Lemonade Stand - They Finally Launched It | Lemonade Stand 🍋 #17

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

On this week's show... DougDoug shows us a map of Austin Texas, Aiden buys groceries, and Atrioc won't share his snacks. 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: 017 Recorded on: June 25th, 2025 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 Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Thursday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm your host D-Ran here with A-Ran and Adran. Today we'll be talking about Iran, Zohan and Cyan, the color. But first, A-Ran, why don't you talk about what's been going on since last week? What I want to talk about is last week I made an off-color joke that lemonade stand was causing all the problems in the world. And that every time we upload, the world got worse. Yes. It was a joke, but then we uploaded that episode. So what's her, hold on, what's our track record?

We did good news episode and things got pretty bad. But then we did, last week was bad news. And then it got worse. So I don't know if it's, it's, it's just the podcast. It's just the podcast, dude. It's time to turn this ship around. I don't know what kind of, we have to sail down the middle. We got to find a way to sail down the middle.

That's our last hope. Otherwise we just canceled the whole damn thing. Yeah, I mean, we can talk about it all. There's a lot of stuff today, right? Yeah. Yeah. So today we're going to, there's a bunch to, there is a bunch of stuff that happened this week. We are going to be talking about the Iran-Israel slash world conflict that has progressed since the last podcast.

So we're going to talk about Zaran Mamdami. I might be saying the name slightly wrong, who just won the Democrat nomination for the mayor of New York City, which is a very interesting, potentially huge shift in kind of the trend of like Democrat politics. We're going to talk about food dyes. RFK Jr. has been successfully purging some food dyes. and we're going to start with Tesla's cybercap because that is really interesting. Tesla finally launched this big thing we've been talking about.

Anything you guys want to squeeze in before we dive into all of it? No, jump in. I got a lot, but I mean, those, yeah, I think, you know, the Tesla thing's interesting because we've talked about this on like our first or second episode. Yes.

We sort of went into their different strategy from Waymo and how they were playing a longer and more dangerous game with scaling. They were not going to do the expensive radar. They were going to do AI only, cameras only, the way the human eye works, and because they had so many cars in the road, they would get so much training,

that was the idea. And we talked about how the launch was coming up in June. We'd been kind of excitedly building up to that point, and now we have the launch, the launch happens. I will say one thing. One, congratulations to Elon Musk. This is probably the first deadline that he's announced

that he is, I guess, successfully hit. Maybe ever. The first I can think of it. I mean, if you say, I'm going to make this shot eight times in a road, you make the eighth. Is that hitting the deadline? I actually, I looked into this to just check. In 2019, Elon said Tesla customers will be able to utilize their cars as robotaxies in 2020. Yeah. That didn't happen. Now, it's 2025 and it launched. So I guess kind of he just, he said this is going to happen. Oh yeah. I just mean he's always been doing like in one to two years. It's like, it's a classic phrase from Elon. Yeah. We're about one to two years away. This time he finally set a date, which was like, that's, you just like, you just. You just. You just. You just. You just. You just. You just. You just shouldn't do that, Elon. He was like, June. We're going to have this available in June. I was like, don't make a specific day because people will catch you on that. This is actually exactly like the RD&T.

You guys are the same. Okay, so Tesla Robotaxies have launched. This is what, again, to reiterate the stakes of this, Elon himself, is this a video? This is a video right now, if you're watching on YouTube. This is of a Tesla driving in Austin. Right now, there's a clip of it going over the, basically into the wrong side of the road, over a. A solid yellow line. Yeah, I'll just rewind this for people who are very interested in it. So let me just break down the basics here.

So what this is is the implementation of driverless cars by Tesla. This is what Elon's been hyping up this whole time. He himself has said that the value of Tesla as a company, the reason their stock is so insanely high is because of the premise. And that is that one's not doing well. Is the premise that the entire fleet of cars could be turned into these driverless taxis, and that would be the value of the company. They become this, you know, the combo with Uber and a car company and everything else. So this is the premise of why Tesla is so valuable, and it finally launched on Sunday, June 22nd. We were recording this a few days later. It is now

live in Austin, however, not quite as exciting as it maybe sounds. So this, yeah, this is available only in Austin. If I go there right now, or perhaps I was at the Counterstrike Major this weekend, and I wanted to hop in one of these to go home. Celebrate the rising skins, the viewership record that got broken. And I wanted to go home using the Robotaxi. Can I call this in Uber right now? Like, what is my accessibility to this?

Yeah, my understanding is available on an app. You can call it. It costs $4.20 per ride. A little Elon Musk hilarious weed joke. So, yes, hilarious 420 meme joke. So obviously right now. So it launched technically in the sense that there isn't a person driving the car. And that is an epic meme.

But it's an early access. There's 10 to 20 of these total in Austin. There's a map if you're watching on YouTube. It is geofenced, meaning that it's in a limited area of Austin, Texas. It is not, you know, the entire city. It's just pink area, right? Yeah.

So on the left, you can see the region that Tesla can actually operate in. The right is Waymo. So Waymo is the bigger competitor and the basically the counterpoint to Tesla's whole strategy of Waymo as much slower and more expensive as a car. I mean, slower in the sense that they have, you know, a lot more detection. They're rolling out slower. Tesla's a little more like send it kind of vibes.

I can tell from the clip. It really, it's sent the intersection. It's Wild West, baby. We're back. Yeah. It's not good look for day one. And it's worth pointing out that this is not public. You basically have to be invited to it.

So technically, this service is live. But the reason it matters, even though most people can't go actually use. this right now you need to invite one Elon's saying they're going to scale up to a thousand vehicles in a few months which is insane I think that's quite unlikely by comparison waymo has us approximately like 100 to 150 in Austin so probably they're not going to get to a thousand anytime soon could we go back to the rollout plan for a second because part of the value that we had talked about was this idea that they had already sold so many cars right so many people own teslas and the idea is like

if you can just push a software update and use these cars in this way, all of a sudden, people could start renting them out when they're not using them. They could become, like, I could own a Tesla and make them available for this service. That's part of the rollout plan here. Exactly.

But for the ones available right now, did they make a bunch of their own separate robotaxies? These aren't existing Teslas that were already on the road and owned by people. This is Teslas that they're bringing into the city and are their own Uber service, their own app. So these are model-wise. These are just the same cars that they're selling to other people.

But they were made, you know, specifically for this. This isn't like a random person can go send to their car onto the road. But again, this, that exactly what you said, that is the pitch. So Waymo's whole vibe to this is they're making these cars that are really, really expensive. They have a ton of sensors, a ton of tech. They have LIDAR, they have radar, this extra types of technology that Tesla doesn't. Tesla's strategy is it's going to be the same car that they sell the people for $30,000. can also be one of these robot taxis.

So if this rollout succeeds, Tesla then has the ability to have millions of these things suddenly appear on the road, whereas Waymo has to individually make these at a very slow, expensive level. That's the gamble, and it's why this is kind of a crazy-ass thing.

Long-term, is there a plan for... Are they planning on selling these cars to companies like Uber and Lyft and they're going to run the service? Are they maintaining their own service? And, like, I'm going to open the Tesla app. and be a customer like that. Why would they go to Uber?

Well, so something that I had just read literally yesterday was that Volkswagen has been working on their own EV-Robotaxies that they want to roll out by 2026, but they're partnering with Uber to do it. They're not making their own independent service. They're giving or selling the taxis to Uber to run through their own app. Rather than building out your own platform, but Tesla, a company comparatively experienced,

with software compared to like other car companies, I feel like it does make more sense for them to be their own brand, their own thing. Yeah. So even Waymo is partnered with Uber. So again, that's part of the gamble here with Tesla, is they're doing everything. And so you go, you get one of these things

in Austin right now through the Tesla app. So the pitch is, again, the reason Tesla is this obscenely overvalued or correctly valued company, depending on what you think in the stock market is because of this pitch. Like, they can overtake all of Uber and Lyfts, because they will be managing it all themselves. Yeah, they're not just going to be a car company anymore.

They're going to be a transport service. Yes, like across the entire country. So they are explicitly trying to do everything themselves, and that is the moonshot of why Tesla is theoretically worth so much. Uber actually was in self-driving and trying to do it themselves, but whoopsie days, they killed somebody in 2018. And so they shut down. Cruise, which was one of the big competitors,

they got shut down and they lost their license in 2023, and then that's basically been shuttered. Can you fucking kill somebody anymore? You can't just kill some of a car nowadays. Want my country back. Get back to it. Whatever happened to make a human does it. All right.

I want rights for my robots. You think nobody died building the railroads. Such a funny saying. You could apply that to any murder. That's not. So, yeah, we can chat more about it. How I feel about that. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm skeptical.

I'll say it. I'm, you know, classic a jerk, skeptical of Tesla, but, you know, they're having, the example you show was the funniest one, but there's other errors already happening on day one. And just to be clear, this is like 10 cars that they super pre-prepped for. They already like pre-routed this whole area. They had cars with LIDAR go through and scan it all to prepare for their systems. They have a driver, a passenger driver in every car for safety. Wait, really?

Yeah, you're in the backseat. A Tesla employee's in the front seat. Oh, so that guy in the front. is just the employee. He's the employee. Every car has a dude sitting in the passenger seat with a button to like kill switch it.

Yeah. And like I saw one word as a guy in the backseat. He's like, all right, I want to stop here and get out. So he brings the stop button. The car just pulls over

in the middle of the road and stops. And then the guy in the passenger seat has to call Tesla and he's like, hey, we gotta restart the car. And that level of like live service availability only works for 10,

you know, they're not gonna have in the real world millions of operators ready to go. All right. Guy who can only contextualize things through gaming here. Okay. You might recall, you might recall, you might recall when Valve,

valve rolled out Counter Strike 2. And they replaced Counterstrike Global Offensive with it. And it was in beta technically, and they were inviting people. And it was shit. It was bad. But the reason they did that is because they got a way larger amount of people testing and using the product in order to solve and move the product forward faster.

At least that's what they say. So, what do you, like, we're in the first couple days. Is this not just a way of resolving, you know, bugs and issues and how this works? That is what it is. It's a beta, right? I totally get you. But it's a world where I think the counterstrike example is not perfect. With equivalent consequences in both scenarios.

