Lemonade Stand - Everyone Is Gerrymandering Now | Ep. 027 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

On this week's show... Aiden becomes a King Maker, Atrioc learns how to rig an election, and DougDoug tells us about DrugDrugs. We launched a Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/lemonadestand for bonus episodes, discord access, a book club, and many more ways to interact with the show! Episode: 027 Recorded on: September 02, 2025 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Thursday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I read a tweet about it. Apparently he's dead. You, well, well, the... All right, scrap that. Donald Trump is dead. No. I did think that was better. He had a dark spot.

He had a dark spot on his hands. For two days. For two days, which I've never seen an old person have before. He had thick cancles. He's got to think cancles. God forbid an American have. He had fit canckels. JD Vance is wearing a Trump suit.

Okay. That could be the best theory. He had an emergency meeting today and I had people that were just, they were on their knees praying and then when he showed up pretty normal, they were. Where are we hoping? Trump is stuck at it. What do you want to do? Donald Trump is dead.

As of right now, September 2nd, 330. PM. And that's why we need a new president. That's what we have to do an emergency and that's why we need a new president. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, you guys know that the lemonade stand secret goal this entire time was to get political power. We didn't care about this low limit podcast shit. It's a stepping stone. It's a stepping stone. Just like San Francisco. We're glad to be Gavin Newsom. We're moving

up. Okay. And we've decided that our best chance at getting someone in this clean cut guy right here, Aiden. We're too old. People are sick of old. We're too old. We need the youth. We need the youth. They need a young face. And we want to get Gavin Newsom out onto podcasting and you into politics. So that's been our plan. However, we've run into a couple

challenges. All right. And the first challenge is that people don't want to vote for Aiden. People don't really like him that much. Well, hold on. I've come up with a plan. You see, it turns out you don't really need that many people to vote for you to win an election,

which is why I've volunteered to be your campaign manager, Aiden. And if you can pull this up, I want to teach everybody what gerrymandering is real quick. if you haven't heard of it, because we're going to be using gerrymandering for our plan to get you elected. And this is what everybody's doing right now in California and Texas. I can become what Ted Cruz always wanted to be the first Canadian-born U.S. President. Yes. Nice. Nice. What's your... And instead of fleeing to Cancun, you can flee to Sweden when I do it goes from...

No, I mean, like, me and my White House staff will probably be on like slack. Yeah. Your Mar-a-Lago is Sweden. Like, four days a week, you're going to be in Sweden. Every, like, more logo headline, but it's him fleeing to another country. You're barely here. Okay. So, yeah, okay. So, Doug, you have been hired as his campaign manager because Aiden got desperate. I was kind of making fun of him.

And you apparently thought about this for a while, watched the news recently, and realized you found a way to make this possible. It's impossible and impossible. Aiden, we don't actually need the majority of people to want you in power. Because they're not going to get them. That's great. These guys' policies are not popular. Well, I think if I tried hard enough, I could have gone.

No, I don't think so. If I, like, tried it because I'm so... I think the more you try, the more it's like yuck. If we unleashed my career-mark. You need to look like you don't even care. People think that's really chill. They're like, damn, that guy's a total chiller. Okay.

I would vote for him. Yeah, I'm a chiller. We want a president who's a chiller. That's a long bit America's... Okay, let's imagine a hypothetical city called Lemonville, and you break it up into five districts. Unfortunately, we do not do voting where every person does a single vote. There are good reasons for that.

We do representative voting. So if you take a state or a city or a country, you divide it into different districts, and then each district votes for one person who's going to represent them. So in this theoretical example, if five districts are made up, Lemonville is five districts, if you want to have voting power in Lemonville, you only need three of those five, right? That makes sense. So let's imagine there are 15 Adens in Lemonville and there's 10 dugs. You've got... The worst blood rotation of all times. Which is two people.

No, there's 15 and 10. Oh, it's going between 15. It would be Sweden and AI in my ears. Just non-stuck like, Sweden, AI. Sweden, AI. So in this example, you have 60% of the vote, right? You are the majority. It's an Aiden town.

So let's say you kind of evenly distributed people. Let's say 15 are in three of the districts, 10, my 10, or in the other. Then that would naturally align like this. 60% of the districts would be yours. You would have won them and 40% would be mine. Three and two. So I went. So we settled it.

I am more popular. Yes. In this case, yes. But let's say you rearrange it. Theoretically, if you have 15, you could put three of your people in each of the five districts, and I only have two in each district,

and in that case, you win all five of them because all you need is the majority in... You just need a slight majority in each district. The people love me. Yeah, we're going to get to the real world shortly. This is setting up for our plan. And then the inverse is true as well. Again, I only have 40% of the vote in this theoretical scenario.

But if I stacked two of the districts with just your voters, and then the other three districts I kind of spread myself out, well, with 40% of the vote, I can actually get 60% of the representatives if I group people correctly in a way where I just have slim majorities within each group. Doug, that doesn't make any sense. No, it makes sense.

Democracy. I don't like that I'm losing now, even though I have the same amount of aidings. Dude, those first two districts are a nightmare. Yeah. You got some baggage? And we know this would turn into three districts because they would leave and go to Sweden.

Yeah. So, ladies or gentlemen, using the power of gerrymandering, you can really control what each district ends up as, regardless of the number of people who are actually rep overall interested in your party.

Introducing the Aiden party plan. Aiden, I think we can get you to president. This is my path that you forced for me. and we've gotten you merch. I don't. Aiden, 2028. Dude, I don't know.

It would be more embarrassing to wear this around the city than a MAGA hat or this. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the Aiden 2028 plan. Okay, so I'm gonna be real. I'm pumped about this.

Because this is why I paid you to do. I was like, Doug, find me away. Yeah. And then you're, I'm getting no energy from you, Atriot. Like, no reciprocation. I'm skeptical. I want to hear your plan. How are you going to make this country better?

It seems like all you figured out is how to steal an election. I haven't seen anything. Well, no, hold on. It's not stealing. I'm using the legal available process. This is literally democracy. Now, let's scale up. Let's start in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has 15 districts for city council. So if you have eight of those 15 districts, you have a voting majority, right?

There's 3.9 million people in Los Angeles. So if you do the math on this, even if everybody else, me in this case, has two, 2.86 million people, and you only have 1.4. If you spread your 1.4 across the eight districts, only with having 33% of the vote, you would actually win the majority voting power in Los Angeles. Is that real? This is real right now with 33% of Los Angeles. If you slice it the right way. If you slice it so that you just go for eight districts and a slim majority in each one, you can win to 33%. Dude, that's wild. I guess that does require you to have people who can, are rocks, solid aid and voters, right? You can know.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. And God knows I have some rock solid aid voters. Yeah. And just to be clear, like two thirds of people would, the dogs here, would vote against you and you would still have complete voting control in the city of Los Angeles with a million people. Well, we thought of a fair fight. Well, hold on. I think we got to go bigger. Yeah, I mean, that's just L.A. We got to go to California. Anyone can win L.A.

California has about 39 million people and there's 80 districts in the state house, right? So, if we were to spread, there's about 487,000 people in each district. So if we win 41 of the 80 districts, we would have voting majority. So it turns out, even if I have 29 million out of the 40 million people in California, we just need you to get 10 million. Only 25% of the total population of California. We spread them across the 41 districts, and you can win voting majority in California

with only 25%. I like that 30 million vote for Doug. He is completely locked out of it. I would be so upset. You've run the greatest campaign of all time. I could have been running this campaign instead of doing this podcast. It's not that hard.

10 million? That's not that much. Chene's fucking smirking face with a backwards hat and 25% of the vote making all the laws. What up? I'm running this year.

With like one really convictive. Vote for me. Actually, not even that many of you need to vote for me and I still don't even care. You just need, yeah, one quarter of people. Now,

An important thing that we're going to be talking about when we get to what is actually going on in the country right now, which is that what if the Doug side wants to win every single vote? Well, all you technically need is 51%, right? So if there's 80 districts and in every single district I have just one more voter than half, I would win every single one with 50%. So the inverse is true. You can abuse the majority votes as well if you spread yourself out evenly amongst the district. This is important for when these seats would be used nationally, right?

Yes. Okay. So if you wanted to get as many as you can out of one state. Right. And you have a slight majority. Yes. You're aiming to do something like this. Yeah.

So we're going to come back to this. But let's talk about the president. 340 million people in the United States of America. There are 50 districts, which are the states. And let's assume it's evenly spread. That's a big assumption. I guess we assume they're all voters to. Yeah.

And so we'll get to the voting thing as well. But, you know, this is just total people. Okay. 6.8 million per state is what he would average out to. So how many people in theory do you actually need to vote for you in a presidential election to win? It's about 26% of the population. So if I have 251 million people and you have 88.4, but you spread yourself out just amongst 26 of the states.

You completely ignore 24. They hate you in 24 of the states and you win a slim majority of 26. You win. If I would, okay, so if I'm an omnipotent being, and I'm playing my game of, you know, Civilization 9, where I'm running simulations here, this is the absolute minimum that I could win, the minority could win the election with. Actually, it's even worse, because CGB Gray did a video, because of the electoral college, where each state automatically gets two votes for the elections on top of the basically number of representatives they have, there's actually the smaller states in America, have more voting power for president proportionally than the big ones. Yes. Right.

Yeah. Yes. It turns out if you were to just focus on the smallest states of the fewest people, you have an outsized advantage, basically for every voter. They're going to have more influence in the overall number of electoral college votes. You ignore the big states. So you ignore the big states. You just focus on the smallest ones.

You just get a 51% majority. Turns out with 21.9% you can win the presidency. Almost 80% of the country could vote against you. Mr. Beast video. He might win. Mr. Beast might fucking win, dude. One video and you get two thirds of those to vote for you. So this is the like the worst version of how this system could possibly be abused,

assuming you have the free pressure of like moving people around how you want because there is something here and you've explored this more than I have where you do have to redistrict and plan things around the realities of where people live and exist. That's, that's like the main inhibitor to you like doing something like this, which is sort of like pouring different colored jelly beans in each jar and saying like this is how extreme it could be. Right. And at the same time, this is exactly what we're going to talk about, which is California and Texas right now are planning on doing this and this has been going on. So this is all to illustrate how incredibly impactful it is of how you group people together.

