Lemonade Stand - The New Ferrari is Ugly and the Pope is Pissed (Unrelated) | Ep. 64 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

On this week's show... Atrioc wants to buy some memory, Aiden has a Nordic Fact, and DougDoug needs to hydrate. 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: 064 Recorded on: May 26, 2026 Our Ads Philosophy post - https://www.patreon.com/posts/our-ads-148897410 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 1:52 The New Ferrari 24:19 The Pope on Al 32:23 Samsung Possible Strike 43:17 SpaceX's Pitch for IPO 58:45 Cuba is out of Oil 1:10:18 Stock of the Week 1:19:30 Nordic Fun Fact 1:27:40 Google Glass(es) is back 1:36:14 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

Welcome back to the Lemonade Stand. And I was just on the Yard podcast subreddit where I was sad because I saw somebody had left two yard shirts at a at a thrift shop. I'm like, oh, they're giving it up. It's sad. You know, at least I have another podcast and I see that the top comment on it is,

oh, nice of Atriac to drop off his clothes because they're both like five X-Ocephers. So it was like, it immediately turned my sadness. Yeah, upside down. And yet mine is deeper than ever. Okay, whenever we do actually release merch, let's have small, medium, large, atriarch. I think what I like is like, I have such an outset impact on your life.

Like, I'll look at the big A comments and there will be, the top comment will be like Waitriac L.A. Do you have the comments are you're fat? You don't have a credit card? Well, this is all me. It's all you. And, you know, my co-house. Yeah.

It's crazy. Well, this week we have, honestly, such an insane variety of topics to bring up that we argued about the title of this episode for about 30 minutes. So I don't know what we decided on at this point. Hopefully by the time you're looking at it,

you're seeing one of my titles, which include the Pope, everyone run, the Pope is pissed, the new Ferrari is ugly, the Pope is pissed, and Pope did 9-11. The Pope did 9-11 was a real suggestion from Doug for this episode.

We'll A-B tested. And you may be seeing it right now. You may be seeing it. And the fact that you saw it meant it's probably going to win because you clicked through and are watching right now. So I appreciate your support of my title. It is a very clickable. It's just not very accurate. And we'll be touching on other light topics such as Ebola breaking out in the Congo, Cuba running out of oil. I suspected striking in Korea. But we will start with Ferrari and the Pope. Bring it up Perry.

Not maybe that the world's biggest topic, but it is the number one trending story on like the FT and Business Insider and Wall Street Journal. People are so pissed about the new Ferrari, folks. It came out in the consensus is from the car people that it's quite ugly, including our producer Perry, who's a big car guy, he's nodding right now, telling me it's the ugliest car he's ever seen. So I'm going to give a shameful admission right now. When I first saw this car, I thought, oh, it looks kind of cool.

And then everyone told me how bad it was. And I was like, oh, yeah, I get you. I think I know why you thought it was good. It looks suspiciously like the Xiaomi. Yeah. It looks like a mystery of the Shaii, S.C.7 and the Honda fit you drive. It legitimately does. They're like merge the two and then they put a slap the Ferrari sticker on it. Okay. But then I heard the price, which if you don't know if you're listening, is $650,000.

There's a quote from Ferrari. I'm not going to find it in the second. I'm just going to tell you from memory. It was a quote from one of the designers of this car. And he's like, this is proof that we can compete on profitability with the Chinese companies. And then, what? Yeah, that's what he said. And then in the same sentence of the article, it's like the car costs $650,000. It's like, yeah, you can compete on profitability when you charge as much as a house for the car.

The whole point of the job at 6th, it's this is 35K or 40K. So I thought that was crazy to me. Edish, can you pull up the picture that we have from China of Aetriok leaving the car looking like paparazzi or taking photos of him? Please put that out.

Which is a car that we saw in China within 10 minutes of it being announced publicly and it is way cooler than this one, same color, and cost $35,000. I don't know if it's way cooler. The interior of this car is kind of cool. We can show it.

Maybe I can find it for you. Here, right here. Check us out. Check us out. Look it up. I think the interior of the car has got real physical buttons. It looks nice.

But $640,000 $6,000 is crazy. It's such an insane. But, okay, got to tell you, is Sawyer Merritt somebody we trust? I don't know who that is. He's saying it's one of the ugliest designs. You can't find someone compliment.

this car on the internet. Everyone is... It does have to suck because they hyped up the fact that Johnny Ive designed this car who is famous for his work at Apple. He was a person who designed a ton of Apple's like earlier products.

And Apple, a company, hailed for its design. So they intentionally get him, bring him on board to design the car. They do all this teasing of the interior and how amazing it's going to be. You would announce, immediately shit on by everyone. What's funny is,

so I saw that. Doesn't it feel like if this exact same car came out, maybe lower price point and had an Apple logo on it instead of a Ferrari logo, people would be way more, doesn't it feel,

I think the reason people are so mad is because it's a Ferrari. I don't know. Am I wrong? Perry, as a car guide, is that, like this feels like a tech car that does, it's, you know, because there's the Ferrari guy,

here's this video, you pull us up. This is a former Ferrari chairman. he's like tearing up and he's like, I can't even say what I really, you know, it's all in Italians. There's no point in playing the clip,

but it would harm Ferrari. This is the destruction of a legend. Take the logo off. At least the Chinese won't copy this car. Oh my God. He's like so mad at it. And so I just feel like it's like maybe it's because the Ferrari people see Ferrari in a certain way,

a certain design language, and this is a betrayal of that. I mean, I'm a pretty casual Ferrari fan. Okay. And I think it, kind of betrays the design philosophy of their cars. It's kind of bubbly.

Like it's way different. And it doesn't feel or like look like a Ferrari as someone who's definitely in the market to buy one. Okay, but that was actually one thing I wanted to bring up because I thought my first thought and then echoed by a tech crunch article that I saw was that this isn't for me. Right.

I'm not buying this. All the people online shitting on it aren't buying it. Yeah. Maybe there is a cohort of Ferrari owners that are the primary market for owning this vehicle. Because if you don't know, the way Ferrari works is you sort of have to apply to buy new vehicles. 80% of what they sell in a year goes to already existing Ferrari owners. It's not just like showing up to buy a car like you do normally. They keep it massively scarce.

Yeah, you literally can't just go get one. And you can't even like sell yours to someone else without going, like there's some rule against it. Yeah. Yeah, which is a strategy that has worked well for them. If you look at their stock over like the last five years, as far as car companies go, they've performed really, really well. But now I wonder if this like betrayal and design philosophy

or this like public outcry against it actually is shared by the people who primarily buy their vehicles. Because ultimately you don't need that many. It's a bunch of poor people like clamoring and being like, the rich should be buying cooler cars. Like none of us are buying. these fucking cars. No, but that's what I mean, right? Is like, maybe you're also

pissing off this richer consumer base that you're mainly appealing to as well. We don't know. That, I'm sure the guy who used to work at Ferrari is one of the founders and hates the design. Is someone who has enough money to buy this car? On that, no, can you pull us up, Perry? And also that's the stock. We should talk about a second. But this is,

the really funny tweet that I saw, which is, is this how Ferrari plans on powering it? And then it's Enzo Ferrari turning over it is great. Yeah, that's good. That was good. But if you go back to the stock, the stock did tumble on this news. This reminds me a little bit, though.

Do you guys remember that Peloton ad with the, with the rich woman who gets it for Christmas? And they became like a viral thing. I don't know what made fun of me. It was like a... No, I can only remember the one with the guy from heated rivalry, who I think is really hot. Okay.

Well, maybe that one did better. But the Peloton ad was widely made fun of by a bunch of broke people. And then their stock took a tumble. And then sales came out for Christmas, and they were amazing. And it was like, they made it seem like too weird or niche or rich, but it worked. Like this could be a Jaguar story where they bounced back. Maybe.

Yeah. I don't, what happened to Jaguar? I'm actually not sure what happened to Jaguar. I'm actually not sure what happened to Jaguar. Everyone hated that and it didn't go back. We don't know if they've bounced back yet. But it could be a thing where everyone shit on, I mean, they didn't actually do that well, but everyone showed on a cyber truck.

And it was like, it's ugly to me, but somebody likes this type of shit. Dude, it is okay. But it's not doing well. No, a ton of people. a ton of people buy it who work at SpaceX because they'd have a contract to buy it like 10,000 of them.

But it's not telling that well, that's true. So there's a market for, I'm sure there's someone out here for them this is the right car at the right price and it's distinct. I think it's like you stand out. I think maybe the greater risk because they're probably only producing

so many of these and ultimately you only need so many people to buy it and you need an initial like group that buys it off the novelty basically. Is if you're trending in this direction are you damaging the brand and the reputation of the car? Because that's what Ferrari's value is compared to even a company like Porsche. You know, Porsche has a powerful brand, right?

But they sell way, way more cars than Ferrari do. And I think there's sign of this like first level of like rich guy's car that's there. And it's just like I say comparatively accessible. But in Ferrari's case, like, proportional value in the brand comes from its reputation and the idea of it being this next level, inaccessible thing. And does this design harm that in the long run? Is it a reflection of something being lost at the company? I think that's probably the greater risk than like this specific model not initially selling out. Yeah, I mean, their markup is massive. So you're buying the brand. You're buying the cool. If everyone thinks you're a tool for having one, it kind of really undercuts what. they're paying $600.000 for. I don't know. I really don't know how it'll play out.

You want to know a crazy stat? What? Ferrari, the company, is worth more than Volkswagen. Volkswagen sells 9 million vehicles a year. Ferrari sells 13,000. That is wild. That is wild. Their user base is... I once someone told me the reason Apple was the most valuable company on Earth back in the day is because they can sell the volume of Toyota with the margins of Ferrari. And it was like, kind of, they do both, but no one else can do that. And yeah, I think that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, I, I, okay, can I. Okay, can I ask where, where does the Pope come into this? So, big announcement that he might be swapping the POMobile to this Ferrari is, you're your first and only.

Right. And, and, and we're probably going to edit that out of the video as well. We might get in trouble, uh, the Pope now also. We're the first to break that. Yeah. and the one to put it away as well. The Pope famously drives cars. Yep. Well, he doesn't drive himself. He famously gets driven around in one. Look, I'm still doing it in some investigating.

