Lemonade Stand - The Markets Have Gone Crazy | Ep. 074 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

On this week's show... Atrioc draws numbers, Aiden goes off script, and DougDoug makes a game show. We launched a Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/lemonadestand for bonus episodes, discord access, a book club, and many more ways to interact with the show! Episode: 074 Recorded on: August 4th, 2026 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Thumbnail by Cheyenne DeWolf - https://x.com/cheyedewolf Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh Segments 0:00 Intro 1:36 Stock Market Under The Surface 6:43 Leopold Aschenbrenner 10:16 Explaining Leverage 19:12 Prediction Market Bans 28:51 Leesa Ad 30:41 Devolving to its base form 36:20 Financial Nihilism 41:14 Demand for Math Geniuses 46:14 Flock Camera Cancelations 56:41 Trust In Government 58:31 Anthropic Ad 59:41 South Africa's Vigilantes 1:11:39 Bud Light Falls 1:19:03 Nordic Fun Fact 1:26:25 Insurance Fraud 1:34:45 Outro New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Wednesday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Could you pick it up for me, please? I need you to pick it up for me. It fell closer to you. Hold on, hold on. Thank you. Can you back up your chair like one second? I think your shoes are on time. Maybe like, look, can you look down in check?

Can you look down in check, please? No, don't do it that way. Like, I need... What do you do it? I need you to pick up my bed. I got your pen. You're doing it in the wrong. Never mind.

Welcome back to Lebanon and A, everybody. It's good to be back this week. There's dire news. Dyer news. That's not what it is. I heard... That's not what it is. I'm taking control.

You're going crazy. How do you explain how good my portfolio is doing? I throwing stuff at me. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the lemonade stand. Okay? This guy has been squeezed like a tube of toothpaste by his other podcast to the yard. We get a desiccated husk of a man.

We get a husk of a man. They drop him off after school. He's wiped and tired. And we have to, say, Aidan, tell us about the markets. What do you think about Korea? And he's just drop a pen to try and harass me, I think. I'm loaded with pace for you guys.

You've got pace? I've got pace left. Why don't you just tease the paste? We're talking about today. You got to go bottom up. They squeeze from the middle. They would. They would squeeze them.

They're lazy. They squeezed through the middle. All right. We'll squeeze you bottom up today. Let me just crack over the delicious. Stop! With the Red Bull. Guys, we're getting off track.

I don't want to bring you in. You know what else is getting squeezed like Aiden is? Like a two to do is. Investors. in this crazy stock market. Wow. That's a transition there. That was good.

Today, well, you have to, Perry, you got to be on the, you got to be on the slides. You can I, he's on the camera. Can I be honest with you?

Yeah, be honest with me, Aden. Because you're saying the investors are getting squeezed. Yeah. And I opened the New York Times this morning. Yep. And the SMPs at a record high. We had a record high today.

Which means that everybody at home is probably doing fine. Yeah. Regular people rejoice. Dettys. How do you explain? the thumbnail that presumably shows a big giant red arrow pointing downwards. How do we explain? That's a great question.

How do we explain that we've somehow framed this? I'll get to that. Okay. So today, the U.S. stock market hit record highs. The S&B at all time highs. And of course, it was due to the greatest reason of all time. A deal to open whore moves is imminent. Thank God.

Finally, we have this piece of news in this podcast. We've never covered this before. It's always been something we've been hoping for. A highest quantity of deals of any president I know. Well, deals announced. And what's awesome is that the market took this and ran with it and a rent-record highs, even though not but 18 hours before this, Iran had said there absolutely has no talks on Hermuz. And I feel like we've done all this before.

So this is not what today's about. Today's not about the S&B 500 or the broader stock market, which again is following the Iran War. But it is about some really weird stuff that has been happening in normally very successful sectors of the stock market until very recently. And that's like AI, tech, magnificent seven companies, like memory companies, all of them are seeing what you might call volatility, a lot more wild swings. And that is causing weird things to happen, like people getting, people who are normally very rich and successful to get wiped out. Or like we've talked about with Korea, a huge part

of the country, one in 30 Korean adults to lose their savings in one day. So that's what we're going over. Today, literally today, AMD and SpaceX, two successful companies, both of which reported record-breaking earnings. And any time other than recently, both of these would have been surging, they both plunged after hours on great earnings. It's a weird, people are responding to very AI-exposed companies a little bit differently. Mag 7 stocks in this last month shed 2.2 trillion combined. Some did good, some did bad, but it's a net outflow of Mag 7, which were dominating in previous year. F.T. printed the end of the

mag seven and had this fucking, uh, what is the poem from, uh, Robert Frost. No, that's the only poem. Shell Silverstein. No, you guys, it's Breaking Bad references it. It's got a big statue. Perry, you got to know it.

Shakespeare? Breaking bad, one of the episode. I'm not going to move on until we figure this out. It's too, it's like, uh, the gnarled husk of twisted stone. And I wrote, my name in the sands for, I'm just gonna wait until Perry Google is. It's not Shel Silverstein. It's not. And it's not Robert Frost.

So give me one more poem. Olivia Plath. Sylvia Plath. No, it's pretty sure to live ya. You said this before. Ozimandius by Percy, Bryce Shelley, Ozimandius, okay?

That's the, they did an Osamandius thing. It's a, yes, Shelverstein. They just get stuck to it. can't trust these AI overview. Um, Oracle, okay? By mid to late last year, I don't know if you know, but Oracle CEO, what I just bling on? Robert? Dude, you've, I got Larry Ellison.

Larry Ellison, my God, I was thinking Robert Frost in my damn head. Larry Ellison was the richest man in the world less than a year ago. And, uh, Oracle has been cut in half. He's been destitute. And more importantly, as a little bit of a shade of, uh, you know, big short type beat, credit default swaps on Oracle, which are basically bets that Oracle will not be able to pay its debts and fail

have hit higher than the great financial crisis. They're surging. So like all this stuff is happening under the surface of what seems like a calm up green market. There's like rampant rotations. And this already happened, we talked about as in the show, previously it was like everybody pulling out of

the staf big tech companies to go into the memory companies, like the picks and shovels of the race. like the sand disk and Micron. But now they're pulling out of like this AI stuff, a lot of it all together and going into things like oil. Oil has hit record profits. Exxon,

I think Chevron just had its best quarter in the history of the company. Exxon had like its third best. They're all fucking crushing. So everybody is rotating into more commodities and things like that. So everything is moving behind the surface, but the overall number is saying the same. And I think it's interesting. And the example I wanted to give was why I thought this was like a story worth talking about

is this guy, Leopold Ashenbred. who's like this 24-year-old wonderkind, if you haven't heard of him. He wrote a thing called, oh, no, he wrote a thing called, Is it Situational Awareness? The name of the blog? The name of his company is situational,

where it's such fun. He wrote a blog about AI, and it basically was like a 150-page blog that said, like, it's gonna change everything. It is absolutely gonna reach up the world, and we're gonna just bet everything on that being the case sooner rather than later. Real quick, his thesis is largely,

he's showing like, okay, if these, if the power of, let's say, these models are growing by an order of magnitude every two years. And then the power of, like the actual harnesses around the models are growing by order of magnitude every two years. He looked at core aspects of the kind of overall AI market and said, if the capability of AI models and the underlying infrastructure keeps going up by an order of magnitude every two or so years, then I believe that like you just do a long play on AI and you will win. And he's like heavily invested in Anthropic and also his wife works there. Yeah.

So he's like 22 or 23 the time he writes this. He actually, his background is he was at FTX with San Bagman-Fried. Oh. He was like an intern there or something. And he got out before everything collapsed. But so this guy, he writes his piece and everyone's like, oh, you know what? Maybe you're right. You know more about AI than me.

Let's give you some money. So a lot of well-capitalized people give this 23-year-old kid a ton of money. He has no financial experience. His background is all in, you know, researcher AI. And he goes, okay, I'm going to make the craziest, uh, leveraged debt-fueled long bets on AI. He just bets on it.

He bets on memory. He bets on the AI companies. Um, and he borrows money to do it. He takes their money and borrows money. And for a while, he has one of the greatest returns in Wall Street history. He literally is up a thousand percent. He's beating all these established Wall Street Titans. And people are like, oh, I gotta get on this.

They keep throwing their money at him. And instead of taking any of it off the table, he just, borrow more money and does it again. He just keeps tripling down. So recently, even though most of these stocks are up from when he bought them, there was a down day in a lot of these companies, specifically pulling up Sandisk. This is a memory company that he invested a lot in.

Now, you look, he probably bought Sandisk like down here originally, but he kept buying it and kept borrowing to buy it all the way up into here. So this down period essentially wiped him out. So his bank started margin calling him and saying, hey, you have to put up more fresh cash or we're going to sell all your stocks. And he's like, well, I don't have any fresh cash right now. He called around.

He called around. A little fun story. You know the podcaster, Dwar cash Patel. Yes, not personally. You personally know him and you're best friends with him. Turns out Dwar cash Patel is his roommate. Yeah. And I'm not saying there's anything untoward here,

but the timeline is very weird because right as behind the scenes, this guy is about to get, wiped out and is getting calls from his banks. Gorkish Patel writes this blog that is like extremely, extremely like AI is about to 1,000 X.

You need to invest right now. To try and like, basically Leopold's like, if I have one more down day, the banks are going to take everything. And then right then his partner or his roommate who is a very notable and influential tech guy writes a very positive thing. Yeah. It's a little bit weird timing.

