Lemonade Stand - Mission Accomplished | Ep. 053 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

On this week's show... Aiden talks sailing, DougDoug pre-fabs some answers, and Atrioc gets charged up. 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! Start speaking a new language in 3 weeks with Babbel. Get up to 60% OFF your subscription here: http://babbel.com/lemonade Episode: 053 Recorded on: March 10th, 2026 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 Thumbnail by Cheyenne DeWolf - https://x.com/cheyedewolf Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh Segments 0:00 Ahhhhh! 5:59 "Very complete, pretty much" 9:37 Consequences 13:05 Iranian uprising? 19:14 Strait of Hormuz 22:10 Iran's missile strikes 31:12 Congress is supposed to vote 33:38 Building more homes 40:04 tastytrade ad 41:43 "Character of the neighborhood" 44:55 The source of people's wealth 54:40 Even Helsinki is falling behind 59:38 HongKong's crazy rental price 1:05:00 Changing zoning 1:08:50 Babbel ad 1:09:56 Shopify ad 1:11:04 Pre-fab homes 1:17:39 New EV tech 1:24:08 Chinese AI 1:29:57 Thank you! 1:32:16 Outro New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Wednesday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Weapons on cockroaches. They're pointing microphones and cameras on cockroaches. And they're selling them to NATO. It's happening right now. It's called swarm biotics or whatever. It's not just that they put the cameras and the microphones and the aion and the cockroaches. They then use a brain neural interface.

They're putting weapons on cockroaches. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next week. Hey, good app. Wait, go go back. Let me see that again. This is crazy. No, it's just real.

They're putting weapons on cockroaches. They're putting weapons on cockroaches. Okay, can I be honest, though? Uh-huh. That is, that cockroach looks. like it's got a weapon on it. Yeah, I wouldn't, like, if this is wandering. It's wandering around.

I'm not like, no bugs, you're nothing wrong with it. I'm not looking at that. I mean, like, oh, this is a normal cockroach. I'm like, what is going on? The rest of their things are AI generated to make the cockroaches look really slick. Like they have really slick little sleek backpaps because then in real life, they're just,

there's like a giant, mechanical thing. But they're training the cockroaches. I was looking at a video. It tells them, like, they still have control. their legs, but the neural interface tells them where to go? This is so fucking weird. Maybe I, maybe they'll start adding little turrets

on top of them. That's what I'm wondering. That's what I'm wondering. Look at that. You can put all sorts of stuff on that. Wait, wait, wait, wait. The military industrial complex has gone too far. This is the, this is your line. This is my line. Don't get the cockroaches involved. Even have a logo in the back. I mean, it makes you wonder

if it could be used in other battles that are happening around. Tigers the world. No, don't segue me yet because I would say, pull us up. Oh,

we're not segueing. We're staying on cockroaches. Okay. I want to stay on, on bugs being turned into weapons or tech. There's no way. You have a second bugs into weapons story.

Title thumbnail. It's not Iran. It's his bugs. It's cockroaches or weapons now. Okay, quick pull us up. They have successfully, I read, I'll put the paper into fucking chat jvety,

to be honest, but they uploaded a fruit flies brain completely one to one digitally. And then the digital fly behaved exactly. They copied neuron by neuron. I mean, they have like one, one trillionth of our real brain in a fruit fly. And it behaved exactly as if it is like a spooky deporting weapons on cockroach. We'll see all next week. Thanks for watching on an A-stand. We'll have more bug stories next week. I actually have a crazy, I hate We have more. We keep going off a bug. All right. Let's go. More book stories. There's no way.

The Bucks story episode. Nobody cares about housing or Iran. I wish. So a friend of mine who works at a government contractor, one of his projects was taking like slices of flybrain and breaking it down into like, I think, petabytes of data. What's the above terabytes?

Like every little literal connection within a fly brain and taking like slices and then building out the digital, version of that, maybe to translate into something like this. Maybe it's literally this. And he was one of the people working maybe on that same project. He said it took ages and he said they had to like develop a new way to intake the amount of data that just a fly brain is. Yeah. I think it's the same thing. We finally have enough storage capacity to do this. And the fruit fly has the smallest number of parameters in its brain of like any creature or whatever. Yeah. And he was talking about how they created this whole digital apparatus,

not in the simulation itself, but where you could like click and zoom into like any part of the brain, the connections. Wait, you play this video while he's talking. No, I mean, there's like, keep talking. Keep talking.

You can zoom into any part of the fly's brain at the most minute scale and then click on the different neurons in the brain and get an explanation of what that specific neuron does. Isn't that crazy? Which is, and that's just a flies brain. What I'm saying, with the implication of it is, digital

consciousness, right? If you could do it, again, the human brain is a bazillion times more complicated, but if you could, isn't that like a, isn't that a matrix level? And that's how why we're probably in a simulation. We're probably a similar. I should ask him about this. You got me,

it's, you got me, weirdly excited about books. I thought it was crazy. I didn't think this episode was going. Let me try to segue us again. Yeah. Maybe you guys will stop it and do more bug talk. You're professional guys. One of the problems, and you can even pull those at Perry, with putting the only problem, really.

If Lemon Party comes up on the screen, I'm going to shoot myself in the studio. With putting weapons on a cockroaches, is technically the Geneva Convention isn't, like, doesn't cover that. Right. It's like air bud. Right. There's no rule. There's a bomb can't be on a cockroach. Right.

So, at least bombs in on cockroaches. Me and the ICJ using the airbud rule for my war crimes, it's like, Your Honor, your honor. Your Honor, we killed the civilians with flies. And then you're on trial for massive war crimes for decades, but you did it all with bugs. Well, the bugs are the ones who are the legs. The bugs are not a fly can't do it. The bugs are going to trial, not the human. We're all judges look stunned.

We are giving it suggestions, right? It's not a crime for me to tell someone how to go murder another human being. Yes, it is. Not. Yes, it is. Anyway, so. You're a bad lawyer. You're a lawyer.

It's not a crime to help commit murder. The Department of War, anthropic, anthropic. It was a human at the trigger. It was a fly. If we lose it. If we have every task, the fly decided if the drone shot. The Pentagon routing their AI through a bug. So it counts as having consciousness.

They put a cockroach on the mouse. So they click the cockroach, but technically the cockroach pushed the mouse button. That's really funny. Okay. But you know what's not funny that's get serious. That's the segue? That's the segue.

That's the segue. That's the takeaway. guys, let's get serious here. Calm down for a second. The war in Iran is day 11. Okay, but thank God there's a positive piece of news from our fearless leader. Okay. Let's watch it right now. Yeah, please. Thank you. Mr. President, you've said the war is quote very complete, but you're defensive. Just pause right there. The war is very complete. Okay. That's the first thing you said on CBS. And then maybe possibly followed up. Secretary says this is just the beginning. So which is it? And how long should Americans be

Well, I think you could say it both. Makes sense. So I don't know exactly where we're at. I think it's a sort of thing like, you know, the military's in and out, but the amount of spy cockroaches we will leave will take decades. You'll never get rid of us.

Those are going to be. You may never be able to get rid of it. Raid doesn't do it. These are tough cockroaches. Yeah, that's a dumb quote. That's pretty stupid. Yeah, I don't know if you, so I get me a high level.

It's day 11. There's massive, massive oil price shocks the other day. hit above $100 a barrel at $1.15, which could lead to like $4 plus gas here. And it's hitting all countries all over the world. And so there was a bit of a, you know, a retreat a little bit of like, hey, this is almost over. We're getting oil through the state, through the Strait of Hormuz. The war's going to end soon.

And then prices came back down. So I think it seems like to be a response to that. And then other people in the military were saying this could go on longer. So he's kind of like trying to massage both sides of it. I do think there was a, you know, if there's, any one thing that will get the American public to unite against something, I think it's higher gas prices. And so it does feel like there's a lot of pressure to not let this go on because the longer that straight is closed, the more definitely, not maybe, a hundred percent it will

cause an economic slowdown because gas prices will just keep rising. So I wonder, yeah, I don't know. Is there a great quote by Fox News, Brian Kilmead, who cheered on the attack and told the captains of oil tankers that they must simply conquer their fear. Quote, if you want to diminish the Iranian threat, you want to make sure this ends up with complete Iran capitulation. Show some guts and go through that straight and do it. Which is, you know, it's a... Show some guts. Yeah, I will say. That brave stance for a TV. There are a few tankers who have, yeah, for a TV guy to say, not a guy sitting on a ship about to go through a danger straight with billions of dollars of oil on them. But

A couple tankers did do it. I don't think it was because of their bravery. I think it was because of their possibly greed. I mean, there's so much money to be made if you can get through. The idea that the oil tanker ships, and, you know, I apologize to any oil tanker captains. We have a lot of, it's a big, a big portion of audience. My assumption is that they aren't sending their boats and their people through the straight of Hormuz for the love of the game. And they're not, like, for the love of a common A free Middle East.

Like, it's probably because it's their job. and the idea this Fox News channel host is like, do you even, are you in it for the money? Or are you doing it because you love to ship oil through the straor motor movement. Do you working in oil? I do it because I love the job. They can pay me nothing. The quote, if you want to diminish the Iranian threat, show some guts. Who the fuck would care?