I've done some boots on the ground journalism when I was 13 and went to a Catholic high school, even though I'm not Catholic. And I can report to you that the Pope has officially come out with some opinions about AI. And it is published in the Magnifica Humanitus. You know what that means? What's that?

Magnificent. humanity. Oh, that's so much easier than I thought to translate. Yeah. Now, the core of this, like, you can pull up a video Perry that I linked. There he is. Our Pope. Now, uh, Pope's actually American Pope, bro. American Pope. It's a big deal for us. He's a big, uh, Chicago Bears fan maybe. He was born and was. He was born in Chicago sometimes. Yeah. No, he's a, he's a real hooper. So, no, this is, this is not the most consequential thing. But it's a fun little thing. So what, uh, initially, I read like a headline, I, I don't know if I'm dyslexic or I glanced past it. And it was,

the Pope is releasing an AI encyclopedia. That's what I thought the story was going to be until I started reading about it. That's your brain auto-filling what Doug wanted to see. Well, no, hold on. He is releasing an AI encyclical, okay? What is that? An encyclical is popes release a sort of like open letter and philosophical kind of musing to ostensibly the bishops of the Catholic Church, but really it's to everybody. Okay. And this is on average, like one a year for the 120 or 30 years, something like that. So this is the Pope, he's been in Pope for like a year now, is his first encyclical, and he's made it about AI.

So what's interesting is the head of the Catholic Church, somebody who looks to a lot, has made a big, big, big effort to learn about AI and talk about it. And just a couple interesting takeaways. One, this is ostensibly about AI, but as I read this like 200-page document, I didn't get through the entirety of it, I'm sorry, I tried. The first third is basically describing all of the,

definitions for like what is good in society and what we should strive for. Kind of like with the human condition and social good. Bottom line it. What does he think is good? And think about humanity. What does he think like we should do? Social justice. Okay.

Common good. Others. It's a little generic. It's really well written. I just like, you know, it's like, when did the Pope go woke?

I went to the accent. That was my first question, Aiden. That was my first question. It was like, what happened to the Pope I used to know? Who's like based? I think that the actual interesting takeaway.

That was more of a Benedict guy. Well, he's all woke, dude. Okay, so, okay, wait. Listen, the reason I'm actually interested in asking you about this because I've seen everyone try to give their take without reading it or giving any. Everyone is, I clearly only read a headline. Including me.

I only've seen headlines of like the Pope attacks AI or the Pope has interesting thoughts on AI. And like everyone's taking their own direction. Yeah, here. I'll give you three quick takeaways. And then we can give our thoughts about how much we like the Pope. Okay.

Okay, point one is he basically makes an argument for the church should actually give commentary and guidance on the material changes of the world. And he's like, look, this, the encyclicals, some of the most famous ones were during the industrial revolution when the world is changing dramatically and we the church should offer guidance in periods like this. Even though, you know, I think for many people, the reputation of someone like the Pope is to be very like high level and ephemeral. So that's all. Yeah. So that's one. He lists a lot of concerns then about AI, like the middle third of this document he, puts out is about AI and concerns with it. And one of the things he says, and the word he chooses, which a lot of people have latched onto, is that AI should be disarmed, which I think many people headline-wise have taken it to be like, the Pope hates AI. Not exactly. So here's a quote that I particularly liked. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of armed competition, which today is not simply limited to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails

a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger data sets driven by a desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. So he's like, it's really like very thoughtful and he talks a lot about how he thinks that, uh, there, there are specifics. Um, I wrote a bunch of quotes, but I don't have to go into him about how he thinks that, uh, the development of AI should be much more transparent and the average person should have much. more involvement and say and how it is developed and does a lot of the like otherwise we risk this all just becoming very, you know, exacerbating income inequality. And so some cool ass shit

that I love, which is that are given this new technology, the metrics that we should have for like the health of the world and governments instead of GDP, which he calls out specifically, should be like the dignity of people's work, shared prosperity, inequality, inequality reduction and environmental protection. More than ever, quote, more than ever in the age of AI and robotics, it is no longer possible

to rely solely on the invisible hand of the market. So I want to throw that to you and give opportunity for you to counterpoint. And basically tell the Pope why the free market is the most powerful way to govern.

The Pope is not getting a Ferrari at this range. At this level of income growth, he wants to be sure the Ferrari can reach everybody. He doesn't want it to be held by just those. What you just described sounded really cool for a book.

I think it's the part that is interesting is that he seems to have taken a real interest in learning. Yeah. Do you think you vibe coded a task manager app? It's the night before. He's, it's 1230. Shit, I got my encyclical tomorrow. Claude.

Claude. Write me an essay. Yeah. It's great. I think it's interesting because this obviously is a huge world-changing impactful thing. and it's nice to see someone with a ounce of, or not an ounce of big leadership, try to understand it and give a thoughtful nuance take.

I think it's cool. I think that's, that's awesome. And then why do you think Protestants are wrong? That could take the whole episode. And it is. The title's going to be why Protestants are wrong. And I want to go into it. Give me some more quotes.

What stood out to you? I mean, there's a lot. In practical terms, in the age of AI and robotics, ensuring that the economy favors human dignity means adopting certain criteria for firm action. And then he talks about he wants transparency, accountability, over algorithms. He wants the benefits of innovation to be paired with investments and skills. So he's very clear about like, he talks explicitly. This is going to displace workers and that there's, he makes a whole section about the dignity of work and how it's really important to not

just have AI destroy jobs and then give people money that the feeling of, of work and contribution to the world is actually an important part of like being a human and growing. And I thought that was pretty interesting of not, it's not just like we need UBI. You know, it was like explicitly pulling against that. And then like I said, having measures for equity

that go beyond just economic growth, which I think, you know, probably all three of us feel somewhat passionate about changing. I mean, Benedict was, he was more of a GDP guy. It's just simple, you know? Just rock solid. GDP go up. It was one of his big quotes. was that God-Lyca when GDP go up.

I kind of want to ask viewers because in my own life I've seen the transformation of my Catholic family and the way their faith has developed a lot of people in my own life who have fallen away from the church and anecdotally feeling like this person has lost a little of the punch

that it would have had like even 50 years Oh, definitely. The importance of the Pope to like the average person and the, the way they can, the Catholic Church can impact the world is like dramatically different from it used to be, right? I'm kind of wondering for people listening, does this guy still have a huge impact in either your own view on things or in your family's views, maybe your older relatives? Like, how lauded is the Pope's word in, in your own lives?

I'm just curious, like, people's inside. I mean, from an American POV, this is. just facts, or I'm not generalizing, but as facts, majority of Christians are more likely to vote Republican. And Trump has been in like a feud with the Pope, and it hasn't impacted their opinion of him too much. I can't imagine the Pope's got the sauce he used to have. I feel like the President having beef with the Pope would have been

an electorally damning thing for your base 50 years ago. That would have been like insane. Yeah, that is wild. Now that you say that. And now it's like nothing. It's like, yeah. And it's, yeah, it's just Tuesday. Are the majority of Christians in the U.S.

even Catholic, though? I'm not sure. I actually don't know. I feel like the answer is no, but I don't know. But you just feel like the aura of the Pope would have made a bigger deal in that. I don't know. To me, it's kind of surprising.

I think it's really cool to have someone like this give a really thoughtful, arguably, I think, a little too long of a take. Again, it's 200 pages and the middle third is the one about AI. Trim it down next time, your holiness. Was there any points on AI weapons? because I was, I had a section that I had for the China Trump meeting recently about this and just, I read more about it.

And it really is like something that's super kind of spooky in that it kind of upends a lot of power structures. If somebody powerful had the ability to control a lot of AI weapons, autonomous control drones or whatever, it like upends the consent of the governed. that you need in a lot of cases. Like it really, if it gets more advanced, it really does call into question a lot of things that have been true for all of history, which is you kind of need this pyramid

of humans to all agree. And even if you're fucking people at the bottom, the people at the next level. But if you have so many of those drones, once you're in, you're kind of locked into power in a way. This seems to be one of the few things that states in conflict agree up on right now, right? Isn't like the China,

US, I think Russia, all agree on provisions around automation of weapons. And maybe I'm mistaken about Russia, but I definitely had read during the U.S.-Chinese summit that one of the main things that is agreed upon is not to allow AI to just have control over weaponry, especially nuclear weapon. This is not 100%-over decisions to kill.

I agree. I know they said that, and I know that there's like general consensus that's a bad thing. And I think currently nobody is doing it. as far as I know, but everyone is training. Everyone has tests of it. No one's done it.

No one's, everyone has a human on the kill button. But it's just so, God, but you gotta have it in the pocket. You guys, like everyone's getting it in the pocket. That's what's the kind of spooky to me.

I think the sputious part is that it's not on you then, kind of, you know? Like, you can offload the blame if you're the general or the head of a state

where you're like, our AI went rogue and did drop the bomb on X, Y, or Z, And it's not our fault. But it's also like the thing, like, I'm thinking about more,

the scary part for me is internal, which is like, if you were a despotic leader, and previously you told like, you know, if you told citizens to fire on other citizens, oftentimes they wouldn't do it. A certain level of,

you know, if you're a worse enough leader. Like a famous example is when the Soviet Union fell in 91, there was tanks out front of Boris Yeltsin at the time, and they didn't fire on him. And he walked out and he stood in the tank and like made them stand down. And it was a big moment of like shifting power.

But like if it's autonomous and you just tell it what to do, that's not, it's not going to stand down. That's not. So I don't know. That's a weird thing for me. I just don't know if that upends the whole. Revolutions in history.

I don't know. The Pope explicitly says that. And he's, it is funny to read something the Pope read and it's very specific about AI weapons. Like you have to be able to retrace and reconstruct decision making processes, which makes sense, you know, as in you need to be able to look back and understand how a decision was made. He says you should not be able to delegate lethal force to automated processes,

and you have to establish a shared framework at the international level to curb the technological arms race. He's not like anti-tech in this. He's very much like, here's the ways we need to be responsible and shift how we measure these things. Even though he uses the quote, like disarm as the word, which is interesting. He also got Ebola on stage. It took... Wait, no, no, sorry. Cut that out too.

Don't cut that. That was a brilliant fucking segue, bro. This guy's still got it. That's why he used to go. It looks like there's about twice as many Protestants as there are Catholics in the U.S. Oh, damn, really?