So let's talk about the House of Representatives, which is what this really comes down to. So in this case, there's 340 million people in the U.S. There's 435 districts or representatives. So 435 people get elected to go represent, you know, the states, the people in Congress. That means there's about 780,000 people per district. So in the worst case, you could have control the House of Representatives

with only 25% of the population. Again, it's basically the same as the presidential election numbers. So the grouping matters immensely. Now, all of this is kind of theoretical. And now what I realized as I was researching this is, there is a real plan here. Okay. How could we abuse this system? I'm introducing the Aden Party plan part two.

This is real and back, okay? Right now, in the House of Representatives in the United States, there are 212 Democrats and there's 219 Republicans. Close. Okay? Yes. There's a seven-point, seven-seat difference. I'm in the lead.

Yeah, currently Aden is in the lead. So for something like the big beautiful bill, the Republicans only were able to pass it because they have a majority. There's just two parties, basically, right? So what if we, the Lemonade Stand Party, took... The Lemon Party.

The Lemon Party, if you will, took four seats from the Republicans, just four. Okay. So the Democrats would have 212. Yeah. Republicans have 2.15. We have four.

If you look at the numbers now, with our four votes, we could get the Democrats to win or we could get the Republicans to win. We are a kingmaker with four seats out of 435. Okay. They both have to come begging us. They have to come begging us. And we can go, hey, we'll pass a big beautiful bill, but you have to increase taxes. You have to give us free lemon trees. You have to do all this. Okay. All right. All right. No, no, no. Guys, this gets better. This gets better. I'm not getting left out of this political. Get in here, get in here. So, genuinely, right now, if we were to get four people elected to the House of Representatives, us, a third party, we would essentially have control of the House. We could, like, massively influence the direction of the country. So, how would we do that? We need to win in four districts, right? We've got to win in four districts.

Well, it turns out not every district is the same size, because let's say you have, the districts are supposed to be about 780,000 each, if you split them evenly. But states get the districts, they don't go across state bounds. So let's say you have Wyoming or Rhode Island. They have about a million people. That's a kind of awkward number. Should they get one or two districts? Well, they get two. So that means each district only actually has about 550,000 people. So the four smallest or four of these smallest districts in the country have 563,000 people on average. Okay? So we have our four targets that we're going for.

But as you pointed out, not everybody votes. Only about 75% of people are actually a voting age and eligibility. So we knock that number down by 75%. And then, or by 25%. And then of that, only 50% of people actually vote in midterms. Okay? So it halves it again, which means in these actual four districts, in the United States, there's about 211,000 midterm voters.

That's it. We would just need to get them. majority there. But it gets better because it's also first past the post voting. Okay, so you don't actually need to get 51%. You just need more than the other candidates. So if we went in there with a third party and we got the Republicans and the Democratic candidates to split votes with us, we're each one third, one third, one third. Yeah. We only need 34% of the votes to win the district. Okay. And if you do the math on that, that is only... Like in this world, our platform needs to be equally appealing to people who are currently voting for both parties. We have to

pull from both. And have to pull from both. That is just 72,000 voters per district in these four districts. And what that means, we right now, even if we only had 0.28 million people, 280,000 people, we could win four seats and take control of the House of Representatives with 0.08% of the

United States population. This is a real thing we could do. And I want to point out between this show, we get about that many people listening at least this show. This show. That's this show. If we move them to Rhode Island and Wyoming, if we tap all three of our YouTube channels and the yard, we actually could get control of the House of Representatives right now. If you upload the right Mario Kart Wii footage targeted towards Rhode Island,

we can get. I can pull in, I mean, that's a few. That's a number. That's a percentage. That's a big. This is crazy, dude.

Guys, 99.9.9% of the country. could vote against us. We could still control it. And be the kingmaker of legislation. And every time they try to look up our party online, they're just flashbang by naked old men. It's tough. There's no way to combat the Lemon Party.

We have them covered on every front. You know what? This fucking scares me for literally, Mr. Beas could do last one to leave the Rhode Island polling station, wins a Ferrari or whatever. Yeah. That's a, he has enough. This is not that many people.

This is not that many people. This is a shockingly small number of people. 280,000 people. Or Elon Musk, you know, just thinking about Elon Musk's America party. How much money went? If you just flipped four seats, I'm just realizing you really are kingmakers.

You legitimately are like the person that could make. This is specifically Elon Musk's plan with the America party. He is not trying to beat the Republicans or Democrats. He is trying to do this. He's trying to get like three or four seats so he can control the voting. I guess, because my first thought with that was,

well, an existing party that maybe you don't have that much control or influence over because they're still the majority. But because you get to choose between the two and you wield so much of the consequence, I guess you have the ability to influence way beyond the actual number of representatives that you have.

Yeah, because Democrats and Republicans are now so polarized. They don't vote the same on anything. Literally, it's, you have to have a majority to get anything passed. So you'd have to come begging to the Lemon Party with the big beautiful bill. We could be like, you have to drop the taxes. Lemon Party would come in there and just like suck up all the power, if you will.

People would be coming and suck in Michigan. I promise you that. I promise you that. That's crazy. There's two old parties and we're going to be a new old party getting in there. All three of us are just going to be grappling together. That's what America's wanting, by the way. In the bed of power.

That's the lemon party promise. There's three guys in that picture of lemon party and then it's like, I'm the fourth. And those are the same representatives. Eating a lemon. This is, I mean, yeah, it is a very, very extreme thing, right? But to just see what the bare minimum math could be, Ludwig made a joke about this on our show years ago, on the yard, where he talked about moving enough people

to like a small town in Nebraska that you could get, you could conceivably acquire a district. Get political power. Yeah, get enough political power as an influencer. It's not only possible, it's like shockingly possible. Because again, it's not even that you need to go take over a whole district. You need to take over like a percentage that's just more than the two other candidates. I mean, it's crazy.

Like, that's not to say this is easy. We're probably not going to get 280,000 people to move to Wyoming right now, but this is crazy. Looking at you. It's not, it's 70. Yeah, I think maybe a good way of saying it is it's not actually easy to do this in the sense that I feel like if powers at B really were intent on doing something like this, maybe they would have done it already. but I think it's the idea that it's way easier than you have in your head. It's not like you need to convince

51% of the country to get behind you. You actually can manipulate the system in such more achievable ways. So is more of this because I want to tie it into what's going on. No, no, no. So this is a general about the power of districting, which leads into what is going on right now

in the country, which is both Texas and California are going through major redistricting specifically to try to utilize this power. Do you go back to the, split the Doug and Aden split city. So yeah, if you guys want to know, the reason this is sort of coming up in the news is that the 2026 midterms are coming up

for the House of Representatives. And the House of Representatives is pretty important to have a majority in because you set the agenda for what's going on. You control budget and spending. It's where all tax and spending starts. You control a lot of oversight and investigation panels.

A lot of budgets are set there. Like, it's just a really important thing to control. And so both the Democrats and Republicans really want to control it, especially Republicans currently have the lead, they don't want to lose it. So Trump put some pressure on Texas Governor Greg Abbott to find

him five more seats was the idea. He needs to get five. God, that's such a good euphemism. Just find me five more seats because Texas has enough Republicans that they can slice this. Do they have? Let me look up the number while you're doing that. It's like when he called the Georgia

Secretary's thing. He's like, just can you just find me the votes? It's so sick. What a good euphemism. Okay. So, so that pressure kicked off. And now Abbott is looking to, again, redistrict Texas to slice it in a different way to where they end up with five more. If the vote goes the way they expect, then they'll probably get it with five more House representative seats for Texas in the next election, 2026. And so in response, California and Gavin Newsom are firing back and basically doing the same thing. And redistricting and try to get five seats of their own.

I think it is five, right? It is five. Five seats zone. So if they both fully accomplish their goals, it'll net out even. but a lot of other states are now jumping on the freight. It's becoming like this. I think the main takeaway is that both sides really are starting to see elections as existential, more than they used to.

It's been ramping up, but this midterm, you can clearly see that like nobody's willing to, there's nothing off the table to like get it done, to do whatever you takes to get back a majority. I think there's sort of an arms race here, right? Where normally the way redistricting works at this level is every 10 years, the U.S. collects and publishes the census. So like the 2020 census, the 2010 census, and that information about our population, our demographics is used to set the districts

as they are in each of these states. It's a process that each of these states handle. And in general, it is very, it's breaking form or decorum to start redistricting during a period that is this far away from the last census. It's like in general you would try and wait until the next 10 year mark to do this. And that is one of the things that's being criticized about these changes is that you're clearly taking action for the midterms. And this is something that is not common or not something you're supposed to do.

I think with how heavy that narrative has been perpetuated, I had an idea that this must barely happen ever. But there are cases in a number of states over the last, like, in this century. of states choosing to redistrict in the in-between terms of those senses. Senses? Yeah, states do it. But I think the idea, my understanding, is that, you know, the national census happens every 10 years. That's, that's it.

And they're trying to push, or at least Trump's trying to push for a 2025, you know, middle of the 10 years, we're just going to do it early. We're going to do a national, just right before 2026, basically. Yeah. And then redraw everything now. Do you know anything more about that? Is there a reason or a rationale? I mean, the reason is like to get more seats, right?

But what is the... Oh, so this is, from my understanding, the, let's say the villain chair argument here is that the census data that we collect, similar to the jobs data that we had referenced a while ago and maybe the argument for hiring the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was this census data is wildly inaccurate, is not reflective of the population

as it stands now, especially because that census data was collected during and through COVID and the pandemic, which was such a tumultuous time. And too much has changed about population and demographics since then. And we need to, A, update the census and push forward a new effort to collect a new national census data at a time when we wouldn't otherwise be doing one, at least at that level. And then also, because that data is, A, inaccurate, or B, perhaps you think that because the data was finalized and published under the Biden administration, that data is inaccurate and being used and weaponized against Trump and the Republicans in power right now. My understanding is the data was collected during the Biden administration or the previous Trump administration

during COVID as best as possible and then was finalized and published during the Biden administration. Okay. So it's like, well, maybe the data is inaccurate. Maybe this is reflective of a process that isn't working for us anymore. And we need to step up and take these actions now. And it's not all about winning the midterms. I don't like this argument you're making. I'm leaving the party.

You've already lost one. Well, there's a lot. I think what we don't think about. You're like, you're collapsing, right? If you have such thin margins, if you lose like eight people, you go to zero percent of the foot. I was like, I want free candy too. We're like, dude, we got to keep you, man. What we don't think about here.

