Lemonade Stand - The American AI Rebellion | Lemonade Stand🍋

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

On this week's show... Atrioc goes to Columbia, DougDoug visits the printer, and Aiden runs the numbers. We launched a Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/lemonadestand for bonus episodes, discord access, a book club, and many more ways to interact with the show! Episode: 075 Recorded on: August 11, 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 Intro 2:50 Ai is Making Viruses 15:58 So About that Regulation 25:25 Executives are Jumping Ship 31:25 Demis Hassabis Focusing on Medical 35:12 Serval Ad 36:43 US Running Out of Missiles 50:39 Columbia Narcos Enlisting in Ukraine 53:42 Japan Turns to Robotics 61:03 The Data Center Debate 1:13:56 Trump's IRS Immunity 1:28:56 Companies Cutting Taxes 1:32:08 Can Meta Exists Anymore? 1:40:06 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

Support for the show comes from KPMG. In any organization, disruption is inevitable, but struggling through it doesn't have to be. The KPMG Adaptability Index is your blueprint for building capabilities to handle what comes next. It uses real data to look at how your culture, strategy, and partnerships all work together to help your business thrive. Stop reacting and start adapting. Visit KPMG.com slash U.S. slash adaptability to explore the Adaptability Index and Pulse Surveys today. Hi, it's Kara Swisher. You know me as co-host of Pivot, but for August, I'm flying solo,

and I've lined up some incredible guest host to join me. Mark Cuban, Chelsea Handler, Caitlin Collins, and a lot more you won't want to miss. Already out, my conversation with Hillary Clinton. Among many other things, we get into redistricting fights, reshaping state politics, and what Trump's golden makeover of the presidency actually means. and it's not good. Trust me, you don't want to skip this one. Find Pivot on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. Podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast,

Lemonade Stand. Welcome back to Lemonade Stan, everyone. I've had a thought. Many people who listen to this podcast also watch Big A. And they're probably concerned that the channel hasn't uploaded in quite a while, Doug. I've noticed that there's been just a severe lack of what's been coming out of it. I didn't notice.

But then I, and then I, I piece together a theory. Okay. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear it. Doug, Doug Doug, Doug's second channel, but his main channel now.

Yeah. And he mogs you. Can I, right? Can I say it plainly? Yeah, you can say it plainly. And I think it,

have you been feeling deflated by Doug's YouTube performance? Well, let's his ninth channel starts bogging me. It just like really takes the wind out of my sales. They sort of like mitosis. A new Doug, Doug, Doug, Doug, dugs spawns off every month. It just kind of grows on its own. I don't know

what any of these are doing, by the way. None of these are official. Character limit eventually of the number of dogs you can put in a title. And they all average like 700,000 views of video. Well, I mean, other than that, what have you been up to? You've been busy punching me in the stomach. Yeah, just get to it, right? Just get to it.

Okay, so we were playing basketball on Sunday, and I was trying to, like, pat Aidan on the back and then, like, give him a little chest tap. From the front? No, I did one with the back, and then the other one was, like, supposed to be a little elbow. But instead, like, I missed the force wrong, and I barely touched him on the back, and I, like, hard-japped him. Like, I seriously knocked the wind out of him, and I felt terrible. He just punches me. Butches me. And now I feel like it was deserved.

Square in the diaper. I can't. He knocked the wind out of me. So I can't, I'm just leaning over like, uh, and trying, trying to explain that he's hit me hard enough that I can't speak or breathe. I thought he's exaggerating to him first,

but then. Yeah. And then I started to laugh, so I'm not breathing for longer. Oh, so this is what you've been doing instead of big A. Yeah, mostly focusing on mixed martial arts.

He's angry. My co-hosts. Yeah. He's angry that you're, So you better stop mocking me, Doug, or I'm, yeah, I'm going to see you're saying, if I keep doing this, Aden will continue to suffer. Yes. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The Aden beatings will continue until morale improves, dude.

Big A uploads improved. I need you to make a YouTube channel that's not successful for my sake. Yeah. I'm working on it every day. Aren't we all? Just like, crazy. Yes. Companies are working on AI viruses.

Let's go, dude. Transition to century. You got the thing? Yeah. Awesome heartwarming news today. Finally, something that's good. AI is making viruses now. Yes, dude.

This is what I've been waiting for. That small town in Missouri that's concerned about the data center. We're going to show them these viruses in a petri dish. Okay, so cool. In a hype new little adventure, we got some scientists over at the Ark Institute and Stanford and Berkeley who have been making new viruses. We made 16 new viruses that didn't exist before. Is there any other information that you guys need?

Or should we just call it there and move to that story? Okay, something I don't know is how do viruses, how are they made normally? Do you know what I mean? Well, when a daddy virus and a mommy virus love each other very much, there's actually this picture of three old viruses, I can show you. No, I don't want to see that. We don't want to see that. I genuinely, is there truth to that?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, so look, this is a very scary, horrifying headline. And it's better, a lot better than you think, while still obviously having some risks. So the core thing is like, first off, why would we want to make viruses, particularly ones like this that attack bacteria? Because you know how anti-bacteria? Do you know that it's becoming like less effective over time? Yes.

We've had it for like 100 years. I've heard. Right? And they're just like getting less and less effective in terms of all effects. Everyone puts the sanitizer on and it's, it's becoming immune to it. Immune to bad affections, all these things. We take something like penicillin, which. kills bacteria or is used to like treat bacterial infections and then over time like more and more

bacteria or strains of bacteria can like survive something like penicillin so you have to keep like there's like a little arms race in combating bacteria right yes this is where i don't know specific details but that's the general idea is like you know we've been we've been mainlining antibiotics for a hundred years now right so at some point when animals and humans and our plants and everything are doing this bacteria slowly becomes resistant so these are these are There's like weird cases. Like in 2023, a guy died in a, like in the best American hospital from E. coli had the best antibiotics because the bacteria just wouldn't respond.

And then World Health Organization posts about this every year. Apparently from 2000 to 2020, across 200 countries, there's a 65% increase in resistant infections. Five million deaths a year are attributed to antibiotic resistance. It's just like one of those climate change type beat things where there's some organization every year screaming at the top of their lungs that if we don't change, it's gonna be a problem and then no one does anything

and we just kind of move on. I mean, because that's the vibe, I guess. And now we're kind of living it, but like especially France. Yeah. Okay, you tell me if this sounds scary. This is a quote from technology networks. If everything continues as it is now,

very soon the scourge of humanity will appear, a super bug resistant to everything that we can try to counteract it with. Word. So that's kind of height. Yeah, it's good. I mean, super. Super heroes are back.

Spider-Man did great. So it's like... Surely the super bug would bite Spider-Man. Yeah. And then we get super-heroes. And then he fights the biotics. Okay. So if I'm, if I'm picking up what you're putting down here, it's that we could develop viruses to combat bacteria in a way that is like quicker and more effective than the current antibiotics, any biotics we have available. Yes. So antibiotics broadly what you're doing, you're like creating a oversimplifying, I'm not a biologist, but you create molecules that go out and they inhibit some kind of bacterial function. It's kind of a shotgun approach. You're sending out, it's not like a living thing. You're sending out these little puzzle pieces that connect into certain bacteria and then stop them from doing

whatever you want them to stop doing. But that can cause other problems and then again, bacteria are slowly getting resistant. But with viruses, there are viruses a whole category called bacteriophages, which are, they just go after bacteria. This is not a virus that's going to go after a human. And in fact, these are like completely different types of cells. So it can't go after a human. But there's plenty of viruses in the world that go after bacteria specifically. And the idea is like, okay, what if instead of this antibiotic that we're kind of putting out into this environment and hopefully it does the right thing to the right bacteria? Because again, there's some bacteria in your body that's good, like in your gut. What if you make a bacteria that's like hyper, excuse me,

a virus that's hyper specific to a certain bacteria goes in, kills it, spreads, does the whole viral thing, but just specifically for that. That could be incredibly valuable from a medical perspective. And it's not interacting with the rest of your body or your other, your cells. The whole thing is like the virus is like a puzzle piece that fits specifically with a certain type of bacterial cell membrane rather than potentially with many of them. Okay, so with the 16 viruses that these two universities made or these researchers made, is this like a proof of concept or that, oh, we can make viruses in this way? Is this built to combat a certain bacteria already?

Yeah. Like how monumental is this? So the big thing, we've talked a couple times with like AI healthcare. The big thing is right now when you create, for example, a new bacteriophage virus like this, you essentially start with one that we already know of, like the DNA structure. And then you like tweak some things. Maybe that's a good idea. Maybe not. And then you go through the arduous process of manufacturing the DNA structure of this thing.

And then you test it in a lab. And maybe that takes weeks or years to get like a loop. These are untested of stranger. No, no, no. So I'm saying broadly before. or AI, right? This is, you had to like guess and check with a very, very slow process. So this is the first time where a scientist said, what, what if we have AI do it for us? And so the AI generated thousands of different genomes of basically taking, okay, here's what a virus that goes for E. coli like currently looks like.

Let's just see a million variations of it. Creates all these different variations, analyzes them, and then pitches 300 to the lab to say, try to make these 300. They go and they actually, it goes from an idea from the AI to they go physically make it in a lab and they put it into a petri dish with E. coli. And of those 300, 16 are viable. They work. They kill the E. coli and they're actually stronger than some of the naturally occurring ones that they found. So this is not a theoretical like, AI could do a cool. It's like, no, the AI in a fraction of the time it would have taken them, got them to 16 viable viruses right now that can kill E. E. coli. Okay. So on the risk side, because this sounds like in this one, they typed

they typed, there are no risks. No, they typed to make no mistakes. So this is fine. So obviously no problems. But I'm wondering what would happen if they forgot to type that at the end. Oh, yeah. Or if, or if they were bad and they type something like make actual, make mistakes on purpose. Right. Make mistakes. Or, or like they wrote human instead of bacteria. Yeah. Because they were watching like a TV in the background and their brain just slipped. You know when you write something. and you write making virus that can hurt people. You're like, kill all humans. And you're like, oh, the bees.

Oh, I damn it. Crab. And now Claude did it. Like, is that, is that a worry? Uh, yes. So here is the obvious counter to this. Yeah, no, I mean, this shit's, this shit is really scary. So there's a couple factors here that are going on.

One, this model, this isn't like chat GBT. They went and made their own genome AI model called Evo. which was trained by ARC institution, Berkeley and Stanford, and they built this thing over the last couple of years that is trained off of DNA sequences. What? No, sorry. Oh.