Yeah. But to quickly move on, let's pivot. Let's talk about Ebola. Something like... The Pope to Ebola. What are you guys... These are the three least related topics

that we have ever discussed. This is why we couldn't title of Pogue is. Ferrari, the Pope. Open Ebola. It's a fucking wild week. It's a wild week. Okay. What do you guys know about Ebola?

Genuinely. Blood disease. Yeah, the blood's involved. Bloods disease, 50% kill rate. What do I know about Ebola, legit? I know it's a deadly disease. That's all I know. You know what I honestly know when you say Ebola is so embarrassing.

When you say Ebola, the first thing I think of is the movie Osmosis Jones from 2001 with like Chris Rock. Yeah. It's like an animated cartoon. And there's a virus in there. and he goes, Ebola's child's play compared to me. That's the first thing I think of. So I'm kind of caught up on the medical research. There we go.

If you put influenza and COVID and Ebola on a CSGO team, Ebola's top fracking every time. Is it the worst? They're operin. Ebola has a high fatality rate, especially this strain. It's one of the highest in the, is it like top? So Ebola, a virus, there's an outburst. break of currently in the Congo, the eastern part of the Congo. And the main way that Ebola is transmitted

is through bodily fluids, things like blood, vomit, uh, and diarrhea. And it causes you, like you have, you, you get things like diarrhea, you're bleeding. You're expelling fluids. You're expelling a bunch of fluid as you die from this. And part of this like dehydration and fluid expelning you go through puts the people around you at risk because the full. fluids that people get into contact with is the way people get it. So like people providing medical care to people with Ebola are very at risk to contract it as well. And right now this outbreak in the eastern part of the Congo is getting really big. As of last week, 900 people had already died. This is a disease with like a 40% fatality rate. And this specific strain of Ebola right now

doesn't have any major treatment or vaccine available for it yet. And this is a new strain of Ebola. I don't think it's new, but it's rare and researching. And this spread, they are like months behind on containing it. Because there is no apparatus or effective apparatus in the eastern part of the Congo to be able to contain something like this. If you guys don't know, the eastern part of the country, and the Congo is massive. It's like six times the size of California.

The whole eastern part of the country is in disarray. It's very segmented. The government that exists in the capital doesn't really have control over this area. There's a lot of like warlords and taking control of like smaller areas of the country that are at conflict with one another.

There's not a lot of infrastructure that like allows supplies or like the military that exists in the country to even be able to come to potentially stabilize that part of the country. This is and it's been really... Are it effectively ungoverned or it's like... In a lot of ways, yes.

And it's been that way for, I think, around like a decade. And the Congo has a very, you know, volatile history going way, way back, right? This plays into how this disease is, like, able to be combated, right? You're not able to, like, leverage the resources that a more developed country might be able to. I think it's hard to imagine when you live in, like, a, you know, a place like the U.S. Or a place like France. Like, the government can't just, like, deploy and, like, start developing tests for the disease and, like, deploying medical workers. It's really challenging this part of the country

to be able to like test and contain an epidemic. A pandemic breaking out like this. And already like an international aid group had set up like a medical tents to like help out the hospital in the main area where this is breaking out. It's called the Bonilla. And there's like 700 to 900,000 people

in this city of Bonilla. People burnt down these medical tents in order to get a body back from these tents. So another issue with how disconnected and fragmented communication is about the disease is that people have a lot of like fear about the medical people that do come in. There's a lot of like conspiracy theories that are spread. And a really common thing is like when people die, you want to go through like burial ceremonies and deal, you know,

deal with the dead in like whatever respectful or appropriate way, right? But if you take a body that has died, from Ebola, the fluid is still containing the disease. So if you go through these like normal practices that you would, you're very likely to contract the disease. And people out of fear of the medical staff that are available in there to help them, like burned down these tents in order to recover a body and like bury it in the proper way. So the limited amount of staff that does exist there is having a really difficult time like communicating with people and help. helping contain the disease in whatever capacity they even could.

It's a really, really difficult situation and like part of the reason why like a lot of Ebola pandemics have like spread in this specific area. Yeah. I mean, like they banned funeral wakes and gatherings more than 50 people. And yeah, there's a huge amount of pushback from young people in the community when they try to come in and help. Yeah, so that's, that's wild. So yeah, I mean, I can see it from your point of view of like if you're somebody who's

who wants to help, not only are you at a higher risk of getting a disease, but you're at a risk of being attacked or having your place of work being burned down. And like it's, yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. That is a difficult. And right now, it, you know, it looks like this is just going to continue growing and spreading in this area of the country. And it was interesting.

I'd read another article, too, about the reaction in the capital city of Kinshasa. And that's way further away because the country is so large, right? And day-to-day life there hasn't really like changed much or been held up at all. On one hand, a reaction of like, well, the country doesn't have that much infrastructure for the disease to actually like travel to that area of the country yet. There's like that argument. But there's the other part of it where the government doesn't really have the apparatus or the means to like deal with an outbreak like this either. So like life, people can't just like go home and chill and stop working. you know, people need, you know, need an income.

They need to continue working and, like, living life and they're willing to gamble the chance of this outbreak, like spreading to a larger city because they can't really afford to be more conservative about it. It's kind of a tragic story, and a lot of contexts around, like, how a disease, like, spreads in a place like this. Yeah.

I think that's always when I hear about Ebola, that's one of the things where I feel like, okay, well, hopefully it can't get too bad because you have to be in contact with bodily fluids. But with these kind of conditions, yeah, that gets a lot harder to avoid. It does seem like it'd be very, it's hard to imagine something like this

becoming a sort of global pandemic just because, you know, ultimately it's not traveling through the air, at least the strain, knock on wood. Jesus. Yeah, I don't know how like viable that is, like to what degree it could like mutate and do something like that. I could speak that.

Being in this area with these conditions, it's like, yeah, that's so rough. Yeah, I think like, travel to the country, like Uganda has closed, like, travel off with the Congo already. A lot of other countries around the world are like limiting people who have been to the Congo from entering. So there's like, US set up a quarantine facility in Kenya for any Americans exposed.

And then I think there's like a, the DRC team has to isolate before being able to compete in the World Cup. Yeah. They're like making them go to a 21 day bubble just to, which is kind of, you know, there's some controversy there. Yeah. I kind of want to keep an eye on the story and see, you know, how the situation escalates. It definitely sounds like it can, it will continue to.

But I thought it was pretty wild to see that story of like the tents being burned down. It's like, yeah, I will say insane respect to the dog. I mean, the way you described it, that, that just sounds like the most thankless, difficult, incredible job to be doing that. That's really impressive. And I mean, if we just move on over to Korea. Dude, this is like topic whiplash this week. No, no, no, no, hold on. You have to find a diogenic way to connect Ebola to Samsung in Korea.

And you need to do it with taste. We did it flawlessly for our topics. Doug's transition was one of the best I ever heard. You did put up a goat transition and it's like, just lie, just make something up. They won't quote it out of context. The doctors in the Congo shouldn't strike

much like the people working as Samsung. Anti-strike stance. Yes, I'm Union Buster Aiden. Dream with me. Oh. You want to become a streamer. You might be working for

two guys who commentate Super Smash Bros. Melee. And they got a little show they do called The Reads. And they've even entrusted you to do their merch. Well, what do you do? You can use Shopify to sell that merch.

You got no idea what to do. It doesn't matter. Shopify makes it so easy. Your name's Ludwig Ogren. You have to sell those clothes somehow. This really happened. He used Shopify. The Reeds, Scar and Tove entrusted him to sell the reeds merch.

And he built a store all by himself, even though he knew nothing about it. And had been fired from every job before that. Yeah, it's funny that of that group, he was the smart one on setting things up and he just found a way to shopify. The true star managed to use some of their easy to market, easy to use marketing tools. Yeah. It's time.

Wait, this is a happy story. He got fired from his jobs before that. And then he successfully, okay, thanks to Shopify, did this job for the reads. I would argue it's entirely Shopify.

And they did sell merch because I have a bunch of reeds merch. Wow. It's time to turn those what ifs into Cheching with Shopify today. You can sign. up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash lemonade. Go to shopify.com slash lemonade. That's Shopify.com slash lemonade.

The U.S. and Iran say they've agreed on terms to end the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz. You already see oil prices from a high of $126 a barrel down to about $80 a barrel today. That's a lot of progress. The war, of course, drove up the price of gas and other essentials and has led to some ugly polling for President Trump. 61% of adults polled by NPR, PBS, and Marist disapprove of his handling of the economy. His handling in a certain light makes sense. His priority was preventing Iran from getting nukes.

But Trump's messaging was unusual, unusual for a president. Last month, the reporter asked Trump, to what extent was he thinking about Americans' finances when he negotiated with Iran? I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. What's he doing coming up on today, explained from Vox? Hassan Piker has blown up in recent years. After the 2024 election, the popular leftist Twitch streamer became a go-to voice for the Democratic Party. But Pikers' glow up has angered a section of Democrats who are growing louder in voice.

Hassan Piker is anti-American. He is bigoted. He's anti-Semitic. And he is deeply misogynistic. So in March, a Democratic group called Third Way, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal's opinion section saying, quote, Democrats are too cozy with Hassan Piker. He is such an extremist that it will only do damage to Democrats and hurt their chances of beating right-wing populism.

Now, Piker is controversial, no doubt, but is he toxic? I don't think this helps Republicans at all. I think, as a matter of fact, third-way's brand of politics has helped Republicans. Their attitude has been to constantly concede on culture or issues to the Republican Party and never focus on economic populism. I'm a Stead Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube

or wherever you get your podcast. This is a relatively big story in that we've covered this a bit on the show, maybe some on Big A, but the big winners of the AI boom recently have shifted from the hyper-scaler companies to the picks and shovels companies. Not just Nvidia, but all the memory companies.

They've been making literally gargantuan amounts of cash. Samsung and TSM in Taiwan. Taiwan just passed India to be the world's fourth biggest stock market or whatever entirely off of one stock. India has like, I'm not getting a thousand more stocks over a certain market cap, but one stock TSM has brought Taiwan up. And Samsung in Korea has had a similar boom where a few memory companies in Korea, which dominates the memory industry, have made so many sackfuls of cash that it's changing things.