Either way, there was another down day. And he did get wiped. out. He had to sell to the guy from the whole GameStop saga. Kin Griffin. Yeah, to Citadel. Yeah. So, wait, actually, real quick. Brandon, could you explain why the fact that he's massively leveraged and also like a third of all Koreans? Why does that ruin them? Because if you look at the graph, like a normal person would go, okay, well, it's still, the amount of money is still way up from a year ago. He should be fine, right? Yeah. It's, it's, uh, it's pretty. Because this is what's underpinning everybody going bankrupt, right? It's like this, the, the numbers of

are all still up from where they were. But the problem is everybody was leveraged. So what does that do, Brendan? Well, I do want to say this, but I did just do this on my clip. Actually, let's squeeze some toothpaste. Aidan,

why does that? Yeah, why does that? You come into this empty, empty, bucket of toothpaste. You've got paste in there, man. Give us some paste.

Okay, I'm just to do this. Can you show this? Here, Aiden, I'll just draw it and you explain it. Okay. Okay. Now, I like this. I like this. This is good.

Okay. Aiden, what are we looking at this? So if I have taken on debt to invest in something, I see the upside of that on the way up. Like I could like borrow a million dollars and then that million dollars grows, I see all the upside of the profit. But if I keep putting in borrowed money in again on the way up,

and that erases my returns, then I still owe the underlying loan even though I've just lost the gains that I made on the way of. I'm not explaining this while. I mean, I think he's right. That's right. It's unrelated to the picture, but that's right. Can I be...

Can I be... Can I be honest? The picture didn't help me. So like if you bought $10,000 of stock, right? And you put in $5,000 of your own money and $5,000 of the bank's money, if the stock happens to drop from $10,000 to $6,000, you know, some people, if you're not in finance, you might think, well, okay, now I have $3,000 and I owe the bank $3,000.

But that's, of course, not how it works. You still owe the bank $5,000. So now your equity is down to, you know, a little, all the losses come out of your side of the thing because you still owe them money. And what's most important is if this green part ever dropped under the red part, the bank would be worried you couldn't pay them back. So when it gets even close, they do what's called a margin call and they call you up and they say, hey, if you don't put more fresh cash in here to top this up, we're going to sell everything you own to make sure we can pay back the red money.

They say, Aden, it looks like you're all out of pace. We're worried you're going to run out. Yes. You need to put a little bit of your own. You need to put more of your own paste in in order to prove to us that this is going to be fine. Because we're afraid. We can't squeeze any more out of what you got. Yes.

That's exactly right. The banks are not willing to risk an empty toothpaste tube. They do know one of the empty two. They're very reasonable. Dare I say, you guys margin called me today. Yeah, we did. And I insisted that I had the pace to back it up. And we haven't been proven red or not you do.

So this happened to him on billions of dollars of stock. And I want to say, you know, there's this number going around that, hey, he's still up 80%. That's what he's been saying. Yes. His, his quotes are, his fund is down 67% on the month. He had to sell the vast majority of it to Ken Griffin from Citadel. But he's still up 80%. on the year. He's not fully liquidated. He's not going to shut down his fund and he's going to

keep going on. I take full responsibility. He also got married this weekend while this was going on. He got married while it was going on, which is crazy. He's getting calls like every major bank. Me at the altar. Just just looking at my wife like read the vows and then doing a little. Yeah, I think he had to do a little check. Literally during the vows, he would have lost like $30 million during that like. Yeah. Yeah. In that, yeah. 30 seconds. Billions a day. So we, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm surprised he was able to keep his cool during that that's You would have been a wreck at the altar. Yes, of course.

Billions of dollars and was getting called from every major bank. Oh, we got to cut that. Are he's going to be furious? Can you show this really quick? So 70% of his fund was in a bunch of stocks that he picked. This is what stocks look like. Oh, okay. And 25% was he made an investment in Claude Anthropic.

Okay. So when he got margin cold and they sold, everything and wiped him out and Ken Griffin laughed at him and took all his money. They lost everything. He just kept this. And so when you blend that all together, you say you're up 80% because Anthropics really up. But just to be clear, all his stocks are gone. Every stock they invested and got margin called and wiped out. So he's running his phone. There's nothing left but a piece of Anthropic that he owns. Yeah. Yeah. The margin call system, I didn't know much about it before this whole saga either. And just the idea like if you have borrowed all this money and then your thing

goes down. It's exactly what you said. You just have to have to go down by like a certain percentage before the banks go, we are taking everything. It's like it's so, so susceptible to a downturn. And it's crazy that a guy like this is up however many hundreds of billions of dollars. And then like, you know what? All four X leverage just send it again. I guess that's the power of power or arrogance of youth and experience. Maybe because, you know, all the Wall Street pros were, or even the riskiest ones were like, this guy's crazy. You know, but you're up

a thousand percent. You don't take any off the table. It's crazy. So why is this guy important right now? Like where does this come around to? Yeah, well, he's, he is a emblematic of what's going on with the markets getting,

the number is volatility. The swinginess is getting greater and greater. Things are moving. Like every day you'll hear like record breaking loss, record breaking gain. And you end up kind of in the same spot, but the swings are getting so much wilder. And so everybody who is using debt in these instances is more and more likely to get

wiped out. And that's why it's interesting right now. Nobody is, you know, we're not seeing a crash yet, but we're just seeing people who are on the edge of debt are getting wiped out. So people who have kind of taken the AI bull run and been willing to leverage themselves to insane degrees are getting punished by the fluctuations in these. But what's crazy to know the number ends up being the same? Just the fluctuation. is enough to white people out, which is an unintuitive thing. But what's crazy is you say people that are, so people who are like, I'm all in on the future, I'm borrowing and betting everything.

They're getting wiped out for sure. But also people who are like, this shit's over. It's all going to crash. I'm betting everything on the crash. They're getting wiped out because after a huge down day, they're having insanely huge up days. People are borrowing money to bet on both outcomes and all of them are getting shaken out. So it's like, it's just a really weird time.

It's a very weird time in the market. And it's very hard to be. And as a, you know, we sit back in S&B 500, it's kind of fine. But everybody who's professional investor is like saying it's, we can't trade this right now. We don't know what the fuck's going on. It's just too wild. No matter what you pick, it's swinging. So those headlines that you showed.

It talked about the magnificent seven in particular, which all pretty much all have significant connections to the development of AI. Yeah. Maybe minus Tesla for one, but they're already kind of a weird stock. there. And then I was going to say Apple because they aren't developing their own proprietary AI. They're sort of insulated from this in a way that these other stocks are not. Because my understanding is they have become the number one company by market cap again. Like they've returned to the throne because they're insulated from a lot of this scrutiny that comes with.

That's a perfect example of what we're going through, which is like the it's so over, we're so back market. Because everything you're saying is true from like, a week ago. Apple was number one. Now it's a video again and Apple's actually down quite a bit. It's like there's this big war going on between AI is is incredible and amazing and sure you can make billions. And it's like, oh, fuck, there's not making any money. That's what's happening. And like every week you'll see huge swings in these companies. The Mag 7 on the whole is down, but it's really diverged. Meta is getting fucking crushed. Everyone's like you're spending a gazillion dollars and you don't have any of show for it. Google's getting kind of crushed. They're spending a gazillion dollars. They don't have any free cash flow. anymore. But like Apple doing pretty well, Amazon's up,

Nvidia's up. So it's like, it's just diverging. It's just a weird time. And then Tesla, of course, is way down. Worst week since 2022 because people are like, you're spending a ton of money on robotaxies and AI and nobody even thinks of you as an AI company. I mean, it's not even, Elon Musk's important AI company. Elon Musk's other company is supposed to be the AI company. Yeah. So why is Tesla spending so much on AI is everyone's asking? And it's, yeah, I just think there's finally some punishments for these companies. for being like AI, AIA, AIA, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A,

$300 billion we're spending on it. People are asking where, what's coming from that? And so there is somebody being punished for that. You know what? This is a small tangent. But, you know, another company at the top of this, like, market cap rankings is always Saudi Aramco. And, uh, the e-sports World Cup has been going on. And me, I think me and slime used to joke a lot about, like,

we'd be working at Beyond the Summit. we'd be like, what if one of these was sponsored by Saudi Aramco one day? And then we have to do like a Ramco reeds during like a Super Smash Brothers tournament. During the East Sports World Cup this year, the idea of the tournament is that similar to like the Constructors Championship in F1, there's like an overall team score alongside people winning in individual e-sports events at the overall event. And every time they do an update of like the range, or leaderboard on broadcast, they call it the Aramco Power Rankings.

And I was like, here we are. We've come full circle. Like the joke that we used to make to each other in our office has become a reality. The Saudi National Oil Company is doing esports ad reads. Wait, I took a transition because I think, at least on my stream, you know, you go back two years, we would make a lot of jokes about gambling and prediction markets in that. And it feels like all of them have just become true and normal facts of life

that's gotten bigger than we thought. And you had a story about prediction markets. Yes, part of markets, really, the same subject. Yeah, just kind of a little interesting thing, which is that you're starting to see a lot of pushback on some of these prediction markets like Kalshi and Polly Market and Robin Hood. So a notable interesting story, I thought,

Minnesota, the state, outright banned prediction markets in May. And so they just full on said no. There's actually a bunch of states in the U.S. that are trying to push back against specific aspects of the prediction markets and saying like, hey, you're basically sports betting here. We want to stop that. Minnesota is the first one that just said full on, like, we're done. And then that means, though, like, if I'm in Minnesota and it's on my phone and I'm betting on whether or not Aiden says the word smash bros in this episode or something, like, do I. It would be illegal for the company to operate in that state. Okay, but they don't, right? They just like do it. It's like, online kind of breaks everything. I kind of, but I mean, you can still see where people are, and then they have provisions about VPNs. So, you know, I'm sure you couldn't fully enforce it, but still, to the average person you're saying, hey, it is a felony now to, or not felony, but you know, it's against the law to do this.

And then the prediction markets and the Federal Trading Commission sued Minnesota. And this week, the federal, or last week, the federal judge blocked the ruling with an injunction and said, no, you have to allow gambling. Wait, really? Yes. So, you know, so at first I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? What? You're forcing them to gamble? What are you talking about?