We would have the same problem. There could be like five kingmakers in our party who like demand shit from us. It's all the way down. So one guy in Rhode Island is just determining the fucking... Since the collection... I would argue that since the pandemic happened, a skyrocketing number of Aden and Lemon Party supporters

that just were not accounted for previous senses. So it seems weird that we wouldn't do it again. I see. Well, I can show you this graph. Can you pull us up, Perry? This is a... bipartisan estimate of how many seats each individual state has gained from gerrymandering. Now, many, many states don't have a conclusive bias in gerrymandering or gerrymandered stuff. But these are the key example.

So Illinois for the Democrats is clearly drawn in such a way to where they're getting more seats and they probably would if it was perfectly aligned. And the same is true for Republicans in Texas and Florida and then a bunch of other like southern, south, eastern states. So here's the thing. Both parties have been doing this, but the current net advantage, from what I can find,

is 17 seats in total for Republicans in the last House election. So in the last House elections, Republicans got probably 17 more seats than the voting percentages overall for the country would indicate that they should get. Well, so, okay, that's what I thought too,

but I think even this is about like really blatant. in January mandering, because I read an article by the AP that basically 41 out of the 44 states with more than one congressional district, the winning presidential candidate had a larger share of the state's congressional seat than the presidential vote. Basically, that means that most, basically no states can get this perfectly right. It's incredibly hard to district in a way that's fair. And, you know, are people distributing, the population is distributed in a certain way. And the idea with gerrymandering is you make these weird shapes to try to include however many people you want.

But ultimately you can only influence that so much. Like in the desert area of California, very, very Republican. You're not going to be able to like, you know, really like... There's some really good in-depth explanations about this stuff. I think the example I actually saw from a long time ago was in Chicago where when you're talking about how you draw these districts in what is supposed to be a representative democracy,

what are the lines that these things should actually be drawn around? That's not to say that there's no abuse in the system. but if you're trying to do it as honestly as possible, you know, what is more reflective of group's opinions, right? Do I draw it in like a distribution of equal area? That seems like a fair place to start. But actually communities congregate in much different ways than that, right? There might be a group of people of the same, like, immigrant background

or the same like working class background that are in a weird shape in a city and are around a very different type of, minority group in that same city. And, you know, what is the fairest way to separate those groups of people? Assigned housing. And in Singapore, they simply would have... So I think that's an important thing to keep in mind is even when you're trying to do this as genuinely as possible, the arguments for how you put these people together are not super straightforward. Yeah, so here's the example I want to use, which is California, the districting is decided by an independent commission. So in theory, it's unbiased, right?

Versus some of the other states were like... But they did have voted a change right, that's the point, right? No, they're... Well, I know it's like coming up, but just like right now. Yeah, for now. So 60% of California voted for Kamala Harris. So 40% voted for Trump in California, but Democrats have 83% of the House seats.

So it's not that California is gerrymandered necessarily, but it is districted in a way where the Republicans in California get about half the voting power that they should. So even in that graph that's like California isn't gerrymandered their way to more stuff. The reality is the Democrats in California right now have far more voting power than they should at a national level compared to the actual representation of California. Which just gets the whole problem. It's so...

And it'll be exponentially worse after then. Yeah. And they're trying to make it worse. Yeah. This only worsens the issue. So to tie it into like directly where we're out right now is Texas was the first state by Trump to be pressure. to make these changes. California's stepping up to counter it. And now a variety, and after that was brought into play, a bunch of other Republican states were also getting pressure. And Illinois and,

you know, everyone's jumping in. To make the changes. And besides them, now the, there's a bit of a decision lag, but other Democratic states like New York are trying to step up to see if they can make these changes in time for the midterms as well. But because they're on the backfoot responding, it's unclear whether the votes or the policy changes at a state level are going to come in time for the midterms in order for those changes to be made at all. I heard it described as, you know, in a normal democracy, the voters should choose their candidates or their representatives. And in this, in gerrymandering, the representatives choose the voters.

Like you're just, you're picking the ones that will give you the result you want and slicing it in a way. And I find it to be, I mean, you know, we can throw around. I do think it looks like the Republicans are doing it, or at least getting more of an advantage. They've done it more successfully. But it feels like for all voters, it just means our vote is getting thrown out.

It doesn't matter as much in every state that we live in. It's getting so widespread that we're getting to the point where the elections are being drawn ahead of time. Like, we're not. So what I wanted to ask you guys is I think there's a big, the reason why Gavin Newsom is stepping up to challenge this in California, right? is because of a political goal at a national level, whether it's selfish, and he sees this as his opportunity

to push himself as like the next candidate for the Democratic Party at a national level, or whether it's genuine in this is the most important way we need to combat, you know, fight fire with fire and make sure that they can't gain all these seats and we just sit here and do nothing. And what I wanted to ask you guys is, how does this process make you feel

at an individual level. Because part of me is like, yes, I want this to happen in California because it's necessary to engage in this battle of national politics, and I don't want to be put on the back foot at least in this Democrat

versus Republican fight. But also, as an individual voter, I don't think it's really fair or good that the system works this way at all and that we're pushing further and further down a way that reduces the power of individuals voting in states where they're the political minority. Right.

It blows. It's fucking blows. I think the obvious answer here. Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, speaking for personal experience, like I at multiple times have not voted for president in California because I know my vote doesn't matter. It's like, why? And I know that's, I'm sure people would have issue with that,

but, you know, there's been a few elections that I've been a part of. where despite with that one guy in the YouTube comments things, I vote Democratic, but then in California, it doesn't matter. And that feels bad that, because of the way that we're grouped together, which is all of California,

goes to a single group, it doesn't matter. Like, my vote for the president doesn't matter. And then that, you know, that same thing, you can apply at all these different scales like we talked about.

And then the thing when I was doing this research that really made me feel weird about it is less about the funny scenario where with 0.08% of the vote, we get control. That is very funny and we could do that, but is actually this one, which is that in the theoretical Lemonville, where you have 60% of the vote, if you district correctly, you can take 100% of the representation. So it's much more likely that the group in charge can not only would they have the voting power to start the redistricting process, they are much more

capable of like outsizing their advantage. And the fact that California right now is like 83% represented by Democrats. Florida is now 72%. Texas is trying to get to 79%. Like it's just swinging way out of whack with how people actually vote. Yeah, I mean, if there's 10 seats, you have 60% of the vote. I think everyone alive would say the fair thing

is you get around six seats. If you had 60% of the vote, and if you're gonna get 10, then every state that doesn't do gerrymandering is becoming less relevant. Like they're falling behind. Do you see any way that this stops? I don't see any way that they stops.

Now that the Pandora's box is open, any blue state who has control of their house and is like, we can start a redistricting vote. We can literally find three more seats. Everybody's going to do it. This is really pretty depressing to me. Not only that they could do it, they almost have to do it without, you know,

the arms race is open. It's like irresponsible to not do it. Yeah. That's the situation we find ourselves in, where, you know, we have to almost pray that it evens out. It's like five from Texas, five from California. Yeah.

But at your vote feeling so useless, I agree. I remember when I think it was the 2016 election and I lived in Washington State and I think I voted in the primary and then my ballot got mailed to like my parents' house instead of where I was living in Seattle at the time. And then I just didn't vote that year. And it was the first election I could vote in. And, you know, Hillary, surprise.

Hillary won in Washington. right? It's like me not voting didn't feel like this huge difference maker at the time, especially because I was fucking 18 and I didn't think about my vote much beyond the president. Right. It was, yeah. To be clear, it was also when I was younger is when I was younger. Yeah, but it's, it's, I think it's got to be frustrating both ways. If you're a Republican in California, you feel like it's basically a wash. Like what can I realistically win on at a national level? Kind of feels like nothing. But if also, if I'm a different, the idea that like I can kind of tell myself I don't even have to show up today and it don't

it doesn't matter um and I'm not saying that either of those perspectives are true in the sense that you know voting is important at so much more like local levels as well when you show up you you you vote on so many more things that affect your like state or district uh at a more personal level but I think a lot of people forget about the things that aren't headlines it's why people vote less in the midterms to begin with uh they just it doesn't attract all of the same political attention from voters. So this is why I've been thinking

we go back to the Roman system of we all meet in the forum and you can beat people as clubs. Right. Yeah. Hash it out is a good way of putting it. You say Roman forum because I was literally thinking

to that book we read about the polarization in Rome. So I looked into this. I was like, why the fuck do we have a representative democracy? Why doesn't everybody just put in a vote for what they want? So not only was it logistical reasons

when the country was started, you couldn't have the Pony Express fucking mailing in every vote. But on top of that, so like James Madison talked about it in the Federalist papers and he's like, we don't want a mob. If you have, you know, 10,000 people show up to vote and 6,000 of them are voting on one side. They can just physically intimidate the other side and completely control. And that is what happened in Rome. And they specifically called that out. And we're like, we don't want to be like that. So what will, this system where we represent, where we vote for representatives, they will have a mature, stable government. And they will be able to have the nuance that a mob. would not be able to. So they thought of this and they're like, this is the, but now in modern day, it's like, maybe we should just,

everybody votes, you know, everybody just types it into, I mean, I've thought about this for since the year 2001 when they were doing nationwide voting for American Idol and it seemed to run by, like, why can't I just get on my phone? I wasn't even born then.

I don't know what you're talking. You were 30. All right. Villan chair, you know, I don't think Russia or like China is thinking about hacking the American Idol voting system, right?

feel like that's the argument against digitizing. They wanted Ruben Sutter to win. Putin won in Rubin. I want big balls to code our voting system. But that's, isn't that the argument behind,

you know, this, I guess is the argument behind mail-in ballots and it's not true either, but the argument about any of these things that would make voting more efficient or more easily accessible as you're sacrificing the security

of the election. Well, I saw a tweet that they're stuffing the ballots. Yeah. I saw, president say that this morning. Yeah. I was watching. I saw a blurry video on Twitter

where a guy is stuffing papers into a box. Checkmate. It was a press conference about like moving space force from Colorado to Alabama. And he spent a good chunk of it talking about how Colorado sucks because they have mail in voting and it's all fraudulent. I guess this is all part of this push for 2026 of doing whatever is possible to stack the deck to make sure because the stakes are so high. So he wants to ban mail-in voting because it favors Democrats,

and he wants to, they both want to redistrict because they favor each other. And then, you know, there's the National Guard appearing in blue cities as possible, you know, intimidation. And it's all just to win these. I want to show one more thing, though, because this is, I think, a really cool graph, if you can pull it up.

