Lemonade Stand - The Trial of the Century | Ep. 061 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

On this week's show... Atrioc goes to court, DougDoug solves birthrates, and Aiden finds a tiny problem with US trains... 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: 061 Recorded on: May 5th, 2026 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Thumbnail by Cheyenne DeWolf - https://x.com/cheyedewolf Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh Segments 0:00 Intro 0:42 Elon vs Sam 12:38 OpenAI's beginnings 21:20 Ramifications 34:30 Anthropic Ad 36:05 Brightline is in trouble 52:20 We missed this 53:31 Huge sums of money for having a kid 1:02:40 Trump accounts are interesting 1:09:55 Telegram's CEO birthrate strat 1:16:56 A bit on Credit Cards 1:23:20 China's 12345 Hotline 1:28:23 A bot free Social Media 1:31:46 Tinder Account Scams 1:34:33 Outro New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Wednesday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-F-Frey at O-D-O-O-D-O-com. Well, well, well. Well, well. What does it mean? What the hell does you say? What are you doing? Who lives there? Nobody knows.

That's my adjo. Welcome back to Lemonade Stand. That's my ad, that's why I live. It's good to be back. And it's good to be back. We have a number of topics to talk about today. You love Tucker Carlson. I don't.

I don't. You love him. He's your favorite person. Oh, okay. What would happen if you went to that address? Oh my God. I don't know whether to give them your address or Tucker's house.

Because you're always hanging out. Hang it out of the same space. We have a few things we want to cover today. But the main thing that you have brought together a lovely presentation for is the trial of the century. The trial of the century. And I'm going to make the case as to why it's actually a really big deal

and why it is a big trial. and you're giving me a look like you don't think it is. Who is involved? That's a perfect first question, you know what's great about this? Okay, I intentionally didn't look into this at all so I can be the guy who doesn't know about AI.

And you get to talk about it and I get to ask questions. It's not even really an AI story, which is why I am bringing here. I think it's a human drama story, although in a business story. The AI parts will get to. I think there is some. AI has a lot of issues.

I think I have a good, Thanks for covering. I have a good synopsis of that thing. Because this is about, you know, this is about Open AI and Elon Musk. And for those who followed back in the day when Open AI was first starting, Elon Musk was really upset that Dendee didn't beat the DotaBot that they built.

And it's kind of all hinged around that. That was the article I read. Yes, it all comes back to Dendy. If you can pull us up, Perry. The trial of the century has just begun in Oakland, California, between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Okay, and they're both there in person, which is rare for billionaires.

They usually either don't show up or they don't have to or if they do, it's very briefly. But they've been there, Sam Alman's been there for all of the days, despite not having to testify yet. So it's been like, because so much is at stake for both of these two men in this trial. And they have both wheeled out an absolute litany of lawyers.

Elon Musk bought two top tier law firms, both of which staffed with an army of lawyers. and I'll talk you about Sam Alman's lawyer in a second. Say litany of lawyers 10 times fast. I will. If I have to. But there are,

there's a bunch of people protesting out front. It's becoming a bit of a media circus. Again, this is a small court in Oakland and yet because of the size of the trial, there's a crowd of people outside every day waiting to get in. You have to line up at like 5 a.m. to have a chance to have one of the seats there.

Wait, wait, okay. These signs are saying things like reclaim our country. boycott. I'm not sure literacy. I think they hate. They're dislike both people is what I'm getting from me. Speak up protest. Okay, so they're they're not rooting for one side. No, I didn't get a lot of ones of that. One sign

one sign for audio listeners, if you go back quickly. It says resist the brolarchy. Resist the brolarchy. Mosque says AI race may kill us all gur, but he won't stop. Wow, it then says no nerd rike. Okay. I'm only showing this

one guy where there's a, there's a lot of people. Anyway, there's a guy that had a robot costume chained up to two people that said, I am Sam Altman's AI enslaver tech fascist. And by the way, you know, just to prove that it is two-sided. The back of his costume, which I don't have the photo of here, but it does exist, is the XAI logo and it says GROX AI Fashist or whatever. So as far as the crowd, it's concerned, these guys have teamed up. They're enslaving people.

I'm a little loss on the protest. As far as the police are concerned, they're not like both the guys. But that's not really the story. The story of it is the amount of money and control at stake in this incredibly monumentous trial where nine jurors are going to decide, I mean, the fate of the AI industry in America is basically what's at stake. So I want you to take a look at these numbers here. These are the four largest lawsuits in American history.

Top left is BP oil spill. top right is Bank of America mortgage fraud around the 2008 crisis bottom left is the VW Dieselgate as we know and then bottom right is Enron scandal and the number next to them 2016 and 14 and 7 are the billions of dollars that were awarded

okay so the largest in American history is a $20 billion award for BP oil spill can you guess how much Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman for that's right $150 billion okay

More than every one of the top 10 previous highest lawsuits combined. You know what? I'm realizing one more gap in my legal knowledge. When you sue somebody, can you just say I want this amount? Can you just pick an amount? Why even stop there? Why not go higher? That's a very big number.

But there's actually even bigger ones that we invented. You could go higher than that. I guess that's worth saying. I don't know why this number was specifically changed. I do know that is what he feels he is owed. Okay. Although I think he wants it to go to charity. He doesn't want, he personally doesn't need $150.

Oh, so he's a good guy. Yeah, he wants to go to the share. That's like seven and a half BP oil spills. That's, that's right. That's a lot. I think that's what the damage was calculated at. I, yeah, he wants to go to charity. I think it's an important point because I think, I'm going to set this up here.

It seems like Elon must go with this trial is less about any individual legal claim and more about hurting or damaging Sam Altman. So we'll get into the specifics here, but I think that ties into it. He's not really trying to gain personal wealth from the trial itself, more from the long-term effects. You're going to donate all the money to a charity

that gives data centers to towns and need. And these guys used to be friends. So you can find a whole host of interviews and videos from them back in the day where they used to hang out. And now they are truly bitter enemies. I can't over. state how much during this trial, they can't even look at each other, how Elon Musk is both on

social media during this whole past week and in the trial, calling him scam Altman, calling him, you just, you know, saying a lot of terrible things about him. And at one point during the trial, when Elon Musk was berating him, Sam Altman just got up and left and then waited outside for the whole rest of the thing. He just didn't want to be in the room. So there's a real animosity there, but they used to be friends. And they even created the first, um, what looks like the first AI generated video. It is a real video, but when you watch it now,

it looks AI generated, which is these two guys talking about their favorite video games 10 years ago. I'm looking for any video games to play. Can you give me a recommendation? Overwatch. I play Overwatch. Anything else?

Overwatch is amazing. Overwatch is amazing. Yeah. Generally, Blizzard does great stuff. Well, there's Hothstone. I haven't tried that one yet. Yeah. I know people love it.

That's what my kids play the most is Hothstone. Also from Blizzard. I'll check that out tonight. All right. Well, thank you very much for the time. I know you gotta get going. What? That was a truly genuine, beautiful conversation. What did we just watch?

Really showing the dated times as well, complimenting everything. Coming out of Blizzard. Yeah, Blizzard's great, and Overwatch is great. So they clearly had some kind of connection there. They shared favorite video games, and now they hate each other. So there's a lot of aspects of this trial I wanted to go into

because it is, important who wins. It really is going to make a difference. So first of all, the lawyer, as I mentioned, Elon Musk's team, massive, massive team. This is them wheeling in crates of documents.

They have two separate major law firms. But Sam Altman kind of won up tier. He got this guy, William Savitt, who is Elon Musk's former lawyer. He's a lawyer who defended Tesla many times and who knows the ins and outs of how Elon,

his buttons to push, how to get him to say certain things on the stand. What are the risks? What is, you know, that kind of thing. So they got him. He's also the guy who at one point made, Twitter hired him to make Elon Musk follow through and his attempt to buy them.

And that worked. So he's got a track record of victory against him. So, you know, maybe 1.0 there. Then the jury. So the problem with the jury, the first part of this trial was that they couldn't get a jury because a vast majority of the people in Oakland referred to Elon Musk as, quote,

greedy or quote, a piece of garbage. And there was a person who had to be dismissed because their job was harmed by Doge's things. And so a lot of jurors got struck. Eventually, the judge had to say is, the reality is that people don't like him. Many people don't like him. That does not mean Americans can't have integrity

for the neutral process. So they kind of had to move on. Like at some point, they could not get, because he's such a famous figure. Yeah. They were looking to find nine jurors who didn't really know of him. Or like it had a neutral opinion.

But everyone has an opinion on Elon. Musk just because of the nature of his celebrity and size. So it became a bit of a trouble. Then we got to the testimony. So Elon Musk had to testify. He did seven hours of testimony over three days. And I'm going to give you the two

sides here. And by the way, you can take either side. They both have some good and some bad. Elon Musk's and his team's attack is that Open AI was started

with his help. He put in all the money, all the connections, all the effort. He helped get it off the ground. And then they scammed him by saying it was going to be a charity. And now it's a for for profit organization. And that he wanted to do it for the benefit of humanity. And now it is this dirty for profit thing. And he's mad about it. He basically framed himself as a defender of the philanthropy and charitable giving and how this is a charity scam. Now, I'm somebody who believes the most recent thing I heard. And Elon sounds like a pretty good guy here. Yeah.