You have to gamble. Have you ever read the bill of rights? People overlook one of the amendments oftentimes. It's we have to rip a parlay. George Washington was big on that. The Ninth Amendment. If it doesn't say that, tell me what it says right now. The Ninth Amendment.

There will be a man entering is 25th year of the NBA. The people have to gamble on it. They have to bet on it. The World Cup just happened, bro. You're not going to not gamble. All right, so here's why. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is a federal agency, has said that event contracts users can trade on prediction markets fall exclusively under the agency's jurisdiction. As in, the CFTC, which is a federal agency, says that they have the exclusive right to regulate swaps and these certain types of betting contracts.

So because of that, the judge in this case, as well as the federal government are saying, You, a United States state, do not have the jurisdiction. So if every single voter in Minnesota said, we do not want gambling to be allowed here, they would not be able to stop it. Correct. Because it is a federal ruling. That's crazy. And because, according to the judge, there's several contracts on Colisean polymarket that fit

this definition of a swap. Yeah. They're not regulated by the state. And she did say, I mean, this is a Democratic judge. She was like appointed by Biden, I'm pretty sure. And she said, like, maybe. Joe? Right, who was asleep of the wheel, clearly. Couldn't have made a good pick. Couldn't have made a good pig. And she said maybe she'll narrow it to be like we'll ban certain parts of the markets, but not the others. But ultimately, this is going through a bunch of court cases now. So Kalshi said, you know, today's decision makes it clear. States cannot ban things that they don't have jurisdiction over. Meanwhile, Minnesota Attorney General said prediction markets are gambling, plain and simple. And Minnesota has every right to keep predatory gambling out of our communities. So this is, this is, this.

is wild. So there's a bunch of states that are now trying to do this and push back against that. There's 14 states, according to routers, which are pushing back against this, right? And again, they're more going for specific angles. But the CFTC, the federal agency for trading, is counter suing them to make sure that the gamble. Our government is suing state government. To make sure that the gambling. Okay, there must be a connection, right? So, I, it's, you know, it is, it is under the executive branch. I know, but just knowing with this administration, there's probably who's so it's it's it's Donald Trump I think it's Donald Trump Jr. is on the board of polymarket or calci and uh or he's considered he's one of their advisors excuse me and uh this is

already fallen under scrutiny it's like why do you need the president's son to be like one of your advisors at the company there's this really funny interview of the owners of again can't remember it's calci or polymarket where there it's both i think he's a he's an investor and one and a board member on the other. Okay. And I can't remember which company is getting interviewed, but their answer is the interviewer is like, so why is the president's son, like one of your advisors? What sort of advice is he getting you? And they're like, well, we have a lot of advisors. They give us a lot of different perspectives. And she's like, well, this isn't any advisor. This is the president's son. And they're like, again, we have a lot of advisors. And they just repeat that talking point like four times.

I think what is also interesting here is there's an effort. This is kind of the crypto era. president, right, for his term. There's a lot of like ties to cryptocurrency, either like Trump or his sons or people adjacent to them making money through cryptocurrency that we've talked about on the show. And there is a push right now to remove the responsibility of regulation of cryptocurrency by the SEC and hand it over to the CFTC because the CFTC has

basically less, is expected to scrutinize crypto less than the SEC does now. I mean, clearly they're not. And this kind of seems connected in that here are these massive gambling companies that the president's children have connections to. Swaps company. Excuse me. Swaps companies.

Well, I got a real quote from the head of the CFTC. Michael Selegg, who was set up for this job by Trump in December of last year. These are not casinos. not sports books, they're markets. And the bottom line is we're going to defend our authority in court. So yeah, I guess that's right. So, okay. Let's go. Great. I do see the connections that we're talking about. Well, before we broaden out to other prediction market news. Okay. Three fun facts. One, France, uh, they blocked polymarket completely in July. So that's a

battle going on now. Spain blocked polymarket and Kalshi in May. And that's estimated to go for multiple months while they do an investigation. Did France block it before or after? France lost the World Cup because... This is July. And so, you know what? I don't know. We need the date, wouldn't we? Because it would be so funny if they did it right after because a bunch of French people lost a ton of money gambling on France.

I heard the World Cup was the biggest revenues, those prector markets I've ever had. Yeah. And then the third, fun thing, in Wisconsin, our favorite state, there's actually a statute from 1849 that says you can't vote in any election in which a person, quote, has been made

or become interested directly or indirectly in any bet or wager depending on the result. So Wisconsin has come out recently and clarified if you bet on any prediction market on the outcome of a political campaign and you then go vote, that's a felony and your ballot is thrown out and it's election fraud. So now there's going to be an increasing movement that if you do go gamble on political events, you can't vote, which is like obviously I, well, I don't know. I was going to say obviously. I haven't thought about it for more than 10 seconds.

but like that's, it's fucking bizarre. That is bizarre. Because they did not intend that when they wrote the law for what we're in currently. It was, it was clear voined back then. I mean, it was like not good to have anybody betting on political outcomes. But really,

you couldn't, you can't run. It should be you can't run and bet on it. Not you can't. Like if I bet on Trump Biden and then I vote for my local Wisconsin state senator, it shouldn't be like, uh, I don't know.

I don't know. I'm trying to equivocate it to like sports or something. I think it's one of those things where maybe there's just no reason it needs to happen. Do you know what I mean? Like maybe we could craft the scenario where it's acceptable, but it's like I'd rather just be safe with this one. It's like money, monetary incentives should not be tied to voting.

And there are monetary incentives because I'm going to do my transition. I mean, I guess there's broad monetary incentives tied to voting in that who, who you vote for. There's financial and economic outcomes. But that, da, no, no, that. Support for this show comes from Anthropic. Guys, I just got third place in a streamer Pokemon

Invitational. And I want to tell you a quick little story about something I did for that. My coach was crunching the numbers on how much damage one Pokemon does to another Pokemon with this moves. And it's a pain in the ass. It took a lot of time.

And he's a busy man with a family and a kid. And he's like, dude, I don't have time for this. I want to help you for the tournament, but I have stuff to do. And I literally thought, okay, maybe I'll ask Klaude. And I just asked, I put in my six Pokemon and there's a Pokemon. And I said, hey, could you help me with a booklet? It made me an, like, an 80-page booklet with every possible thing.

It got every number right. He checked some randomly. And I printed it out to the tournament and it helped me a lot. I didn't know it had that capability. It's getting crazy. I don't know how it calculated the damage of every possible move in the EVs and the IVs, but it's crazy. So problems worth solving. Get started with club.

at clod.a.ai slash lemonade. That's clod.a.ai slash lemonade. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.i slash lemonade. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-4-free at O-D-O-D-O-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com.

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

but it always came down to, why are you like this? And as you know, there's no simple answer because people are not simple. We're messy and complicated and contradictory and layered. So on my new show,

I'm sitting down with the ultimate disruptors, the athletes, the artists, the activists, and the architects of our culture who looked at the way things were and asked, why do we do it like this? And can we do it differently? My hope is to give us a little more space to that question and to the person on the other side of the mic,

not to tell us their answer or read from their script, but to take us on their journey. Check out my new show, Why Are You Like This, on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app. New episodes drop every Thursday. But as I was saying, Robin Hood, you guys know Robin Hood, you love Robin Hood. Maybe you've traded on Robin Hood. We love it.

Robin Hood got into prediction markets not but two years ago. And as of today, they now make more money from that than from stock trades, which is what the whole company was founded on. It has eclips both stock and crypto revenue for the first time. They are basically a prediction markets company. And of the prediction markets, it's pretty much all sports betting. So Robin Hood has seamlessly transitioned. from being a stock investing app for your phone to being a sports betting company. I think Wisconsin should go further. If you trade on polymarket, you shouldn't be allowed to work

at a company. Okay. You know what? For a lot of young men, that would be a plus. That's a win-win. They already want to opt out of work because it's like a bad, you know, you buy Invinia, you're banned from a job. I can't job search, mom. I already, I got to be a trade. I'm too biased. I might, I might, I might do my job differently for the outcome of my bet. If I knew. Maybe this is time to make our big announcement. What's that? Podcasts.

I think we've been thinking about winding it down. Yep. And if you head on over to lemonade dot stand, you can start betting on pretty much anything. Oh yeah, yeah. We're going all in on prediction markets here on the show. I said we wouldn't take a prediction market sponsor. I'm telling the truth.

We just simply turned our brand into one. And we're going to bet on the results of other podcasters. We're going to bet on. And you've got some info on the yard. So it's going to be. We're going to bet a lot on whether or not flying farts. But I saw this number. It kind of shocked to me while I was researching about this Robin Hood thing.

Actually, wait, I had one more thing. There's a quote from the information that was talking about this. This is Dan Dolev, who's an equity research analyst. He said, the people on Robin Hood love gambling, and the prediction market is right up their alley. It's the perfect replacement for crypto because it produces a faster reward system in your brain. You don't have to wait. So this is a guy who has no soul. just commenting on the true raw reality of it,

which is that people play Robin Hood for a dopamine rush related to money. And they've evolved a better one, which is just gambling. Straight up sports gambling is better than crypto, which is better than betting on GameStop, which is the evolution. It's just funny that everything can,

like it's like every social media company eventually ends up being short form video that you scroll. Yeah. Every single other financial company ends up being sports gambling. What was the chutter? the chutter app like chutter used to be like a TV

network of sorts oh my god that can't be how you say it are you saying chutter you're saying cheddar like the cheese chutter you said chutter like a chudder yeah

that chutter sounds like griter but for like conservatives yeah I guess no difference huh you're saying chudder you're saying chudder like a

C hudder like it's cows chutter. Like if a cow ate so much cheese, it came out of its udders. That's a chutter. You're borrowing so much more time right now. Cheddar, yeah, cheddar. Cheddar. There you go. Yeah, there go. That was natural. That was seamless. That was cheddar. TV network of sorts pivoted into some weird TikTok slash sports gambling app. Like it was supposed to be pulled. Please pull this up.