I want to be so clear. No, I don't talk about consequences. I'm talking about like... When CS2 launched, if you died in the game, you died in real life. A lot of people don't know that. It's like if there already was a successful counterstrike that was doing pretty... You know what I'm saying? Waymo's already out there with more successful rides.

So if you're launching with a bad or a not successful product or a more dangerous product, then you have to get better pretty quickly. And maybe they will. Listen, I can't proclaim to be an expert on how fast their services will train. But I, I'm of the core philosophy that we talked about since the beginning, which is like there are limitations to being camera only that can't be easily overdone.

They can't be easily overcome. They will always be. And if they're making errors in broad, daylight in the middle of the day with a passenger driver, then how are they going to handle fog, rain, wind, any of the camera things that we talked about that have been a problem since people thought, watch that, that, uh, that was

the guy's video, the Mark Rober. Mark Rober's video. Like, those problems haven't been solved. They've just been shouted down. I don't know. That, to me is my core problem with this. So let me, let me argue for the other side. I think it's very easy, particularly for, uh, let's say our audience, to go

Elon, dumb, Tesla, dumb. This is dangerous and bad. And I, And I, I, I think, like where this is going. And next topic, let's move on.

So let me make, let me make the counter argument. Yeah, yeah. There's this, there's this belief, uh, that Waymo is the sort of perfect one, because they're going slow and steady.

And there's these tests of like Mark Rober did, where it didn't drive through a car and whatever else. Uh, here is an example. Here's a video from Twitter. This is like two straight minutes of Waymo's making really bad mistakes. My personal experience is that I got my, tail ridden by a Waymo

and it was very front. It was like right up on my ass and I was driving and I didn't like it at all. Yeah, if you pull this. This is a video of a Waymo, uh, I believe pretty recently, straight up driving down the wrong side of the road.

And it just does this for a while. There's two full minutes of footage like this. There's plenty. Yeah, here's one of it looping in a roundabout. These are actually quite funny. Um, and these are all really cars on the road.

So the idea that Waymo is this sort of like perfect impeccable being. And then Tesla's, coming in is like the irresponsible stepchild, it's not accurate. There's still plenty of evidence that Waymo has issues. Doing a self-driving car is extremely challenging. And so what's interesting about this whole thing, yeah, a lot of funny comedy going on in the background.

Yeah, it's just sitting here. So, I mean, even, even anecdotally. Oh my God, why is it going? Yeah, there's some bad. There's some bad stuff. Literally outside of, this happened a couple months ago, literally outside of where I live. they had closed off sections of the street

to film something and there's a police officer there when that happens and he's standing like blocking cars from going through and there's also cones out to show that you shouldn't drive there right? All of the human drivers figure this out. I see a waymo come around the corner. The cop puts his hand out the waymo just drives by him onto the set

of the shoot. I'm not getting and then the And the cop, the cop turns around, looks at the Waymo, and he just goes, like, to himself. He just shrugs. Because he doesn't know what to do. Because there's no human in the car. It's a robot. I'm just chilling, man.

It's roaming free, like God intended. So there's been a bunch, and I think similar videos of Waymo's blocking emergency vehicles. So I do agree with you about this part. Yeah. So, again, I think it's very easy to go like, oh, Tesla, the bad. But the reality is this is a really, really challenging problem. Now, at some point, there is going to be one of these companies that is safer than the other, right? And we don't have enough information to be able to point at this and go, Waymo is definitively safer.

Yeah, because one's only been out like a few days. One's only been out a few days. And my understanding, although we don't know for certain, is that what is driving the Tesla's right now is full self-driving. It's the same technology that you, if you go buy a Tesla right now, can use. And again, that's the pitch. That is the whole point of this. Their goal here is to say, the same Tesla you can buy for 30 grand can go be a taxi and can go make you a bunch of money in the street on the side because it is the same technology,

right? So if you want to understand how good the robotaxies are, almost certainly what you can do is get into a regular Tesla right now. In my experience, I don't know if you guys have talk to people who have this. I don't have a Tesla. I haven't seen full self-driving yet, but I've talked to five or six people who have. They say, oh, it's really, really good, but you kind of need to like watch just in case. They're not like 100% there, but it's almost all the way there. And that's not good enough. Actually, that's the end of the sentence. period. So there's a period there. And so that's, that's what's interesting is this thing is is no different than the Tesla's going around. And that's kind of the most info we have. Ultimately,

probably one of these companies is going to win. And again, if, if Tesla hits a person and kills them or seriously damages them, like happened in San Francisco to Cruz, it's probably over. I mean, like literally, if there's a huge major accident, it's probably over. It's not enough to cross into the yellow borders one time. Like we have that clip. Everybody's been showing that one clip over and over. That's the only clip I saw of Tesla really messing up this weekend. So it's like now it's almost a waiting game. Like can they make the cars safe enough fast enough before they cause a huge accident and get the whole company shut down? Yeah. So that's what I want to say is I will never disagree that there's many errors with Waymo having dealt with one myself. It's more of

that they've done in enough cities with enough rides now and nobody's died that I'm feeling like every day, I'm feeling all right, well, they're doing a pretty good job. It's been rolled out. It's rolled out and tested enough that I'm like getting more confident. But with the Tesla one, it's only 10 cars, small area, with a human and the passenger. So this is not enough of a test for me to say that I can overcome my skepticism. What is this? A counterpoint. Elon Musk said congratulations for a successful robotaxie launch. Oh, then it's done. I didn't know Elon was on the side of this. Take it back. Yeah. I also want to quickly reiterate for people, why even do this? And it's just, it's worth reiterating. $42,000 people.

a year from car accidents, 13,000 from DUIs, 12,000 from speeding related incidents, 1.2 million people die every year from car accidents, hundreds or trillions of dollars in damage just in the U.S. alone every year from car accidents. Humans are wildly irresponsible, shitty drivers on average. I include myself in that. I still text when it's like important and I know I shouldn't. There are times when I go to change the radio. There's times when I'm exhausted. I don't drink can drive, obviously, but like, even as a, I think, a pretty responsible person, there's times from, like, why am I allowed to drive a death machine through the highway at 80 miles an hour? This is insane. Waymo has on their website on the safety section some great information about,

you're looking at like 80 to 90 percent reduction in crashes over what a human would do in that same period of time. So to put this, like, to really ground this, tens of thousands of people die in the U.S. every year. These cars already reduce the number of accidents by 80 to 90% that number is going to keep going up as they get better. This is going to be a massive humanitarian achievement when we stop killing literally millions of people every year because human beings are driving cars. There's more going on than just that. But it's worth re-grounding it. Like this is the benefit if this works out. Yeah. I think even longer term benefits of, isn't the ideas if you had so many of these going around and they can communicate with each

other and coordinate, you reduce a lot of the aspects of traffic, congestion. I think it's, I still think this technology is super cool. It doesn't mean it's consequence free, but I'm looking forward to. Yes, it does. Counterpoint. Yes, it does. Elon said it was success. I don't understand what you mean. You know, plus the mass reduction in, I've heard that like statistically one of the greatest drivers of human misery is commutes. Yeah. Like people having to be in, So if you could take a nap on your, you know, that kind of thing, it could actually overall life satisfaction go up for a lot of people in a way. I got a picture of a city of Sims with their green bars.

I think even if you imagine the, you know, some grand utopian future where it's, you know, we have more, we have better planned cities, we have more trains, we have all these different public transportation resources to get around. Yeah. There's always a utility for. cars. Like there, there, there is still going to be utility, whether it be in, like, more rural areas or to, like, get out of the city or to just get somewhere fast enough. There's value in, uh, yeah, also just have an immediate impact, you know, in a country that has been built

for cars. Yeah. You know, that it'll take a lot longer to get a public transport network built than it would be to just improve the current car infrastructure. Is it really, is it really 420 a ride? It's 420 and it's 420. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, He's fucking based. He's so not cool. It's just it hurts, man. We've talked off the pod. He swerve past the cop.

It goes epic bacon. We could be normal. We could at least be normal. It could be five dollars. It could be five dollars. I like the spirit of being a meamy and having fun with a business. It just blows that it's this lame.

You know what I mean? Like that's the problem. It needs to be on a different wave of. hire someone who's cool to pick these numbers, right? And it's like he's just not delivering. He's in the forefront. Yeah, dude. This is the problem.

There's a cooler number. Yes. If he did 69 cents. Oh. That's whatever. It's under a dollar. That's pretty tight. But it is clearly like,

$69. Because Waymo's cost more than Uber's here. Waymo's prices are not low. Are they not? Yeah. My understanding, Waymo in L.A. cost more than an Uber. many people have told me this when they try to call it.

It's like I don't go away because it's a little more expensive. I wonder, I mean, maybe because it's a premium service and right now that you have to get invited to, your invite usually gets accepted immediately. But, and there's a limited amount of cars so they can just hike it up for demand's sake or something. But I think that aside, they also can't go on highways in L.A.

Or at least they couldn't a few months ago. So all of the rides, take longer. Yeah. Like the one time I took one to a party, it should have been a 10 minute drive. I get in the car and it says estimated time of arrival 28 minutes. And I was like, that seems wrong. Maybe the wrong address.

That's how I found out they don't go on high list. Just wanted to spend more time with you. Yeah. Want to just talk to you, Aid, and make a friend for once. You talk to human Uber drivers all the time, but whenever the AI's in there, you shut them, clam up. I did this on my most recent trip. I talked to this guy from Azerbaijan.

We talked for an hour. on WhatsApp, he's going to help me plan my trip. I want to see you talk to chat GPT. I want to go ask. And he's time for that. And he says I have, he says he's friends I can hang out with. You're crazy. That's sick.

You're crazy. He can't make fun of me because I introduced him to a friend I met in a grocery store, like randomly and then we went on a road trip with that guy. Dude, one of the coolest dudes ever. This is a random guy. We went on a road trip. I can't wait until we replace that guy with a Uber, with a Waymo. Yeah.

You and Chuck. chatting up a chat GBT bot in the car. So where do you live? Like, do you guys want to hang out after this? And you're like, hey, can you go on the freeway?

It's like, wow, you're so right. What a great point. You're so smart, Aden. That's actually, that's actually my,

my big anti-position on this. It's like not that a bunch of people will lose their jobs from like the, the withering transportation industry. It's just that I won't have anybody to talk to you. You're just going to be sad in the car. 80% of Aiden's friends are people

even met in Uber drive. And now it's all gone. Yeah, I build a network. You're jealous. I get it. What was that called the third job? The third living space? Third spaces?