And I'm starting to think that the source I read might be totally wrong on this. So the issues with that you're probably already seeing. But I do want to say some part of that is true. Just to give you on credit, if you go into, at least from his testimony and from what I was able to research, he was instrumental in the founding of Open AI in that they would not have been able to get Ilius at Skever to leave Google had he not made the call. They would not have been able to get introduced

to Jensen Huang and get GPUs early. He made a lot of the calls. He also put in $38 million of his own money. So there's some aspect of he was really important in the early phases of the company. You'd have to be next level delusional to sue somebody for $150 billion

and not have it be based in some like a rice grain of truth. So I, it's like, but there are obviously, there's another side to the story. So there's more anyway. But I want to say some of the things. Even, I mean, to Elon's credit, for like a decade now, he's been talking about the dangers

of AI and AGI and why he has been consistent on that for a long time of like, we need to be thoughtful about this and a regulation, even before that became kind of a popular opinion. That was a big part of this trial. The judge had to shut it down. Because at some point, Elon Musk kind of pivoted a little bit from like, this is charity fraud to AI is an existential threat to humanity. They even brought in a expert witness Who was a Berkeley professor, go bears

Yeah, was he? At least it's the, my understanding? I lied. I did read about this a little bit. Okay. At least they brought in a Berkeley professor. They brought in the witness, but then the witness was revealed upon cross-examination To have been paid a quarter million dollars

For his testimony where he also said AI is so dangerous And what opening it? And so it kind of detracted a bit from what are you saying. He's getting like $5,000 an hour, you know? Based on that, I think Elon sounds like a bad guy. Okay, we continue. A couple of things came out during Elon's, Elon's testimony that were funny.

Is Elon Musk talking to the CEO of Google at the time, Larry Page? He said, what if AI wipes out all humans? And then Larry Page said, that would be fine so long as artificial intelligence survives. I said that was insane. That's just crazy. And then Larry Page called me a speciesist because I care about humans more than AI.

The only reason Open AI exists is because Larry Page called me a speciesist. What is the opposite of Google, an open source nonprofit. So he made the case that he started Open AI, and he co-founded it, was because of to get back at Larry Page for his insane beliefs about AI. So that was part of it.

However, this line of thought isn't really falsifiable. The idea that AI is going to wipe us all out and this is exceptionally important that it's a profit or norprofit doesn't really factor in the in to a business case. Like we're discussing legal, who owns it, all that.

Additionally, and the defense brought this up, they were like, hey, it is a little bit hypocritical for you as the owner of a massive for-profit AI company to be making the case that AI can't be in the hands of for-profit or it will wipe out humanity. That was my next question. That was actually my next question

is, has it come up at all? It came up a lot. It came up a lot and the judge even had to like say something about it. It is so blatantly hypocritical to be making billions of dollars and putting it into AI, the same time he's like, it can't be for profit.

So then, so Elon Musk's part was, as what you expect. Then Greg Brockman, president of Open AI, came out and did a testimony just yesterday. And there was a lot out of that.

By the way, if you're watching the polymarket odds of who will win this trial as it's happening, which you have to do in 2026. Why is that written? Anyway, continue. What's interesting is,

as every person is defending their side, their chance of winning goes down. So Elon Musk at the end of his testimony had like a 13% chance of winning. But then once Greg Brockman spoke, it's now back up to like 50-50. So they've both done a pretty bad job under testimony. Okay.

So and Sam Altman is still ready to, we're talking about this as it's happening. Sam Altman will testify soon, but it's not testified yet. So Greg Robben comes out and he talks about the real key point of this dispute is the year 2017, team, which is where OpenAI had done the Dendee stuff.

They'd done the Dota 2. They're getting off the ground. But Elon Musk looked at them and said, we're losing to Google. This thing's a flop. And according to Greg Bachman, he said, we need to be for profit. That's what we have to do. Like, we need to convert this company into for profit. And I think I should be the majority shareholder.

That was his idea. And he said, the reason he had to do this is because I need $80 billion so I can colonize Mars and build a city. And so that's why you guys need to give me the majority stake of OpenAI as we make it a for a private company. Now obviously that puts a knife a little bit in the, this is all for charity,

this is all for good kind of. Let me just underscore this. So this, the company that Elon helps co-found and recruits for after, I forget what, a couple years I've got exactly the founding date. Elon suggests turning it into a for-profit company. Yes. And now,

eight years later, the trial is about the fact that it turned into a for-profit company and that he feels he got scammed because of that. Yes. Cool. And if I'm a guy who believes the most recent thing he's heard, this is taking a whole 180. But, but,

okay, Greg Brockman, do not put a compressor on that butt. Full volume. Actually, turn that up 10 dB. anybody who's watching this on a second monitor, they're going to bring it back to first, okay? I want to include the quotes here. Musk wanted open ad,

I changed corporate structure. He wanted to become open as leader. He deserved a majority stake because of his business experience and he intended to use that stake to build a self-sustaining city on Mars. Okay, that was the thing. It looks kind of bad for Elon.

However, they also got Greg Brockman's diary in discovery of what he was writing during this dispute. and he said in his diary, I can't see us turning this for-profit that they were planning in secret to cut Musk out because of his action. Basically the idea was,

you can find a lot of text messages and discovery. Elon Musk got real pushy about going for profit and he wanted to be controlled. And then they decided about himself, he's got the right idea with going for profit, but we don't want to do it with him. They decided to cut him out of the picture because he's clearly being very demanding.

And so he writes this down. I can't see his turning into a four-bought without a very nasty fight. And his story will correctly be that we weren't honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for-profit just without him. And that is a damning piece of evidence.

Like, we weren't honest with a co-founder who's put money in the company and we did want to go for profit without him. So this kind of swung things a little bit. Additionally, when they tell Elon Musk that he's out of the company, they want to do it without him. him, Brockman says,

Musk, I thought he was literally going to hit me. I truly thought he was going to physically attack me. Apparently he was so angry that no one for him to have a majority equity, he stormed out of the meeting and then said, I will withhold funding, which he has done. He has not funded since then. So they did offer, after all this fighting, an equal equity split where they'd all get an equal amount and Musk rejected this.

He said, you guys are great, but I could start another AI company tomorrow. One tweet is all. takes. So after that, it feels like he had opportunity. He really just wanted to force it his way and they went the other way. Now, technically, it's also worth saying, you've mentioned this before. Open AI is still technically a nonprofit. Nice. I'm back on the, that's still technically a nonprofit that owns a for-profit company. But listen, everyone that comes out, every text message that comes out of this thing. The judge was very, very clear that there'd be no social media during this. The idea is like, do you want to turn to a circus? There's an aspect of these trials that are so

public of like, let's make it a PR war. Yeah. And both sides apparently have hired PR divisions to help kind of control the narrative. So you see a lot of stuff on social media trying to paint one side or the other is bad. And so she had to give a gag order to Elon Musk. because he was tweeting so often so many terrible things about about Greg Stockman, Greg Stockman and Scam Altman, who were trying to get rich. So that happened. And then right before the trial started, Elon Musk texted them personally and said, by the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. And they responded by taking that public in the trial. They did discovery and showed it. And the judge is very furious. And so, I don't know. Again, the sense seems to be from the Elon side that he wants

revenge more than he wants a charity outcome for this. And he filed this lawsuit in 2024, right? And then this is the trial happening now. Yes. It's been, it's been a long time coming. And the animosity is only but brood. But I want to, I want to explain what I think might be happening here. So, And why this is such a big deal Because as we're saying, it's a 48% chance, a coin flip right now. If Elon Musk wins this and Open AI loses, the result would be that Open AI would have to,

quite possibly give all the money they got from Microsoft back, which they don't have, it's billions of dollars, they would have to make their product open source in some way. So the proprietary open ad problem, which, by the way, Elon Musk admitted two gasps in the courtroom that he has distilled for GROC, as in GROC stole open AI training data or trained off of, you say, trained off of open AI and the courtroom gasped.

So obviously the judge pointed this out. There's a bit of a conflict of interest in that you're asking clearly a competitor of yours that you're already trying to distill knowledge from to make their proprietary product open source. But I want to bring up a different point and why Elon Musk, despite, I think the odds are quite close now, but prior to this trial,

and according to legal experts that I was reading, his chances of winning are really low. They kind of dotted their eyes and crossed their tease on getting the nonprofit thing with Microsoft. So I don't think you have a good chance of winning. However, here's a reason why he might want to do this anyway. So these are the 10 largest IPOs in history, but the biggest one is Saudi Aramco.

When a company goes public, you know, lists as shareholders for public purchase. Sawyer-R-R-Empco, $25 billion. It's the state oil company, right? Biggest one ever. Great business. Great business. Good fundamentals.

Right, great fundamentals. It does have good fundamentals. Bring in a ton of cash every year. They have big plans for this canal. Does some of it end up doing things like live golf? Yeah. Sure. Sure, who does it get a little money out there.

But, okay, these are, I mean, it's the biggest ever in human history. the biggest IPOs. And the biggest IPO last year in 2025 was $6 billion, just to get a scale. This year in 2026, three big companies are planning the IPO, and SpaceX is going to IPO at $1.5 trillion.

It's going to be by far, if it goes through, the largest IPO ever, ever done by a factor of any. It's bigger than the next 10 combined. At the same time, Open AI wants to go public at like $900 billion. And anthropic was to go public at like $950 billion.

And there's a real, concern that the market cannot stomach all three of these at once. They won't all, they won't all three be able to get the supply of liquidity they need in the market. And so there's actually a major, major advantage to being first. And so if you can tie up your opponent in any sort of legal battle that makes their IPO delayed or slow down or have to push it back a little bit, there's a material massive advantage. Like, The first one to go public is likely going to do very well. The ones afterwards may, in fact, do worse.