Please pull this up. I actually think this is worth showing. Okay, so I think this is the same company as that TV network. The only reason, they are spelt differently. This is spelled C-H-E-D-D-R, no vowel at the end of it. But it's the same logo. So I always assumed it was the same brand. Correct me if I'm wrong on that.

But this got announced like last year. I don't know if the platform actually launched successfully, but I remember seeing the trailer and it was basically, here is a short for free with cheddar coins. Yeah, it's just cheddar coins. The future of sports gaming is here. And you could watch like short form video about sports while live sports betting on things. And I was just like, you know that I've seen this sketch where it was like getting caught jerking off in 2050 or something.

And it was like the guy like his parent like opens his door and the kids like in a rig that takes him like fucking like two minutes to get out of like he's in a like walking. walking machine VR headset. And I feel like has Goody not gone too far? Yeah, yeah. The whole combination of dopamine chasing has gotten absurd. And we're very far from to get the ball in the hoop.

A human being, a human being in the year 1500 went an entire lifetime without feeling the dopamine. Yeah, that you get in five minutes on cheddar. So anyway, It turns out that delivering this rush of dopamine is a good business, whether or not it's good for society. Because Polymarket and Kalshi alone, this time last year, combined for about $5 billion worth of trades, this time today, it's over $25 billion. So it's literally just as unbroken.

Once this was released to the population, it has just doubled every few months. It's crazy. People fucking love this. And the backlash, obviously you talk about the state's backlash. People are also seeing rampant increase in gamblers anonymous from younger members. Rampant increase in, I don't know, you know, I don't want to get too dark with it, but like suicides from financial. All this stuff is having consequences that are like, it's happening so quick that nobody can absorb it. And certainly even states that try can't seem to actually get anything done.

So not their jurisdiction. Yeah. Yeah. So there's not their jurisdiction. Their citizens' lives and finances are other problem. It feels so sad and rooted in that. like financial nihilism that existed right now. And I go back to that idea a lot of before I was doing,

you know, before I started the yard and I had like my normal salary for my normal job, I think the pathway of like turning that salary into something like owning a home seemed so far-fetched, even though I had a pretty good job. Like I, you know, making like $65,000 a year. I was pretty happy with that. And I was like in my early, 20s. That's a fucking awesome job. But the amount of savings I

had, it's like the idea of getting a home out of that, especially in the places I lived in, which were like Seattle and Southern California. It's just, it felt unapproachable. So in order to, I feel like you need, you get this

sense of needing this massive financial breakout in order to make anything significant change in your life. While you're constantly scrolling through videos of, people's like luxurious lifestyles and like influencers doing things that you want to be a part of

but you don't have access to. Like it's this terrible environment for you as a young person searching for a job you can't get maybe applying for sending thousands of applications in on LinkedIn, not getting anything. Maybe at best having a job where you can only put a limited amount of savings away.

You can't take any of these steps you've been told about your entire life. You spend all day scrolling fucking TikTok and real. showing people's lifestyles that are unachievable at the salary. So you fucking all in what you have and hope you get a huge payout because you saw some crazy thread on Wall Street bets or something like that. Yeah, and then you get a phone phone call because some people do that and it works.

And they post it on social media and you hear all the stories of like the guy that hit crypto or hit. And then it's like, oh, well, I have to chase that. I think about that trip. We went on this trip to Italy. The yard did like shortly after COVID restrictions had started lifting. Yeah. And one of Cutie's friends came on the trip. And he had just earned a bunch of money

through that NFT year because he bought like a rock. And the rock, him and his friend poured their savings to split a 20K rock NFT. Like an image of a rock. And then it like, uh, it over 10xed. Like, and then they just sold the rock. And then we're millionaires. And that was the guy I was on the trip with.

But like we're saying, don't listen to stories like this. That's not going to happen to you. Okay, I think, I think this is actually this is a good example of like this. It's a good example of you. Is it? Trying to convince them.

Wait, I just said people get full by old stories. You're like, yeah, I got a story about a guy who had a great trip to Italy. No, no, no. He 10 X Rogen made a lot of money. That was pretty cool. But he's what? Okay, so he has this dream vacation in Italy.

Keep going. He's not with influence. Right. He's like these successful podcasts. He'll know. Keep on. I see the issue. He's a one in a million guy.

And also on top of the... He's super... Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this is amazing. And he's got a smile that knocks your socks off. And he gives you kind of an air of anybody can do it if they try hard. No, what I was going to say is

those people also, they only share the ups. No one is... No, even the people who do win big or one big at some point aren't itching to tell you about the, you know, the follow-up. week where they lost most of it on something else. Like nobody,

nobody is happily sharing that story. So you get this really distorted vision of all of the successes from a limited number of people, most of which haven't even actually found that much success. Yeah, I mean, especially on polymarketing, polymarking calcium in these things, just to be real,

like their record revenues are because of customer losses. Customers have net lost billions of dollars in aggregate. So on average, if you play the position, to break rich markets. But the problem is I've said this in my chat and the first thing they say every time is I'm different. They say those guys are I'm not like they're joking but I think some of them are not joking. They're like, nah, I'm built different. I have an edge. Wait, I actually think this pivots well. Because the guys who actually are different. Okay. Are the people that are

getting head hunted by these like hedge funds and organizations. If you are built different, this is what I actually think is if you are built different and capable of beating the system, what's happening to you really, you're getting, you're a quant at like a hedge fund and you're, you're crafting the algorithm that like beats the game. Yeah, that's not most people. That's who you're playing against. So yeah, it's actually a good transition. So I saw this article, the million dollar talent wars for 20 something math geniuses. And it turns out there are a select few people who are, I'm not good at math, but there's people who are incredibly incredibly good at math. And for the longest time, they, actually, let's see this picture.

Where do you think this is? Well, he's wearing a shirt that says Harvard. Okay. So is it Harvard? It's not Harvard. I'll be narrow it down. Do you think this is a tech company in Silicon Valley or do you think this is a financial company in New York?

Okay. Let me look at the details. I'm going to say it's not a tech company because the type of snacks they have don't look like the type of snacks. of like extremely hippy, way too expensive snacks they have at tech companies. Damn, that's actually a really deep cut.

You got it right. That is normal water. It's not Hint Water. Okay. In water is tech company water. For the longest time, these extremely intelligent math graduates which is a very small percent

would mostly get headhunted by financial firms in New York like this. This is Jane Street. And they would pay them really good salaries to be quants, like you said. That was their thing.

And they would trade against retail traders and beat their ass. That's essentially what they're used for them. But now, much like sticks of RAM, the price of these commodities is being bit up by Sam Altman. Okay? Human beings. Sam Altman and the AI companies have realized that quants are also exactly what they want for their, um, don't finish the blink. Linear algebra.

For their linear algebra token machines. Yes. And so what was already a. pretty lucrative spot to be in, Wall Street Quant, is now the spot to be in of all jobs. And basically, they are being bid up by both sides of the coasts of this country with absolutely astronomical salaries. And people are saying, a million dollars for someone right out of college is something people don't even bat an eye at anymore.

They're getting, you know, like $1.5 million with huge signing bonuses. They're getting insane, insane amounts to either go to, again, like Jane Street or Citadel or open AI an Anthropic. And that's the, that's the bid up. And so people are saying the current hiring climate is like bidding wars for professional athletes. They're basically the Luca Donchich of fucking math and they're getting life-changing money.

I mean, and they're getting stock packages too. They could literally change their life. So it's just a weird time. And I thought, you know, this was interesting. And they say, they interview these people and a lot of them come in with ambitions to become an academic. They love math for the math of it.

And then they do one internship where they get paid 30 racks a month and they're like, I'm never. Once they have a taste of what it means to work for these firms, the majority that would rather go into industry. This is like, I apologize because I'm forgetting his name,

but he's like fabled as one of the greatest modern mathematicians right now. Terence Tao? Yes, Terence Tao. And he works at UCLA, which publicly lists the salaries they pay. Yeah. And this is like, he's a, you know,

he's a prodigy. And, I mean, not a prodigy anymore. He's well into his career, I guess. He's a 40-year-old product. Yeah, yeah. And, and. You're sure talking, Terrence, not to.

No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. But he, he is that, he is that. You think you're wicked smart. What's your numbers, huh? He's making like $760,000 a year working at UCLA, which is, you know, pretty insane for a professor. But considering his stature, right.

And he's working at academia. Like, that is the ceiling of academia for, for his background. It's a legend at a great university at the top of the top of the top of. Yeah. And then these. kids who are just finishing college, not to say that they're not extremely intelligent. Sure.

But they're making more than that signing on these companies out of college. They're even signing bonuses of his full salary. And it's like, okay, ideally we'd want these people in like research in academia. Yeah, it's just an odd. And you know,

you don't know if this will last or whatever, but right now has never been a better time to be a math nerd in college. So all of you pivot your majors right now. All right. Yeah, I think it's kind of cool. This is actually,

I think it's great. I'm not saying this is a good or bad story. I have more opportunities or getting more money to go do things. I think that is broadly a cool thing rather than just like, oh, go be an iBanker and otherwise you have no options. Yeah. Well, you know, those are financial firms. And we could slide on over to more of a tech firm.