Third spaces? It's Uber for you. It's going to be gone. I think we could move on. We're all kind of on the same page here, which is that Elon's great. Tesla's great. I want to wrap this up with a segment I call massively oversimplified. There's a huge amount going on here.

I do want to get moving. So I just want to ask Atriok, are self-driving cars good or bad? One word answer, please? Yes. Oh, yeah. The answer is yes. Yeah. Okay.

Everybody, you're all caught up. I say yes. I think they're good. Let me, no, I do it. He said, are they good or bad? And you said yes. Oh. I mean, that was actually the correct answer.

I'm going to leave this with a funny story. I think they're good. A little funny tidbit to send this off on. I was wondering, why are all these car companies launching in Austin specifically? So I looked into it. The reason is because Texas in 2017 passed a bill that prevents cities from making their own regulation so only the state can do it. And then the state just has.

had simple rules and don't require a permit. So Tesla doesn't even need a permit to do this, which is crazy. So the Austin government, the city of Austin like can't do anything to stop Tesla. And so apparently, um, like some people in, I think the Texas, Texas Assembly, like, asked Tesla, they're like, hey, we're going to have new rules for this stuff. Please hold off until September 1st and we get this new bill launched. And Tesla just didn't, just ignore it and just sent it anyways. I literally had lawmakers. I was like, is Texas just really chill? What's going on? It's like, not really. They were just kind of like trusting people and then politely asked Tesla to not do this.

And they just sent it this weekend. I like that the incentives are that the conservative statewide government of Texas has turned the liberal city government of Austin into a testing ground for the world. They're trying to get rid of the limbs. They're trying to get all the limbs run over by robot cars. So they did pass a new law. September 1st. This is going to happen where there's going to be more stringent rules and they're going to need a permit. So now there's an interesting thing of like.

If they have to also get permitted by September 1st, otherwise Tesla's kicked out, which is like two months away. So interesting dynamics here, but that's the gist. Villan chair on this. You might recall when we talked about housing in Japan and how they keep prices so low relative to other similarly important cities in the world. And part of that is because they nationalize zoning. And people at the local level can't fuck with it. fuck with zoning and inhibit basically growth or progress. Now, I think maybe unlike housing, depending on how you look at it,

this could have a more consequential effect on people getting hit by cars in the street. But I think there's something to be said there about. You can, you know, they were able to move forward without being blocked at a local level to test something that could be a really important technology in the future. I was hit by a house in Tokyo. I did. They have some weird houses there. I wasn't paying attention

and walked into it. It was a house moving castle. It's not one to one, but it was, I immediately thought of that when you brought up as like, oh, hey, deal with the state.

You know who else says houses? Speaking of city politics. I ran. I was going to go to Zoros. Oh, sorry. Wait, wait, hold on. I got this. You know who else has houses?

New York. New Jersey, which is right next to New York City. It's not a roundabout way. But yeah, city politics, state politics. We got a surprise win from Zoran Mamdani in New York City that people are really talking about. People are quite a buzz about.

I don't know if you want to give it up to, Aidan. Yeah, I mean, if some people may have been following this race already, I think at a city level, a mayoral election might not be that important in general. But if we were to go way back, the current mayor of New York City is Eric Adams. And for those who don't know, a Democrat, kind of a more. a center Democrat who has been rife with controversy. Mainly because he was indicted on corruption charges. Who hasn't?

New York mayoral politics. Which is wild. And to top that off, the Trump administration, after taking office, stepped in to try to get rid of his charges, to which there were a lot of accusations of a quid pro quo. In that Eric would be Mr. Adams, if you will, would be giving Trump and his administration assistance

in allowing immigration officials to arrest more people in New York City in exchange for, and cooperation in general in exchange for him getting off the charges, which I don't think has panned out. I think he's still getting charged if I'm not, but maybe I'm not correct.

I mean, it caused a big controversy. There's a lot of like long time, even Republican, um, uh, I forget the word, you know, legal top level people who are like, hey, this is, this is obvious corruption.

Yeah. Like what you're doing is you're saying this guy can get away with crimes as long as he helps you with ice raids. And like, that's not cool. And so they, and the crime was already corruption. Yeah. The crime was too corrupt.

And so a couple of them stepped down. I'm like, they wrote these really beautiful letters about like, hey, I've been in the law. I know, Doug. I know. My mic is not perfectly aligned. I'm going to get a megaphone. But yeah, they wrote these, these great letters. about, hey, this is like not what I stood for,

not why I got into the law and they stepped down. And I guess what happened since then is that the corruption charges are still going through, is my understanding, but I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I'd have to take a closer look at that. I don't think the charges are lost. Anyway, the reason that that's important

is New York's incumbent Democratic mayor has no social standing right now. He's not even running. So this opened up this huge opportunity for a bunch of Democrats to come and run in the primary. He is running. but not as a Democrat.

But in the general. Yeah. And he is not expected to win. No. At least right now. Yeah. You know, unless you're a hardcore out of fit. I know you're out there.

You're out there. Dozens of us. Me and a couple guys in the Turkish government. So anyway, this opens the door and you guys might be familiar with the name Andrew Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo is this familiar face in New York. politics specifically, famous family, and Andrew was the governor during COVID and had been in New York politics for ages before that. He resigned in disgrace due to credible accusations of, I think, 12 women regarding sexual harassment and or sexual assault and fell out of politics after he stepped

down from that position. But in the wake or like the vacuum of this mayoral race, he steps back up to run as sort of the establishment candidate for the Democratic primary. And he, as soon as he entered the race, became the favorite, pretty much. This recognizable face whose main message was that in the wake of him stepping away from things, things in New York have gone terribly wrong, the progressive or existing Democrats in New York are running our city into the ground and I have the experience to bring New York back in the good direction it was in the past.

That's kind of the core of his message from my understanding. And his defense against the sexual assault allegations was, this is a quote, I'm not perverted, I'm just Italian. I forgot he said. So. Oh, for God, he said that. I'm not perverted. I'm just Italian. That's a strong defense. I think, yeah, I should have really just ended it right there. They're respecting his culture.

Dude, I forgot. So a bunch of other people are entering this race as well. But over the last few months, especially, Assemblyman, Zoran Mundami, steps up to run for mayor in this election. A Democratic Socialist has been an assemblyman since 2020. and runs a campaign of sort of boots on the ground for the people. Unity in New York City stand up to Cuomo and the billionaires that are supporting him, the corporations that are supporting him. Let's freeze rent. Let's make childcare free. Let's raise taxes on the wealthy to help pay for these programs.

Let's make transportation free. I would say a very left-leaning campaign. basically. And he begins to build a lot of momentum in the last few months leading up to the primary election last night. And it was kind of getting closer week by week. You could see he was gaining favor

in polls. And I think leading into the actual election, he wasn't favored to win, but he had turned the election into a heat. Nobody knew who was going to win anymore. And in New York's voting system, their ranked choice

voting, it's my understanding that him a few of the other candidates also kind of created an anti-Quomo platform together, basically this idea that if you like me, vote for these other candidates as your two and three. You rank them one through five, basically.

Yeah, to reduce the likelihood of Cuomo winning because they all didn't want Cuomo to win. And Mamdani comes out on top at the end of this last night. And the questions that have come around this is that, like we talked about on this show, the Democrats in the wake of the last general presidential election are sort of lost, looking for faces or leaders or a new message to sort of lead the party forward as we've lost

these major elections. And this was a symbolic, one of the first big Democratic elections in the country that symbolizes what direction the Democratic Party might be choosing to go in. Cuomo, this more establishment Democrat who has a lot of corporate money behind him, An example is, like Michael Bloomberg donated $8 million to... A ton of billionaires donated his campaign. Oh, so now we get free speech. Aidan? Yeah, I'm actually pro-citizens United.

A lot of people don't know that. That's all your core positions. And I switched my opinion when I started making podcasts. And so, so another organization called Housing for All, an organization that represents landlord's interest. donated 2.5 million to his campaign. And Momdami is combating or pushing against that message. A lot of his campaigning is online, social media,

like meeting people in person, walking the length of Manhattan, being on the streets, and knocking on doors, this campaign of unity. And I thought that was really, really interesting because I didn't really want to talk about this until it played out all the way, because I had a hard time having hope that this guy would win. And it's not that there's nothing to critique about his record or his policy positions, like how he's actually going to get things done. But at a personal level, I really want to see someone like this with this messaging get into power for the chance at creating the change that they're representing. because I think that is an interesting opportunity.

Now, I'm sure you guys have opinions about this, but the hard part will be, can the mayor of New York with these sort of policy positions and the power that's afforded to him, somebody who has only led and passed three bills in his assembly position prior to this, can he actually create the changes that he's saying he will? Super, super interesting campaign.

I have a somewhat spicy criticism. Maybe you start. I feel like you're going to be. I got, I mean, I have a lot to say. I have some grisels criticisms and some. All right, let's Oreo sandwich this then. I'll be the criticism cream. No, I have some too.

He has criticisms too. I know he does. Mr. Mr. Rent Control. He wasn't talking about that. Yeah, so there's a really great newsletter my friend turned me on to called Tangle. And it's this guy every day posts a newsletter where he talks about some issue.

Here's what left-leaning perspectives are saying. Here's what right-leaning perspectives are saying. And then he gives his sort of take. So I was reading that this morning on the way here, literally while driving. should not be in the car. That is a joke. You're hopefully a minute.

I was a joke because of the segment we just did. Yeah, I was just drinking and driving. String a hour so I've tried. So he made a good point, which his conclusion is basically, this is less about Zoran winning for progressivism and socialism is now going to take over America, which I think some people feel like this is the moment. This is like, you know, Bernie Sanders reincarnated coming back. And, you know, Bernie Sanders from his grave would be very happy right now.

endorsed him. RIP, RIP Bernie, by the way. But really, what this is. We shouldn't say that because our pod could cause it. I know. Oh, shit, you're right. He's alive.

He's alive. He's alive as well. Wait, no, no, no. If we acknowledge that, that means he'll die this week. That's true. Wait, he's, we have no opinion. Sean, Bernie?