And so I think that is Elon Musk's deeper motive here. As to whether or not Sam Altman and Greg Rockman lied to him, they probably did. Like there's two sides to it. So I don't know, you've read part of it. I don't know if you have any more thoughts that you wouldn't give in. But that's where we're at now. There's weeks more of this trial to go. But in the end of the days, if the nine jurors favor Open AI, I'm sorry, favor Elon

Musk, then one of the biggest AI companies in the world is going to basically implode. And it'll be a huge win for Elon Musk's business interests. Yeah. And anthropic. I mean, if I'm giving, like, from what you have explained, the synopsis is, Elon is actually just mad that he was cut out of the for-profit version of Open AI a long time ago. Yeah. He didn't actually care about it being turned into a profit, uh,

into a for-profit company at all. He actually wanted that. He wanted to be for-profit. But they push it towards for-profit without including him and then later made an offer that included him, but he didn't like and he didn't have enough controlling. That's right.

And so none of this has to do with charitability at all. He's just angry, wants revenge on these people that cut him out of the deal at the time, and he's trying to leverage the legal system in order to get something out of the situation or enact his revenge, it seems like. Yeah, yeah. And both parties are not really in the clear,

which is unsurprising. It's unsurprising. And I do think, at least for these three guys, I think I'll know, again, I don't know too much about him, but he comes off looking like the only guy that cares about, even AI or like research at all. Yeah. Of these three figures,

because internal text messages of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, especially Greg Brockman is like him discussing how do I get to be a billion dollar net worth? Like they're like that, like they seem to all care about the money of, including Elon Musk. All three of them seem to care about control, power, and money and are finding different ways to kind of screw over each other. So if we were to ground this maybe for,

let's say I'm a guy who's protesting outside the courthouse. Yeah. I'm in a robot costume. Yep. I don't like either of these guys. I've got people chained up on me. Yeah. And I'm on the fuck AI as a whole train.

Sure. Is there even a side to really like root for here? Because there's a winner and a loser and it's like there, I don't think there's anything. There's nothing for that person to really be excited. No, I don't think so. If you're out of fuck AI as a whole train, I mean, one of these two very rich AI dominant men is going to come out with an advantage. Yeah. I would say realistically, yeah, I don't.

Is there any, I can postulate a couple of times. thing. So some knock on consequences that could happen. One, if Open AI is forced to open source their software, that changes things a lot. So the whole ecosystem of AI right now, everybody's not profitable, but burning massive amounts of money and trying to eke out profit where they can. And if they are forced by jury to release open source models, that is going to hurt their ability to make monetized products even more and the other competitors in the space, even more, right? And so the ability for then Elon to go out and then say, because again, the SpaceX, X, 1.5 trillion dollar metal dick you've put on the screen, is in large part predicated on the fact that they bought XAI. So this is both space and AI, right? That they need to say is this massive valuation. It's going to make all this money. So then being forced to open source would be like really interesting. AI, opening eye shutting down would be interesting because they're like the dominant leader right now. So then you allow all these other companies to kind of come in. I don't think there's a way if you just hate AI like I don't think this is going to stop it. But it's I think it's going to hurt AI.

companies. Well, maybe for another party is say I'm at Google or say I'm at Anthropic. There feels like something there for those people where you have a lawsuit that is so big or so critical for these two companies that it potentially gives you an advantage. Like in Anthropics case, right? You have two parties that potentially want to IPO, but you have the ability to race to that IPO first and get that advantage you discussed. Yeah. Or in Google's case, like a company that is already safely public, has a ton of money. They have two competitors duking it out. I think Google is super happy that two competitors are just dealing with a stupid bullshit

legal battle. They're totally safe and they're out of it. Anthropic actually is on open-a-side here because Anthropic is also structured as a public benefit corporation. And there's some legal consequence if this favor, the jury here favors, uh, Elon Musk, then he could easily turn that same Sauron's eye. He also hates Anthropic. He talks shit about them all the time as well.

Like he could easily find a way to lead that continuing down their path. So, well, hold on. Public Benefit Corporation is not the same as nonprofit. No, it's not. It's not the same. However, at least from the legal experts I was reading, the idea is that they have clearly, public benefit corporation is supposed to be.

It's basically you have the mission. of a nonprofit and then the goal of give sugar hoarder's value and you are legally obligated to do both. Right. Yeah. And the idea is that you could make the case that they have not fulfilled their legal obligation. Especially if it's under the terms like, you know, a lot of this trial was spent being like AI is going or could kill everyone, wipe everyone out. It needs to be a non-profit hands focusing on that mission. Yeah. Unless it's from XAI and SpaceX. Unless it's GROC. Unless it's GROC. Yeah, that is, by the way, that guy is, you see Berkeley professor, Stuart Russell, who has paid $5,000 an hour to go in and basically just talked how dangerous AI is.

It's like not helpful, I don't think. No, it wasn't up at all. And so that line of thought got kind of destroyed. They kind of pivoted mid-trial into the more of the charity scam thing. And I don't know. It's just a very interesting battle of wills. And again, they both have paid. And this is true.

They both have paid PR firms. So like a lot of what you're seeing on social media is like paid stuff trying to paint one side of the other is, I got $10,000 checks from both of them. It's tough. Well, lemonade stands have been getting a lot in the inbox later. And if I'm taking Elon Musk at face value, Larry Page is a blood boy in the basement. Also, yeah, I mean, Larry Page does come out

looking like a fucking psycho, though. I've got to be honest with you. The idea that it's species is to care of that. If that's a real quote, that's crazy. Larry Page's got blood boy, that's great. Oh, so sorry, he cares about robot. He cares about the ethical treatment. of AI.

Jesus. Dude, saying that in 2016 or something is insane to me. Oh, wait, okay,

something I don't know about. I have more to say about it, but I have a slide. Yeah, yeah, wait, just with Open. So if Elon wins, there's,

there's all these obvious benefits. Yeah. What is, you maybe know this better. Is Open AI get anything from this other than holy shit Elon is off our back? If they win,

they're back to the position of, oh my God, we need to come up with $500 billion in the next year. Open. It is a defendant. So they're, okay, they don't get anything.

They are just going to survive. They go back to, can we survive this insanity? They go back to the... Like, Elon has nothing to lose here, really. No, that's the power of a legal system when you're incredibly wealthy. I mean, they're both. The real winners of this trial are the lawyers

who are getting paid absurd amounts of money in mass to do, you know, this bullshit work for billionaires who are fighting each other. I'm trying to think of any other text messages that came out that were particularly salacious. There was definitely some... stuff. I'm put it on slides.

But when you're, while you're thinking about that, I got two fun tidbits about this as well. The judge is, I believe, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, right? This is the same judge who's presided over the Epic versus Apple case. Ooh. Yeah. So she's the one who's been like dealing with that and like chiding Apple and saying you guys clearly are flagrantly ignoring my order. So this, she's badass.

She's done some like very high tech, um, a high profile tech court cases. Definitely. I'm just to go off that in this trial, it has been, she's been kind of universal praise because it's been a circus. There's so much pressure, so much on it. And she has been super consistent about sticking to the rules, sticking to procedure, not letting anyone fucking dominate the conversation or take things off subject and to do the gag order and social media. It's very hard to get billionaires to shut up and take it seriously. And she's done it. She's not like treated them special. So I've been impressed. Second fun anecdote,

I mentioned that on a Patreon episode we did that I had this long conversation with the guy who worked at SpaceX from 2014 until, uh, it was like four years, right? And like worked on the space like actual launches and whatnot, help design rockets and satellite. Super cool. So he worked with Elon, uh, including directly at times, but SpaceX early days. And one of the things that he told me was that the, if you were going into a meeting with Elon, one of the things you would do before the meeting is check what is Tesla's stock price right now? Because that would dictate his mood going into the meeting, and he would be either very angry and snappy or in a really great mood if it's doing well right then. So there are like people who've worked literally with

him over the last decade or two saying the stock price of his companies really does a, and so it gives credence to that, that idea of like this could just be about juicing SpaceX for this unbelievable IPO. Well, again, and I want to say the context for Elon Musk's position in the AI race right now. Grock is a distant fourth. Have you seen? the hot anime women on Twitter? What are you talking about? Despite how incredible that feature is, Grock has been dumping just as much money

as almost everybody else, but they're not seeing the market share gains. So like Gemini has been really growing. Open AI, growing but losing share, but still growing. Grock has been flat. So it's like he's spending just as much money but not seeing the results. And it would really, really help him

and SpaceX and this big IPO, were competitors to be knee-capped in some way. And I do think he's using the legal system as a way to do that. I don't think he genuinely wants the charitable outcome of Open AI. It doesn't make sense when you run a for-profit come, it doesn't make sense.

Now, if we sat down to Elon Musk one-on-one and asked him about his principles. Anyway, I don't know if there's much more to say. I mean, we'll definitely have some minor updates in future episodes because it goes on for weeks. I think Sam Altman's, testimonies you're going to be really interesting. I'm sure more crazy shit's going to come out. You can watch this live on YouTube right now. I was listening to some this morning,

except it's only audio, no video. It's audio only. And it's not very high quality. So if you're trying to get in on that. And also they just fit in an insane amount of boring stuff. I mean, I was reading the summary from a reporter who's in the room and she kept typing zz, zz, z, z, z, z, z. There's like parts where even the jury, she said are like, like, like looking exhausted falling asleep because there's just so much document reading. So much Like, anyway, big trial. We'll see what happens. Support for this show comes from Odu.