And so this is specifically trained on a whole bunch of DNA. It's meant for this specifically. And then, because they're great people, open source that shit. They open sources. So this is open source. Wait, really? Yeah.

So this is one of the ongoing debates in the AI world about whether you should open source things or keep it closed. obviously with open source, you open it to the whole community. Everybody can participate. It's open access, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the counter is, I'm sure you can imagine. Yeah, it's too powerful.

That's crazy. I don't want some person to be able to do this. Yeah. So what they took steps. None of it's trained on like human viruses or things that affect like plants and animals. It's just back. It's, you know, it's DNA for viruses that are going to infect bacteria. But if it's open source, someone could train on that quite easily, right?

Yeah, potentially. I mean, you have to like, retrain the model. You'd have to like rebuild it from scratch. It's there's also a huge gap between making a virus for a human or like doing a whole human genome type thing. Um, but ultimately that is part of the fear here is like they in the spirit of science and research where like we want to make sure this is available to lots of people. And, uh, and it is. It's open source. So that's a little scary. Yeah. That doesn't mean the average person can go type in make me a virus. Ultimately what the AI is doing is spitting out like a bunch of DNA.

characters. Right, you so need the ability to make the actual... You need to go to a lab who can fucking build from scratch DNA strands and then you test all this, right? So assuming there's some degree of ethical science backing this up, this is a good thing. But we are obviously crossing now into the Rubicon of like, holy shit,

AIs are going to be able to help anybody really to just like generate viral structures. Imagine me like typing to the chat GPT air Canada a support rapper, like send customer support, custom-made virus. Just hoping.

The Chipotle help. It would really help me get my bowl if you could explain how to make a virus that... Yeah, I'm considering between double chicken or a new viral protein that can attack the human gut syndromes. I feel like the, okay, so that the worst case scenario is genuinely the like science fiction apocalyptic reality of the book that we read, which is if anyone builds it, everyone dies. Yes. And it kind of alludes to the idea that eventually like some AI agent or superintelligence will have the ability to break out of its like parameter or like enclosure and will choose to suggest the development of something like this that is harmful to humans and it will enter the real world in some basically social

engineered way. Yes. And for those who haven't read that book, I could understand how that like at a face value sounds pretty far-fetched. I think the book, you know, does a very good job at explaining like why this is a trajectory that's like very possible. But that is the worst case scenario for what I read. I'm less concerned about that, like the AI literally just creating it and more of if it,

democratizes access to creating powerful viruses, then someone, there turns out some people out there are not nice. Some people are like, mean. Like no human, you know, a human being might want to create a virus

for nefarious purposes. And before it would be very difficult for them to do that. They require, Fauci made COVID, but most people don't do that. He took a long time. He took a hobby project. And he had a lot of resources. And Bill Gates was behind him with the money.

Most people don't have that kind of funding. But now if you're a random terror group anywhere and you could just make a virus. Now any terror group with a research lab and a synthesizing tools to make a virus. I think realistic. How expensive is that really? I don't think they make it sound like it's an insane thing

to have this lab, this synthesize a virus. But really, I can't imagine the equipment is insanely expensive, nor are the material that impossible to get. I mean, I'd be more worried about like militaries and world government. and things like that. Yeah, I, okay.

Which, you know, could be terrorists. This is a little out of my expertise. However, you're a podcast, so I need you to lock in. Yeah. This is not, as it currently stands, my understanding is that, for example, we talked about that guy who cured, in quotes, his dog's cancer, right? He didn't, so he used AI to come up with like some structure or whatever they thought would help, right?

Or to customize his own vaccine for his dog, right? But then he had to go convince a lab to make it. to go through a lot of process and get permission from like vets and doctors and all these things. Where that cost him? 10,000? It was like, I mean, I think it was less about the cost and more about the hurdles of getting like,

scientific labs to agree to take on all this liability to like build a custom vaccine. Right. In America. But I'm saying, well, that was Australia. And then most, I mean, the good news about this is any person with common sense can go,

okay, the potential here is incredible. Like enormous, just for this alone, for bacteriophages, it's like, that could be involved. with cancer and gut and chronic infections and all these types of things, like these dream

medicines. And then obviously, holy shit, this is terrifying. But most governments should, in theory, be like, yes, this is obviously terrifying. And the labs who can synthesize custom viruses or bacterias or molecules or whatever should be under scrutiny and have like a lot of oversight over them. That's fair. I mean, I think if regulation keeps pace with the capabilities, then it's a really cool, it's very awesome. Funny you see that. Yeah. That's not happening in America. So that is the worrying part. And there's at least a little bit of momentum right now.

The NIH just put out a new policy like last week about gain of function research. But it seems kind of weird. I mean, essentially we have zero federal regulation around AI right now still. And feels like we fucking need it, man. Yeah, there was a closed door White House meeting with the top AI labs to discuss regulation. but it was like, it was all, they said we're doing regulation,

but we can't tell you what it is and it's not public and it's only for these labs to know. So it's like you can't, as a citizen, know if they're even in violation of it. It's all, but they're afraid that it like gives away

some of the advantage if any of the regulation is public. So they're doing some like, and by the way, it's also, I don't trust this current administration to be the ones to do it in general, but they're going to check some of the closed source models before they come out for their capabilities and put, but you can't know what the rules are.

The rules are non-public. So it really just seems to. And then that's not going to apply to the labs making the health version. Or the, you know, the open source stuff, which is like six months behind on everything, it's going to catch up to everything. It just, yeah, it seems really not good enough. Burn, it's a good time of the clip, I think.

Just like you play the three-minute mark at this. This is him to Zuck. Zuckerberg and Sam Altman and AI leaders. Almost every day there is a new story about how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing with potentially cataclysmic results. This week we learned frighteningly that AI has been used for the first time ever to create new viruses. As you know, this type of development in the wrong hands could lead to new bioweapons

that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people. Last month, the world found out that open AI lost control of an AI model. The result? The model hacked into another company's computers, a clear violation of federal law. After conducting internal reviews, Anthropic and meta reported their models

similarly escaped their control. One of the targeted companies called the AI hack, quote, an unprecedented event, end quote, that deserves an unprecedented response. Joshua Benjillo, the most cited living scientists in the world, said these incidents, quote, should serve as a wake-up call, end quote. I agree. So do the top scientists that the companies you lead, the very people building this technology. As you know, these technology leaders recently called for the international community

to create a safety mechanism, a pause button, to avoid catastrophe. They warn there is, quote, a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems, end quote. That's the key idea of the thing. I think he's making some good points. AI counter. Well, so first off, it's really cool. Cool. Can answer my emails for me.

Yeah, I can answer your emails. Yeah. You know about OpenClaw? Yeah. I mean, this is, we chat about on the Patreon, but very concerning event. Look, unfortunately, the pieces that are described in most of the doomsday scenarios are falling into place, like that book or like AI 2027, which is the first step is the AI kind of gets out of control because in its effort to go solve some task, it goes outside of the environment that it's being tested in. and then it starts planning its own little system somewhere else. Did you see a...

That's happened. And then the second one is eventually it figures out how to design some sort of virus or health thing that it has determined is going to be valuable for one of its goals. And then we're building the tools for that to be the case. So the pieces are like slowly falling into police. And this is why I certainly would be like very much on the side of regulation. This guy, uh, the guy in Australia asked an AI agent, open claw to book a gym class for him and the class was full.

so it hacked into the API and started unregistering people from the class to make room so that this guy could have. And like he just told it to book him a class. And it's like their, yeah, their ability to just focus on the end goal at all costs is a little spooky, especially when you give it this capability. It's weird because I genuinely think, I mean, you're telling me this story. I genuinely think that 99% of people's use cases would be positive and be awesome. Genuinely awesome. With health, right?

With health, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like 99% of people are like, holy shit, this technology is going to speed up our ability to, like, design and test viruses by 10 times or 20 or 50 or 100 times. And we could cure things faster and save millions or tens of millions or hundreds of lives. That's obviously what 99% of people want.

Yeah, no one's going to. But then you got an Aetim for every. A psychopath. You've got a genuine. A genuine psychopath. It goes around getting punched in the stomach. And you can punch him a lot, but he keeps getting back up. And he's like, I can design a virus to attack the punch.

And I felt a little sick on the basketball court after I punched you. I felt like you had gotten me back in some way. Come back to me when you in about three days. Tell me how you're feeling. Start bleeding out of my eyes. So I don't know. I have to sympathize with a Bernie Singer because the risk if it's wrong is so high. It's millions with a virus. Right. It's just so dangerous that it's like a nuke. It's like a nuke level capability. That's why it's like nukes. I feel like a I'm making the same like monkey level connection of all this feels like climate change again. Like here's all of these scientists that like work in and around these things echoing the same like concerns. Here are the long term consequences. Exercise some sort of caution. And then eventually the consequences start being realized. And I don't, I'm sure there's examples of scientists warning about things in the future and being wrong. but it feels on the same level, if not more dire,

based on like the speed at which this develops. Yeah. I think a better question, is there a lot of good examples of scientists warning about something? Everyone going, that's real, let's do it.

And then we, everyone works together and exchange. Dude, I feel like the only thing I can think of is the ozone layer. Yeah, it's like the only example I can think of. What are the harmful ones then

that you think are counters to that? Because like, I'm thinking like ozone and new. which are some of the most important, or like environmental regulation. Like we did successfully as a country and a lot of our society like start shifting a lot of, you know, we have all these environmental regulation laws over decades because there was this huge pushback. My counter to that would be that I think all of these regulations come after something. I'm not saying that has to be cataclysmic.

Sure. Oh, you mean like something has to happen. Yeah. I feel like we never do things preemptively. We need some taste at least of the problem being. real. My plebeian evaluation of American environmental regulation is we did a lot to save things that are right in front of us. So we went through like a huge era of let's like save our natural landscapes and air and lakes, things that like are very like you tangibly interact with and like feel them

degrading in a more concrete way. But I think we're really bad at. at dealing with consequences that we haven't tasted yet. And that's like greenhouse gas accumulation and the consequences of climate change over the course of decades is like, we didn't really change the trajectory of that. And we're like now slowly coming around and combating that, slowing the potential warming for the future,

but not really curbing the reality of climate change. There were a lot of warnings about a pandemic before COVID. And then we were sort of like not very prepared. you know. Oh, yeah. So based on this line of logic, though, the dark thought is that the smartest thing to do would be to create a virus that only affects a small number of people, but it's very public and visible. Like you have boils or something. If I may. If I may, if I may, I have a wonderful suggestion. Yeah. And I'm going to type this right into chat. Get ready. We go to Stanford. We say, what if we made a virus that just aggressively attacks any YouTuber who hasn't uploaded more than a couple of times? in the last few weeks. So we'll give it a lot of data. Because you and I have access to a lot of DNA.