I don't know. I don't know who he is. I don't know how we save him. Okay, so his point, I agree with. This is less about did socialism win and now it's taking a stronghold in America's biggest city and it's more like, Zoran was a really, authentic, likable person who goes and talks to people. He's young. He's what, like 31 or

33. 33. And Cuomo is what, 60? What, mid-6-10? 700. Pull up the age. This is the most, actually, Perry, if you can pull up Cuomo's age. This is so representative of our generation or generations feeling like the boomers have just been in control our entire lives. They aren't letting go of control. This guy who was the governor of New York is now coming back to try to become mayor of New York's city. The attitude he had was basically like, yeah, this is sort of beneath me, but I deserve it. I'll come in and like take stuff over. And instead, you have a guy who actually, he's 67. The guy is 67. So we have somebody who's actually going to represent the generation who is like

living and going to be impacted by these policies coming in and being eloquent. So I love that about Zoran and I'm really glad that there's a young person representing us who is actually making into power. That is fantastic. And he's hot. He's hot. He's hot. Okay. As our resident reporter. From the streets? He's up. He's up. So,

energy-wise, awesome. Policy-wise, he is just, you know, super unabashedly socialist in some of his policies. I am concerned about some of these things, although I don't feel like deeply knowledgeable enough. Maybe you can talk more about rent control atroc.

There's one piece of his platform that is really concerning to me and the one that I have seen no good argument for. One of the proposals he has is he's going to start a network of city-owned grocery stores. The pitch being, we are going to have grocery stores in the city run by the city that's funded by the city, and their whole goal is to be

just keep prices as low as possible, and that way the grocery stores can't price gouge you. Groceries are too expensive, so we're going to come in and offer an alternative. That sounds great on paper. In practice, this seems unbelievably dumb to me.

Groceries stores are legendaryly low margin. They do not make much money. The price of food is not coming from grocery stores. They make like a 1.5% margin. The profit, if at all, comes from the inputs and the farmers creating produce and the processing plants. If you think about food as three steps to oversimplify, it's the creation of food and farms, livestock, everything, the companies like Tyson who process food and then the stores that are selling it. The stores that sell food are incredibly low margin because there is so much competition that they cannot sell it for a lot.

On top of that, in New York specifically, in the areas he's talking about, you have these bodegas, which are these like corner stores, basically, that are small businesses. You don't have Walmart running corner stores in most parts of New York City. If you walk around like I did a couple weeks ago in Brooklyn, like you don't see these giant grocery stores. These are small individual owned businesses. So the premise that the city should come in to lower pricing and that will help grocery stores, I think, is such a deep misunderstanding of why the price of food is what it is. It doesn't address the root problem. All it will do at best if it succeeds in having low prices is basically push out the people who are like often immigrants running small businesses in local communities who then would have to compete against subsidized government food in some of these businesses. That doesn't make sense. And then on top of that, this idea that the government would come in and efficiently run a

grocery store when the government is legendarily bad at running a. anything efficiently. And that's what the book Abundance largely talks about. It's not what a lot of people think it is. The core point of abundance is a lot of well-intentioned regulation by government has stopped government from actually getting outcomes that are effective. So likely what would happen is you have a DMV-style inefficiency running a corner store that is basically funded by the government that is as expensive or more expensive than everybody else or at best pushes out a bunch of small businesses. This is not where the cost of food is coming from. This is the wrong problem to tackle entirely.

And it makes me concerned that if this is what he thinks about grocery stores, that his other policies like rent control might be as uninformed as this. To quickly counter and just give him a pit of credit here, what I've seen him talk about

is that he really wants to focus on outcomes instead of process for government. He acknowledges. He thinks this could be a quick experiment and he's willing to adjust and change his opinion. I really like his mindset around that. I love the idea that he might come in

and make a point to say, we're not going to run this like the DMV. We're going to make something run really run well and run efficient. And maybe this could be a test case for him to say, look, we as the government can actually get things done for people in an efficient way. This just feels like one of the

worst things to tackle and to me makes me very concerned for him because it implies a deep misunderstanding of why things cost what they do. Actually, you rip. If you have a response to that. I'm wishing him the best. I know that there's probably some, you know, hardcore socialists

in chat who don't want to hear anything negative about this guy, but this is, I think of all his, there's criticisms of all his policies, and this is the one that to me is like, this is concerning. This, this, this implies a lack of fundamental understanding of things. Okay, I'll jump in. Here's the thing. I think there's two big, uh, seismic, tectonic plates that are moving in society. One of them is ever increasing wealth inequality, right? That we, it's just, it's trickling up. And another one is the rise of social media, which disintermediates the ability of money to control gatekeepers like big news shows or newspapers and like get the message out.

So those two things combined, I think, to create someone like Mamdani who's preaching an anti-in equality message and can go around traditional gatekeepers to get. And that is a lot. And this, by the way, this same pressures, I think created the Tea Party into Trump. And I think these things are, these are creating populist movements. movements all around that allow people like Trump and people like Mondani to get around the system. And the main reason is the traditional centrist, like let's figure the seeing out, pragmatic system is failing. It's failing because it's been captured by, I guess,

moneyed interests. So like with Mom Doni, I just want to say, I think I have a very similar to you actually, which is I'm skeptical of things like a citywide rent freeze or state-run grocery stores. Not because I don't think the intention is great. but because I've looked at other, like, you know, Berlin, for example, got a progressive mayor in 2019, and they did a rent freeze. And it ended up being really disastrous. It ended up causing rents outside of the rent control to spike.

Supply plummeted. They had to take it back. And in fact, when they took it back, they had to, I don't know if they had to do this, but they ended up doing things, where the landlords could retroactively charge for the rent they would have gotten, which led to a huge, I mean, it was disastrous, right? They're going through this whole pain from this.

So I can, see, what basic economics would tell you is that things like this generally don't work. And by the way, state-run grocery stores have been tried. A Florida city tried it. And it ended up being huge cost overruns for the city. They couldn't run it efficiently. It didn't work that well. So in general, I'm skeptical of those small plans.

But if he is a decent human being, which is like the baseline that I'm looking for in a candidate, like if I would have in this election, I would have voted for him. Because Cuomo was being accused of sexual misconduct by 12, 16 women. Eric Adams is insane. You know what I'm saying? It's the polar opposite of like old shit guard versus like new authentic people. And the main point I'm wondering.

Real Adams heads, no. I'll see you guys. Real Adams said. I'm registered in New York this year. So of course, like I'm happy for him and excited and I would have voted for him if I was in New York. So I want to get that across. There's a few things that aren't perfect for me

and I'm skeptical. But like I think in America, step one right now is to get more candidates who are, as you mentioned, this is my main point. So you kind of, you said before me, it's just young. Like we, I think we can all collectively see that almost all the wealth in America has now trickled up into boomers in asset prices, stocks and houses, that everything in society has been built to keep those things propped up.

And it's all trickled up into that. And if we don't find a way to get that out of their hands into most other people's hands, these problems, I don't even problems, but this, this rise of populism will continue. It's unavoidable. are desperate. They are looking for a different solution and you can no longer control the media to keep them out. So, uh, yeah, I'm overall excited. I like a decent human being who is not captured by corporate interests. Now, that being said, you know, um, New York has a history of plenty of mayors promising big change. De Blasio in 2017 ran on a tale of two cities, which is like

we have one city for the elites and one city for regular people. And, and, uh, we need to, have economic equality and nothing changed, right? Do you guys remember when Rudy Giuliani said he'd take a time machine to stop 9-11? That was our last goat there. He just didn't do it. Why didn't he do that? Rudy, why didn't you go back in time and stop 9-11? But the kid did his promise a lot.

Dude, what a world if we lived in 2001 and the mayor of New York personally stopped at terror. And it was Mark Auburn. So my point is that like, I don't even remember what race it was, but I've looked into global mayoral elections before. And generally, mayors don't have that much power to change things. It's very limited. And they end up doing a lot of like what I call photo op politics where they have one little pet project. They do a photo op with it.

Most of the city stays the same. And they use it as a platform to run for something greater. So Ron's something like a good guy. If that's the outcome, that's fine. But I'm skeptical that New York is going to. dramatically change. So that's my nuanced opinion. Still excited.

He's the guy I wanted to win of this group. But I don't know, Aden, if you want to jump in. So I, maybe I'll start with what you just said there. I'm similarly skeptical at the power that he has from a mayoral position to dictate a lot of the change that he wants to, right? Because as the mayor of a city, you're overseeing a budget that has to be balanced. You don't have the same tools that the federal government has. your ability to like spend and raise taxes is very different from your ability to do that at the state level and the federal level. It's not that I don't believe he means what he says or that he has good intentions. I also would have voted for this guy, but I'm I'm skeptical hopeful of his ability to create the changes he's looking for. And I hope in his position, because I'm not very familiar with city level politics,

that he's able to affect the change that he's looking for, at least with a lot of these things. But with what Doug said, on the food front, I don't know a lot about this specific policy or how he wanted to employ it or how he says it would work. So I'll go off of your explanation of it, right? Sure, I can even maybe find,

he made a little video about it, so maybe I can find that and pull it up, but go ahead. I do agree that it seems a little silly in a general sense. Margins in the grocery business are low. the way you make your profit in something like selling groceries has a lot to do with volume. So if you're only opening stores across New York City, your ability to price things competitively with those private stores, I think is actually going to be really difficult, even if you're pricing

them to not make a profit. Because stores that might be in New York are using their ability of their volume outside of just that city to price things. at what they are from my understanding. But one thing that I know about New York, and you mentioned the bodegas, is a lot of areas of New York City that are poorer often only have these bodegas as their means of grocery shopping, basically,

and whatever is available in them. And a lot of bodegas, since they're small or in these areas, don't have a lot of maybe, like, healthier or, like, fresher foods. And they're in areas that people, call food deserts. And it's an issue in New York City that a lot of poor areas don't have access to good, healthy food because of that. And I would hope through maybe a program like this,

you're creating equal opportunity for everybody to have, you know, fresh fruits and vegetables in an aisle of a grocery store that's accessible to everybody in the city no matter where you live. Maybe that's a part of what this policy is trying to achieve. I don't think that pushing, you know, creating competing businesses with something that might be owned by a family or a small business in these areas that, and this pushes them out, I don't think that's a good consequence. So if that's something that's going to happen, I hope that he reconciles that somehow. But the food desert thing is one thing I wanted to point out. Yeah, that makes sense. On the topic of the abundance stuff that you talked about, I do kind of agree, but a lot of that book,

and I think it ties into the public housing stuff he's talked about as well, or the rent control stuff he's talked about as well. The point of that book is largely not that the government is inherently inefficient at doing things. It's the government has been very bad at creating the tools. It needs to effectively tackle issues. So in the example of housing, right, I think the most egregious example that it brings up is if you want to build the exact same apartment from a public perspective,

it costs significantly more than if a private company built the exact same apartment. That should not be the case. The public housing should be able to be built at an affordable rate that is comparable to the private one, and it only costs more because of the abused rules and systems that we've created that forces it to be that way. And I think, you know, grocery stores,

might not be the best fit for this. I agree with that part. And he seems like a very genuine guy. And from the quotes of his peers that work with him, even people who don't necessarily think he'll be a good mayor, they speak to how genuine in his approach to issues he is, which I think is really, really good. Yeah, I mean, what I really am so desperate for is a pragmatist.