And the Samsung workers who have been working around the clock to fulfill this demand for memory are rightfully wondering where their piece of the pie is because the profits of Samsung have gotten so gargantuan and yet their pay hasn't changed. So there's been this brewing strike. And they have a lot of leverage right now because the demand is so high

that if Samsung slows down or shows down factories for even a moment, the amount of loss they're taking per day is more than like yearly revenues in previous years. Yeah, can I give you just a sense of, how much this has grown. So it's from Bloomberg. Samsung is on track

to become one of the world's most profitable firms this year with its semiconductor arm posting a 48-fold jump in profit for the March quarter. Wait, 48 for the quarter. 48 times the amount of profit. And so the workers want to cut of that.

So here's a number that is stuck in my head. I don't even need to pull it up. Samsung could pay every single employee at Samsung a 4. $400,000 bonus, everyone from the top down of the janitors, a $4,000 bonus, and still have their most profitable quarter ever. So obviously, like, it's the right moment for a strike,

and all the workers with their highest amount of leverage and the ownership having the most amount of money to give are brewing for a strike. However, because there is such a desperate desire to avoid the strike, not only by Samsung, but even by the Korean government, who really wants to keep this, tax revenue and this boon going of Korean memory, the negotiations have been fierce,

but the latest update I saw, which I think is like six hours ago or something that they have held off on the strike, they have a tentative agreement, they're going to get some kind of bonus. I don't have the hard numbers, maybe we can even find it, but that's the idea. So it's a very interesting story of worker. I think this is probably, I guess we don't know, but historically, memory cycles like this are cyclical, which means like there's a moment where supply is low and demand is high and you get a ton of money. And then they build up the factories and then the price goes way back down and the moment's

gone. So this is kind of your moment as the workers to really like get a piece of the pie. You can't, you don't want to wait it out or the moment's not going to be there. So okay. Yeah. One hour ago. Yeah. They reached a deal. Okay. So the union, the labor union voted in favor. Um, and they will be getting an average bonus of about $340,000 per chip worker. And I believe there's about... Per chip worker. And Samsung is also from Bloomberg. Samsung employs about 78,000 people in its semiconductor division.

Dude, $340K bonus per person. I don't know if it's going to be to every single person because you don't know exactly. But certainly it's going to be tens of thousands who are now getting... I mean, that's... 340K per... Is that, like, for real? Yeah. No, and not only is it for real,

because this started last year with S.K. Heenix, I don't know how to say their name. Yeah, so... Heinex and Micron and... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so they, another South Korea company that's making the memory, right? So basically, S.K. Heinex and Samsung

are the two that are just gangbusters profit right now. So, infrastructure-wise, you need GPU chips, which crunch the numbers for AI. But you need memory chips in order to feed information to and from those GPU chips. So they have to be done together.

Like what Nvidia does requires both, uh, both the GPU chips to be made and memory. And so S.K. Hinex is the other one that's going crazy. 2025 they made a deal with their labor union to give 10% of operating profit to employees. That meant an $80,000 bonus for each one in 2025. And they're expecting $900,000 per person in 2027. Dude.

Holy shit. insane. Holy shit. Yeah, and then another quote from them, even, it's all from Bloomberg, even Hyundai's, uh, Hyundai Motor. Wait, that's a 10% profit share. This is USDA. This is United dollar. Yes, this is dollars. Well, I hadn't heard that one. 900K per person. So that's what they're expecting. So, you know, it's assuming profits keep going. But this is for, that would be 2027. Yeah, but that's on 10% profit share. That's crazy. 10% of operating profit goes to employees would be 900,000 per person. That's crazy. Incredible. This is, I mean, this is awesome. Yeah. Right? This is genuine.

I feel like this is awesome. I will village chair. Now, I don't say this because I don't think it's awesome. I think it's great. In fact, it's a trend. And so another thing is even Hyundai Motors Union has begun talking about similar rhetoric, saying the company should set aside 30% of net profit as a bonus pool. The idea of companies setting aside net profits out as bonus pool for employees, I think is fantastic.

The only counter argument, which I didn't deeply dive into, but this is again from a Bloomberg article that was going through this. This is one of those articles. You know when CNN is like, this topic is very divisive. And, you know, truck lover 49 on Twitter said this.

So they're quoting... People are saying. Yeah, netizens on... But anyway, the supposed counter argument is that Korean, like, everyday people are saying that should go to everyday people.

That should go to government programs. It shouldn't just mint like 75,000 millionaires and only go to those people who happen to be employed at Samsung and nobody else gets a slice. I mean, I can definitely see the argument. If you looked at this from like a national, almost like a national resource value, and if you look at Samsung's position contextually within Korea, I could see that argument, like how Norway nationalized its oil

and then has this sovereign wealth fund that is basically this like backstop for, and there's like 300,000 USD for like every citizen of North. way or something like that. You could view Samsung in that context, maybe. I mean, there already is, you know, there's a, there's a big wealth gap in Korea. And Samsung employees are certainly some of the better paid higher-end people. So it's like the better off doing even better, like way better. Have you heard the thing about, I mean, this is like, this is like all people who are already doing too well?

But how in people who work in tech in like the Bay Area, there's like a real, uh, massive wealth divide about to exist. We'll talk about later with the SpaceX IPO, but all the big IPOs are about to happen. And like just randomly based on whether or not you worked at another tech company or anthropic, you're going to become a life-changing $40 million. Like you have a ton of fucking money or you have 400K and it's like you're doing pretty

well. But that's, and it's like this weird massive wealth gap is just going to appear this year between tech workers. It's like an interesting concept. I think given that we have so little, wealth redistribute. This is like a pretty cool way to start rather than like trying to get your steak too buttery.

It's something. It's something. But I get that too. It's like some people, they coin flip Nvidia and other people wind up mogul moves. Oh no, big tragedy. And we both worked. No,

big tragedy. I do think of that in my own life because I remember I basically coin flipped between Blizzard and Nvidia. It was so close for me. And my life would be so different. And everybody, my wife, my parents, my friends, they all said, Blizzard, Blizzard, Blizzard.

And I was so close to not doing it. And it was, I don't know, it's just crazy. But that's luck. That's not, I don't know, that's crazy. Yeah, I mean, interesting story. I think it's kind of cool. Definitely, I don't know. I'm kind of a pro-union guy.

I think it's kind of cool. Especially non-public unions where it's private company. I think it's really smart. Like it works. And they clearly got a benefit out of it. If they did nothing or waited, this moment's going to pass and they would get nothing. And now they got it.

And still they're having the most profitable quarter ever, so the company still winning. Samsung is in 2026. Actually, you can pull this up, Perry. Estimated to become one of the most top five, the second most profitable company in the world, only second to Saudi Arabia that's fucking huge. Which is again,

I think the argument would be like this is a level of wealth that potentially is worth almost nationalizing, right? And if you did like back napkin math, 220 billion in profit, I'm not saying the government should go seize all that, but like if they did, and then you split that amongst

the 50 million South Koreans, that's like $4,000 a person. You know, so you could argue this should be a giant dividend and maybe there's worker bonuses and whatever else. Or like the Pope loves, free market invisible hand, you let it ride. Well, I mean, even if they change nothing, assuming, I mean, there's a lot of corporate tax loopholes that would you should fix. But if they were fixed and you had a normal corporate tax rate, them having this quarter is already a massive boon to the amount of money Korea would have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. True, true, true. You know, so it's, uh, yeah. This company's taken off like a rocket. Wait, I'll segue. Oh, fuck, you got it. You nailed it.

That was crushed. No, no, no, no. Dears, dears, dears. No, I don't have one. No, no, do yours. Free ball it. No, no, no, do it. You know who shouldn't strike is SpaceX employees because they have the greatest leader of all time.

Elon Musk. And that's why I want to hear more about the SpaceX. That landed just like the recent Starship. Did it go bad? Actually, I actually didn't check that. I don't know. I didn't hear that. All right.

So, SpaceX, we've talked about them IPOing. They have actually done the filing with the SEC. So they filed a document and as part of that, you know, the process of an IPO, you got to file with SEC and be like, we're planning on doing this. Next up, they're going to go try to like shop it around to various people. But this SEC is like them, you know, legally disclosing their financials and the various state of the company and all this. So read through a good chunk of this thing as well. And what they're trying to do, if you pull this up, Perry, is they are trying to, it's sort of supposedly launch at a $1.75 trillion dollar valuation. If you look at the top most valuable companies of all time, NVIDIA, currently 5.2 trillion. Apple is 4.5. And so 1.75 puts them around Saudi Aramco, Tesla, and meta. It actually be more than meta. The top 10 company worldwide as it lists. As it lists. So you might be wondering, how would it possibly justify this? So I'm going to give you a couple fun takeaways from their IPO. So here's the form. First off, this is not usual. And I had to go

like double check to be like, am I crazy or is this not usual? It opens with like, 15 pages of rockets. It's just pictures about space. None of these have any captions. There's no point to any of it. It's awesome. They're getting me. It's not normal, by the way.

Audio listeners, I'm looking at some cool pictures. It reads the first like 20 pages of it reads like a book for children about why NASA is cool. Like it's awesome. Okay, so then, you know, over this very, very, very long document, some of the interesting things they make a big case about how there's three divisions essentially that they're targeting or marketing and saying,

look, this is what we got. First off is the space rockets business. We launch rockets. Look at these pictures. They don't make a ton of money. We'll get to that in a second. Second is communications. And that's what they're calling their satellite network, particularly Starlink, which is very profitable, which we'll get to in a second. And then third is AI. So as a reminder, they tacked on XAI recently. And what sort of realized, as you look at the final, financials of this. If you pull us up, Perry, our best friend of the podcast,

Professor G, scroll down a little bit to the bar graph. Oh, yeah, our good friend, Prof.G. So if you look at this graph for people who are listening, this is the revenue and loss for each of those three divisions that I just said.

You can see that connectivity, which again, Starlink, is by far the most profitable thing they have. They're making $11 billion and only losing $4 billion, like $7 billion in profit. That's the, four billions of profit. Oh, sorry, sorry. 11 million revenue, four billion profit.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. So, four billion to profit, space, they're losing money, but they have four billion in revenue, and the reason is they're spending like three billion a year on R&D. So that sort of makes sense. And then you have AI, which is this, like,

tumor tacked on to what would be a great company, which is losing them $6 billion. And it is a tumor. Like, this didn't exist as part of the company. It was a rocket company. And then Elon wanted to save Groch and XAI, and so he made. space x buy it and now they have this money losing tumor yeah attached to space x

well hold on so this loss we're looking at the 6.4 billion dollar loss right now does that is that after you include the twitter blue subscriptions surprisingly yes they talk he talks about twitter in this and it's it's it's like someone like it's like someone is drunk and it's from a different presentation they'll just be random paragraphs about like we have so many users on x and then it goes back And then it goes back to rockets. And there's no explanation for why that's relevant. This doesn't make any sense. X has everything on.

It's the everything at, including rockets. Yeah. So in this file, a huge part of it is basically trying to justify why they will be able to use AI as basically the key pillar of their business. I noticed you already found the really funny graph. So we'll come to that in a sec. But essentially, there's a ton of argument where they say, look, we have the biggest, we've already launched this massive satellite network. True. You know, we already have the business infrastructure to get things into space. That's true. Saying we have solved most of the technical hurdles in order to do something like get data centers into space and we believe that we will be able to create far more of the computing that is needed for the future of AI by putting into space and we are going to be at the center of that. Notably there is that I could see no information about like, for example, cooling, which is one of the giant technical hurdles behind data centers in space. But it is a huge amount of this pitch is

based on the idea that the future of the world is going to be AI. The future of that AI will be run in space and we are uniquely positioned to do it. And now how do you justify the, which is sorry, how do you justify the valuation? A track has the chart. Go ahead and pull this up. This is a total addressable market chart. You know, the TAM is used in a lot of pitches where You guys maybe have seen it back in these sports pages. People would say like sports is a $8 billion a year industry. And if we get even 1% of that, we're doing, it's a classic like huckster way of pitching things.

And their total addressable market, again, these numbers are made up. They're not based on anything reality. And they include businesses they currently don't operate in. Many of these, they don't currently make any money in or do any of this. Yeah, this is like the pitch of like the reason we're going to be worth this. much is because this is all the business we're going to get.

Yeah. Yeah. And so they end up with a number of 28.5 trillion, which is essentially equivalent to the US GDP. It's not only the US GDP. The entire B2B business right now is like about a trillion dollars generously. They're saying they're going to have 20 times that. I didn't just enterprise and applications.

I had to put together a business plan for my Swedish immigration application. it looks a lot like this. For three white guys' podcasts is like, it's billions of dollars. It's a trillion's many. The amount of money we're bringing to Sweden is going to be crazy. It's going to be like to be astronomical.

Yeah, again, many of these businesses they currently don't operate in and don't make any money in. So the idea that they can just make these, I mean, he's always been good at that of throwing out big numbers, but this is one of the most egregious ever. And it's worth saying,

I just want to say, of those top 10 companies you showed, meta, Amazon. Yeah. SpaceX, by far, is the lowest revenue and profit. It does not belong in that group by any measure. Like, even Tesla. Tesla makes more money in revenue and profit.

Maybe not profit anymore, actually. I'm not sure, but in revenue for sure than SpaceX. So it really is like a dwarf among giants in that group that is just like stretching more than ever the future promises versus what it has now of any company that would be in that big group. We talk about price to earnings and that ratio a lot on the show and how Tesla is the standout in that top group of companies as having a really high price to earnings ratio, right?

Yeah. Like a way, like this stock seems to be significantly overvalued based on this one metric compared to these other stocks. And you're saying SpaceX's would be even crazy. So Tesla is the greatest one of the group with about 100. They don't have the number for SpaceX. It's not a public company, but the estimates are between 200 and 300.

So it would be by far the most like baking in this future promise of any companies that ever made that big. Yeah. There's an aspect of the IPO that I want to talk about that if you're going to cover it, I don't know that much, but I'll say it if you don't. So it's like it's about the float. Is that covered enough? Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Okay. So the idea is that, you know, the amount of shares that you put up to the public is like the amount that they can buy in sell and trade. And if you put a smaller amount, because it's more scarce, you know, there's automatic demand from people that are interested in SpaceX, from Elon Glazers, from companies that want to get involved, from passive investors in 401K that have to buy it. And if you put up just a small amount, the demand of that will cause them to chart super high. And it makes all the rest of them on paper worth that same amount. Yeah. So he's only listing like the smallest amount any

company's ever IPOed for it. It's like 5%. It's like I don't know the number. It could be liar. It could be 10%. But it's like a very, very small percent of the companies being actually publicly listed. But because all that demand is going to flow in, it's going to make the price pop and make it seem like all of the billions of shares that he owns are all worth this amount. I mean, it's like a real, it's a real testing of like the rules that shouldn't run that way. Do you know who Max Fosh is? Yeah. It's the Max Vosh video. He became the richest man in the world for one day because he had one share. It's that. He is that. Yeah. And so it's surprising that it feels surprising that given all of that context, you can just do that.

that. So that's the thing. So all of this stuff he's doing, including this fast listing, which is getting it to list quicker than other companies normally would and be picked up by retirement accounts quicker than it normally would be allowed to. All these rules got changed for Elon and these new IPOs this year of Anthropic because they all kind of threatened to go elsewhere. Like the NASDAQ really wants SpaceX to list in the NASDAQ. And if he's, they're like, if you don't do these rule changes, I'll go list on the New York Stock Exchange or somewhere else. there's not really a lot of options, but he's doing it anyway. And so they caved.

So the NASDAQ caved and gave them these rule changes that are like really incentivizing retirement accounts to buy them before they've been proven and to do a small float and a, what is like the difference? Like for me as a layman, I couldn't tell you the difference between the New York Stock Exchange versus NASDAQ versus whatever. All I know is that they make money off of who's listed on them.

Like it's to their benefit. So I don't know why it's the difference for like you as a layman. I mean, they list different stocks. NASDAQ is more tech stocks. But it's not like there's a... But they're changing the properties of how things are listed in order to incentivize

like retirement accounts you're saying? So yeah, a lot of people's retirement accounts track the indexes. You might have like a 401k that buys the S&B 500. Right, right. And it buys all those starts

or it buys the NASDAG. That's a big popular one. And so normally you would have to wait a year after being listed or something before it's like proven its earnings in a way to start buying it. But now it does it instantly. So everyone's retirement.

accounts, like very quickly after this company gets listed, are going to start automatically buying shares. And they buy shares based on market cap waiting, so the size of the company. And so he's like artificially boosting the size of his company and getting more passive bit. All this has caused people to be quite upset, I think. Is he, is he leveraging the exclusivity of the listing to do that? Because you can be listed on both of these things at the same time. Yes. But I assume he's saying, like, we're, like, if you do this, we'll only go with you. I am not an expert on how you could list on multiple ones, but my understanding is that you pick one,

it's listed there, and the size of it helps the NASDAQ or whatever in its growth and moneymaking and et cetera. So I'm not 100% expert on that. But I do know that he's leveraged the two against each other to get these rule, which would not, like a smaller company would never get this deal. But SpaceX is the biggest IPO ever,

and they can kind of like throw their dick around. Yeah. There's one interesting piece about the, the shares. So one aspect of this IPO that people are noting is that it's extremely unfriendly to shareholders. Because in theory, if you buy shares into a company, you should be able to vote on how the company works. It's the entire idea. Elon currently has 42% of SpaceX, but he has class B shares, which get 10 votes per share compared to a normal peasant class A share, which is one vote per share. So he, after this IPO, will have 85% of voting power.

No one else will have more than 5%. So the voting will just be for show. He can vote whatever board he wants. He can vote whatever compensation he wants. So when you buy into this company, if you buy any of the shares, you are basically saying, this is Elon's literal ship

and whatever he wants to do will happen. And I'm hoping it earns me money. You have no input. It's crazy. He's pushed the limits of people's, willingness to believe him to be a little bit greedy that the price will definitely go up no matter what. I mean, he's really pushed it.

And I got to say, this is the Zuckerberg playbook. He was the first one to do this because the IPO for Facebook was what was hugely demanded back in the day. He got these dual class shares that have given him total controller Facebook for all these years, even though he doesn't own the majority of it anymore. He sold up enough. He has 10x voting. And Elon is following this footsteps.

This used to not be a thing because shareholders, obviously, if they're buying the stock, want to have the vote. But everyone is just all in it. They just want the price to go up. They don't care about, I don't know. It's gotten weird. I wonder what the result will be.

It's an interesting, it's a very interesting IPO. Yeah. And I think the weirdest part is like, so even, okay, Prof G Media, our best friend said, quote,

Starlink is genuinely accident. 3.3 billion in revenue in a single quarter, 1.2 billion in operating income, a 36% margin year of year, No serious competitor. If that was the whole company, it would be one of the great businesses of our era. They have this, the rocket launching is, I think, amazing. We've talked about it a bunch on the show. I've glazed it. Starlink is unbelievably successful. And now they're jamming the

AI side onto it and making the entire IPO about the AI side of it. And it's really, and then you mix that with like the weird Elon things of like super low float and he has all the voting share. It's like very, very strange. It's crazy. Like, uh, have you flown United recently, they, their Wi-Fi on a bunch of

their planes now is just Starlink Wi-Fi. Yes, and it's so good. It's actually, it's just really, really fast Wi-Fi

on the plane. And I'm like, imagine all the like contracts you can potentially have with all these airlines. You have, you have something that people literally

can't compete with right now. And I feel like it, that it's one product that as much as I fucking hate Elon Musk, I'm Starlink is fucking awesome. It seems fucking sick.

Plus the rockets and the catch, but it's not as cool as GROC. I think we'd all agree on that. Hey, I love that. Love that. Oh, I thought you were transitioning to a GROC story. Oh, I wish I had a GROC story.

Do we have a difference? Here, I can transition. Okay, get us from SpaceX IPO to keep closing the damn. Cuba. Get us to Cuba. What? Next time SpaceX launches a rocket,

I hope it does not crash in Cuba because they've been through enough. Aiden, tell me more about what's going on. Well, no, hold on. If a SpaceX rocket crashes and there's a horrible oil spill, that could be really helpful. They could use the oil. Dude. Cuba, it's rough right now.

I don't know if you guys know this, but they've basically run out of oil. So for people in Cuba right now, what does that functionally look like? Their power grid is offline most of the day. I heard it's like 22 hours. Yeah. They have one. to two powers a day right now for the average citizen.

And the way this works is people are, uh, have to cook with things like charcoal and wood in their homes. And, uh, the power only comes on at night. So people have to wake up whenever the power has to turn on. They get up maybe like 11 p.m. Lights suddenly turn on. Everybody gets up to do their laundry, charge their phones, try and cook the next day's meals,

all at the same time. And then also because there's such a limited amount of oil, like people's ability to get to work, I can't drive to get to work, or like a bus isn't available. So people are walking hours to get to their job or unable to work because the job they work requires power to function at all.

Energy is the economy. Without it, it's, I mean, everything... And a lot of people just do not have enough to eat, don't have any money, and I think that, you know, the context that leads up to the, this situation, at least very, at least recently, is the U.S., earlier this year, cut off Venezuelan oil to Cuba, which was the majority of the oil that they relied on to run the country.

And then outside of that, I think it was like a little over 60% of their oil was coming from Venezuela, but they were also getting a lot of oil from Mexico, and then a little oil from Russia, Algeria. and something that was kind of interesting to me is something Marco Rubio said about this recently where he basically... He's very invested. Margo Rubio is like this is his passion project

is what's going on in Cuba. Yeah, he's been... His grandparents are Cuban, right? He's Cuban-American. He's Cuban-Man. And this is a huge... Huge voting bloc in the U.S. is Cuban-Americans, right?

And they are particularly passionate about this issue. And like Marco Rubio is like a part kind of representing that crowd in the U.S., right? He said that, like, because the Cuban economy is in free fall and they don't have any money,

that's the reason that they can't get any oil right now. So stay with me a second. Yeah, I'm with you. Something that was interesting to me was, oh, how were they getting all the oil before? This vague idea that Venezuela was sending them oil basically as aid. But what Cuba was often offering these,

like other countries, was their human resources. So Cuba has a lot of doctors, for example, right? And they don't have enough money to buy oil. But what they were doing before was, like, offering their doctors as, like, we can help your country and send staff and human resources in exchange for the oil that you give us. It wasn't just purely out of, like, aid or donation.

Cuba was offering what it had to offer and then paying for a limited amount of it in the capacity that they could. In Mexico's case, they were like circumventing the restrictions that have been in place around Cuba by the U.S. for a longer time by creating like a shell company basically that allowed them to like do transactions

with the Cuban government and send them oil. And this is the apparatus that gave them enough oil to function until this year. But then the U.S. really cracked down on it. not only cutting off the Venezuelan supply, but pressuring Mexico to cut off their supply as well. Venezuela's oil has been sanctioned by the U.S. for a while, right? But it was still allowed to flow to Cuba?

I don't think, like, there was no blockade enforcing that. So they were, they're sending oil, like Venezuela, not cooperating with the U.S. sanctions around how that oil is, like, being distributed around the world. And the U.S. at the time, not like, military. enforcing a blockade to limit. The post-Moduro kidnapping is like US has much more sway over Venezuela's

sending of the oil. Exactly, exactly. Presumably we were not, we being, the United States government was not cool with it, but was not stopping it. Doing anything to like enforce it. Got it. And, but now Cuba has nobody left. And the oil, only

oil they've gotten in the last couple months was the U.S. allowed a donation of Russian oil, which was like $700,000. barrels, which was basically lasted, I think lasted Cuba like another two weeks or three weeks. But now they're in a situation where they literally, they have basically nothing left. And the average person in the country is suffering the consequences of the blockades enforcement.

And I think something kind of confusing to me is, you know, what is the U.S.'s goal here? because the U.S. hasn't actually been that explicit about what they want. Because there's a reason that we're putting all this pressure on Cuba, right? One thing we've done more recently, I think it was like a few days ago. The CIA director went to Cuba and basically gave them like the... Oh, that sounds good. It's a good start. And he's like, he's a great guy.

His name's Greg. He plays ball on the weekends. He actually comes to our pickup game. Don't even say. C.I. A.man playing ball with the... Every week he's in a different outfit. We never know who he is. He always shows up for pickup.

Got a good three though. Yeah. Sounds unauspicious, Aiden. I think there's kind of this vague idea right now with like the action that we took against Venezuela earlier in the year. We're in like this renewed Monroe doctrine era of the U.S. where we want heightened control over our hemisphere.

like we want, we want heavy influence over all of the Americas in a way that we haven't pushed for. That's what I heard. Yeah, that was their, that was the doctor of mind of this. But yeah, what did, I mean, maybe you're answering this question, but what is the specific goal with Cuba? And I don't. So the most concrete ask right now, there's this vague idea of like, we want regime change. We want a more economic influence there. We want a government that like, uh, follows U.S. demands.

We want a complete change in the institutions of who's in power there, right? But we haven't, we don't have those explicit demands necessarily. But what the CIDA director did say, uh, he, we want at the very least to remove, uh, foreign military bases in Cuba that are like intercepting U.S. communications. So there are Chinese and Russian military presences in Cuba that like, like, because of the proximity to the U.S. Right. Like, uh, to, to, to spy on the U.S. And we want to get rid of that. And that's like our first like real concrete demand. Uh, the only other thing that I've, uh, I had seen is,

we indicted Raul Castro who's like 94. He's literally in his 90 He's like on death door Yeah it seemed like really soon I mean if we don't do this He might run for the US Senate He's too young duck

And I think this He's too much of a spring chicken There's this vague idea That's similar to the indictment of Maduro This is like a threat That we're gonna come in And remove this guy from power But the wait

If we send in Black Hoppers To kidnap a 95 year old man I'm gonna lose it Yeah so this is the criticism is that if Raul is like removed, it doesn't change anything. He's like he's a symbolic figure, is my understanding.

Okay, name the last time that removing or killing a leader didn't help the situation. The last time. This is like a CIA brainstorm? Other than the last two that happened this year. We should do next week, by the way, we're gonna,

I'm pre-annouting so you'll do it. Talk to your Venezuelan friends. I want to see her an update on Venezuela because yeah. That was one of those situations where it's like, yeah, I think Maduro was a fucking bad guy a bad leader,

but has anything changed? Like it's just Deli Rodriguez doing it. Has anything actually changed on the ground? And maybe it has, but I, it feels like nothing changed. Yeah, I haven't, I haven't caught up with them since the week after that happened. So I, uh, I should definitely check back in. And in Cuba, unfortunately, I don't know anyone. Like I, Aidan doesn't know all the guys.

Uh, but I think the, the sad reality of what's happening right now is the last, like, the country for the average person, it's like they have no power to live. a functioning, you know, I would say dignified life in the words of the Pope. It's a reset to this donut. Maybe you don't have energy on a society, everything infrastructure is built around energy.

It's a complete collapse. Like it's a huge, huge regression. People die. Hospitals can't open. And I think there's this theme of similar to Iran in Venezuela, maybe less so with Venezuela, is there's all this like

these pressures and actions from the Trump administration, but not necessarily a clear plan or goals that are being explicitly laid out. There's just this vague idea of we're taking action because I was surprised when I was looking into this to see the lack of like cohesive demands or messaging around like what this is supposed to get out of the Cuban government.

Surely the person who said, we are now going to militarily enforce that no oil goes from Venezuela to Cuba and they'll have 60% less oil. Certainly, I would hope there was some follow-up, or did they like, were they like, oh, sorry, it's 12, it's lunch, let's break.

Is there any follow-up to that? I mean, that's what you're saying, right? Like, we have not, we cut off the oil to Cuba. They're now suffering, and there's no follow-up on, like, what we're trying to accomplish. There's, there's an idea of, like, we're trying to negotiate with Cuba about something.

But that's what I mean. And to remove the government from power to get a new one in, The progress there is not, the plan and the progress there is just not very explicit. From what I'm reading. In the back part of my brain, has Trump said like 50 second state or something about Cuba?

Is he, Trump, Cuba state? I don't think so. I guess not. That's crazy. He says about fucking Greenland Canada, not Cuba, which is on the door.

I don't know. We have also said, like, if they begin negotiations with us, like there is $100 million dollars available in aid or something like that. Okay, but on March 18th, Trump says he can do whatever he wants with Cuba floats idea of taking the island. He believes he'll have, quote, the honor of taking Cuba.

But what does that look like? What is the point? I don't understand. The expansionist tendencies of this guy. It seems to be like he wants to change the map and have it be his legacy. I swear to God, it feels. Yeah, the most concrete, the most concrete demand I've seen since the blockade is this, is the CIA director going there and then, you know, asking for military,

presence to be removed from there. That's like the, uh, but we'll see, you know, we'll see how it turns out. I'm not, you know, my heart definitely goes out to people who are like normal people who are caught in the crossroad of like great like, like, I don't know, powers. This is a perfect transition. Please continue your heartfelt thing because I want to talk about the stock of the week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, what is the stock of the week? Atriac? Why do we set up this order from Cuba's disaster? The problem is, you and I have goofy business stories and AIDS the most of the pressing shit in the world. We're trying to fit Ebola in between space.

They're calling it the most incoherent podcast episode of all time. My next one is Google glasses. I can't go from Cuba. I can't just stock of the weekend. That's a really sad story. You know, now that we're... Wait, wait. Is the stock like a really important company

that would help the average person feel better? No. No? In fact, it's not. It's like a... Here, uh, bring up this really... me, me showing that the struggling mother cooking with charcoal in her home, the stock of the week. Yeah. Yeah, what is it, Atriott?

Tell me what it is. Human family. If you need some financial advice, here's the stock of the week that can really turn it around for you. We need a little sound effect. Bibi Biddy Biddy Biddy Bidoo. If you're just the little graphic I made that feels kind of in poor taste now, it feels too crass and financialized. But this is the stock of the week segment, which we just started, where I'm going to go over an interesting stock change from the past week

and maybe talk about some of the context or story of it. Does the company here have power more than two hours a day? They have a lot of power. They have a lot of power. A lot of political power. And in fact, a storied history with our own podcast. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the stock of the week is Intuit Turtacks. So brace yourself.

because ever since we canceled our partnership with Intuit Derbidex. Turns out their stock has had in the past week, they were the largest falling large cap stock in the world. They fell 27%. There you have it, folks. That's the lemonade stand difference.

And if you zoom out, it's 30% in the past week. I'm doing up stock of the week. So this is the largest fall in the last week. We have any major stock. But if you zoom out six months, they lost half the value of the company. Oh my God. And if you zoom out a year, they lost 60%.

