Lemonade Stand - The Big "Beautiful" Bill; OpenAI Wants War With Apple; Flying Taxis Are Coming | Ep 013 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

On today's show... DougDoug searches BBB, Aiden wants to file his taxes directly, and Atrioc joins the Fellowship. 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! Recorded on: May 28th, 2025 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Audio Listeners can hear us: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Yz44z9z3t8VQu4WRmsrs6 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lemonade-stand/id1799868725 Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7d7e1f54-49a3-4082-81e8-f70bfe1ace63/lemonade-stand iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-lemonade-stand-269417962/ Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Thursday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Lemonade Stand. Our top story tonight is the big beautiful bill from Donald Trump. That's right. With me today is my co-host, Atrioc. Aidan. Aiden. Who just got off his week of being psychoanalyzed by the comments. Yeah, that's true.

Wait, were you? Yeah, dude, so many comments last week were about, like, this is actually so fucked up that Aiden was excluded. I can't believe they truly. Oh, yeah. Can we? Okay, I'm going to crash out of them. Jesus Christ, right.

Breaking news. We're going to talk about our friendship. Wait, friendship discussion really quick. And then the big beautiful bill. I didn't rewatch the episode, right? Did we edit out Doug explaining clearly that they reached out to us? Because I got so many comments being like, wow, those two choosing to exclude Aiden. I think I didn't emphasize enough that one, we didn't really know what was going on until right before.

And two, we assumed it was like they reached out to us two directly. It's like, we're the streamers. This is a stream thing. They must want streamers. And also, when you're reached out to randomly and asked, do you want to interview Gavin Newsom? At least for me, I don't go like, hey, can I bring my friends along? Like, I don't do that.

This is a fucking, like, open house party. It's not a frat house. Like, I do it. It was like, yes, sure, dude, we'll do it. I didn't want to rock the boat. There was just a lot of people getting upset. Like, some people were legitimately angry on my behalf. And I was like, whoa, we can pump the brakes.

Okay, well, you cares what I'm going to crash out about. So I look at the comments, there's like a thousand plus. comments, right? If there's a comment on like, hey, I don't think Aden's position on Estonian property rights is right? Aidan's in response. A thousand paragraph response. If it's like, Aden must think these guys are pieces of fucking shit and he hates them. No, it. Quiet. Didn't feel they need to correct the record.

I let the, you know, I let the, just wear it all. I did respond to one. There was one person who was particularly vicious and just absolutely coming down on you guys and I was like all right buddy you can chill out

I'm here I'm telling you that it was fine it was honestly it is way way funnier to have not been there dude I thought it was so funny that's why it's way better than getting to be there

and give one softball question in 15 minutes like that's what I thought the story of not being there filled better time on the podcast than anything else. But. And just to come clean, I mean, Gavin News and asked specifically if Aden could join the podcast. I told them you were sick. I said you couldn't make it and we don't.

So that, that detail, I feel like that changed. You don't need to like focus on it. But yes, that is the thing that happened. You didn't mention that last. And we're moving on.

The big beautiful. Oh, look at that beautiful. Wow. Dude. Why don't have a bowl of time? I don't even know how. I have friends from like college.

I'm going to a wedding this weekend. And my friend was like, Hey, are you going to come to come to New York a little early for the wedding? And I was like, hey, sorry, I can't make it. He was like, I get it. You're hanging out with Gavin. It's like, that's like the whole thing now. I did look.

And like, I felt a little bad. But again, it was like not clear what was going on necessarily. And we're talking to people about future opportunities and being very clear it's got to be all three of us. Yeah. That's why we did it. For the people who have a parisocial relation with the podcasters, we'll remedy that in the future after getting the funniest possible story out of it.

And the problem was they're parisocial and they're in the comments, but they're not even in the Patreon comments. If they're paying for it, then I will... Then of course we're friends and I can hear their thoughts, but if it's just... That's why if you want an extra hour a week, you can go to patreon.com slash lemonade. It's a man.

We don't need to plug this. And we just did the book club episode too. Anyway, but we do want to get back to the big, beautiful bill because I think that has come up a couple times in the last few weeks and it's been a big, big topic in the news. But I think like many budgeting, spending bills in general,

I think it's really hard to wrap your mind around what does this actually mean. And this week, Doug is going to be helping us break that down. Yes. He prepared it for this episode. And then I think we'll fit a couple smaller things in here towards the end, like apparently in Los Angeles, they're trying to get some air taxis ready for the 2028 Olympics and also a couple follow-ups from the last episode. So I kind of want to get into this because I like my entire life is you hear about taxisies. like tax cuts or the budget bill and those things circulate through the news and I you know from even when I was in high school listening I listened to NPR in high school and when I drove to class

I was like this sounds interesting I don't know what it means because nobody ever explains what the you know 400 page thousand page bill actually synthesizes down into okay so here's the if you're too lazy to listen to the whole podcast here's it synthesizing to a single thing Right now, the U.S. is like a train heading towards a cliff. We talked about this last week. The cliff is the fact that our deficit and our debt are growing so large that eventually we will not be able to finance things as a government. And we are getting precariously close to a disaster scenario as we talked about last time. But thank God, Trump and the Republicans got elected because they came in with the whole promise and we're going to cut down spending. And then unfortunately, we looked out the window of the train and the Republicans are strapping jet fuel and fucking nitro rockets to the side and shoot. doing us towards the cliff faster. Trying to go so fast they cross the gas. Are they trying to jump the cliff? Why are we coyote?

Did it from last week? Has anyone thought about what happens to your country when you manage to hit like 300% dead to GDP? You actually come around the other side. There's a problem in the middle, but if you get a cross. It's like a speed bump. You go fast enough, you don't notice it.

The problem, though, is unlike what the Republicans think it is, it's actually like the outside of the breath of the wild map. It just stops you from going to. You don't get to like loop around to the other side. side. This is a flat earth situation. Okay. Um, okay. So, so, so I'll outline basically the core kind of vibe of what's going on at the big beautiful bill. And then there's a lot of different angles to talk about. So at its, at its core, this is a, uh, reconciliation bill. We can come back to that later. But that's less, I think, important than our Congress is voting on a giant bill.

It's going to affect a bunch of budget things. In fact, it has to affect budget things to even exist. Unlike a lot of other bills, this only needs a majority in the House and the Senate. meaning it's just, you know, 51 people in the Senate. Usually for people are not aware of American politics, you need 60 votes in the Senate. That's not the case here. And then right now, Republicans have the majority in the House and Senate so that they can just get the Republicans on board. They're good to go. So what exactly are they trying to do?

They're trying to pass a bill. It's going to change spending. If you pull this up, Perry, here's a nice, simple chart. And this actually is like... You describe it for audio people, just like a basic overview? It's just showing that what the bill is going to do is instead of... of reducing spending because we're way, way, way the fucking debt, we're increasing it. This is actually has a bunch of costs to the government.

This chart is a little misleading because spending an income. These are all estimates, by the way, largely by the Congressional Budget Office, which change a lot based on different factors. But this is basically just giving you a rough idea in terms of trillions. The estimate from the CBO is over 10 years, which is the timeline that I think is easiest to think about. It's going to add about $3.8 trillion to our debt. I also want to jump to and clarify.

That's the low end even. I clarify one thing. The 60 vote requirement in the Senate from my understanding is because we have gotten so used to using the filibuster in the Senate to stop legislation from being passed that you need

60 votes to overcome the other side's filibuster in order to get legislation passed. So if nobody is filibustering, then a majority is enough for legislation. But now we need 60 for almost everything because of how common filibuster-proof. How common filibuster is. So instead of then, you know, the idea of the filibuster is you have to get the support of the minority party.

Yeah. Like that's the idea is you can't just dominate everybody if you have 51 Senate members. But then instead they do things like this, which is reconciliation bills. We can get into the details of later, but this is basically a bill that gets to bypass that. Okay, so some quick outlines of what's going on. This, as a quick history, passed the House of Representatives last week. why right now it's breaking news. Flag. They're debating it in the Senate.

Yes. So it has to be approved by the House of Representatives first. It passed by one vote. The vote was 215 to 214. So just barely passed. Several Republicans are not stoked about this. It's now going to the Senate. It needs to pass that. And then Trump is saying, yes, I love this.

And he's the one calling it a big, beautiful bill. And then he'll pass it, right? So it's halfway through right now. It now needs to go to the Senate. In its current form, this is what we're looking at on spending, approximately. So, primarily, this is going to cost a shitload of money because it's going to make all these tax cuts that happened in 2017 permanent. So if you want a simple takeaway from this, the main thing that is going to cause a bunch more of our debt to increase is because all these tax cuts that we did in 2017 during Trump's first office are set to expire at the end of this year. But this is going to make them permanent.

As you can see, it's going to add about $3.8 trillion essentially lost revenue that we would have made. And that's over the next 10 years? Over the next 10 years. Okay. So $3.8 trillion. There's also things like we're putting $144 billion into the defense department to upgrade the military, putting 67 into border security. So this is for building a wall.

Just because it's $144 billion additional dollars. Yes. On top of us, so this is $850. So this isn't that big, so it's, you know, located in media. Yeah. If you are looking at the visual here, this is the change over 10 years of what we would have done otherwise, right? So this is $3.8 trillion more that we are going to be in the hole because we're losing all those tax revenues.