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Trust me, I know fans. They don't skip, they stay for hours. They don't move on, they manifest. They're not a demographic group. They're fans. Spotify advertising. You're among fans. But you guys are also going to talk about.

Aiden, what's going on in your neck of the woods? Well, we've talked about a little thing called Bright Line a lot on this show. We talked about trains a lot in general. We're a train-based organization, to be honest. And for those who don't know, Bright Line is the high-speed rail in Florida that opened up in 2018. And they have a full, they basically now connect Miami to Orlando and a bit more than that, I think. And we've talked about it pretty highly, just as a project on the show, is a representation of getting something built in the, in our country.

Yeah. As, as kind of a success story. It's like here, it's possible to get something like this done. But recently, over the last few months, there have been a number of articles about the financial state of Brightline and how they may be in a position to declare bankruptcy.

We don't get nice things. We don't get nice things, bro. I was one of our early optimistic episodes. We're going to have fucking... What? So, Trains can't have a hero's journey? In the darkest hour. What's gonna make the victory satisfying

if it was easy and profitable from the beginning, Aiden? Has there ever, but what was Bilbo on that journey, if not saddled with debt? I think Bylan should sue Sam Alton. No, I think Lord of the Rings should have no orcs. No, sorry, he just walks in there. Come on.

That's a good point, Doug. That's a good point. It'll be more exciting when we get there. So to give some background, the train has been operating, at least in some capacity, since 2018. And it is a massive infrastructure project that requires a lot to be built. And naturally, that sort of company is not making money out of the game, right? I think everybody would expect that. Unfortunately, also, the company went through COVID, where, you know, nobody is using their trains.

They were closed for a long period of time. Yep. And they're also not making money then. But they come out of COVID. 2022 is like the first fully normal year. And they do tank a big loss that year of over $200 million in an operating loss. And going into 2023, we actually see things begin to improve for this company. Their operating loss is declining.

They're not making money, but over the same like nine month period at the beginning of 2023. Okay, it's getting better. their operating loss is only 190 million. And... And they're all of these and $100 million. And then if we continue to follow Brightline up until now, they actually

have managed to make more and more money as their ticket sales and ridership has climbed. And it continues to get better like month over month or year over year, rather. Which is cool. It is a success story in that specific regard. However, depending on where you, which sources you read, this company is saddled with about four to five and a half billion dollars

in debt. For those who maybe remember, we talked about something a long time ago called private activity bonds. And when this company opened up, they funded this massive infrastructure project by selling bonds to the public. This is a way for these types of things to get built, right? and a super, super ambitious project, not a lot of love in the U.S. for rail, right? Difficult to get the amount of investment required. So what happens? The government steps in and is like,

we'll give you guys private activity bonds. Basically, the government, like a municipal government or state government, slaps a little stamp and says these bonds you issue Brightline, the interest that you'll owe the bond holders will be tax-free. Yep. And this helps motivate people to invest in a project like this.

And the government is down to forego the tax revenue on that interest because it's up for a public good. Well, you know, this train being finished is going to be something that benefits society broadly. And private activity bonds get used to build things like sections of highway or bridges. They're intentionally used often for like public infrastructure projects. But Brightline took on an extraordinary amount of debt. And then not only took on these billions of dollars in debt, but the interest rates,

because this project wasn't super likely to succeed, are also very high. Like we're looking at like 10 to 14% across all of these bonds. And you know what I said that their operating loss was at, you know, 190 million, 150 million in the following year? That's just the operating loss of running the train. That's what it costs, like what it costs to actually run the train against ticket sales.

If you count their interest payments, they are losing, and the fees they have paid to restructure... No, no, that's not counting interest payments. Or the fees to restructure the debt payments along the way, they have lost hundreds of millions more dollars per year. The number I saw is the most recent

2025 operating loss was $127 million total, but then on top of that is $117 million in interest. Interest is like doubles their loss every year. That's insane. Because they were they had already started struggling to pay the to make the bond payments. They had to pay the interest for that year, which was $178 million that year. And then pay money in a debt restructuring deal. That was another $150 million on top of that. So their total loss for just $20244 was $549 million. Well, we're never going to get trains. Our trains are juggling credit cards to pay off fucking they can't even pay them point. I get, if, if, if, The train itself is operating at $100 million loss. And now... Could they just raise the debt ceiling?

And get more money. The Trump. And the dams won't let them. The Dems won't let them. Chuck Schumer's brought him. And the Fed chair at Brightline said he's going to start printing more Brightline bucks. Who's going to buy these anymore? The Brightline bucks?

The only way... Those weren't real. Those weren't real. No, but Brightline bonds. How did they keep issuing them? So they're not... Okay, so here's the issue. They have, this is, the, the market around these bonds has clearly completely lost faith in the company's ability to pay them.

Because the bonds are now trading at like 28 to 33 cents on the dollar. Okay. Which is insane. It's going bankrupt. And also, I think it was Moody's, uh, lowered the quality of the bonds from like triple B to triple C. And then Brightline requested that they remove the rating and said, You guys haven't given us enough time to respond to the ratings change. Please remove it entirely.

It's always a good look. And they've already in 2026. When the health inspector letters covered up. Did they try the strats of saying Cs get degrees? Yeah. That could work. Apparently in 2026, they have already skipped interest payments on one set of the bonds earlier in this year, which is the second postponed payment on these bonds.

And they're only allowed to defer. interest payments three times before violating the terms of the loan. So it's two strikes. They're going to default. You don't want to buy a train? We can get in on it. We can pick it for cheap, bro.

Like a fishing boats. Guys, we need a few more patrons this month. That's the next patron goal? We run the lemonade stand train. So we get bright and we buy bright line out. It's already yellow colored. Do you know is this going to is this going to stop the train

going from L.A. to Vegas? I do. I do. It looks like it won't. So the reason being is that Brightline West is a completely siloed company from the Florida project. And that's good because it's famously easy to build in California.

That's so funny. And if we were being optimistic about Brightline West, which everybody loves driving to Rancho Cucamanga, even if this Florida project completely defaults and runs into these big financial issues

that they most assuredly are. They have better circumstances in the West. They got outright funding from the Biden administration. Like a huge amount of money from that. And it's a like higher, higher traffic, more tourist demand route than what they've built in Florida. Like there's more precedent for the demand

that they'll be fulfilling. However, the project is also more expensive, just in total. So, you know, this doesn't look good for that one. I'll say that. But at least it doesn't seem to financially harm the Brightline West project moving forward. Yeah.

But what's happening, you might ask, what happens to the trains in Florida? And apparently Brightline has been trying to get investors, like the bondholders, to do a debt for equity swap for months. and they cannot get the bond holders to do it. Nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to do it.

They want you to sell the trains for scrap and pay them back. But if we all agree to not ask for interest for a while, we all agree, we don't own any bonds. Sorry, if the people, the equity holders, I mean, to be fair to them, ridership and revenue are going up every year. It's like they're largely doomed because of interest.

I've also seen, there's one more thing. I've seen no evidence of this happening in Florida specifically for this case. But public, sorry, private activity bonds do have a precedent of the government kind of has a vested interest in these bonds working out successfully. Because if projects fall through that they allow to be funded with these things, right? Then they lose respect for the following bonds that they allow in the future, right? So if the government, if this whole project blows up and then the, I think like one of the municipal governments is like, Tampa. Like in Tampa comes, it's like, hey, guys, we have this great investment opportunity for you.

Here's another private activity bond for you to invest in for this like other infrastructure project. Somebody's going to be like, well, you fucked this on the bright line thing. That bombed. I didn't get my money back. So in other specific scenarios where these types of bonds have been used, the government has actually stepped in to bail things out because they don't want to lose their credibility in the future. It's such a fucked part of public activity bonds, though. It's like the implicit guarantee that the government will bail you out is a big part of it.

That's why it exists, why they're like so... Yeah. But they're trading so low that it seems the market thinks that will not happen, right? Otherwise, they wouldn't be trading at 28 cents on the dollar. Yeah, I mean, the market doesn't,

nobody wants them. Yeah. Yeah. But that would indicate... It seems very expensive to bail out. I mean, is Tampa even got the money to... That's the thing. It's like, I think at this scale,

like when I looked at the other example of how this, like this other infrastructure project, which was like a highway was bailed out. It was way less money than this. And it was in a different state. So I don't think there, I, again, I've literally read nothing that implies

that there is going to be a bailout in this specific situation. So they're unable to get that swap. The hope is that if they are forced into bankruptcy and the debt were to be restructured, then ownership would change, the trains would continue operating under whatever new ownership there is.

and then probably all expansion efforts and the idea of this like Florida line becoming much bigger, which is what Brightline is working on now, is probably over. But the existing train would continue operating in some capacity under new ownership. So it's kind of a bummer story, honestly,

because I think two years ago, three years ago, Brightline was this very promising thing and oh, here's rail getting built in the US. It's high quality. People are using it. but even if, even if they were meeting their projections in like ridership and growth,

they still would not be making enough money to get over the amount of debt that they have. So kind of a bit of a bummer story, but I thought a really good follow-up considering how much we talked about this last year. It'll be so sad if like the one train project we get in America. Ritalin West, don't worry about that. We're going to Vegas.