Someone who maybe they have an ideal and they try it. And if it's not working, they tweak it. Like, as long as they're not like... Yeah, he is... explicitly said that, which makes me very hopeful. Because I'm like, even if I disagree with this grocery store thing, that's fine, because he keeps saying repeatedly, like, let's try a thing and then we adjust if it doesn't work.

That's incredible. That's amazing. I love that. That's incredible. So, yeah, I'm more than happy for him to be wrong on some of these things or right. Or I'm wrong or whatever. Like, the main thing is, is he's not corrupt. If you're not taking bribes.

I know. Why is the bar so low on the fucking other side, dude? It's unreal. It is unreal. Yeah. He's also too, it's too old. Let us fucking run the country. We need a 17-year-old.

Yes, sir. Zoran, on Twitch, he'd be too old. People call him a boomer on Twitch, bro. They'd call him Unk. One specific thing. We don't need to watch it, but if you just, if he pulls up, Perry. So on his TikTok, Zoran, and this is what I watch, talks about the grocery stores thing.

So if you're just looking for specifically his words, it's like a minute long, you can listen to it here. And this is, again, one of the things he's done well is he's, like, very present on social media, and that's why he's reached people. But yeah, go ahead. Um, the, the one thing I wanted to touch on or talk about was, uh, rent control because he's talked about that a lot, putting a cap on how much rent can go each year. And I am personally of the

opinion that I don't think if you're tackling the problem of affordable housing in the long term, rent control across the board is not a good policy from my understanding of economics, basically. Uh, However, when rent control got put on the ballot in California's most recent election, I voted for it. The reason that's the case is because in the short term, if you do not have rent control, but you also don't change anything about your approach to building housing or changing zoning laws, then the housing issue is not solved either way. So I rather have rent control so that the existing people who have lived in the place that would be priced out of their homes have protection and can continue to be in their place.

That doesn't mean it doesn't have any consequences still. But if you're not going to take the other steps to address the issue of housing, then I may as well vote for this. That's my personal outlook on this. And I wanted to hear maybe just your guys' thought on that policy specifically. And maybe if we briefly explain why rent control isn't an effective means of solid housing for people. I'll jump in because I think it's not super popular, maybe even with our audience for me to say that I'm against rent control. And especially because I want the same outcome, which is affordable housing for lower income people. So I want the same thing.

I just, I'm trying to think of like an easy example. But let me give you one. So I was at a, I was at MagicCon this past weekend. Everyone was cracking packs, right? They were cracking card packs because they were all, they're pretty very very. valuable. And Ari pulled a card that was worth like $900. It's just crazy. I mean, it's insane. Okay. Maybe you still have Pokemon. Let's say you're at a convention like that. You crack a pack and you get a first edition Charzard worth $100,000. And then Nintendo goes, you know, we really want

everyone to be able to play with Charzard. So you can only sell that card for $10. You can't, you can't sell for more than that. We want everyone to be able to afford it. Yeah. You can't hoard your Charzarm. But you know that there's so much, everyone around you is willing to pay $100,000 for this. They will pay for it. That creates a very strange incentive. where you are incentivized to find a way to black market deal this chart, to find some way around. Just because even if you're the good guy, you're like, you know, I'll give it to you for $10, that person is going to find a way to resell. Like, they're going to, people are going to try to get the actual value of the card.

If you have not changed the supply situation on the ground for the amount of houses there are, with the amount of demand there is, and you try to tell people that can charge less than what the market rate offers, there's going to create a lot of perverted, distorted incentives. Or people will do things like take their houses off the market, try to sell the land for development somewhere else, which reduces overall supply. People will landlords try to burn the place down

for the insurance money because they can get more money from that and they can from the rent. New construction stops because people are worried about further rent control rules that prevent them from penciling out how much they will be able to make from a building so they don't know what to take the big risk to build it.

Like a lot of bad incentives are created. Plus, you get things like people needing to have friends in the city or in council to find a way to get into one of these rent control apartments. or you have people who have small families in big four or five bedroom apartments that don't downsize or move. They stay in them their entire lives and stick in it. So you get all these misallocations or someone who gets a new job elsewhere in the city but can't move because they're stuck in a rent control apartment and they can't afford to move somewhere else.

So they're stuck there and they lose opportunities. There's all these weird knock on effects that happen when you try to distort pricing like that. So obviously the real solution in almost every case is to just be. build more houses to just increase the supply. Now, I am less excited about the government doing all the building, but still, as we've talked about before, I'm way more excited about that than the alternative of just no more increased housing. Like if that's, and I think he has mentioned that, like he's supporting 200,000 new units or something. That's awesome. I think that's great. And I think anything that gets more supply. I think in the real world, you know, I've lived in a rent

control department where the landlord was horrendous. we had black mold in there. And he has no incentive to listen to me or change because I'm at a below market rate and I can't leave. I'm a captured tenant. The real, um,

the real world great situation is when you can say, fuck you. When a guy's like, I'm going to raise your rent and you're going to go, I'll go down the street. They have better deals. Yeah. If you have somewhere else you can go,

that is a better deal. If there's actual competition, that is the great situation. That's what you want for almost all markets. It's the ability of the consumer to be like, but you want to overcharge me for this? I'll go down the street. I'll go somewhere else.

Any government, that is trying to create that, I think is on the right track. I think it's the best way. I totally get what you're saying. Nobody wants someone who's lived in a house for a long time in the neighborhood and the character to be thrown out on the street or kicked out because of rising rents.

I just, I'm skeptical because I've seen it and looked into it and really studied it for a lot of cities that have had the same like, oh, it's obvious, just freeze rents. Yeah. It's what I've been calling. Do you guys know the Rizzler?

The kid? The kid that does this. Yeah. He was on Conner Eats' Pants's Fortnite Friday and he said, this is my campaign for running for president. I'm going to make rent $42 and everything's free or whatever. You know, like, I'm calling it Rizzlernomics. I feel like there's a rise of like two big groups.

One of them is blame everything on immigrants and one of them is Rizlernomics. That just tell you how everything's possible. It's all free. We're not to, and so I'm worried about both, right? I'm more worried about the ones that's like everything's immigrants problem. Yeah. But I'm also skeptical because history has a lot of examples of Rizlernomics not working out, ending up being problematic down the road.

Yeah. I'm just giving my high level opinion. I still want to say, overall, super happy with this guy, glad he's winning. I think it's great as a broader trend of America being like, let's finally try, you know,

more progressive. Let's try someone who's going to raise taxes on the rich. Let's try someone who's going to... That's been so verboten, like totally not allowed in American politics for a while. So I think it's good. I just, on a few details, I have some quibbles.

I think the thing I'm hoping for out of him on the side of, you know, I'm not particularly excited about rent control for the reasons that you outlined, but I am excited about his desire to create a ton of public housing units and also incentivize building in New York from the private sector and changing city-level zoning

something you can do from a mayoral position. These all seem like things he can have a conceivable impact on. And that feels really good. Those are the parts of the housing policy that I think should be most emphasized. And I think people get, the rent control usually comes first bullet and is the thing that people latch on to because I think it's very easy to understand and it sounds really good. And it's like I said, I voted for that policy in Los Angeles for the reasons that I described. But I think the economic reality of it is if you're trying to solve the underlying problem of housing, it doesn't work. and you need a bunch of other policy following it

or in its place to actually address the problem, which is giving, yeah, providing it. But also one more of his policies that, you know, you might not think I was for it. He has a plan for, I believe, free city buses in all of New York. And that might sound like Rizzleromics or whatever, but actually is not that expensive.

It really is not a huge chunk of the budget. Other cities have tried it. it generally increases ridership. There are some downsides where, you know, when it's totally free, it becomes a total cost center for the city instead of like net even. And so generally the quality of the buses

sometimes degrade, like some cities have done it wrong and it becomes a cost center. And so, but overall, many cities have tried this to decent success where the ridership goes up where people will use it. It's good at reducing some congestion in some areas. This is one policy he pushed forward or managed to test for a while

already. I think it was in 2023. He made five different, he made like one major bus route in each of the five boroughs free. And ridership went up that year. I think the MTA had some disputes of it created confusion of are all the routes free

and fair evasion on other routes or something. But overall, a successful policy. And then I think he ran into he was not able to get it past the pilot year, though. But it's a policy that Cuomo ended up embracing and inserting into his platform, apparently,

which I thought it was interesting. Yeah, I think that sounds really cool. Yeah, I think it's cool. And certainly worth trying, right? So you know what else? It's interesting that he said in his platform. No, this one's going to land. This is a good transit.

Yeah, yeah, I'm scared. One of the iconic things that came out of Zoran's campaign is that when for some reason they were asking every mayor of, every mayoral candidate of New York City, what country they would visit first when they became mayor and every single one of them jerked off about how they would go to Israel

and then he was like, I would stay in New York and help people. Is that real? Yes, yes, it's wild. I do know that like, oh, yeah, sorry. No, that's it. I do know by the end of the campaign

they were like, it was getting so wild with just national politics. Like all the questions were about, what do you think about the war, Israel and Iran? What do you think? It's like, this guy's the mayor of New York. I kind of get it in the sense

that there are my base understanding is that there's a lot of Jewish people in New York and it is the most, it is the largest Jewish population in the world in a city outside of Tel Aviv, that's what It's a big city that one.

So there, and because Israel is involved in so many conflicts right now, this issue becomes so pressing particularly since October 7th. And but I was I was kind of frustrated by it.