This is a one-time 144 for the Defense Department to upgrade, modernize the military and all that, which has some merit, although we don't have a lot of money, and that's one of the areas we can get into. A bunch of money for border to security all this. So this is why can't you upgrade and modernize the military with the first $850 billion? Yeah. Why do you need an additional? Many are asking. Many are asking. You know, that's a lot of money to modernize the military.

I don't think that's like the baseline. That's not like... Come on. Do you know how much it costs for a soap dispenser? That's like two more F-35s. Right. It's not even like it. It's barely going to get anything, dude.

The one thing I like about it is they're like focusing on unmanned drones, which is, I don't know. I'm not a fan of unmanned drones, but that is where the military is going. So at some point you got to invest in that. But also, $800 billion could probably cover a few drones. That's what I'm saying. I think it's like when we want to do new stuff, we're like, well, we can't take the old stuff out.

Right. That's the problem. We can't like cut our. spending on tanks we're not using. We have to still buy those. Well, what we can do is take health care from poor people, which is what we'll get into next. So yeah, you might be wondering, so this slide, I think, is the main thing. This, this massively impactful bill, this is, you know, going to be the type of thing that Trump and the Republicans go, we fucking did it, we delivered, we got you those massive tax cuts permanent. We're adding to

that, we're making the military strong. We're making border security. This is basically a, right? They're spending trillions and trillions of dollars to tax people less, less, in quotes. it's, you know, the amount that you're currently being taxed. It's not going up. More into the military, more into border security. But then they are making some cuts. So where are they cutting the spending? In theory, they should be cutting tons of spending

because that's what the Republicans are supposed to do. That's like one of their core tenants, cut taxes, which they're doing. And cuts government. It used to be the... Right. So they nailed one of the two, which is of their goals, right? Which is cut taxes. But ideally, you also cut spending. And so they are cutting spending primarily for medical.

Medicaid and welfare. So you can see on this chart for people who are listening, Medicaid, they're going to cut about 800 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years. Medicaid, put very simply, is health care for

poor, disabled folks in the community. There's two things that sound very similar. Medicare is for retired people. Medicaid is for very, very poor people below a certain poverty level or if they're disabled or whatnot. I have a quick question about the Medicaid cuts.

So my understanding is the way that this will work is they're employing new work requirements for people on Medicaid, which as a byproduct of that, a bunch of people who are currently on Medicaid will no longer have access to it. Is that the way that the savings happen? Yes. So we can come back to this, but the short version,

and you have I have a little chart for it later, the short version is that Medicaid covers a certain number of people and one of the key thresholds of whether you're eligible for Medicaid, where basically the government will pay for all your, your health care is your income level. So if you are, if you, it's about 134% of the federal poverty limit. So I think it's like $20,000 right now. If you make $20,000 or less, then you're eligible for Medicaid.

And what this is going to do is say, if you are single, you don't have dependence and you're able to work, you need to be working. Otherwise, you're not eligible for Medicaid. So it's going to take a large chunk of people who technically are able to work. They're able-bodied. They're not taking care of other people. you now, if you're in that position, have to be working in order to be covered for this stuff. That alone is going to be saving $800 billion over 10 years, but it's also cutting millions of people for Medicaid.

Like the reason we're saving $800 billion is not because they're negotiating for drug prices. Yeah. It's because they're kicking people off of Medicaid. That is the gist of it. Yeah. So other things they're going to be... That's insane. Yeah.

So that's one of the big ones I want to talk about. We can kind of get back to that. But, you know, the reason that Democrats and many people are obsessed. set over the big beautiful bill is because again, we're doing all of this saving and reducing taxes for people and the majority of it is coming from Medicaid and welfare. So we pull up a chart that I just said, Perry. I've shown this before. I just think it's relevant.

If you go back to your red one and then we'll... The red one here, yeah. It's just, you know, just to be so specific on where these tax savings are going, you know, it is not to poor people. It's not to, or middle class people. They're getting some. They're getting some. Yeah.

But proportionally, it's... Unfortunately, the majority of the tax cuts are going to people that make, I mean, the biggest beneficiaries, if you make over 914,000 a year, which is, you know, L.A. podcasters. And what, it doesn't, this, it's a ridiculous, you know, I mean, you can't put it any more stark than that than like, this is who's getting tax cuts. And the savings come from kicking people under 20 grand off healthcare. That's, that's crazy. I don't know.

It feels, I feel like a caricature. saying it, but it's like, how can that be explained any other way? I remember being in a Valorant solo cue game a couple years ago. And I promise this ties it. Okay, okay. It's pretty rare for politics to come up in that environment. Sure. But someone, I think I said, uh, I was, I just said something in the game.

And then one of my teammates said, I bet you fucking, I bet you're a Biden voter. And I was, and I was like, uh, I was like, uh, I mean, I did vote for him. Like, who did, who did you vote for? And he's like, Trump all the way, baby, or something to that effect. And I was like, really? What's your problem with Biden, man? It's like, you don't want to, it's like, he, Trump's cutting taxes for people like me.

It's like, he's helping me. And I still think Biden should win. And I was like, it's, this is, he's doing things. He's doing bad things, man. This is, this is not working. I, uh, that just reminded me of this conversation because, uh, I, the tax cuts are all heavily for the richest people. If you did not listen,

A TREC just put out a clip of the most recent Patriot episode we did on his channel, public for free, where we spent a bunch of time talking about, and more in the actual episode, talking about why cutting taxes

for the wealthy has consequences, especially in the long term. And this is just continuing to further the problem. This is taking the tax cuts that we pushed through in 2017 during Trump's first term.

and making them permanent. They don't even have an expiration date anymore. Yeah. The tax cuts, again, looking at this, the huge takeaways from this of this bill are the Republicans are going to make these tax cuts permanent, which is going to cost us enormous amounts in revenue. And then most of where we're saving money, if at all, is through Medicaid and welfare. And also climate change and other things we can get into.

So this started in 2017, the Tax Cuts and Job Act. This was Trump's big legislation that he did. And it did three main things. One is it cut down individual tax rates. So you as an individual pay less in the United States for taxes now. But again, we'll talk about how it's kind of distorted towards rich people. The second is small businesses.

So if you're small business who has like, to put it, it's a pass through business, but let's just say small business, you get a 20% reduction. So that was actually a deduction on federal taxes. So that's actually also a pretty big thing for small and medium-sized businesses. And then there was a corporate tax cut where they go from,

I forget what it was, from 35 to 21. Yeah. So, yeah, something like that. Like 35 to 21. And so there's just like absolutely, yeah, 37 to 21. So the amount of taxes that a corporation paid

was 37%, it goes down to 21%. That is massive. That is a huge, I mean, it's like billions of dollars in tax savings for major corporations. If you look at that, so I looked this up last week in the wake of recording the last episode.

Sure. Because we, in the main episode, we didn't talk much about raising taxes in the context of the national debt. I think that was because we, I think we forget because we talk to each other all the time that we had talked to each other about that in the previous like Patreon episode recorded

and then talked more about it after. But I don't want to ignore that part of like dealing with debt, raising, raising taxes. If you look at the corporate tax rate and the cut that we made in 2017 and the drop in revenue that that happens, we cut down from I think like 300 billion in 2016 to something like 200 or just over 200 billion the following year when this tax cut goes into place.

And then we follow those years with record corporate profits, right? So the number, even at 21%, does climb into like the 400s. And does, you know, we do see record corporate tax revenue in America, even with that cut. businesses grow so much during that period of time. But if the tax rate had still been 35%, you would be adding an extra $200 to $300 billion a year in tax revenue. If the corporate tax rate had stayed at $35 instead of $20.

Yeah. If you just account for the difference in percent and maybe not, I don't know, shifts in, offsetting the tax or dodging the tax. So there's three huge categories that happened in 2017. the individual tax cuts, the small business tax cuts, the big corporate tax cuts. The big corporate ones are already permanent. That already is that's not on the table here.

So what we're talking about is just whether taxes would go back up for individuals and small and medium-sized businesses. I don't know why the fuck. The corporate tax one was permanent and the other two which might actually help people aren't. Don't understand that. That's crazy to me. That was one of the big criticisms the first time around when that legislation passed. The idea that the small business ones were going to expire and the giant corporate ones ever well. I did want to ask.

question here is when we talk about these cuts for small businesses versus the way that the corporate taxes work, if either of you know the answer to this, how do you gauge, like, what is and isn't a small business of like who gets to indulge in that tax cut? Like, how is that actually judged and Yeah, so in this case, it's just specifically the type of business. So if you are a corporation, a full-on C-Corp in the United States, that's the corporate tax. If you are an LLC, S-Corp, anything with pass-through. So for people or not, so like we've all dealt with this.

If you're a small business owner, even if you are, if you're like a freelancer, you are a sole proprietorship, which means it's pass-through. If you are, if you make a small LLC to be a video editor or do it, you know, I don't know, a haircut salon or whatever, you're probably a small business

where the money just passes through from the business to you. And so basically they're the same thing, to put it simply. Whereas if you get to a certain size, you make a proper corporation. Yeah. It's a fairly solid filter of like,

If you're in a pass-through small business, you use these type of business structures and otherwise you make a corporation, which is bigger, it has more taxes. So you're saying if you're a one-man Uber driver or only fansperson, you should turn yourself into a corporation and not an S-QA-L-C-E.