Just as a reminder for people who didn't listen to the episode like a year ago, going from L.A. to Vegas. Massive, massive popular route. That's a great spot for a train, except it doesn't go all the way into Los Angeles. It goes to Rancho Cucamonga, which is like saying you have a train to New York City,

but you just have to drive to Philadelphia to get to the train. And the good thing about Vegas, at least, is that it's getting cheaper and more accessible to the every person than ever. Yeah, everyone loves Vegas right now. Another hilarious thing, Perry, if you pulled this up,

I met a person who was from Florida in Japan randomly and asked him about Brightline. And he was like, oh yeah, that's the train that kills all those people. I'm like, what? So you can go to brightline killcount.com. And there's detailed statistics of how many people have been run over by the train because Floridians don't have any concept of trains apparently. They have, so it's 205 people have been killed by the train.

They have a map where all of the deaths have happened. And then not only that, you can look at these like detailed statistics because Florida releases everything. Bro, this is awful. It's like mostly old people. Like there's a lot of Florida retirees who are like just parking their car on the train tracks or something. So I don't think that has helped.

No, I mean, this isn't helping the vibes for sure. For sure. You know what? I mean, it sounds like they have a money losing business where they kill old people in Florida with trains. Yeah, well, you got to spend money to make money.

And then also do we know. You do have to spend money to make money? Right, exactly. And do we know maybe other trains kill a lot more people, all right? Maybe those fancy Tokyo subways. I think it was less. I think it's, it's suicide, obviously.

But I actually don't think accidents are very high in Japan. I'm trying to find out the exact number. Yeah, yeah, it's very different. They had at most 22 accidents per year, and I'm not sure whether they're fatal or not. You know, this is a tangential story, but it reminds, you guys heard about GameStop trying to buy eBay? Yeah.

It's just funny because GameStop is a company that's worth $11 billion roughly. eBay is a company it's worth like $46, $56, $56 billion, so much, much bigger. Yeah. And so in order to buy them, they're going to have to take on $30, $40 billion, like, just an absurd amount of debt. And so the interest payments are going to be so gargantuan, which means eBay is going to have to be run so much better by the GameStop guys.

They're going to make so much more money to overcome that. Like, I don't, it's saddering to me. Maybe, maybe this is a fucking dumb question. but I'm gonna own up to it. How is that allowed? Why isn't eBay buying GameStop? Do you know what I mean? Like when I hear about something like that,

it's like, why isn't the other company buy the smaller. You ever see a ferret, hunter rabbit? I'd, and that answers your question, Aided. I mean, anyone can buy anyone if they can get the money.

Yeah, I guess. That's the idea. And a bank is willing to loan you the money because they think they can get it back somehow, whether or not they scrape your, take over your business and scrap it.

They should do private activity bonds for that one. That doesn't make any sense. No, no, you know what I understand. Guy and drops it in every conversation. Get a real private activity bonds vibe for this. Guy who's only read about private activity bonds. Oh, this is a classic pad situation. You forgot.

I'm guy who hangs on to the last thing he heard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all there. Yeah, yeah. You know what? None of this is going to do, Aidan. What? Help us have more.

kids. But Doug has multiple ways. People are getting around that problem. Yep. Doug is pregnant. Doug's pregnant. That's yeah. That's where we're gone. Actually, okay, I forgot to mention to you guys. I wanted to do a quick story. Um, because this one, we miss this, uh, but I figure better late than never. We've never missed anything on the show ever. So I, I disagree. Yeah. So this is a just quick story. Happened in Greece. King Philip of Macedonia absolutely smashed Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Karenea. And it's looking like the Mediterranean could completely change from here on out. Yeah. Particularly with his son Alexander. So we'll keep you guys posted as we learn more. That is something we missed. That sounds intense. It sounds high stakes. I was kind of looking

through have we missed anything. Have we missed anything? That's probably the only thing. It's probably. Yeah. We'll keep you posted. Yeah. Lot could potentially come from that. Now, this next topic. Um, making. He'll never get to Zerxes. Like, you're out of touch. That was 100 years before this. Me pulling up your analysis next episode. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you.

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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 mad.

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 Sted Hearnson, and this is America Actually.

Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. I want to start this topic with a bit of a demonstration. A.m., this is a serious question. I will offer you $20 to get on the table right now with your girlfriend and get her pregnant. I mean I'd have to call her. hesitation. Proof that financial incentives aren't working to get people to have children. She's at work.

Right, right, right. We can, we can protest, but it's weak, it's not happening. This week's episode will be seven and a half hours. Wow, you fuck crazy. All right. All right, so birth rates, we've talked about a bunch. We don't have to go over the entirety of the birth rate conversation. But what is interesting is some things are changing with what people are doing to try to increase

birth rates. So some notable things. We've already talked about this. A lot of different countries right now are just starting to pay people when they have kids, right? It's just here, have some money. So this is a government program. Some quick examples. These are all U.S. dollar amounts.

In Hong Kong, you get $2,500 for each baby born. In South Korea, children can get up to $22,000 over eight years, like plus monthly checks and various other things. In China, you can get $515 per year for each child under three years. And, of course, all these child care subsidies. Japan has numbers too. So we've talked about this pretty obvious thing that people are trying

and it is not working right and we've discussed this. Yeah. I mean I've made the point I think that like that amount is so small compared to the cost of raising a child and the opportunity cost of like the woman having to leave work and like $2,000. This is on the main app now.

People don't know about the hot take. Oh, was it on Patreon? My flaming take on Patreon a while. Was that Patreon? It wasn't a main? Well, I think it was a Patreon episode. I think it was Patreon. But we talked about how a Depending on the perspective that you look at it,

affordability is not at the center of the birth rate crisis, if you want to call it that. And I know there's people typing already. Shut up. Shut up. You got that from Tucker Carlson, right? But I think you have a good point is like similar to, you have to start somewhere.

It doesn't seem like there is a substantial example of financial example of financial. financial help that moves the needle enough so we can see what that could. I haven't seen anyone that's really paying the true cost of a kid. Like if someone told me to buy a McLaren right now, and I'm like, I can't afford it. And they're like, well, I'll give you $800. It doesn't really change the decision. But what if the number goes up each time you buy an additional McLaren, which is what they're doing? And you can write off like the food and the diapers for the McLaren. Yeah. The gas is free.

You just have to come up with the $200,000. You just have to run of McLaren. But you're like a herbie fully loaded McLeod with a giant diaper on the middle. Yeah, I think there's two, from that conversation a while ago, I think there's like two ways I kind of break this down in my head. There's the core affordability aspect that certainly does matter, which is people are under immense financial strain in a lot of places

that prevents them from having kids when they would like to, because they simply cannot. afford it because of, you know, cost of housing. But you even under strain. Like, isn't it feel like, but it's like a sacrifice. Like you really, you're going to be financially hurting when you do it. Like if you are a comfortable middle class income, but everything's getting more expensive, you're not necessarily under strain.

You're not like, oh my God, but it's like, damn, this kid is going to reduce my wife's income. This kid's going to cost us a ton of money. It's the savings I'm going to have to cut back. Like, it's going to, your lifestyle will change dramatically. ability to afford luxuries will change dramatically. And so it's like, I think that's the cost. It's like not necessarily like, oh my God, I'm in poverty. I can't afford a kid. It's like, this is just going to be financially way more difficult in the alternative. You know, as compared to like

the world where having a kid is a, like if you're a farmer back in the day, it's a financial benefit. It's a straight up benefit. But we've gotten rid of that. And now it's like a big financial negative. Do you're saying bring that back? Bring back. Child labor. Child labor. Yes. Make it in that pause. And when I was getting back is we need to open up factories where kids can work or at least they can start

making Roblox game. Get them to work somehow. Well, they can make the brain rot that you'll steal. Yeah. Wait, so I want to ask if you have any like kind of insight into maybe

is there any progress being made in any places where people are rolling out programs to support families? I feel like they're loosely. He's making a face like there, Maybe. Interesting, you should say that. That's the entire conversation. So yeah, so Bloomberg posted an article, Asia's billionaires are bankrolling a push for more babies. And basically, they're

starting to see that many billionaires are tackling this problem. And on, on the surface, as I first started to look into this, it's a lot of this billionaire who owns this company is offering these crazy amounts of money for the, uh, for various people, right? For parents. And then as you start to look into it, it's for employees. But they're offering giant lumps of money for their company's employees in an effort to try to get them to have more kids. This seems to be different, like billionaires around the world being like, I'm going to pour my money directly into this to produce more children. So South Korean, a couple interesting anecdotes. I'm going to say all of these wrong. I apologize. Chongbung-gu's craft and ink offering employees a lump sum of roughly $43,000.

And again, this is all dollars for every birth plus additional payments. See, that's a lot bigger. Right. That's a lot more until the child turns eight. Lee Jun-Kun Buja-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-M-Sor. Is that $43,000 a year? No, four, so it's for the birth and then plus additional payments until they turn eight. Oh, wow. So you just get a lump sum of 43,000. Yeah, yeah, probably, yeah. The next one pays $72,000 cash per newborn and has floated plans for tax-free housing for families with three children. Again, these are for employees. This is huge amounts of money now.

In China, Zhang Ji Pei, founder of Far East Holding Company, is giving its employees tiered cash awards for those who have more babies. So you get more giant chunks of money that increase with each kid you have going from 21, 210,000 won for third child to 280,000 for fifth. They're prioritizing hiring graduates who promise to have large families. And his quote is, what our company is doing is akin to watering the pond to raise fish, which I thought was very poetic and strange. I wonder, I wonder if, because one of the things we had heard about and learned a little about while we were there was China's pivot on this from the government side. Yeah. And the messaging, you know, going from this era of the one child policy to a very hardcore public message about please have more more children. Public, local officials calling single women in their districts or areas about having children.