Flock. I've heard really only positive things about them lately. Okay. I'm surprised that you have. paste at the end. In our run of show, we had South Africa as our next story. And as you were saying that I was like, South Africa is a tech firm now? Like, how are we getting to South Africa? He's dodging his paste being squeezed. I did fuck this up a little bit. I thought, I saw the perfect segue to that topic. And then I forgot which one of ours was first. And then we're going to have

four Aden stories in a row. We're going to squeeze you so hard. You know, I'm a second half guy. I'm a second half guy. I'm going to say, let's go on a flock. All right. Let's say what we think first, me and Aden. About flock. Yeah, I mean, I love Let me set it up for you. And I know you love flock. More than you.

More than me. Actually, I don't even like that much when I think about it. I'm not even a big fan, but you are a huge fan. It's mostly me. Yeah. You've been pulling me into it, but I kind of have a backing away. And yeah. And I pulled up that Ben Jordan video where he's like showing how easy it is to like hack

flock cameras and like spy on your neighbors. And I was like, we should do this. We should spy on me. All right, as of this month, there are now 120,000 Flock cameras in the United States. A Flock camera, if you are not aware, is traditionally, it is a small camera that is all about license plate. It's often called, oh my God, A, P, LPR, an automatic license plate reader.

An alper. Sorry, is it 120,000 or 102,000? Okay, so there is 120,000 reported by Flock, but this is a map called D-Flock, and there's two open source projects that are basically trying to track this. So you can go and, like, look in America because people have found these. So like, if we go here to LA, right, you could actually look like, okay, so we'll go to Aetrox home here. There is. You can see.

Atrox, oh, well, his house is like south of four of these cameras, right? But you can actually look and go, okay, if I were to drive to work, I could do a route that avoids them because they're all tracked publicly. And what I would say here is like, if you come from the south, there's no coverage at all. And if you were to then leave east, there is no ability for the police. to track what you did. It is please. This is the whole screen blur it. Don't even consider the idea.

Don't even put it in Los Angeles. Also, you know, so that we don't have to blur. This is not a truck's address. Brandon leaves his home unlocked most of the time. He does not have a ring camera. No cameras.

But yeah, no, so you can actually look and see in any city in America, the of the 120,000, there are about 100,000 that they have tracked and added to this database. When you're looking at it, it is shocking.

It is a lot. And so what the, you know, what's happened with flock? Well, dude, there is so much. The short version of this is that as it has grown absolutely massively to cover so many different cities and states and jurisdictions. And there's like, it's not just police departments who want this stuff, who are the, you know, the primary use case to be able to track criminals or stolen cars or whatever. You know, an abduction happens. They can quickly find whoever did it. It's also like homeowners associations.

It's like various groups or schools that want to be able to set these up and then say we will be able to rapidly get information about like any license plate of any car that goes in our area. That's the business proposal. Yeah. Can I ask you all I understand because I'm not a flock expert. What is the difference between flock and like CCTV?

Like if I was a homeowner association and I get a bunch of flock cameras from my neighborhood, what is there between that a regular camera? Is it just that AI tracks the license plate or what? Yeah. So the core product, is, I mean, it's kind of the camera, but really, we've had license plate tracking technology for decades, right? You know, that that's a thing that, like, police have had.

The difference is that now it is a software company that is installing all these cameras where all of the data gets sent to a centralized database that can track it all against each other, right? So that's really the product. You are purchasing access to, and this is where it gets controversial to all or some subset of the data, and that way you can go to flock and say, hey, I need information about this thing, and you pull it against all these different pieces of data that they have, right? So it's really the network that pulls all this information together on top of they are the ones, you know, putting these cameras all over the place. Interesting.

As you can imagine, a lot of people aren't stoked about this. And so according to LA Times, this past month, LAPD announced they are pausing their flock contract. After a three-year contract with flock, which Los Angeles has been using that's done. And they are saying that their main concern is actually not really about mass surveillance. It's about data privacy. So there's two problems that people have with flock primarily. One is the concept of mass surveillance. It's kind of creepy.

We'll get into that. Second is the idea that if you're a little city or a big city like Los Angeles, you want these things for your local PD to help with crime or whatever. You don't want federal agencies to be able to track what everybody in Los Angeles has been doing. So in theory, when you sign up for flock, you are signing up to have, you know, a certain areas information shared and tracked. But there have been many, many instances where flock, even though they say they're not sharing, whoopsie daisy, a state department or a federal department does end up getting access to it.

Right. So this keeps happening over and over. And sometimes it's they, they don't actually, they don't directly give access, but whoops, the people running LADP or LAPD, excuse me, like sent some of the data. to this agency or gave them permission or said, hey, ICE, you can come in. And this is particularly becoming contentious because ICE has been shown now to access like both LAPD and San Francisco PD's database to find where people are, despite on paper that's not supposed to be the case.

And so this is, you know, this happened in L.A., which is a pretty notable case. It's happening in actually a lot of cities now. So like Santa Cruz, El Cerrito, Santa Clara County Mountain View, all California cities are all stopping their contracts or turn. turning off flock because of the data, like saying, hey, our data is, you know, going outside of our network. We are not okay with this. There's 53 cities last year that quit flock. That's from Tech Times. But at the same times, tech times reported that nearly 800 cities approved new flock contracts in 2026 alone. So it's interesting that some major cities in California and other

ones around the country are starting to say, no, we're not okay with this using the data distribution as like the main thing. But it continues to just absolutely balloon all over the place. What does the city get out of it? Let's say I'm a small town mayor and I have to spend a fuck ton of money to pay this software company to come set up cameras all over my city. What am I, what am I getting out of it? Well, so the pitch is and it's worth, look, I know everybody's going to fucking quote, do the Ben Franklin quote. Okay. And they're going to post it in the comments and child smart they are. And I get that.

All right. But let's at least make an honest argument for why you would care about this. And actually San Francisco is a good example. So they started pushing this a couple years ago. They've now installed about 400 cameras in San Francisco. And you can go look at it. And San Francisco had a major crime,

let's say, either perception or problem, depending on how you look at it post-COVID. And certainly everybody I knew there was having cars broken into constantly massive property. It was very, very bad from firsthand experience. or my friend's experience, not from Twitter.

Yeah. Oh, you seem like... No, that was... I feel like by the last, like, couple years, more people I knew in San Francisco had had their car broken into than hadn't.

Yeah. Like, it got insanely good at it. It was an insanely polished system of... It was polished in just, like, wanton destruction. It was like, they were just breaking everything and, like, every friend I knew had it happened. It was like, you didn't...

You couldn't park a car anywhere near any popular area Because they were- And you shattered a window. But they would shatter regardless of whether there was something in there. It was just to check. So it was horrific on top of all this property, crime, whatever else. So crime really did get horrifically bad, according to many people I've spoken with in San

Francisco. So then they do this big anti-crime push. And as part of that, Mayor London Breed at the time starts pushing for this program of we are going to install these cameras that will help us track criminals faster. These guys who are coming in, smashing a bunch of windows and driving off before we can get anything. Like a police report hours later doesn't really have. help them, the person's already gone. Right. So, uh, they've been installing a massive amount of

flock cameras and their other tools like drones and reported, this is from flock that in 2025, crime in San Francisco fell by 25% in a single year. Homicides of the lowest it's been. And Mayor Daniel Lurie has said that flock's combined tech is quote, a turning point for public safety in San Francisco. So both flock and San Francisco, the PD and the mayor are saying, thanks to these tools, we have massively reduced crime. This was last year, right? I think 2025 they... Yeah, okay.

So, because it kind of... It's just a big interesting question, right? Because, you know, in China, this is par for the course. We walked around, there was a camera every damn three feet. They didn't even think about it. It wasn't even like a... And it's just a question of... I mean, I really do think hearing this story,

I am the most concerned, similar to this, with data privacy, where it's the idea of whatever they're collecting being used for, or being just put into the model and train and used on things way later for way different purposes. That's a scary thought

because these things always seem to evolve and grow past what they say they're going to be used for. Yep. I think... And actually, let me say this first because I know people, this happened the last time brought up flock. You know, there's no...

We can't prove that flock is the thing that caused crime to go down, right? It's one of many factors, maybe not even a factor at all, right? It's hard to know. They're obviously biased in this. And the second is, it turns out SF standard and 404 media reported that whoops, the SFPD, let out-of-state cops run, I think millions of searches on their license plate database, including on behalf of ICE. And so now they're talking about like, we're going to be stricter about it.

But it does come back to this fundamental question. So San Francisco, you have a city where there was massive crime where people were really, really upset about crime and we're looking for a solution. and this is being attributed to one of the things that is allowing police to respond to things much faster. And there are real examples where you report that somebody broke into your house and drove away, you give a license plate to the cops and they can within 10 minutes locate the person.

That is cool to stop crime. That's also means that cops can track you in 10 minutes, right? It's obviously good, you know, it's obviously horrible for privacy and tracking and government surveillance in that angle. You need to have faith in like the institutions to effectively use the tool, not have like third parties misuse it

and like have respect for privacy. And I don't think there's any, like, I cannot imagine kind of across the board right now. There's that really that trust in government to like use the data appropriately. Confidence in U.S. institutions near all time low. I think it is actually an all time low. This is an older article.

I think we're at an all time low. So that, yeah, I just think people don't have the trust in this being used correctly right now. It is. Same thing is like if someone asked me in the government, they're like, hey, can we raise 10 billion in taxes to build, I don't know, a train or a bridge? I'd be like, in theory, I very much love that. But I'm very worried that I can trust you to take this money and not build it. It could be 10 years later, you haven't built it. It's a lack of trust. Yeah, it's weird to, you know, again, when we were in China and you talk to somebody who's like, oh, it's great. Crime is way down. Yeah. You know, I, to be explicit here, I do not like this world where flock cameras can allow companies to track what everybody. is doing. I don't, I'm not a fan of this, but it's also, it's hard to go to somebody in San Francisco and be like, you're giving up your privacy. And they're like, yeah, but my car doesn't get broken into anymore. It's, it's tough, I think, um, when there are people that feel it's greatly benefited

them. Yeah, I think that it's, it's ultimately like a personal question, right? I think about the China trip all the time because like bringing up the point of your privacy being lost and the onset consequences of having that information available or accessible by the government. And those people being like, hey, this doesn't matter to me because the difference in crime between now and like 10 or 20 years ago is like night and day. And this level of enforcement through the surveillance state is like what improved my life. And like I wouldn't make that choice. I don't want that personally. But you know, for certain people like they're willing to make that tradeoff because of the because of what it was like before. And I, I, I, I,

I think, yeah, I think that's just what it. This is a big thorny question. We have talked about it. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back to school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced deli-meat products for always 375. And get life brand pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready with a whole world and more. Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro level?