And it ends before it even gets super bad. This is how often, the blue dot would be Democrat, Reds is Republican, how often they collabbed or voted on the same thing. So the gray is good, basically. The gray is like a bipartisan bill. So it means the two-party. came together and collaborated.

If there's a gray dot, that means they connected on something. And so you can see in the 40s and 50s, there's a lot of gray. I mean, they're a pretty big overlap. They often would find some sort of common ground to get something past.

Keep going. Keep going. By the 80s, they've sort of started the split apart. By the 90s, it's entirely apart. By the 2000s, there is almost no gray at all. By 2011, it's, I mean, by you see in 2007, there's like literally one line.

And this stops at 2011, but my understanding is, is become essentially non-existent. It's two completely divided parties and you cannot get something passed in this country unless you have a majority, which has caused everything to slow down, which has caused, I mean,

Trump is the most extreme example, but executives, the president, has been taking more and more power because nothing gets done the other way. So they're just grabbing it. They're just grabbing it and doing things. And the American public, I don't think, is pushing back as much as they should

because our normal representative system is not able to make progress. Well, I think the broader argument, the pro argument for these types of actions being taken, like this sort of redistricting, or you could take it to, you know, other actions Trump's having right now, but, you know, other executives in the past, too,

is that nothing through our congressional process gets done right now. And that's very frustrating to the average person. They want to see action taken and results from that action as soon as possible. People are, I would say, understandably impatient, you know, maybe, maybe not reasonably so, but understandably so. And they, it's like if, if I want the executive to take action because this polarization exists,

I want the redistricting to happen because it enables, uh, the part, even though it sacrifices something about our democratic process, it enables the party in power that I voted for to finally fucking take action, which is something that I've been waiting 10, 20, years for. How do you, you know, how do you argue with that person? Because like you said, you don't see a version of

how this issue with gerrymandering gets fixed. And does that mean we just sit and wallow in a system that produces no results forever? Does it mean I finally get to admit that I'm happy with the executive taking action because it's

something? Even I'm not like they're going to say like, so my head and my heart have a different, like, I, as we said before, like I personally, I prefer not to have any chairman. I prefer to try to get it as fair as possible. But in this moment where I am really unhappy

with like the big, beautiful bill and things the house has been passing, I can see myself like giving credit to do some for doing, for just doing action. I think there's a bias towards action. But I can see why, I can see why someone would hate it on the other side.

I get it. But I just, I'm understanding why, a frustration, a tectonic plate frustration in this country is causing people to like support things they wouldn't normally support. Like act, just movements, just making some action versus like, I don't know, like a strongly worded letter

from Hekeem Jeffries or something. I want to see like something being done to try and counter it. Yeah. And yeah. If your main way of interacting with politics for the last two decades is gazing at gridlock and feeling like nothing is done, then maybe you're just,

happy to see except for war. They're pretty down for war still. Yeah, yeah, but that doesn't count. That doesn't count. People are just happy to see action taken for action's sake. You know, like they're willing to

look the other way or you know, the cognitive dissonance necessary to look the other way on these infringements of like due process or rights or or the status quo is fine because at least something is getting done. If somebody at your office isn't doing their job,

are you okay with your boss? Just maybe you slide over to his desk. You just start doing his work. Like at some point, you just wanted to get done, right? Are you taking on your boss's work for free? Because he's not doing it. No, Trump is taking on the, um,

the employees work? He's doing the homework of the Congress. Yeah. This analogy makes sense. Okay. Pop quiz for you guys. Do you know where the word gerrymandering comes from? this is a factoid that you will be able to take.

Do you know where the word jerrymanoring comes from? Aidan, TikTok, TikTok, if you don't know it, you have to say, I'm a little stupid boy. I'm a little stupid boy because I don't remember. I don't remember. There was a man named Elbridge Jerry. He's one of the least known founding fathers, but he is a founding father.

And in, I don't know, the 1800s, I don't remember the exact year, he decides to redistrict to help the Federalist Party. And he creates a district, can you show my screen, that looks like a, salamander, I guess. It's so long and narrow, and it helps all the federalists get a majority.

And so a newspaper, a local newspaper, draws this political cartoon and calls it gerrymandering because of salamander. Oh, because it looks like a salamander. Okay. Wow. So after Aiden's, though, we'll call it Calvin snaking or something. Yeah. Lemon party.

Calvin limiting, yeah. But that's where it comes from. So, yeah, I think we all agree it kind of sucks. it's happening and it's going to be hard to reverse. It's going to be a weird. Yeah, by definition. Because once you redistrict and you get controlled, you have the ability to prevent any vote to undo it.

One little thing I saw that was interesting I was reading into it was that states that have, that don't have control of the judiciary, like almost what I found is almost everybody tries to gerrymandar, but if you don't have control, like solid control of the judiciary, usually your gerrymandering gets undone. Like later on, they'll strike it down or redo it.

So that is one of the main things That has made Republican states more effective at it Is that they both put in their gerrymandering plans And the Republican ones can keep it Because their courts don't overturn it Is what I was what I saw on the research So that's where we find ourselves I mean I don't know if we have any larger stuff about

2026 or or DJT He did his press conference this morning That's what they said So the whole weekend everybody was saying he was dead Because he had fat cancles And he had a big weird looking bruise on his hand Hopped vein in his hand or something. And, but it turns out he was fine.

He's golfed and came out today to show everybody he was healthy and talked about moving Space Force to Alabama. So he was fine. It's actually kind of a nothing burger. But he did talk a lot about, again, 2026 and how they need to get National Guard. Oh, I'll say this. The National Guard. So we talked about this a few months ago, two months ago, when there was the ICE protests in

L.A. Yeah. And the National Guard was sent to break them up. Harry, could you pull up this presentation, H. made. Sorry. Continue. Do you think that was

a takeaway from what I said? Audio listeners, it says in quotes, Donald Trump is dead and quote, Atrioc 2025. Technically he did say that. Technically,

he did say that. I don't know if it was on the podcast, but at some point you did say those words. There's still a few months for this to be true. Not that that's the right. Oh, whoa. Okay.

I'm just saying hypothetical. Hypothetically. Even given a time one. You said you'd kill J. Vance. Oh, I wouldn't say that. He said that. Wow.

So a court struck it down. A court struck down the right of the president to have sent National Guard into California without the government's will. The line from the... I'll actually have it if I want if I can pull it up, but he basically says that the president cannot use the National Guard as a personal police force.

You mean because he's dead? That's right. If you were living, you could do it. He's incapable. J.D. Vance can do it. Vance can do it. Yeah, the goal of what was done in California seemed to be to create a national police force

with the president as its chief. There was no, because it was, because there was a rebellion. That was the emergency. But the judge said there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to protest and enforce the law, which was my experience on the ground.

I think the civilian law enforcement had it handled. I got tear gassed by him. You were crazy, though. That was like four days after. You're just going on. Doug was there for the love of the game, actually. You just do that every weekend.

You just don't know. It was there. I was there. I'm not kidding, by the way. They were there and they did tear gas me. Amongst other people. I got many stampeded. Really?

Well, I was, because somebody just said, ah, and then they all started moving back and I was in the middle of the crowd. But nothing happened. There was nothing to cause the ruckus, but everyone would move back. So is this a, is this a California court or a national,

like a federal court? That's a great question. Where was this judge based? And was he based? Presumably each state that the National Guard. Liberal judge, woke judge. The National Guard

is moving into more than California now or attempting to be moved into more than California and each state will have to raise their concerns individually like through similar means. I imagine this is happening first because this happened much earlier than the other recent efforts. I'm sorry,

like Trump is moving the National Guard or announced that he is moving the National Guard into more cities and states. That's right. Yeah, this morning he said he's going to move it into Chicago. He said Chicago's a war zone and people are dying. And even though Governor J.B. Pritzker does not

want the National Guard there. He is going to do it anyway. And it'll set up another court battle. But that's for a different state. This is only for California. It doesn't, it's not even enacted yet because the rules were, change. Like you can no longer, a judge in one state cannot hold a stay on a president's

actions nationwide. They can only. I like his bow tie. I will say that. He does look like he's a contact going for him. He's got a little bit of freshness. He's older than Trump, looks like. Is he? Good. I like that a lot of our representatives are old. Yeah. I've been really scared that we're going to get anybody young. It keeps me up and I don't. Honestly, I'm fucking petrified. You're a little scared of politics. Then you see somebody comes in to save the day who's also 84. Dude, I saw the day. Because people were making the joke about Trump dead. I was like, well, how old is he?

Trump's dead? You heard it in my presentation. Barry? Trump is 79. So he's younger than Biden is now, but older than Biden was at this time in his term. He's the oldest president ever inaugurated, which is Trump now.

Do you know how old Bill Clinton is? Bill Clinton's like now? Like 83? 84? There we guess. I don't know. He seems pretty old. same age.

Oh my God. Oh my gosh. You know how old George W. Bush is? 85. 79. Same age. It's the same people. We keep getting older

and our presidents say the same age. It's the same people. And they're all born in 1946. We have been ruled by the same year of boomers. Christ. Right after the war for our entire lives. Ever Obama who was a little bit younger, but like that's crazy, dude.

Yeah, it's just boomer. into boomer into boomer, even as they get older and older and older. That's wild to me. Okay, I mean, this is all, I don't know if you have any more politics stuff. Is there anything like that? Yeah, so I have one more follow up. Similar, a ruling from a federal court recently, I believe, that the Trump tariffs are being struck down or the Trump tariffs are unconstitutional.

Yeah. I mean, you know, the Constitution gives the power of the purse and the power to levy tariffs to Congress, and Trump has declared an emergency, which is that we're being ripped off by all our partners to impose tariffs at will, like on a handshake, on a, any moment he wants. He's putting up 50% tariffs, take it away, 20 minutes. We've all went through it. And a judge struck that down. It's going to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

They're actually having an early ruling. I think Trump is going directly to appeal to them. That's what he said this morning. I don't know if it's him personally, but, and so we're going to find out whether that holds up with the Supreme Court. If it doesn't, the result will be pretty wild because everyone that paid a tariff

will get a refund. The government will have to refund hundreds of billions of dollars. Hi, Mr. Steelman here. Mr. Steelman who loved, who actually was in love with the tariffs the whole time. Yes.

And Mr. Steelman can acknowledge that the rollout of the tariffs and the enforcement of the tariffs initially, It was a little confusing. It got a little crazy. We were getting them out there and we were pulling them back.