Yeah. I wonder what level that's like tied to in China specifically. Are there any results from this? This is, this is new and basically one of the things now happening. So we've seen for a few years, you know, I think what's particularly notable about this is the difference in scale. Like you called it out, $43,000 is a crazy amount of money compared to China giving you $500 for having a kid. Right. These are, these are not even close. One of those is like you could hire a nanny to help for an entire year.

It's a life-changing amount of money. Right. That is a huge thing. And so that's what was highlighted by this Bloomberg article, and there's a number of different examples. I had hoped that it would be a little more like billionaires are now contributing to each child that is born. It seems to be more about their employees, and then they just drop these giant sums. But it's just an interesting change that seems to be coupled with the government changes.

And then there's a different version, which is happening in America right now. I know what you're talking about. Which is... Elon Musk, who's been helping by having as many kids as possible personally. That's a billionaire who's really been contributing. That's been swinging the needle substantially, we'll say. And I believe you guys want to have kids at some point.

Yes. And I assume it's going to be what? Couple dozen? Yeah, probably 24. Okay. We're shooting for eight. That'll help a lot. Oh, but you're taking them out to a different country. You've got hurt our numbers. Unbelievable. All right. So you and I need to have far more than that. We need to have at least eight more. Right. Okay, so this is interesting. You're paying 70 racks per kid. Bro, you don't even have a credit card.

You don't even get credit card points. What are we talking about? I don't get credit card points, so I need kids points. No, they can sell you, it goes to right to your PayPal. You don't need a credit card. I can create a self-sustaining

streamer ego system where they watch my stream and I get the ad revenue. Yeah, it's like the farmers of all. Yeah. I'm turning out kids. They're becoming my viewers. They type cool messages to make other people think of this is a sick community.

And I'm getting 70 racks per. A farmman. table, bot farm. Oh my God. And they're making Roblox games for me. And I'm playing. You're playing the Roblox. It's all internal.

Okay. So Trump accounts. This is a new thing that I'll be honest. I like this was passed as part of the big beautiful bill. We actually talked about it with one of our best friends Pete Buttigieg. And so this is a new initiative. And the idea is that any kid, any parents in America can create an account for their kid. And that account is going to be managed by institutional investors, investing money into private

companies across America with essentially 0% management fee. And so you as a parent can create this account for your kid. And if your kid is born anywhere from 2025 through 2028, we have already budgeted this in the big beautiful bill. The federal government is going to add $1,000 into your account. And then the idea is hopefully other family members or friends or philanthropies or employees will also contribute to this. And so they have a website called investamerica.org and they show, if you pull this up, Perry, they show what would happen is if, you know, if you have a kid who's born with $1,000, if you assume that there's a 10% return annually based on the S&P 500 over time, it shows how by the age of $5, it's $1,600. By 12, it's $3,500. And by 18, they have a $6,500

just thing there ready to go for them. And it's both, we want to give people money when they turn, when they become an adult, but also teach people and like, have them get, see this real experience of watching how investment grows compound. And then if you just add a little bit of money every month, like $50 a month, which they have on this, that $1,000 by the time you're 18 is $38,000 if you can find the ability to put $50,000 in. So this is assuming in the bottom bank corner. Yes. Assume 10.5% annual return, which is true of the S&P over time, I believe. But it's definitely true in the last like 10 years. Certainly last 10, but I believe that's like a year average, something like that.

Yeah, yeah. So, I assume a lot. But what's interesting about this is that a bunch of billionaires have signed on to invest into this. So a notable one is Michael Dell, the founder of Dell, who has committed $6.5 billion into this program and said he's going to try to add to like 30 million kids, add 250 bucks into this account. Ray Dalio came out and said he's going to contribute to this for Connecticut kids and

try to give 250 bucks to a bunch of them. And Scott Besson, the secretary treasury, what I think is so interesting about this is he's really pitching this as like, hey, billionaires, big, rich people, you don't want to give money to the government, right? That sucks. They're going to waste it. We all know how inefficient they use capital. But what if you gave money to give it a bright line or give it directly to the kids? This is a quote from Scott Besson. Trump accounts are not a government program. They are a radically new platform that returns us to a social contract anchored in individual ownership where everyone starts life on an investing journey. There's one that's like every, yeah, every American will be invested in the free market system and its continued success. And so there have been a ton of companies and billionaires who are like getting really excited about this and willing to pour hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into this because it is being pivoted as cut out the, by the way, it is literally a government program.

But cut out the government. just give money directly to kids and now you as a parent just buy all these people throwing stuff in if you can contribute a little bit every month as well your kid could turn 18 and have 20, 30, 40, 40,000 dollars and I think that on paper is like pretty great.

You can't withdraw from the fund early, right? Like it's something that like... It's basically an IRA and it basically unlocks it when you're 18 and you can pull it out and do whatever you want at that point. Yeah. Or you obviously leave it in savings. I mean, I think I have... It's interesting because I'm my...

layers of cynicism to this, which is, you know, why is this the approach that needs to be successful? Why is this the type of thing that, you know, billionaires are excited about versus like other comparable types of social programs or that would try to implement things that have similar effects to this? But if we were to bring this back to the context of the birth rates conversation specifically, yeah, this isn't money that's accessible during the upbringing of your child, which I think is the number one, the number one. I, the number of, number one barrier to a lot of people is like, I need the money now to take care of the child now. This is also a concern in American context. So you're sending your kid off to college, go live by

themselves, all these things, right? Still, I think still relevant in the most idealistic scenario. But yeah, I mean, look, Stan's just had a kid. They have one of these Trump accounts for this kid. It's going to have $1,000 in it. It's going to be $6,500 at the rate of growth by the time he's 18. but I do think that $6,500 in $244 is not enough money to make a meaningful difference. It's fine. I think I agree with you on a fundamental level that billionaires giving their money that is going to kids in some way is a good thing. There's no downside, really. Right.

It's a good thing. But the way it is structured, I'm skeptical about because the primary benefit in the short term, which is when it would benefit Trump the most, is that it helps probably the stock market. It's just more money going into passive vehicles that go into the SMB 500. It's only going to the SME 500 and that's where it's... Yeah.

You know, I think... That's my... I think if you were to take... A lot of things we do in banking industry are about keeping that from ever shaking because that is so much underpinning what boomers vote for. SMB500 being up.

What I think I like about this, one, I do... I wish that I had something like this growing up just to literally make me aware of investing in the value of compounding interest because I just didn't fucking know. I mean, I sat on this show at one point. I just didn't even pay taxes out of college

for the first year or two, which sounds incredibly stupid and is, but like nobody ever just sat and was like, this is what you got to do as an adult. And I think stuff like that, where it's going to be like an app that you can look at is valuable. And then the second,

and the main point I'm trying to make here, is that if you take the average billionaire who has become publicly, overtly cynical about government spending, and like that's what Elon says all the times. Like the government's going to waste all the money. That's why I should have it. I'm more efficient.

this program seems to be perfectly catered to be like, hey, billionaires, this is a good use of your money. And it's this really strange way to convince a particular type of like hyper-capitalist to be like, that's where I should put my money. And it's just going to kids. So I think that's particularly interesting here. It's like a marketing tactic to make them all feel good. And the dumbest fucking part is that legally it is called Trump accounts.

That's not an nickname. It is called the Trump account. No, I looked into this back when Michael Dell got up on stage with Trump and announced he's putting a couple billion in. I really tried to look for the angles. And I do agree with you that, like, at the end of the day, the billions came out of his account and it's going to kids. Yeah.

So that's a good thing. I can't argue with that. It is, like, the small percentage of his money. No, he's got a hundred. Incredibly small percent. He's got $175 billion.

He's putting in $6 million. I think I did the math on, like, what it would be to him versus someone who had $100, and it was like, it was like $17. I mean, it was a small, it was like a small donation. I got one final approach for you You guys know of Pavel D'Rov

No Perry pull this up He says like four times I don't know Pauvel Daraov Is the CEO and founder of Telegram? Oh I do know Pavel Daraov! Look at this fucking giga Chad man The telegram guy got Shaley shredded right? Yeah, okay Wait, isn't he in jail? No he's not in jail he was He was captured right? He was arrested in Paris in 2024 but he was released. They released him? Yeah they released him

He's back in Dubai, where his country. So the whole thing in Telegram, the whole thing is it's a messaging app that's super secure, so terrorists are really, really down to use it. It is worth a lot of money and they make a lot of money. So this guy's worth $14 billion.

Pavelduroff, what's his strategy, you say? How can you get the birth rate increase? Dude, with pecks like that? That's right. Tell me, you donate sperm over 15 years and allow anybody to use it. This is a real website where you can go get Pavel's donated sperm

and get pregnantated. Pabelsperm.net, bro. And so he now has over 100 children around the world. Not only that, ladies and gentlemen, he announced very recently that in his will, he has said that his fortune will be evenly divided amongst all of his heirs. So every single woman who goes and has a child with his sperm

gets part of the fortune for their child. This is how you increase child birth rates, dude. This is it. Audio listeners, I'm looking at. Dude. I'm looking at a title that literally a website that literally says free IVF with Pavel Dirov's donated spurned. And then it explains. He pays for you to get impregnated. Like you're buying an iPhone. So I don't know if you can see it down here. I sent a message. How much money is it cost to get is come? I want some. And they haven't replied. So I will keep you guys posted on this. Put your email as atrioc at lemonade stand.com. That's not my. No, that's my email. Oh, I didn't tell you about this. Sorry. I've been. I've been talking to some people. I've been hearing some strange things from people getting emails. So three very different tactics going on in the world.