This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. Presidential races are always messy, but 2028 is shaping up to be our messiest presidential campaign yet. There are a ton of names that are rumored to be thinking about throwing their hat in the ring. All righty. Here we got Trump. We got Kamala Harris.

We have Marjorie Taylor Green. So this week on America, actually, I wanted to hold a little fantasy draft. Of course, we got to have AOC. on the list and stud George Clooney. And to do that, I want to invite two of the messiest people I know. Box journalist and podcast host Kara Swisher. Let me tell you. Here's the charm of a cyber truck.

An independent journalist and political commentator, Don Lemon. This could go really fast because I got boom, boom, boom, boom, and I'm sure Kara's the same way. I'm a Sted Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. We could talk about, we could talk about, uh, another crazy situation. Don't transition out. This is an Aden story next.

Guaranteed. What's crazy? Tell me about it. What's your guys, what's your guys is next one again? Okay, okay, wait, hold on. They're remaining between me and A truck. I think it's literally just AI insurance fraud.

And then it's four Aden stories. So if you can transition harder to my story than any of yours, we can do that one next. Your last one is so tough from here. We might have to go to South Africa. South Africa. Give me some pace, Aidan. Travel with me. What's going on in South Africa?

Okay. So I saw this story crop up at the end of June. And basically a unique, unique movement, at least from my perspective. Talked a lot about on the show about how anti-immigrant sentiment has risen across the world. And I remember our Japan trip especially because there was this. rising criticism of immigrants within Japan, and admittedly, as an outside party, I thought this was kind of hilarious in like a very bird's eye view, because Japan is almost as homogenous as it gets. There's just not a lot of immigrants in Japan, period. The number of immigrants there has

increased over the last, you know, the last few decades. But ultimately, this is a country that is pretty much all Japanese people. Yeah. So to see the pattern of country encounters economic problems blame immigrants happen in a country like Japan, it was like, it was almost so absurd. It was just funny. Yeah.

Because not that... And you can win an election on it, which is great. You can win an election even there. Yeah. It's a golden standard. So that apparently like this political strategy is like, you can apply it at any time. And I think people have an understanding of parties around.

the world right now in Western countries, especially, pushing back, right-wing parties pushing back against immigration. And I saw this story in June about South Africa, where a similar sort of thing is happening. So I imagine you guys understand this to some extent, but South Africa has not been doing particularly well. And like the early, like to late 2000s, there was kind of this surge in South Africa changing and the post-apartheid era. and it looked like it was in that kind of developing to developed countries sort of stage. It was going to become one of the next big countries

on the world stage. But as time has passed, that hasn't really come to fruition. South Africa is maybe the most unequal country in the world, an enormous disparity between the richest people and the poorest people in the country. Incredible levels of government corruption, incredible levels of unemployment.

I had sort of a joke story earlier in the year about how South African unemployment had fallen from, I think, like 38% to 35%. Oh, beast, they did it. But this is, you know, when we talk about unemployment in, like, the U.S., for example, we're looking at it in unemployment rate of like, like, four. Or if things get to like, if things got to 10, that would be really, really bad. And this is a country with over 30% unemployment and has had that for quite some time.

It is funny you mentioned them like in their rising phase because I remember thinking when they first made bricks. It was like Brazil, Russia, India, China. And then South Africa felt like the, I was like, are they really like one of the. We're in there. Yeah, but they were in there. Yeah, like you said, they were like this rising economic star of Asia. Yeah. And they had the World Cup.

Africa. They had the World Cup. And I think there was a lot of spotlight on the country to succeed. Now we're in a position where the country has been doing quite. poorly for quite some time. And there are huge populations of immigrants within South Africa. A lot of people from other countries in Africa that have immigrated there over the last few decades, people from Nigeria, people from Malawi, people from the Congo, looking for opportunity in South Africa, which is relatively better than like the area of the country that they might

be coming from. And in recent years, there has been a huge rise in anti-immigrant. sentiment among the like poor populations of South Africa in these like areas or like slums in South Africa basically taking issue or accusing foreign born individuals of you came here illegally, you're trafficking drugs, you're at the root of the crime, you're at the root of the unemployment, you are stretching social services and education in ways that make it worse for us South Africans to live here. And there has been a rise in basically vigilante groups. Really, like some community leader will start gathering, like support and people and advocating for the exit of these immigrants and have begun pressuring people to leave the country if they are foreign born because they are at the root of these problems they are accusing of.

and, uh, they are threatening, like, potential, or sorry, threatening them with violence, uh, or, uh, earlier in the year, they had set a deadline of like,

you need to leave the country by June 30th, or we are going to come raid homes and businesses as groups and physically remove you. Uh, that also sounds like violence. Through, through, sorry, yeah, through the threat of violence. Yeah. I think, sorry,

Prior, to be clear, prior to this deadline, it had been more like community demonstrations. Maybe there had been like smaller one-off incidences of attacks or intimidation. Yeah, casual racism on Xbox 360. Yeah. But the big thing that was happening is there was this issuance from a variety of groups that if you were not leaving the country by June 30th, then we are going to show violence in order to remove you from them. Naturally, a lot of people within the country are very fearful of their position because of these threats. And the government, because of the overall state that it is in,

it is not necessarily endorsing any sort of like policy or backing these groups, but they are often like standing by or not really enforcing or policing the way these groups are interacting or threatening immigrants. They are in some cases, but largely the guys, guys, government is very out of touch with how these communities are like being threatened. And these vigilante groups have been able to posture these threats without facing many consequences for it. Um, so in the buildup to this deadline, I thought it was crazy. Like, it's giving examples of like this Ethiopian store owner and his brother have lived there for 11 years. And they're interviewing some of the people that come to a store, some of his friends. And they're like,

we can't do anything. Like, they're going to come with guns and they're going to, uh, an I don't want my friend to have to leave, but I think he should leave for his own safety. And in the buildup to these threats, tens of thousands of people start to leave the country, even if they have the papers or documents. So the thing about this like vigilante sort of system, not to say that it would be justifiable to like, you know,

kill somebody that doesn't have papers, is nobody, like, the vigilante group isn't like kicking down the door of the shop and saying like, show me your voice. visa, they're kicking out people based off of their foreign-born status, or even if they, like, people who have been born in South Africa, but are parents of those immigrants. And so naturally, a lot of people fled in like fear of this happening. And as more and more people have begun to leave at the same time, uh, these massive, like, camps have begun to form at like certain borders or in certain cities where multiple, like tens of thousands of people are congregating. And, uh, are congregated.

in camps, waiting to be like repatriated back to their country, their original country, in order to just stay safe. So it gave, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, but now the South African economy is thriving, right? And everything is great. This, I've been told this works. You just, you violently attack people who are different. It's not violent. They picked the other options. They picked the other option, sorry. One of the two. There was no. And now South Africa is thriving. And everyone is happy. And everyone has a job. It wasn't violent. There was the threat of violence. threat of violence, but they had to do it because this was the problem. And believe it or not, in July, the country 180.

I think the thing that gets noted over and over again is when like experts weighing on the topic, like I was reading some articles from like a South African newspaper where like people are writing like in South African like academia like weighing in on this issue. It's like these are people who are engaging with very. real problems in their country. Social services do stuck. The country is incredibly corrupt. There is a lack of opportunity for people. But ultimately, the same story is playing out here where they are scapegoating a population that has very little to do with the material challenges that the country is facing right now. But, and look, I don't live in South Africa.

So it'd be crazy for me to just like go up to a population. You're a podcaster. I'm a fucking... Say your piece. But I read through the... I think it was like YouTube video comment sections of like an Al Jazeera piece and like a DW piece,

which are very much taking the angle that I would say I'm taking right now, which is that immigrants are probably being unfairly blamed for problems that they probably have very little to do with. And the argument from the South Africans in those comments and it is basically, we are like stepping in where our government refuses to step in. We see that there's like a lack of like control at like the border, a lack of like oversight over immigration. And we are like taking our country back and in like enforcing the laws and the capacity that they should be enforced.

That's the way these vigilante groups see it. Listen, I don't know enough. I literally don't know enough. I'd have to learn more about it. I do know or at least history has shown that on economic problems specifically, this type of action is not, it was not gonna change. It's not gonna suddenly make the unemployment rate fix. It's that, that never happens.

And I think there's kind of a sad story and basically the last few months, like over, I think over 50,000 people had like left prior to that deadline and then tens of thousands more have like gone into these like, these temporary, like basically temporary refugee camps before like transport comes to like bring them back to their country of origin.

And it sounds like the government has stepped there to like manage those so there's like this tacit approval from the government about like all of this happening while like not being the initial vehicle for it happening in the first place I just thought this was an insane story because this scale at which it's happening it's like you know one camp has like 20,000 people from Malawi that have many of which have like lived in the country for for years and years and years just have to leave their home or separate from their family because of these like movements going on. That is a truly insane and dark story coming out of South Africa.

And it reminds me so much of another story about Bud Light sales by the exact same person, Aiden. There's no, I can't do. Transition. Okay. You know what? What are? I get it.