I'm also not in this election, right? I don't live in New York. I'm not voting for this guy. But the idea that we're asking mayoral candidates about their position on Israel-Palestine, it's like maybe I care from a moral perspective of, oh, how do they feel about this issue? But it's, what are we doing?

Like, you want these people who have next to no ability to affect foreign policy to weigh in on this. It feels so... Dude, you might as well ask you... It does feel super performative. Yeah.

And not on the candidates part. I mean more on the interviewer and questioners part is... I'm like, I don't want to hear about that. I want to hear about how he's going to fix housing. Yeah. No, I totally agree. And I actually would go one step farther

and I think it's very deliberately designed to be a hot button social issue divider to make this guy more or less appealing to... different groups in New York, despite his inability to have any impact on this actual issue. You might as well as your student body president. I think they are wielding his position, like politically or the political organizations he's been involved in when he was younger as, or his statements about Israel, Palestine, as a Muslim

person, because he's going to be, if he gets elected, he's going to be the first Muslim mayor of New York, right? and trying to I'm trying to set him up as an anti-Semi basically and use that as a campaign point. Which, I mean, I guess failed. Yeah, it didn't work. But you see the photo where they try to make him

look like Jafar? Like they, they like darkened his face. Yeah, they photoshopped. Yeah, it was crazy. I mean, there's some underhanded shit. Yeah, let me see if I can do this. You know who else has taken photos? People in Iran.

That's brilliant. That's God. He just keeps, he does it again. Oh, is he the goat? He does it again. Yeah, I mean last week. Oh, you know else goes to Israel? The people of Israel who just bombed Iran.

They, that was pretty good. I think they're already there. Where? The largest population of Israelis. Okay, so I, genuinely, I have the exact same God that you're at here right now. So much is happening every day. Because so much keeps happening and it's really hard for me to keep ahead on this topic. And I kind of want to spend a short time on it only because it keeps changing so quickly.

And I kind of want to look at this like a few weeks. weeks from now and see how the dust is settled. Israel had just bombed Iran. The United States was not a part of it. Over the weekend, the United States, while Aiden and I were in the midst of drinking and playing Mario Kart, were informed that the United States had bombed Iran, specifically bombed the underground nuclear facilities that Iran is currently building. Supposedly, we destroyed them, although now there's conflicting. Some reports are coming out saying we didn't do that much damage. We only set them back a few months. The White House came in and said, No, no, no, no, we did.

This was a big, beautiful bomb. And then since then, there was a ceasefire that was meant to be 12 hours. It was immediately broken by both sides. There's a fun video of Trump talking about that. If we pull this up here, yeah, no, so this is, again, so United States gets involved. Trump, after firing bombs at Iran is like, the now is the time for peace. And then neither side does peace. So he says this.

You know, when I say, okay, now you have 12 hours, you don't go out in the first hour and just drop every, thing you have on it. So I'm not happy with them. I'm not happy with Iran either. But I'm really unhappy if Israel's going out this morning because of one rocket that didn't land, that was shot, perhaps by mistake, that didn't land. I'm not happy about

that. You know what? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that? God. Okay. What a quote. Dude. What a

It is so funny to me that Trump runs this whole campaign of like, all this stuff is easy. I'm going to solve all this in one day. Ukraine, Russia, one day. Middle East, one day. And then we're just watching in real time as he runs into like, whether it's health care or U.S. Russia or anything, he's like, this is complicated. Well, these guys really hate each other. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

If they knew what the fuck they were doing, it would be easy. I just didn't think they could dislike each other in that. Yeah, I thought this would be a one conversation deal and I'd fucking wrap this up. I'd go in there, drop a few bombs and then we're good. I'd say peace loudly on Twitter. Well, so my understanding is as of today, the ceasefire beyond the initial break of the ceasefire is holding. Is tentatively holding. Oh, okay.

That certainly won't change by tomorrow. By the time you watch this, I'm sure, you know. That's what I'm saying is I'd rather look back at this with a few weeks out. I think the main, the main frustrating thing is sort of what you were explaining just now is, that any bullet point of what is going on right now is disputed. It's like how much damage did it do? Why did we do it? Is the ceasefire going to hold up? Like everything has a little addendum of we don't actually know yet and it feels and maybe this is my

privilege in the information age where I expect answers all the time right away of what happened right? And reporting on a global conflict is challenging. But I think that is being the difficult thing over the last few days. It's trying to understand the issue and then seeing multiple parties dispute where the issue is actually at. I think we can leave it at that. Or not leave it at that, but that's the conclusion. We really don't know.

In theory, the U.S. government took action to destroy the nuclear program of Iran. And maybe that worked. And that's kind of it. And now it's just this weird hotbed and only the mayor of New York City can solve this. I know. Thank God. We have to get them in, okay? Yeah, I don't know.

As you said, there's just huge, huge question marks. The big ones were, did they even have nuclear capabilities to begin with? Were they enriching it? Yes or no? If yes, did we destroy them with the U.S. B2 bunker buster monster? Bunker Buster bomb. That's a fucking tongue-dustler. Yes or no.

We don't know. There's different reports. I mean, there was a U.S. early report, military early report that was like, no. We only sent them back a few months. But then the White House disputed that. We don't know if that's true. If it was only a few months and their stated goal was to destroy it, does that mean there's

going to be more conflict? Are they going to go back? The incentives are now for Iran to full speed ahead because they've seen what happens when they don't have a nuke. So there's a lot of like decision trees based on yes or no. We don't know the truth of any of it. Everyone has different opinions based on, you know, which camp they're in and what sources they read.

And the truth is going to matter a lot because that's going to end up whether this becomes an ever increasing conflict or if they can hold a ceasefire. And I don't have a deeper thing to say than that. It's wild. I will say that like the thing I've been refreshing every single day, just constantly Googling and checking is what China's response is. I think it's like underrated how they are, you know, deeply intertwined with Iran. And if they see a world where U.S. and Israel truly want regime change to a new government

that's not friendly to China and would control the strait of Hormuz and not let oil get out to China, then they might have a deep incentive to get involved. They're strongly condemning the action. Like, that's how this could escalate from, you know, bad situation in the Middle East to larger global conflict. But I, yeah, other than that, I just, the main things I've been saying is I really, really fucking, I don't have a lot of faith in Trump,

but man, I really hope we don't progress to boots on the ground in Iran. That would be the, you know, we've had two examples of, 20 year, just quicksand. That's not what he said on Twitch last night. He said boots on the ground next week. I said, I'm strapping on my boots. And then he, you will not believe how much Raytheon's talking about. He did it live.

I did live. Dude, that's a couple of crazy things I want to say is, okay, okay, I want to crash out for one second. This is a small problem in the grand scheme of the many things we have going on in America. Iran, Israel's a small problem? No, what I'm about to say is a small problem. But it is consistently annoying that week after week, I just see proof of someone in government

pre-buying an event in the stock market. Many representatives literally buying military stocks right before we bomb Iran is like, it's just so deeply demoralizing to me that we have open. It's not even like no one cares anymore. There's open insider trading every week, and it is starting to like...

What's the point of getting into politics? If you can't make a little bit... Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's why I stand behind Eric. You can't let one man fall. If one man falls for corruption, the rest will start falling. You're right.

And if I don't stand for Eric now, they'll come for Pelosi later. God forbid. If we don't stand for our corrupt politicians, who's going to speak for the podcast host, dude? First, they came for my corrupt politicians and I did not speak out. Yeah, then they came for the better help ads we're going to be talking.

Yeah, I don't know. I just find it frustrating. And that, yeah. It is, I think there's just not the ability to focus on the issue. There's, no one can maintain it in, in the political mind of people. It's not at the forefront of the list of things that people are experiencing. And then the people who have to affect the change are the people who benefit from the existing system.

So they're not going to be like, I should really start working on this. I'll get it right on. You think that's your open Robin Hood and buy. Yeah. And there's no way to make it sexy enough to get a lot of people to care about it for a long time. It's crazy because if you ask normal people on the street, regardless of their political affiliation, if you should be able to buy stocks based off of government inside information, no one says yeah. No one. I've never met a guy who's like, yeah, I think this is I.

Yeah, so that sucks. And then was there anything else on this I want to say? I mean, that's the main thing. Yeah, I mean, two quick points that are definitive that came out of this. There's an interesting fracture on the right as a result of this. So like Marjorie Taylor Green, who is somewhat respectfully to MTG stands out there, a bit of a lunatic. But she is like highly critical.

We have a ton of MTV stands in our audience. Yeah. 60, 70% of our audience is a big bed diagram between the Zoran stands and the MTV stands. She is like was really openly critical of this. What's fun about Twitter now is I just get blasted with right-wing people, and I don't follow it. But anyway, so I've been seeing a bunch of her tweets, and she's super critical. It's basically like, this is not what we voted for.

We don't want war. A lot of people on the right saying, like, this is, you know, Trump advocated. Say he's the peacemaker. He's not going to get us into a war, and he just bombed another country in the Middle East. So that's one interesting element is the right, is pretty fractured over this. And also, AOC is one of a number of Democrats saying that Trump bombing, Iran, Iran is basically a constitutional violation and is worthy of impeachment because, as a reminder, we're supposed to have Congress declare when we're going to war with people. You're not supposed

to have the president just go bomb whoever he wants. That's not how the country works. This is an actual question. I, the, so president, commander in chief, you're in charge of the military, you're able to like make decisions the whole way down, right? Is the idea here that because his action is basically equivalent to a formal declaration of war, which is something that Congress does have to do, he's breaking. That is AOC. Trump broke a rule? A government procedural rule? Yeah. I saw this. Oh, he's done for him. This will get him. Which I like, which is

not sure what Congress's role is at this point, which is a good. Donny T's run out of rope on this one. Yeah, so that's the interesting thing because we've had every previous Democratic president has authorized strikes on a bunch of Middle Eastern countries. Obama did it, Biden did it, Clinton did it, I believe Clinton did it. So, and then I saw a clip of literally Nancy Pelosi saying when asked explicitly by press, she's like, no, the president Obama does not need congressional approval to authorize the strikes. And I believe that was for Syria. So that's actually what I did think is like for for things like strikes. And I know this sounds, I don't pragm, or functionally, I don't know

if it should be like this, but from the perspective of precedent, having our presidents made decisions like this all the time, and it's the Iraq war, for example, Congress had to vote on us invading boots on the ground. You know, they may have voted for it for questionable reasons, but they they voted for it at the time, and that's when we, that's when we did it. But as far as single strikes go or strikes go in general, I, I, I, I'm not saying that this isn't wrong. It's more, this feels like it happens all the time. That's the question.