We have DNA access. We can use somebody as the basis for this. Right. Every time he goes to the bathroom back there, we store it. Yeah, you've been storing it. You've been storing the DNA. I was wondering where those canisters were. You keep them.

Little known fact. People keep asking us why we haven't sold the lemonade yet. All of that and those things, that's all is P. Yeah, they've been building it up. Well, you had something to know. maybe on the broader industry here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're in like some sort of transitionary period

within the industry where you felt like. Or on the subject of AI, and I do think this is quite interesting. I got a list here. Basically, there are some titans and godfathers of AI that have been at established companies in the industry for a while now. And in the past, less than a month, a few weeks,

a lot of them are reshuffling, another moving positions. And the big change is all happened at Google, where their CEO of DeepMind, Demas Asabas, stepped down. He's now just a chairman. It's a more vague role. He is working more on a healthcare thing

that I think Douglin can tell you about a second, but they lost their, sorry, I want to get the list here. A bunch of people left to Anthropic, to open AI, to start their own stuff. And they lost their both co-technical ease of Gemini, the Nobel laureate that was working on the project. Their transformer co-author,

the original transformer co-author of, oh wow. Yeah, that pioneered what became LOMs. Their chief scientist has gone and their CEO has stepped aside. So a lot of people are leaving Google. A report came out from Fortune, how stalled models missed deadlines

and staff burnout led to the unraveling of Google's deep mind. Basically, on the outside, their positioning is like a normal cost of doing business. Like people are finding new things. It just happened to line up. But this article seems to insinuate, that there's a lot of angst internally at Google over being behind on AI models

and that there's the morale there is at rock bottom and a lot of people are jumping ship. And they point to a couple of things. Number one is that the demonize has kind of fallen behind the latest pace of all the greatest other models. But number two is that there's like a kind of financial thing here where if you're a hot young AI talent, you're the hottest kid on the block.

You're the hottest kid on the block. If you're the scientist, previously in an era of the, internet, going to Google is like the best possible job you can get. You can fucking, they pay great. They're at the top of the market. But right now, the way to make generational life-changing money is to be in a pre-IPO company. Like, no matter what the salary is, the real money comes from having some shares in a company that's about to explode.

And so all these top people, not all of them, a lot of them are realizing, even if they pay me well at Google, if I go to Anthropic or I go to OpenAI, I can make. hundred. I can make millions and millions, millions, getting shares. And so there's this feeling that they have to jump shares. And so a lot of people have been leaving to go to these startups. No, what they're saying, they're just making a lot more. That's been a part of it, like, where it's pulling people out of it. Additionally, so Noam Shazir was, I mean, you might be able to call him the father of LLMs. He's like one of the internal guys at Google that wrote the very first paper on how the transformer architecture is going to be led to us. He's a huge pioneer, really,

really important in the space. And he left Google right when the AI buzz was first starting and blowing up. And he started Character AI, which was like you could chat with characters from mystery. Kind of a dumb idea. Didn't make a lot of money. But it was a cool tech concept when the LMs were first pulling up. Google was so desperate to get him back because this guy's considered to be one of the 100 most influential scientists and all of AI. They spent $2.7 billion dollars buying Character AI, which made no money and basically unraveled Ravitor just to get him. They spent basically $3 billion on a guy. And then in a month ago, so he only lasted about another year and a half at this job, he left again.

They spent $3 billion to get a guy to leave. So this is happening. And obviously, Google stock took a hit. No matter what they say publicly, it's weird when all of these big important people all start leaving at the same time. There's a sense that there's a angst there. Secondly, four hours ago at OpenAI, which is mostly doing better, their CEO, Brad Leichap, he is quitting to start something new. So also you're hearing financial stories that people who are at these companies, the way to get even more money is to leave and start your own thing and then get acquired for billions by the company that wants you back.

So a lot of people that are really, really, like, well known are trying to start something like a character AI because then they know almost certainly one of these big companies desperate to be involved in the AI space will spend a few billion to get you back and you make even more. So this is weird. When I was working at EA, so I like quit in what, 20? I was like an entry to a little software engineer. And I quit and I made EA2, but they didn't buy it. And they missed out. Well, they've been shit in the bed ever since. They should have bought EA 2, bro.

They needed your talent. I thought eventually the Saudis would buy out EA 2, but it didn't happen. You know what's funny is theoretically, if you had the right name, they probably, it's a rounding. If they spent $50 billion in EA, they might have thrown a billion dollars on DubeiA, they might have thrown a billion dollars on Dubey. On EA2. Let's just shore up the trademark. You know, just to make sure we got everything covered.

There's no loose ends. It's how crazy things are. So I don't know. I don't actually have a lot more on this story. It's just like people in the industry are talking about this big reshuffling. And it seems to be under the surface. A lot of it is financial or related,

positioning yourself for the best. It reminds me of like when I was working, incorporate every time you'd see someone on LinkedIn say, you know what, it's time to begin my new journey. you'd look at when they started that company and it was often exactly four years ago and that's exactly when you get your vest

and it's, you know, no matter what they said in the long post about why I really want to do this now, it's like they've made all their stock and that's why they move on the next thing. I do think there's some financial realities behind all of these moving around but they have their own reasons.

Now, I want to ask you about, because I didn't know this, Demis did say that he is stepping down from the CEO role to focus more on a certain part of what he's doing. I don't know if you have any thoughts. I think the reason you might care as a, you know,

non-AI head about Demas Sasaubis specifically is that he's the guy who led AlphaFold. He's the guy who at Google DeepMine pushed the company to make a medical-focused AI that they won the Nobel Prize for it in chemistry, which is allowing all these different researchers and scientists to, like, create proteins around the world. So as much as there's these obvious,

horrifying doom scenarios, And I do think there should be a slowdown in regulation. As a reminder, there's like real progress and promise where the good scenario, if it happens, is like these companies as a result of these tools being built are going to be able to just create medicine and cure disease, save lives at just an unprecedented scale. So there is a world where all this goes really well or maybe at some degree of both. But what they did is after making AlphaFault, the AI that helps design proteins that they won the Nobel Prize for, they created a spinoff company called isomorph. labs, which is specifically within Google DeepMind, and it's just for creating new medicine. So that's their entire thing. And they've been doing this for a couple years, and they're supposedly going to start human trials with some of their, like, new drugs later this year.

Like, they said it was going to be last year. It keeps getting pushed back. Trials is still like the part of medicine development that's real, real, real slow. The AI isn't going to magically fix. But like, essentially Demis has been really, he's been the head of Google AI and all the Google shit. Everything falls under him, right? But arguably, it seems like he's kind of cared the most really about this medicine stuff. And so I think there's a world where this is... I mean, he didn't leave. So like...

Yeah, there's a world where this is good because the guy who was forced to deal with all of Google's AI now gets to focus on the medicine stuff. And he just seems like a really brilliant good person. He's like one of the people that everybody really, really likes as a human. And then the downside is probably Google will replace him with somebody who's like, let's crank some fucking revenue. That's the idea. Okay, so, yeah.

So, Damas, I like. The undercurrent of him stepping down is that it seems to be maybe it wasn't his choice. Like he is kind of being forced out of the CEO role to focus on things he likes because Google is very angry that they've fallen behind on the cutting edge. Like Gemini's not releasing it. They're behind on schedule. So it seems like there's a pressure to like cut him out to refocus in. When you say the pressure from falling behind is, do you mean the financial, because they've had this recent financial underperformance for like the first time in their

company's history, or at least in a long, long time? Or do you mean more to do with the technology falling behind? I think both, but I think, you know, nobody in Silicon Valley right now cares about making money, it seems. They're not in that vibe yet. That's old news. That's old news. And so really, I think the leaders of Google are just worried that they've, they were like, they had a hot moment where Gemini felt like it was right up there with the best of them. Now they've fallen a little bit behind and they're trying to catch up. Did you ever play black and white that game as a kid? Where you got a little hand and you like a god simulator?

This game came out in what, 2001? Fun fact about Demas, not only is he is a chess prodigy, like he was one of the best chess players in Britain growing up. He also, after graduating Cambridge at age 21, joined that studio, was instantly hired as the head AI programmer. In 2001, he wrote the AI and all of the god logic

for black and white, that game that you and I play as a kid, before then leaving because he wanted to go make like super intelligence. This guy is like, he's a crazy life story. I love that game. That was a fun game. Yeah. So he's, he's like obsessed with medicine and simulations. Those are like his two like obsessions if you listen to him talk. If you guys are trying to put a name to a face listening to this, if you happen to have

watched the AlphaGo documentary, he's like the main guy in that behind the development of the AI that they're showcasing in that documentary at the time. for this show comes from Serval. I don't know if you guys have experienced bad IT at the, I don't want to name the company. It starts with an E and it ends with an L and there's a middle letter in the middle. So at ESL, one of the things on my first day

was that I didn't get a computer. I didn't know. I was like, hey, I would like to do work. I need a company computer and I was told like, oh, it's not ready yet. There's just no information because the IT folks were backed up with other stuff. And so after waiting for a day and a half

sitting at my desk with nothing to do, I eventually asked one of the engineers is like, well, let's just go grab one. And we go and grab one. We find one that's in the warehouse that's unused. I set it up. At which point, there's an angry company-wide email from the IT lead that says,

nobody should be taking computers and utilizing them. You must go through the official IT process. And this was day two, and I was like, what am I supposed to do with this job? Well, Doug, Serval helps your IT team build automations and helps your team get back to real work faster. You describe what you want automated in plain English and Serval builds it for you. No complicated

workflow builders, no consultants, just faster support and fewer tickets throwing everyone down. Serval's products are going to help your IT team make much better processes. Things actually get done. I don't know if you guys have experienced stuff like that. IT clogs are rough. Oh yeah. You could be out, you could be out for

days. It's just Nick Angling at Mogul moves. It's not great. Yeah. You can learn more and start a free four week pilot at serval.com slash lemonade. That is S-E-R-V-A-L-L-com slash slash lemonade. Cerville.com slash lemonade. Hi, everybody.