Intuit TurboTax has been an absolute free fall. If you zoom out all-time max, you can sort of see us on this chart. But ever since mid of 2025, they have been completely collapsing. And right around in the middle there, you can see is when we canceled our partnership. So there's a big thing.

And that's why you need to sign up now at turbotax.com slash lemonade. We bring back the ad. So why? Why is this company an absolute free fall? I mean, this amount that they fell in this very short period of time is equivalent to Starbucks and Chipotle, both going to zero in a six-month period.

Pretty big fault. So TurboTax is a company that is basically four separate companies in a trench coat. It is Intuit TurboTax, which you know, which is the public tax filing company. It's QuickBooks, which is for small businesses. It's credit karma, which is like checking your credit score. And it's MailChimp, which is like,

The company I used at Twitch to make email newsletters for marketing. MailChimp I did not know. Yeah. I once famously misread the MailChimp prompt and send out a letter to 7 million people that just said SDFG. And let's just say that was stock of the week. And that guy got hired at NVIDIA after that. They didn't even fire me.

But the crown jewel of the company is actually not triple text. It's QuickBooks is where the vast majority of the profit of this company comes from, selling to small businesses, their tax solutions. They have a 70%. It's a duopoly between H&R Block and QuickBooks. Basically, every small business in America uses one of these two, outside of a few exceptions,

and they make us their money from that. So that has been disrupted lately by AI. This is perplexities, computer for taxes. A lot of AI companies are swooping in and trying to find ways to guide you through the tax process, the way TurboTax does, but for way, way cheaper.

And none of them are quite good enough yet, but the threat is in the air. that they're going to be taking a large part of this chunky market share and doing it. The second part of this stock dropping so much is that they're the first company in the past year to do a mass layoff and say, it's not because of AI publicly. They made the big mistake of cutting signatures to work for thousands of people and saying nothing with AI. And the market, instead of rewarding that, punished it because it just seems like, oh, shit,

your company's in a bad spot. The reason they did that is because they are very wary of even saying the word AI, because AI is such a threat to their business that they want to pretend like it's not a big deal and nothing to do with it. And then the final reason that they're having this class in this past week is they just announced earnings. So we've talked about this.

There was a new government feature called direct file in 2024, which allowed low-income users to just file their taxes directly through the government and not have to use any secondary thing like turbo tax. And through a little bit of lobbying in 2025, of the Trump administration, Charity taxes able to get that gone.

So this year you could not use direct file. It was removed by the government. You're telling me that happened and we signed a deal with them after that? Look, like, it's a joke. It's a joke. If you want the actual explanation, you go to go read a fucking public patron post.

You want the actual explanation. I'm goofing off. He's a bit of a goofer. So here's the thing. So in mid-20205, when this law, being went through, the stock market was like, oh, well, they're going to make bank. Like, they've clearly eliminated their biggest competitor. They're going to grow a lot.

This is awesome. But it turns out when they released earnings this year, despite the fact there was no direct file, all low-income users used TurboTax less. There was a lot of pressure among price-sensitive DIY filers, and they ended up just finding others. So I don't know what they used, but they didn't use TurboTag. They didn't have the growth among low-income users. The direct file was was shut down, but that was like the government program.

But they still, there are free, there is a number of companies that do it for free. So I think people just used those. Yeah. Having maybe gotten used to direct file in the previous years, they didn't come back to TurboTex the way they thought they would. Yeah. And so all that combined to make a, you know, a pretty weak earnings report and the company just keeps going to go into free fall. So that is the stock of the week. I hope that context helps you understand what's going on within two.

I thought that was kind of just an interesting story of why this company. but he's not only part of the software is getting eaten by AI's Tori, but also like, the lobbying didn't work. It's a kind of just an interesting, interesting little update on, that's the stock of the week.

No, I forget if you already mentioned this, but I'm sorry, let you finish the jingle that we, everybody knows and loves. He's doing background. I'm not going to do it the same every time.

Is there, is there like revenue way down? Or is it just, no, it was actually a pretty decent quarter. Like they beat on revenue and they beat on profit, but it was these little things buried into it. One, we're having big layoffs. Two, our low-income thing didn't grow the way

they thought it would. And then three, please don't talk about AI. Please don't talk about AI. Please don't talk about AI. So the reason, okay. So they're getting beat off because of AI threats, not necessarily because their business is currently collapsing. It's not collapsing. It's just the growth has really slowed. It's really stalled. Got it. Okay. I mean, most of their profit came from, we fired a bunch of people and we don't have to pay them anymore. Gotcha. And that hasn't gone through our business yet. So I think also maybe another thing that brought them down is on QuickBooks, they recently added that tips feature, which just sent me

to the fucking move in anger. I opened a $100,000 invoice that unironically had a tip section at the bottom 10 through 20%. Do you know what happens when you click 20% on a $100,000 invoice? You can probably do that math. Wait, when you say tips, do you mean tipping on...

Tipping. They were giving you advice. Tipping on an invoice? Yes. Yes. I open, I'm not getting, I open a hundred thousand dollar invoice because that's like the maximum that'll let you pay it at like a time when you'll get quick book invoice.

And it had a tip, tip percent at the bottom. Who are you? Like I'm at the fucking coffee shop. And I, in it, but. Did they do a good job? Dude, the factory owner spitting the iPad around on his $100,000. Yeah. So, let me just send you that extra 15K.

That's crazy. He does my latte crazy. Yeah. But I do think the biggest part of their falloff comes from the PR nightmare they feast with the Reddit posts against them on the lemonade stands. And the H.R.R. Subredits.

And I think that crushed their brand. And God, God, I stand with them. I stand with them on the subreddit. But the only thing more annoying. Wait, with Intuit or the people? You're still deciding. Oh, Doug, remember when we said we were going to do surface?

The only thing more annoying than me forcing stocks in this conversation would be Aitin forcing the Nordic countries into this conversation. And I know you've got a brand new segment. It's a new segment, ladies and gentlemen. Bidda, bit a bit, bit it. Oh, is that the Nordic fun fact of the week? Wow.

I can't wait. We made this a segment largely to stop you from doing it in real life. I want to contain this to the podcast. Speaking of the podcast. You want to make all of them. suffer well. I would rather than you guys suffer than him ad hoc in my real life telling me, oh, do you hear about this

shit in fucking Norway? Oh, do you hear about how Sweden's got? Okay, everything else. They might have made school buses that go two directions. I don't give a shit. Aiden, and you're going to tell me only on the podcast now. We, we, Brendan and I, we don't know what this is. It's just called Nordic Fun Fact. Go ahead.

I didn't want a spoil? No, no, I know. Well, what do you think if you could imagine what Sweden's national pastime is. What do you think it is? It's fucking standing in the dark at 4 p.m. That's top 10. Another guest, Doug. Free healthcare. I don't know. Putting fish on bread in some way. Combining those two things. Also top 10, free health care, not even top 20, not even close. It's, it's packing your lips with a little bit of Zinn.

Oh, actually, I think I know this. Except it's not Zinn. I saw this. It's, it's snus. I read this in the paper, like the physical paper. So if you don't, if you don't know this, In Sweden, everybody is packed up, baby. They got a horseshoe of these in their mouth. Anecdotally, one of my favorite stories is I know more than one person who sleeps with two of these in. That's fucking crazy. In Sweden? Yes.

And if you're an American, you're probably aware of the general trend of products like Zinn catching on, especially in the last few years. They've become incredibly popular. But they have been a part of, I would say, Swedish culture for much longer than that. They've had like little tobacco pouches that you like, that you put in your mouth like little pillows and they've switched to something like more synthetic in recent years that is but like per capita use of these things

is way higher in Sweden than most of the world. And that's it right there. Yeah. And so I read, I saw this lovely article on the FT titled French Nicotine Pouch Ban is an attack on the Swedish way of life, minister says.

This is actually an anti-Swedan store which is funny. I'm glad you brought it. France, France put it into place a really strict ban on these pouches. You can no longer buy them in France,

but not only that, you can't have them in your possession at all. So normally how it would work with laws among countries in the EU is even if you have like a localized ban on something like this,

it wouldn't necessarily be considered contraband or illegal to have that product within the EU in other countries, with asterisk on that. And Sweden is apparently- You buy this in Sweden, you bring it to France. Yeah, yeah, that would be fine. Okay. And Sweden is really upset by this ban because it goes way further.

It bans these products in a way that would set you up for a massive fine and potentially prison time if you had like a pack of these pouches that you traveled with into France. How that it'll actually be enforced, you know, we'll see. but people, politicians within Sweden are claiming this is a huge attack on Swedish culture. In Sweden, we have had a relationship with since the 1600s.

And it would be the equivalent of banning something like French wine. Yeah. And I don't really know. It's as if we prohibit French baguettes in Sweden. Or private health care in America. Yeah, yeah. Sweden's argument.

It's part of our way of life, Right. Right. It's their culture. That's what George fought for. Yes. It's not really... It's not really...

Really clear if there's going to be any reaction on France's part, if there's going to be any addendums to this law or like reversal of it or caveats. But Sweden arguing that it has direct consequences for the free movement of persons. Because EU citizens risk sanctions while traveling through France for just... Do you think it's the free movement of... No question. Or do you think it's the massive exporting of snooze from Sweden? It's a huge economic thing and they don't want friends to...

That's fucking. dumb, Atriac. It's about the cultural. What's wrong with being packed up with your boys in France? Speaking of that way, show the graph. Scroll down.

This is how popular snooos is in Sweden. The right graph is the youth. And you can see ever since they launched the nicotine pouches, it has just been exponential hockey stick up. Absolutely, exploaded. So the boys are packing the Zins or the what snooos in.

I don't mean to, I don't mean to speak ill of our brand new segment Nordic fun fact. However, this feels more like a France fun fact. This feels about what France is doing. Also, I, so, you know, my understanding is a dumb American. French love smoking. Why are they so anti-ZZZZN?

Okay, that's actually a really good point. That's a great question. Why is France banning snooze when everyone there smokes a pack a day? I think they're trying to protect the cigarette industry because Zinn is threatening the French way of life. You're fucking right. That's honestly a good point. I never thought about they smoke so much in France and they're worried about fucking snooze. I have no idea what tobacco or like nicotine consumption stats look like in France.

If I could take a stab at it. I bet it's literally, yeah. Go for it. If I could take a stab at it before you look something up, here's what, here's my guess. Because even on this chart in Sweden, right, you can see that tobacco or like smoking and nicotine pouches were declining in use up until like 2016, right? Yeah. And tobacco use in general continues to fall off.

while tobacco consumption rates are different in various countries, a lot of, like, smoking in the U.S. has fallen off of a cliff. It's been seen as this giant success in public health, right? Which I believe that. Yeah. But the uptick in pouch use and vape use, like, I think the argument here is that you, if you wanted to protect the public health of France,

maybe smoking is already on the decline and you're not too worried about it. So you just want to stop this new trend in its tracks before it can really take off. That's what the AI overview at Google.com is also suggesting. Smoking's already declining over time. So this is a broad attempt to tackle nicotine.

But maybe it's by big cigarette and they're just, they put on a mustache. I wonder what the fucking undercurrent, the financial undercurrent of this is. But I just got to say, on a broad level, you'd think, it feels a little presumptive of Sweden to tell France what they can and can't ban

for health reasons. Like if it's, if they were like saying Sweden can't do it, that's one thing, but it's like, in France, you should be able to regulate what you want. Well, okay, to give this argument some credit, I think this is a silly story with this specific subject matter. I think the idea of you getting mad at another country

banning snows in a vacuum is ridiculous. Yeah. I think it's ridiculous. that some of my friends sleep with two of these two, by the way. But I think the underlying idea here is there is some infraction on the agreement that we are all partaking in as a part of the European Union. We all have agreed to these rules and stipulations about how commerce is done between our countries. So why are you making an exception and breaking our agreement? That's the context that they're arguing. How it will hold up

I don't know. You should follow it up another Nordic fun fact of the week. That was actually kind of interesting. Next week we'll be back with my other Nordic fun fact of the week. It turns out Iceland's thinking about joining the European Union.

Oh boy. That doesn't sound as fun. Let's go another snooze update. Yeah. Maybe mostly snooze facts in the week. Well, I want to hear an update from Doug because already on this show, we actually did a little history lesson

on Google Glasses when they got initially announced. Wait, let me, let me hate this one in because I think there's a good thing. The next topic, which we'll probably close the show on, is about smart glasses. And Doug has something to say about that. And before he does that, before he does that, I want to say that

when we were prepping this episode, just an hour ago. Right. You walked into the bathroom, said, meta, take a photo, then took a photo of your pee, then brought it out and showed it to me, and it was bright neon yellow.

So you need to drink more water, but I'm excited to hear more about why you were doing this. Meta played Dubstep. I don't want to listen to this. You've also been doing this off camera. You were playing classical music earlier or whatever. I couldn't hear anything. You guys were saying. He's drone this out. No, turn on Dubstep.

Oh my God. Okay. Thanks to the new meta updates. You can't, glasses, whatever, you can listen to, look, new Google glasses. We talked about it a while ago. All right. In our failed products, right? That was like an example of one of the, like, Google Glass. Yeah, like one of the least successful. So, you know, long period of time

where Google was trying to do this. One of the interesting things that came out of Google I-O'd last week, which is their big yearly tech conference, is that they said they are definitively launching new glasses. Now, these are a little different. Perry, I gave you a link

and you can pull them up here. But basically, they said we're doing two things and they're going to be both coming in 2026. The first is audio glasses that are going to speak into your ear. It is called, instead of Google Glass, intelligent eyewear. They are partnering with

Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. You can see some looks here if you are watching on YouTube. Looks good. And these are going to be very, very similar. You said looks good. I like these ones. I mean, they seem fine, right? I mean, I'm not a big, yeah.

The style, not enough. That one's kind of interesting. Not for me, but like it's like a, it looks like it's fashion glasses. I think, you know, the fact that they're partnering with like legit glasses brands. So two categories. First category, audio only, which is going to be very similar to what meta's glasses are currently

doing. And that just means there's a speaker in your ear, it has a camera, and it's going to connect to Gemini, which is their AI model, and it's going to connect to your phone and you can be like, I had something to my calendar right now. Oh, like, take a picture of this, blah, blah, blah. So they're launching this, and then they are also going to

launch a second version, which is partnering with X Real. And you can see actually from C-Nexam. a video here in the background. Now the reason I wanted to show this particular video is because gaming is fucking back gentlemen All right if you play this this is infinite climber again. No, it's not infinite scalar which by the way is a big deal and you have to admit Secondly check this shit out. You could connect with a steam deck and you could connect your phone or a laptop Daisy chain it in I played games on a steam deck and then brought up a YouTube browser the little processor puck and played tutorial videos alongside a hollow night. Okay.

Okay, now let me explain what's going on here. Oh my God. This second category of glasses, and this is where the more interesting piece of this little mini story is, is going to be a version where there's actually a screen in the glasses. So we are finally going to have, you are wearing glasses and you get like a heads-up display that shows you, here is a Google map, you can see it, and as you're walking, it adjusts, right? Here are images, here, or videos here, whatever. And this CNET video shows him he is playing Silk Song.

The output from his Steam deck is playing Silk Song, sent into a video live in his glasses as well as another window, which is a YouTube tutorial of the same game, all inside of reality that he is looking at through the glasses. It is, to put this differently, basically Applevision Pro, but in glasses. Which is never going to talk to each other in person ever again. It's a little sad. Like, I will be playing Silk Song during Nordic Fack of the Week. During this year. This shit's kind of crazy to be honest. Trent's got too far. Don't.

No, you're so right, Ed and you're so right. Meta, turn up the sounds. Meta turn it up. So, you know, this is going to launch. The audio one is going to launch in the fall. The glasses one,

supposedly, is going to be launching later this year. They're partnering with X reel for that one. The reason I think is sort of interesting. Meta, these glasses that I actually bought a year ago, year and a half ago, and was like, yeah, this would be cool to try new glasses.

I've used these one time, including two times, one of which is setting it up and the second is taking a picture of my pee and showing it to you. But to give you a sense of how well these are doing, as we know, Applevision Pro kind of fizzled out. A lot of the VR stuff kind of fizzled out.

But meta glasses, in 2024, when they launched these Rayban things, one million sales. 2025, they sold seven million of these things. 76% of the smart glasses market is owned by meta, according to IDC. So later this year, meta is going to do Meta Connect in 2026.

Supposedly, they're going to maybe add a display screen so they can try to compete with what Google's doing, maybe more AR features, maybe additional sensors. That version with the Silk Song thing, you're going to have to have a little device in your pocket, little puck. Maybe they do something like that or a wristband. Google kind of has advantages on integrations. But this is pretty cool in that these have been actually going like huge. These are getting insanely popular, I think a lot more so than I realized.

they're and as these become mainstream, the instant you get an actual working HUD in these things, it might really explode with what people want to do while simultaneously being very dystopian. You know, it's like I want to have a nuanced take on it because I tried the, I bought a pair as well. I thought it was a cool idea I wanted to try it out. Meta played Dobsstep.

Yeah, Dubstep while I'm talking. I think the music part is actually kind of awesome. Like no one around you can hear it. It looks pretty cool. Though I think the worst part is right here, bro. I think it's a vibe killer to have a camera in your glasses Once anyone else in the room notices it, you feel like such a weirdo.

It's not a cool. I think it breaks the social contract to have a camera on your classes. I honestly think that's the worst part. You're not, you're obviously listening to stuff to that, but I just think it's a problem. Better turn it up.

And I think a version that had no camera, but the music and maybe the HUD is kind of interesting. Like I think it's kind of, it could be cool on like a flight or whatever. But I just think the camera breaks something. It's weird. Women love when you approach.

approach them with these songs. For starters. You're just so obvious. Someone did it recently at an event I was there and you're talking to them and you realize, oh wait, this is weird. Like you could be recording this right now. It's just a weird. Because I open every combo with a slur.

So I just like, it's me. It's like you're recording. And I don't want to cancel. I don't want people that can cancel for that. I think you're right. I think camera aside. The general skepticism of this product strikes me as similar to the six fingers AI argument.

It's like, sure, maybe it doesn't work that well right now, but it's gonna get to a point where it works an A's. It works pretty well. The music part works great. No one can hear it around it and you can, it looks, it's awesome. I think there is a cynicism for the product that I see broadly outside of that, outside of the camera that I feel that way about. For the camera, I feel like it's like, dude, it's kind of like phones where I think people

just get whittled down. I think that's my unfortunate take on it is I do feel like we obviously feel uncomfortable about that, but as soon as like enough people have these on all the time, you just suddenly have to accept it, which is fucking annoying. But I

think the reality of it is if it just becomes popular enough, it'll be fine. You're probably right. People will get whittled down. That's a rough thing to hear, but you're probably right. But when I first used it, I don't know. At least so far people have held the line. And by the way, people kind of said that about like, I don't know, Apple Vision

Pro and stuff. And that in public is horrible. But that's different, right? It's so different. It's, it's, it's, that's the whole thing with why this is interesting is it's the first form factor on your face that feels comfortable. Can I ask a question? Do you, I don't know if you know the answer to this. If you used a version of this with a screen in there, and I'm like talking to you, is it very obvious that you're watching something on a screen? So I don't know. I mean, these aren't out, right? This is, it's not public yet. Like, do I see in your glasses like the reflection of you like?

I can't tell you. Watching YouTube videos or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. Because that's a big impact. It's like, I want to be able to watch like a Counterstrike videos while driving. And I don't want the cop to be able to know. Yeah, officer. Yeah, I guess I was going to do fast.

Is that don't khylidst? Riddle me this. Is it that much, technically it's better than if the phone's like near my lap and I look down occasionally. You could always. say technically it's better than something for anything. There we go. I'm whittling you down. That's not an argument. Meta, show me Doug's pee.

Anyway, folks, that's the wide world of our story. Before Doug breaks an HR rule, it shows. It's so long. We'll get you next week. You want an extra hour of us debating this. You can find us on the Patreon. That's another agreement of limited stand in the books.

Thanks for watching, guys. Bye, see next week. Bye, fade out now before I see Doug Sphee. Formula One, so hot right now. It's like if traders in succession at a baby on wheels. Teams lying. Drivers beefing. Celebrities everywhere.

And scandals. Lots of scandals. So we made a show about it, the Red Flag's podcast where we recap races and break down all the latest F1 headlines. But no nerdy tech talk. We only cover the stuff you're wanting. to hear about.

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