tumor cells. They make it in three months, the institute. And after spending an additional three months creating these ethics applications, he finds a vet who's qualified to do like, IMM immunotherapy treatment for dogs, and they start vaccine treatment for his dog. They actually use this stuff in December 2025. This is like three months ago. Within seven weeks, about 75% of the cancer is gone.

[Aiden]

Damn.

[Doug]

The dog is not cured. It's much, much healthier. She's now able to like, run around and chase squirrels. She looks healthier. The actual size of the tumors, one tumor didn't respond. So he's now sort of sequencing the DNA of that to find out why. And this is a quote from the folks who made the RNA vaccine for him. This is the first time a personalized cancer vaccine has been designed for a dog. This is still at the frontier of where cancer immunotherapeutics are ultimately. We're going to use this for helping humans. This is super inspiring. This is racy. Part of what allowed this to work is that this guy is like a tech entrepreneur type dude. He's been working in machine learning for a long time. So that one quote that I said where it's like he figured out pipelines to compare the two, that's, that's him having experience in this stuff of doing, like, real intense data analysis. But I think what's interesting about this story is like, ultimately it was a, an individual who went and did this, who figured out how to do it on his own, who was not using some giant company, and then went and worked with like existing companies to say, hey, sequence this dog DNA, please. Hey, create an MRNA vaccine. Here's the exact, exact proteins I want it to basically target, right? Because once you have that, it's fairly easy to make an mRNA. So this is heartwarming. It's fucking hell and awesome. And like, what a sweet story. And on top of just like, oh my God, maybe we're going to democratize this sort of technology. Important caveat is that this is already being done in humans. So we are already trying to do personalized immunotherapeutics for cancer. There's already trials go under underway. There's, there's a, this is a very promising area of research. But the big difference and what's notable about this one, very heartwarming, a lot of people are gonna learn about this, draws a lot of attention to the issue. And then two, it's like the barrier is really being dropped again. We talked about AlphaFold, which is the software that lets you model protein structures that's available freely. And so it's not to say everybody should go start making their own vaccines, but it's kind of crazy to see that a single person was able to do something, something like this.

[Aiden]

It's awesome. This is an incredible story. I like your explanation because I only heard the high level summary and they make it seem like you just typed it in the chat GBT and it gave him the cure. Yeah, it's like no, you did a lot more effort. But that's, that's incredible. I do gets me really excited about the future of medical technology. I think.

[Brandon]

I thought you were joking, but this might actually be the end of the episode. Like the implications of, you know, the implications of providing a large scale cancer cure basically to as as many people who need it and it's personalized based on the specific type of cancer they have. That could be what this is in the long run.

[Doug]

So let me Steel man it again. These are not necessarily my opinion. Right, right. But I think it's worth.

[Brandon]

He shouldn't have done it to a dog. I don't like it.

[Doug]

It's worth expressing.

[Aiden]

Steel Manning.

[Doug]

So your first main counter argument, not that cute, it should die. The second one, there's a big difference between a single MRNA vaccine versus applying it to, to, to humans. So there is a big, you know, the difference between basically a guy kind of experimentally treating his dog is different than hey, you're going to put this into humans at scale, it's going to have a wide, a wide effect. And then you know, again a very important thing to note here. This is not like some new thing as much as the stories and headlines are being communicated about that. And so there's a lot of progress that's promising right now in basically vaccines specialized for cancer. So like real quick primer. Cancer changes all the time. That's part of the challenge of it. It's part of why it is very hard to have a medicine or Something that's going to cure cancer for all these different people. Because every person's individual cancer is mutating and expressing itself differently. So the more personalized you can make something like this, the more effective it is going to be. But then that is kind of the problem.

[Aiden]

Right.

[Doug]

So if you, if you expand this to people, like right now they're estimating if these things hit market or are approved in like the next one two years, which is, which is hoped for, still might be like 100 to $300,000 per patient, per Kronos.

[Brandon]

Yeah. Because you don't have the, you providing the scale when everything needs to be so specific and personalized and updated based on like how cancer develops or the person or the specific patient.

[Doug]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

Reducing the cost must be so much harder.

[Doug]

It's a, it's a weird balance that you basically people making drugs on this stuff right now are trying side of like, do we try to do a broad spread that will hopefully help certain people but isn't going to like really target their specific thing? Or do you hyper personalize? But ultimately, I mean this is, and I said this in the Medicine in an AI episode a year ago, I specifically called this as a possibility out, which is that you pull a tumor cell out and you design the custom proteins that you need, the neuroantigens that define your tumor cell specifically. And then you have a model create the protein in terms of the structure and then create the, the vaccine and get T cells into your body that are actually targeting it. Speed is a factor. And if you can do this extraordinarily quickly, if we can create machine models that like you go into the doctor and this stuff is designed and ready to go later that week. That's when it starts to be like, we might cure cancer. Right. So this is again, I'm going to reiterate the same thing I said a year ago. This is like one of the, one of the few things with, with AI and machine really machine learning where it's like this is fucking incredible. Like this is pushing us towards a world where one of the most difficult challenges ever, which is cancer, like we can tackle and we can tackle it by having stuff that builds an entire system that's customized to you super fast.

[Brandon]

I imagine there's even a combination of treatment here where you're using something like this. Like in the example you provided. Right. It reduced 75% of the cancer that was there. But like attacking or reducing enough of the cancer that it's at a manageable scale or a targetable Scale where you could treat it with chemo or radiation to like finish the job. There's. I don't know. There's so many exciting possibilities here.

[Doug]

Yeah. This is by far one of the coolest things going on in technology and biology right now. And it's like massively accelerating because of things like Alphafold and because of the work people are doing. It's great. It's fucking great. Great.

[Aiden]

That's awesome.

[Doug]

Oh, also this specific guy is he's just doing it to save his dog. But he's basically because of the attention, he's like, hey you. Here's a Google form. You can try to share information. I'm going to try to find a way to start making this more accessible to other people.

[Brandon]

Wow.

[Doug]

But I mean it'd be funny if.

[Brandon]

Is this the end of the episode?

[Doug]

This ends and then it's like starts playing. Anyway, I want about to talk. Talk about Counter Strike. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for watching Lemonade Stand. We assume we just came off the dog story.

[Brandon]

Probably.

[Doug]

You're a monster.

[Brandon]

Aish could go crazy with this episode.

[Aiden]

I have no idea how this goes,

[Brandon]

but if you want to check it out, an extra hour of the show every week, you go to patreon.com lemonade sand and also our next two episodes are going to be in China.

[Doug]

Oh, just. That's it.

[Aiden]

Okay.

[Doug]

All right, bye everybody.

[Aiden]

Thanks, bye. Just cut there for the show comes from Tasty Trade. If you're an experienced trader or long term investor, you probably are familiar with trading stocks. Used to be like Aiden is not.

[Brandon]

I don't remember that.

[Aiden]

You don't. You're not experienced trader but you.

[Doug]

Trade is a platform of choice for traders who don't settle. All right. You can trade stocks, options, futures and more all in one platform. You got low commission so you can keep more of what you earn. You can go to tastytrade.com lemonade today to get started. Tastytrade Inc. Is a registered broker, dealer and member of. I don't know how to say these things.

[Aiden]

One of you go NFA and sipc.

[Doug]

But I still know how to trade.

[Aiden]

Unlike Aiden.

[Rhonda Miller Goodrich]

This is advertiser content brought to you by Stonyfield Organic. Our cows, them going out to pasture, they love it. They're so excited to go out every day. They wait right at the door. In fact, we milk them and we just open up the laneway and let them just go right out to pasture. I'm Rhonda Miller Goodrich and I'm a dairy farmer in Cabot, Vermont. Our farm is Molly Brook Farm. We're an organic dairy farm and we are a supplier to Stonyfield. Molly Brook Farm has been in my husband's family since 1835. We started our organic transition in 2015. We had 53 acres of corn ground and of course we had to use earth herbicides and pesticides and the soil was dead really for all intents purposes, we stopped growing corn and stopped using herbicides and pesticides and we seeded that down to perennial grasses. After that, we began to see biodiversity in that soil again. To be organic certified, our cows need to be in pasture at least 120 days. I think the organic practices really benefit our animals. You know, having good feed, good water, a nice light area, that's what's important to us and that's what's important to Stonyfield. Visit stonyfield.com to find Stonyfield Organic Yogurt near you. Support for this show comes from coreweave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is coreweave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose built tech building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything. Ready for AI to learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to coreweave.com readyfor anything.