I get it. Yeah. I reap what I sell. I, I fucked around with the run of show. And now I have to talk about. And now after talking about families in South Africa being split up. by vigilante groups. That's right. I now have to talk about how Bud Light isn't the best selling light beer in America anymore. Yeah. Was it a mistake to put the bolt on the sheet?

No, maybe. We can do this. We can transition it. Okay. Um, yeah. So is there a lot of humanitarian aid that the U.S. is sending to South Africa? No, Doug. We're selling the, all the leftover Bud Light that is fucking selling. Okay. Whoa, that's interesting. Tell me about that. You're saying it's not selling? That's selling? What's happening? What's going on with Bud Light? Okay. This is a small story that I saw that I thought was kind of funny, which is that Bud Light has officially been surpassed as America's top selling light beer. Wait, that's guess. Who beat it? Who's taking the crown boys? Who's the number one light beer? It's going to be somebody. I'm going to guess. No shelters, right? It's we're talking a light beer. Light beer. I'm going to guess Corona. I ain't a kitten. Nope. Miller Lighta. Mickelub Ultra. Oh!

Hot dog! Maybe I'm just out of the game. I don't feel like I've ever in my entire life heard someone say, hey, get me a, grab me a Mikhailob Ultra. I just like... Well, the interesting thing about this, A.B. InBev, which is the overall holding company for not only Bud Light and a ton of other beer brands,

including Mikulab Ultra, including Budweiser, which had had the crown in the past. this holding company just owns all these beers All beer in the world almost They have like a third of all beer consumed Yeah, it's insane It is funny because when I clicked on this article I kind of like I think in a passive way

I knew that these companies weren't directly competing with each other But it was like I opened the article And I was like wait This company just owns all these things It's like this is a fake battle And Wait I remember this because there was the big kid rock

Like cancel bud light Like shooting the cans thing And then it was like, yeah, Bud Light got dethrone, because they got DeThrone back then too. And it was a different ABM-BF company. So they just moved the dollars from a different, all the consumers were buying the same company's beer

from a different brand. So what's kind of interesting is there's a huge, huge falloff of light beer sales. Like if you, in general, like if you look at Bud Light, Budweiser and Mikkelup over time, and you look at where all of these brands stand for this year compared to previous years,

there's just this gigantic. gigantic trend of like light beer consumption in America falling off. Wait, I have the, I have the chart that he's looking at. It's so funny because it looks like a Ray Dalio rise and fall of empire. Yeah. It looks like Great Britain, America, China.

Okay. So, the era of Bud Light peaked in 2010. Yeah, Mickelope Ultra is now the king, which is a fraction of the light beer sales in 1990. Yeah. Damn,

we used to drink. And the story, the story that is kind of told, is that in 2023, Bud Light did that ad campaign that they got a lot of flack before where they worked with a trans influencer and she was like drinking,

you know, the drinking Bud Light on her on her Instagram story or in an Instagram post. And immediately there was this huge like right wing pushback and supposedly Bud Light sales did fall. And I'm not denying that they did.

But as I dug into this article, there was a couple interesting things that I saw, which is that these brands were all on a huge falloff already. This entire category of drinking has been declining. And also, A.B. M. Bev dropped the marketing spend for Bud Light in recent years. They just cut the marketing budget huge, so they weren't spending as much as they used to. Whereas with Miklub, they just started spending a bunch more money on that brand.

So it's like, like, Mickelub was the beer of the World Cup. Right, right, right. at least, was it just in the US or is it the whole World Cup no matter what? And they've increased the marketing spend on that brand a ton. And then also, what's kind of funny is if you look at their,

there was, you know, the claim of like losses around that time because of the backlash to that ad campaign, which, you know, I won't deny that like the backlash in America existed. But they are now 30, if you check the market cap of AB in Bev compared to what it was during that time,

to now. The company that is now worth $38 billion more by market cap, even with the decline in sales of by light and these drinks. We won. We won. We won. We won. And so the new, it's like the, the mountain top is lower than ever, but Mickelubs the new king. And all of the competitors are just owned by the same guys. Yeah, no joke.

Which. It's funny, look at the way, and you're based on this chart, like Bud Light has been in free fall since 2010. It's like it's not it. No individual thing stands out in the chart than the fact that people have just been drinking less of it every year since 2010. No way that I,

look, hey, I'm happy to be wrong here. There's no way that I, there's gonna be a big resurgence of light American beer. I just feel like this, right? You never know. Did you see,

I don't have the like statistic in front of me, but like very recently it was announced that Americans are now doing cannabis more than any other substance. Yeah, yeah. Zoomers, Zoomers don't drink and they smoke weed way more. I think alcohol, yeah, alcohol as an entire industry is kind of in a rough spot compared to its historical position, right?

Like, people aren't going out in the same way. I also think, like, the public rhetoric, especially in the U.S. around drinking, has just completely changed. Like, I feel like it's way more mainstream to be, like, completely sober to talk about the negative consequences of alcohol on your body and just be like, nah, that shit's pole.

and like have that be the... You know, like, back in the day, since I'm a freaking unk, you know, you would talk about going out and dating at like bars and clubs and like that would be the party area. Yeah. And it says everybody's using run clubs now. Like younger zoomers don't go to bar. Bars are not a thing.

And like the nightclubs is way less of a thing. Many nightclubs are closing. People are now doing like fitness clubs and run. That's how they meet papers of the opposite sex. It's just interesting. They're lame. It became lame. They got to be,

they got to drink more. They got a cruellist thing to do. You got a cruel thing to do. If you're not crushing bud lights, you're not cool. You want to be like us? Come on. We're cool.

Are you Gen Z? Get a bud light. Get back out there. Get it back out there and pipe. This is their marketing strategy. They pay us for this ad. You might think, might take a sip and go,

this bud light tastes like shit. And then think, oh, surely Mikkelob Ultra is better because it's doing better. And you'll take a sip and you'll be surprised as well. But it's cool. We told you these, we told these guys you were cool.

all right. Drink more meichelope or whatever. You know what's cooler than Bud Light? What's cooler than Bud Light? Is it? Trump's IRS immunity. No, it's AI insurance fraud. I don't know. I think we could let's try a couple transitions. You know what's cooler than Bud Light? You know, what's very cold.

The Nordics. Nordic Fun fact. We want Nordic fun fact. You're making me do three in a row. Yeah. Aiden, not only are you doing three in a row. We can squeeze it on insurance. No, he wants to hear about insurance fraud. That's boring, bro.

If this is not the fucking... Sickest Nordic fun fact. I want to be pissed. You promised us a full toothpaste of squeeze and this Nordic fun... Bring the fucking heat. Shake your body. Here it is.

Okay. Okay. Well, I have a question for you both. Do you like war? I want to be life. I like... I like... What do you have?

Cut that. You might not like this one, then. Wait, wait, wait, wait. There's no way... Did they come out and denounce war or something? Is this one of this is like, hey, in the Ukraine. Yeah, in the Ukraine, Mark Carney said the war is bad. How quickly can I pivot this to Ukraine?

No, this is about Denmark. And I promise you Nordic Fun Fact listeners, I will give Finland a bit of love very soon. Don't you worry. I will. There's a clamoring for Finland specific Nordic Fun facts. There is. It's so important.

Sound off in the comments if you're ready for Finnish Nordic fund back. I know you've been dying for it. Okay. There was, there's interesting changes. The Danes are changing some of the rules around conscription.

Oh. So in 2024, something that they changed was that not just men are eligible for conscription. It's been in women to war? It applies to women as well. And that was a change they made

back then. aren't Danish women like average six feet tall or something they're warriors you're thinking that you're thinking a good point I think you're thinking of Dutch but I'm not the Rick front back guy dude I don't have any facts Netherlands is not Nordic it sounds like it is it's in the club

it's adjacent the big change they just made is that that service that you were put into when you were conscripted before was a four month period unless you chose to stay longer. And they have just recently expanded

that time to 11 months. So everyone that is conscripted has a longer base amount of service that they have to do. Required. I think this is required in Denmark. Can I bones perj? How do I get out?

How do I, if I'm Danish. I think there's ways out of it. I think Danish people weigh in on this. But I, my understanding is that it is required, but there's a lot of ways for you to get around the service. And this expansion to both, including women and this raising of a change to 11 months, is especially in reaction to the threats to Greenland, the invasion of Ukraine, just this dynamic of conflict, like changing in Europe, where they feel threatened and want to

prepare in a way that they haven't in the past. And there is like a decent amount of feedback, even from young people in the country about this, where that four months is just like a very short period of time to like be able to really learn anything. And less or abroad. Yeah. And this 11th month, 11 month period gives you a lot more time to like learn, uh, things while you are in the military.

Uh, the expectations of this program is by 2033, they're hoping to raise the, the annual number of conscripts that they have from 5,000 to 7,500 to increase the size of the military. I'm looking at it right now to see how you can get out of it. I wanted to see if I was a Denmark citizen, Dane, and I wanted to get out of conscription. It is saying that they have a certain number of slots

they want to fill, and most of the time, all those slots are filled by volunteers. And if that happens, nobody gets called, no matter what lot you draw in the fucking conscription. It doesn't matter. You can opt out. But if you drop below, like, a certain percentage, you get margin called.

You got to go in. You get margin called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they start taking the lottery numbers. So if they're increasing the number of slots, mm-hmm. The volunteers have to also go up. Otherwise, you start actually getting, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting, interesting.

And a lot of these initial people being pulled in are, you know, one of the places they're getting sent to is Greenland for, like, initial, like, training or, like, stationing. But they, the military wants to increase the recruitment to 13,000 people per year overall. So the expectation is about like half of that is going to be coming from conscription. Wow. That is a lot of people to suddenly start. It's also saying that people were fined a volunteer when it was four months,

but they're way less likely to volunteer now that's at 11 months. Yeah. So the number of volunteers are actually dropping. Yeah. So I think that I assume I would guess as a young person, the positive feedback about being able to learn more within that time period is the minority of people. It's one of those things where, you know, something that's like 1999 as a price. feels a lot less than, or whatever, like $6 feels way less than $9.