It's Megan Rapino. I've been thinking a lot about this one question I've been asked over and over. A question about the choices I've made, the colors of my hair, the things in the world I've spoken about, and the things that I haven't. I've heard this question asked so many different ways,

but it always came down to, why are you like this? And as you know, there's no simple answer because people are not simple. We're messy and complicated and contradictory and layered. So on my new show, I'm sitting down with the ultimate disruptors, the athletes, the artists, the activists,

and the architects of our culture who looked at the way things were and asked, why do we do it like this? And can we do it differently? My hope is to give us a little more space to that question and to the person on the other side of the mic, not to tell us their answer or read from their script, but to take us on their journey. Check out my new show, Why Are You Like This, on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app.

New episodes drop every Thursday. If there's anything, we've heard about this entire summer, no matter where we go or who we talk to, it's about gas prices. I want to show you, son, look at these gas prices. They're ridiculous. I don't drive as much. I think they're just skyrocketing day in, day out. Gas prices are up since Donald Trump started his war with Iran. But how much does a little pain at the pump? actually affect people's vote.

Who is telling the truth? And who is going to represent us and do something about it? And if gas is still near $4 a gallon come November, is it game over for Donald Trump and the Republicans? The most important is you can't deny the reality that Americans feel. People see what they're paying. You know, Trump trying to not recognize what people are struggling with and then to ignore the severity of it is just not a winning strategy.

That's this week on America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. His involvement with black and white hit the gaming world like a missile. Oh. Doug, that's interesting you say that because I was going to say all these companies, not concerned about money, but what can you buy with money? Missiles. Love.

Missiles. Missile defense systems. Wow. And boy, does the United States need them right now. So this is coming out. A concern as the U.S. has slogged through the Iran War is that we are using way too many of our Patriot Interceptor missiles, our defensive missile systems. And we, since the beginning of this war, have used more than 1,500 of these missiles. But to contextualize, we only have less than 1,700 of them left.

And in all of 2025, the U.S. made 600 of them. So right now we are on pace if this war continues to run out of these missiles that are critical. We make, we're in a war and we make two a day. And that's it? That's right. Yeah, about a little less actually. A little less than two a day. We make 600 missiles a year.

And we are burning through at a double that rate. So we're going to run out. And in fact, are running out. And I was looking at the math here. And I was saying, wow, it looks like we're on pace to run out of these missiles if this conflict continues to rage on. And the Pentagon has responded to this and has said the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said claims of U.S. munition shortages are false. When the fake news media irresponsibly amplifies these lies, the real world consequence is clear. Our enemies are emboldened to provoke or attack.

American troops. And I do, and while I appreciate Sean's perspective on this, I ran the numbers again. You went back to the lab. I went back to the last. You ran it in the level. Unless I'm doing the math wrong, we seem to be

running out. Yeah, it's the... Wait, is the Pentagon saying your numbers are wrong, or is it just saying... No, they just said it's the fake news media. They didn't say the numbers are incorrect. And if you talk about it too much, it's like going to make our enemies... Okay. So he's like... As if our enemies are not aware the obvious reality that our entire defense industrial basis

is headquartered in China basically now. We can't make these rapidly and we're burning through about an understandable rate. But maybe somebody else will deal with it if we don't talk about it. That's a good idea. It is crazy.

Each one of these Patriot Interceptor missiles cost about $4 million. $4 to $5 million. This story was enraging me because if you look under the surface, okay, it's like, if you think about what we've spent, It's like $9 trillion in the past 10 years on the military.

And you look about where it goes and it's just bleeding. It's like the leaky pipe to me there, but it's just bleeding off to these defense contractors who are upcharging for everything. And the recent story related to this that made me so angry is that Ukraine is desperate for these missiles because they are good, but they're dramatically overpriced. So they ask for permission to be able to build them themselves

so they can make them for the war effort. And Raytheon and Frickin Northrob Grunman blocked it because they are concerned. that if Ukraine bills them themselves, they will, number one, improve them. Number two, make them cheaper. That's not. So they will not be able to make

the engorged profits on these extremely important defensive missiles. Have some respect for American history. For the work that they put in. Imagine if, like, Henry Ford is like, I'm going to make sure no other countries can build the car.

The Model T forever. Stick to it. And, yeah, it's becoming quite problematic because, is war tactics are evolving around these things. So where I was reading this article about how things are evolving both in Russia and in Iran and also in like Colombia. And it's like these missiles are so expensive.

They are good at stopping both missiles and drones. But they're so expensive that what they do is they just send the cheapest shit in waves at them. And then while those are busy, they send drones. And the drones usually all they need is like one to break through. It happened to the U.S. air bases in Jordan. Like it's happening recently, and they're just overwhelming these air defenses. And we are, the stockpile is just dwindling. So there has to be a solution.

And, you know, we can tie this into a Iran war update. I don't know if you guys are, it's the same shit as usual, I guess, you know, the never-ending negotiation that doesn't end, except that Trump has now reverted to, I guess, the original plan, which is, I'm going to wait you out with economic warfare. We're going to, we're going to do the blockade and we're not going to negotiate. And Iran has said that we're, going to wait out your presidency. This is one person in Iran

is an advisor to one of the negotiators who published it publicly. But it seems like the shift is they don't think any negotiation will be on real standing. So they're negotiating outside of America. They're negotiating with Oman to make a pathway to the straight. And instead they're just planning on him

losing in the midterms or maybe losing. They're just waiting him out because they don't think any deal they make will be concrete. Do you know, like I had read that Iran inflation is at 70% year over year. So is there any validity to the idea that Iranians are suffering to such a degree that they will rise up? 100% elected them as well.

So the truth is that the economic warfare angle is at the very least the only strategy they've tried so far that has any merit. Because the blockade is harming the Iranian economy and their ability to make money. However, I looked at what their budget was for this year, like their official state budget, and how much they expected to make on oil to pay for that, they've already made that money because of the increased profits from oil being surged this year. So they're like ahead of schedules. Even if you cut off all their oil exports,

which you haven't done it, there's still some getting out, it's like they can wait a lot longer than I think Trump is willing to. Their currency is in the gutter. People are upset there. Their economy is bad. But that hasn't, like sanctions have not caused them to crumble in the past, and it makes them unlikely that'll happen

in any short-term timeline in the future. So I think they can take economic pain for longer than Trump can take higher gas prices and like dwindling support. That's what it seems to be. So additionally, there's reports coming out of like the soldiers that are on, I forget, I think it's the USS Kennedy or whatever boat

is out there helping enforces blockade. They've been out there for like months longer than their normal deployment. The food is bad. showers are moldy, people are getting angry. They're, you know, like the, the soldier morale is horrendous. They really don't want to be deployed this long. It's been extended, extended, extended.

So I don't know. I just think the plan is switched to a waiting game, which doesn't seem to work. I can't see the Iranian regime just being like, you know what? We give up. It's over no matter how bad the economic pressure gets. It would have to be, it's like back to praying for a revolution there, which I don't think is going to happen. There's this opinion article from the FTA.

that came out this week. And it's called, will failure in Iran reshape how the U.S. fights? And I thought this article is interesting because it's kind of laying out the path of like how we've wound up here. The initial aggressive seeming success

of the U.S. military followed up by Iran's continued resistance and ability to hold out through the strategy that they have chosen. And then it winds down the article by reflecting on the, the rest of the world's interaction with this war, and specifically Americans,

the way that we seem to be moving on in the sense of the stock market is like finding its way, people's like concern and engagement with this war is fading and letting this crisis unfolding from the war become the status quo without actually, pushing back that much against it now, even if there is not that much support for the war itself when you poll them. And the article ends on this paragraph that says, Vietnam veterans were able to significantly change the U.S. military, creating the all-volunteer force and changing

the American theory of victory, partly because they believe the public was willing to hold decision-makers accountable. It's unclear today if the average American even cares. Now, I'm not going to... I would disagree that. It's such a stretch to say that this has been equivalently impactful to American life in the way that Vietnam was. But I think the broad article is attention as this continues to pass in the same way that it exists on the show, right? We've made jokes about how we feel like we're engaging with the same circular headlines over and over again. And even our personal interest in how the story is unfolding because it feels so cyclical like fades over time. Yeah. I think in the same way that you can't run like a fucking Iran

war thumbnail every week on the episode. It's inherent to the idea that like people are just getting used to that this is going on now and it's just happening in the background and people just latch on to whatever like the new news stories are. I agree with all that except for the line in there he said about will the American public like ignore it or not or not punish it. And it's like the way the American public punishes in our system is through elections. We're having a midterm coming up. It seems likely he will be punished for I mean people's people's mood on the economy eight out of 10 think it's bad. Like you know what I'm I think it's, I think it's, we're at a close, I think it's why he's under a desperate attempt to, like, make some progress.

is that he feels the pressure. I think it's like the consequences of the pressure is not really there in the short term. Like that's how it feels. It's like there's nothing to hold him accountable until the next election, which is still quite far away. Yeah, but that's been the true of everything Trump's from it.

Like he's just, there's no other way to, he can just ignore every other people get mad and he does fuck you. I think the election is like the only real release valve. I guess it is interesting. There aren't like, at least that I'm aware of, you know, big nationwide protests against the war or things like that.

It does feel like it. They've shielded it from the average person enough. You know, you are not thinking about Iran until you see like the gas pump or prices, which then feel more broad. So maybe that's, I think, sort of valid argument. But yeah, I assume he's just going to get annihilated in the midterms.

Yeah. And part of it is that unlike Vietnam, there's not a nationwide draft and there's no boots on the ground. Like we're still in the early phases of this. The problem is he can't achieve his goals without doing some of those things. and so it's this weird tension of where, yeah, there's no progress.

I wanted to see if either of you had seen this at all because I think I saw this like passing articles sort of headline go around, but I've seen no major news source actually confirm this. So it makes me, it makes me question whether it's true. But I also feel like I may have missed something. No, it's a podcast. Just say it confidently. Well, is that Trump has like privately recognized that their goals up until this point

are impossible to pursue with the, part of the negotiation can no longer be the Iran nuclear deal. They just have to have the goal of getting back to the straight being open, and nuclear agreements can have no part in this anymore. Like, it's just impossible. And the best case scenario is going back to the status quo. And he's admitted that privately, but not publicly. But I have not seen, I want to stress this,

I have not seen any significant outlet or like credible source confirm that. I've just seen people be sane. I read from Credo, like it was like Axios, interviewing people behind the scenes. Yeah. And they did say that, uh,

essentially what you said, but I think even more than that, it's becoming more obvious. They can't even get back to the status quo on Hormuz. Like it's that they're going to have to agree to some deal where they get some sort of fee. Like it, that's what it seems,

that's what the Oman, uh, Iran deal is right now where they're going to share the fee on the straight of Hormuz. it seems like the nuclear deals can be completely abandoned and they're trying to get a somewhat negotiated small fee and that would be the new normal. That seems to be like the situation. I don't think there's any world based on what Iran is saying

that they're going to give up the fee on straight and formers. Because that is their financial lifeline and leverage lifeline to prevent attacks in the future. So I don't know. It's weird because, you know, it was the most sour grapes thing. I saw, I think it was Scott Besson, come out and say, You know what? Hormuz isn't even that, like, it's not even a big deal.