So you have people like AOC saying this is an impeachable offense. You have people on the right and left going, come on. This is exactly what all the presidents have been doing. So I think it's a bigger question of like, should presidents be allowed to do this? My intuition is certainly no. Doesn't seem that chill, to be honest. That's not super democratic. But also we did elect the president.

I don't know, man. It's, yeah. I can look into this more in a future episode. I have a link, Perry, I want if you could bring up, and I want to just walk through what I think sort of Trump is dealing with here. You mentioned this with the Marjorie Taylor Green stuff, but this is proving to be remarkably unpopular.

He is polling at January 6th levels following this Iran stuff. Because he ran on a policy of America first, no intervention, let's stop focusing on the Middle East. Let's get everyone out, let's just focus on us. That was one of his strongest differentiating points between other people, was him saying, I'm the only president during my term.

Dude, it's the reason Tulsi Gabbard has a job. It's the reason Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard has a job because of her anti-war position that she sold into the Republican establishment and now she has the role she does. It's bombing Iran. So it's, anyway, it's proving unpopular.

And that's why I think if you walk through the actual step by step of what happened, you know, so Trump bombs Iran says it's only, I think Vance comes out and says, we're not at war with Iran, we're only at war with their nuclear facilities. Okay? We're just going to do this and get out.

That's so sick. Which is a crazy statement. That's so money. But then right afterwards, Trump tweets, you know, it's not politically correct term, regime change. But it's the right thing to do. And so it's like, oh, is it not about nuclear facilities? This is about overall regime change in Iran. But then immediately backtracked.

And then immediately goes, this is over, ceasefire. Because I think Trump, for as many faults, he's very good at reading the room of his base. This is one, he's very like a political animal with the core people that keep him in power. And I think he was able to quickly intuit this was not overall popular. This is negative for the core chunk of the country that keeps him solid and in power. And so he is about face on this. That's why he's like, he's yelling at Israel now. He's yelling at Iran too, but also Israel.

He's like, we have no war, we're out, ceasefire. And I think he's just reading the room that this is not playing the way he might have thought it was. And I don't have the graph in front of me, but I saw a graph in front of me. but I saw a graph of American approval for each Middle East strike major intervention over the past 20 years. And it was like Afghanistan 2003, 98% approval. Like most Americans are like, fuck yeah, let's go. Then it's like, I'm sorry, it was Iraq first. In Afghanistan, it's like, it's like 72.

Then it was Syria. And it's like, well, 54, barely. And now for this Iran stuff, it's like 28. Like most Americans are just not, they don't want this. This is not what they, this is not an escalation they want to see. they've been down this road. They know it. No matter what you say on timelines and escalation,

it just somehow ends up with more money and troops and time shoveled into an endless, hey, I keep reusing this word, but quagmire. And so I don't know. That's what I would think people are broadly feeling across both spectrums of the political establishment in America. And I think he's reading that,

whether or not he can stick to that is a different question. Or whether he has a choice. Things can be out of his hand now. Once you bomb a country, they have different incentives now. And they might accelerate towards nuclear, even if they weren't before, if they weren't really progressed. Like, things are going to be different.

You can't, it's a fog of war. We don't know what's going to happen. But anything else from you guys? We can end on some slightly good news, kind of. Oh, I had a quick, a quick, interesting thing. We talked about buy now, pay later, aka credit cards, aka loans.

And recently, FICO has announced that they're going to start including Buy Now Pay Later data in their credit scores to finally take this in account. Because we've talked a lot about how right now you can just sign up for these things, not pay and have no impact on your credit score. So it's not clear if the other credit agencies are going to start incorporating this. but FICO did a bunch of data analysis on Buy Now Pay Later payments like a year ago with a third-party company that they published, and now they're formally incorporating it into their scores. And I thought it was really funny. There was a quote from someone who worked at FICO. I think it might be the CEO, the person in charge of FICO.

And they had said, this might help young people start building their credit history and boost their credit scores. That's a good thing. Which I thought was really funny because lenders, there's pressure from lenders on the other side. They want this data to understand that they shouldn't be loaning to people who can't pay them back. They want this to be accounted for on the negative end. And she's kind of trying to explain it away from the positive. But that was just a small update that I saw. I want to give a quick shout out to this guy on Twitter, Blaze, who said,

I finally paid off my Costco hot dog. And he clarned up to see that. Clarned that in four easy installments of 37 cents. That's called building credit, folks. And this guy, if he hadn't paid off the Costco $1.50 hot dog, his credit score will now be hurt. So that's good. It's good that there's accountability for the span.

That's what I'm saying. We need that. We need that. You shouldn't be able to cheap Costco out of their hot dogs. Yeah, I don't have a, you know, oh, sorry. No, no, no, no, go ahead. I didn't mean to play.

Oh, I just want to say, like, I think this story is really funny. It's just the inevitable result of over and over again Wall Street trying to find some the way to give dead people that can't afford to pay it. And eventually, people aren't paying it back. And so we have to put the system back and re-regulate back to exactly where, like, it's just a endless cycle. I think businesses like Karna and Afterpay are essentially a scam on investors right now, because they're not making money on these loans because a significant

chunk of the people who take them out, don't pay them back. Not paying them back. But they're on their books. Am I wearing my EBDA hat? You know, EBDA is earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, emmerization. It's a way people put on their balance statements to ignore some of the costs, to pretend like their business is more profitable than it is. That's what these companies are doing.

They're just ignoring the on payments and being like, wow, we are making a lot of money on these loans, in theory. But it's not coming in and they keep giving them like extensions and ways around it because they'll pay it back, but they're not paying it back. They don't have the money. You give them loans they can't afford. And this will catch up. This will catch up to the business is either failing or it'll catch up to a bailout or this will catch up to the governments when they try to regulate and figure this out. But this is a problem. I mean, the same thing with student loans where we just finally started tracking credit scores for that. And people's credit scores

are dropping by the millions all over the country right now who didn't pay their student loans. So someone's missing their hot dog payments and their student load bags. It's bad. Okay, well, we had one more topic we wanted to go over, discussing food dyes in the United States and some recent news around that. We got like five, six minutes, but I think this is mostly feel good. Have you been wondering what the hell has Robert Kennedy Jr. been doing,

RFK Jr., he, you know, the kind of vaccine skeptic who got put into the health and human services secretary? Yeah. What's the guy been up to? Yeah, what's the guy been up to? A lot of weird stuff. But one of the things that he posted this week, which I thought was interesting,

we don't need audio on this, but we can pull the video. His main thing is to try to get people healthy again, and his basically crusade is against what he perceives to be all these artificial influences that are making people sick. One of the things he's been railing against is artificial food dyes,

like food dies that color food, certain colors, and make them look more appealing. So his quote in March was, the crisis that we have in mental health, in suicide, in ADD, in ADHD, all these are linked, particularly to dyes.

All of them are linked in very, very strong studies to ADHD into cancers. And he wants companies across the U.S. to stop using these artificial dyes and replace them with natural dyes, like beet juice, for example, or turmeric, like it says there. And so this is less of like a formal announcement, but this week, a bunch more of these companies you can actually see of the video, General Mills, Kraft, some other huge ones like McCormick, are removing. They have agreed, after talking to him,

to remove all artificial dyes from their foods over the next year or two. So this is cool because artificial dyes are made out of petroleum and they're probably not very good for us. And so I looked into like, I think there's a general sentiment that's been changing over the last few years that like food dyes are bad. Like red dye 40. Everybody talks about that. You can take my yellow number five from like cold dead hands, RFK or Doug. What are you fucking European? I want a brightly colored palette of food in front of me different.

You don't, you're not interested unless it's bright and colors? I eat Sour Patch kids once a week at minimum. And I love how they look. And if they're grayish, I'll lose it. It's not about flavor. It's about look. No, I'm with you. All right.

So let me give a quick primer on what food dyes actually are on what this means. So they're made out petroleum, which sounds really bad, but a lot of things are made up petroleum. Basically, that's used as a base to make chemical compounds that then are used to make lots of other stuff like other great foods, like styrofoam and plastic. And so there is no health benefit to these dyes. It is strictly to make things look more appealing. they make a chemical compound that reflects

certain lights in that way it looks really red or whatever. And so in 1960 in America, there was this act that basically said, okay, artificial food dyes are going to be allowed now. They have to be approved by the FDA. If it shows a link to cancer or whatever else, we're going to remove it, but otherwise it's allowed. And so

since that point, there's been, essentially in, you know, what, 70 years ago now, 60, they were like, food dies are chill. That's fine. And now over the past few decades, there's been more and more studies that starting to say, this is maybe bad. A few of them have been straight up linked to cancer, and those were just removed. But a lot of them, there's been these studies, and I've read several

of them, that are basically seeing, okay, are these food dyes in our foods causing hyperactivity in children and like messing with kids who either have ADHD or giving them ADHD? So there's a big FDA study in 2011. They basically said, for a small group of children who have ADHD, it may affect them, but it's not causal. Like, we don't know for sure. Maybe it's something else. UK did the same thing in 2011. Exact same thing. There's a possible link between the consumption of artificial colors and increased hyperactivity. A whole bunch of other studies in 2022, then, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, they did an overview of many different studies. Reading that, they said, these studies do support a relationship between food

die exposure and adverse behavioral outcomes in children, but we need to reevaluate it. We really don't know. So the TLD. of this is we don't know what these things are doing. On paper, it's just a chemical compound that reflects light. We don't know why this might be causing kids to have ADHD or making kids with ADHD have more hyperactivity or potentially giving cancers. Like, it's not even clear why they would do this. And there's a whole lot of studies now that are sort of like, it seems like maybe there's a correlation, but we don't really know. And study after study after study shows the same thing. This isn't the same across the board, right? These are for like

different consequences for different food dyes or similar consequences between them. Yeah. So the common thread is that they keep testing with the dyes that were approved with this act. And those specific dyes in these foods show that some subset of kids do seem to be affected by it, but we don't know if it's the food die exactly or other factors because there's so many factors at play. And so RFK Jr. has basically come out strong out of the gate. And of as many crusades, this is one where he's like, food dyes are super bad.