Incorporations have a bunch of extra taxes. So that you can avoid the taxes. Those are corporations, they pay the tax, but yeah. But, yeah, no, I mean, there's a real cost to actually uping to a corporation, although maybe people want to do that

if this doesn't go through because then their cost is jumping up. It's all very strange. So let me finish the kind of overview of this and we can dive into what's interesting or what we're feeling because it's all, there's a lot here. So again, the main thing that this bill is doing, cutting a shitload of taxes and which is going to cost us a ton of money and then putting in extra money to Defense Department border, we are taking that money from not even that money.

That is a bad way to frame. We're mildly compensating for how much money we're going to lose and spend. by cutting a few billion. These are balanced. All this green does not add up to the way. And that's what this first slide is. Like, to be clear, we are not cutting enough to justify all the spending.

And so we're cutting from all these various topics we can get into. And that is really the gist of it. I mean, we have some interesting things because we already mentioned it or not showing up. Yeah, like here's an example of the idea. I made a little calculation or a little code. If we want to calculate how much money you would save

based on that 2017 thing, which actually it's already visual. So I don't need to bring up laptop. But I'll just leave on what you'd say. I'll leave on this. So imagine that you make, you know, let's say at the bottom here, $50,000. The idea, your tax rates got cut, right, in 2017.

That's the whole thing that we're talking about. So due to those tax cuts, if you made $50K, you would pay about $2,300 less in taxes. This is asterisk simplified if you were to itemize and do all these other things, you'd get fancier. You can see that if you make $10,000, the difference in that tax cuts and job tax, saves you about $360,000 a year, you save $2,000. It's not bad. If you make $100,000, you save about $4,000, not bad. And you can see $200,500K also several grand. But then if you make a million dollars, you're getting back $20,000. And in fact, if you go even higher, if you make $5 million,

your tax cuts are going to be $100,000, you're going to save $120,000. If you make $10 million a year, you're going to save $250,000. And so... We got to, thank God. Somebody has to ease the pressure on the eight digiters. On the people that make 8 to 10 million dollars. I agree. So I think this is an interesting graph that is,

you know, again, if you're just listening, essentially these tax cuts, which are supposed to, you know, the argument for tax cuts, right, is you still only get the economy. You get more money into people's hands. They'll spend it. It'll stimulate everything.

Exactly. Because you know what that 10 millionaire could use with that 250? He could all in on sheep. And then he makes it, maybe makes a big play off of that. You ever think about the stimulation? The sheep simulation?

I want to be more stimulated by millionaires and we need money in their pockets to do it. I think this is a very illustrative graph of these tax cuts that are supposed to help people. You know, the primary benefit is going to come from being incredibly wealthy. And so there is a whole lot to do here. And there's even a crazy-ass thing that they slipped into this bill, which again, the only way that this can be a reconciliation bill is it all has to be related to budget. So all of these things, they have to be like, this is related to our budget. That's why it has to be in this bill. One of the things they slipped in is that states cannot regulate AI for 10 years.

Oh, I saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there is now a- Just go through. If this goes through, there's a ban on regulating AI by the states, and it can only be done at the federal level for 10 years, which they say is budgetary because it's the federal government doesn't want to have to oversee the cost of what the state's regulation would do. That's a whole other crazy thing. So there's a lot to get in here.

But this, again, right now, this is going to. going to the Senate, the idea, the Senate right now, it's like split. So the Republicans have a slight majority. However, there are plenty of senators who are pissed about this. There's lots of people in general who are pissed about this. That analogy I started with, that was the Republican promise coming into this election was like, we're going to cut spending. The Biden administration's been spending too much. The Democrats spend too much. We're going to cut this down. We're going to eliminate the deficit. We're going to make the debt. And they are doing the exact opposite. And so there are all these people like I've listened to All In this past week.

That podcast is turned. It was Ron Johnson, right? They have become, what, like guests? He was a guest on all. At least not the one I just listened to a couple days ago. But they have really started leaning more and more right over the past year or two that I've been listening to them. They are like staunchly shocked by this and just like this is a betrayal of what

was Elon Musk is upset. There's senators like, so now we can kind of dive into any of this. This is a crazy ass thing. This is going to have a huge impact on our debt. People's Medicare. coverage, the whole principle of the importance of our debt and whether we even give a shit, it's all crazy. It's interesting.

I read an Elon quote. So we've talked about Elon a good bit on the show and, you know, taking, if you were to take Doge at face value and Elon's goals at face value, which I don't think they necessarily deserve at this point. But if you, as people who were making an effort to lower the deficit and cut spending, effectively. Elon looked at this bill as someone who's basically a part of the Trump administration and said, I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don't know if it can be both, must said. And he's been pretty critical of what this looks like right now, which is funny

because I, you know, I'm not one to laud his performance so far anyway. Like I don't think they're doing a, I mean, they're doing a good job to begin with. But it's funny that even Elon is looking at this and is like, this doesn't seem good or in line with what we were supposed to be pursuing. Yeah, I mean, it undermines everything he said. You know, like the idea of bringing the deficit even close to balance is gone with this bill. Yeah, he criticized it. Republican Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, went on a couple podcasts, just criticized it. Rand Paul's been all over TV saying, this is, you know, putting debt on our children.

It doesn't make any sense. So there's like two big ways you can criticize this big, beautiful bill. One of them is that it's cutting things that the government might be useful or important for, which is like Medicare for poor people. Like the things it's cutting are... That's like the standard, I would say the main critique that I would have and also the critique that is primarily echoed by the Democrats right now. And then you have this pocket of the Republican Party where they're staunchly more in support

of a balanced budget. And they're like, this obviously does not accomplish that. Please cut more things in order for this to get through. And the rest of the Republicans seemingly are just like, nah, fuck it, spend more. Which is crazy. Yeah. Which, I mean, it's crazy in,

if you take this situation in a vacuum, I do think it's crazy. If you take everybody at their word and what they believe in and what they want to pursue, I do believe that this seems crazy. But if you look historically over the past, you know,

30 years, 40 years, no, going back to like, going back to Reagan at the least, maybe next. Republicans do not have a strong history of balancing budgets in the United States. I mean, recent Democrats don't either, but I would say that Republicans are even worse in that they tend to cut taxes at the same time that they increase the spending.

I think the difference is like no Democrat has ever been willing to be brave enough politically to say like, oh, times are good right now, let's raise taxes, and nobody ever does that. but Republicans will cut taxes and then also increase the spending like the Democrats before them. Yeah, I think that's fair side. You know, I was thinking about that during when you were talking about your valerent, Esquipat, talking with the guy. It's like, you know, Biden, POV, that type of Democrat is fully willing to increase

spending as well. Yeah. And not increase taxes. So the deficit also blows out. But this is most likely worse because it also cuts taxes. so the revenue goes down. But they're both bad. What I'm trying to get at is like it's,

it's unsustainable really. It's just, it's problems for the young, for everyone who has to deal with it later so that you can keep things afloat now. It's kicking the can further and further down the road, but the can is also getting like more broken and spiky, the more it gets kicked. But also bigger and heavier.

You can't get bigger and heavier. It's picking up other trash. What's the one game where you can roll around and pick up trash? Catamari Damasi. Yeah. But also it's stupid because the Republicans ran on a promise of we're not going to kick it anymore. We're done kicking it.

And now they're going up with a fucking toe poke gigantic launch towards the goal. It's like, dude. Can I, I want to divert this slightly. I was saving this for another time. But I thought this comment was particularly interesting on the last episode. It was a person who said that this podcast is becoming too left-leaning, this fear-mongering about the national debt is such an insane, like, anti-right-wing talking point. And I was so confused by that, because hasn't moderating the budget and moderating spending,

at least on the surface, I'm not saying, judging by the actual actions, been a core tenant of Republican platforms for like 30 years? Am I wrong about that? Fiscal conservatives. That is in theory what the Republican Party cares about. I think this is creating a schism right now in the Republican Party between what you might call the tech right and the other right. I don't even know what the good name to that. Maga right, I guess.

But like the tech right specifically is clearly like this is a line that they're hitting because you're talking about the All-Lend podcast, but also Elon Musk. Also, there's like a, there's a clearly a uncomfortability with how blatant this is. And people feel lied to. Yeah, I mean, because they really ran on it. It was not, especially this time around. It was really discussed, especially among those circles. It was a really common talking point from people who were a little more, let's say a little more in the middle, a little more debating who they would vote for leading into this election.

I feel like for those people who weren't the diehard Maga crowd, the main reasons they were voting for this administration were to deal with fiscal things like this. Let me say something. I was, let me phrase this very carefully. I didn't, I'm not glad Trump is president, but that was one thing or I was like, okay, at least this, we have an administration which is explicitly going to address this. That felt very hopeful to me because that was not a focus at all with the previous administration. So when Trump was elected, although there are many things I disagree with him on, to that guy's credit of this has become two left wing, that is an area where I'm like, I super agree with these priorities. We have to get spending under control. At some point, our politicians need to address this. So this was an area I was really hopeful of like, That would be fantastic if that is a result of the past four years or of his administration or whatever. And this is, again, and I share, I think, that same sentiment with, like you said, many people in tech who is, a lot of who I follow. And the tech industry became super political in the last year before Trump's election because they were being told over and over we're going to deregulate and spend less.

And the deregulating piece Trump is delivering on, to be fair, but spending less. I want a villain chair this perspective for a second. And I want to ask you, your personal opinion, but maybe also your guys' overview of this situation, is this sentiment was super common. It was something I saw across a ton of people. I think there's a base economic concern of people who are like, there's inflation and my groceries are more expensive

and gas is expensive and I don't like those things. Of course, that's like the base economic concern. But when I talk to a lot of people, you know, people like my dad, for instance, or a lot of people in the world of tech or random people just in my life. They often brought up the issue

of the deficit and spending and solvency. Why do you think so many people were confident that this administration was going to address that when Trump did nothing to manage that in his first term? He blew up a deficit that was even larger than the Obama administration before him. He did nothing to curate,

the deficit in the first time. So why did anyone have the confidence in this administration to approach it any differently this time? Do you think that, do you think it's just timing? It's like, well, you just had four years of a guy you don't like or didn't perform very well, and you're just hoping the other guy does better. I just want your guys as maybe both your personal perspective and an overall perspective. I think for both me and more so distilling the many people in let's say the tech space that I've been following over the past few years, two pieces. One is the feeling that Biden administration was spending too much. It felt like this is causing inflation. Our debt is just growing at an insane level. This isn't

good. I have felt concerned about the amount of spending with every administration, but it felt like, oh God, we're even increasing beyond that. And so that was one. That was at least being called out. And so in theory, on paper, again, I didn't vote for Trump, but like the Republicans are saying this is going to be a priority of this term. So one is that they're saying it. And the second is Doche. Like they are putting, again, people who are hugely influential in the tech space, like him and David Sachs, guys who have been talking about this and find a huge priority

and saying we're going to give them the tools and create a space to tackle deficit. So there's a level of action being promised that didn't exist before. Yeah. figures that are being put into place that in theory we're supposed to address this problem. Right. And people who, I mean, because, you know, credit to them, they've put, I mean, a lot of people don't like this, but some very, very successful people have, are helping with this problem in the government right now. Antonio Gracias, as I believe is his name. He's another one of like this guy who's like crazy wealthy and he's now helping to try to sort out fraud and stuff like that. On paper, I think this was very exciting for many people in the tech space or center or fiscal conservatives or whatever. because you're saying, okay, here are guys who have a track record of spending efficiency in their personal business lives, they're being brought into the government.

And that was not really what Trump did in his first term, right? He was just bringing in a weird collection of people. This time it was very much like, I think a lot of the pitch of the Trump team was, or the Trump administration, when people were voting for him, was, look at this team I'm collecting, right? It was RFK Jr. And it was fucking Vivek, and it was Elon and just this like strange giant, umbrella. Just the worst Avengers movie you have ever seen. And I think that, that very

intentional, like, I don't think, I think maybe people who just hate Elon Musk underestimate how deeply loved he is in the business and tech space, how respected he is in terms of the success of his businesses. And the idea that a politician who's going to be president is going to bring in that guy and give him influence over the government, allow him to slash stuff, somebody who's done this over and over and over to varying degrees of effectiveness, that's really, really enticing for a lot of people. So at least from a more tech-focused perspective, that is what I saw repeatedly from people said to it. I mean, I can definitely see the angle. Right. And now those same, again, like literally the same people, Elon all in are like this sucks. We were so excited for this.

And this is the first time I've seen them breaks. This is the first thing. Yeah. There's a lot of things that Trump's done that you could probably break on or like Twitch on. They've been pretty all in his corner, pun intended. Yeah. And this was... They were like justifying tariffs. And every week they would... Right.

This same podcast that used to be, I think, pretty moderate and balanced, like, has become like, we're defending what Trump did this week or one week. And Elon is infallible still, which is wild to me. And... But this was a... This was a... I mean, because this is... What I think this is, you said it was like a betrayal.

It really is like... You can't be so direct in your messaging on what you want to do and then do it so exactly the opposite and not think people are idiot. You have to, you have to assume that everyone is an idiot to not feel betrayed. I think this is like one of the most direct betrayals of messaging. I think Doug answered it. I mean, I saw this firsthand because I, you know, I do economics commentary on my stream and, and I made plenty of videos during, especially the last few years of Biden where I was like, dude, this is unsustainable. We're doing a trillion dollars every hundred days. Yeah. I'm not happy with this. And so I attracted sometimes some of these people that

were like more interested in like, why don't you look at E. on it. And I think Elon was the big, he was the big magnet to be like, it's different this time. For these people. This, he's here and it's going to be different this time. And obviously, you know, I've been skeptical from the beginning on that. And, um, but I was also, you know, I liked Elon. I hope. Until pretty recent. It's been a bummer. I really, I've liked the all in guys. I was like, it was a long time. Because I just, I used to just admire him so much. And then the past few years, it started to be like, come on. Come on. And then the past six to 12 months is. really was like, man.

He just keeps running it down under tower. And I just, well, it's funny, he's like totally, like in the past, I'm talking about two weeks. He's like, done. Yeah. They either kicked him out or he's done.

He's like, I'm back to 24 hours in the factory floor. No, no, no. So this is, he said this on Twitter. He like quoted a guy who theorized this. And he said, he did the bull's eye emoji, which is somebody said, Elon tried.

And he was in the government, wanted to get all this cutting and spending. And he has realized that Congress isn't. going to do it and they don't actually care. And now he's going to focus on what he thinks actually matters, which is increasing GDP. Because that's the other way we potentially get out of this.

If our productivity grows immensely. So he has explicitly... That's a charitable way to play. Yeah, that is the extremely charitable, and I'm sure Elon would like to embrace that interpretation. Nothing says grit like sticking it out for four months. What are we talking about?

But that is, I think it's illustrative that the, I would say, the focal point of this movement to we're bringing in the big guns to tackle the deficit and make the government efficient. That guy, the face of it, the most vocal, the most visible, he has explicitly said, this is fucking hopeless, they're not going to stop spending money, I'm going to focus elsewhere. That's crazy. The super team, because I am now distinctly remembering, I read a lot of these.

Big ball. Substacks. No, I read these subsnacks. Big ball. Big ball subsets? I read these substacks from like 30-year finance guy. I just like reading their, or like people that worked in the internet. energy industry going on. I just, I pay for their subject. I'm going to read it. And there's these,

there's plenty of these guys are Republican. I'll just be honest with these. Some of these guys are like, I've been in Wall Street for 30 years and, uh, the deficit's out of control. And one guy specifically, he wrote this whole impassioned piece. And I'm paying for this. I'm like, I better fucking read it. And it's about how, listen, Vivick Ramoswami is going to make, use this guy as the real deal. And he's going to make Doge actually be serious. And before Doge had even begun, they kicked out Vivik. And this guy had to publish a retraction, you know, and has paid something. second and he's like, and it's like, you know, it's like a one paragraph attraction to a nine page article about, maybe.

He was like, yeah, I don't think it's happening. Dude, they just brought, they brought, I think what Trump did well is they brought in a team that was just a repudiation of everything else, right? They brought an RFK Jr. was just like, oh, fuck you. And they bring it to Elon, it's like, fuck you. and like that appealed the people who were just really, really upset. Which is, by the way, somewhat on a base level fair in that I don't think it was working. I don't, no, I think in general, the system is not working for people.

For regular people, for regular people, for everyone, for small business for anyway. This system is not working. Yeah, the anger, the anger at its base and the, is justified. Yeah. The direction that it is directed in and the people that get to wield the anger are not in good standing. The example I love to use is like, maybe we all agree that the one ring needs to get thrown into mortar. But if Gollum tells me he's the guy.

I agree. Give me the ring. I'll do it. It's like just because you say, just because we're in words agreeing on this principle does not mean that I can trust you. Dude, and then we gave the rings to Elon Bagan's who walked up to Mordor, looked out the landscape, was like, fuck this, I'm out, I'm leaving. There's too many orcs. He just gave up. You didn't tell me there was going to be orcs. It's been four months I've been walking to Mordor.

You're telling me it's going to be another three months of walking through Mordor? Yeah, it's a long dream. You made the whole fellowship and you're giving up like a... I'm going back to the shire. I'm going to form a lot of wheat. That's why I knew Doge was fucking doomed from the beginning.

At the very announcement, they were like, yeah, we're going to have this wrapped up by July 4th, 2026. And I'm like, we have 50 years of overruns

and government spending. You're going to solve this in a year in a year and a half. You're going to just solve it and be done. That's, I mean, that's so stupid from the outset. It's such a...

It's going to come out with a, of the, you know, full self-driving, and taxis, and the yard d and D. The Yard D&D. Okay. Are the subject of you... Let me quickly just cap this off.

I want to point a few things. We've been mostly talking about the deficit. And last week, the episode of you missed it, largely about how the debt of the United States really can destroy the country in a lot of ways. And there's an argument of like, if this continues, eventually we can stop affording things. That's ultimately the problem with the debt.

At some point, people will stop loaning us money. And when that happens, we can't pay for most of what's going on in the government. So this is a catastrophe that we are heading towards that the politicians are ignoring. However, for the Republican side, if you are a Republican, the, let's say, deficit and debt element of the Republican pitch going into the election, that has been soundly not delivered on at all. However, they did do other things, which is that they're going to cut tax rates. They're doing that. Assuming this passes, again, it has to go through the Senate. And there's a big question of like, what's the Seneca to do?

They're pissed there as well. But they, if this goes through, they did cut taxes. They said they wanted to increase and re-bolster the military. They're doing that, putting a shitload of money into the military. They're talking about the border, right? They're putting a ton of money into the border. I wanted to talk about the border specifically, because from my understanding, the majority of the money that they have allotted for the border is to continue building the wall. Yes.

And I, let's, let's, first, I want to start with, I take deep, personal grievance with this administration's approach to handling immigration right now. I think it is unconstitutional and immoral. But if you voted for Trump with the ideals of how he was going to approach immigration in mind, you wanted him to stop illegal crossings and reduce issues at the border, then spending $47 billion on the wall is insane to me. because as far as I understand, the current policy approach

has already radically reduced the number of crossings. That also is confusing to me. We're at an all-time low of illegal crossings in general and new people applying for asylum. So if you like his approach to border security and the goals that he had in mind,

it's like if the goal is already mostly accomplished in that regard, why are you okay? was spending $47 billion on extending the wall. It, which is... I mean, I heard a quote that is stuck with me, which is that to a regular person, any number ending an alien sounds the same.

When it comes to like politics discussion. It was that Stalin quote. Stalin said that. You brought it back to Stalin, actually. When you were talking about number of people that... There's a famous... A trillion billion million. It's all...

If you lose one dollar, it's a tragedy. If you lose a trillion dollars, it's a statistic. He said that. It wasn't about... money. I asked Chad GBT. I don't know if you're asked me. Anyway,

you know, I just don't think that is a factor to be. Again, I'll just point out that like, I don't think they hip- I'm not surprised by like the, oh, I can piece together two points here

and like point out some level of hypocrisy. I'm not surprised by that part. I don't think people look at things or analyze things in their day-to-day life in that way. I just think at a Why from a political perspective Why even throw it in?

It's like you've already won the battle, so to speak, on immigration. It's like why even what do you gain? It's like a powerful political totem to unite a base. I think it like is a physical manifestation that you can point to of something being built or done. It's like rhetoric. If you're up 150 to 30 in a basketball game, you don't stop shooting, okay?

Yeah, but you put him like the G-League team? I don't know. No, you give LeBron $46 billion and you bring him in. Oh, dude, wait, crazy fact about, okay, so the border security section, they're spending about $70 billion on border security in this bill. So two-thirds of it, 46, going to the wall. The other third is just they're like hiring agents and adding tech for, and border stations and all this stuff just to help with immigration.

And part of what they're doing, stated goal of having the capacity to deport a million people a year. That is the stated goal of this, is like, get the system to the point. That's what the other third of that money is going to. It's like, we want to be able to deport. How many is that a day?

Like 30,000 a day, right? Is that the number of three months? It's just not tenable to begin with, but it's also, I mean, I think it's immense problem with, when you're deporting a million people a year, you're not, dude, you're not deporting like violent criminals,

which was what the rhetoric, like, fueled, fuel that you're deporting people that have that have like lived here and suffered through the immigration system as inefficient as it was also as somebody who experienced it firsthand in the best circumstances possible it was still shitty and you're just deporting people who have like brought like crafted lives here pay taxes or a part of their community it's the idea that you need to deport a million people a year is insanity to me to begin with And that's what you feel comfortable spending money on. It's, it's, it's frustrating. It's very frustrating. Yeah, I think this bill's a disaster, man. I think this bill is like the first, not the first, many, many, but this is like one of the first big, massive rubber meets the road of like how unsustainable, I think, this policy.

Like all this stuff just now it's really hitting in terms of like what we're going to change our spending on. And it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't seem coherent. It seems incoherent. The whole thing seems like a bunch of petty grievances packaged up in a way with no plan to spend it. Can I hop in here with a petty grievance? One of the small things that they threw in,

and I noticed this when reading an article, was that they're cutting the IRS direct file program. Do you guys know what that is? Yeah. It's that new program where you don't need to use turbotex or all that, so you can just directly file with the IRS. They send you your return essentially and you can sign off on it. Yeah.

So there's this introduction of that option finally to have like a government available. Most other countries doing your taxes a lot simpler and a lot cheaper because the government, like the U.S. government has most of the information that you need to file and prepare your taxes ready to go. You shouldn't have to be filling out so much information in most cases, like the average citizen who's, you know, putting their W-2 into the system and going through turbotax and going about that, right? The, and there's been criticism to this policy from Republicans since the beginning. There's an interesting quote that I read from two Republican senators. I think Mike Crapo and John Barrasso.

His name is Mike Crapo? I mean, it's C-R-A-P-O. I'd trust that, man. Crapo, I don't know. I'm both crapo. They wrote this. We write with serious concerns regarding your agency's recent unauthorized action to create a permanent internal revenue service direct file tax preparation program.

The American people do not want an all-encompassing IRS acting simultaneously as the tax collector, tax auditor, tax enforcer, and tax repair. I think if you sold this idea of like the government is like taking over your tax submission. missions too. Like, there's a way to demonize which is so funny. Keep your government hands off my tax collection.

It's fucking absurd. Even reading that out loud as if it's their real thoughts is an, it's Intuit TurboTax lobbying. Spoken like a puppet up their ass out of their mouth.

The level of lobbying for that side of the industry is the way the reason, and the way this will be defended on the side of the tax companies like the TurboTaxes and the H&R block they say, there's been ways to file your taxes for free for years, which is kind of true.

I don't know if you guys have filed just a W2 in a long time, because all of our taxes, because we own businesses, have changed a lot. But when you just submit a W2 on things like TurboTax, if you, there are ways to submit for free, but one, they try to upsell you every other page that you flick through while you fill out your information. and people just, I think people, because taxes are a confusing process, they add on little plans and things as they go that they don't necessarily need. So the messaging isn't very controlled to begin with.

It's made to pull money away from people. And then for any sort of deductions or basic tools that you might need beyond your general W2 taxes, they charge you heavily for stuff like that. Dude, I give me a specific example. I mean, I worked it in video while streaming for a couple of years. And I was doing both. and they start to get pretty equal. And I remember doing my TurboTax,

NvidiaW2 and trying to add my streamer income. And it was like 10 pages in a row of clicking through. Every single one, it would fearmonger me and just saying that I'm missing some free money or that you can't do this. And then I wanted to add, it would pull me to a payroll. I ended up, and obviously I was spooked because I didn't know how to handle all these different things

at the time of a corporation setup. So I ended up paying for like the ultimate premium turbo tax plus package with three different bonus features. Like I was buying a battle pass for fucking Valerant and it didn't even do a good job. At the end of the day

I didn't even get you a job. Because it still requires your input as the person who isn't very, you don't have the accountant with you helping you sort through it all. So the reason why this stuck out to me is this is one of those things

I think like when you're talking about anti-trust legislation being utilized against like a grocery merger, for example. There's so few people lose on this being available. This is just fundamentally good for this service to be available for free to the average citizen. And the bill removes this, and they are promising that it will be replaced

by a, quote, public-private partnership that will still allow 70% of citizens to file for free. And from my perspective, this was a step in the right direction of making taxes slightly easier and slightly more affordable for people. It wasn't a program that was used by many, I think, only something like only 160,000 people used it in the first year, but I think that's because the marketing and communication around it was very bad. Most people didn't know that this had become an available option, and it had limited rollout in a bunch of states, right? But it was clearly, to me, a step in the right direction,

something that only serves to benefit the average citizen by it being available. And for some reason, in this bill, it's getting snuck in that we're going to remove it. And I think if I were to villain chair this sentiment, the idea that the government is inefficient and the IRS as an institution is not well run and we don't know how to effectively spend public money in this country so by handing it off to a private company

we can more efficiently operate something like this but it's already a service that has been dominated by lobbyist private sector companies for decades and it is the shittiest experience in the developed world as it is now and you're like saying no we need to make this one public option that we just got recently more private. Yeah, I mean, I just think even entertaining it as like a real thought is it's not. Nobody assumes that this person is speaking in good faith.

This is just a benefit into a turbo tax who spends a lot of money on lobbying. That's that they make a bunch of money. They have a monopoly on that. I wanted to bring it back to, you know, the criticisms that were levied by Elon Musk and other people against this bill because Trump responded to them just a few hours ago. Oh, interesting. and said he kind of deflected, you know, because he said... Yeah, we should point out really quick.

So this bill, this is old... It's Congress. Congress is making this, debating what it is. They need to pass it. So it needs to be passed by the House of Representatives. It was passed by the House. Then it needs to be passed by the Senate. And then the president signs it.

He is vocally supporting this thing. It is not his bill, but he is stirring up support. He's pushing it really, really hard. So he is super proud of this. He's taking credit for it. He's convincing all the replying. Republican congressmen to, you know, support it and trying to get concessions behind the board. So this is not his, but he's influencing it.

He's super insupportive. He has learned it his marketing prowess to calling it the big, beautiful bill. He is threatening to primary any Republican person who doesn't support it. Because again, they only need the Republicans to get it through. Right. They don't need any Democrats. And the Republicans aren't all on board with it because of all these different issues. Yeah.

And so someone asked him, you know, what he thinks about Elon disagree with the bill. And he said, my reaction is a lot of things, you know, and then kind of pivots away. And then goes, listen, we'll be negotiating that bill. I'm not happy about certain aspects of it, but I'm thrilled by other aspects of it. That's the way it goes. It's very big. It's the big, beautiful. But the beautiful is because of all the things we have in it because it's big.

Well said. All these fucking numbers that I've been showing, that's the first time it's made sense. Yeah, I think if we were. To wrap this up quickly, it feels like an antithesis, even if you were to take this administration's goals at face value, and a lot of people that are a part of it like Elon Musk, this bill clearly, even according to a large number of Republicans, stands against those goals.

And it stands against reducing the deficit. To be fair, goal, many of the goals that they stated are fulfilled in this. But while betraying this giant goal that was supposed to be there. Okay, can I just, can I, because I, I just want to make it so clear that this is going to get forced on us whether we like it or not. What I'm trying to say is like, I think for the average person, for our entire lives, it's been kind of like, if you kick the can, it, who can't, what does it actually mean? And I'm saying we're at the point where it is now, you know, I want to bring up, I want to see if I can send a chart here. Oh, the treasury bond. Yeah, that's super important.

This is so important. This is a really, really big disclaimer. This is the big disclaimer that kind of makes it real. Now, I'm sitting the link to, maybe you have a thing. But, you know, for our borrowing costs, which is like the United States goes out to the world, goes out to pension funds in America,

goes out to you and me, I own some treasury bonds. And they say, we need to borrow money to fund this massive deficit because we don't have enough to do all the things we want to do. And we'll give you 4%. Everyone in the world has now said no. That's too low.

we don't trust you. And so the amount we have to offer keeps rising. The U.S. 10 year and the U.S. 30 year are rising so dramatically because we have to offer more and more interest to get someone to trust us enough to loan us their money, which is like what happens in countries that are in these sort of debt spirals. Again, I want to say one more link in which you can pull it up. And I've shown this article before, but I think it's relevant right now.

Again, the IMF International Monetary Fund is talking to the United States like we are a developing country now in that we people are it's like if like i was going to loan aid money maybe i've loaned you money consistently because you're a deadby and you need money all the time yeah and then you know normally you've offered me a small little bonus as a little interest as a taste but then you tell me hey man i need to borrow more money than ever also i'm quitting my job also i'm buying a Ferrari i am not going to trust you i am going to demand more collateral more obligations higher because the risk has gotten so much higher. Let's swear to put it really simple.

That is happening now and it's not, it's not fake anymore. It's like this is, this is real and our costs are rising as we speak. Like it's becoming unsustainable. The world is looking at us like with wary eyes and people are pulling their money out of US assets. I want to say like Villan Chair,

let's take that guy's comment from earlier and say, your fearmongering about this, how bad could the consequences be? This is not a big relevant. talking point like people say it is. But we just made an entire episode about that. We did. And I think it was watching.

Yeah. And how this spiral happens in other countries, whether it's Japan or Greece or... Dude, Speaking of Greece, I showed you that link. Yeah. Dude, recently, our 30-year borrowing costs are higher than Greece.

We are the world's biggest economy with the World Reserve currency, largest military, and people are more trusting of Greece to pay the money back in 30 years than us. I can't make it clearer than that. Like, that's a problem. And that's before we cut all the taxes.

And, you know, so it's just, people will feel a measurable decrease in their quality of life. If this can continue, if we don't do something about it. And I think that's where I can handshake agree with someone maybe on the tech right who's like, we have to fix this. I think we have to fix this as well. But if no one's doing it, I think, I think also it's like, remove this conversation from the context of the deficit or the national debt. I do not think for reason, we spent it basically an hour talking about why raising taxes on the wealthy and byproduct raising taxes on corporation matters a lot in like a functional society. And I don't want to retread that entire conversation here.

But I do think a general critique of this from me is the idea that we are continuing to cut taxes, which is what we have done for the better part of 50 years, while we make cuts to things like the poorest, people's health care, food stamps, gender affirming care. I do not think that those things as expenses for tax cuts that are predominantly enjoyed by the wealthy while we increase military spending and border security spending is the right thing to do. I just think it is the wrong thing to do. And I say that with my big, you know, refer to the, at least the clip we just put out where we talk about why raising taxes is important. But that's, that is, you know,

that's kind of the criticism that I start with. And then you layer it with the pressure and the political, sorry, the pressure in the economic situation we're in as a country because of the debt. Yeah. To me, there's just no wins with this bill regardless of where you sit.

There's very few wins that you, that you can find. Again, I don't feel this. But if you're a Republican who doesn't really care about the debt of which there are many and you care about all of these other MAGA virtues, this is doing that. Sorry, if you're not, I think if you're not really, really wealthy and also don't care about the deficit in the future of the country in like an economic sense, there's not that many things to cheer for here. That's what I feel like. I do think there's interesting things to be said about like there are some tax cut aspects for poorer people and like middle class people. like the It includes tax

The growth of the We're increasing the child tax credit I think It has the It has the no tax on tips And stuff there's no tax on tips And no tax on time I mean I don't agree with the no tax on tips

I don't either But those are the things that are thrown to Thrown in there Regular people Yeah okay so you are right It's like you can latch on the tidbits That you can support It just feels like the general course

Of the bill has very I don't know I think in most regards It succeeds on what Republicans want, it just fails spectacularly at reducing spending. And so if you don't care about that, which clearly a lot of Republicans don't, and clearly most of the country seems to not care that much, then this is great. It's nailing a lot of what, it's reducing taxes for people.

If you're rich, it's great. If you're lower income, now there's no tax on tips and overtime. The border's getting more. The defense department's getting more. Like, it's delivering. You guys are right. It is delivering on all these. And there's all the stuff we didn't even talk about.

They're cutting down. they're increasing the salt deductions so people in high tax places get stuff they're rolling back a bunch of climate tax credits so one of the areas they're making money which we didn't talk about. We're going to save hundreds of billions of dollars because we're reducing all these tax credits that the government gave for clean

energy development. I think that's fucking stupid but if you're somebody who's like who cares about the climate, let's just drill, let's get more oil, let's get more carbon like let's do that. That industry is cheering right now. They're loving it. AI regulation. That's

being clamped down on. I should say it's like being solidified that states can't clamp down on it. So there is from a Republican's perspective a lot of victories here that is overshadowed by this monstrous failure. Speaking of AI, because I, unless you have anything you just want to add. No, I, I think we've covered our thoughts. You're so right. I think I'm ready to move on. I think for me to make a broad general statement of this having no wins, I think there is a very traditional things to cheer for here in that and you're totally right.

So where do you want to go from here? I want to go to not closed AI, Open A.I. Whoa. Which, to be clear, is it closed system. Yeah, it's a closed system, but will not be regulated because of this new bill. I want to talk about Open A.I. Because there's like a big business story.

I think it's interesting. I want to talk about it. In that Open A.I. Has just purchased Johnny Ives. If you know that is, he's the designer of like every major Apple product you might know, especially the look and feel. I wish I had a list, but like the iPad, the IMac, I watch, MacBook, almost everything.

I would say if you're somebody who's been interested in tech and like the, especially growth of Apple in the 2000s, Johnny Ive is almost like a deity figure in terms of the value he brought to that company. Yeah, he has that sleek modern design philosophy. That sleek modern scalp right there? And he designed, yeah, I got to hear it. IMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple, in terms of look and feel. He also was deep on how the iOS works, like how the sleek design of that. And that has been hugely credited with giving Apple a unique luxury brand status that allows them to sell higher marked up phones and make a gazillion dollars

and be the most valuable company in the world. Well, he left Apple a few years back and started his own design firm that hasn't really done that much. It hasn't made no ton of money. Some little one-off projects here and there. And then out of the blue, OpenAI, bought his company, for $6.7 billion. Again, this company made maybe $200 million in revenue

and profit almost nothing. It was a really expensive team. So it wasn't like it was worth $6.7 billion, except for it's an aqua hire basically to get him and his close design team, which means clearly open AI is planning to make a physical hardware device. This is a guy's specialty. That's what he wants,

that's what he's always been good at. Open AI is clearly seeing the future is we're going to get out of this Apple system. Because in the post-Mobile phone era, two companies, Apple and Google, have kind of dominated all of tech by being the physical device that you have to go through. Physical support system, whether it's the Play Store or the Apple Store. And everything has to pay them a tax. Everyone has to bow and scrape to those two companies.

Zuckerberg is talking about this. Facebook's a big company, but they've always been second tier to Apple and Google, who own the product that they have to be delivered on. And so that's why he was so big on the Metaverse and trying to make. glasses, and he's trying to find any way to get a hardware system out of the Apple universe. But he hasn't been very successful. But Open AI has Chad GPT, which now the fifth biggest website on the internet is getting 500 million users like a day. It's blowing up. People are using it. They're getting off Google search. It's becoming this big new paradigm shift. And they are thinking

that their next step to domination here to be to changing tech and making a new paradigm from the Google, the Apple era, is to make a physical device. Now, they haven't leaked what it is. But it clearly, I mean, what I saw, you know, I looked at speculation. I looked at like stuff that leaked, the podcast he's been on. The idea is something that is screenless, physical, carried on you, and is very heavy in AI. And I assume it's like, you know, you've seen those terrible rabbit pins. Yeah.

Those all did really poorly. But obviously, Johnny Ive is a different beast. And Chad GPT has infinite money, right? So there could, I just want to bring this up because I think it's interesting with the way tech has been and what this means right now. This is like such a sea change for the industry. I didn't realize, because when you guys had kind of talked about the headline version of this before we were recording, I think my expectation was he was just going to be dealing with the design of like the software or the implementation of how you interact with it. But the idea that they're working towards a physical product, I mean, I imagine some very good version of,

your phone that you only have to talk to that you carry around all the time, that seems a lot more of a trade. There is a prototype that nobody knows about, but it's been seen. Yeah, they said, they have made a thing. Completely captured our imagination is what they said. The first product they've been working on,

and it's, yeah, it's pocket-sized, contextually aware, screen-free, and is not smart glasses. So you assume it's like the rabbit or the pin, but he also said those products were very poor products that don't have new ways of thinking. But there's clearly something going on.

This is a clear push to change everything about what the tech space has been for 10 years. Can I say something? Die. Oh, sorry, I'll let you finish. It's not that crazy that Doug wants to talk about it, man. You cut my Medicare. I mean, if you want to keep going, it's right.

No, I'm dying. Go, please, sorry. Here's what I'll kind of give the tech perspective here. Fuck yeah. Yeah. Fucking yeah, dude. Got some cool ass hardware and shit. It'll be awesome.

That's kind of my. It's so rare to, when we talked about tech being like a cornerstone of the show when we were making it, I think one thing that I was a little sad about was growing up. Tech was so interesting because new physical things were coming out all the time.

And it feels like in this era of AI, but even before AI, things were so software focused. And the idea of a new game-changing device coming out, you know, except for the Vision Pro. Which was Game-Changement. Can you guys imagine life before the Vision Pro?

I can't even remember what it was like. If we could do one episode, all which Vision Pro is on. But I think this just, a little me is excited in the same version of like a, you ever seen like MKB? PhDs, like first YouTube videos where he's a little kid and he's talking about like a laptop to the camera. He's using like an old shitty camera.

It's really cute. And that's how I felt growing up when I looked at new physical things in tech. I was so interested and excited when just stuff would get announced and dropped. And this kind of feels like that now that you've shared it with me. It's like the idea of something new and groundbreaking finally coming out and not just, oh, it's the iPhone 17. Yeah, I feel the same. And there's a general sentiment in, like, Peter Thiel talked about this, where there's, like, a famous quote he said, which is like, we were promised flying cars and instead we got 140 characters, meaning that, like, decades ago, we're like, there's me flying cars in a decade or two. And instead, the biggest thing was Twitter, right? And so software has basically dominated the tech industry for the past couple years. Nobody really gives that much of a shit if the iPhone 16 has whatever, you know, new camera in it. Like, it just hasn't been that innovative in the hard of airspace compared to what it was in decades before. And the cool thing, that I would say is one of the reasons

that I think AI is exciting is that it is going to accelerate hardware development. And potentially this is going to come up with what you're talking. But as an example, self-driving cars, we've talked a little bit about Waymo in the past and it is, I got that feeling

when I got into Waymo. I was like, oh my God, future. I was just pointing at the car and going, future, future. When my Waymo stopped on a dime to avoid hitting the homeless guy that walked into the street, I was like, that's crazy.

crazy, I would have hit that guy. Like, this is, this is an insane thing that the car just stopped itself in front of somebody. It is cool to see tech that makes you think future. Right. They just be like, this is the future. And it's been rare. And this is a major jump up from what we are used to. And one of the cool things that AI will enable is that it will allow a massive acceleration

of robotics. So one of, for example, with something like Optimus, Tesla's robot, or there's many, many, many different companies making hardware now. Nvidia talks about this a lot. They are specifically designing chips that are going to allow physical systems to simulate an environment. And the idea is like if training a robot from scratch to move like a human would take decades to really get right, instead of having them physically train in your lab for eight hours a day, you can have them run simulations, let's say, mentally, and do a million of them in a day.

And so the level of the rate at which robots can learn to interact with complex environments is going to accelerate to a degree, which that makes all of these things feasible that weren't before. The idea is you could build a system that can automatically build a house whereas before that is too complex. So AI is dramatically accelerating robotics. So I think these types of things

are going to be much more rapid over the next 10 years. Every year or two we're going to be like, holy shit, did you see this? I think you have an example of it. Yeah, it's cool that this links together so well because I didn't know about this at all and there's this announcement,

at least a hopeful announcement, of these new air taxis being introduced in Los Angeles, the company called Archer Aviation has been working on these air taxis, and they're trying to get them approved by the FFA, FAA, in time for use at the 2028 Olympics. They're hoping, apparently, to get them approved by the end of this year for commercial use, at least for testing. and I kind of saw this at first and I was like, you know, what's the difference? Is this really that different than just a helicopter?

Yeah, how is this actually different? And I don't think it's true. I think the big changes from what I can read looking at the article is it has way more space, way more engines, and is way quieter than a helicopter. And it's something that is more suitable for common public use than a helicopter is.

Because when you're near a helicopter, it's incredibly loud. Like, it's something that is not fun to be around. And if you had helicopters flying to the same degree of traffic that, or even a comparable degree of traffic that cars were around the city, it would be miserable. And I think the idea is, you know, shutting down the noise pollution aspect

and helping L.A. meet this insane goal that they have of no car, for the 2028 Olympics. They want to remove cars from transportation as much as possible for that event. Or at least that was the stated goal a long time ago.

With some venues still having parking for certain events, but strengthening public transportation enough in L.A. That the, I mean, the amount of people is being for that event to be a massive, massive cluster. I would love if we're all flying around in air taxis.

I guess I'm a skeptic on how L.A., which is already so choked, is going to stomach the, I mean, L.A.X alone, the increase in travel all in that U-turn loop. We got the people mover coming. You know about the people mover? Yeah, people mover's going to save us. I mean, there are little changes. You know, there are little changes L.A. has managed to make in the expectation of the Olympics coming in 2020. And little things like this, I do not think this air taxi company is going to be a central park.

No. The part of what relieves traffic. Imagine it is that we're all just fucking zipping around. I think I was more intrigued by the idea of a more efficient, quieter helicopter being invented that had reasonable use for, and is decently affordable enough for a normal. person to use to get around a city. That is kind of intriguing, right? This is almost back to the future idea. I don't know how.

Yeah. They haven't said anything about what pricing will be like. Is it driverless? I think, I know those are being developed, but there are different levels of regulation. I feel like, I haven't followed it. I don't think it says it is, but there's no way they approve a driverless version.

Not to start, but so there's a bunch of companies that are doing this and then they're farther along in the Middle East is my understanding. Last, I looked in this was like a year ago. so it's probably out of date. But this is an industry that's booming. And then obviously regulation is just one of, if not the most challenging thing.

It sounds like most of these are functional and work and are cool. So I think the value of the excitement of the 2028 Olympics is not that these are going to fly everybody around, but that might convince the city to approve some of it and then it actually starts, right? Because just that first step is what's important, just proving it a little bit.

So if there's 10 of these flying around during the Olympics, that would be a big exciting media thing, right? You're talking about, they're going, oh my God, in L.A., there's flying taxi. And that would be, I think, the impetus for then it to really start expanding in a major way. Did you ever see in, I think it was in New York, they tried Uber helicopter for a while.

I don't think it's available anymore. And there's this viral tweet from years ago of somebody trying to get an Uber from Manhattan to JFK at like peak surge pricing, and they show the Uber options on their phone, and the normal Uber X is more expensive than the Uber helicopter to JFK.

And I think as far-fetched as this seems for widespread availability in the near future or by the 2028 Olympics, the idea that something like this could be decently accessible one day is pretty cool. Yeah, it will accelerate. It's gonna accelerate. It's like with driverless cars.

Like most people in the country, statistically have not tried a driverless car. And it still seems like this kind of weird foreign. Even most people in LA haven't tried one yet. Yeah. But the rate, do you guys remember when Uber first started coming out and you heard about it? It was like, oh yeah, you couldn't call their phone. It's like, what?

And maybe you were out like after a bar or something. Or somebody like, no, no, you should try this thing. And then like a year later, it's ubiquitous. Oh, it's so cheap. Wow. Yeah, that's awesome. It was $5. It was so cheap.

While we're talking about, um, well, Wamo, you know, mentioning self-driving. Can you pull this image up, Perry? I'm sending you an image through. I don't know if you can. But they, you know, living in L.A., you see them all the time now.

I don't know if you guys are. Yeah, yeah, they're around everywhere. And the ridership data, which we're going to pull up here in a second, is gaping up huge. Wow. It's like really, really spiking. And they just passed 10 million total rides. And, you know, it is starting to hit that breaking point.

At least here in L.A., where it's like people are familiar with it, they're comfortable with it, and the word of mouth is spreading. Like the rides are going consistently well enough that people are willing to give it a try. And then you're seeing it everywhere, which is like a kind of a marketing tool.

You know, what's funny is all the extra stuff is kind of like a marketing tool. Yeah, the fact that it's not a standard vehicle and stands out so much is the reminder that this is different and you should go ahead and try. And also makes you feel safer almost all the extra bells and whistles. So anyway, it's been working.

It's funny that, you know, as we approach Tesla's big June, Austin day that they've been talking about. Perry, can you try to find that what the supposed launch date is? In theory, Tesla is launching driverless cars in Austin, Texas, within the next month. And I don't think it's going to happen. But yeah, sorry, go ahead. I don't know if it's going to happen, but like it kind of needs to because they keep talking like they're the leader or the forefront of this. And as Waymo passes 10 million rides with like a better safety statistic, less, less accidents, less, as far as I don't know, major, maybe I'm the wrong.

Maybe there's a couple borderline, but like the track record is good. Now, I will say this. I want to give some counterpoints that I've seen a lot of is that people are noticing as Waymo's drive more and more on the road that they are notorious tailgators. Like they'll, so people are break checking them all the time. And I noticed it. I was robbing to a dinner recently, and it was like on my ass. And I was like, get, get off me.

It makes me a comment. You are a boomer. Like it does. So there's like complaints going around. But as far as I know, they just are really insanely fast. June 12th. That's in two weeks. Yeah.

Oh, that's so soon. There's no way. Wow. And they're expanding. Waymo's expanding to South Bay and San Jose and I think other places. So it's like, it's happening. They are rolling out. And I wonder how that's going to.

measure up as Tesla has been doing a lot of talk for years now, finally has to deliver. They have to have this robo-taxy service. Don't put it. I'm going to do it here. You just got to. I'm just going to scream from the distance. You just got to keep it with you.

It's like in my way. It's in my way. Okay. The one thing I wanted to bring up because we were talking about the Olympics in L.A. And you were talking about what a disaster it's going to be because we don't have very good public transportation infrastructure here. And there's so many people that come to attend such a global event like that.

And there's this weird thing with L.A. That L.A. is like particularly suited from a financial perspective to host the Olympics because all of the facilities are already built. Yeah. The city is big enough. That all of these things get reused all the time.

Unlike most cities, there isn't this gigantic expense to the country to host the games, to which most of these countries do lose a ton of money on and then have these like ghost stadiums and buildings after the fact because they needed them for just that portion of time. And L.A. is perfect because all of these facilities exist. But then it is coupled with the fact that we're the only major airport in the world with like without a tie to like a train. That's supposed to be getting built. We like suffer from horrendous traffic. Our metro access is so few areas of the city

relative to what it needs to. It's an unfortunate clash of the city is uniquely suited to host the Olympics and to not host it at the same time. Yeah, LAX is going to be a nightmare. I just know it will. I just know we're going to have headline think pieces

on how LA's infrastructure has failed this. It's going to happen. That's great. No, I'm curious. We're going to, somebody is going to go into the loop at LAX and come back out of changed, man. Like 10 years later, you've gray hair. I think this is great.

You're going to have all these famous people from around the world come into L.A. L.A. and see that respectfully it's a shithole. And that will cause way, way, way more motion towards changing things. Necessity is the mother of invention. Having a bunch of prominent diplomats from other countries stuck in the U.

And L.A.S. is the mother of invention. Talking about the weakness of American transformation. What was that when he visited San Francisco, the tweet about nothing cleans up the streets of San Francisco like a Xi Jinping? Oh, dude. Like, okay, can you imagine how many media outlets are going to be showing images of L.A. traffic and L.A.X

and then show videos of China high-speed rail. Like, they're going to embarrass us, and it's going to be awesome. I think it's great. It's going to be a great thing for the future. It's not that far away, which is crazy. One thing I wanted to talk about is, I think in the spirit of,

We've talked a lot about how we're open to feedback, open to corrections on the show, and we did a big episode about Greece, Greece's national debt, the consequences of national debt last week. And someone had a really good follow-up in the comments. And they said the main correction on Aiden's presentation about Greece. Greece, during the quote, good times, did save money, asterisk. They actually saved a lot of money. They just chose to save money on low-risk projects and infrastructure on top of many social

welfare programs. Now going to the asterisk part, the great crisis of 2008 for Greece wasn't that they were in debt. It was that their assets were not possible to be liquefied at the time because the assets were either overestimated or fake altogether coming to the Lagarde List scandal. The Lagarde List scandal is a list of politicians that were responsible for faking the numbers of Greece's assets, progress of investment plans, e.g. infrastructure plans, et cetera, and product of the public sector. The actual scandal is in the fact that this list with the names was, quote,

lost when demanded from European court for due process, but the scandal of faking our economical status is a whole different case in itself. So when the crisis hit, what Europe had considered as prerequisites for member states to stay afloat ended up not being existent,

even though stated as existing. So yeah, Greece is a very special shit hole. I am from there, chill, with a very special case for its economic crisis, and I'd say that it's not comparable to any other nation. And a couple other people brought this up as well, that their initial, what he's kind of getting at here is that their initial entry to the European Union was defrauded. Like, they had faked a bunch of economic data about their country in order to get into the

European Union in the first place. And when this all played out, it came to light that they had lied about so much. of what got the membership, which was why this was even more of a controversy in the European Union. And I thought that was interesting because that was a little bit of context that I didn't really have in the presentation.

Good for them. You know what I'm saying? Sometimes you've got to line your resume to get the job. Yeah, to get the job. You got to do what you got to do. And then they got to keep it. They couldn't get fired. Apparently they wrote the whole budget

with Chad GBT. In 2008, which is actually ahead of the game. Greece was using Chad GBT when it was telling Dendi how to play Dota. That was the first, I think I talked about that. This is the first time I ever interacted with the companies. I watched the Open AI Dota AI fight against Dendi in a 1V1 at the international. You know, that's not even, you're making a joke.

It's not even that wild because the Greece finance minister left that job to work at Steam to do their economy for CSGO. That was the guy they hired? Yeah. I'm not kidding. You're fucking... Isn't that crazy? No, you're lying.

I'm not, I'm absolutely not lying. Are you serious? You look at... I literally thought... Look at Yanis Varofakis and Steam. Look, look, look, look. Yeah, this was a big thing.

They hired because I remember... Greece's new finance minister, VALV's former steam market economist. Sure. Ten years ago. The fate of the Eurozone economy could well be in the hands of a man who once monitored

the sales of virtual goods via micro transactions in Doted 2 and counterstrayed. Okay, wait, so he started at Valve. I know he was a big economist. I would have, I just want to be clear, I would have bet my life you were fucking with me. Yeah, I'm not. I read his book. That's insane.

Not that guy. His name is Yanis Varifakis. Now, I've read this guy's book. Talking to my daughter about the economy. Yeah. I mean, you can look up Greece market economist's theme. Wait, why is it hard to spell Yanis your eponymous? Come on, dude. Type in Yanis?

Jesus Christ. No, not like that. No, if you just searched Greek politician who worked at Steam. Yeah, he was this, like, very well-known economist, and it was this big deal when Valve hired him because it was literally Valve was, like, essentially the first company to do micro-transactions,

and they created the whole economy, and they're like, we're going to hire an economist. It was a wild thing. I remember that story back in the day. I thought he, I think he did something for Greece prior, then went to Steam. That's what I remember as well. And I don't think we should fact.

check that. Let's go off vibes. It's a podcast, dude. It's not about facts. Come on. Anyway, he's interesting. And Valorant.

He gives you autism. Yeah, that's just, that's just, that's just, that actually, common knowledge at this point. If you just tacked that in there, that might get you demonitize.

It's a YouTube thing at the bottom where it's like, this Valorant's, because I've been back checked. It is just like, replace the word that he said with a different word from the episode. Don't have the V word there. Have a different one. Valerate.

Use a valet. The Valerite gives you autism. That's Roulette. The CDC actually backs that one up. No, no, no, no. It's vaccines give you Valerie when he thinks about that one. I think even Fauci would agree. Valerite's got a root cause there.

Guys, we got 10 seconds. What's the most urgent story we can cover in the last 10 seconds of this episode? We have 10 seconds? Yeah. Okay. What is the most urgent story? What if people like either at the end of the same?

What do I need to know in the next 10 seconds? seconds on order to get by for this next week. What if we are breaking news? On July 27th,

I'm going to find Donald J. Trump in his home. Okay. Cut it. Okay. No, I've got it.

You got a story? So, there's a lot, but it's, pretend I want to go longer. Right, right, right. So what I want to do

is cover more stuff that's kind of like breaking, right? So something I really wanted to talk about is scrolling. Uh, U.S.

Court blocking Trump's tariffs, the bulk of which will be temporarily caused. And that was kind of high- I have a lot of talk about on the, you know, there's a longer story so we have to go to the next episode. But I'll talk about Trump being called

Taco by Wall Street. Taco is an acronym that I'll take you what it is later. Nah, you shouldn't have said that. That was way, way better without the second sentence. That's the end, everybody. Thanks for watching the next time.

Be sure check out the Patreon if you want more of us yapping. Anything else? No, we got to do the paper. on the way up. Oh, right. Saving to each other that now...

Thank you so much for watching Lemonade Stand News.