You really do need to be careful. At some point, if we want to, if we want to start making a difference, the three of us, we pool together a barrel or two of wool together. Of lemonade stand. Of lemonade stand. Wow. And then we'll figure out the steps from there. Okay.

Something good will happen. It's a real lottery ticket. would you it's funny people love loot boxes atioc it's like a

loop box oh I got a special dug dug dog child look at how tall he is he's he's so lanky

and then you get Atriox's fortune I have to give you my uh dude you know what's you know he's got to suck

by the way Pavel specifically said his six legal children that he's had with you know, with women he's in relationships with. So he has six of those and like literally a hundred from donated sperm. Yeah.

He said they're all treated equally. He doesn't want his legal children to have any advantage. So all of them get an equal split of the fortune. Is that dope? That's so funny. That is why. Dude, the text says from our clinic you can undergo IVF for free using Pavl Dura of sperm, one of the most famous and successful entrepreneurs of our time.

Isn't that sick? You like market yourself and be like, don't you want me? There's got to be some psychological underpinning of like a, a ganges con. Like you want to populate the... Isn't this an Elon thing too? Yeah, Elon doesn't do the same thing.

Well, Elon doesn't just put his sperm out for free and say, I'll pay you to get pregnant with it. He doesn't do that. But in the trial, just a little one more, that was one of the texts that came out,

was, I forget their name, Chauvonne something, but she's one of the board members of Open AI who ended up having twins from Elon. Really? Yeah.

Oh my God. Okay. He got her pregnant. But she says in the trial, we're platonic. We've never had sex. He just paid for my IVF with his.

his sperm. That is, so this is like a, so he's doing on a small scale. I would, I would argue Elon's doing it the old fashioned way. Would you? Pavl's doing it with technology. Open source. Open source. Also, how much, you don't wonder that sperm clinic like every day? Dude, the amount you must be. It's in for 15 years. I'm just picturing, dude, I'm picturing like a, like data center racks. But with his, this is also a real. This is also a real. like do you press the red button or the blue button, you know? Because if there's too many kids, they don't get that much money. The fortune is too smart. Yeah, yeah, you have to, you have to, because there's a, there's diminishing returns for people who keep jumping on the train.

Exactly. Yeah. Uh, me and my girlfriend are debating whether we're even going to do it. It's interesting because with this room. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, weigh the options. Plus, you know, there's a bit of the fortune you get. You know, in 20 years, 14 billion is not even going to worth that much. Yeah. What if you, what if you order the cum, dump it out, have a regular kid with your wife? And then later on be like, hey, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is this is Paul's kid. I would have, Pavelle comes to your home, he picks up the child. He's like, rotates it like an item in Skyrim. Looks at the back. No, that's not my hair line.

I, okay, I'm going to be honest. We're at the end of this segment right now and I don't think we arrived at anything that that works. You know? Well, sorry, sorry. The very first thing we talked about. 100 children, by the way. 100 more children than would have been. The very first thing we talked about

seems like the most promising, but it seems like they've just gotten introduced at these companies. Yes. So, right. And that is also based off of the volunteer effort, like a couple billionaires being willing to spend that amount of money.

Yeah. On, yes. I wonder what the legal clause is. This is fixing anything. No, no, no. I don't think so. If you're a corporation and you will give 70 grand to someone have a kid and then they work

somewhere else. Do you claw that back? What's the legal? Yeah, I don't know. Presumably, you get rights to all of their lineage. Yeah. You have to name the kid, Delta Airlines. I mean, I'm curious to, you know, I am really curious to see what, what this does, right? Because you have data about if a government is offering small lump sums of money. And then you're like, okay, what if a billionaire is like, we'll give you 70 grand, right? Yeah. So it'll be interesting data in a few years, but we don't know right now. It's essentially this is like people, this is how some of the responses that are.

happening as people realize that there's this like demographic cliff coming. If you want to hear more about this topic, we actually talked about it for a long time on Patreon. Live demonstrations. You know, a couple months ago. And I think we could probably put that episode in like the description or something like that.

But I have a couple other things I wanted to talk to you guys about. Oh, yeah. Yes. Okay. I thought. Punch me. This is. With facts and logic.

I'm punching you with facts and logic. And make it logical. I want to hear a logical argument for what this is. Okay, I'm curious what you guys have to think about this. I saw an announcement. I actually initially thought this was an April Fool's joke. It was a tweet that Ghana was introducing

payment functionality to their national ID cards. So imagine like you have your California driver's license and it has like your little chip in it. Okay. Like you can tap and. and scan your ID. You thought it was an April Fool joke from the Ghana government.

So it wasn't from... Okay, it wasn't from Ghana's... Lo, good one. It wasn't from Ghana's Twitter account. It's like May 5th. Aiden logs on a Twitter. I can't wait to see what the South Sudanese government did for April Fool's.

I can't... It took me a while... It took me a while to find something besides this tweet that backed up that the system existed. And it was tweeted out on April Fool's Day. So I'm like, I'm looking at one source. I'm having a hard time finding anything else about this thing. But then it actually is real.

It's something they just like recently introduced coincidental timing. It wasn't from the Ghana. I didn't think Ghana's government Twitter account was fucking around. It's just a random. It was just a random Twitter account. It's April 1st. What's our joke today? You know what?

Your ID can be used as a credit card, L.O.L. We got them. Please continue. You know what? You know what I'm going to do on this show? I'm not going to research anything anymore. I'm just going to show up. I'm just going to show up.

And say my address twice, huh? That's what you're going to do? Shut up! Shut up, dude. So, there are other countries in the world that do this. We've talked about Estonia on the show before. Okay. But I wanted your just basic thoughts on that,

functionality be introduced because I think like as an April Fool's joke or ignore all the negative consequences that there could be around security concerns or right or people don't like the idea of consolidating so much information with with the government

is the bank with am I banking with Ghana or are they connected I think there's a partnership with some people are you giggle that's a question that's a real question I just sounded like a commercial you'd watch a He was like, now that I started banking with Ghana,

me and my family have been able to start the shop. I just got my Amex Ghana. Oh, you're still with the black? You still have the black in it? I've got the Ghana. I've got the Ghana. I've got the Ghana. It goes crazy.

No, I think just, I thought it was really interesting because my initial reaction to this was kind of exciting, similar to the idea of like the EU was announcing that like digital, digital wallet or digital currency so that you don't need to use like intermediary credit card companies anymore. This seems really convenient,

surface level. And I was wondering if what your reactions would be if this was introduced in the US. So I guess the, I mean, it's just, it's implementation, right? Is it tied to a state bank? I think in this case,

in Ghana's case specifically, there's other countries that do this. Ghana's case, they have a partnership with a bank or like a bank equivalent that they have connected to. There's like a company they're partnering in doing this through. I want to set the stage for this conversation

and unironically, A-Trock doesn't have a credit card. And this is insanity. How is that setting the stage for this conversation? It is important. I want to defend myself. I don't have a credit card because I don't like credit. I have a debit card.

I spend money that I have. It's crazy. I don't want to borrow money. I don't want to go and suck off Jamie Diamond from Jamie Morgan Chase, which you do every morning to ask for your money so you can buy a fucking latte prepuccino. That only happens if you don't pay.

Which means clearly you weren't paying your credit cards. Every morning I get out of bed and I go, oh, Jamie. Jamie. You suck off Jamie Diamond. And it's fucking awesome. And you watch her Carlson. And you come in here, you list my address. And I knocks on my door and says, where's my interest, honey? Look, here's the reason I bring

that out because I don't give a shit that this wallet has four cards in it instead of one. I don't care. It's no different. I have to carry the wallet anyways. I don't feel like it, I don't know what I'm, you know. I don't think this would matter. I do agree with you on that. I don't think this would change in a well-banked society like America. What am I getting out of this other than I'm flashing my ID more often in public?

Well, you get one less card, which I think you would like. You don't have to have your debit card anymore. And you only, I don't want a credit card. I don't want a credit card. Which doesn't have a lot of meat to it into making fun of a track. No, dude, I literally, it's unbelievable. It's awesome. Wait, I had more of this topic. you guys made fun of me and now I saw red.

So many places don't take credit like debit. They don't take debit. Do you just leave? You just go, you just leave the restaurant? No, they, everywhere takes it.

Everywhere takes it. I've had no issues. I've had zero issues for my podcast call how it's making fun of me. I had no issues. I have good credit score. I got nothing about it has affected me in any way except for you guys.

You don't need to be upset about the dumb decisions you made. This is, you guys are paid by big credit to push people into a life of servitude. Fuck, I had something I wanted to say. And you ruined it. So when we go to the gas station, do you flash your debit card at them? Do you realize how embarrassing that is?

I'm gonna flash. You're an adult. Something, dude. What was your next topic, Aiden? Because I literally can't think of what I wanted to say about this. Oh, we need to move on? Yes, we need to move on.

from the Ghanian credit card ID situation, which turned into basically, I don't have a credit card. What point is that true? We've covered four news stories in the world on this episode of the podcast. And I think one of them is that Ghana, maybe as an April Fool's joke,

has the ID card to say it. And then I don't have a credit card. That's the big four things that we had to, people need to know about this week. Okay, it's just weird because you could be getting so many, points.

Is you literally a lot of points on the table? I don't know about this. Okay. Okay, the other thing I wanted to talk about was a missed story from China that we, I almost can't believe we didn't talk about this because it actually came up a bunch and it's the idea of the one, two, three, four, five hotline.