Oranian oil shipping for reducing. Who is fucking probably international migrant who's being paid too little on a boat gives a fuck about this? What are you talking about? If our oil tanker captains were more patriotic. I do want to talk about a few of kind of the on-the-ground developments in the last week. Okay. We recorded.

Yeah. Because I think there's some pretty heavy consequences, especially in Iran. You know, not just for the government, but for civilians. So the Iran envoy to the UN has reported 1,300 civilian casualties in Iran already, which is quite a lot. Yeah, quite a bit. And I think there was a prevalent story of an elementary school being hit with over 100 people dying at attack,

which is incredibly sad, I mean, over 100 people, including a lot of children. Also, that elementary school apparently was attached to a former military base, or sorry, excuse me, a current military base, but is right next to it. And supposedly the reason for the attack, and I think that was US strikes.

not sure if they were like Israeli as well. And then also Israel has attacked over 30 fuel depots in Tehran. So I don't know. I'll just go to school real quick. I mean, just before we move on. Yeah. Okay, my understanding, we didn't talk about it last week because at the time, the only person reporting was Iranian state media.

But now it's been confirmed, I think, by the U.S. State Department. The U.S. edit, yeah. Yeah, the U.S. edit. And then Trump came out and said, I don't know, maybe everything about Trump, but he did say that it's possible because they found it was a Tomahawk missile, which is an American-made missile. He said possibly the Iranians stole a tomahawk missile

and then launched it at their own school. That feels like probably not. I think probably. That feels like a flimsy. Yeah, it feels like a very flimsy. It's at the risk of sounding pandery and being like, you know what, guys, I think war is bad.

You know, the U.S. military, all evidence so far seems to seems to point to it was the U.S. military, bombed a girls' school and killed 175 people, mostly who are school girls. Like, this is horrific. Yeah, yeah. It is absolutely horrific.

So I just do want to just insert that before we get back to jokey stuff. No, that's, this is horrific stuff that is happening. These are like innocent civilians dying. Anyway. And I think the point that I want to hit on here with the note of that school is an example, the overall number of civilian casualties,

and then the 30 plus fuel depots hit by Israel. So I don't know if you've seen, there's a pretty good on the ground reporting I've seen from CNN. I forget the guy's name, I apologize. But he's been tweeting out videos while he's been reporting there. And the clouds of, like, oil that are in the sky

and, like, hanging over Tehran are collecting and then, like, raining oil down upon the city. He took a video and there's, like, oil collecting on certain. from the rain that's distributed everywhere. Yeah, yeah. And there's supposedly, you know, major health consequences because of the amount of, the amount of oil

that's like been put into the air from these explosions and attacks on the fuel depots. And also there's been some videos that I have seen, I have not gone out of my way to verify this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of that oil collecting on the sides of streets and in ditches and then catching fire at night. So the city is like on fire and burning those fumes and like building. It looks apocalyptic. The videos I've seen is like very like orange

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

behind you going in. When you take actions like this, I think you obviously lose a lot of that support or the chance of that support even existing if it did in some major capacity, right? Yeah. I mean, we talked about it last week, but there was the guy that studied every attempt to do regime change by the air and how it has zero percent success rate. And it's because it generally hardens the populace. They almost have to support the current regime, by default because it's just such a, there's no realistic way to change the facts on their ground.

And being bombed from the air consistently is just a demoralizing. Yeah. I think you're being attacked by like a faceless entity that's causing civilian casualties. It's not very inspiring. There's no way to like, get behind that side.

The one like poll sort of that I've seen that talked about the amount of support is this is from, I also forget her name, I apologize. This is the daily, so the New York Times podcast, the day after. after the war started. And she mentioned how some of the best data

that we have to understand how many people support the regime or not in Iran is these polling that they did where basically 20% of people showed explicit support for the regime and then the 80% were not explicitly supportive. So in theory there's this like 80, 20, where 80% of people are not a fan or are neutral on the current regime and only 20% are these hardliners. But who knows how quickly that shifts when you're-

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

change. That's such a good quote. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's so, you know, weird. So now the question is like, what is the off ramp of the war? I think pretty much nobody is stoked about the idea of this continuing for a long period of time, but then, like, how do you

declare it to be over? And then it's exactly what you said. At this point, there's no indication that the regime is lost, and they just installed new Supreme Leader Mojtabha Kamenei. I'm sure I pronounced that well. Who is... I think he's probably nailed it. Yeah, from Isaac Saul, from Tangle,

quote, is more hardline than his father, younger, avoids public appearances, and just had his wife, mother, father, a sister, and a child killed in U.S. Israeli strike. Do we expect to be able to make peace with this guy? So I think there's a juxtaposition here of the U.S. government having a success, quote unquote, in Venezuela, and then feeling that maybe they empowered to take action like elsewhere in the world. Yeah.

And the difference, I mean, it feels almost impossible for them to not understand that this difference would exist, and maybe I'm naive for thinking that. But in Venezuela's case, it's like we captured a foreign leader, a new person came into power that we, you know, we wanted to come into power. And we now have, at least at a government to government level, like a stronger or relationship with Venezuela than we did before. We have like some sort of leverage over that government. And also the underlying system in Venezuela, hasn't shifted or dramatically changed. Obbeit there's a lot of time for things to play out.

We'll see how this change affects the country, if at all, for the average person there. But in this case, right, it's like new leader installed, not necessarily by us. He's been like assigned into the position. And the government is clearly not on like good terms with us. It's not playing out the same way at all. So even in this like best case scenario

where you like believe the intention of the U.S. government in both of these scenarios. Let's just say we exist in that world. It's not playing out how you would hope at all. Yeah, so, I mean, from like a game theory perspective, Iran, you know, they lost this military. They're not going to, you know, they've lost air superiority. They're not going to win the war enemy conventional means.

But my understanding is that they are trying to damage, make this like such a bleed economically, they make the pain so much that because if they were, if they were to agree to ceasefire an hour and surrender, The thought on their side would be that the U.S. and Israel would just resupply, refuel and then probably do something like this again. Like whatever I read it. They would just. And so my understanding is their goal is they have to drag this out as much as they really can to make it so that this is not attempted again because the pain was so high.

The economic pain, the backlash, the political pain. Like even they have people from the Iranian state media apparatus like tweeting to Americans about how you're going to have higher gas prices. Like they're putting out, you know, they're putting out this kind of met. That's the messaging they're going for. They're going for like almost a Vietnam style where it's like we're not going to conventionally win this militarily, but the damage at home will be so high. I'm kind of wondering. So a couple of the things I've read in reporting is there's kind of this race with the Strait of Hormuz to like get it back in action as quickly as possible. And part of the way of doing that is U.S. ships have, and maybe Israeli Navy, the Israeli Navy as well, has destroyed over 40 ships in the Iranian Navy.

So they're trying to deconstruct the apparatus that could enforce the blockade on the strait so that these painful factors that will influence the opinions of like the Gulf states and other allies in the region from, like getting rid of that pain as quickly as possible so Iran doesn't have that piece of leverage anymore. Yeah, but here's the problem.

It's not a conventional Navy that's blocking the Strait of Hormuz. It is the fact that they can set up like, you can weld together these drone launchers and put out a $10,000 drone. Yeah. And one of these drones can stop a tanker or blow it up. And so the risk reward is so stacked against it that nobody will ensure a tanker to go through the street. That's why even though China's vessels have been given, quote, safe passage by Iran, they're not doing it.

They won't go. Nobody is going through the straight except for a few very risky ships. They're like turning to transponder off. To the love of the games. I'm sick of people who just do it. for the money. Yeah, they're doing it for the love. They just love the thrill. Did you guys see this at all? I was curious if this point came up, because a few, a handful of people recommended watching Professor Jiang's videos about this. He does, he's like a game theory guy. And I, he really

emphasizes the point about like desalination, desalination plants in the Gulf states, because there's kind of this resource war of water between Iran and these other states and how if they attacked desalination plants. This is a huge area of risk for these places. None of these desalination plants have been attacked so far from what I can see. I was curious if you have any thoughts on that because people kept bringing it up. I think that's a good point. I mean, it's weird. I watch that guy and he says a few things that are really cool and then he just throws in a truly crazy thing every fourth line. And so I don't know what to think about him. You have an example? An example was he's like the U.S. and China will both fall and the great powers of the world would be

like Germany and Japan. It's like, I just think there's no You're the only one saying that. Oh, I'm sorry, Germany's on the rise. I don't know. It just seems like where are you pulling that from? It just seems so. Guy who doesn't read.

Guy just hasn't read a lot of fucking box like that. And he's got a couple of their crazy line. I'm not pulling off the top of my head. So maybe he's got, I mean, he did correctly make a good prediction on this war in Iran. But anyway, I just thought that the risk was interesting. The note of the risk was interesting to me because I hadn't thought about that part.

And those places, aren't under attack yet. I did want to share something with you guys. So I have a close friend who lives in Kuwait and he was just sharing his perspective on what's going on right now because they're one of the places that has been hit in Iranian strikes. So Iran reports that they're only attacking military targets in these places, right? But he did say that while this is a claim and they are primarily hitting like U.S. bases in Kuwait, that they've hit. hit a place like the public institution for social services, like a government building that handles retirement payments, pensions, and other financial services to like orphans and widows.

And that place was hit. And a few like civilians have, uh, have been injured. And during the early part of the war, like the initial reaction, uh, the sirens were going off like very frequently. they could hear bombs or strikes very frequently. It's apparently like petered off in the last week. And he said the reaction on the ground isn't necessarily like, the average Kuwaiti isn't very like pro-US. They're very anti-Israel, especially in Kuwait. He noted that even compared to other Gulf states.

He thinks like anti-Israel sentiment is particularly strong there. And that there's a real sense of like golf unity right now. Like we, we stand together as the Gulf states and like want the wars to end as soon as possible. We don't, you know, we don't want to deal with this. We like stand with our Gulf brothers. It was interesting just getting his perspective of someone who's like living a bit more of it right now.

Obviously comparatively removed to, you know, someone in Iran. But on the other side of it. I mean, my understanding is that all the Gulf states were, you know, those cities, out there, a lot of them were thriving and growing, especially in, like, tourism and banking for regional, like, a lot of people are, like, people were starting to flood places like Dubai, but other cities around there. And this is obviously hurting the narrative of like, these are safe, great places to do commerce and business and, and that was growing. So there's like a real push from a lot

of people and entrenched powers all over the Gulf of like, hey, this needs to end. We were on a great path and everything's fucking it up. I guess the counterpoint, so the view I've seen, expressed is the realistic end goal is that the U.S. and Israel just destroy the shit out of as much of Iran's military capacity as they can, and then they leave. So like a quote, this is from Arab news. Again, I'm going to hit this flawlessly, Abdul Rahman al-Rashed. In the coming weeks, estimates suggest that the remaining elements of Iran's weapons arsenal, along with its factories and military institutions, built over three decades will be destroyed. This could grant the region a reprieve from Iranian threats for perhaps a decade in which a weakened but surviving regime attempts to rebuild its capabilities. Apparently there's a lot of people who are like, look, that's okay. You know, folks in like the Gulf states, for example, who feel like Iran has always been the kind of crazy person across the water and that this, if it stops them from being a threat for like 10 years maybe, like even that could be good in some senses, but that's good. That gets what you're talking about, right? Which is like, can they secure,

like if this ends really fast and at the same time stops Iran from being able to shoot missiles and fund a bunch of insurgents all over the place. Maybe they're happy with that. Yeah, maybe. You go ahead. I have kind of a question to that. Good thing to tie-in to both of what you said is you mentioned, you know, the initial reaction from Iran was kind of like willing, firing missiles all over the Gulf.

Kind of as like a just like a- primarily at U.S. bases. Yeah, primarily U.S. bases, but it was, you know, I mean, hit hotels in Dubai. Possibly U.S. soldiers were staying there, but like it's a hotel. People are. Well, that's, sorry, quick interjection. Kuwait friends said that they also hit a commercial port in Kuwait and the claim was that U.S. troops were there.

Right. that isn't necessarily, like even from a Kuwaiti perspective that isn't necessarily true. Like for lunch? Hmm? Like they were shopping? Like, no, they were like a port,

like an oil port. Oh, I was imagining like a fish market. No, no, no, no. Sorry. Anyway, anyway, keep going. So they hit all these targets. And they've been seemingly getting more precise on U.S. military targets.

And there is a sense that possibly, this is the claim, that Russia has stepped into help with targeting. Like they're giving them satellite information. No, they've said openly that they're giving them. Well, Russia said they didn't do it. Oh, okay. Russia's claiming otherwise.

But there's a sense that they did do it, which is kind of an act of war in itself. Like Russia, that kind of elevates the stakes outside of just Iran because that's no amazing. Russia's the bad guy. I wonder, this is from a New York Times thing today, but I had seen that it seemed like Russia had come out and said that they were providing

the Iranian government intelligence and also that this isn't really that big of a deal because they've been providing Iran intelligence for a long time. And that's like well understood. The Washington said Russia secretly sharing locations of U.S. targets with Iran, U.S. officials say.

But then Russia told Trump directly, this is him and Steve Wickoff saying it has not shared intelligence with Iran during the war. Okay. And that's the more recent. That's seven hours ago. Yeah, yeah.

So they're saying it didn't have it. You didn't read the one from three hours ago? I told you this guy doesn't read. Yeah, I don't read. Yeah. That is an escalation. But what I'll say on what you said is that there's a worry that if nothing fundamentally changes on the ground, you know, this is this is an egregious active war.

Like it's they now are going to be full speed ahead. The second things are stabilized with Russia and China, both motivated to make sure that they are well stocked with missiles. Well, you know, completely to recent. set up deterrents capabilities and possibly nuclear again. Like there's no sense that the new Ayatollah or Iran is going to be like, all right, well, we're... Okay. This is my big question. Kind of off the back of that and what Doug had said is as this is happening, Israel is also getting more aggressive in Lebanon with the claim that they're like helping further dismantle Hasbala

and their integration into Lebanon, right? And then they're attacking Iran. They're attacking Palestinians. Like, I've recently watching, like, more of the post-October 7th life in the West Bank and, like, the degree of, like, checkpoints. And, I would say apart hide living conditions in the West Bank.

And Gaza, like, completely devastated. When, what is the end? goal. Like even if I took Hezbollah in Lebanon, right? They did that walkie-talkie attack where they supposedly decimated Hezbollah, which kind of makes sense from the reporting that was even told on the Lebanese side. When is enough enough? When is it end? When have you won? Like, are you going to kill? And even in Gaza, it's like you've leveled the place entirely. You've killed so many people and that and the aggression still hasn't stopped there isn't this like glowing rebuilding of that place or something i i just don't understand from an israeli perspective like when will

you ever stop attacking people when will you know you are safe if this is if you continue to take these drastic violent actions i i don't know what i think they thought this was this i think they thought, because most of those things you're talking about are proxies that were funded by Iran through their oil money. And I think they thought this was it. But it's seeming more like, I'm talking about from their POV. Yeah. Like this is a, this is, this is not going to work that way.

Like it's just, yeah, you're attacking a country of 90 million people and the citizenry that you've supposedly supposed to rise up and like flip-flop things isn't fucking doing it. So now what? Yeah, yeah. And I genuinely intriguing the answer to that question. You know, I think Israel would like US. do the heavy lifting on this, but it feels like Trump's patience is really, you know, he's a, he's a guy that changes his mind quickly when there's market pressure and is also generally

doesn't hold attention on a subject very long. And it already seemed like his last press conference, you know, he, he said both sides of it, says both, but the tone of it was that he's like, this is about to be over, everyone relaxed, like where he clearly would like to move on pretty quickly. And so, yeah, from from Israel's people, like, like, they're just stuck. They've made all this chaos and enemies, and then the U.S. is going to bolt and run out. They're going to get out pretty soon. If gas prices are above $4 consistently,

even if Trump didn't do anything, the midterm sweep will be so drastic. They could also lose the Senate. Nobody wins an election if gas prices are above $4 consistently. It's going to be a bloodbath. So I assume that's impeachment talks. There's all these next level effects

that'll happen if this holds. So anyway, I don't know. If you guys have any final thoughts on Iran, because we do have a major topic on housing that I'd like to get to, Yeah. I hit everything. Any thoughts? I know it blows.

You know, something that just for people who aren't American or even are American who maybe forgot, you're supposed to have Congress declare war. You're not supposed to do this. Oh, this is, okay. So, you know, the way it should work is that a president can do this and then you have 60 days to wrap everything up. And then an additional 30 to like get everybody out. But apparently that's not very well in four. I have not looked into the exact history of it. But just a reminder, you know, when we went into Iraq, we voted.

Congress voted. That's crazy. That's supposed to happen. It's not supposed to be the president can just decide to bomb countries. It is well in my lifetime seeing these two different conflicts, Iraq and Iran, you know, both of which are seeming to be ill-advised quagmars. But Iraq, they did, they went through so much effort to try to sell it to the public. You know, they had, they marched out Colin Powell to the, you know, they had, they marched out Colin Powell to

you win to talk about WMDs to every nation on earth. They had they got Congress to vote on it. They did every possible thing. And I think, you know, no credit to push on this. But at the very least, you got a record of which representatives voted for it and who didn't, which is important. You got a, you got, it's tougher to say like, oh, we got into this blindly or whatever. But when your president does it at 2 a.m. via tweet randomly.

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

will get less popular as gas prices bite. So yeah. The last thing I wanted to mention was the Swiss defense minister, Martin Fister, on behalf of Switzerland, said that the U.S. and Israel have broken international law with their attacks on Iran. So it's like, that's Switzerland, the famously most neutral country coming out and saying it. I think that's so funny, though. Like saying international law as it being broken lately

is like saying the sky is blue. It's such a useless. International law has not meant anything for a few years now. Nobody does anything. It's because they're using it's using cockroaches. You don't want that. Mostly fucking close to following international law.

Jesus Christ. All right. Well, we want to talk a little bit about housing. We all want to come with a few different examples of how things are trending in good directions, how things in certain places

are trending in bad directions. Back to the Lemonade Sand Roots. Yeah. Why don't I start with a little kickoff of America and kind of what's going on of the America? I think generally the three of us

agree that building more housing is good. I would argue that we also feel you know, correct me if I'm wrong fellas, that other things are good too. Like, for example, preventing institutional buyers just taking up homes. And ice cream is good.

Ice cream is good. War is bad. That, for example, like, I would support, like, government building, right? So when we say building more homes is a good thing, which is generally my feeling, it's not like that's the only thing you should do. And it's, like, ultra pro developer with nothing else. There's an article I like by No Opinion, Noah Smith. It's called The Left NIMBY Cannon, and you can find it.

I'll raise my arms, Perry, to show it. This article, I think, is good. It's a few years old. But what I liked about this is that he makes an, I thought you don't have to subscribe for this one. But he makes an argument that is backed, he basically lists a whole bunch of different articles that show how building does bring rent down.

And even in the case where you're building market rate housing, that market rate housing is going to absorb, in his words, yuppies. It's going to absorb the like the rich out of town people. And that means that those yuppies aren't moving into the more working class poorer neighborhoods. So I point this out not to say this is the truth, but I think he references a lot of different articles that I think are good and worth and worth looking into. And again, makes the point of like, look, we aren't like these free market absolutists that think developers should run roughshod over everybody. But it is a core, it's a core belief of yimbism that building more will drop

rents. And even if you support government housing on a mass scale, as we're going to talk about, like right now, this is an article by the L.A. Times, Harry, that is, this is in 2022, so it's like, you know, potentially a little bit outdated. But affordable houses like per unit in Los Angeles are taking, or sorry, this is Northern California, are taking a million dollars per unit. So even in the context of like, hey, we want to really invest in affordable homes by the government and enforce this, our government is so unbelievably inefficient and so expensive at building these things that we aren't able to get the things built. So regardless, there needs to be changes, at least in the U.S., to making more.

more things built. So I think that's sort of the premise. There's some interesting success cases. Let's start with Austin, Texas. Austin is notorious for having gone on this just an absolutely gigantic building spree over the past couple years. They hit a peak where rent jumped 25% in 2021 during the pandemic because a ton of people push there.

And then they have just been going crazy on development ever since. And now not only have rents dropped dramatically as they've built an absolute shitload of units. They're 22% off the peak. Um, the landlords, like just basically have way less bargaining power and are having to offer all these discounts to people in Austin. Um, looking at some of the numbers, uh, yeah. So almost 50,000 rental units were added to the city in 2023 and 2024. By contrast, 50,000, by contrast in that same two year period, San Francisco added a total of about 4,300. Over 10 times the amount of new ones. So Austin, Texas, which is a blue state, or a blue city, by the way, is like a success case of they've built a ton of housing.

Rent has fallen dramatically. I don't know. Go back. I just love that line. That line is the core of it. The rental market is saturated with availability. Landlords have almost no leverage. She has seen buildings offer three months free to new tenants and rate reductions to keep ones already in place.

That is the core of why this works, man. I just think when when there's so much competition for your rent. They have to give you the best deal because otherwise you'll just go down the street somewhere else And that is I mean that is just the that is the best way like laws that restrict landlords are less effective at punishing landlords than just by making them having to compete with other people because when they have to do that You literally can just ignore them. You can just go somewhere else and then they're desperate if you're if they're the Only game in town and there's laws that say you can only charge a certain amount or whatever they find you know it's It creates this black market where they try to find ways to get around that and loop and you're still stuck there

You have only one option, which is this landlord, who may or may not be an asshole. But when you have a lot of supply, then it changes the math. And I have a graph here, too, if you could pull it up, Perry. While you're playing it up, it's funny. In this same Bloomberg article, they're quoting, like, the landlords being sad. It's like the supply picture is really tough. No, that's what I'm seeing out of Austin, they're all, like the flip side of it is, the homeowners and the rental owners are getting pissed.

Right. They thought they were, it's going to be a gravy train. People that bought Airbnb's and tried to do that. And Austin are getting holes. Think of the Airbnb owners. And it's like, that is what upsets. owning does, rental to income ratio is the cheapest has ever been in Austin right now, which is like pretty

awesome as progress. Oh. Do you know, like top ahead, are there any? For audio listeners, it was big, now small. Yep, there you go. I think in the last year, we're at a time in the U.S. where the average rent is declining for the first time in a long time, right? So what are the other, do you know what the other notable areas or cities

where this decline is also happening? Well, not the exact answer to that question, but there are positive developments happening. Here's three examples. One, in California last year, we signed SB 79. I even went up to Governor Newsom at TwitchCon. I shook his hand and he said, do want to take a picture. I said, no, I don't care about you. But I do want to congratulate you on thank you for signing SB 79. I think it's great. And what it did is it makes it much easier and lowers restrictions to build housing and developments near transit stops, like big transit stops, which is crazy. The idea that the, the, the taxpayers will fund a BART station in wherever, and then the local neighbors will stop any housing from being built at that train station that we all paid for. They were only allowing single family homes near train station. Have you guys ever gone to the end of the BART on East Bay? It's crazy.

You drop off and it's like, it's like the most barren place. It's like, why the fuck aren't there skyscrapers everywhere? They're a nine-story buildings. I did this on accident at the first day of an internship I had because I got on the train the wrong way. And then I'm going in the, clearly going in the opposite direction of San Francisco after like three stops. And it was near the end. And I was like, why, there's no buildings around at all.

It's wild. We spent, anyway. Why didn't you get off and go the other direction? Dude, shut up. This episode is brought to you by TELUS Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what?

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Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch. Steep. Flip. Or that. And enjoy. Via rail.

Love the way. I'm a Sted Herndon, and this is America actually. We're all talking to each other to see. What did we do wrong? What did we not see? I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona, and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell.

I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this. But for me, it's not a 2028 question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss. in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America, actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington. His plans for immigration reform and more. So we're making progress in Illinois, J.B. Pritzker. The governor did a push recently.

It hasn't been approved yet, but he's basically proposing this bill that is going to dramatically increase the ability to build homes. A big theme that keeps coming up is zoning, where people have set up. up zoning that only allows single family homes and then you just can't build more, you can't build certain types. And so there's been this major push back. Yeah, but just for the audience, it's zoning. It's like an area of land of your city is only allowed to build a certain type of thing.

And generally in most cities, it's single family homes, which is because that keeps the property value for other single family homes around it high. The character of the neighborhood. The character of the neighborhood. And so there's a lot of political pressure from homeowners to not change the zoning. This is just like, this is just a rule that stops people from building duplexes, triplexes, apartment buildings, anything else. And the Pritzker example is he literally said,

all residential lots are effectively ending single family zoning and you could have duplexes, triplexes, and four flats on all these places. So, you know, it is progress. We're seeing progress like this in pockets all over the country, not even left or right thing. Like, I think there's a general consensus. Yeah, it's both. Yeah.

It's bipartisan. Yeah. Which is fantastic. And so, and I think generally for a long, long time, local homeowners have had the ability to shut all this stuff down and it was not politically tenable because if you're going to go try to get a law pass that says, hey, we're going to allow a lot more building and a lot more neighborhoods, the people in those neighborhoods who are the most active voters and old people who are the most likely to have homes and be the most active

voters are going to come out and strongly oppose it. This SB 7 bill or 79 bills like repose, oh, what a coincidence by a whole bunch of people in the rich neighborhoods in Los Angeles. What a coincidence. They're so concerned about the character of the neighborhood. Keep in mind, I think it's important to fight for the other side here. Put me in the villain chair. I was watching a news piece about Surrey in British Columbia in the Vancouver area and how there is an increase in efforts to build affordable housing projects. Often do plexes or triplexes in these areas,

much larger buildings than a lot of the residential homes in the area. And this older woman came on the program and said that she doesn't like how the buildings look different and hang over her home. Good point. And I think about her and how the height of the homes near her might, it might, fuck. Well, it's so tall, you have to miss with her day. She puts her building in a little more shade during certain times a day.

Right. I feel like we're not. We're, we all steal man it. Do you think 2007 was, or 2008 was a good thing? You guys think the great recession was a good thing? You think everybody getting laid off? I think war is bad.

You think the recession was good, huh? Because that was caused by falling housing prices. So think about that. Well, that's just, that's, that's like saying that the many, many, many refugees post-World War II is because there's falling housing opportunity, you know? There was not enough housing. I do say that all the time. Yeah.

But I would argue it's more because of the war that did that, not the, there was an upstream effect. I only heard of World War I. To give that a little, a tiny piece of credence, right? say you were to like maximize this effort across all places in the U.S. as an example at the same time. And then people who are heavily leveraged in real estate, usually older people, and I'm not talking about companies or I'm talking about oftentimes the major source of people's wealth is locked up in their homes or properties they purchased. And I'm not saying that it's fair that how

has been commoditized in this way. But if you do lower the value of all these places at the same time, there are like knock on economic consequences of that. Like people, when they feel less wealthy, they spend less money, they maybe don't have their retirement in that like this is their primary nesting and their retirement isn't spread across any other type of asset. I'm not necessarily you saying you have to feel bad for these people, but understanding that there can be a negative consequence from this type of policy making in the long term, or sorry, in the short term, that we, I think we inevitably have to fight through in order to arrive at a more balanced housing market that is fairer for more people. Like, there has to be some sort of pain for somebody,

and right now, a smaller, older pool of winners gets to be happy about the current situation. and most younger or working class people cannot afford places to live and that's the broad problem that needs there needs to be some sort of give on one side of this. Yeah, I mean that's, yeah, it just needs to be balanced.

Housing has gone up, I forget the exact numbers, I'll need to check, but just like a crazy amount over the last 10 years. I'm like 73%. Like, I'm sorry, that's too fucking much. Yeah. Like that, if you're a homeowner,

like obviously our society, at least in America is set up where that's your primary investment vehicle, but it shouldn't be the idea that you, it is unfair if we asked you to lower your home prices, even though it doubled in the last decade or two, sorry, if it only is gonna gone up like fucking 40% over the last decade, that's an insane return.

I don't know with the exact numbers, but God, it's like, it's so ridiculously out of control. Yeah, I agree with all this. I mean, we've talked about this on the show many times. I just, you know, I think people need to be ready to understand the scale of the pain is real, it will not only hit, it will heal everybody. And that's just, that is what it has to happen.

Like if, if housing prices were to materially correct, like I'd say, you know, 20, 30% drops nationwide. Right. It would be a recession level event. There would be massive job loss. It would be huge slowdowns in spending. And it would be a pain that would, I guess, primarily hit these older wealth.

It would just good. And then we could find a way to work through. But that, like, the slowdown that's happening, for example, after the ever grand implosion in China, which is currently in two years of falling housing prices, the impacts of that are real. Like, especially outside of the major tier one cities where there's a lot of export growth. Like most people, and China really doesn't use a thought market. They don't have 401Ks. Most people invest their retirement into housing. They would buy a very expensive apartment in the city or a house in the city.

And those have been falling and falling and falling. and the propensity to spend has gone, I mean, it's completely gone. Like it's really, really slowed down the part of the economy that's not exporting EVs, solar panels, whatever. And the pain from that is real. Like that is the type of thing you'll feel

if we do that here. We have to do it. And I actually commend China for trying to pop the bubble and like slow it down. But that is, I guess people just think it'll be easy. Like if we just...

Yeah. And it's not going to be easy. I would really feel for people who've bought a home in the last five years, right? But for somebody who has held homes of any kind for like the last 10, 20 years and almost any area where these prices of skyrocketed and it's become unaffordable, it's like, sorry, you got to take some pain. It's this. We can't have the younger two, three generations take all of this pain. This is absurd. But yes, like you said, I mean, the people that bought it in the last five years post-COVID housebuyers, primarily millennials. Primary millennials who stretched a bit to get a big fucking loan.

Right. People who did in the last couple years. Okay, as a homeowner then, or as a property manager, you scumbag. The landlord who has 12 swum tenements. Oops, next month, I'm raising them again. Do you imagine Aid comes in with that face and raises your rent?

I would murder suicide. It would be murder suicide. And I'm pretty sure the only person living in your place is your girlfriend. So do you up charge her rent every month? Oops, babe. Sorry. It's up again.

She pays rent. She pays right. Oh, she pays right. You've been double-targe in here. All right. So here's a question. All right, you have bought recently. Presumably you bought not just for the love of the game, like an oil tanker captain,

but also because you thought it would go up in value over time. Are you okay with the idea of your property goes down and 20% in order to correct the market? Yeah. It's so funny if you said no, though. No, not me. I would assume you're not stoked about it. So the thing is, if I, it's like I got a. I got on the ladder by by podcasting.

And it's like I look at all these young people around me. They aren't starting podcasts. What are they doing? And I'd rather pull the ladder up. Yeah. To the moon, baby. No, shit. Yeah, I think I genuinely, if rents in like Los Angeles went down by 20% or homes,

I mean, like just straight up the value of homes went down by 20%. And, uh, I could, Yeah, I'd be happy with that. But I'm also in a, I would say a privileged situation where I do not have the bulk of my income in my, or sorry, the bulk of what I have in my home.

It would be, you know, it would be painful for you. Because I think for people that, the thing is people that are not hurt by this too much, people who are at one property, they plan on living in. Well, you're gonna sell eventually pretty soon to go to Sweden, right? So you would take a hit

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

own a home and you manage to make it work. You were given this game. You were born into this game and you played it as best as you could and you tried and you scraped and you stayed and you found a way to do it. But the game is so rigged and bad that people are going to have to change the rules

and you're going to get fucked. And that... It's like the people who all end the taxi medallions in New York at the worst time, right? Those people like they took on huge loans much like you have to to fucking buy a home.

They found a way to get like a down payment on the medallion, which skyrocketed over a million dollars. For people who don't understand the context, to drive a yellow cab in New York City, there's a limited amount of medallions that allow your cab to operate. And because of that cap, the prices of these things skyrocketed. And prior to Uber, a medallion to operate a cab in New York City crossed like the million dollar threshold, if I recall correctly. And what people would do is take on enormous amounts of debt in order to buy this medallion and become a cab driver in New York City. But then Uber and these apps like came into the market completely changed the dynamic of how these things work and the

value of these medallions crashed. And it's like you can, you know, say fuck those guys. They've all end on a bad investment. But I think there's an equivalent of that in in housing where I'm not saying things shouldn't change. I think it's so important. We have to create change and there has to be pain somewhere. But I know people in my personal life that scraped by and found a way with their pretty good jobs and their conscious saving and they're not incredibly wealthy people who manage to buy a home in a cheaper area of L.A. And that's all of the money that they have. Like, it's going to hurt for them. Of course. And I hope, uh, it's like you need to provide in the same way that the cat, like, Momdani brings up the cab driver thing a lot now. In the same way support I think should be

provided to those people, you need to find ways to ease the pain for people in that spot. I don't think the pain should be eased for people like me, because frankly, I don't need it. It's like, I think you should increase the pain on you sometimes. I don't think we need to increase the pain. I think whoever the next politician is should promise to hurt you a little bit. Okay. All right. Could I, could I posture?

Actually, you guys go. You know, you set up a posture. I have to know what you're posturing. Well, I have, I have an interesting. defensive position. I have some housing things. Take, take, take. So I looked at two international examples.

A while ago we made an episode where I talked a lot about Vienna's housing model. And for those who aren't familiar, Vienna breaks down their housing into like social, public provided housing from the government, partially subsidized government housing, and then private housing sector.

And by like providing a lot of like supply in all of those areas through different means, they've managed to keep rent very low in Vienna compared to a lot of large European cities. Helsinki in Finland turns out they do something very similar and Helsinki owns 70% of the land in the city

which is like insane nowhere near what most cities own of their own cities and because of this they have like ordinances about development and basically like 25% of new development needs to be allotted towards like fully public or social housing where there's like a limit

on basically like you can't run like rent for profit and they that's those areas still get developed. And then like 30% of development is like partially price regulated and then 45% is totally private sector. And they have over

60,000 social housing units in a city of less than 700,000 people. And this dynamic is part of what keeps rents in Helsinki relatively affordable compared to a lot of European cities. The average is like 1250 euros a month,

like 700 for a studio. and I thought that was interesting because the execution of this plan is very similar to Vienna's. And I think the value of this plan is that you have a public, non-profit-motivated way of building housing that competes against all of the private offerings on the market.

And it's like private housing can still exist, but if you have a large enough percentage of the market that is not profit-motivated, competing against, the private offerings, it forces those private rents to compete against the public options, especially if you keep the supply of those public rents widely available. And that's becoming more difficult over time. They are struggling to keep the socialized housing available, and it's increasingly becoming a lottery system over time.

Like they just aren't building enough or what? Yeah, they're falling behind their goal of like units built per year. They're trying to build like 6,000 to 7,000 units per year, and right now they're only building like 4,500. And this is the government on their own land. Yeah, the government is, it's still contracts with companies. Okay, but it's their managing. And the reason companies sign up to do it is because the developers have a guaranteed amount of profit, like built into their contracts still.

And then they, because the public housing is in such high demand, their project is guaranteed to pay out. Uh, so there's still like a motivation from a developer side to like get involved with the city. Uh, and I thought. Uh, any, you know, it's just interesting. I just think, uh, there's this general sense, especially I just feel like outside of maybe East Asia, I think it's really talking about like most Western countries, it feels like

what they've lost the ability to build, to reliably build things quickly and on time and on budget and like it, you know, we see this most in the in America. I see this in California all the time, but it's happening all over. Like it, it just feel like that. I don't know if it's because the web of laws has restricted it in some way or if it's just a loss of practice or capacity or whatever it is. But like, you know, 50s America built massive highways on time and on budget. We built like all the bridges we built.

It's like crazy. It was trains. And now we can't build these things. And it's just so, so slow and hard. So I'm, I'm sure it's a complex nuance thing. We've talked about parts of it before. But it does feel like one. of the biggest obstacles, especially to get people to even trust, in your example, I think

that's a snowball effect. People trust government to do something, then they do it well. And they're like, oh, I want to do more things. Right. And whenever you would, it works both ways. When it doesn't work, when you throw money at it and it doesn't work, people trust it less. Right. And so, yeah, I don't know.

It's, uh, it's something that I think a politician would do well to solve. I like what Mondani's been trying to do to be open and honest about costs and try to get things that people feel of material impact. But I think it takes. It's going to take time and wins because people at this point are at the lowest level of trust and this kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, in the U.S. as an example, right? So social housing has such a stigma behind it to begin with. The idea of like being on social or public housing has a very different meaning in this context versus like one in Vienna or one in Helsinki where these buildings are like way more normal to build in. They're like very nice.

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

Not really. Do you know that it's like the most unaffordable housing market in the world by like a pretty wide margin? I had heard that. Well, isn't it like, is it really? I thought it was up there with some Canadian cities. No, the Hong Kong has got all of the Canadian

and Australian cities beat out. Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers in the world of any city. They have like over 500 skyscrapers. And it's a pretty crazy juxtaposition of like this endless sea of skyscrapers backed onto like green mountains and nature. And there's, it almost feels like there's no in between, like when you look at the city. And part of the reason when you actually look at the land of Hong Kong is that it's relatively underdeveloped. And Hong Kong, similar to, you could say similar to Helsinki.

owns the land of like the entire place and more more than Helsinki but how they handle this is there's no there's excuse me not no very low income tax in Hong Kong and the way they primarily raise revenue for the government is by leasing land to developers or landowners on these like 50 year time leases and because these are so limited and there's so many people there and there's so much business opportunity there, the value of those leases has exploded. And that makes everything more expensive. Like by square meter,

it's incredibly expensive to be in Hong Kong. Even anecdotally, like I know a lot of people who live there, the apartments are usually incredibly small. Even, like, I have one friend whose family is insanely wealthy. And they have an apartment that is like maybe twice the size of the studio we're in, which I don't know if that's, great context for audio listeners or even for people watching. Audio listeners were in a giant 6,000 square foot warehouse.

I don't, Perry, do you know how many square feet the studio is? The lemonade stand compound is massive. Why don't we not say that? But imagine what you can see and multiply that by about five. Is it the amount of space? Yeah, I think like there, I'm guessing. I would say my, it's double the amount. My friend's place is probably like maybe 1,800 square feet if I had to take a real guess.

And it's in like the central part of Hong Kong. And that apartment, I think, is like $10 million. That's crazy. It's fucked up how expensive it is. And the way they approach this, they intentionally choke the supply to explode the value of these leases because they have plenty of space to develop.

But it's the primary source of income for the government and they don't want to raise taxes because the amount of like wealthy people and businesses that operate there. So there's just in this, chokehold where this is the only way we get money. We have to keep expanding the value of these leases. We don't want to give any permits for people to build.

And this is the complete opposite approach, where it's like we limit building as much as possible, even though we own all the land, and we use it to maximize the amount of funds. Yeah, it's bad instances. I have a graph here, Perry. You were totally dead on. In Hong Kong, worse than the world.

Surprisingly, I didn't know Australia had beaten Vancouver here. Sydney is number two. San Jose number three. I lived there. I do recall, even, you know, I think I hit the fucking lottery

working at NVIDIA. I remember I was thinking about whether I wanted to stay there or move. And I was like, one of the factors of that, other than hating San Jose was like,

do I really want to spend this amount of money? And, you know, it was just a disgusting amount of money for a small little home here in San Jose. It was disgusting. It was,

uh, I think it's just, and I can only imagine on a job I had before, like a regular, I don't know, it just. Respectfully, San Jose sucks balls.

It does. No, not respectfully. You know what the difference? I don't like San Jose. Look at this list of cities. Look at every city on this list. I think I've been, I think I've been to like almost like most of these places. Yeah.

Dude, San Jose is the worst place on this place. Dude, culturally out of all 20 of these, it is by four the bottom tier. It's crazy. It's the third highest. And it's only because it's near all these big tech companies. It's right below San Francisco. This is the major city right below.

So it's like Silicon Valley. It's all. SF has is beautiful. It's my favorite city in the world. San Jose is if God took a shit. Oh my God. If you haven't been there after working on the beauty that is San Francisco. If you just I want you to imagine the worst place you've ever been. Okay. It's not that bad. It's just boring. It's just boring. It's just really boring. It's just nothing expensive. And imagine and imagine it's the worst place you've ever been. But it's just there's single single family homes everywhere. And that's all it. As far as the eye. I can see... To go family homes and tech companies. But there's nowhere to go. You can't do or buy anything. And everything's expensive.

You can't hang out with anybody. Yeah. You have to understand how hard this is for tech people. You're paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you have to spend a lot of it on rent. Show some sympathy. Those some goddamn sympathy. My understanding, by the way, I don't know if you have any insight to this,

but my understanding is that, you know, Canada is also at crisis levels in many major cities for housing. you're shaking your head. No, it's all good. No, but because it's been a crisis, I'd say about two years ago, there has been a similar thing to what we're seeing now,

which is kind of like a focused, desperate attempt to be like, we have to change something. And there have been, see, I'm not super well versed on the specific laws like SB 79, but there have been a forward motion in Canada

to change zoning, to get building going. Yeah. And they've been like moving kind of quickly because the problem is so severe. Right. You know, Canadian incomes are lower and prices are higher on average in many of these cities. So people are like, it literally makes, you know, we're talking about people who like,

they kind of did everything right. They're doing income, no kids. They were able to get, like the almost doesn't exist in Canada at some levels. Things are so expensive. You just kind of don't have a way unless you're already wealthy, you're left money, or you get incredibly lucky. Those are the only three ways to like get on the property ladder in a major city. That's the good thing.

And that's like, that is a takeaway from this. things are finally changing. So Scott Wiener is one of the California legislators who've been pushing for housing bills for a long time. And basically they just get shut down. It's been going on for, I don't know, 10 years, something like this. And SB 79 is the first major one that actually got through. And that was with, again, like, mayor of L.A. coming out and saying, like, we're strongly opposed. We feel like local neighborhoods should keep the character.

And it's, you know, the normal opposition. And like, we've finally got something through. Illinois, the mayor of Illinois to say, we're, like, I'm pushing. It hasn't been approved yet by legislature, but I'm pushing to remove zoning essentially in many capacities. And then, you know, if you pull this up, like Mom Dani, like one of his big things is about building. And it's just this, I bring this picture up.

He met with Trump. We talked about this. This was two weeks ago. He went to Trump. And so the background here is that they're like right east of Manhattan in New York City. There's a giant train lot that is just not being used. I forget what is the name of it? It is the Sunnyside Railway.

Sunnyside rail yard in Queens. It is crazy to look at a map and just see this huge undeveloped land. And it's used by trains, right? It's a train yard. But it's wild in like one of the most expensive areas. And for decades,

people have been trying, mayors have been trying to get something built there. And so Mayor de Blasio tried to build it, got plans. It couldn't go through. But now it's like getting more momentum. And then, you know, Mom Dani goes and talks to Trump and says,

hey, here's what the newspaper would look like if you approve and give us, I believe it's $21 billion in federal funding to cover the train yard over the top, so it's still usable, and that we'll build on top of that. And the reason it's particularly notable is because the paper that they printed out for this photo shoot is mocking an infamous, infamous paper from the New York Daily News from 1975, where our hero, President Gerald Ford said to the city, drop dead. Ford to City, drop dead. Vows Hill Vito, any bailout.

We finally got Gerald Ford on the podcast. in a way. Well, I feel like this is the spiritual successor. We're we're carrying on his legacy. You know, I looked up because I thought it'll be a funny bit. I looked up Gerald Ford impersonators. Just not thriving march. No one's doing it. I don't understand. That doesn't make any sense. As owner of America's famous and most successful president. He did nothing but win. Apparently Chevy Chase did a really get Gerald Ford bag in the 70s in the 70s. We lost him. We lost him. Well, we can't really get him. I don't think Chevy Chase will do our pod. So we'll try to get like, we'll hit up all our contacts. We're trying to get Chevy Chase

the pod. And when he finally responds to like, we're going to ask him to be like, hey, it's just to do a Gerald Ford bit for five minutes. Actually, I don't know why I said it's very good. It's famously bad. Apparently, Gerald Ford tripped once during a press conference. And that's the only aspect of him that Chevy Chase does. He just kept being clungly. He was his normal voice. He didn't just was tripped a lot. Best part about Gerald Ford, he never won an election. It's so awesome. He just kept the people above him just kept resigning or dying. He just kept moving up. Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder

to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. ABC News. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice.

I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG private wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IAC. IG Private Wealth.com.

Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with. Amazon. Okay, I think it's a good, good, cool segue to talk about prefab homes.

So I was looking into, like, what are some ways that maybe people in the West are actually going to speed things out here? If you pull this up, um, pre-fab homes are basically the idea that instead of having a, you know, a team of constructors go to a site and you build everything there, you build many of the parts and as many as you can essentially in advance, in a factory. And then you ship them there and you sort of construct it there and it cuts way down on these costs and shipping times and has all these interesting benefits. And so if you look at some of the other countries that are successful in this, one is Japan.

So there is this study that was done by Australians, and I'll pull it up, we'll link it in the description, I guess, that looked at all these Japanese companies who do this. After World War II, they were so desperate to get homes made, this is by MDPI, so desperate to get homes made that they did a ton, a ton of prefabricated housing. and that has become a huge part of the Japanese housing where something, I believe it's like 13% it says here in this article that you can pull up, Perry, that it's a huge portion of what they're building is these companies that do these pre-made things and show up.

Yeah, 13% of total residential construction started in Japan. Weirdly, unintuitively, for these three companies, it actually is more expensive than having them build a home, but the idea there is they're working with you a lot and really customizing it. rather than just they just show up and like make the exact same thing every time. I reached out to Seedog and he said that when he had been like looking into potentially buying a home in Japan, that was an option for him where he was like, yeah, you can do all these prefab options where they're going to come in and just like build a house super fast, way cheaper, way faster.

Or even if you go with one of these like fancier prefab companies in Japan, like it can be really nice on top of that. And there's all these benefits where they do super high quality like quality assurance in their factories. That could be really cool. And then Germany. The first wave of those was like pretty bad, right? But they've gotten so much better. So here's the thing. So Germany is an example of them not being great where post-World War II.

Not great? Prefab homes. I thought Germany and Japan wanted to take over the world. So Professor Jiang is wrong. No, no. Here's why he's right. So Germany basically is a Bloomberg article. Germany revives a building style.

Again, prefab, I mean, you know, pretty similar history here. Germany also post-World War II dealing with tons of refugees. So particularly in East Germany, Soviet style, they just did, you know, massive amounts of these, like, identical homes that they would just make in this sort of single format. And so these are starting to come back in Germany and become more popular. And they're talking about how, look, this can be like six to nine months faster than a traditional home that's made on site. And the value of this is not only can we be a lot, lot faster with, like, we just see they've built way fewer apartments. Not only can we be faster, not how can we be cheaper, but we're finding ways to address that concern. of like you're just getting the same thing as everybody else,

and we have these customizable options. So what I thought would be cool, we can start prefabbing our conversations here on Lemonade Stand. If we plan them in advance, we don't have to actually think through everything. We can just be, right. So I'm gonna ask a question, Aiden, I'm gonna give you three prefab options.

So even if you don't like the first answer, okay. Wait, wait, wait, even if you don't like the first answer. Right. You can look to the second card, so just let me know. The audio listeners, Doug's passing out cards. Okay. So, sorry, I'm not supposed to look at my second card yet.

Hardia? Yeah, just first one that you can decide. So, uh, we, we don't have to think. All prefab. And it's,

Hey, Aden, what are long-term ramifications if Iran closes the straight of Hormuz? And I have to, I just, you have to pick one of the pre- The whole point is that

I can pick from, we're not starting from scratch. Yeah, you don't have to think about this. Right. Moline. You have to pick one. The whole point of this is,

no, no, no, that's sorry. It's just all of them are so good. Uh, I don't care if oil prices go up, I'm rich. That was great.

He didn't have to do any thinking. This was really efficient in and out conversation. I didn't think about it. Doug, is it, are there more cards than this? I don't know if I love. No,

no, so the whole thing with the prefab, right, is I'm not giving you every option under the song. That would be traditional development. It would take too long. Yeah.

The point of this is the conversation is pre-made with some amount of customization. And you're going quick and I like this. It's revealing a lot about you. Am I going to get asked another question? Here, I've got one for A-Track. So,

question. what do you think about former president Gerald Ford Oh, I know what I think What you have to read one of the pre-fabed options Oh, you gave me so many good options I'd suck that man dry

That's the best option That's the best one That's the best one Isn't this cool how you're customizing the conversation You hesitated Homophobic of you don't you think? No, I didn't hesitate I just loved my options

and I picked the best one. Yeah, I'm going to be honest with you. I would have loved that option instead of, you know what? I can't. By the way, I don't think I can read this one. I don't think I can read this one.

I won't even say that one. If you want to diminish the Iran threat, show some guts and go through that straight. Yeah. All right. And then I got my own prefab cards. So the rest of the episode, if you guys asked me a question,

I will just pick from one of these prefabed answers. Okay. Okay. Hold those because I have, wait, are we... Yeah, go ahead. I have a topus topic. Okay. That I thought's really interesting.

Can you pull this video? BYD just, I want to hear your Doug's take first. I'll tell you the top level topic. BYD just unveiled five minute charging stations. And they've proven the technology and it works and they're going to roll it out all over China. And then in Europe kind of dramatically changing the EV versus ICE car debate. That will be fixed by AI. I don't see a change yet.

This is the normal episode. Okay. Ask me another question. BYD is given ice cars? I don't like that. I don't know. Internal combustion isn't right? I was like,

why is it called ice cars? Why is it called ice cars? Aidan, you're a liberal cuck. Get a real job. Doug's been kind of base on the podcast lately. I don't even have to think anymore. I can't even say my other one.

I can't. I can't. I can't. I can't. I'm currently wearing a butt plug shaped like Gerald Ford's face. That's one you wrote for me to say. You think that's one of my three.

prefab topic. I'd say you can pick which of the option the whole value of this. Let me chime in there. No, we're not going to. If you guys want to watch it's really kind of, it's actually kind of crazy tech. And, you know,

one of the things I hear people talk about with EVs, as someone who currently doesn't own an EV, one of the risks I have is like, what if you don't have a charging station? How long does it take? It takes a, you know, it's a pain versus filling up, yes, it's quicker. This is crazy, crazy fast.

Full charge. And they can do like 70% even faster than this. So you can just get it and go. And they're building these new battery stations. And, you know, I do think this is one of the big holdouts for EV adoption. And they're planning to build, I think, 3,000 of these in China and then a few hundred in Europe really soon to start kicking it off there. So I do think, you know, kind of scary for non-Chinese, especially non-BYD EV companies. It's like a really coming, like, you know, I think this is something that might impact Tesla.

It makes Tesla sort of less competitive because they've had this charging network advantage. And now that BID is building out something that I think will be significantly faster based on the comparison that I saw could cause disruption in the market. Do you know, you know, you're a liberal cuck. Yeah. Do you mention that? And I do agree with that. It's actually a really good point. It does apply on here.

And I do think Aiden should respond. I'm an expert on blank and that's wrong. Fuck. He's got me locked up. He's got me locked up. Do you know much about the, a friend who had lived in Shanghai for a few years had told me.

Is the IQ ones? No, I'm sorry, the Neo ones with the battery swap? Yeah. Yeah. About that battery swap thing. Is that,

because in that context, that seemed to remove a layer of the charging downtime. But is that something that is like not caught on and it's not super prevalent? Full disclosure. I lost, money, betting on Neo stock because of this idea back in 2021.

And it didn't pull. It's, I guess it's fine. But the idea is, you know, if you don't know what it is, Doug, they drive up to a station. It takes a battery out, puts a new charge battery already and you're out instantly. Okay. But I guess the process of it is more difficult and it's harder to build these stations everywhere. And they ended up sometimes being a line anyway where you're like waiting.

So it wasn't as like, it wasn't this miracle that made people want to buy the car. Additionally, people just simply don't seem to think of that too much. When they're buying the car, they want a good price, quality car. And they think of that stuff later, the charging stuff later. I feel like at this point, I don't know. I don't own an electric vehicle. I would like to whenever I end up buying a new car. My understanding for the average person that this is not critical, but the instant you have this five-minute thing,

like the last reason to go buy a gas car, I feel like is gone, right? That's only what, two minutes longer than that. stopping at a gas station. Yeah. In some case, it's faster. I mean, you know, again, you can get half charge or whatever, like super fast and then it does the rest. Yeah, yeah.

So anyway, I think it's a remarkable feat of engineering. I think it's pretty interesting. And I do think it is, yeah, breaking down the final barriers to making this. But then the question is like, are we going to have this in America or will we put a tariff on it to stop it from being here? We will not have it in America. We don't want the current plans. The communist charging stations.

We do it the old-fashioned way. That is the problem is while you're charging, you have to recite a passage from Xi Jinping thought and Mao's the Red Book. And if you don't do that, your car does not charge. And it was a stipulation they said was demanded. I'd, I was just, I'll do it. For the Xiaomi SE 7, I'll do it. I don't know what to say.

I'm excited. As a reminder, we're going to China soon. Very excited. Very soon in a week or two. So we're going to be doing multiple episodes from China, trying to cover China, everything that we can see and talk about. And one of the things that obviously we'll be talking about is just the electric cars. I mean, suspicion is that it'll be everything and everywhere, right?

And it'll be interesting to see what a city looks like with that everywhere, plus a crap ton of public transit. I mean, we're supposed to be taking, using the high-speed rail network while we're there. I'm really excited to check out Chengdu and Chongqing specifically, because I've heard those cities are, like, great examples of, like, modern Chinese cities. Like, even Shanghai is, like, something that is a little, a little, like, out. relatively outdated, relatively westernized.

Like, I've heard Shanghai's amazing, but, like, if you want to see what a Chinese city looks like from the past 10 years specifically, where we're going to check some of those places out. And I did want to attack one thing on. I saw an interesting piece about these cars in China and Europe, apparently, but I think China's enforcement comes into place by 2027 that, like, all new vehicles must have physical dials

for their functionality. The iPads have to go away. Really? And I was so relieved to hear that because I'm hoping that's a decision that's made in more places. It's probably the thing I hate the most about the car that I currently have.

I don't have an electric car, but I have like a... You don't like the dashboard? I think it's kind of cool. No, I hate... Because you have to touch the screen to like multiple times to get to things, right?

Which means you have to look at the screen to navigate it. Oh, I see. But with old school dials, right? You just know where they are and you can like keep your eyes on the road. It's like, easier to navigate.

You don't have to go through multiple menus to access things. And you aren't hung up by software in the same way. So China and Europe are apparently taking a step in this direction, like requiring cars to be built with physical dials again. And I was like, woo, that's, I feel like that's a very consumer forward choice because I actually think the iPads are a worse experience. Yeah, it's not quite, I mean, reminds me when they removed buttons from the iPhone. You know, it's like, well, I would have preferred it,

but you get used to it eventually. But yeah, having some dials would be great. It's true. Yeah, I don't know. It's tough. I have the trial.

I mean, I think the 2017... You have an ancient car. The 2017 Honda Fit is the greatest car ever made. It has dials so I can see why you'd want to emulate that. I'm never going to change it. The car's falling apart. It's in the fucking parking lot out now with pieces falling off.

But I... You need to buy a new car. Can I say it on the show? Take off the tariff and I'll get a Xiaomi as you said. You're trying to do the Sam Bankman-Fried. I don't use my money. type of thing. Just get a new fucking car.

You could buy it. It could be used. I'm not doing the Sam Bankman free. You're doing the same bankman free thing. And you're probably as good league as he was. He was bronze. He was bronze. Oh,

one more China tech story that I think is interesting. You guys remember, we actually, you helped me with a video on. He did a little thing. The deep seek flash crash in like middle of last year. Okay, video in quotes, but yes. How old. You did a little,

Yeah, you just segment in there. But the idea that it was the first big time that Western AI companies woke up to the fact that an open source model from China could kind of distill what's called their weights. It could prompt Chad, JBT, JBT, something questions, and use that to train its model and catch up and have like an equal.

Anyway, DeepSeek 4 was supposed to come out already around the recent Chinese Economic Conference. It hasn't come out yet, but it's going to come out soon. And I do believe we're going to see another big, reaction because apparently this one is matching the latest models. So there's already a scare on that front. It's open source. But then the third thing is that it's according to them, and we'll see if we're going to dig into it, trained entirely on Chinese chips. This is the

first one with no invidia chips involved in the process, which is going to cause like a bit of a panic or a scare. I think this is coming pretty soon. We're going to see a lot of headlines about it. Taiwan is a part of China. So Nvidia would be Chinese You already got your visa. I agree until I get my visa approved. It's why, dude, this stuff is, even for me as like, you know, someone who wakes up, like with Morningwood thinking about AI, I have kind of gotten bored of the like, did you see this new model?

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

if the hardware is an advantage and the software can be distilled? Where's the moat in AI models? I think that's the big question. Here's a counter argument. One, DeepSeek did not just copy other models. It is clear that a lot of the Chinese models that are being developed,

like Kimmy or Deepseek, are using the American models to get, a lot of the question and answers to train on because with some of them you can say, what is your name? And it will say, I am Claude. Yeah.

And so that is true. But at the same time, I don't remember with enough technical details to give specifics. But DeepSeek did go and come up with these innovations. What was particularly interesting about Deepseek is that because of the restrictions they had on chips, they managed to come up with these like crazy optimizations in order to make their model competitive.

So while there was a sense of like, okay, deep seek has clearly been sort of cheating. you're not supposed to go. I have no care about who, I mean, again, you trace it up the chain and they, you know, like all these AI companies stole data. You know, it is oversimplified. And some, I've seen other people suggest this

on the truth platform X.com, which is that, you know, deep seek is really valuable and they were able to make it because they copied the other models. And I think there's clearly more to that. They've got some really smart people who did some crazy optimizations. Yeah, they're leading in like the video space

with seed dance and, I'm not making this a competitive thing. I'm just talking about from a market dynamics perspective. It's like pretty wild that an open source thing's about to come out, that it's going to be close or matching. Yes. So the reason I'm trying to establish that it's not just copying is because I think there's more differentiation than it might appear.

And I think a lot of people are just, here's the benchmark with the newest model. But the big hype thing for the past three months now has been Claude Code. This substack, I think, does a nice job of overviewing some the features of ClaudeCode. If you pull it up, it's called ClaudeCode and what comes next. And this talks about how there's more than just, they're not just scaling things bigger anymore, which I think was particularly susceptible to an open source model coming in and

eating their lunch. They're starting to add some really smart ways that the AIs are coordinating subagents and doing all these different things, right? So the, he calls them magic tricks. But there's a, the AI companies are increasingly doing more than just increasing the of data. As that happens, I think they're going to be differentiated more and more. And I think it's less likely that you're going to see the same thing that happened a year or two ago where it's like, oh, new model just came out from Lama that's open source. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying

we're getting to the point almost like Moore's law where it's started to get to a point where it's harder to fit more transistors on a chip. So companies had to start parallelizing, right, in order to get more out of chips. And I think that's seemingly starting to happen here of where the AI companies of starting to hit the value of what just giving even more data looks like. So they're having to really invent optimizations and clever things. And that's not easily copyable in the way that DeepSeek potentially did with Claude. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense.

The point is like, yes, I agree with you, everything you're saying. It is going to be wild if an open source model comes out, and it could really hurt NVIDIA, and it could really hurt all the AI companies in the West. At the same time, they are starting to actually finally differentiate. In some ways, right? I think it'll be a big discussion point at least. And it is very funny that companies like Claude and OpenAI are annoyed at DeepSeek for stealing their, like, responses and using the AI for training. Yeah, everyone is stealing.

They're all right. Everyone's stealing everything. That story about Facebook or our meta, like having people, like, leave the company campus so they could set up a separate area to just download every book in existence. So it wasn't like on Facebook property. Right. They torrented. Like they, like petabytes worth of book data and then fed it into the machine, but off campus.

So it was different. Anyway. I think at the end of this episode, I want to kind of round it out and talk a little bit more about our trip. If that's all right. Okay. Sure. First of all, I want to say thank you because the reason we're going on this trip was we

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

Yeah, sure. Maybe just not specific dates. Yeah. Yeah, no. The plan is we're going to Shenzhen and Guangzhou and Chengdu, Chongqing, and Shanghai. And then we will be going to a couple smaller places along the way as well. So trying to, mostly focusing on some like big cities and opportunities that will be in each of those places. but I really hope it's a fruitful trip for us

because we've talked a lot about China on the show about the amazing things that are supposedly there and I'm really excited to experience them. As someone who went to China, I've only been to mainland China once. I went a long time ago when I was a teenager and I've heard it's changed so much since then. Yeah, I mean, we've read three of the books

we've done for Book Club are in some way, I mean, abundance, kind of, but then House of Huawei and Breakneck are both about how China as a country is super organized around this massive amount of development and infrastructure and manufacturing and exports. And hopefully we can see that, right? I don't know. For example, we're going to tour the factory where I produce most of the mogul and yard merchandise for like the past four years. Like we get to meet the factory owners and the, you know, get introduced to the process of like how that clothing is actually manufactured in China. And there's a few

more opportunities that are similar to that. I mean, I'll leave here first. We are going to have an exclusive interview with Xi Jinping. I didn't want to say that. It's kind of. It's like, you know what the big asterisk on that is. What's the asterisk? We got to do it with Tucker.

It's limited stand. Tucker Carlson and Xi Jinping. I don't want the show to be biased. And it's a roundtable. We have the most perspectives. And it's a roundtable. And we're not going to talk about anything you think we're talking about. It's mostly going to be the boys chilling.

I think similar to our trip to Japan. we're also thinking about filming some of our like walking around cities we did like a walk-in-talk episode while we were in Japan that a lot of people really liked and we're planning on doing something similar. I think if you want to check out the Patreon for that extra stuff that gets posted,

including the normal extra 60-minute episodes that we post every week. You can go to patreon.com slash lemonade stand and check that out. But the next time you see us, we will, wait, no, we have one more normal episode. Excuse me, we have one more normal episode. I was wondering why you're dropping on. I forgot.

I thought it was, in my head, we're leaving next week. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot that we have one more normal episode.

Yeah, we're going to squeeze out an episode right before we go, and then you'll start seeing the China episodes. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, that's it. That's it from Lemonadee Sand.

Can you give a little, like, closing words in Mandarin? If you want to diminish the Iran threat, show some guts and go through that straight. Yes. Thanks for watching, guys.

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