We need to ban it across the board. even though technically we don't have definitive evidence he is just saying we have definitive evidence and just get rid of all. We're not losing much if you ban him, right? It's just food is less brightly colored. Right. Yeah.

So that's kind of the thing. It's like the maybe the reason, like with a lot of what RFC Jr. does, the reasoning behind what he does is often suspect. And in this case he's saying we have definitive evidence of this. No, we don't. The problem is he says he has definitive evidence for a lot of things that I touch on how like Wi-Fi or radio signals affect you

or vaccines. And then comes to the conclusion that we all agree with, but with a very faulty premise. With food dyes. With food dyes. Yes, that's right. Sorry,

I'm talking to Bill. Um, microchips. This is a complicated thing that's, like personally, definitely out of my depth, right? I,

this is the way I look at this issue, my understanding of it, and I probably need to spend more time on it. A lot of these dyes or ingredients in food, that he has talked about banning to help make the country a healthier, better place are already things

that are banned in Europe or Australia or in Asia. A lot of these things. I thought so, no, they're not. Some of them are, it's generally they're more restricted on the quantity. So there's a maximum amount that can be included. But like they're allowed in the U in Canada, in China.

Okay. Yeah. So my basic example that I would usually go to is like when you try, Have you ever noticed when you try soda somewhere else, it tastes different than if you get the same soda at home? Or if you go to McDonald's somewhere else, it usually is better than McDonald's somewhere else.

Dude, Burger King in, you love Burger King number, but so do I. Burking in Copenhagen was like 10 times better than burying here. Dude, Swiss McDonald's is insane. I don't know what, I don't know what's going on. I know a little about what's going on, actually, but. It was 10 times better. I'm not kidding.

I think there's a base idea that his, What I'm more mean to say is that the general premise that we do not moderate ingredients in food effectively in the United States is true to be. Yes, and it is less than other countries. Yes. And we should find a way to navigate those problems and have better food in the country. It's to have so many foreign friends visit talk about how shit our food is, especially friends that stay for a long time, and then go to other countries and just go to random cafes or restaurants and be like, damn, this is just better. a lot of the time. I feel like that's the in front of me

noticeable gap I experienced going to other places, right? I think we should solve that problem. The problem is, this is baked into RFK's cookey ride of let's get rid of requirements

on measles vaccines. It is packaged with a guy who has outlandish disproven takes about things. And so when he comes up in my position and talks about the effects of these things on people or children, I, it's not that I don't agree, but I am skeptical of what led him to believe that and the way he's going to enforce the policy. Yeah, it looks like there's been some measles

outbreaks recently, so that's cool. This was, so I thought this was really interesting. This is my, my friend, my friend who's a doctor, he studies infectious diseases, particularly intensely. And he's a very, you know, very well performing in his class in both, and not just like undergrad and stuff when we were together, but in medical school. He was the top of his medical school class.

He spends a bunch of his free time just, he thinks reading studies about infectious diseases is fun. Cool. And he, his number one concern going into the Trump presidency was RFK being charged of health in the country and the consequences of measles spreading to the masses again.

He was like, I forget what the name of the number is, but there's a number to indicate the number of expected people that each infected person will spread the disease that they have. So with COVID, that number was pretty high. I think it was six. Like each person who gets COVID is on average expected to spread it to like six more people. And he said, which is a lot. like COVID, COVID was pretty, pretty infectious.

And he was like, measles is 18. And it's... You're kind of a party animal if you get measles. You have more friends. COVID people are losers. And I don't mean, it's not to take away from the truth of what's here in that it would, I do, if there's anything good

out of the time that this guy gets to be in charge, maybe our food is safer in this country. That's great. I would like to see that as someone who just worries about it and isn't super knowledgeable about it. But I worry about, it comes packaged with a guy who talks about things like this, about, you know,

kids don't need to get their vaccines anymore. So I wonder what, you know, even you explaining the data, right? The data that you're looking into is a little more like, we think there might be a connection, we don't really know. I'm not, you know, if it's just changing the color of food,

I'm down to cut it. But this is very different from what RFK is saying definitively when he's explaining why this is important. Yep, it's, uh, so it's strange. Overall, I think it's good. You know, I'm very, like,

healthy food pilled because my mom growing up just like drilled that into us super insanely hard and our food sucked and we didn't get any of the fun snacks that all the other kids got, but it's so, it's super important at fresh food. Were you like me? You were, it sounds exactly like me.

No, no cereal. like whole wheat bread. Like kids like hated coming over to our place because they would only get like cut up bell pepper and carrots and like no other snacks. I'd like go to friends houses to get goldfish and fruit by the foot. But doesn't it pay off?

I like, I see a veggie. No, no it does. You guys are freaks. No, he doesn't have the good mind virus that I think we have. Which is you go to the function and there's a veggie plate and I'm like, let me add out.

Let me add it. Don't let me to your own veggie plate. No, I want the cucumber. Because that's genuinely what I want. It takes till you're like 23, but then vegetables are awesome. Yeah, exactly. Then it suddenly becomes great. So that's interesting.

I think his broad push towards natural foods, and he's pushing for this in like, let's say like encouraging people in like with food stamps for it to be more focused on healthy foods and not like pre-processed stuff and sodas, focusing on school lunches being like fresher foods. I think that's incredibly good. His school lunch stuff is so good from what I saw. That's awesome. Also crazy that people shit on a Michelle Obama for trying to do that sort of stuff.

Yeah, it's wild. But that's the stuff. It's like, okay, there's like these lovely gems in this pile that he's trying to push forward. And I think that's great. In the healthy food section, I think he is doing well. A little exaggerated, but I like

the results I'm seeing. What's cool about this is there isn't even a law. So there is nothing that requires any of these. These are huge companies that are removing food dyes. This is not like an easy thing and it's more expensive. Like the reason you use artificial food dyes

is because it's cheaper and they're more vibrant. So this is a straight up hit to their business and you're talking about like General Mills is like Cheerios, Pillsbury, hog andaws, yo play. You have ketchup, mac and cheese. Anyway, so there's like, this is a big deal

and he's just basically convincing the companies by meeting with the CEOs and be like, guys, just do this. It's going to be healthier. And then, and then he's like, we will make you do it if you guys don't do it voluntarily. And so there's interesting pressure campaign where he's like saying down the road he'll regulate them if they don't voluntarily do it, but that's working. And then the more companies that do this, you know, the others will have to sort of fall in line because if you're the only one that's putting yellow dye number three into your whatever cereal, like you're going to look like an asshole. Maybe one thing that I kind of, that I kind of do like about this. You don't love that? I would like just a law because, you know, the incentive now is for everyone else to pretend to do it or not do it or not to make a big announcement and then down the road sneak it back in a little bit of it.

cuts margins. Like, if you have to whack a bullet with an individual meeting with every CEO, then the second of the spotlight's off, they generally do what's best for their business. You know, unless... Yeah, for sure. Legislation should follow. I think one cool thing about this from what I've seen is the idea of, like, healthy food and healthy living, maybe over the past few decades, more of a, you know, hippie, hippie liberal

thing, right? but it's sort of through the power of Joe Rogan, maybe, and people in similar positions. I feel like this has been demanded by a way broader group of the political spectrum, the idea of, hey, let's just have healthy food. So I do like the idea that this is becoming broadly demanded by everybody. And it creates this sort of change. People hopefully will expect the laws to change.

that's, you know, because it's a hard thing to not get behind in that sense. I was like, the lobby a lot easier to pass if you don't have these companies lobbying against it because they're already agreeing to it. Yeah, yeah, if you get some on board and yeah, I just think next step, right? You guys always try to bring it back to lobby and it's like, it's not that big deal. Can we just let people lobby? Can we give this one to Unk? Unk, RFK, you know what? I'm liking this one. It's cool. I can give this one. Yeah. I can, from what I know about it, I can give this one. If you, if you work. There's certainly no nuance. and I didn't miss anything in my research.

I was going to say, where's the lemon? Where's the lemon? If anybody works, you know, if somebody works at the FDA, if somebody works in food safety, I'm really curious about more of how this works. One thing that changed my view of the FDA and my passive understanding of this is you remember how Maidshot launched an energy drink.

It was like 100 Deves, Juvie. It was Nade Shots Energy Drink company. And we got a bunch of Juvie at the office like years ago and we drink it on the yard all the time because we used to make jokes because when Nate shot announced it he said it was my childhood dream to start an energy drink company which is like Nate shot it wasn't

that. You don't know that maybe it was you don't know that but uh Nate I'm here for you brother but ultimately cool that he did it and a tasty product and we got a bunch of free product and we talked about it on the yard all the time so we find out like a year into drinking these that uh that they're not FDA

approved. And I was like, wait. How can you sell it? How can you sell it? Don't you have to FDA approve products to sell them in grocery stores and things like that? I thought that's how it worked.

That was just my, and that's not how it works? And then I was like, well, then what's the point of the FDA approval? If you can just make some shit and go sell it at Albertson's, uh, what, you know, what is the approval process for? Is it just to be this mark of

safety that you're supposed to get if you're big enough. I don't actually understand that. They're crimping my vibe, dude. The FDA. We're trying to party. They keep rolling up to the house. They keep calling the cops on us. After this movement by RFK,

I bet we can get some yellow dye number five fucking crazy cheap. What if we make a lemon product that's just glowing yellow? Just load it up with dye. The cancer lemon? You eat this? If you don't have ADHD, you wish. We will get it. We will get it.

It's water and dye. No flavor. That's our lemonade. It's guaranteed attention deficit disorder. That's fire. It's water, die, and adderol. And we just pre-packing it to get it. It's all mixed.

It's guaranteed ADHD you will get. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for watching this episode. We've solved. I'm not sure. Did we solve ADHD? We solve lemonade. Gentlemen. Great stuff.

I'm sure nothing horrible will happen in the next week. Also, we will probably be moving up our post date by one day. We're trying to resort schedule. So if we launch, if you see this a pop up next Wednesday rather than Thursday,

that is why. Yeah, we're trying to launch on Wednesdays. Yeah. To get ahead of the bad news we create. Oh, that was why. So we're not so much to blame. All right. All right.

Thank you guys for watching. Thanks you guys for watching.