But that was a part of the negotiations. That was a part of the art of the deal. And now we've arrived at the point where we have seemingly more stable tariffs and the early revenue brought in from these things seems pretty substantial. How much are we talking? How many smackaroos?

Isn't it like a hundred billion? No, no. I don't have that number on me, but yeah? It was a hundred. In June, it was $100 billion for the first few months of tariffs or something. But from here on out, the expected amount, like if you just projected the same amount of tariffs out into the future, is that over the next 10 years, there will be $3 trillion in tariff revenue brought it, which is pretty crazy, right? That is expected, expected to offset the cost of the big, beautiful bill that was just passed, which is estimated to cost $3 trillion over that same period of 10 years. And if I were taking the argument of, look, the tariffs were, you know, messy in their rollout,

but finally accomplishing some of what we wanted, we haven't seen these giant fluctuations in prices that we thought we'd see for the majority of goods. You know, can we say that they were a good thing? Especially since they match up with the expenditure of that bill we pushed through, ignoring the fact that the deficit is, you know, even offset the deficit is growing without that. See, you know, we could set that aside. Well, I don't want to ignore that. No, what if we just ignore that?

You know, what if we just ignore that? I'm, I'm, but imagine, I'm Mr. Steel man. Okay. Here, Mr. Mann. Mr. Mann. And I, I'm happy, like I said, with the executive action that's been taken, it seems like a substantially good move that is bringing in revenue to the country. You know, why, you know, why should I be happy about this judge interrupting someone finally

taking action and creating us? And to back up Mr. Steele here, I have more tax revenue because they cut my taxes, or more money, because they cut my taxes. I can spend it on my favorite things like tariffs, so it evens out. So what you're saying is 8 and 28's platform is more tariffs. That's your plan. You decided that... Well, I was... It's an unlimited quantity of money. I think we could just juice them all like 200%. It's free money, right? It's just kind of appearing at the ports. When you looked at the charts from earlier the year, did you not have a fleeting thought to yourself that Svalbard was squeaking by.

They were ripping us fuck off. The seed vault on Smallbard was ripping us off. I agree. But the genuine version of this argument is that the income, like this is creating a substantial amount of income. I understand it's a consumption tax. It's hard

to project out into the future. Well, okay. That's the key argument here. I think this is what tariff debates come down to is, you know, all the theory and what economics will tell you is that tariffs are paid for by your own citizens, as in the cost of selling the goods here will go up and maybe not immediately,

because we're in a kind of a flux area where everyone's kind of holding off, the cost will be passed on to the consumer. Things will get more expensive. That is the core idea. And then the other side of that is n-uh. And so I can't, like, if you're telling me, no, that won't happen. Tariffs are just free money out of thin air that's coming from the other people, then we have to just wait and see.

At the end of the day, that's the only core argument is like, will it get paid by our citizens and thus be a tax on the poorest Americans that are consuming more, or will it be paid for by the other countries, and in which case, this is a free money printer. So you admit it, it could be free money. It could be like we're the Spanish, you know, empire hundreds of years ago. Okay. Gallons, gallons full of gold just arrive at our shores every week. Maybe that's what's going on, H. Chuck. Maybe that's what's happening. And we're going to have to wait and see. Again, there is tariff money being in. But I, for me, it's almost more important to say that like, even if there's tariff money coming in,

it is still so small. I know you're saying $3 trillion, but I just want to be so, so clear, like so dramatically clear that the amount of debt we have this year will be higher than last year. Next year is going to be higher than this year. That 27 is higher than 26.

Like the debt is increasing every year. We are not making a debt. We're not turning it around. And so it all just feels like circle jerking. It feels like a lemon party. We keep saying, we keep saying, tariff revenue or this revenue, Perhaps, you know, tackling something as huge as the national debt is something that is challenging.

And we cannot make a dime, a turn on a dime on an issue that is that big in such a short period of time. And this tariff revenue and the big beautiful bill, the fact that these things are seemingly canceling each other out in the short term and hopefully the long term is a reflection of the budget consciousness of the administration, which is going to better approach these problems. I want to hone it on that point. Look, I'm the village. He's got the right language. I'm the villager. But I want to hone it on that is because you said, even in this best ideal situation,

the big view of a bill is budget neutral. So we are in a bad deficit. We're spending way more than we make. 2024 is like one of the worst years ever. 25. You're saying at best it's the same. At best, we've given tax cuts to the wealthy. We've cut Medicare.

We've balanced it all. Actually, that could America saves money. But taxes are wealthy. tax cut, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. And then to make up for that, we're doing the tariffs. And that's going to balance it out. But it's not getting us any closer. Even if everything you're saying is true,

we're not getting any closer. I guess what I'm arguing is like, because these things balance out in this, it's a reflection of budget conscientiousness that will surely fuel policy in the coming years that will attack the rest of the budget. Is that not so ridiculous? And if we gerrymandered correctly,

we can get the representatives to do it. I've kicked a can for the last time. Yes, this is the last one. You got to spend money to make money, you're right. Let's give Texas 100 seats. Let's do this. I swear to,

I have a question, though. I always got that phrase. How much money do we have to spend to finally make money? Because it's been 36 trillion. It's 38. Oh, it's 38.

We're the guy with the diamonds. We're the guy's got the diamonds. If we get there, then all of a sudden it starts flowing in. I've said a lot of profit coming in next year, too. I mean, we do make money. We're a rich country. We have a lot of money coming in.

We just spend. so much more and we ignore. It's not many other though, man. I love that. I'm a big spender. I didn't want to say, you guys know Howard Lutnik? You ever? Yeah, I heard of that guy. Can we get a picture of his smiling mode? I heard of

love Howard Lutnik. He's like the use car salesman of That is a good way of putting it, yes. He's just very Look at that smile. He's just sleazy, man. The way he talks is so like, but Howard Lutnik, maybe

disagrees with you secretly because Howard Lutnik, despite being on air all the time, pumping and promoting the tariffs, has been making, or at least his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, has been making massive, massive bets. Again, it's run by his son, so they're in contact. Massive, massive bets, basically against the tariffs remaining legal. Here's how it would work. So let's say you import wine from Italy and sell it in America. You have a big tariff bill that you have to pay if you're importing it.

So you pay, I don't know, $15 million to import all this wine. And now you've paid your tariff and you're good and you're going to sell it and make a profit. If they're struck down, if they're illegal, you are owed $15 million refund. But you're not sure that's going to happen and you need cash now. You can sell the rights to that refund at pennies on the dollar. Let's say you sell it to me for $1 million or whatever. So I give you a million dollars, but now I have the rights to your refund. Now, if they get struck down, I can go cash in that $15 million and make huge profits.

his firm is making these massive, massive bets against tariffs. Like if tariffs are struck down by the Supreme Court, he stands to make millions, like hundreds of millions of dollars on all these debts he's bought. And does he even work there anymore? Only his sons run the company. So he probably, maybe he's a bad relationship with the sons.

It's possible. I will just say it's odd that this is the firm he left to join this job is now directly making bets in opposition to what he says. He's been preaching publicly. And if it does get struck down, they're going to make a ton of money. He wins either way. Maybe he's just hedging. This is brilliant.

It's like when you're sports bet on the team you don't like. Yeah. So it's like either way. Can't lose. They cannot lose you. He can't. He's been winning. I thought it was worth bringing out because I was kind of shocked by that deviousness of that play.

You know what sucks though is in my heart of hearts? I'm like, it's like parents not wanting to fight in front of the cage or something. like I think the tariffs are a bad idea and I think they should be struck down but I almost don't want it to happen because it makes the country look so bad in the middle of all these negotiations with other countries we've been like promising Japan

we're going to do this to the tariffs and you give us this and all these deals immediately all collapse and it's like so embarrassing. It's so embarrassing that everything we've been working on with every country is suddenly not allowed by the Supreme Court. So it's weird, I have this weird

like it's not my majority opinion. I wouldn't agree with it, but a small part of me is like, he's already doing it. Just like I keep it going. There's a part of me that wants to also see it in action, see it through. It's like, you know, it's, because everyone talks about,

oh, this is what will happen with tariffs. And it's like, as long as we've introduced this much chaos into the ecosystem, we may as well get some data and see. And I know that's easy for me to say. But, but man, it's like that way we can at least talk about tariffs

with some degree of knowledge about what happens in the real world versus it all being so theoretical. I think that's part of it, too, is I agree with you. But more from like a, like I'm of the, you know, unemployment is rising. It's slowly ticking up. If it gets bad enough, if inflation is, like,

if the economy is really bad by the 2026 midterms, people will likely blame tariffs and what's been happening. But if they are struck down, then Trump has a really good argument, which is like they were just about to work. It got struck down and now we're in chaos and now that's the problem. And that would be a very annoying line of thought to me. So actually, I kind of do want to just go with it.

We'll see what happens. Yeah. You know, report yourself. If it works out great, then it's great. If it doesn't, then bear the consequences. You want to see Ash? I want to see action. Villanade.

I want you to get into power and do 500% tariffs on every country. It builds so much money. We would get so much money if we did that. The ships full of gold arriving in port. Non-stop. Yeah, I don't know. What do you think? No, this is super.

I mean, just that alone is really interesting. It's like, bend against his own play. potentially, provided he has a spot-on relationship with his sons. We should, hey, let's dig into that. We should, we should befriend his sons. Get him on this show. Got him in the fucking Lutnik family tree. Do you try to fucking.

This weekend, this weekend, I went somewhere for the first time I went to Nantucket in Massachusetts, which is an island off the coast near another island called Martha's Vineyard. It's kind of like, my understanding of it, and the reason I went there is my, you know, one of my girlfriend's best friends has like a family home there and we got invited to go. And this place is kind of like

maybe the Hamptons. Like Nantucket feels like a step down from the Hamptons, but they're basically the same thing. And it's a lot of rich people that, you know, a lot of older money that has accumulated there over time. A lot of like wealthy island life. And where, you know,

we're the Lutniks of the world. world might be hanging out, if you will. And it's not uncommon to like, you know, you'd be, it's definitely one of those places where I'm hanging out at places and I'm like, I'm, you know, I'm not rich compared to these people. This is crazy. It's like real old money. Yeah. And one thing I thought was really, really interesting about the island there is it's so. What? I looked at a four million dollars is the median home price. Oh my God. In Nantucket. Four million dollars. for the media. That's what I did.

I just want to tell you. No, I know. Dude, wait, how many people do we need to send a Mantucket to take over? Dude, that's four times L.A. I'm telling you,

it'd be so much money. And those people, in Nantucka, by the way, it's like, not that I had a bad time by any means, did a bunch of cool stuff, but I was at a brewery.

It's places where, like, I saw a woman with like a Gulf of America hat on. And I'm like, all right. Come on. I got an 8 and 28 hat. Don't think you judge me. Wait, so it's pretty,

it's pretty, Republican? Almost certainly. I think it's the big, you know, it's, it's really, really white and it's really, really, rich. So just based off of those demographics, we, we, and based off of the outfits that some of them

would wear, which, you know, you could be, a lot of 8 and 28 voters, you could be a golf of America hat guy. You were doing a voting rally, you were doing a little, you're going for your base. Uh, anyway, while I was on the island, I found out a lot of things that like 70% of the island is kept undeveloped and cannot be developed for any purpose because it's nature conservation. Uh, there's a bunch of like beautiful parks, bike lanes, trails. It's actually pretty easy to get around the island. I feel like if you don't have a vehicle, a lot of people have their cars there. But I was surprised by like town center areas are pretty walkable. You can run and bike to like most things you need to get to unless you're going for like, at one end of the island to the other. And they also have rules around the types of businesses that can be there. So there's a rule on no food chain.

So there's no fast food chains there at all. No chain restaurants. They all have to be like their own individual thing. This also applies to like retail stores, at least with some more restrictions. Like there's a couple chain retail stores that have made it there, but they have to go through some sort of scrutinizing process. All the homes have to have a certain style and color. of shingle on the outside of them.

So they all look, no matter their size or shape, they all look very similar in the way they present themselves. And every home has to have like a nice name like on a plaque out front of it. So everybody's house on the island has its own like, it's like choosing your gamer tag, if you will. Nice.

Those are for the, sorry. My rich name's like a grandfather. That's for the gamers out there. And I noticed, I noticed, and there was more things along the way as I asked questions, I was spending time there, and it's a beautiful place that has a lot of rules that keep it beautiful

and don't allow businesses to have free reign over the development of the island and the community. And I was like, oh, that's so interesting that this place of ridiculously high income per capita has all of these rules and regulations around how their community can be developed in order to maintain It's a look, culture, and feel.

And I was like, oh, that's two interesting ideas, because I wonder, I wonder, a lot of the wealth and money that has been accumulated in a place like that and also has a lot of political connections. I wonder if those actions are reflected in, perhaps the districts that they live in or are represented. It was interesting to see that such a tangible way the community had benefited from these rules,

but in such a place that is so, so worth. I would argue that they're not, I mean, the rich are benefiting. I saw the same thing about the Hamptons. I saw a documentary on it, which is like the regular people just can't afford a house. Because they completely focus on making it as appealing and undeveloped for the wealthy super rich that live there, the working class of the place,

people that do all the jobs in the gardening, cannot afford to live nearby. So they have to commute very far into the... Yeah, so I don't know how. this works for Nantucket specifically, right? You could be totally, totally right about that. And I think that's a part of this equation. My understanding is that there's an explosion

in the seasonal population of the place, right? Only like 3,000 or 4,000 people live there year round, but then that like 10 X's over like the summer period. And a lot of the people that come to the island are the businesses and workers that like open up for the summer season, almost like the opposite of like a ski resort. Yeah.

And a lot of the businesses that operate have to offer or do offer housing and places for their workers to live for the summer that is like affordable or like easy to use for that time period. I didn't explore this dynamic fully so I don't know all the ins and outs. I'm just saying the Hathens example is like

people would, when a seasonal rush of old wealthy people come in at a certain time of year, there would be a lot of opportunity and jobs but obviously you couldn't afford to live there. So you'd have people that come in work these gardening jobs or work these food service jobs

or whatever, and then in the off season, are literally going into the forest and living like in homeless encampments. Yeah. Coming back out. It might be exactly the same, right? I was just talking to seasonal workers who had been out there.

They usually had some type of housing provided to them through their job. I don't know if that's common. Maybe I just talked to like a few exceptions. I'd like talk to like three people about this. Okay. But you could totally be right about that. And there's something to be said about the rules

and way things are up, set up, only benefiting the people that are, rich enough to afford all those things. Like ski resorts have the exact, this exact same problem that you're talking about. Yeah. It's like all these seasonal workers that need to be there cannot afford,

uh, the food is the most common, I think. It's like you can't go out to like any restaurants or grocery stores because it's not reasonable for your low ski instructor salary to like afford what's available. In the Hampton's example, they showed a tower. You know how like you could make frozen chicken nuggets and fries.

It would probably cost you $3, $2. They, they made a circle of, of it and then a tiered circle of it and then a tiered circle of it. So it was like a cake tower of chicken nuggets. So in total maybe $6 of frozen cost $120. It was $120. It was $120 for a chicken nugget tower. But it's in a tower. It was just, you can take a picture. Is it like, is the tower like pretty cool? Like, would you say it took a lot of time and skill? It did it take a lot of skill. It's just three bowls that are like, but it was cooler. I don't know if it was $120

$3 cooler, but I can see that. I can see exactly what you're saying, which is like, if that's chicken nuggets, what is grocery? What is like fresh fruit? What is, you know, I'm saying that the food has got to be insanely expensive. Yeah.

In those areas. I think that's the, there are certainly tradeoffs. I guess the people, you know, I'd be curious to like learn more about it. Yeah, I mean, I'm reading an article on Realtor.com that does say that some people are living in their car

in the off season. Some people are into the woods? Are those the people living? people living there like permanently? Are there a lot of people doing that? I assume they're working most of the year and then when there's no work to be had, they are staying in their car until the world starts. I see, I see.

If we lemon party to Nantucket, right? We got control with a small percentage of people and became kingmakers. Yeah. I think what the first thing we should do, we upzone everything. No more zoning. And then we just see what happened. Oh! And we just let it ride and we just watch the super rich people get upset.

Yeah, it would be super upset. But in the real world, outside. side of just the lemon party's glorious utopia, which we're going to create. Right, right, right. This just happened. I want to talk, I think what's important by the end of this episode,

we decide where our lemon party is going to be established. Because we could, we could take over the House of Representatives, but we could just focus on Nantuck. Well, we could get, it's like once we've established the location, we could like disperse the party location on like partiful

and like invited to invite a bunch of guys to the party. And like, and then we'd all get together. Clothes optional, you know. Yeah. Well, I want things to stay loose. You don't want it to be uptight. We don't want to be an uptight party.

You'd hate to be uptight because then nobody would vote for us. Oh, get some elderly people too. The Texas Senate. Chariatric fuckers. The Texas Senate just passed SB 840, making it legal to build housing on every commercially zoned lot in Texas on any city of the population over 150K. That means any area zone for like a bar. or industry or factory or whatever,

you can build homes on that now. It is no longer restricted only to commerce. So people can turn a lot of things like, it could be a dying mall or anything, but you could turn any of this area into as much multifamily housing as you want to build. How much do you understand housing in the scale of it? Like a little bit?

Okay, well, let me just post this. Here's what I'd be curious. That sounds awesome. And I also don't have a sense of how much land and opportunity that opens up. Because in my brain, I think of where I grew up in Sacramento. And if Arden Fair Mall shut down, they're like, we can build housing here now.

You know, you'd get a couple thousand people and that's great. And that would not solve affordability of housing, right? If you applied the same thing to San Francisco or whatever else. So I'm curious, like, how much impact does that actually have? I saw the same thing. Yeah. I saw it's like, oh, now this mall can be converted into housing. And that's great.

But are we talking like, you know, I'm curious how much of an impact this stuff will actually. Well, I'll just say, I'll push back. I did look into this specific bill because I did a response to it and asked if it was, what was the catch. I was like, what's the catch here? This seems, it's like a really good bill. So here's what I looked into. The, the, you know, a city might be districted into single family housing, multifamily housing, and, and commercial. Kind of the big three major things you might district the city into. Commercial takes up a pretty huge chunk. It's not just mall. It's like, it's like 20% of a city, realistically. And that's a low example. Like, I'm talking about the worst examples,

which probably are these cities where it's mostly single family housing, 80% single family It's a big chunk of the city that is now you can just buy land on that area and build an apartment building or whatever one. You're completely zoned for that. And they included in the bill a lot of things that stop building usually, which is like parking space requirements over a certain amount or, you know. So I wouldn't say this is of catch-all, especially because it only applies to cities over 150K, which is only like four major cities in tech. Like, it's not actually all over. but it is, I like to see what happened because it seems actually kind of cool.

And could lead to like more freedom to build apartment buildings and move forward with supply. So I think it's not a bad thing. It's not like the utopia catch-all, but it's like a good step of progress. I will give this the Lemon Party stamp of approval. I think that the old men over there are really doing something spicy and I appreciate it.

I mean, it would be great as if the type of thing if this goes well and then it puts pressure on other states. Yeah. California, Gavin Newsom to be like, we should also do this because boy, would love more housing. Yeah, more upzoning would be awesome. I think it would be really cool. So I don't know. I thought it was a nice piece of good news and hopefully it goes well. And if it doesn't, then it's all Texas's fault and problem. You know what I'm saying? There's still idiots. Guinea pig. I mean, this is the type of thing that probably takes a few, at least a few years to see any of the reality of, you know, what direction, positive or negative that it pushes in. I know that's true. It's funny.

Wait. We're just so slow because, you know, China builds things in eight months and you see the impact relatively quickly. Yeah. We just build so slow. Like, even with the zoning in the right spot, it would be interesting to try, I don't know, if there was a world where we could, yeah.

This is an interesting thing on the daily recently, and they were talking about the difficulty of building in America in general, just across the whole country. And construction. is one of the few areas of the economy that in the past like 50 years has not really increased in its productivity at all. Like there's been no significant changes

in the output relative to like time and money put in. And that's, you know, and they're trying to like identify, you know, why is that the case? You know, why do we struggle compared to all of these other countries? And then also reasons that, you know, building homes in a custom capacity

can only be put on an assembly line in so many ways, right? Like a car, we can kind of pump them out. But in the case of this, any attempts to create really replicable assembly line-esque housing has not actually had a lot of success. Like literally building homes. In America or in the world? In the U.S. at least. Because Korea is making nuclear reactor.

on the assembly line. They've modularized it and they're, so I'm surprised that we, we can't crack that nut. I feel like we used to, America used to put down a suburb. Lemon party will nut. Yeah, I couldn't tell you like what all the,

you know, I could take a guess from like other things we've learned, but I can't remember from this specific report what they like interlocking things. The examples that it brings up is over the past 10 years, there've been a bunch of hyped up companies to invest in that are basically like, let's take smaller homes and build them in factories at a scale that makes them widely available.

Like the container home type thing? Yeah, but none of these companies have ever found a significant amount of success. People don't really want to buy these type of homes at the scale that they say their company is going to be able to sell at. I also wonder how much of that is just cities don't allow it, right? Most cities, based on how they currently vote right now,

they shut down new housing in general and probably even more so the idea of, okay, let's get in a bunch of cheap, identical homes, right? To, you know, the homeowner association, that's like the nightmare scenario, right? To the average boomer that is the nightmare scenario if they come in and put the, like, Lego bricks in a big grid on their city

that they've invested into and take it over. I feel like that's so much of suburbs though, right? H-O-A's and, like, copy and pasted homes and neighborhoods like that. I just, with how hard it is to build any houses, I imagine the resistance is even higher. Like, this is maybe slightly above, like, you know, housing for drug addicts

to get off the street or something. Okay. Which is the most vociferously opposed. But, you know, I can't imagine people are open to this. Yeah. I saw in the Hampton's thing I was talking about where I was looking at it up to verify what I was seeing in this video.

And a 600 square foot one bed, one bath house, went for $2.8 million. And... What is this fucking where? Monaco? in the Hamptons in New York. And the H-O-W-A fee was 2.2K a month to have an H-O-A time. I mean, that's crazy.

Do you guys have H-O-A fees? No. I don't. Mine is hot. Oh, yeah? Mine is, yeah, apparently it's like low for my neighborhood. But I, mine is like seven. You keep that big 8 and 28 flag on your loan.

Mine is $700. Jesus. Holy shit. What is the justification for that? And what do they do? And that's pretty low for that. neighborhood, which is crazy. Oh, my God.

Okay. The justification, I'd fuck off. What do they do with the money? What do they do? I think they buy a lot of weed. They just, the board smokes a lot of weed,

dude. Fucking A. It's a person smoking a fat blood in your face. With your money, it's not possible to smoke seven or no. How many people are going to eat in H. Jesus. No,

I mean, I couldn't. That's crazy, bro. It pays for, it pays for a, bunch of different stuff. It pays for like the vents getting like repaired and cleaned.

It pays for like stuff related to the piping. It pays. Oh, so they're like, they're like working on your home or something. Yeah, I mean technically, technically yes. Oh, okay, okay. I was imagining like a neighborhood where you're just like in your plot of land or

something. No, no, no, no. I think, I mean, this is this is in like an apartment complex. Got it. Okay, okay. That's a little different thing. Yeah, there's like, like paying people to like, like common and clean and like work of the facility.

Okay, that's kind of different. That's kind of different. Versus, you know, some suburb place. Had a little tech update. It's the tech guy in the podcast. Ooh. You guys know, recently, Google was ruled on a monopoly by a federal court judge.

And the threat was that they would break up Chrome. And Chrome would be its own separate business from Google. The ruling came in today. That is not the case. That is not the punishment. Chrome will. remain with Google. Google stock popped 8, 10% on the news. Apple stock pop because they now there's precedent that they won't have to split off AirPods, even though it would be bigger than Nike.

And so I guess good news for Google investors. I thought that was a little update. But I don't know what the punishment is now. That's the thing is like, maybe if a judge tells me that that's not the right case that you shouldn't break off Chrome, fine. But you already did agree that they're a monopoly. Is the solution nothing? Like what is the, that is what is the, that is what? That is what what I want to know. And there's no answer to that yet. It needs to be something substantial enough to disobey companies from becoming a monopoly. Otherwise, it doesn't matter. Yeah. To be fair, I would argue that of Google's incredibly influential products they have, Chrome is not the most influential. Like, I think Android is much more.

Yeah, I mean, we're all switching over to Opera GX. You know, Chrome is not the reason that they are so dominant in search. I mean, the real monopoly around Google is the fact that they are used for search and ads across the entire internet. So they just have this total dominance in that field. Chrome, it makes it easy for people just immediately go into that ecosystem. But nobody is using Bing. Like, they're not, you know. And so it's Bingers rise up.

Isn't Bing? Bing's strength is that it's still the default search engine across like a couple things, right? Like nobody's going to Bing.com, but it has some devices that it's embedded on. They default their way into usage. Yeah, is like the primary use. So, you know, in theory, they can default the way into more stuff, maybe. Yeah. But it's just, you know, people are choosing to.

So I just, I feel like Chrome is, alphabet without Chrome is still going to dominate. They're still going to be obscenely powerful. And so, you know, if this turns into a different type of, you know, like divestment, I think that's probably a good thing. If it turns into nothing, that's probably not a good thing. I just, it looks like they're not going to be required to divest anything. They're not even required, because one of the things that was a big part of the case,

was that Google pays $20 billion a year to make their search default on Apple. Right. And that was a big thing. It was like Apple's a huge chunk of American phones and Google's the default on it and no one else can match that. That is still allowed. They just can only make it one year at a time. You can't make a 10-year deal if they could only. So I don't know.

I just don't know what the punishment is. Like they have agreed in the court of law that this is a monopoly. They have an undue advantage that crowds out competitors. and the punishment seems to be fucking nothing. I can't, I'm sorry, I'm not on the mic, but, so I find that frustrating,

even though I do agree with you probably that Chrome is not the core of the issue and wouldn't, like yes, yes, it is tactically, that's monopolistic. It's just, it's just not the piece that's going to make an impact. Villain chair. Speak up villain.

Perhaps, perhaps it is not enough to dissuade the continuation of the monopoly, but if the contract happens in one year at a time, Doesn't that leave room for any competitor to come in and potentially offer something? Yeah, I mean, maybe Bing could or whatever. I guess for that contract? The thing that frustrates me is like in the best case scenario and all this stuff,

it's just the other big tech company gets it. It's never like the scrappy startup making a great new search engine or like, it's never that. It's always like, okay, Microsoft, we're going to let Amazon throw their weight around. And it's like, okay, then it's YouTube. But it doesn't. Yeah, but it's not that Apple will go like, pick a little guy as the default browser. It's not going to have it.

I just really feel like that. But part of that is users. I mean, users, here's a thing. The tough thing with Google is a monopoly is that users overwhelmingly like using Google. Like if they, if there was no dark pattern pushing them into it,

you know, it's funny. Like the number one thing used on edge browser is to download Chrome. Like, yeah. So it's tough to say. But even that, I feel like people are, are maybe taking away the wrong thing. Google is not a monopoly because of the site,

Google.com, right? It's a monopoly because of ads. And that is largely from across the entire internet. Like, you know, ad search is everything. Like most of the internet is drawing its revenue through ad search. So that's where they're incredibly powerful is as an advertising network. Yes, they have an advantage when people use Google, but that's not, it's, that's not like people going to Google.com is where they're generating the revenue. And this is part of the argument around so right now, when you Google something, there's this AI summary, Right. And part of the concern there is like if you give people the answer at the top, they won't scroll down and have to go back through a bunch of ads. So it's potentially really threatening their core business. But the fact that they're even doing that to me indicates that clearly that's them literally being on Google.

Is not the power. It's the fact that any website on the internet basically, the website you have open right now is using Google ads to source Google, like to source ads. Like they are the like flow. They're the river through which all advertising dollars, which powers the. internet goes through. That's, that's the monopoly. Yeah, I mean, I agree. The monopoly was in digital advertising, not in search. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, if 10% of people go from Chrome to Bing, that's not, it's not 10% of Google is lost, not even remotely. It's like a tiny, tiny, tiny bit. Look, let's end this on a high epic note. Pharmacy benefit managers for health insurance. Oh yeah. You want to talk this for a lot.

Yeah, okay. I'm interested. This is, all right, I would say this is on the, surface gonna sound very uninteresting and it's actually kind of wild. So as I was looking up our future 2028 president, Mark Cuban and his company. What the fuck happened to me? Cost plus drugs. You're wearing an 8 and 28 shirt. All right. I just think, no, no, I told you we have to split the vote. Cuban's gonna take a third of the vote. Republicans will take a third of vote. You take 34% and we take a lemonade party. It does like, no, honey, that's not. Don't even worry about it. I don't even like her like that. Mark Cuban and I are friends. Okay. We've been getting, I mean, we hang out a lot at work, yeah.

So, and I'm going to be home late tonight, by the way. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. So in the various research I've done about health care and insurance and costs and all this stuff that we've done over the last six months. One of the things I've come back to is like, why the fuck are drugs so expensive in this country, right?

And one of the things that people come back to a lot or the expense is PBMs or pharmacy benefit managers, which I had never heard of before this. Normally people think of insurance companies are the reasons. why it's so high. The drug manufacturers and profit and all this stuff. But when you talk to, when you hear people talk about the health insurance industry, many of them will say the real problem is the pharmacy

benefit managers. Mark Cuban talks about this. These middle men? These are like, yes, but in a weird way. RFK Jr. said that PDMs are the main problem and the reason he thinks for everybody who remembers several months ago when they made an executive order to lower prices for America,

the reason RFK was like, we think we can actually do this is because now people don't have to go through pvms. So here's what it is. Let's say I make a drug that, you know, helps with Alzheimer's or something, okay? Or balding hair, okay? Mine would be Molly, but like three times better. Okay. I, I make lemon Molly, okay? So I make lemon Molly. Three X Molly. And it helps your, your baldness and you feel great at the same time. And it cures baldness. Anticure's baldness. Because we do need that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's great for raves. You're going to look good and you're good. You got a head full of that rate. It is extremely rapid. It's like bamboo rate. Like it's within an hour. So I create this

drug and I want to sell it for let's say 100 bucks. Okay. So what you would normally think of is I go to, you know, let's say a pharmacy or a CVS or whatever and I say, hey, will you guys buy, will you stock this? I'll sell you a bunch of my drug. You guys can sell it for 100 bucks. I'm selling it to you for 100 bucks so you can do profit with it. Okay. That's how it would work, except with insurance. Most people in America are insured. And so most people are not going to buy my drug unless it's covered by their insurance. Right. Right. So if I'm trying to convince you to buy it, you'll only buy it it if it's actually insured. You got to be my plan. So I, instead of going to the pharmacies directly, I go to your insurance. I go to one of the big insurance companies. And I say, hey, I'm putting this

new drug on the market. Can you guys add it to your formulary, your list of stuff that you cover? And they say, talk to our pharmacy benefit manager. Pharmacy benefit managers are a new middleman that have appeared the last couple of decades and grown in power substantially. And their role, let's say you're a PBM, I go to you and I'm like, okay, hey, I want to sell you my drug. It's really cool. It makes you feel great. It gives you hair.