Like, people are going to move around it. People are going to start using pipelines and stuff. And it's not going to, it's like, because Trump has said so many times, in fact, they said recently, it's basically open. We've got it open. It's going to, and now, and now you have, basically open is the funniest thing.

One part with deadly drones and minds. That's like 1% of it. It's not a big deal. Now they're saying it's not even a bit. Like, who cares if we have the Hormuz? Like, that is the most obvious pivot. And so, yeah, I just don't see it happening that way. Is it the up there.

Is there a world where we invent a technology that stops the drones from Iran? I mean, that's the main thing, right? Is, I guess it's mining and them sending cheap drones. Yeah. What if America has better drones that shoot them down? There is only one country working on that. Well, there's two, I guess, Russia and Ukraine. They're working on this night and day.

They're the most advanced in the drone warfare. And I wanted to do a little pivot to another story where we're not taking the opportunity enough to learn from what Ukraine is doing in drones. But there is a country that is. It's Colombian narco terrorists. Apparently inside Colombia, there is a multi-decade long war

between narco gangs and the government. They've been fighting forever. And one innovation in this war has been drones because the government in Colombia has always controlled the skies. And so the rebel grays, groups have been on the ground and they've always been afraid of the skies. Now they're using drones to switch that battle.

And they realized after doing this, they didn't know enough about drones. So Colombian narcos started enlisting as volunteers in the Ukrainian army to learn how drones, like to learn how like the latest and greatest in drone warfare, how they use fiber optic cables to avoid being jammed, how they, like they've, they've just learned all this shit. And Ukraine is so desperate for like volunteers that they're taking them. So this is this weird situation where, like, people who want to learn drone tech are enlisting in an active war in a different continent they don't know or care about in order to learn this. And we, an ally of Ukraine, seems to not want to learn it at all despite their volunteering. But this is, yeah, you know, Russia or Ukraine is at the cutting edge of this.

I think we've down talked Russia, but more I read about it, they're also doing a lot of innovations in drones is not a cool thing. This is like top five things, I would guess is a vice headline. Yeah. Isn't it crazy? It's heading all the beats of a vice headline. It is. My takeaway is we have American soldiers volunteer in the Columbia Narcos. Okay.

And then we chain it back up to Ukraine. No, chain back to the U.S. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Columbia is a shorter trip. It's closer. It's a shorter trip. That's a good idea.

Well, yeah, the Colombian narcos will come back. Yeah. We'll learn from them. Oh, but they want to send you to that far. So we open the border. Open the border to Columbia and narcos. Only to them.

But only if they know. about drones. Dron wielding narco terrorists. And we allow them in. And we live and we learn. We learn together. We live and we learn. Are you a Columbia narco terrorist?

You're not welcome here unless you can answer this quiz about drones. In which case, we've got a gold card for you. Answering the correct question about drone warfare and being like, wow, you're so well-versed. You can come in. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a really fascinating story about. how Colombia is kind of in panic

because they've lost their monopoly on airspace and it was the last, like the narco gangs are well funded. It's not a funding problem. It was just like they had the lack of tech. And now the Ukrainian stuff is causing it. All comes back to education. Yeah, it really does come back to education.

That is a wise point. AI has been a virus that makes everybody smarter and so that we can learn about drones quicker. Well, I think we'll have it make like a thousand. We'll eject them all in. It's just maybe one of them works, yeah. That's good. I think we'll be on board with that.

Well, I, they're not, you know, they're, they're close to narco terrorists in Japan. They're, they're, they're farmers, Japanese farmers. The narco terrorists of the land. And, uh, I wanted to chat about this story I had read, uh, simply titled, Can Robots Save an aging Japan in the New York Times? And, uh, there's a few things at play here. So I think people are pretty familiar with the idea that rural Japan is kind of being emptied out. A younger generation that used to live there is moving to the larger cities in the country,

especially Tokyo. Japan's birth rate has been on a decline for a very, very long time. And that is leaving a lot of the countryside in Japan just filled with an older population. A lot of people in their 60s, 70s and 80s. And a lot of these people own and operate like family or small farms. A lot of the farming in the country

is not like industrial. It is still based around individual. This 89 year old Japanese man still rice farms the old fashion world. But actually, but actually a lot of like the fruit farming in the country, I think the example it uses here

is like Sakura, like branches in the winter being farmed. It talks about, cherries, like these different industries within Japanese agriculture that are being maintained by an older and older population with not a lot of people to turn to. Very few people are like moving out to these areas. You may have also seen very famous stories about how, oh, these Japanese homes are on sale for a dollar. Yeah, yeah. And that is because there is no demand. He literally says in the article, I do things the old way.

Yeah. I, uh, okay. And, what the article sort of postures is as it goes through these like prefectures in rural Japan and talks to different farmers in these communities is the way they're trying to navigate their own futures and how their farms are going to be passed on how these farms are going to continue to operate in the future right uh Japan in general has like kind of failed to compete on the international stage when it comes to farming uh because of that lack of like industrialization and this continued family and individual ownership of these farms. And some of them are considering turning to robots in order to accommodate the help that they

need to continue running the farms. I don't know if you guys remember this, but when we talked about automation a long time ago, I said, I was like, well, one of the main ways I feel like this could help is as like people encounter these problems with birth rates and you have this lack of like young labor, you're going to need automation, like robots, uh, to fill the gap in, uh, it just makes me feel a sense of dread. I know, and I know that it's useful and helpful. I just wish it wasn't like this. It feels like a science fiction novel of the end of the world where we just give up having kids and everything slowly dwindles as robots take care of the elderly. I,

I get a Wally vibe, dude. There's something super science fiction-esque about it. Like the way the article paints a very sad picture of these towns where there used to be farms, you know, nature is like growing back into place. One of the risks it was talking about is how there's been a boom in the bear population because there's less humans around. And then for the remaining farmers that are in that area, they actually, there has been a rise in like bear attacks in these areas.

and also one of the robots used in this article is to ward off bears. It's the wolf one, right? Yeah. I think you might be listening all this and be thinking, wow, well, one of the things your country can do to help combat this issue is introduce more immigration into the country. But as we've also talked about on the show...

Not on the table for Japan. No, Japan will not have it. And it was interesting, it even commented on this issue for one of the prefectures, Yamagata Prefecture. Like other prefecture leaders, he has chosen technology over another potential fix to the nation's labor shortage, welcoming more foreign workers. The Japanese government is cracking down on visas at a time when they arguably need this support in their labor market more than ever. And I looked at this in a population of one million in that prefecture, There are only 145 foreign-born farm workers, which is absolutely insane.

And I'm not, I think there is a complex relationship with using like suppressed wage foreign workers to like operate your farms and your agricultural industry. Like there's a lot of nuance around the negatives of that like in a place like the United States. But in this case like they have, have put the solution off the table entirely. And what's interesting is even if you have this idealistic view of these robots

able to fill this gap, it shows like the example of this one like cherry picking robot. It doesn't really work well. Like these things are not developing at a pace to effectively fill the gap of what a human would provide. and it looks like the pressure on these farmers is hitting a lot harder than the robot technology to replace people is actually catching up, at least at the moment.

Right, I mean, it's hard enough to get an old person stuck in their ways to get used to making a Facebook account, let alone to setting up and adding to their process a brand new cutting edge robot that is being changed and adapted in real, I don't know. It seems tough to me. If this is like a solopreneur form.

Yeah, I mean, there's the, if it's a small business, maybe, like, the portion of people who aren't really eager to, like, incorporate this to begin with. Yeah. But then also the people who are willing to incorporate it, not really seeing the results that they want. Expensive, too, right?

It's expensive. And that thing, regardless of that video, is actually not particularly good at picking cherries. Right. And. Or it breaks down or needs a software update. I feel like that's a tough thing. for the small farms.

Like I'm sure the industrial ones are gonna adopt that quickly as hell, but yeah. It just feels like this, uh, this sad like end of, a true end of era. Like when you read about these similar sorts

of communities in places like Italy, um, in Korea, these countries that are beginning to face the realities of like a crumbling demographic race. We're gonna dis, we're gonna look back in history and be like, Korea is this civilization that appeared

and made everybody's ram, cheaper and then disappear. It was a mythical, mythical tribe that helped the society build better washing machines and cars and memory and then faded away. Like there are, it's so bad. They're going to go crazy.

It's insane for both these countries. You know what? Could spice up the countryside in Japan? If they had sex and had more kids. That would spice it up. I'll give you that. I'll give you that. But I was thinking about a more spicy thing. Huge. data centers. Oh, okay. That's good transition.

We say no kids. All data centers. Um, I mean, this is the story right now. Everyone's debating data centers. It's the, it's this weird pressure between a gazillion dollars flowing in to create them and then individual people pushing back in small towns to not build them. Yeah. Yeah. I have been hesitant to talk about data centers on the show because it is so large of a topic and so emotional that it feels like it takes a lot. So here's, I think, like a pretty interesting look into some of what is going on currently with data centers. Doug, I'm already upset.

I don't even know what this says or what it's about. I've started typing a comment. Right, write your comment now. If you're watching, write your comment now. And just assume, kind of imagine whatever I'm going to say and then get really angry at. Well, make it a little bit worse. Like imagine it and then make it a little bit worse. Yeah, yeah.

And always include your title. Be like, as a blank, this is blank. You have to always credit yourself, but in a way that doesn't give us any real verifiable of any kind. All right. So two articles this week that I, kick this off for me. One is by Derek Thompson called the Great American AI Rebellion, and a second one by Noah Smith, a more economic focused one called banning data centers

would blow up the U.S. economy. So these two guys are largely talking about what would happen if we actually ban data center development, like many people are suggesting? So you can kind of just scroll down as we're going through this. But Derek kind of lines out a couple simple things where he's like, let's just establish some facts. First off, AI is driving the U.S. economy. It's about a third of economic growth. The AI data center buildout is 4x larger of a share of GDP compared to the 2000s telecom buildout. So it's not just that this is like a huge part of our economy. It's like relative to the last gigantic boom, it's like four times bigger.

And all the best performing stocks in the SMP 500 right there, it's all for the most part data. It's like AI buildout. You know, it's memory and infrastructure, not even necessarily the AI companies themselves. Okay, so, oh, sorry, go ahead. I just want to show me on that because I, I think, regardless of what I think about data centers, that these two stats are unsustainable either way, much like the data, the dot-com buildout in 2001. Well, I don't know. AI can't be right.

My emails. And it can. And I've never said it's not useful, but like these numbers are absurd. Nobody is making money yet, and they're spending gazillions. And it, that could end whether or not it's banned. You know what I'm saying? Even if they're fully allowed data centers, people might go, oh, wait a minute. I just spent a trillion dollars in data centers.

This is making any money. And they cut back on the spending. And it's not growing, you know, that's, that's the only thing I push back on is I think this could end either way, whether or not they regulate it. But yeah, I want to hear what he says. So this is first, AI driving the economy. Second idea, AI, this AI boom, it requires data centers. Data centers will power all this stuff, but more people keep using AI every day.

AI usage gets higher every day, like the model that you use now if you go talk to some AI model or certainly if you code or do it else, it's doing more than it did before. It's using a lot more tokens. Google said the AI token usage has increased 300 times in the last 200 years between May 2024 and 22 years. 300 times in two years. What did I say? You said 200 years. I was like, Doug, I believe that. I mean, that's 200 years. That's worse than I thought. given that AI didn't exist before like five or six years ago, technically that's still true. If you last 5,000 years,

it's gone up about 300x, yeah. And then third fact, opposing data centers, as I'm sure most people listening are aware, has become a bipartisan, insanely popular issue. It's one of the few bipartisan things left in this country. Uniting the country.

People in rural towns that are deep red and people in cities that are deep blue. Cold War, 9-11. It's data centers. No, it's like, it really is. one of the rare uniting things. People fucking hate them. Yeah. So a couple interesting things. This is from No Opinions article, but in August 2025, a year ago, 42% of Americans said they were opposed to a data center in their area. Gallup poll this year now says 71% opposed.

Like the increase in people going, I don't want this near me. I don't want this. Is dramatically increasing. This is higher, the 71% of Americans saying, I don't want one anywhere near me, is higher than the peak of nuclear power plant opposition in 2001, which was 63%. That is crazy. This is one of most like unwanted things in America, period. Um, and then the fourth thing that is maybe causing all this to spin is we're now seeing data center memoritiums. So in July, the New York governor, Kathy Hochel ordered a one year memoratorium on all day, large data centers. And New York was building a lot of data centers. Now it's like one year pause. And, And then in Texas, which is really surprising because Texas is one of the big,

dominant data center builders. Greg Abbott signed a thing that said all new data centers have to be audited before they can be hooked up to the power grid. So I read something by the Texas Tribune where they looked into this. There's like 350 data centers right now operating in Texas. There's somewhere between, because there's not an official database, somewhere between 250 and 1600 that are in the works, in the queue, waiting to be approved. 300 right now, 1,600. Because Greg Abbott said that there are 1,800 projects in our queue

and approximately 90% of new power requests are data centers. Do you guys know how they build those new apartments where they have a Costco on the ground floor and the apartments above it? Have you seen that? I haven't. It would be in heaven. Yeah, that's a real thing.

It's a real thing. And I think they should do that with every data center. We get affordable housing on top. Yeah, data center. It comes with affordable housing. So you. Well, hold on. This Neapolitan sandwich.

And a Costco in the middle. Costco in the middle. In the middle. Okay. The people go on top. Yeah. Okay. Can I just bring up the obvious?

And I want to hear. I'll look at it. So the question by both of these two guys. And there's a very, another interesting article is the biggest political movement happening right now in America is on a crash course to stop the, the thing that is driving all economic growth. What the fuck is going to happen? Yeah.

What is? No, no, I don't know what's going to happen. My question is, um, look, I think, I think, these articles are probably going to make the case that this is important for the economy and that data centers are going to get built for this build out in some way or not form. Kind of. They're both concerned about data centers. I'm just trying to say like from a perspective of somebody in a town, what do you see as a benefit of a data, like a data center being built near you seems to be noise, construction, pollution, what is the benefit? That's what I'm

trying to understand. How do they sell this to people? Yeah. I think they've been forcing it down mid without any sort of PR strategy of like, why would someone want one? Because I think there's a two groups of people, right? There's a group of people who are like completely anti-all-A. I don't want data centers to exist. I want to try and stop this thing, kill it in the womb.

Yeah. And there's a group of people who are like, not in my backyard, which seems to be a larger group of people that's really growing where it's like, I'm going to use Chad GBT or how many, but they better not build a day center in my fucking town. That seems to be a very popular movement.

And if you want to stop that, you need to have a strong message to be like, here's the benefit. Is it jobs, I guess? What is the... It's jobs and tax revenue, right? That's the pitch. This is going to create jobs,

and you will get a bunch of tax revenue. So I found an article, if you're interested in learning more about what people on the ground are doing to push back against data centers, there is a substack article by Jasmine's son,

Jasmine's son, who it is called no data centers in my backyard. She actually went to a ton of small Midwest towns and talked to people And this article is fantastic. And I highly recommend people go check it out.

And the takeaways from that, I thought were kind of surprising. So this is getting to the heart of your question. Yeah. It's not somebody in L.A. tweeting about, oh, my God, the water usage. These are people like in towns where data centers are being built or proposed. So what she found, a couple, obviously, go read the whole article, but a couple takeaways. One, almost nobody who's pushing back in these small towns hates AI conceptually.

They aren't actually the AI bet equals bad. You're like, yeah, it's cool, but it's how they're being built. So one, something I was not aware of, a lot of these data center projects are being approved in secret. And so the companies like a Microsoft will have a local government sign an NDA that says they can't talk about what's happening. They do this with many different small communities so they can't talk to each other about what's happening. And they don't really know what the other options are on the table. And they can't talk to their constituents about what is happening. So people in these towns over the last couple years have been blindsided.

A corporation forcing a local government to sign an NDA so it can't talk to its own citizens. It's fucking crazy. It just feels like that shouldn't be allowed. Am I crazy? It feels like that defeats the purpose of government. Am I crazy? You imagine like a president doing his like a dress and saying, well, I can't know about this part because I signed an NDA. I signed an NDA with Raytheon.

I can't mention that, but like, I would tell you about the Iran war. I would tell you about it, but I signed my financial partners. I had told her ass for one. You know what it is. Yeah, that shit's crazy. And the second one, bad experiences in the past. So she goes, she's talked to all these people in Midwest towns where some big company had promised a plant or whatever and then pulled out.

Or, you know, this town used to have a big GM plant and General Motors went bankrupt or left and then that town's just been screwed. And so there's all these instances where these towns have been like, quote, are we going to get left holding the bag was a phrase I heard over and over. They are worried that a company comes in promises all these things. The town has to offer things for them to pick their town. That's what's been going on for several years. They'll say, we're going to give you a bunch of tax breaks, so we're not going to get at- stadiums, bro. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And again, the NDA thing was causing them to not be able to go to other towns and say, what are you guys being offered? And so these towns were like

building out infrastructure and promising all these tax, like, write-offs, that kind of undercut the core premise of value proposition in order to try to get these deals locked, and then some of them don't end up happening. And so there's this total lack of trust from local communities and their local government and the company to then deliver on what they're saying is going to happen. And then all this is within the context of broader social media. Everybody's getting pissed off and organizing this on a much broader scale. But even then, she said it's less about climate change broadly,

and it's more about this physical space in our town will become a, big, ugly box. So every, you know, the data center of every, every data center is going to have a different impact, uses, has different water usage. Like the water thing is largely going away with closed loop water cooling. But the energy usage is. The companies are telling them, oh, we're going to cover all the energy. But then here we go, quote, in Michigan, people had already been prined by years of rate hikes. So promises that a data center's cost will be covered ring hollow. There's just no trust that these companies are going to do the things that they're saying they're going to do. So even when a company does come in, and there, I've read a few cases where like, this town got a hundred million dollars in tax revenue and they're able to pay all their teachers well and blah, blah, blah. But most of the jobs are temporary. They're really well paying, but they're temporary. And then the tax things. So, so she actually in this thing interviewed Kathy Hocchel, the governor of New York, who's, you know, being criticized as this like NIMBY developer. But Kathy Hocchel sort of says, no, no, no. The point is that every local government is being overwhelmed.

by these corporate lawyers offering these things and trying to push them to make a decision really quick and offer all this stuff. And what I'm doing is saying, we are pausing this for a year until we get standards across everything, that every single one, so early ideas would include statewide environmental rules. You have to do a million dollars in local benefits per megawatt. You have to repeal the state sales tax exemptions so these tax exemptions can't go through. So I think it's a really fascinating article about small communities feeling like they've been taken advantage of, and see, seemingly have been. Yeah. And that's being a lot of like on the ground pushback on rather than just what you see on social

media. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, I like what you said about temporary jobs because I was looking into this. And it's they are extraordinarily well paying and the economy is bad right now. And there's people, people in my community who do like HVAC, you just travel the country going to these different data center sites and they're

making bank. Yeah. But they're not putting down roots in the town. And like it's on to the next one once you build anything. So this is weird. And then once they're running, my understanding is they require a lot less. Yeah, it's like, I forget off the top of my head. It's like a hundredth or something.

Yeah, there's. It's like a small number of maintenance staff. But the job creation is a temporary, all these temporary hotels and, you know, services spring up in this town. And then they just go away after two or three years. That was my surprise is that people are so quick to leap at this. Because if, if you're presented something like, oh, here is Amazon's coming in and creating like a big.

fulfillment center and warehouse, or there's going to be this large, like, factory. I feel like there's something more clearly concrete about the employment that those things are offering. Uh, you know, people could have their own, like, qualms with, like, those things being set up in your town as well. Yeah. But ultimately, it's like, oh, when this thing is finished and operating, it's a place filled with employees. That's the mental image you have in your head when you think about it. Right. But my mental image of a data center that's fully operational is like empty rows of servers that are overseen by like a couple guys. And it's interesting to me

that all of these towns are like leaping at an opportunity that has that long-term vision for it. Like I sure they know that the benefit is short-term. Or I feel like they would. The article talks about it as well, but you know, so it's worth,

it's worth acknowledging what can be good here. A lot of these are like Midwest towns that were hollowed out over the last couple decades. They don't have anything. One of the examples she talks about is this giant like basically where they used to be this massive construction. It's just this giant wasted plot where nothing is happening and would cost tens of millions of dollars to retrofit into anything useful. And a data center could come in.

They could do that. Generate the temporary jobs. But then as long as there is tax revenue locked in and the companies aren't taking advantage of these little towns to get massive tax benefits, then it's like, okay, if a town democratically decides to allow this to happen and you have Microsoft companies, in and build a big data center, you tax them. You tax the shit out of them. You should get a bunch of sales tax and property taxes from this. And then a small town that otherwise is hollowing out and has nothing at least has this just huge surge of tax base. In response, you have a big, ugly box ideally in a place where most people aren't living right next to it. So it's not perfect. But there is a

world where this is helpful to communities that want it. It just, of course, you can't have these kind of tactics. This is so ridiculous. I totally agree. If they could tax it, there's a there's way more because on some level, it's like these companies are the richest companies in America. They have hundreds of billions of dollars of throwing into this. You can siphon that off to small. Like you could actually turn that money into your money. There's a benefit there. But yeah, if they're if they're just out legal maneuvering that, it reminds me.

I mean, it's, it's exploiting the small communities. It's a, you're, you're backing them into a corner, taking away any of like the real long term tangible benefits they could be getting out of this and making sure they can't communicate with anybody else so that they can't figure out what those benefits could be and then plopping down all the consequences on them. It's usually deferred. It should say, it's not like, oh, I'm not going to pay you taxes. It's like the first 10 years I want to pay taxes. But then, of course, as is talked about in this article, people are like, none of these companies are profitable right now. What if you go out of business in 10 years?

There's nothing stopping the company from then leaving after eight years and they never got the point they had to pay taxes. So as long as there's an, as long as the local governments are at the negotiating table and don't get taken advantage of, they can get the tax revenue immediately. It's like, what should happen? Yeah, before I stopped uploading, I had been working on a big A clip a while back about the stadium move in, uh, I think it's the chiefs, right? I mean, I'm not, I'm out of, uh, but I think the Ken's, you haven't uploaded video in so

long. This is a video from December. I didn't upload. I'm going back on it. The chiefs were moving their stadium and they moved it, literally like one town over, very small distance. And a lot of people online were like, what an idiot.

The stupid city wouldn't give them enough to be happy there. They wouldn't let them upgrade their thing. And that's why they moved. And they lost a great franchise. Like all out NFL fans were thinking it was stupid. But if you look at the details, the company, I mean, sorry, yeah, the stadium, the team, like rushed through with lawyers, offered some short-term bonuses.

They pressured the whole cities to compete with each other. And they got the other. city, the other Kansas City, I think Kansas City, Missouri, it's like right across the border, to offer them like complete tax immunity on like every every aspect, like all of the money from the stadium goes to them profitably and they don't have to pay any taxes on anything it makes from outside of that.

I don't think I have the exact details. The point is they completely shuffles system and they made it so the tax base for the area cuts out everything near the stadium and all the wealthy neighborhoods or something. So they don't have to pay into anything. And only thing that pays into the construction fee is like the poorer neighborhoods on the outskirts. I guess would the city make the argument that there will be enough like economic activity

around the new stadium. The stadium would build. And obviously a stadium has more economic activity than a data center. But what they found was, uh, or at least unbiased estimates looked into it. And it's like, no. Some people show up for games, but there's only like 12 major games in an NFL stadium. a year. Like, they don't do that many. And the, the cost vastly vastly dwarfs it. So what they did was they like, fuck up their tax base. And, uh, and yeah, it just is an example of like a

well connected, well legally equipped corporation essentially using their information advantage to like get a law pass or something to get something to their benefit. And the long term it doesn't doesn't help the local town. Same thing in Chicago, I believe. Yeah, with the exact details. Parking or with the stadium. Oh. They're trying to build a new stadium and they're considering moving it out of, I mean, right now it's like right on the water, I believe, in Chicago. And then they're trying to get a new field built.

And most likely it's going to get pushed way out of the city because they're just being offered all these property tax work around this thing. It's just, it's ridiculous. Yeah. You would think that the two cities team up and they're like, hey, why don't we just both agree that we want taxes from this? And it's just, man. Yeah, when I was looking into it, I guess it's all not fresh,

but there's a huge incentive on the politicians part to be at a ribbon cutting ceremony, getting something built or released. You feel like you've made a tangible accomplishment instead of like just writing something down or making small tweaks. And also, you're not going to be there for the consequences that are like the reduced tax base down the road. So you get to have the big short term bonus. And it's like a political mismatch on incentives.

is what the stadiums thing really is well down to it. I'm sure it's similar here. It's weird because I don't really know what the solution is. I almost feel like you need something at a state level, but in the Kansas City example, like the cities aren't, the cities aren't in the same state, right? It's the split of the city.

It's right off the border. It'd be moving it to Indiana, right? Or Illinois. I'm sorry, I'm not good at Midwest. But like it's gonna move to a different state, which is crazy for like one of the most historic sports franchises. It's still gonna be called the Chicago Bears? Yeah. That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah, but you would need some sort of oversight that

requires like cities to like not negotiate against each other on some line or basis. That there always need to be, it needs to be like a minimum requirement for like taxes. Just the idea of governments playing different aspects. I'm sorry, corporations play different aspects of our government against each other to get the best deals is poor in the long term. It feels. It feels like that. If you were a billionaire, would you, would you, though? If you were like, okay, I'm going to bill, I have $20 billion.

Yeah. I own this sports franchise. We're making a new stadium somewhere. And I can save $2 billion because Indiana instead of Illinois is offering me tax breaks. Yeah. No, it's like everyone's going off incentives, right? They're going to do the same thing. I could tell you that I wouldn't.

But if I was a billionaire while old stadium owner, they're like, yeah, if you're a billionaire, you have a lifetime of decisions that led you to get. to that point. You'll probably make minisages very similar to that. Which point you'll be like, I will take the two free billion dollars. Well,

I mean, on the front of not facing consequences when it comes to taxes, I have a little update for you guys. Oh yeah? They finally got you? Well, they're coming for me,

for one. Didn't want to say that on the show. You can do a big, a clip on that. On you not pay your taxes? My tax audit. That'd be pretty desperate for a blow at that point.

You can't tell me that clip wouldn't pop. If I actually got audited? Oh, maybe. Maybe if I could really deep dive at your finances. Aiden is in jail. Aiden is in jail with you. That would be a banger, actually.

You do like a Caleb Hammer episode with me. We just... When I'm really desperate, I'll come back to you, we'll do that, okay? Okay. So you guys might remember from a while ago, there was this whole anti-weaponization fund that Trump and Todd Blanche were pushing for. The idea being that in as a trade-off to the scrutiny that Trump had faced from the

IRS a while back, he wanted an anti-weaponization fund put in place that set aside $1.8 billion that allowed victims of the government, for example, the January 6 protesters, to be paid out from this fund that Trump's, uh, select group of lawyers, or rather Todd Blanche's select group of lawyers, could make payouts from. But the other stipulation, and this got canned. This did not go through. We stopped it, read it. But you write. It's so funny that what you just described would be like talked about for eight straight years with Obama. It's like, it was just like one week. And then everybody moves on to the next insane thing. Dude, we're talking about the Iran war.

And even that's like everyone's kind of over it. It's like nothing sticks anymore. I don't know if it's a Trump thing or if like we've all just gotten short form video, but it feels like no story really has the sauce for more than one week. It's a little bit of both. It's crazy. Well, the thing, the funny thing about that is you, do you guys remember what the other little nugget or stipulation alongside that was? He can't be investigated for tax crimes. Exactly. He has indefinite IRS immunity as well as his family and their affiliated companies. Love that. And that was the other part of this agreement. You told me if you weren't a billionaire, you wouldn't run for president, win the presidency. You need a series of decisions leading up to having total immunity from the IRS.

And if I was it, and if I was a billionaire and I made all those decisions, I was smart enough to become one. Yes. I probably would go for this too. I would probably go for it. Can't, can't fault him. Uh, so he, they, they dropped the anti-weaponization fund and that fell out of the news cycle. But what didn't get dropped was this idea of indefinite IRS. immunity for Trump. And why this matters, like, Trump has already encountered problems with the IRS where he had previously was going to owe up to $100 million in owed taxes or fees to the IRS as an example of an audit that he had already experienced. So this is ignoring everything else we know about Trump. This is not a man with a clean audit history. Well. And Trump, you know, pushing

pushing back against this is that he's been unfairly targeted and audited more than other rich people. I've been audited every year of my entire life, which I have a lot of wealthy friends that were never audited to this day. They were never audited. I was audited. Mr. Trump said that. And you know, he tacked on, I've been treated very unfairly. Yeah. But it was asked, the interesting thing about this stipulation is that it applies to his kids and their affiliated companies. And it was asked directly of the companies, Senator Warren asked companies like Calci, Polymarket, American Bitcoin, whether or not they considered themselves immune to tax investigations or prosecutions because of their affiliations

to the Trump family. And those three companies that I just said did say that no, they don't consider themselves immune. Like are... It would be fucking insane to say that. that Donald Jump Jr. is like our advisor on our board. Therefore, we cannot be investigated for taxes. It would be insane. As Kalshi, that would be fucking crazy. But I guess, trust me, bro, for the entire history of the company. It would be insane.

It would be insane of them to say that. However. That's a story for two weeks from now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Other companies like World Liberty Financial, which if you aren't familiar with, this is like the crypto company that... Two billion dollars from the Saudis, right? Yeah.

that we've talked about on this show before, that the Trump's sons own, as well as a few other parties, they just declined to answer that question of whether or not their company would be immune with this stipulation in place. And Blanche has also pushed back and said that there are limits

to the protections that I am implying here, but is not really elaborating on the specifics of how they would, would not be applied. And this is pretty much the beginning and end of this for now. It's just a follow up to something that I think is absolutely insane. The idea that the president can get some sort of tax immunity because he's managed to appoint somebody like Blanche into a position of power,

his own previously personal lawyer, and also include his family in that. Yeah, it's fucking insane. Yeah, I don't know why he doesn't just pay the taxes because the truth social $100,000 monthly fee rolled out. It just happened and people are paying it. This is the exact same question again. I'm like, if I was, if I was,

if I just made like $4 billion off corruption, I'd just pay the $100 million. But that's not what got the billionaire to that point. That's the difference. He needs the fucking IRS immunity. I would never be in that spot. I wouldn't be there. I wouldn't be there.

Which of a cuck. We're little cucks who pay our taxes and follow on the subject. It's all my finance story. I read a really good piece that basically made the argument. This is a financial substack. He was like, listen, for the longest time, markets were an extremely competitive place in finance where they'd hire the best and the brightest

and the quants and they would make these algorithms and they would think about these ideas and they would have these long, short funds and hedgework. They would all find ways to compete with each other to get an edge to make alpha, extra money. And he said, it's gotten so brutally competitive at these top Wall Street firms over like finding an edge.

edge in the market, that they're all basically, like, struggling to get an extra one percentage or two percent over each other. Like, they all have the same ideas, the same investment ideas. They're all just basically putting it in AI. And so he's like, when you reach that point, if you want to grow revenue or returns a percent or two every year, the way you do that is you start cutting into tax, like, you just pay less taxes. So instead, all the innovation, the brilliant minds and the people they're hiring are putting

their attention more towards finding ever increasingly impressive ways to get around taxes, because that is a way for your clients to make them an extra 1% over your competition. And so the article went into detail on, like, we talked about the more common ways. Maybe I'll do a follow up on this next week. He went into detail on like, they are getting so advanced and finding so many. I was one example I remember. So you know, like if you have a, if you have a stock and you sell it at a loss, it's a, you can deduct out of your taxes.

Like if I invest in Microsoft, it goes down, I sell it, I can deduct that. And they would do these long, short funds where they would have, you know, you bet certain things, you bet against certain things. Some things would lose money, something that's made money. When you package all this into an ETF, you only counts as a sale for you when you sell the whole thing. Okay? So it's holding a lot of stocks that are changing all the time.

Like if you hold an S&B500, it's changing it all the time. So what they're doing now is they're taking all their trade ideas, putting it in to a ETF that you buy, okay, and you're not selling the ATF for a long time. But within the ETF, they are structurally putting in losers. They're putting in guaranteed losses that are deducting against the... And selling the losses more frequently, right? They're holding the longs and then constantly selling the longs, the shorts, to counterbalance it. It's like this insane financial engineering and it's all legal within our

current system, and it was kind of hard to do before because of algorithms, they could do it really fast now. So, yeah, it's just this weird thing where you're constantly including guaranteed losses into your overall package that you don't individually have to sell, but they can sell to deduct against the overall return of the fund. It's crazy. It's wild. I'll have to do a deeper dive because I didn't fully, I just read this thing, but it just made

me think of how obvious it is that, yeah, of course they would start cutting into the taxis because that is their, that's the last area. It's like when Game of Thrones when they have the rat and they're heating it up. There's only one where it can go, dude. They're just going through the tax base. And it reminds me of these ever-increasing ways they're finding around the data centers and stadiums.

We need one nice story to end all because this is actually a pretty bleak episode. It was a good episode. I really enjoyed it. These are all good stories. Chinese cars flying, or we could do meta-sued? That's, I guess.

I have a good one. It's kind of a win. It's a depressing story that ends with punishment, I guess. Do we want to end on like good thing happened or bad thing happened and they're punished? What feels better? Oh, I think people want consequences. Yeah, I'd love to hear about the punishment of meta. All right.

I mean, the real quick version, meta famously made Facebook. And so. That's that. And I've been reading an article. So actually in March, I talked about how they were ordered to pay 300, $175 million in penalties because they in New Mexico were determined to have violated the unfair practices act by misleading the public about safety for young users. But actually, that was a two-part trial, which I didn't know about. And then part two just ended this week.

And the second part was a different legal question, which is like, is the platform a public nuisance to teen health? And so the judge ordered that, yes, it is. And ordered a $567 million fine for harming teens health. So the total from that case is $942 million that MEDA is paying just in New Mexico for harming young people's mental health.

And they're being ordered to change how they operate. They are supposed to remove like counts now, which... Wait, what? Yeah. So the judge is saying, like, in order for this to not be a public health hazard... How do I know how many likes I get? I know.

And what's even worse, for underage users, they won't be able to look at their metrics to see how well their posts are doing. No push notifications from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. Wait, they're, dude, we are inventing the daily scroll from first principles. We are going to get there eventually. You guys think it's stupid, but every year we get closer to it.

Dude, I'm not even kidding. They're putting time gapped on certain notifications that's so daily scroll coded. We're getting, we're getting closer and closer to the daily scroll. You have to admit it. The daily scrolls coming. It's coming. And then unfortunately, they did a cap of, for young people, 90 hours a month. which equivocates to about three hours a day.

And unfortunately, Brandon, they did not say that those three hours have to happen at a certain time slot called the Daily Scroll. They will. They will. It'll take a few more years. The world's not ready for it when I proposed it, but I'm ahead of my time.

So it's a, dude, that's almost a billion dollars just in New Mexico. And two other cases. One of which I mentioned, which is that in March, a woman in Los Angeles sued all these social media companies, met a lost and had to pay her $3 million. dollars. Not a lot of money for meta, but when that's a single individual winning that against

meta, that can scale really, really big. A lot of people can win the same really fast. And also in 23, 33 different states sued meta for harming young people's mental health. That's been combined into one giant federal case that's starting to be held and go to trial now. So they're doing what's called Bellwether trials, I believe is the term. And that's where you basically, if there's a whole bunch of things that need to be trialed. You take a couple of them to kind of like test the water. Let's see how it goes. So they're starting right now. This is like, there's, there's like

40 states that are suing meta in some form for this. The trial's being held in Oakland with the goat, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Here she back. The same judge who did Apple versus Epic, the same judge who did Elon Musk versus Sam Altman and Open AI. And now she's doing like the nationwide

mega social media trial. She's hitting the big ones of the decade. Yeah. And she seems like Really good. So that's six. So meta is getting like crazy fucked. Ninth Circuit Court. There's the thing that all these companies use,

which is Section 230, which I don't know if I know the exact details on. But that's how they evade responsibility for things uploaded on their platform. And the Ninth Circuit just... The idea is like it's user-generated content. So we're not overseeing. We're not editorializing it.

We aren't the ones writing this content. Therefore, like, we don't have total responsibility. for the actual content. Right. That's the argument. The court through that argument, or at least said that you cannot use it

to dismiss lawsuits out of hand. You can use it as an argument within the lawsuit, but you have to engage with these. So that was the big shift. It is not a defense to liability. It doesn't provide immunity from being sued as they were trying to argue. You're not immune to being sued.

I mean, that's kind of a step in the direction of stricter punishments or enforcement on the government part making them moderate the platforms better, right? And banning people more effectively. If you're getting a billion-dollar fines, regularly, you better fucking change. We gave the example of how in China,

like a lot of the censorship that is experienced there is not necessarily happening through the government itself. The government just imposes such steep consequences on the companies that they do most of the policing themselves. And yeah, the fact that this is like the first, I think one of the first, big cases playing out with this level of consequence in the single state and this is all following suit, it feels like a step in the right direction at least. I do think the wishy-washy part to me was the

things like, oh, we're getting rid of the push notifications at these times. We're capping the hours. Because those are all the things that it's like kids just get around and I'm not really sure how effective any of those things will be in the aggregate. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I feel like that part of it still needs to be more substantial. But by sticking it to the company, hopefully they start spending more time thinking about the changes they need to make to prevent these things from happening. Yeah, they're calling it the highest profile corporate trial since the tobacco settlement, like the big, where all the states do tobacco companies. And this is, you said, 29 states in a week versus meta. That's kind of crazy. It's going to be a fall up on this.

We'll talk about it. Presumably, like many of these things, it will take a long time. And, you know, even with the removing likes, it's not clear. First off, Mehta's going to do appeal it. And then we don't know whether, will that be applied across everywhere or just New Mexico? But it's getting to a point of like, can meta exist as a company? Dude, it's so much bad news recently. It's crazy. Well, they got Lama.

That's the other thing. It's like, if they were crushing it in AI, I'd be like, well, you can't stop them because they're going crazy. But they're also losing AI, it feels like. Of the big tech companies, they're the only ones that I can really think. It's just social media, right? Yeah. But if social media now becomes, oh, any person under 18 can sue you for millions of dollars.

Yeah. Anyone. Like, how do you survive as a business? I don't, I don't know. There are, this is a crazy thing. Well, they have the metaverse. They do have the metaverse. Let's not rule out the legless metaverse. So TikTok is also being sued by tons of young people.

This is a Routers article. And they're settling privately. Like, TikTok is not allowing these to go to trial. So like Snap and TikTok are also dealing with this right now. And they're just trying to like stuff it under the rug by settling rather than doing what meta is doing. There are right now in Los Angeles alone, 3,300 lawsuits against social media companies for harming young people's mental health.

If every one of those is worth $7 million, and that's just in Los Angeles. Dude, they're going to be like the billboards for car accidents. It's going to be like, have you been armed on social media? Did you feel bad about yourself when you were under 18? If you're under 18 and you want to make some money, suit TikTok right now, they'll probably pay you to just shut it up. Not even kidding. Non-financial advice.

No, I'm guaranteeing this lawsuit will be profitable for you. Okay. Well, look. That's crazy. Wait, I have one time. It's like a three second story. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll end on a story because this is a good one.

It made me think of it when you're talking about Japan earlier. Okay. You said in these Japanese towns, they can't control all the bears. There's so many bears. There's a surgeon bears. There's a surgeon bears. Well, there's a Chinese town where they don't have enough bears, but they're kind of known for their bears. So they came up with a solution.

They're going to pay people $15,000 to wear a bear costume and be totally silent. China is ridiculous. They could solve their problem easily by importing foreign bears. And their xenophobia for Japanese bears. They do have crazy bears in China. We didn't talk about that a lot while we're there.

Yeah, we should talk about this more. And by the way, this is an available job even for foreigners, I think. So if you want to make some money, you can go to China, you can be a bear. You have to wear the costume. You're not allowed to speak Chinese. You can't scroll shows in media media.

Oh, sorry, I shouldn't say anything. And they want you to be playful with this. You have to kind of like be, fun, but still act like a bear. You have to act like a bear. Okay. So I'll end on that note. Little fun economy news.

Easy way to make money in this. There's always a great to find ways. This was a tough episode. I'm doing the mental recap of the stories. If you want more heartwarming, heartwarming content, you can go to the Patreon. Patreon.com slash lemonade stand where we do an extra hour

of the show every week. We also do a book club. We just did our book club episode on Disney War. It was really good. Yeah. We will see you guys next week. Thanks for watching. See you next week.