Like four months just feels like, eh, it's kind of like long. Yeah, you can do whatever. That's fine. A long vacation can do that. I could fight and Greenland against Trump for four months. Yeah. But I think, you know, the- 11 feels long.

The idea on Denmark's part is not necessarily to have this like massive standing army, but to have this larger portion of the population that is available to be called upon if a conflict were to actually happen. With some training. You have a bunch of people that have gone through like 11 minutes. 11 minutes. 11 minutes, I volunteer for that. I'd go.

11 months of training in whatever capacity so that if a conflict were to break out, that involves Denmark, you're able to access like a larger portion of the population that has been trained in sub-capacity. If you're from Denmark, very curious what you have to say about this. I'm sure your experience in the Danish news about this is quite different, but this is just what I had seen. from Denmark, they get this news from you. Some of them do. I know. Which is, if you're Danish and you're getting it from me, please get it somewhere else.

No, this is the Nordic Fundway. I've seen so many college because I'm a Nordic citizen and I get my news from. I pulled up our YouTube demographics right here. So look, after the United States, Canada, UK, Germany, Australia, you know what the next ones are? In order of most people, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland. Wait, really?

Which are collectively about 5% of our audience. That's great. definitely because of Nordic folks. Sweden, Sweden is like the biggest chunk of that. It's like two, I think, two percent. And I had to send all of our viewership data across all of our accounts for Swedish viewers for my immigration application.

Hey, that's great. So it's good that we're collecting them. We literally are 2% Swedish. I'm not even kidding. If you're Swedish watching this show, you had a hand in me getting accepted into your country. Quit watching. I need you to keep watching.

I need you to keep watching. In fact, if you're American, change your VPN. It's 90% Swedish. And don't do that. And send that clip to the immigration for here right now, man. Because I wouldn't want you to do that

because that would be fraud. Immigration. That would be fraud. Oh, wait. Hold on. Hold on. Are we talking about AI insurance fraud or about Trump

not being eligible for fraud claims because of the IRS immunity? That's also fraud. That's also fraud. Which one did you mean? Which one do you think? I'm in AI insurance fraud. I bet your story.

Oh, okay. All right, Doug. Boring. AI insurance fraud. What's that? Oh, wait a minute. Can I guess what this is? I have literally no stories.

But I'm already thinking about how I would fraud a disfraud an insurance company with AI. Yeah, go ahead. Break your car or pretend to break your car, right? You could just like send a phone. They asked for a photo. Am I? Hey, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Deliver the story. Cut it out. No, no, no, no. I mean it. That was legitimately. I'm literally just guessing. I'm not giving you shit. So this is what is happening.

And I think everybody's aware of AI scams that are like, you know, somebody calls you and it's a fake voice or whatever. People are hearing about that. But Simon, one of our lovely viewers who works at a German insurance company and is like involved with a lot of this stuff, who we've chatted with actually a couple times now, is saying something I didn't even think about this being the case, which is, hey, you know how when like you get in a car accident or you break your glasses or house or something? And then you send photo or video evidence to an insurance company to tell them that something did break. and they owe you money? Well, it turns out AI is really, really good at this. And so Simon was saying, actually, I sent you, yeah, if you scroll down Perry on this, there's these examples.

Keep going, you'll see it here. So where people can just, you know, you take a real photo of your car and you could put yourself in a car accident, sure, but you could also make the damages look worse. You could, you know, remove bindstanders or do whatever else. So I thought it'd be fun if we do a little game show and see if you guys can tell, if you pull this up.

We have to be auditors. What's the difference? And so I added a couple different photos. Why did you delay this? It should be at the beginning of the show. Okay, okay, okay. So the question is, I'm going to have a photo

that you might send to an insurance claim. And I'm going to make a difference. And we're going to see if you can tell what I did and if you'll be able to see if it's fake. Okay. Okay. So here's the first one. Car accident.

You know, it looks bad. It looks bad. You know, there's like a buy standing in the back. Well, okay. Wait, wait. Are you doing that?

I'm noticing? Yeah. Is it feel like there's a bumper, but... Why is it stuck to the... This is the original. No, but isn't the... This is the original... This is real.

This is real? Yeah. Okay. And then here's... See if you can notice the change. And, uh... I was so excited for this segment. You really have you all hyped up.

I was so excited. And I'm so... And I'm so... So, if I had to point out the difference... Could you go back? I actually... Don't go back up. Don't go back.

I think it's... Like, you've taken most... of the car from the first image, and you've put it over three men having sex with each other. Yeah, and so, basically, is an example of what people are doing. Insurance analysts are getting a lot of this.

Down Perry. So you guys kind of get the idea. So Simon was telling me all about how this has become a major, major new problem that insurance companies. No, that's not what he was telling. Well, not that specifically. That was my... I tried to create an example for you guys. I just feel like it works better if you see it. So why is this stuff so hard if you're an insurance company?

Well, the problem is that, you know, like, I don't know if you guys could tell. I didn't even use AI there. It was Photoshop. But you can use these AI models to create images and videos and change images. And every single model now can, like, do it in different ways. You did that with AI? No, that actually... Was it pure Photoshop?

Yeah, it's crazy. Are these all AI? Okay, so these are examples where some... is using AI to modify photos. Audio listeners, for the segment that you just didn't see, be happy you didn't see it. And for the segment we're looking at now, we're looking at AI photos of car crashes.

Yeah, I guess they're real car crashes, but they've altered them to make the damages. Right, so there's multiple options here. So this is fuck because it reminds me of like, you know how they'll give you a free water cup at a restaurant to go get, but you can't get the soda. You're not allowed to get the soda. Whether it's nice people cheat and they take the water cup

and they get Sprider. And if enough people do that, they just don't give the free watercup anymore and they change it. It's like, this is actually a pretty convenient tool where I can send a photo and get an instant insurance thing. But they're going to get rid of it now because everybody is going to defraud it with these AI tools. And now it's going to be a huge, it's already a pain in the ass. It's going to be such a pain in the ass. Yeah. In real time, I'm very frustrated with this.

This is very annoying. Yeah, I don't think, you know, any of us are stoked about the average insurance company. But if you're in their shoes and you just genuinely want to make sure, hey, there isn't like an insane amount of fraud, it's actually, it's getting incredibly hard. And it's, again, it's not, so this is what Simon was giving some internal details about. It's not just, oh, these AI images are really good because what's the obvious way that you counteract it? Well, you train an AI that can detect whether it's AI. But then if every new image model that comes out from all the different companies, with all the different variations, all have their own way to sort of hide it and do a spin, you have to train a model on every single one of those. somebody finds a new way of slightly altering, whether it's a model or whatever, it instantly

goes undetected now. If you get a false positive and someone takes a normal photo of their car wreck and you go, that's AI, you're open up to a pretty big fucking lawsuit. Yes. Yes. Well, shoot the shit out of you. Because, I mean, you claimed it was AI. Now people are going to be like, you know, you're going to get harassed even more by the

insurance company, but I mean, hopefully not, obviously. But like, now they're having to be far more careful. A Viva insurance, the UK company said that in 2025, the fake insurance claims that they had were worth more than 230 million pounds. There was over 18,000 suspect claims, as in like these are fake claims that people are sending in to try to scam them and that it's a record level.

Like this is skyrocketing. And even Simon was like, do we have like exact numbers from a lot of different companies? And he's like, they don't want to share numbers because this is what they're aware of what's happening. The amount of undetected cases that they don't even know about

could be absolutely massive. And a lot of the, apparently a lot of the things that people are catching are because they're using the same photos to do scams multiple times. So this photo, you can pull this up Perry. This is not, this is a real photo. Don't worry. This is glasses. And apparently on German, imagine if you did it again. That would be wild. Now see, look at the reflection of the glasses. So this is if you Google German glasses. This is like the first image. So apparently this image has been used just for him

dozens of times for people trying to scam them for free glasses from insurance claims. But these are famous glasses from Yergen Klopp, who's the national soccer team coach. People are so fucking lazy. And so in the point of this is not always it's very stupid to Google broken glasses and use the first result. Apparently these glasses are so famous they're in a museum. Not only is that stupid. The fact that there's this much fraud being detected right now. And a lot of the reason it's detected is because people keep trying to do it,

heatedly with the same images is crazy. And so, insurance claiming my broken bell. Liberty Bell. And you said you got a liberty bell. It got a big crack in it. Oh, I need to be fixed.

And you can do it with images. And so, and there's a whole weird thing. We're now insurance companies are having to figure out. Do we can't send a real person to go check every single claim. So then you're trying to figure out which claims to go for. And there's these,

there's companies that I looked at like Veris, that are trying to sell products that are like, we're going to figure this out. We have your customers only take photos with our app and then we'll check all of these things. And it's like, dude, maybe that's where it has to go. But holy shit.

I'm going to print out a picture of the German glasses and I take the app and then I'll take a photo zoomed in on it. Right, right. So this is a, I hadn't thought of AI scams and insurance. What a crazy, no, it's a crazy world.

And it's like, this is one where it doesn't feel like people are benefiting. Like nobody, I guess like, some broadsters, but just broadly, this is just going to suck. I think they'd be able to detect Doug's image? I mean, it's not AI. You have to give him that. Yeah. I don't know if they'd give you a refund on your three gay men having sex, but...

Well, no, it's the car. The car is the part I want to respond on. The car happens to be there. It'd be funny if they get it mixed up and send you the wrong refund. They send me three new gay old men. Those men are too old. They're too old to love each other ones. What an auspicious note to end our episode on.

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