100 bucks. Now, you are representing the insurance companies. And your whole thing is you want to get a giant, Mr. Kaiser. Get a load of this. Okay. Yeah, so this is what you do. You go to Kaiser and you say, look, all right, we got this new drug. And so what would be really sick for you as a middleman?

It would be to go to Kaiser and say, you know, you know, you'd be to go to Kaiser and say, I'm getting you a 70% discount on this. Okay? We're going to put, we're going to get the drug. We're going to buy it from this stuff. You guys are going to cover it. And I'm getting a promise from them, the drug, the Doug, Doug, drug manufacturer. Uh-huh.

To get a 70% rebate, okay? That sounds great. Let's say, 50%, all right? So, so you come to me and say, we'll only stock it if you give a 50% rebate. You got to give that back. Okay. What would I do in this scenario? I would double the price of my product.

So the idea is I sell the drug. Wait, does that, I'm the pharmacy benefit man. Yeah. Does you doubling the price and not matter to me? All I care about is the rebate and the optics of that to my boss. So what you are trying to do is you're trying to go to the insurance company, your client, and say, hey, we got you this great deal in these drugs. Yeah.

Okay? He's trying to sell. Doug's trying to sell it for all this money, but we're going to get you a 50% rebate on it. You'll get 50% of the money back. I know. 50% of the money back and it makes it three times. Three times. Better than Molly. I know you do a lot of Molly. This is going to save you. Mr. Kaiser, I know you do a ton of Molly. So your incentive is just to get as big of a rebate as possible because then it looks really good to the client. Okay. I see. Yeah. So that's your only incentive. You also get a fee percentage

based on the cost of the drug. You got to wet your beef. You're being. You got to wet your Of course. Why not be getting a fee? All right. So I've made this drug. I want to sell for $100. You come to me, you say, we're only going to buy it

if you give us a 50% rebate. All right, you got to give us 50% of... That's a $200 drug. What I'm going to do is sell it for $200. And then I give you $100 back later. The pricing has not really changed. I still make the same amount. But then this money is flowing through you

to the insurance company to make it. The insurance company appear to have made a bunch of savings, right? Basically all appearances. It doesn't really make a difference. But what's actually going on here? Okay, well, now I'm putting my drug onto market for $200. If you're not insured, the price now doubled. This is like on the low end, okay?

Not only that, you get a percentage as a PBM of profit from the total price of the drug. So if you can get this price to go up to even more. You want you to double it. You want it to go away. Everybody wants you to jack it up. You want to jack it up. If you convince me to jack up the price. We're all jacking it up.

We're jacking. We're dead. We're all on Molly and we're all jacking. You did. I'm going to be honest with you. This sounds fucking awesome. Right. So from our perspectives,

you, me and the insurance company. Okay, what's going on? I want to make $100. So I'm going to sell for $200. You want to get a rebate for 50%. I give the $100 back to you.

You take part of that. The insurance company has to only buy it for $100. Everybody wins, except for the patient. Because anybody who isn't insured has to buy it for a higher price. I got a question.

Wait, this is, hold on, hold on. So my, I think I broke the analogy slightly by making it 3x Molly that also gives back your hair. Because ultimately that's, you know, consumers don't really need that. But in most circumstances, in most circumstances, this is going to be some type of necessary,

perhaps life-saving medication that the end user doesn't really have a choice in whether they need to take or not. I mean, yes or no. So we can kind of. Because in any normal market, we couldn't freely jack up the price in this way because it's, you know, if it was just a consumer good,

the person at the end of the line could just be like, well, I'm not going to fucking buy it. But now, now in this case, because it's pharmaceuticals, the end user pretty much has to get it if they need it. Yeah, there's much more stickiness to them being forced to buy this thing. So then you go to the pharmacy and they're like, hey, this pill you're buying, this is $1,500,

but you only have to pay $20. If you ever wondered, like, why the fuck is this happening? it's because, well, it doesn't cost them any remotely close to 1,500. But every chain in the healthcare system, everybody jacks the prices up. They all get percentages of the feeds, and everybody is rebating these discounts to each other. They're all jagging. Everyone's jacking, and there's feeds going left and right and center. It's a fee orgy.

Yeah. If you've ever seen people online be like, I was charged, I saw this recently. Somebody said, I was charged $30,000 to give birth at a hospital. And I told them, I'm not insured. This is unbelievable. We can't afford to pay this. And they say, oh, if you're uninsured, we have a rate of $4,000. And they were like, why would you charge $30,000 to begin with?

Because this is how the system works. At every stage, there are these middlemen who basically say, okay, you increase your price. I'll give a discount back to you. We all get middlemen fees in the meantime. And it all sort of evens out. The problem is that the list price just keeps going up and up and up at each stage of this. If you're uninsured, you're completely fucked because then you have to pay these things. And then on top of that, the insurance companies are also fine with the prices going

up because then they can have a percentage of the, they can have a percentage of the cost go to the client, to the customer, to the patient, right? And so they can say, look, we as an insurance company, we're covering 95% of the cost of the drug. You just got to cover 5%. Interesting, but much of their cost killing out a rebate. Right. It's massively inflated. Not only this, all of this PBM stuff is completely opaque. There's no publicity around any of it. Interesting. So no one knows if a drug is on market for $2,000. You have no idea how much the insurance company is actually paying for that. What's probably going on is they pay $2,000 in quotes. And then all these rebates flow around where they only actually pay, say, $100 or $50. Right. Right. So everything gets massively inflated.

But then you pay what, you know, 5% of $2,000. Yeah, if you see 5% of $2,000, that's $100.00. It's like, oh, well, that's a great deal for you. We covered $95. Right. But they paid almost nothing on they're in. So the insurance companies, everybody is happy with the price going up. Except. Wait a minute. Are you fucking telling me that American healthcare is bad? God, dude. Are you trying to get to the, because that's a fucking lie. One of the things as I was thinking about this is like, okay, these pharmacy benefit managers, they are basically making everybody inflate what's going on. This is true of like all major pharmaceutical. Apparently these are ridiculously influential. There's three giant ones that

are, that basically control all this stuff. Nobody has any idea what they do. But they are part of public companies. For example, CVS has one. And they make, because they're, they're public companies, they make billions in profit a year. So just the middleman fees

from the pharmacy benefit managers makes billions of dollars in fees. Like, that means that the amount of profit. You balance it out with like the deodorant that's getting stolen every year. And it's, I think it probably comes out dead even. Probably comes out even in the wash. I always felt bad for CBS

because like, man, it seems like you guys are struggling. And I realize they're, they're just these middlemen. You felt bad for CVS? I like, go into stores and I'm just like, how are you guys afloat? It just feels very sad in a lot of CVS. And a lot of them, you know, shut down and whatnot. I'm like, and now that I've realized what's going on,

which is these pharmacy benefit managers, jacking things up insanely. One of the examples I saw for Mark Cuban said this. He's like, so his whole thing with cost plus drugs is they're not negotiating with PBMs at all. They're not negotiating with insurance at all. They're just making drugs at the lowest cost. They had a 15% margin, and that's it.

And that's the promise. That's why it's so much cheaper. And one of the examples of how much of a difference, his system versus all of the people doing these markups and all these middlemen's and PBMs is he has a drug that sells for $22. It's a chemotherapy drug and on the market it sells for $2,000. That's wild. But obviously he's the cheap version.

I want the $2,000 in my body. Yeah, I like the brand quality. I want the brand quality. I'm not buying off-brand dove soap. you know, I want the fucking real stuff. So it's just, this shit is, you know, there's a knock on effect to this. My last page of notes is just one line and it says they are blood-sucking parasites. Hold on.

I'm pretty, I don't know. It's the villain back. But the shareholder value. It's exploded, dog. I'm not going to win this election. You are not going to win this election. There's no one person in Rhode Island. going to vote for the guy twirling his mustache.

But the shareholders are value. We need 280,000 people. There's not enough. There's not enough. We need 280,000 crazy people. Okay, look, I would like, because this is one where I have heard about this before, and I've talked to, you know,

talk to people that are doctors or like in other parts of the medical industry about how they feel about this system becoming so pervasive. Right. And I've never heard anything good about it ever. The only The only plus is like

Yeah well Some of these guys are making Bought loads of money Yeah And then but it That's it They're all They're making a ton of money

I'll give you an upside I'll give you a great chair I try to steal it And I got nothing man I got a similar to you So the list price of these drugs Is what is You know GDP is calculated

On goods and services Moving in America Okay Okay The list price of these drugs Is what goes into the GDP calculation which is why among all developed countries,

we have the highest percent of our GDP spent on, quote, unquote, health care. So in fact, in a country that is only getting less than 2% growth, a large part of that is just way marked up drugs being shuffled left and right around through insurance companies. So you're telling me that if I sold my drug instead of $100, which, to be clear, was my initial idea, through all these middlemen and negotiating, we're all like, wait, let's just jack this up.

Let's jack this up more. Jack it up 20 times. We sell for $10,000. dollars, that's just 10, that's 100 times the GDP? You've increased the GDP by that much. Have we considered using this to solve the debt? Does this fix the debt? This is a good, it's actually, if you read the book we're reading right now,

is how countries go broke, he talks about this. He's like, this is why debt to GDP is bad. How much do we need to increase the drugs? I might have a different copy of the book, because I'm reading How Countries Go Broke and it's just one page and it says they went woke. Oh, yeah, that's true. That's why you finish so bad. That's why you finish so best.

Okay, right. Well, if you want to continue jacking it up with us on the Patreon, you can go to Patreon. Join the Lemon Party. You can join the Lemon Party. You can Patreon.com slash 118 to hit for an extra hour. At 10,000 subs, we are going to take it over. We're going to get a seat in the House of Representatives. I don't want to go to China anymore. I was thinking just Rhode Island. We're going to to Rhode Island at 10,000. To start the campaign. Vote 828. Let's go. See you guys. Thanks for watching.