Yep. So in China, you can dial one, two, three, four, five on your phone and immediately connect with an on-call, like government-employed staff to lodge any complaint that you could imagine. Literally, you see, like,

damage at a park or a safety issue in your neighborhood or any problem you could imagine in society, you can call one, two, three, four, five, and... Hello? Jiu-Jing Ping? My dipshit calls are bullying me.

Is there anything you can't? can do about that. I know it's not in your jurisdiction, but I would really appreciate if you can send a nuclear missile to Aidan Calvin's house. Oh yeah. Well, actually, if you will sign up for our address. If you're a real friend, you can say my address. Sign up for a credit card. You could buy a bodyguard. I, and we, uh, we got told multiple times it's impressive at the scale at which this operates because they pick up really quickly. People make calls all the time. And oftentimes your requests are dealt with very quickly. And there was actually an example

that popped up on Instagram that Steffick who went on the trip with us sent of surprisingly a foreigner living in China making the call in English and then basically laying out a mixture of like I think it was park

benches and a previously like swing set for children in an area that children climbed on. It was really beat up and broken and no longer safe for kids use and he made the call and within a couple days the area is cleaned up and repaired and then within two weeks the whole area has been like rebuilt out again uh with like new markings on the streets for like parking so they aren't parked on the things where where the kids could play on and it's this

really interesting example of like public service that i don't really even have a comparison point for Like, because multiple people said, you can use this at basically any time for anything. And they're, you know, and people's requests actually are dealt with super, super quickly. Another example that the person we spoke with at the university program said was somebody,

like, for example, you can call in and be like, there's a lot of flies at this public bench. A lot of flies right now. It seems to be, you know, they must be half. matching right now. And then they come in and like clean it all up within a day. Like things that you just wouldn't think of is like, oh, you can just ask your government to do a thing. It's just anything.

And they do it within a day. Yeah, I wonder how they deal with abuse? I'm thinking if we did that right now, the calls you'd get, some of them would be so stupid. And I wonder what you do about it. You just ignore it or do you? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I don't think they didn't suggest that literally every single thing is, you know, not everybody's complaint is valid or perfect. and they're dealing with everything. You can assume that they're getting a similar amount of shitty calls.

Yeah, that's what I'm assuming. I'm just wondering how they do with it. But they have an apparatus. Like they, that somehow, you know, there's no like weight on these phone calls. And no matter where you live in the country,

there's like a reasonable response time, which was the impressive part, the logistics of it. Yeah, I just thought that was like a fun thing to share because it came up so much and we didn't get to talk about it at all. Yeah, it's cool.

Dude, another example that I'm blank. He, so again, the university director, it told us that one example was that a parent called one, two, three, four, five and said, hey, the teacher at the school who teaches my kid is being unfair to my kid. And that person was disciplined. Like, you can call about schools and stuff. And so, I mean, it's obviously only, like a product that is only possible when you have extreme connection and, like, decision-making ability on every level of everything.

Whereas for us, it's like, hey, this bench is fucked up. That needs to be a whole, I mean, I don't know the specifics, but presumably like a city council meeting, whatever, to decide how that's budgeted and who does it and who's contracted and the reviews and everything else. And they just have none of that. Just everybody, you know, you can just act. You can just immediately go make things happen.

And so that is definitely one of the examples that is truly like, man, if you do have central government and you pull it off really well, that is nice. That's fucking nice. I'll read more about it. I don't think there's any downside. No, I'm only heard good things. I'm always skeptical, but I want to know.

It does seem cool, especially in that video, that self-exempt. Yeah. We have, I remember the thing I want to say, though, one more thing before we go. Okay.

About, it was about, it was about the cards. Okay. But it was a tangential point, and it's not funny. It's serious. I was a question.

I want to ask you guys. All right. All right. You said that they're going to tie their bank to their ID, right? You're making of such a face right? And I want to ask, legitimately because I thought about this. I legitimately want a social media platform where your

ID is tied to it and required. And I wonder if you guys would want that or think it's lame. I'm not saying it's the only one, but I would like to be able to log onto a platform where everybody has their government name and you have to have an ID to sign up and it's 100% pure human beings. No bots, no. I think that would be sick as hell. And I want it more and more every day. And I just want someone to do it and I don't care about the fucking privacy of it. I literally just want humans only.com and it's,

and it's, and you can't be, you can't be anonymous. You can't be fucking chumbuggett 420 and you're like talking about shit. You just be yourself. Yeah, I've thought about this a lot.

And I think it's one of those things where my opinion is transformed somewhat recently. From what to what? Like, I think it used to be no. And then Tucker Carlson said. And then,

whatever Tucker says goes and then I pivoted. No, humans only.com kind of rips to me because I think one of the things I hate the most about the internet is the lack of social accountability. Not that I think everybody would be like wonderful and nice because the closest thing I can think of is like early to mid-era Facebook and there were still terrorists on there. Yeah.

And social terrorists. Yeah. Well, real terrorists. Plus you're like Osama on. And to me, the trade-offer, of the security aspect is worth it because it's like, I'm not fooling myself. Like that's, I've already compromised that

in so many other ways in my life. I'm not gonna pretend like I'm not already giving this. Facebook knows what time I take a shit. They know every fucking thing about me from millions of data points. And I rather have a social media platform where I'm like, I'm on humans only. Yeah.

Bro, if you're not on humans only, I do not take your opinion. Yeah, you're not a human. I, this did make me think of something. Because obviously, if you think about this in a broad sense, there's, there's way more down. sides. It's not just about my individual security as a person. It's about like people of certain,

uh, you know, of certain like minorities or opinions on the platform then being attacked or monitored by the government. Uh, I think I say this in the context of, oh, if I trusted the institutions around me, uh, like enough, then I would prefer this type of platform where in person social accountability exists embedded into the social platform. That's a Swedish thing to say, though. I live in America and like I'm already posting on fucking Twitter. I don't trust the institution. It's fucking I don't even like Elon Musk. It can't get worse for me. I don't trust Facebook. I don't like it's all over to go it up. I have no love for my current social platforms at all. I will take humans only even if they're fucking monitoring me even if they're the government's got its greasy

pause on it. Yeah, I understand that. I think it's I don't I also feel that way but I also don't think I'm like the primary party at risk. Oh, sure. Yeah, but obviously there needs to be platforms where you can be anonymous. Yeah, but but this type of platform existing. I think the, the note I actually wanted to end this on was an interesting story. I forget his name. I think he used to work.

I think he used to work at Vox's YouTube channel. And he did this little investigation, uh, into these Tinder, accounts that are going on right now where like the profile photos will be filled with like a really handsome guy and his like late 30s early 40s but then the last picture will be uh somebody else typically like an Asian man uh embedded into like a painting or photo or like bobblehead and it's weird because you're looking at like you know this like European super model in the first five photos and then it's just this like really distorted AI photo that has somebody's human face embedded into it.

He's like, why does this exist? You know, why is this type of account on Tinder everywhere? And when I ask other people who use it, they also have talked about this type of account existing. And it's because of Tinder's photo recognition to approve your, to verify your profile. So when you upload your photos to Tinder, in order to get the little verified badge on the platform,

which people use to like make sure they're interacting with real human beings. You upload a photo, say of yourself, and then you do the face scan thing in your phone, and then it does like an AI matchup to make sure that your submitted photo matches up with your face scan that you submitted to verify you. But the thing is, it only needs one photo

to match up with the face scan. So what scammers are doing is they borrow a bunch of photos from like a really hot guys Instagram profile, right? Build out the profile, take a photo of themselves and then embed it into like a weird picture of like a painting or bobblehead. And that's enough to get past the approval sensor. And then they have a verified profile

that they try to like scan people through on Tinder. And I'm not saying that obviously your stipulation has in the hypothetical world where we have humans only.com, the sensor works really, really well. Yeah. But this is an example of how people and like are already overcoming

these types of verification services to like abuse them and scam people. And I worry that like no matter how far we go, there's always a way to like start bending the rules and putting bots on it. I just thought that was super compelling. Shoutouts to, fuck, I feel so bad for not remembering his name,

but it was a great thing. video. That's really interesting. I had not heard of that. I mean, I do think that like having your social security number and fucking ID would help limit that in the kind of way where like I've been, this is so much a random example,

but I've been trying to sign up for a Chinese Warcraft account so I can watch replays. And you literally need a phone number and you can't do it. And it's like I have money in time and I can't do it. Yeah. So I can imagine humans only having at least that level of friction to where somebody who wants to do it can do it. That's to humans only.

Why the humans only? Humans only. I would love humans only. All right, guys. We covered basically all the news in the world this week, I think. We got it all. The most important ones. Covered Greece, cover Ghana.

If you look for a place, a lot of humans. It just doesn't make any sense. He says he doesn't want credit card debt, but you just said it to AutoPay. You just set it to AutoPay. He has money. This is a totally murdering my co-host. You can find it on the Patreon.

It doesn't make any sense. You paid. Patreon. There's an automatic payment. We've got this time next week. Thanks for watching. Goodbye. Formula One, so hot right now.

It's like if traders in succession had 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 want to hear about. Yeah, and the only thing hotter than the drivers are our takes. And now we're doing it on Vox. Oh, we're so legit now. We're basically thought leaders.

Ted Talk incoming. And we do a podcast with Gunter Steiner called Vanka Hours. I still can't believe that's true. Well, believe it. There is so much for the beautiful Vox Media audience to enjoy. So come check out the Red Flax podcast every Monday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks.